01/01/2026
It was the morning of June 1, 1950, and Senator Margaret Chase Smith was on her way to the Senate floor.
As she approached the Capitol subway, she ran into Senator Joseph McCarthy. He had been watching her for weeks. She was carrying a typed speech. He noticed.
"Margaret, you look very serious," McCarthy said. "Are you going to make a speech?"
She met his eyes without flinching.
"Yes," she replied. "And you will not like it."
She was right.
Four months earlier, McCarthy had exploded onto the national stage by claiming he possessed a list of communists secretly working inside the U.S. State Department. The number kept changing. Sometimes he said 205. Sometimes 81. Sometimes 57.
The inconsistency did not matter. Fear had taken hold.
Across the country, teachers were fired without evidence. Writers were blacklisted based on rumors. Government workers lost their careers over anonymous accusations. In McCarthy's America, an accusation alone was enough to destroy someone. Proof had become optional.
And Washington was paralyzed.
Margaret Chase Smith watched her colleagues freeze. She would later describe the United States Senate during this period as gripped by "mental paralysis and muteness." Senators whispered their concerns to each other in private hallways, then sat in cold silence when McCarthy spoke on the floor.
No one wanted to become his next target.
Smith had every reason to stay quiet herself. She was a freshman senator, elected just two years earlier. She was the only woman in the entire chamber, surrounded by ninety-five men. She had no seniority, no powerful committee chairmanships, no political machine to protect her.
Every unwritten rule of Washington told her to keep her head down.
At first, she gave McCarthy the benefit of the doubt. If he truly had evidence of communist infiltration, the country needed to see it. So she asked him for his proof. Privately. Respectfully. Colleague to colleague.
He never showed her anything.
The more she listened to his speeches, the more she studied his accusations, the clearer it became. This was not an investigation. It was intimidation. A deliberate, systematic use of fear to accumulate power.
And if everyone waited for someone braver to go first, nothing would ever change.
Working with her aide William Lewis, Smith drafted what she titled a "Declaration of Conscience." She circulated it among moderate Republican senators. Six agreed to sign. Many others sympathized but were too afraid.
That morning, she walked into the Senate chamber knowing exactly what it would cost her.
McCarthy took his seat two rows directly behind her.
"Mr. President," Smith began, her voice steady, "I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national su***de and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear."
For fifteen minutes, she spoke.
She never said McCarthy's name. She did not need to.
She spoke of how the Senate's reputation as the world's greatest deliberative body had been "debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination."
She defended fundamental American rights. The right to criticize. The right to hold unpopular beliefs. The right to independent thought.
"Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America," she warned. "It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others."
Then she delivered the line that would echo through history.
"I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny: Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear."
When she finished, the chamber was silent.
McCarthy did not respond. He did not defend himself. He stood up and walked out without a word.
The retaliation came swiftly. McCarthy mocked Smith and her six co-signers as "Snow White and the Six Dwarfs." He stripped her from his investigations subcommittee. He backed a primary challenger to end her career.
But something else happened too.
The letters began arriving. Eight letters of support for every one of criticism. Newspapers across the country praised her courage. Organizations honored her defense of civil liberties.
And President Harry Truman, a Democrat who had every political reason to stay silent, invited her to lunch at the Capitol and told her that her speech was one of the finest acts of political courage he had witnessed in all his years of public service.
The voters of Maine never forgot what she did. They reelected her in 1954, 1960, and 1966.
Four years after her Declaration of Conscience, the Senate finally found its courage. In December 1954, it voted to censure Joseph McCarthy for conduct unbecoming a senator. His power collapsed. Three years later, at 48 years old, he died largely forgotten.
Margaret Chase Smith's career did not end. It flourished.
She served twenty-four years in the United States Senate. She became a leading voice on national defense. In 1964, she made history again by becoming the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for President of the United States at a major party convention.
When journalists asked what she wished to be remembered for after decades of accomplishment, her answer never changed.
"If I am to be remembered in history, it will not be because of legislative accomplishments, but for an act I took as a legislator in the U.S. Senate when on June 1, 1950, I spoke in condemnation of McCarthyism, when the Senate was paralyzed with fear and no one else would act."
Margaret Chase Smith proved something that remains true today.
History does not always change through massive crowds or dramatic confrontations. Sometimes it turns because one person, often someone with every reason to stay silent, stands up calmly and tells the truth.
One woman. One speech. Fifteen minutes.
She looked a bully in the eye and refused to be afraid.
And the country was better for it.
~Old Photo Club
