By Richard Hallet
From our May 1960 issue
A woman in so exclusive a gentlemen’s club as the United States Senate is bound to stand out. She naturally attracts more attention than 99 men. A visitor to the Senate Chamber looks around and says: “Who’s the woman?”
Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine literally is unique. Plenty of women have had political influence; she is one of the few in history who have reached political responsibility. It was Maine’s John Neal who, back in the 1840s, started the movement for women suffrage in this country. So it has been Maine all the way in the production of a woman senator. The movement was born here, and so was the woman.
Senator Smith’s official actions may be right or wrong, better or worse; but they share the Senator’s distinction in being unique. Margaret Chase Smith is not a feminist, but she is a woman and a woman’s views are not a man’s. It was quite fitting and perfectly natural that the “declaration of conscience” should be hers. Men, when they have a conscience, usually have caught the contagion of that fire-atom from a woman.
This, no doubt, was what the late Senator Robert Taft had in mind when he said of Senator Smith: “She is the Joan of Arc of the Republican Party, who may well lead us out of the morass of defeat.” That utterance was no mere flourish of gallantry; it came from the heart of solid conviction.
The Spanish have a saying: Quiza la vida es sueno — “Perhaps life is a dream.” And perhaps, as she rises with the sun and listens to the piping of the birds in the mimosa and dogwood trees outside her Washington window, Margaret Chase Smith sometimes may be tempted to think of her own life as an iridescent dream touched by favoring fate; a conspiracy of circumstance to overthrow barriers and elevate her to higher and higher plateaus of human power.
Growing up in Skowhegan, going to high school there, teaching at a country school, working in the five-and-ten-cent store, how could Margaret Chase possibly have envisaged herself as a senator of the United States, a nationwide political power, repeatedly nominated Woman of the Year and, once, the fourth-most-admired woman in the world?
Her quickness, her practical sense and perceptiveness, and her talent for reconciling human conflicts were recognized definitely in the small town of Skowhegan, and she soon advanced to be head of the business office of the local woolen mill. The pivotal event in her life, however, unquestionably was her marriage to Clyde H. Smith.
Smith ran for Congress and his wife made a vigorous campaign for him. He was elected and she went to Washington as his executive secretary. As such, she soon learned her way around and was drawn rapidly into the very center of the political maelstrom. After three years, Clyde Smith died of a heart attack. Knowing himself to be dying — indeed on the day before he died — he appealed to the electorate to put his wife into his office.
As a representative, she served through five terms, and a whirling decade it turned out to be. It propelled her at the end into the turmoil of a primary campaign for senator. Three men were in that contest against her, and towards the end one of them took a local reporter aside.
“It begins to look as if Margaret is unbeatable,” he said. “But it’s a mystery to me, I confess. What has she got?”
“Well, for one thing, courage,” the reporter suggested.
“Courage? In what way?”
The reporter told the story then current that, flying to Europe, Mrs. Smith’s plane had developed alarming engine trouble. Her calm demeanor helped to quiet the other passengers and to avert a panic.
“Plenty of men have that kind of courage,” the fading candidate grumbled.
“Well, she has another kind,” the reporter said. “She is not a rich woman, but she drops her seat in the House and gambles everything on the Senate. If she loses now she’s just a young lady back in Skowhegan again.”
This, the candidate conceded, was courage of a rarer kind.
The gamble succeeded so well that Mrs. Smith won out in the primaries with more votes than all of her three masculine opponents combined.
Near the beginning of this campaign she slipped on ice and broke her arm. She was off speaking again as soon as the bone was set, actually making two speeches on the very day of the accident. During most of that campaign she carried her arm in a sling, but her brain was not in splints. She swept the primary, and in those days that meant sure election.
Her record in the Senate has been full of “firsts” and “bests.” Senator Smith was the first Republican woman senator; the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress; the first woman to direct a major investigation.
As Chairman of a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee, Senator Smith investigated reports of ammunition shortages in Korean War zones. She found that the shortages actually existed and were causing unnecessary loss of American life.
Generals and politicians alike were learning that they must have their facts well in hand when they clashed with Senator Smith. Her own facts were clear and well marshaled; her range of knowledge wide; her grasp of practical affairs nothing short of terrifying to a witness who let the ground slip under his feet ever so little.
It would be fatal to challenge her abilities on the grounds of her lack of a college education. She came into the fray formidably armed with an array of knowledge and experience wielded in the very heat of combat — that wrestling of souls under the Capital dome which is like the continuing contest between God and the devil.
This characteristic preparation for battle was well displayed in the Jimmy Stewart affair when, as a member of the Armed Forces Committee, Mrs. Smith objected to the famous actor’s nomination for promotion to brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve. Her grounds for opposition were partly because Stewart had not taken the annual Reserve training; largely, however, because she did not believe that he was qualified for the important post scheduled for him in the event of mobilization: Chief of Staff of the Strategic Air Command’s Fifteenth Air Force.
The Air Force sent General Emmett (Rosie) O’Donnell Jr. to testify on behalf of Jimmy Stewart as nominee. The general did poorly. He did not have his facts in hand, and Senator Smith did. Adroit in handling documented data, imperturbable and precise, she formulated questions that cut through the very bone, and the general soon was caught with his feathers down. In fact, the record of the hearing looked so bad when it got back to the Air Force that it was given what the White House called “clarification” for the permanent record. Clarified O’Donnell was a far cry from the confused O’Donnell of the hearing.
Altogether, Mrs. Smith thought the nomination was an unconscionable business, and other senators agreed with her when it reached the Senate floor. Stewart’s promotion was not approved, although it was backed by a resounding majority of the Armed Services Committee.
Stewart’s promotion came up again this past year. This time he had done his training, and Senator Smith voted in his favor — but only after the Pentagon assured her that, in the event of active duty, Stewart would be in public relations and not in the other more critical job.
Margaret Chase Smith’s famous Declaration of Conscience came up in 1950 in one of her rare Senate speeches. It was at a time when the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was making headlines with his charges that the government was being infiltrated by Communists. Senator Smith declared that it was high time to stop character assassination behind the cloak of Congressional immunity.
“The American people,” she said, “are sick and tired of seeing innocent people smeared and guilty people whitewashed.” She said that Democrats and Republicans alike were “playing directly into the Communist design to confuse, divide, and conquer.” She wanted a Republican victory, but she “didn’t want to see a Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear.”
She made no mention of McCarthy, although he was the obvious target of the accusation. This Declaration of Conscience made a profound stir both in and out of Congress. Editorials praised Senator Smith’s stand. Her office was flooded with thousands of letters which tallied about eight to one in her support. Senator Stuart Symington, a Democrat, said later that “Senator Smith represents just about all that is best today in American public life — even if she is a Republican.”
In 1956, Senator Smith sued Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer in a $1 million libel action. In their book U.S.A. Confidential they had confided to their readers, among other things, that Mrs. Smith was a sympathizer with Communists and fellow travelers. The case never came to trial but was settled out of court. The defendants agreed to retract their libel and to announce their retraction in advertisements paid for by themselves. They also paid the plaintiff approximately $15,000, a substantial reminder that those who attack Mrs. Smith must have their facts well in hand.
Is Margaret Chase Smith lonely in the Senate? Apparently not. There she is treated as a senator, not as a woman senator. To be sure, in 1952 the Charm Institute voted her the most charming woman in government. But charm is not what Mrs. Smith relies upon in government committees. Charm’s masculine number is gallantry, and gallantry cannot be to the fore in politics. It has not been through charming her opponents that Senator Smith often has stood high on the lists of best senators, not through charm that she has won the Honest Politician Award, or the citation for Americanism from the State of California.
In her dealings with other senators she is friendly but candid. Although she is both a woman and a senator, she is sparing of speech. She cannot be counted in the Senate among those whose tongues are hung in the middle and wag at both ends. In her campaigns, she has not indulged in personalities, preferring to let her record speak for itself. In short, Senator Smith is not given to frequent orations, knows how to keep her own counsel, and speaks only when she has something to say. In this respect, she is not unlike the western gun fighter who never drew his gun unless he intended to use it. Bowdoin College noted this quality in conferring the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws upon her in 1952. The citation read, “She is a woman of common sense, good judgment, and brevity of speech.”
Mrs. Smith believes in the high political destiny of women and thinks there well might be more women in the Senate. A woman, she believes, would know how to hold the government to a budget as strictly as a housewife must adhere to her allowance. “Real peace,” Senator Smith has said, “would be achieved if we had more women in the United Nations and in top government positions of the various nations of the world.”
Nevertheless, at the GOP National Convention in Chicago in 1952, when Margaret Chase Smith was put forward prominently for the vice-presidency, Clare Boothe Luce revealed that Mrs. Smith had been approached but had refused definitely to be a candidate. She prefers her post in the Senate.
Now high in seniority, she is serving on the Appropriations Committee, the Armed Services Committee, the Space Committee, and the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee. Her position carries with it great power and heavy responsibility both to Maine and to the nation. The acknowledged champion of Reserve legislation in Congress, Senator Smith has been cited by the Air Reserve Association, the National Guard Association, and the Reserve Officers Association. Through her many trips she has been rated as one of America’s most effective Ambassadors of Good Will to foreign nations.
In calling Senator Smith the Joan of Arc of the Republican party, Senator Taft was not suggesting even remotely that she would suffer the fate of the Maid of Orleans. Nevertheless, she was greatly daring to begin with in entering that august chamber of the United States Senate.
Penthesileia, Queen of the Amazons, was killed by Greek Achilles, despite her headlong valor, for “exceeding the bounds of woman’s nature” through her audacity in invading man’s special field. But Senator Smith is historically real and not a myth, a feminine force in quite another sense and in an era more receptive to its clarifying influence. Among modern men who have entered the lists against her, none has succeeded in the role of Achilles, and it is unlikely any man will. Margaret Chase Smith is solidly entrenched.
A Complex Portrait
In 1960, Margaret Chase Smith was at the height of her political career. Six months after Richard Hallet profiled her for Down East, she won reelection to the Senate in a landslide, a feat she repeated in 1966, despite spending little time or money on her campaigns. In 1964, she ran for president, becoming the first woman to actively seek the nomination of a major political party. During the latter half of her Senate career, Smith took a series of principled stances, voting consistently for civil-rights legislation (and often sleeping on a leather sofa in her office so she could get up throughout the night and vote to end filibusters of the legislation by Southern Democrats), as well as for the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment.
Of all her accomplishments, Smith remains most famous for her impassioned 1950 speech condemning red-baiting Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. And yet, she was an outspoken anti-communist throughout her life, as well as an ardent supporter of the Vietnam War who went so far as to suspect anti-war protestors of harboring communist sympathies. By the early 1970s, those views left her at odds with many of her constituents. In 1970, she struggled to answer questions from jeering anti-war students at Colby College, an episode she later called “the most unpleasant experience of my entire career.” Two years later, she lost her Senate seat to Auburn Democrat William D. Hathaway.
After her defeat, Smith retired to her home in Skowhegan, where she opened a congressional research library in 1982. She presided over the facility, which contains more than 3,000 primary-source documents from her time on Capitol Hill, until her death, in 1995. Today, visitors can also tour Smith’s house, which has been turned into a museum, and view rotating exhibits. Currently, Painting an Inclusive History: Maine Women in Politics, a collection of 26 portraits of Maine female politicians by Dresden painter Jerri Whitman, is on display (through Nov. 27, 2024; 56 Norridgewock Ave., Skowhegan; 207-474-7133). Two depict Smith in her Senate days with her signature halo of gray-white hair and rose corsage, beaming and clearly in her element. — Sarah Stebbins
