The Current Need for Senators Like Margaret Chase Smith

Seventy years ago, Senator Margaret Chase Smith delivered her “Declaration of Conscience” speech. I don’t usually praise Republican senators, but Smith was a courageous politician, and the country needs more like her today.*¹ 

Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) was a U.S. Senator from 1947 until his death at age 48 in 1957. He became widely known nationwide after giving a speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, W.V., in February 1950.

In that speech, McCarthy showed a piece of paper that he claimed contained a long list of known Communists working for the U.S. government. He declared, "The State Department is infested with Communists.” That was the beginning of the so-called “Red Scare” that soon spread across the U.S.*²

According to Wikipedia, “Barely a month after McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, the term ‘McCarthyism’ was coined by Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block.” He and others “used the word as a synonym for demagoguery, baseless defamation, and mudslinging.” 

Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine) was a U.S. Senator from 1949~73. She died 30 years ago (in May 1995) at the age of 97, the last living senator to have been born in the 19^th century. She became widely known nationwide after giving a speech on the Senate floor on June 1, 1950.

In that speech, Smith presented a “Declaration of Conscience,” which was endorsed by six other Republican senators. It embraced five statements, the first of which began, “We are Republicans. But we are Americans first.” And here is the fifth statement in full:

It is high time that we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats about elections and started thinking patriotically as Americans about national security based on individual freedom. It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.

Sen. Smith called for the country, the Senate, and the Republican Party to re-examine the tactics used by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and (without naming him) Senator McCarthy.

Where are the senators like Margaret Chase Smith today? Despite all the malicious things done and said by the current POTUS, to this point there has been hardly any dissenting voice coming from the Republican senators (or House representatives). This is a real and present danger to the U.S.

Eminent lawyer and law professor Alan Dershowitz’s book War on Woke: Why the New McCarthyism Is More Dangerous Than the Old was published last year, and it merits our attention.

Dershowitz contends that the new McCarthyism challenges the basic tenets of the classic liberal (in the traditional sense) state: Freedom of expression; due process; presumption of innocence, right to counsel, equal application of the law; and tolerance and respect for differing viewpoints.*³

I disagree with the honorable law professor when in the Introduction he states that the “bedrock principles” just mentioned are “rejected by McCarthyite extremists on both the hard left and the hard right.” He seems to go out of his way to endorse “bothsidesism.”

All the “basic tenets” mentioned above are being primarily disregarded by the President and ignored by the top Republican politicians.

Now, five full months after the inauguration of Trump 2.0, is high time for conscientious Republican senators and House members to step up and speak out against the undemocratic policies of the POTUS and his tendency toward embracing fascism.

There is some limited Republican opposition to Pres. Trump, dating back to his first term. That is mainly seen in Sen. Susan Collins (from Maine, like Smith), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), and also Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) since 2024.

Currently, there is also some opposition by fiscal conservatives such as Sen. Rand Paul (also from Ky.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.).

In addition, there are also a few GOP senators opposing the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed by the House at the end of May. That opposition is seen mostly in statements made by Senators Josh Hawley (Mo.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), Thom Tillis (N.C.), and John Curtis (Utah).

Still, most Republican senators vote in lockstep with the President. What the country badly needs, though, are politicians like Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who for the good of the nation will speak out against not only their own Party’s senators but especially the President.

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*¹ I am indebted to Heather Cox Richardson for prompting me to write this blog article. Her May 31 newsletter was a long, informative piece about Sen. Smith.

*² It is noteworthy that Clay Risen’s 460-page book Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America was published earlier this year. He writes in the Preface that “Trumpism and the MAGA movement” is not the same “as McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. But there is a line linking them” (viii). It is also worth noting that McCarthy's primary lawyer, Roy Cohn (1927~86), was also Donald Trump's lawyer in 1973 when the Justice Department accused Trump of violating the Fair Housing Act.

*³ Dershowitz (born in 1938 and about two weeks younger than me) became Harvard Law School's youngest full professor and is now Emeritus Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law.

 

Evaluating Three McCarthys

As far as I can remember, I have never personally known anyone with the name of McCarthy. But I have known about three “men” with that name, and I am posting a brief evaluation of those three here.

Charlie McCarthy was the name of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Beginning back in the 1930s, Edgar Bergen (who was an actor, comedian, and ventriloquist), made Charlie McCarthy a popular and beloved figure in American entertainment from 1937 on for decades. 

I probably heard Bergen and McCarthy on the radio in the late 1940s. During those years my birth family would often sit around the dining table in the evenings listening to radio programs. Surprisingly, Charlie was well known as ventriloquist Bergen’s dummy even though he couldn’t be seen.

Bergen (1903~78) was the father of the well-known actress Candice Bergen (b. 1946). In her early girlhood years, she was irritated whenever she was referred to as Charlie McCarthy’s little sister.*¹

A few years after I first heard of Charlie McCarthy, as a high school student I began to hear some about a Senator named McCarthy.

Joseph McCarthy (1908~57) was a U.S. Senator (R-Wis.), first elected to the Senate in 1946. He was relatively unknown until early in 1950 when he began charging that there was massive Communist infiltration in the U.S. government.

Margaret Chase Smith, Maine’s Republican Senator from 1949 to 1973, was a leader in the opposition to Sen. McCarthy’s spurious charges. Heather Cox Richardson wrote about that on June 1, 2022, noting that “once upon a time, Republican politicians were the champions of reason and compromise.”

In 1954 the Senate finally voted to censure McCarthy, and according to a Senate webpage, “Censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy died three years later, 48 years old and a broken man.”

But McCarthyism—and it is interesting that his name is one of the few names that became an “ism”—has continued to live on, most recently in Trumpism, another instance of a name becoming an ism.

Roy Cohn (1927~86) was Sen. McCarthy’s chief counsel in the 1954 hearings, and then he was Donald Trump’s lawyer and mentor for 13 years in the 1970s and ’80s. A Yale history professor’s opinion piece about the connection of McCarthyism to Trumpism was published on Dec. 4, 2020.

Kevin McCarthy is a current U.S. Representative (R-Calif.) and the top Republican in the House. First elected to Congress in 2006, McCarthy (b. 1965) was elected as GOP majority leader in 2014, the fastest-ever ascent to that pivotal leadership post.

McCarthy is a Southern Baptist, and his pastor in Riverside, Calif., flew to Washington to offer the opening invocation of the House on the day before McCarthy was installed as the majority leader. The next day, McCarthy told a D.C. group of religious conservatives that he was “proud to be a Christian.”*²

During the impeachment investigation in 2019, Cleveland Plain Dealer cartoonist Jeff Darcy referred to Rep. McCarthy as “President Trump’s ventriloquist dummy puppet.” He then added, “Out of respect to legendary ventriloquism puppet Charlie McCarthy, the two are not related.”*³

Soon after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, McCarthy was highly critical of Pres. Trump, rightfully calling it an "unprecedented attack on our nation." He said that Trump's words and actions "helped to encourage the actions of the rioters" and that the President's "betrayal of his office and supporters" was a "dishonor to the country."

However, before the end of that month, McCarthy backtracked his criticism and even went to Mar-a-Lago to visit with Trump. He seems to once again to be “my Kevin,” as Trump has referred to him through the years.

Now Rep. McCarthy is vying to become Speaker of the House when the 118^th Congress convenes on Jan. 3, 2023. Implying McCarthy’s lack of integrity, columnist Dana Millbank wrote on Dec. 2 that McCarthy “sells his soul to extremists in hopes of eking out enough votes to become speaker.”

Clearly, Charlie seems to be the best of the three McCarthys.

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*¹ I first remember Candice Bergen as the leading actress in Sand Pebbles (1966), one of my favorite movies.

*² Even though I was a Southern Baptist for 65 years, I have far more respect for Rep. Jamie Raskin (see my Dec. 10 post) who is a Jew, than for Rep. McCarthy. That is largely because of the latter’s hypocrisy or opportunism—and for his besmirching the good name of Christians.

*³ Here is the link to Darcy’s cartoon and article about Kevin and Charlie.

Note: The fourth paragraph about Rep. McCarthy was generated by ChatGPT, the new AI online program. I just slightly modified what it wrote from my prompt asking for McCarthy's criticism of Pres. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.