Profiles in Character #1 - Margaret Chase Smith and the Declaration of Conscience
Margaret Chase Smith was the only female senator when she rose to speak on June 1, 1950. One of her fellow Republicans – and the subject of her speech - was Joseph McCarthy, whose desk was directly in front of hers. On February 12th, he had told a crowd in Wheeling, West Virginia that he had a list of names of State Department employees who were communists. In the next four months, he repeated such charges, without producing evidence. Yet communist advances in Eastern Europe and China provided a willing audience for the frenzy he provoked.
Elected in 1948, after three terms in the House, Smith had never made a major speech. She doubted her ability: “I had butterflies in my stomach. I was so nervous I didn’t think I could actually go through to the end with it.” Though she never mentioned McCarthy’s name, everyone knew who she was talking about. “Joe began to get publicity crazy,” Smith had said, “and other Senators were now afraid to speak their minds, to take issue with him . . . A wave of fear had struck Washington.” “Something has to be done about that man,” she fumed.
Her speech, accompanied by a “Declaration of Conscience” signed by six colleagues, implored senators to think about “everything that we Americans hold dear.” Deeply troubled by the Senate becoming a “forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity,” she pleaded for “soul searching.” The Senate was ignoring “basic principles of Americanism -- The right to criticize; The right to hold unpopular beliefs; The right to protest; The right of independent thought.” “The American people,” she added, “are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds . . . The American people are sick and tired of seeing innocent people smeared and guilty people whitewashed.”
In her speech, Smith said “our country is being psychologically divided by the confusion and the suspicions that are bred in the United States Senate to spread like cancerous tentacles of ‘know nothing, suspect everything’ attitudes.” Though a devoted partisan in a minority party, Smith said “I don't want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny -- Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear. . . . Surely we Republicans aren't that desperate for victory.”
It would take four years, until December 1954, for McCarthy to be formally “condemned” by a vote of 67-22 for conduct “contrary to senatorial traditions.” But during that time, he did his best to make Smith pay for her apostasy. When Congress reconvened in January 1951, he kicked her off the Permanent Investigations Subcommittee of the committee he chaired. She was removed from the Republican Policy Committee, and he promoted an opponent for her 1954 Senate re-election bid. She was accused of being pro-communist in a book, U.S.A. Confidential, an attack she believed McCarthy inspired. Some of her co-signers for the Declaration of Conscience abandoned her. Undeterred, Smith served three more terms and won a libel suit against the book’s authors.
Born in Skowhegan, Maine, she was the first woman in her family to finish high school. She had a fierce determination to succeed. She was a liberal Republican, strong on national defense and supportive of social legislation. Her New England independent streak led to bucking her party, even as a junior legislator. She supported the draft, its extension and lend-lease, against the wishes of isolationist Republicans. She would later support NATO and the Marshall Plan. Though having little to gain in a state with few African-Americans, she supported integration. She insisted on equal treatment for women in the Armed Forces, though insisting “I am not a feminist.” Later, she supported Head Start, food stamps, unemployment compensation for migrant farm workers, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and open housing legislation. The “little people” want protection, she believed, and chastised fellow Republicans who “failed to protect the little guy.”
Smith was not flawless. She became overly sensitive to criticism and was tone deaf to the anger of young people against the Vietnam War and of women’s demands to end sex discrimination (she refused to join NOW). Yet, in 1964, she was the first woman in American history nominated for president on the floor of a major party convention. Asked if her purpose was to encourage women in politics, she replied, characteristically, “I’ll be candid. I ran because I would like to be President of the United States.”
The last point of the Declaration of Conscience testifies to how this woman of character had the courage to act:
“It is high time that we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats about elections and started thinking patriotically as Americans about national security based on individual freedom. It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques -- techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”
Photo Credit: National Archives
