History can sometimes help us through current moments by showing what’s needed and providing inspiration.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of a great act by a great lady. Margaret Chase Smith was a U.S. representative from 1940-49 and a senator from 1949-73. Her name is always followed by “the first”—the first woman to serve as a senator from Maine, first to serve in both the House and Senate, first to have her name placed in nomination for the presidency at a major party convention.
She was generally considered a moderate to liberal Republican, and sometimes called a progressive one. She wanted to provide citizens the help they needed to become fully integrated into society and productive within it.
She was independent and made this clear early. She was initially the only member from Maine to support Lend-Lease and extension of the draft. She survived these votes because she understood her state: It was isolationist but also patriotic, against war but for preparedness, and Mainers didn’t like partisanship messing with foreign policy. She was for civil rights, supported Social Security and Medicare. She had a strong sense of where she was from, and felt the civic romance of it. She told biographer Patricia L. Schmidt that she loved Maine’s small-town church spires, and her dream was to see that each town had the money to buy a spotlight so the white spires could be seen for miles at night.
She faced criticism from the right. No, she’d blandly state on being questioned, union leaders hadn’t endorsed her in the last election, but she couldn’t help it if union members loved her.
She was by nature honest and humorous. Her dignity and simplicity led people to think her a blue blood, but her roots were modest. Her mother worked at a shoe factory, her father as a hotel clerk and barber. She got her first job at 13 in a five-and-dime, didn’t go to college, and became a telephone operator. She was proud of all this and liked to speak of her roots, not to brag about her steep climb but as a kind of affirmation: Look what’s possible in America.
She’d married a local politician who became a congressman, Clyde Smith. When he died in 1940 she filled the remaining months in his term and was re-elected in the first of many landslides. There were Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington clubs.
She never asked anyone to vote for her because she was a woman, but because she was the better candidate. Still, she thought women brought particular “sensibilities” to office: “The thing that concerns women more than anything else is the betterment of social conditions of the masses. Women are needed in government for the very traits of character that some people claim disqualify them.”
She could be wry. NBC’s Robert Trout once asked what she’d do if she woke up in the White House. “I think I’d go right to Mrs. Truman and apologize. And then I’d go home.” She thought a lot about how other people heard things. When she spoke to grade-school children, she always explained that though it is true she sat on the floor of the Senate, she wasn’t really sitting on the floor.
But it is her “Declaration of Conscience” speech for which she is best remembered. It was 1950 and she was increasingly disturbed by Sen. Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade. In February he’d made his speech in Wheeling, W.Va., charging communists had infiltrated the U.S. government at the highest levels. He claimed to have 205 names of known communists; in later statements he put the number at 57 and 81.
The base of the party found his opposition to the communist swamp in Washington electrifying. His wildness and disrespect for norms was seen as proof of authenticity: He’s one of us and fighting for us.
Smith was anticommunist enough that Nikita Khrushchev later described her as “blinded by savage hatred,” and she was certain communism would ultimately fail. But you don’t defeat it with lies.
She always listened closely when McCarthy spoke. Once he said he was holding in his hand “a “photostatic copy” of the names of communists. She asked to see it. It proved nothing. Her misgiving increased.
She didn’t want to move against him. She was new to the Senate; he was popular in Maine. She waited for her colleagues. They said nothing.
Finally she’d had enough. On June 1, 1950, she became the first Republican to speak out. On the way to the chamber Joe McCarthy suddenly appeared. “Margaret,” he said, “you look very serious. Are you going to make a speech?”
“Yes,” she said, “and you will not like it.”
He has some intelligence network, she thought. It left her rattled.
She took her seat. McCarthy was two rows behind her. When she was recognized she said the Senate needed to do “some soul-searching.” The Constitution “speaks not only of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation.” Those “who shout the loudest about Americanism” are ignoring “some of the basic principles of Americanism,” including the right to hold unpopular beliefs and to independent thought. Exercising those rights “should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to his livelihood, nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us does not? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own.”
People are tired of “being afraid of speaking their mind lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists.’ . . . Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America.”
She took on both parties, accusing the Democrats of showing laxness and “complacency” toward “the threat of communism here at home,” and the Republicans of allowing innocent people to be smeared.
She feared a fiery McCarthy rebuttal. He quietly left the room. She was praised in some quarters— Bernard Baruch said if a man had given that speech, he’d be the next president—and damned in others. Her colleagues didn’t like being shown up by a woman.
McCarthy got her dumped from a subcommittee. The Maine press didn’t like that and pushed back: “They Done Our Girl Dirt.”
Her speaking slot at the 1952 Republican convention was pulled. She told biographers that at first she was given 25 minutes in a prominent spot, then 15. Finally House Minority Leader Joe Martin told her she could have five minutes. “And you have to represent a minority.”
“What do you mean a minority?” Smith asked.
“You represent the women,” he said. She passed.
Yet she had three more landslides to come. Maine admired her independence and integrity. She didn’t lose a re-election bid until 1972. She was almost 75. Times had changed.
What are we saying?
When history hands you a McCarthy—reckless, heedlessly manipulating his followers—be a Margaret Chase Smith. If your McCarthy is saying a whole national election was rigged, an entire system corrupted, you’d recognize such baseless charges damage democracy itself. You wouldn’t let election officials be smeared. You’d stand against a growing hysteria in the base.
You’d likely pay some price. But years later you’d still be admired for who you were when it counted so much.