JUNE 1, 1950: CONSCIENCE & COURAGE
Note: I imagine only .001% of Heather Cox Richardson’s readers follow PINK THREADS, whereas I’m confident 100% of my readers are fans of LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN. She also wrote about the anniversary of Margaret Chase Smith’s historic speech today. I promise I’m not copycatting. It’s understandable that two historians would focus on integrity and confronting a bully in the present moment.
Seventy-five years ago today, freshman Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine) rose to reprimand her Republican colleague, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. Without mentioning his name. In February 1950, “Tail Gunner Joe” had charged, without evidence, that Communists and homosexuals had infiltrated the State Department. Sundry assertions put the number at 205 or 57 or 81.
In the aftermath of World War II, Americans were unnerved by the spread of communism behind the Iron Curtain and in Red China. Beginning in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) campaigned against liberals and left-wingers in unions and universities, in Hollywood and the State Department. In 1950, Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, requiring that “subversives” submit to government supervision. When President Truman said it “would make a mockery of our Bill of Rights,” Congressional Republicans overrode his veto.
McCarthy was also a first-term Senator. Originally a Democrat, he changed parties and defeated the revered incumbent, Robert La Follette, Jr., in the Republican primary and demolished the Democrat by attacking his war record. McCarthy was a Marine, but the public did not know he only flew as an observer on twelve noncombat missions in the Pacific. He earned his nickname by shooting at coconut trees. He had not distinguished himself until his anti-communism campaign rocketed him to fame in 1950.
McCarthy was popular. Voters found him brash but authentic. Equally opposed to communism, Smith was offended by his exaggerations and lack of evidence. She anticipated someone more senior would speak up. When no one did, with him looming two rows behind her, Smith rose to be recognized. She said the Senate needed to do “some soul-searching . . . about a serious national condition.” She criticized his behavior and that of the Congress, accusing Democrats of “complacency.” Political discourse, she observed, had been “debased to the level of . . . hate and character assassination.”
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. . .
[Exercising those rights] should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to his livelihood.
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 in America . . . 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.
She called her speech “A Declaration of Conscience.”
Senator Margaret Chase Smith, undated
Rather than rebut her remarks, McCarthy left the chamber. Her declaration attracted national attention but only six cosigners, whom McCarthy ridiculed as “Snow White and the six dwarves.” Republican leaders smeared her, ousted her from key committees and denied her a speaking slot at the 1952 convention. In 1954, McCarthy supported her primary challenger.
McCarthy was a bully. Smith’s speech did little to restrain him. Reelected in 1952, he was appointed chair of the Committee on Government Operations, where his investigations were more aggressive, expansive and erratic. “McCarthyism” became a synonym for witch-hunting, prompting playwright Arthur Miller to write The Crucible, about the hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.
Supported by the Catholic Church and the Kennedy family, McCarthy launched a “Lavender Scare” against homosexuals, claiming a connection between so-called sexual perversion and communist depravity. Assisted by legal counsels Roy Cohn and Robert Kennedy, McCarthy intimidated suspects, pressured people to testify and blacklisted others. More people lost their jobs charged with homosexuality than communist sympathies.
Politicians were reluctant to risk backlash from his base. CBS journalist Edward R. Morrow was bolder, airing an expose of McCarthy and his methods on March 9, 1954. It contributed to the Senator’s downfall. That dramatic episode of “See It Now” is the basis of both a 2005 movie and a 2025 Broadway adaptation. George Clooney, co-author of the screenplay and star of Good Night, and Good Luck, has been nominated for a Tony Award.
(Wikipedia)
Finally, in April 1954, McCarthy attacked the US Army in televised hearings. Democrats refused to participate and Republicans stopped attending the hearings. The country has never seen him relentlessly grill and insult witnesses. Ervin Griswold, dean of Harvard law school, described McCarthy’s role as “judge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one.” The Army hired Boston attorney Joseph Welsh as its chief counsel. On June 9, when McCarthy browbeat a young lawyer, Welch thundered, “Have you no decency, sir?”
Finally, the Senate acted. In a rare measure, it condemned McCarthy for “inexcusable . . . reprehensible. . . vulgar and insulting” behavior “unbecoming a senator” and voted 67 to 22 to censure him. Ostracized by his colleagues and ignored by the press, he increased his drinking. His biographers have struggled with rumors and FBI files purporting that McCarthy was both a homosexual and a serial predator of young women. In 1953, he married a researcher in his office. In January 1957, with the help of Catholic Cardinal Francis Spellman, they adopted an infant daughter. McCarthy died in May 1958, age 48.
Senator John F. Kennedy (D-MA) was hospitalized and unable to cast a censure vote. Because he never denounced McCarthyism, Eleanor Roosevelt refused to endorse JFK for vice president in 1956 or president in 1960.
Margaret Chase Smith, who was defined by integrity, was vindicated, but she was too much of a Mainer to gloat. Born in 1897 in Skowhegan, 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, telephone operator, circulation manager at the local newspaper and office manager at a woolen mill.
Margaret Madeline with George and Carrie Murray Chase
At thirty-two, she married Clyde Smith, a newspaper publisher and local politician, twenty-two years her senior. 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 as a volunteer, because a Depression-era law barred women from paid work in federal 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 womanizer died of advanced syphilis. The day before he died, in April 1940, he urged his constituents to support his wife.
Over 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; a 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. Referring to the 1939 movie starring Jimmy Stewart, Maine voters formed “Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington” clubs.
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 Capitol Hill tenure was eventually surpassed by Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski’s forty-year run.
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). Smith never asked for anyone to vote for her because she as a woman, but she thought women brought certain “sensibilities” to office, “for the betterment of social conditions of the masses. Women are needed in government for the very traits of character that some people say disqualify them.”
Smith did not consider herself a feminist. On the rare occasions the Equal Rights Amendment reached a floor vote, Smith supported it, 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.
Representing an isolationist, ship-building state, in 1940 Smith supported military preparedness, Lend-Lease and extension of the draft. She served on the House Naval Affairs Committee, where she introduced legislation to create the US Navy 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 to the WAVES 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 without benefits. In 1947, as chair of an Armed Services’ subcommittee, Smith authored a bill giving service status to Army and Navy nurses. That year the Senate passed the Armed Services Integration Act, to extend benefits to all uniformed women. A House committee curtailed female benefits, over Smith’s lone dissent. That version passed the whole House, but with the support of Secretary Forrestal, Smith’s original prevailed in the conference committee in July 1948.
That year Smith entered Maine’s hotly contested Senate primary, to fill an open seat. Because she was not considered a party loyalist, the Maine GOP supported the governor in the four-way race. “If she votes with us,” Republicans complained, “it’s a coincidence.” Female volunteers swarmed to her shoe-string campaign. She won the primary by 64,000 votes, more than the combined total for her opponents, and defeated the Democrat in November with 71% of the vote.
Smith’s eventual 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 USSR launched Sputnik. A hawk on foreign affairs, she was an expert on national security. Smith remained a party maverick, supporting the Great Society and civil rights and voting against President Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees, Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell.
Smith became a Senate institution, with a red rose in her lapel. Between June 1955 and September 1968, when she broke her hip, she cast 2,941 consecutive votes. 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.” In 1964, she ran for president, “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 nomination of conservative Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater was not unanimous.
1964: Campaigning for president, age 66
Known as “the conscience of the Senate,” she died in 1995 at age 97 at home in Skowhegan. Margret Chase Smith remains a model of courage and integrity. “It is high time that we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats, about elections,” she emphasized, “and started thinking patriotically as Americans.”
1989: President and Mrs. George H.W. Bush award Smith the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
SOURCES:
Unless otherwise identified, photographs are the public domain.
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).
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
“Joseph McCarthy,” https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/joseph-mccarthy
“Have You No Sense of Decency?” https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/mccarthy-hearings/have-you-no-sense-of-decency.htm
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),
Statistics: The Center for Women in Politics: www.cawp.rutgers.edu/facts
Elisabeth Griffith, FORMIDABLE: American Women and the Fight for Equality, 1920-2020 (Pegasus, 2022).
Totally different from HCR's article, and more fascinating.
Excellent in depth reporting as usual.