Career
Smith was an educationalist and curriculum reformer who served on the Committee on Curriculum of 1911-1927 and the Advisory Committee of 1911-1935. He wrote the often-cited The Wars Between England and America (1914) and produced a two volume life and letters of United States. President, James Abram Garfield (1925). Smith contributed to the debate about the future of American historiography that took place in the American Historical Association and elsewhere.
He was critical of the approach taken by James Harvey Robinson who, Smith argued, did not "consider it necessary to be impartial or even fair." An archive of his correspondence with Harry A. Garfield is held at Williams College.