Roland Cotton Smith

For many years Roland Cotton Smith had been rector of the historic St. John’s at Washington, where his contacts with political life were numerous. Coolidge he had known from his own earlier days of preaching at Northampton; the Taft and Theodore Roosevelt families attended his services at Washington, and he officiated with Bishop [Henry Y.] Satterlee at Alice Roosevelt’s White House wedding. Smith was himself a genial soul; he had in early years indulged in the pastime of amusing literary skits, and perhaps the Century will visualize him most distinctly as one of the smiling togated Romans who, exactly two years ago, sat in the Senatorial benches to right and left of Cæsar. As preacher, Cotton Smith possessed none of the orator’s arts in voice or manner; he was awkward in gesture, but he had the gift of stirring his listeners to idealism and perception of spiritual truth, and won the strong personal affection of a wide acquaintance. It was said of him that, with his own quick intelligence, he was at heart most bored with men who uttered platitudes in the manner of having said something worth while, but that he covered even this with the mantle of his charity.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1935 Century Association Yearbook