Letters from an American - June 1, 2024
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June 1st, 2024.
Today, as MAGA Republicans attack the rule of law and promise to prosecute their political enemies if they get back into power,
it's easy to forget that once upon a time, certain Republican politicians championed reason and compromise and took a stand against MAGA's
predecessors. On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, stood up
against Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and his supporters, who were undermining American democracy in a crusade against communism.
Margaret Chase was born in Skowhegan in 1897, the oldest child of a barber and a waitress,
and became a teacher and a reporter before she got into politics through her husband,
Clyde Smith, who was a state legislator and newspaper man. Soon after they married in 1930, she was elected to the
Maine Republican State Committee and served until 1936 when Maine voters
elected Clyde to Congress. Once in Washington, Margaret worked as her
husband's researcher, speechwriter, and press secretary. When Clyde died of a
heart attack in April 1940, voters elected Margaret to finish his term,
then re-elected her to Congress in her own right. They did so three more times, always with more
than 60 percent of the vote. In 1948, they elected her to the Senate with a 71 percent majority.
When she was elected to Congress, the U.S. was still getting used to the New Deal
government that Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had ushered in, first to combat
the Great Depression and then to fight for victory in World War II. Smith's party was divided between
those who thought the new system was a proper adjustment to the modern world and those determined
to destroy that new government. Those who wanted to slash the government back to the form it had taken in the 1920s,
when businessmen ran it, had a problem.
American voters liked the business regulation, basic social safety net,
and infrastructure construction of the new system.
To combat that popularity, the anti-New Deal Republicans insisted
that the U.S. government was sliding toward communism.
With the success of the People's Liberation Army and the declaration of the People's Republic of China in October 1949,
Americans were willing to entertain the idea that communism was spreading across the globe and would soon take over the U.S.
across the globe and would soon take over the US. Republican politicians eager to reclaim control
of the government for the first time since 1933
fanned the flames of that fear.
On February 9, 1950, during a speech
to a group gathered in Wheeling, West Virginia
to celebrate Abraham Lincoln's birthday,
an undistinguished senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy
claimed that he had a list of 205 communists working for the State Department and that the
Democrats refused to investigate these traitors in the government. The anti-New Deal faction of
the party jumped on board. Sympathetic newspapers trumpeted McCarthy's charges, which kept changing and for which he
never offered proof, and his colleagues cheered him on, while Congress members from the Republican
faction that had signed on to the liberal consensus kept their heads down to avoid becoming
the target of his attacks. All but one of them did, that is. Senator Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation.
She had seen the effects of his behavior up close in Maine, where the faction of the Republican
Party that supported McCarthy had supported the state's Ku Klux Klan. Clyde and Margaret
Chase Smith had taken a stand against them. On June 1st, 1950, only four months after McCarthy made his infamous
speech in Wheeling, Smith stood up in the Senate to make a short speech. She began,
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 suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear.
I speak as a Republican. I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American.
Referring to Senator McCarthy, who was sitting two rows behind her,
Senator Smith condemned the leaders in her party who were destroying lives with wild accusations.
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, she pointed out.
Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for
themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic
American principles. Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America, Senator Smith
said. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others. Senator Smith wanted a
Republican victory in the upcoming elections, she explained, but to replace President Harry
Truman's Democratic administration, for which she had plenty of harsh words, with a Republican regime
that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this
nation. I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four
horsemen of calumny, fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear. I doubt if the Republican Party could do so,
she added, simply because I do not believe the American people will uphold any political party
that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans are not that desperate for victory. I do not want to see the
Republican Party win that way, she said. While it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican
Party, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people. Surely it would ultimately be
suicide for the Republican Party and the two-party system that has protected our American
liberties from the dictatorship of a one-party system. As an American, I condemn a Republican
fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat communist, she said. They are equally dangerous
to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture
the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.
Smith presented a declaration of conscience, listing five principles she hoped her party
would adopt. It ended with a warning. 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.
Six other Republican senators signed on to Senator Smith's declaration.
There were two reactions to the speech within the party.
McCarthy sneered at Snow White and the Six Dwarves.
Other Republicans quietly applauded Smith's courage,
but refused to show similar courage themselves with public support.
In the short term, Senator Smith's voice was largely ignored in the public arena,
and then, when the Korean War broke out, forgotten.
But she was right.
Four years later, the Senate condemned McCarthy.
And while Senator Smith was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
McCarthy has gone down in history as a disgrace to the Senate
and to the United States of America.
Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions,
Dedham, Massachusetts.
Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.