JUNE 1, 1950: A DECLARATION OF CONSCIENCE
Maine Republican Margaret Chase Smith served in the Senate with Wisconsin Republican Joe McCarthy, when “Tail Gunner Joe” launched his witch hunt, alleging there were Communists and homosexuals in the State Department. Unsupported by evidence, the number of spies McCarthy claimed to have identified changed daily. Without using his name, Smith called him out.
She called her speech “A Declaration of Conscience.”
Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism . . . are all too frequently
those, who by our own words and acts, ignore some of the principles of Americanism –
the right to criticize; the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest; the right of
independent thought. [Political discourse has been] debased to the level of a forum of
hate and character assassination, sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity. . .
The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be
politically smeared as “Communists” or “Fascists” . . . Freedom of speech is not what it
used to be . . . It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.
I speak as a Republican. I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I don’t
want to see the Republican Party ride to a political victory on the four horsemen of
calumny – fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear.
Her declaration attracted national attention but only six cosigners. It did little to restrain McCarthy. He ridiculed Smith on the Senate floor as “Snow White and the six dwarfs” and supported her GOP primary challenger in 1954. Republican leaders removed her from key committees, damning her as a political maverick.
Senator Margaret Chase Smith (Public domain)
Margaret Chase’s integrity was part of her identity. Born in 1897 in Skowhegan, Maine, she was the oldest of six children of a barber and a shoe factory worker. At thirteen she took a job in a five-and-dime and never attended college. After high school, she worked as an elementary school teacher, a telephone operator, the circulation manager at the local newspaper, and an office manager at a woolen mill.
At thirty-two, she married Clyde Smith, a newspaper publisher and politician twenty-two years her senior. He had served in local offices since 1899. When he was elected to Congress in 1936, she was already president of the Maine Business and Professional Women’s Club. Like many wives in that generation, she managed his Congressional office, despite a Depression-era law barring women from paid work in government jobs if their husbands were employed.
Congressman Smith’s New York Times obituary does not give his cause of death. His Congressional biography lists heart failure. Another source suggests that the womanizing isolationist died of advanced syphilis. The day before he died, in April 1940, he urged his constituents to support his wife.
In the next seven months, the widow Smith won four elections: a May Republican primary, by a ten-to-one margin; a June special election without a Democratic challenger, to fill the unexpired term; the June GOP primary for the full term, amassing four times more votes than her closest competitor; and the November general election, which she secured with 65% of the vote.
In her first full term, 1941-43, there were ten women serving: Senator Hattie Caraway (D-Arkansas) and nine women in the House (4D, 5R). When she left in 1972, she was one of two women Senators (1D, 1R), serving with thirteen Congresswomen (10D, 3R).
June 1940: Congresswoman Smith, age 42, sworn in (Library of Congress)
Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman elected to Congress from Maine, the first woman elected to both houses of Congress, the first Republican woman to serve in the Senate, and the first female Senator whose husband had not previously held the seat. She lost her first election in 1972, at age seventy-four. Her thirty-three-year tenure was eventually surpassed by Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski’s forty-year run.
Representing a ship-building state, Smith supported military preparedness and the draft. She served on the House Naval Affairs Committee, where she introduced legislation to create the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service). Not allowed to serve on ships or overseas, WAVES worked as aviation mechanics, clerks, control tower operators, medics, and parachute riggers. They taught gunnery and aerial photography and tested planes in wind tunnels. Secretary of Navy James Forrestal admitted Black women in 1944.
Lt.(jg) Harriet Ida Pickens and Ensign Frances Wills, the first Black women WAVES commissioned, December 1944. (National Archives)
The 350,000 wartime WAVES, while paid, were considered volunteers; they got no benefits. In 1947, as chair of an Armed Services’ subcommittee, she passed a bill giving regular status to Navy and Army nurses. The 1947 Armed Services Integration Act, which would have extended benefits to all uniformed women in the military, passed in the Senate. The House committee curtailed women’s benefits, over Smith’s lone dissenting vote. That version passed the whole House. With the support of Secretary Forrestal, Smith’s version prevailed in the conference committee in July 1948.
That year Smith entered the hotly contested Senate primary to fill an open seat. Because she was not a party loyalist, the GOP supported Maine’s governor in the four-way race. “If she votes with us,” Republicans complained, “it’s a coincidence.” Female volunteers boosted her shoe-string campaign. She won the primary by 64,000 votes, more than the combined totals for her opponents, and defeated the Democrat in November with 71% of the vote.
1949: The newly elected Senator, age 51 (Library of Congress)
On the rare occasions it reached a floor vote, Smith supported the Equal Rights Amendment but refused to make gender an issue. “If we are to claim and win our rightful place . . .on an equal basis with men, then we must not insist upon those privileges and prerogatives identified in the past as exclusively feminine.” As the only female Senator for twelve years, she used the tourists’ restroom. She never accepted an invitation to a White House dinner until Jacqueline Kennedy suggested she bring an escort. She did not consider herself a feminist.
Her seniority put her on powerful committees: Appropriations, Armed Services, and Government Operations, which she traded for the Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee in 1959, after the US had been embarrassed by Sputnik. She became an expert on national security and a Senate institution, wearing a red rose in her lapel. Between June 1955 to September 1968, when she broke her hip, she cast 2941 consecutive votes.
She remained a maverick. She opposed President Eisenhower’s promotion to brigadier general of actor Jimmy Stewart, an Army reservist and decorated World War II veteran. More significantly, she blocked the nomination of Lewis Strauss to be Secretary of Commerce (but she was not depicted in the blockbuster Oppenheimer). A decade later, she voted against President Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell. Smith supported the New Deal, the Great Society, and civil rights; she was a hawk on foreign affairs.
In 1952, she was asked by a reporter what she would do if she woke up in the White House? Smith replied, “I’d go straight to Mrs. Truman and apologize.” She did run for president in 1964, “with few illusions and no money.” Smith lost every primary but was the first woman to have her name advanced for nomination for the presidency by a major party. She refused to release her twenty-seven delegates, so the, a nomination of conservative Senator Barry Goldwater was not unanimous.
1964: Campaigning for president, age 66 (Public domain)
Known as “the conscience of the Senate,” she died in 1995 at age 97, at her home in Skowhegan. After World War II, in the era of fictional icons like Wonder Woman, Rosie the Riveter, and Betty Crocker, Margret Chase Smith was an actual woman of principle and integrity. Her Declaration seems especially timely today.
It is high time that we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats
about elections and started thinking patriotically as Americans.
SOURCES:
Margaret Chase Smith, “Declaration of Conscience, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/SmithDeclaration.pdf
Committee on House Administration of the US House of Representatives, Women in Congress, 1917-2006 (US Government Printing Office, 2006).
Karen and Herbert N. Foerestal, Climbing the Hill: Gender Conflict in Congress (Praeger, 1996).
Janann Sherman, No Place for a Woman: A Life of Senator Margaret Chase Smith (Rutgers, 2000).
Richard Severo, “Margaret Chase Smith Is Dead at 97; Maine Republican Made History Twice,” New York Times (May 30, 1995) https://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/30/obituaries/margaret-chase-smith-is-dead-at-97-maine-republican-made-history-twice.html
Peggy Noonan, “Who’ll Be 2020’s Margaret Chase Smith?” Wall Street Journal (December 5-6, 2020), https://www.wsj.com/articles/wholl-be-2020s-margaret-chase-smith-11607040752
Statistics: The Center for Women in Politics: www.cawp.rutgers.edu/facts