I want to stick with Margaret Chase Smith this week, in part because I can’t get my mind off her and in part because we have a new Congress coming in, the 117th, to be sworn in on Jan. 3, and its members could benefit from Smith’s rules of the road. She was the first senator of either party to stand up to Joe McCarthy. Her fellow Republicans scrammed: McCarthy was popular back home. So did Democrats; they feared McCarthy too. What she’d done and suffered through made her name. History appreciated her, and so did flinty, independent Maine.
The problem with McCarthy was that he was reckless and cynical but there was some truth in his overall position. There were communists in the U.S. government. Alger Hiss was one. But not the 205 or 81 of them he’d claim, and not the innocent people he smeared and whose lives he ruined. So standing against him was a delicate thing: Your moral disapproval had to be both compelling and calibrated, acknowledging the truth but asserting other, higher, longer-ranged truths.
She did that. What can those being sworn in learn from her?
• Know what you’re about and say it. Smith wasn’t much for grand political theory; she was plainer than that and closer to the ground. But she knew why she belonged to her party and she had a picture of it in her head. Her Republican Party was Lincoln’s party of justice and mercy, Teddy Roosevelt’s of “trustbusting,” Dwight D. Eisenhower’s of “peace” and “world leadership.” David Richards, director of the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan, Maine, told me, “Being a politician in her conception was about service and conscience more than ideology.” But she had a philosophical approach and she didn’t shy from stating it. In her stump speech when she ran for president in 1964 she said, “I call myself a moderate or independent Republican. I operate independently of the party but I never fight the organization.” She named where she stood: “I am at the left of [Barry] Goldwater, and at the right of [Nelson] Rockefeller.”
• If you want to be believed, say it straight. She didn’t think public remarks should be fancy, and she probably wouldn’t recognize the airy, edgeless statements we mistake for eloquence. “My speeches in the Senate are blunt and to the point,” she said. “I do not indulge in political oratory.” “I study the facts, make up my mind, and stick to my decisions. I never dodge an issue.”
• Your state is more than a platform for your rise. Her connection to Maine was almost mystical. “She was Maine,” said her biographer, Patricia L. Schmidt, author of “Margaret Chase Smith: Beyond Convention,” by telephone. What deepened her knowledge is that her entire life had been one long status shift. Her mother was a waitress, her father a barber; she was the oldest of six and didn’t go to college but to work at the telephone company. She wound up as ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, putting the CEO of Lockheed on hold.
She knew how the salesgirl at the five-and-dime saw the world because she’d been one; how businesspeople thought because she’d been one of them, too. She wasn’t exactly awed by the patriarchy. Her father was an alcoholic and not fully stable, her late husband a philanderer who hurt and embarrassed her. (No one knew, but she quietly supported the mother of his illegitimate child, Ms. Schmidt says.) From this emotional background she rose to social respectability, which was her real status shift and allowed her to be an outsider-insider.
Travel broadens but struggle deepens, and gives you unexpected insights. When she was at odds with the sentiment of her state she didn’t think: My people hold some old-fashioned views, I’ll have to be careful. She felt leaders set an example of how to think, make an argument for a point of view, help bring people along. She believed the imperative of politics was not to accept but to improve.
• Don’t abandon the middle ground, which actually exists. We’re a big and varied country. Maine isn’t Mississippi. People can be ornery about their rights and slippery about their responsibilities. No one likes being lectured. Lead toward your conception of the right but always seek middle ground. Never leave it abandoned. Do that and the country splits into separate camps.
• Understand you won’t always be appreciated. Smith was a breakthrough woman who encouraged women to enter politics. She backed an Equal Rights Amendment, but 1970s feminists didn’t acknowledge her accomplishments and called her “elitist,” by which they meant “Republican.” An idiot from the National Organization for Women said Smith stood for “everything women in the liberation movement want to eliminate.” Smith in turn didn’t like their lack of decorum and criticized their air of anger and grievance. She felt those attitudes would cause division in the great center, and that change lasts when it comes through inspiration, not accusation.
• People need concrete help. If Smith were with us now, she would doubtless wear a face mask—she’d lived through the 1918 flu pandemic—and she would lacerate the government for not sending facemasks to every American last spring. If it didn’t have them in reserve it should have admitted it, not gone back and forth about whether masks are necessary. Health officials could have told people how to make them at home; they could have sent cloth. I imagine her saying, “You can’t suddenly change your mind and command people to go to the drugstore or Amazon. Not everyone has a computer, not everyone has a charge card; it’s your job to help them!”
• Spirit has its place. Smith didn’t much like John F. Kennedy ; she saw him as a Massachusetts glamour boy. She was willing to work with him when he became president, but it started out rocky when she fought one of his foreign-policy appointments because his oil interests might skew his thinking on the Mideast. JFK took revenge by visiting Maine and forgetting to invite her to the greeting party. She ignored the snub, jumped on a plane, went anyway, and merrily waved at the crowds. Seeing her moxie, he changed tack. Would she like to ride back to Washington with him on gleaming Air Force One? No, she said, snubbing him back. And made sure the story got around. Later he called her “formidable.”
• Human sentiment matters. It’s not a byproduct of a political life, or any life, it’s the product. People should have honest feelings and show them, as opposed to, say, commoditizing your emotions for public consumption. When JFK died there was a lot of oratory in the Senate. She didn’t speak. She listened for a while and then crossed the aisle, unpinned the rose she wore each day on her lapel, and placed it quietly on his old desk. Everyone saw. No one touched that rose for days. I remember hearing years ago that when Smith died, on Memorial Day 1995, someone put a rose on her old desk. No one knows who, but the rose went similarly undisturbed. I’m not sure it’s true, but it should be.