04/06/2024
On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, stood up against Republican Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and his supporters, who were undermining American democracy in a crusade against âcommunism.â
Margaret Chase was born in Skowhegan in 1897, the oldest child of a barber and a waitress, and became a teacher and a reporter before she got into politics through her husband, Clyde Smith, who was a state legislator and newspaperman. Soon after they married in 1930, she was elected to the Maine Republican State Committee and served until 1936, when Maine voters elected Clyde to Congress.
Once in Washington, Margaret worked as her husbandâs researcher, speechwriter, and press secretary. When Clyde died of a heart attack in April 1940, voters elected Margaret to finish his term, then reelected her to Congress in her own right. They did so three more times, always with more than sixty percent of the vote. In 1948, they elected her to the Senate with a 71% majority.
When she was elected to Congress, the U.S. was still getting used to the New Deal government that Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt had ushered in first to combat the Great Depression and then to fight for victory in World War II. Smithâs party was divided between those who thought the new system was a proper adjustment to the modern world and those determined to destroy that new government.
Those who wanted to slash the government back to the form it had taken in the 1920s, when businessmen ran it, had a problem. American voters liked the business regulation, basic social safety net, and infrastructure construction of the new system. To combat that popularity, the antiâNew Deal Republicans insisted that the U.S. government was sliding toward communism. With the success of the Peopleâs Liberation Army and the declaration of the Peopleâs Republic of China in October 1949, Americans were willing to entertain the idea that communism was spreading across the globe and would soon take over the U.S.
Republican politicians eager to reclaim control of the government for the first time since 1933 fanned the flames of that fear. On February 9, 1950, during a speech to a group gathered in Wheeling, West Virginia, to celebrate Abraham Lincolnâs birthday, an undistinguished senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy claimed that he had a list of 205 communists working for the State Department and that the Democrats refused to investigate these âtraitors in the government.â
The antiâNew Deal faction of the party jumped on board. Sympathetic newspapers trumpeted McCarthyâs chargesâwhich kept changing, and for which he never offered proofâand his colleagues cheered him on, while congress members from the Republican faction that had signed onto the liberal consensus kept their heads down to avoid becoming the target of his attacks.
All but one of them did, that is. Senator Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation. She had seen the effects of his behavior up close in Maine, where the faction of the Republican Party that supported McCarthy had supported the stateâs Ku Klux Klan. Clyde and Margaret Chase Smith had taken a stand against them.
On June 1, 1950, only four months after McCarthy made his infamous speech in Wheeling, Smith stood up in the Senate to make a short speech.
She began: âI would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national su***de and the end of everything that we Americans hold dearâŚ. I speak as a Republican, I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States senator. I speak as an American.â
Referring to Senator McCarthy, who was sitting two rows behind her, Senator Smith condemned the leaders in her party who were destroying lives with wild accusations. âThose 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,â she pointed out. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic American principles. âFreedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,â Senator Smith said. âIt has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.â
Senator Smith wanted a Republican victory in the upcoming elections, she explained, but to replace President Harry Trumanâs Democratic administrationâfor which she had plenty of harsh wordsâwith a Republican regime âthat lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this nation.â
âI do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of CalumnyâFear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.â
âI doubt if the Republican party could do so,â she added, âsimply because I do not believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans are not that desperate for victory.â
âI do not want to see the Republican party win that way,â she said. âWhile it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican party, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people. Surely it would ultimately be su***de for the Republican party and the two-party system that has protected our American liberties from the dictatorship of a one-party system.â
âAs an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist,â she said. âThey are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.â
Smith presented a âDeclaration of Conscience,â listing five principles she hoped her party would adopt. It ended with a warning: âIt is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniquesâtechniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.â
Six other Republican senators signed onto Senator Smithâs declaration.
There were two reactions to the speech within the party. McCarthy sneered at âSnow White and the Six Dwarves.â Other Republicans quietly applauded Smithâs courage but refused to show similar courage themselves with public support. In the short term, Senator Smithâs voice was largely ignored in the public arena and then, when the Korean War broke out, forgotten.
But she was right. Four years later, the Senate condemned McCarthy. And while Senator Smith was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, McCarthy has gone down in history as a disgrace to the Senate and to the United States of America.
