Remembering an Act of Conscience and Courage

Yahoo

29-05-2025

TODAY MARKS THE 30TH ANNIVERSARY of the death, at 97, of Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. And in three days comes another important date for Smith: June 1 is the 75th anniversary of her 'Declaration of Conscience' speech denouncing her colleague Senator Joseph McCarthy's hunt for alleged Communists in the U.S. government—an extraordinary act of political bravery, and one that came at considerable cost.
Smith entered public office under unhappy circumstances. A lifelong Republican, she was married to Clyde Smith, a representative from Maine twenty-one years her senior, from 1930 until his death on April 8, 1940. According to public accounts at the time, Clyde died from a heart attack. His actual cause of death was advanced syphilis, which had been diagnosed in 1938. As Margaret's biographer Patricia Schmidt writes, it's unclear whether she was ever aware of her husband's diagnosis. But she once told a historian that Clyde 'loved the ladies and they loved him.'
Margaret was her husband's secretary and knew his congressional district as well as he did. At the age of 42, she was elected to serve out the remainder of his term; she then won four full terms in her own right.
During her near-decade in the House, Margaret Chase Smith built a reputation as an independent thinker. As Schmidt relates, Smith supported President Franklin Roosevelt's Lend-Lease program to help Britain defend itself against dictatorship—the only member of Maine's House delegation to do so, which set her against the stance of the Republican party's isolationist wing. She also took a stand counter to most of her Republican colleagues to support a bill to allow merchant ships to be armed and permitted in combat zones.
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With these votes and others, she became a champion of national defense and a strong foreign policy. Though rooted in principle and independent judgment, these stances ultimately proved politically savvy as well: Maine was the home to several military installations and defense contractor facilities, such as the Bath Iron Works shipyard.
While Smith maintained the persona of a 'traditional' mid-twentieth-century American woman, she was a strong advocate for women's equality. She was especially attentive to the needs of mothers who worked during the war as civilians and women who joined the military as nurses and other noncombatants. She fought for increased funding for childcare in war-time factories and for improved status of women serving their country in uniform. On various occasions between 1945 to 1972, she cosponsored and voted for the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
In 1948, she ran for the Senate. Maine was solidly Republican in those days, and after roundly defeating her primary opposition (which included both the sitting governor and a former governor), she won the general election with an impressive 71 percent of the vote. She had ruffled a lot of Republican feathers, and she was not the favorite of the party establishment, but her independence and attention to her constituents helped secure her victory.
Senator Smith was the first woman to serve in both the House and the Senate, and from 1949 to 1954, she was the only female senator. With the Senate as a more prominent platform, she immediately went to work to raise her stature. Smith was selected to temporarily act as Senate minority leader in March. She was more than once named the Associated Press's 'Political Woman of the Year.' She was mentioned as a potential contender for the vice presidential slot in the 1952 election. Many Republicans believed her moderate voting record and her gender could be useful in balancing the 1952 ticket.
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EVENTS OF 1950 WOULD ALTER the course of her political career. It was in February of that year that Senator McCarthy began his long cynical campaign of fearmongering and exaggeration—starting with claims that he possessed a list of Communist Party members working at the State Department. McCarthy promised to release details supporting his assertions, but few particulars and no complete list of names was ever revealed.
The Senate established the Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees—the 'Tydings Committee' (for its Democratic chairman, Millard Tydings of Maryland)—to investigate McCarthy's claims. Nine State Department employees were investigated but were cleared. The Tydings Committee determined that McCarthy's list was 'a fraud and a hoax.' Most Republicans joined McCarthy in rejecting the committee's conclusion as partisan.
Margaret Chase Smith was a committed anti-Communist and took seriously the threats presented during the Cold War. However, she had serious objections to McCarthy's methods and doubts about the veracity of McCarthy's claims. Troubled by McCarthyism, she was determined to speak against it.
Smith hoped that speaking out would position her as a forceful and courageous advocate for the truth, but she knew it could be a political landmine. In 1950, at the start of McCarthy's campaign to root out Communist subversives, many Republicans viewed this new Red Scare as a great opportunity to score points against the Truman administration, in advance of that year's midterms and the 1952 presidential election. Certainly at first, more Republicans were with McCarthy than against him.
Although she knew she would face criticism from her own party, Smith chose to act on her principles. On June 1, 1950, she delivered the speech—her first in the Senate—for which she would be most remembered.
Smith's ringing 'Declaration of Conscience' criticized both Republicans and Democrats. She accused the Truman administration of complacency regarding Communist influence and espionage, but she also reproached Republican politicians who alleged that certain Americans presented domestic threats.
Her words from 1950 resonate today:
Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism—
The right to criticize.
The right to hold unpopular beliefs.
The right to protest.
The right of independent thought.
She went on to critique 'the present ineffective Democratic administration' but nevertheless cautioned about giving power to a reckless Republican party.
Yet to displace it with a Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to the nation. The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.
Smith persuaded six other moderate to liberal Republicans to join her in a statement issued concurrent with her speech. The statement closed with this:
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.
She didn't name McCarthy directly—but she didn't have to: The target of her attack was obvious. She later recalled having run into McCarthy on their way to the Capitol. McCarthy asked if she was heading there to make a speech; she replied: 'Yes, and you will not like it.' He sat two rows behind her during her speech.
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SMITH EVENTUALLY PAID a steep political cost for her political courage. Immediate reaction within the Senate was mixed. Many senators remained fully aligned with McCarthy at that early stage in his effort. Some of her colleagues praised and congratulated her.1 Others, including those who agreed with her, were reticent—they didn't want to appear soft on communism, especially not once the Korean War ignited a few weeks later. Even most of her Declaration of Conscience cosigners eventually abandoned her, the exception being Sen. Wayne Morse of Oregon, who left the Republican party, becoming an independent in 1953 and a Democrat in 1955.
The Republican party establishment punished Smith. She was removed from the Permanent Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Expenditures Committee by McCarthy, who was the ranking Republican on the committee. She was removed from the Republican Policy Committee. She was left off the list of speakers at the annual Lincoln Day rally and was scheduled for only two speaking engagements at Maine Republican rallies in the leadup to the 1950 election—a snub for a sitting senator.
Perhaps more notably, talk of her as a potential vice presidential candidate dried up. A small grassroots effort at the 1952 convention to put her name in nomination fell apart. Eisenhower stated his preference for Richard Nixon, and Senator Smith opted out of attending the convention to be with her dying mother back in Maine.
While Smith's standing in the party fell, McCarthy's rose, if only for a short time. He spoke at the 1952 convention, and with Republicans capturing the Senate that year, McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI). He used the PSI as his platform to continue pursuit of alleged Communists. (He was assisted by an aggressive young prosecutor named Roy Cohn, who later became a mentor to a certain New York real estate developer.)
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Ultimately, though, Smith was vindicated. McCarthy's clout declined beginning in 1953 as more of the Washington establishment, including Republican officials, came out against his extremism. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67–22 to censure McCarthy. Republicans split evenly, 22–22. While he continued his anti-communism campaign, his stature and credibility were irreparably diminished. McCarthy died in 1957.
Senator Smith continued to display her independence and courage in the Senate for another eighteen years following McCarthy's downfall. She defied Eisenhower and Nixon on several occasions. Her voting record included support for education, civil rights, voting rights, the War on Poverty, and consumer protection. She declined to fight against the closure of an outdated Air Force Base in her own state ('this would simply be playing politics with our national security').
Smith launched a dark horse candidacy for president in 1964. While she failed to win a primary (Illinois was her best showing with 25 percent of the vote), she stayed in the race to the convention and denied Senator Barry Goldwater a unanimous delegate vote for the nomination. She was the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for the presidency at a major party convention.
Her luck ended with her 1972 Senate re-election bid. She received 47 percent of the vote in a state where Nixon received 65 percent. At 74, she was returning to private life after 32 years.
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THE POLITICS OF 2025 would likely not be a good fit for Senator Smith. Maine Republicans might consider her too independent. After all, the most recent Republican governor was Paul LePage, who said in 2016, 'I was Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular.'
And she would probably find today's Senate strange. What would she say about the motivations of senators who, at one moment (say, after an insurrection) are harshly critical of Trump, only later to turn shamelessly obsequious toward him? What would she think of Ted Cruz (a modern-day McCarthy figure if ever there were one), Mike Lee, Tommy Tuberville, and Lindsey Graham? Would she make another Declaration of Conscience to compare Trump and his sycophants to McCarthy? Would anyone even listen to her?
It's possible that Senator Smith would find common ground with at least one fearless group: the Republican women who oppose Trump, who became especially prominent in 2024. The list is long and includes Liz Cheney, Barbara Comstock, Nancy Kassebaum, Christine Todd Whitman, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson, Sarah Matthews, Stephanie Grisham, and Olivia Troye. All were former elected officials or served in Republican administrations, and all endorsed Kamala Harris.
Smith might also have a pleasant conversation with the woman who holds her Senate seat, Susan Collins, who voted to convict Trump in 2021, did not endorse Trump in 2024, voted against the Hegseth and Patel nominations, voted to block Trump's tariffs, and raised objections to some of Trump's budget proposals.
Collins, an admirer of Senator Smith, could put to good use Smith's counsel from June 1, 1950, and warn fellow Republicans to not 'ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.' Perhaps Smith would advise Collins to make a new declaration—one that fully rejects Trumpism.
Collins's Maine colleague, Senator Angus King—an independent who caucuses with Democrats—recently paid tribute to Smith in a Senate speech. He warned of President Trump exceeding his constitutional powers.
King is sending the right message, but we need Republicans to make their own contemporary 'Declaration of Conscience.' The time has come once again to directly challenge a radical movement.
Whenever you're ready, Senator Collins. . .
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1
One notable instance of praise for Smith came a year after the speech when Hubert Humphrey told Smith she was doing 'a whale of a job.' According to biographer Patricia Schmidt, Smith replied, 'Hubert, if you think I'm doing such a good job, why don't you join me?' To which Humphrey said, 'Oh my God, that would be political suicide.'