What was Margaret Chase Smith’s Declaration of Conscience?

June 1, 1950

Four months after McCarthy’s speech at Wheeling, Margaret Chase Smith rose in the Senate. She was the Senate’s only woman, a Republican like McCarthy, and in her second year as a senator. McCarthy was in the chamber. She never said his name. The Congressional Record prints how she began:

“I speak as a Republican. I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American.”

What she said

Her charge was against the Senate itself. Its deliberative character, she said, had too often been debased to “a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity.” Senators could smear any citizen from the floor, and the citizen had no legal redress. Then came the passage Herald quotes:

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 did not wave the danger away. There had been, she said, “enough proved cases, such as the Amerasia case, the Hiss case, the Coplon case, the Gold case,” to make Americans suspect there might be something to the unproved accusations. She attacked the Democratic administration’s record as well, and she condemned extremes on both sides in a single sentence: “As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist.” What she refused was a party victory won that way. She did not want to see the Republican Party “ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny,” which she named as fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.

The statement and the six who signed

She closed by reading a five-point “Statement of Seven Republican Senators.” It opens: “We are Republicans. But we are Americans first.” It blames the Democrats for confusion and complacency, and blames “certain elements of the Republican Party” for trying to ride to victory on the exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance and intolerance. The six who signed with her were Charles Tobey of New Hampshire, George Aiken of Vermont, Wayne Morse of Oregon, Irving Ives of New York, Edward Thye of Minnesota and Robert Hendrickson of New Jersey.

Colleagues answered on the spot. Millard Tydings, the Democrat whose subcommittee was then examining McCarthy’s charges, praised the speech and proposed a new word for it: “stateswomanship.”

McCarthy’s answer, and the long wait

McCarthy answered with mockery: he called the seven Snow White and the Six Dwarfs. Most senators then stayed silent for four years. Speaking cost her something: in 1954 McCarthy’s allies backed a rival against her in the Republican primary in Maine, and she won easily. When the Senate finally condemned McCarthy, 67 to 22, on December 2, 1954, after the hearings described in Who said “Have you no sense of decency?”, the roll call shows Smith voting yes, and with her the five other signers still in the Senate: Aiken, Hendrickson, Ives, Morse and Thye.

Was she the first to stand up to him? Democrats had moved earlier: Tydings had opened hearings on the charges in March 1950, and he lost his seat that November. What set Smith apart was her party. She spoke against the rising star of her own side, and six Republicans signed with her. In 1951 a Democrat, William Benton of Connecticut, went further and asked the Senate to expel McCarthy. The full story of the era is in What was McCarthyism?. Smith, the first woman to sit in both the House and the Senate, stayed in the Senate until 1973; in 1964 she was the first woman whose name was placed in nomination for president at a major party convention.