
Frances Gordon Smith, from her 1918 passport application
Born in Atlanta in August 1872, Frances Gordon was a daughter of Fanny Haralson Gordon and John Brown Gordon—Confederate general, Georgia governor, and U.S. senator. Her sister, Caroline Lewis Gordon Brown, became active in civic affairs in Berlin, NH. Her brother, Frank, served as a major in the Spanish American War. Her nephew, Kilbourn Gordon, was a Broadway writer, producer, and director (his works include the play Kongo, aka the Lon Chaney film West of Zanzibar).
In June 1888 she married lawyer R. Burton Smith, a brother of Georgia senator Hoke Smith. They had two children: a daughter, Hildreth (who married Caroline’s brother-in-law), and a son, Gordon (who drowned at age 20 in 1909 while on an engineering assignment in Panama). Dewey Grantham’s Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South reports that Burton Smith had problems with alcohol, and Frances Gordon Smith referred to him in her 1918 passport application as her “former husband” and stated that she had not known his whereabouts for four years. (He apparently had gone overseas a year before her as a YMCA worker.)
Gordon Smith earned a credential in dietetics from the University of Chicago (she was listed as a student there in 1908). She gave lectures (such as this one in New York in 1916).
From late 1917 to February 1918, she served as a speaker for the Food Administration (headed by Herbert Hoover) on conserving food, reducing food waste, and addressing food shortages among the Allied nations. As this December 1917 Richmond Times-Dispatch article reports, she asserted that “the stark wolf of hunger is at the door of the world. . . . while conditions are bad in England, they are unspeakable in France.”