| Activity | H. M. Smith is most remembered for his days as a powerful administrator in the Bureau of Fisheries. Smith ran the agency in good part as a scientific research body, eventually running afoul of the Harding administration and his immediate boss, Herbert Hoover, who wanted to see a more applied approach taken. Smith was finally obliged to resign in 1921, and after he was actually released in 1922 moved to Thailand as a fisheries consultant. Smith published some three hundred works, including around one hundred on fisheries science; the rest were devoted to a mix of subjects focusing primarily on ichthyology (including a good deal of systematics and natural history).
1884 - 1885 worked as an assistant in the National Museum. 1886 joins US fisheries commission. 1895 - 1902 professor of normal histology at Georgetown Medical School. 1898 secretary of the National Fishery Congress. 1900 US representative at the first international fishery congress, Paris. 1901 - 1902 director of the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole. 1903 spent 6 months in Japan studying fisheries there. 1903 - 1913 deputy commissioner, Bureau of Fisheries. 1905 represents the US at the Third International Fishery Congress, Vienna. 1907 - 1910 director of the Albatross fisheries and marine resources expedition to the Philippines. 1909 - 1919 associate editor, National Geographic Society. 1912 US representative, Permanent International Council for the Exploration of the Sea. 1913 - 1922 commissioner of fisheries, Bureau of Fisheries. 1923 - 1935 lives and works in Thailand as special fisheries advisor to the Siam government. 1935 - 1941 associate curator of Zoology, Smithsonian Institution. |