Women of Influence: Margaret Chase Smith
Who was the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for the presidency at a major party's convention? The answer to that trivia question is Margaret Chase Smith, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1940 to 1949 and a U.S. Senator from 1949 to 1973. She was the first woman to serve in both houses of the United States Congress, and the first woman to represent Maine in either. Margaret Chase Smith was a moderate Republican, and was one of the first from her party to criticize the tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy in her 1950 speech, called a "Declaration of Conscience".
Margaret Chase was born in Skowhegan in central Maine on December 14, 1897. Her parents were , to George Emery Chase and the former Carrie Matilda Murray. Margaret was the oldest of six children, two of whom did not live to adulthood. Her father traced his ancestry to immigrants to the original Thirteen Colonies in the 17th century. Her great-great grandfather had been the commander of an artillery company during the War of 1812, and her grandfather served in the Union Army during the Civil War. Her mother's family was French Canadian. That family immigrated from Quebec in the middle of the 19th century and Margaret's grandfather Lambert Morin changed his name to John Murray to avoid anti-French Canadian and anti-Catholic prejudice. George Chase was the town barber in Skowhegan, and Carrie Chase worked as a waitress, store clerk, and shoe factory worker.
Margaret attended Lincoln and Garfield Elementary Schools and began working at the age of 12, a local five-and-dime store. She was so forward-thinking that as a child she bought herself a life insurance policy. She also helped out at her father's barber shop, shaving customers when her father was busy or away from the shop. She graduated from Skowhegan High School in 1916 and while in high school, she played on the girls' basketball team, and was captain in her senior year. She also worked as a substitute operator with a telephone company. While working on that job In that position she met Clyde Smith, a local politician, who arranged a job for her as a part-time assistant to the tax assessor.
Following her high school graduation, Chase taught at the Pitts School, a one-room school near Skowhegan. She also coached the girls' basketball team at Skowhegan High. She went from being an operator to become a business executive for the Maine Telephone and Telegraph Company, doing that for a year before joining the staff of the Independent Reporter, a Skowhegan weekly newspaper, coincidentally owned by Clyde Smith. She became the circulation manager and served in that role from 1919 to 1928. She co-founded the Skowhegan chapter of the Business and Professional Women's Club in 1922, and served as editor of the club's magazine, called "The Pine Cone". From 1926 to 1928, she was president of the the Maine Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs. She also became treasurer of the New England Waste Process Company in 1928 and was also employed as an office worker with the Daniel E. Cummings Woolen Company, a local textile mill.
On May 14, 1930, Chase married Clyde Smith, the local politician, who was 21 years older than her. Smith was a Republican and Margaret Chase Smith became active in Republican politics. She was elected to the Maine Republican State Committee, on which she served from 1930 to 1936. Her husband Clyde was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Maine's 2nd congressional district in 1936, and Margaret Chase Smith accompanied her husband to Washington, D.C. to serve as his secretary, managing his office, handling his correspondence, conducting research, and writing some of his speeches. She was also treasurer of the Congressional Club, a group composed of the wives of congressmen and Cabinet members.
In the spring of 1940, Clyde Smith suffering a major heart attack, and asked his wife to run for his House seat in the general election the following September. He endorsed her in a press release in which he wrote" "I know of no one else who has the full knowledge of my ideas and plans or is as well qualified as she is, to carry on these ideas and my unfinished work for my district." Before the election, Clyde Smith died on April 8 of that year. A special election was scheduled on June 3 to complete his unexpired term. It was a solid Republican district and there was no Democratic challenger. Margaret Chase Smith won the special election and became the first woman elected to Congress from Maine. Three months later, she was elected to a full two-year term in the House in her own right, defeating Edward J. Beauchamp, the Democratic mayor of Lewiston, by a margin of 65%–35%. She was re-elected to three more terms over the course of the next eight years, and always received at least 60% of the vote.
While in the House, Smith developed an expertise in issues concerning the military and national security. After being appointed to the House Naval Affairs Committee in 1943, she was assigned to the investigation of destroyer production. She went on a 25,000-mile tour of bases in the South Pacific during the winter of 1944 and also became the first and only civilian woman to sail on a U.S. Navy ship during World War II. She was dubbed the "Mother of the WAVES" because she was the one who introduced legislation to create that organization. (The United States Naval Reserve (Women's Reserve), better known as the WAVES (for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), was the women's branch of the United States Naval Reserve during World War II.) She strongly supported legislation that created the special female military units during World War II and legislation that gave women permanent status in the military following the war.
Although she was a Republican, Margaret Chase Smith supported President Harry S. Truman's foreign policies, and Truman considered her as a possible candidate for Under Secretary of the Navy in 1945 and for Assistant Secretary of State in 1947. Smith became a member of the House Armed Services Committee in 1946, serving as chair of its Subcommittee on Hospitalization and Medicine. She sponsored the Women's Armed Services Integration Act, a bill to regularize the status of women in the armed forces that was signed into law by President Truman in June 1948.
Smith was a moderate Republican who often broke ranks with her party. She supported much of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal legislation. Her husband had done the same while he was in office. She voted in favor of the Selective Service Act in 1940 and in 1945, she voted against making the House Un-American Activities Committee a permanent body.
While a member of the House, Smith's trademark was her wearing of a single red rose, a daily part of her attire throughout her career in public office. She led a campaign to have the rose declared the official flower of the United States, which Congress eventually approved in 1987.
In August 1947, after three-term incumbent US Senator Wallace H. White Jr. of Maine decided to retire, Smith announced her candidacy for his seat. In the Republican primary, she ran for her party's nomination against incumbent Governor Horace A. Hildreth, former Governor Sumner Sewall, and Reverend Albion Beverage. She ran a poorly funded grassroots campaign, running on the slogan, "Don't change a record for a promise." She was asked by the wife of one of her opponents if a woman would be a good Senator. Her answer is classic:
"Women administer the home. They set the rules, enforce them, mete out justice for violations. Thus, like Congress, they legislate; like the Executive, they administer; like the courts, they interpret the rules. It is an ideal experience for politics."
On June 21, 1948, Smith won the primary election and received more votes than her three opponents combined. In the general election on September 13, she defeated Democrat Adrian H. Scolten by a margin of 71%–29% and she became the first woman to represent Maine in the Senate, and the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress.
Smith was sworn into the Senate on January 3, 1949. She soon gained national attention when she became the first member of Congress to condemn the anti-Communist witch hunt led by her fellow Republican Senator, Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin. She had been open to acting on McCarthy's accusations about Communists working in the State Department, but when McCarthy failed to provide any evidence to validate his charges, she saw McCarthy for what he was. On June 1, 1950, Smith delivered a fifteen-minute speech on the Senate floor, known as the "Declaration of Conscience," in which she refused to mention McCarthy by name, but denounced "the reckless abandon in which unproved charges have been hurled from this side of the aisle." She said McCarthyism had "debased" the Senate to "the level of a forum of hate and character assassination" and she defended every American's "right to criticize, right to hold unpopular beliefs, right to protest, the right of independent thought." She added, "I don't want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny: fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear." She was joined by six other moderate Republican Senators who signed on to her Declaration. They were: Wayne Morse from Oregon, George Aiken from Vermont, Edward Thye from Minnesota, Irving Ives from New York, Charles Tobey from New Hampshire, and Robert C. Hendrickson from New Jersey.
In response to the speech, McCarthy pejoratively referred to Smith and the six other Senators as "Snow White and the Six Dwarfs." He removed her as a member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and gave her seat to Senator Richard Nixon from California. He also helped finance an unsuccessful primary challenger during Smith's re-election campaign in 1954. Smith was always proud of her battle with McCarthy, later stating:
"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 junior Senator from Wisconsin had the Senate paralyzed with fear that he would purge any Senator who disagreed with him."
Smith voted in favor of McCarthy's censure in 1954.
In the 1952 election, Smith was mentioned as a vice-presidential candidate under General Dwight D. Eisenhower. She reacted to the rumors with good humor. She was asked by a reporter what she would do if she woke up one morning and found herself in the White House, and she replied: "I'd go straight to Mrs. Truman and apologize. Then I'd go home."
In 1960, Smith ran against and defeated Democrat Lucia Cormier, the minority leader of the Maine House of Representatives, the first time in American history that two women ran against each other for a Senate seat. During the administration of John F. Kennedy, Smith argued that the United States should consider the use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. This led Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to call Smith "the devil in disguise of a woman" and said that her position exceeded "all records of savagery." In response, Smith said: "Mr. Khrushchev isn't really mad at me. I am not that important. He is angry because American officials have grown more firm since my speech."
The morning after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Smith went into the Senate chamber before it convened and laid a rose on the desk Kennedy had occupied as a Senator.
On January 27, 1964, Smith announced her candidacy for President of the United States. In her speech declaring her candidacy, she said: "I have few illusions and no money, but I'm staying for the finish. When people keep telling you you can't do a thing, you kind of like to try." A songwriter named Gladys Shelley wrote a presidential nomination campaign song for Smith called “Leave It to the Girls,” which was sung by a singer named Hildegarde. Smith failed to win a single primary election, but did manage to win 25% of the vote in Illinois. At the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, she became the first woman to have her name be placed in nomination for the presidency at a major political party's convention. She placed fifth in the initial balloting, and denied unanimous consent for Senator Barry Goldwater from Arizona after refusing to withdraw her name from the final ballot. In spite of this, she campaigned for Goldwater in the general election, and appeared in a television ad defending his position on Social Security.
Smith was the first woman to serve as chair of the Senate Republican Conference, serving from 1967 to 1972. She was a strong supporter of the space program and served as a charter member of the Senate Aeronautical and Space Committee. NASA administrator James E. Webb once claimed that the United States never would have placed a man on the Moon if it were not for Smith. She voted in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1968, as well as the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. She held an all-time voting record in the Senate until 1981 with 2,941 consecutive roll call votes.
Margarer Chase Smith experienced a decline in health that required her to use a motorized scooter to get around in the Senate. It was rumors of her poor health as well as her support for the Vietnam War that led to her defeat for re-election in 1972. She lost to Democrat Bill Hathaway, the only election she ever lost in the state of Maine. A Republican primary challenger had accused her for being out of touch because she did not have a state office operating in Maine. Smith lost the election by 27,230 votes, a margin of 53%–47%.
In 1973, Smith was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and in 1995 Smith was awarded the Naval Heritage Award by the US Navy Memorial Foundation for her support of the US Navy, US Naval Reserves WAVES, and the military during her congressional career. After leaving the Senate in January 1973, Smith taught at several colleges and universities as a visiting professor. She returned to Skowhegan, and she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George H. W. Bush on July 6, 1989.
Margaret Chase Smith died in Skowhegan, the place of her birth, on May 29, 1995 at the age of 97, after suffering a stroke eight days earlier that had left her in a coma. Her body was cremated, and her ashes were placed in the residential wing of the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan.
Margaret Chase was born in Skowhegan in central Maine on December 14, 1897. Her parents were , to George Emery Chase and the former Carrie Matilda Murray. Margaret was the oldest of six children, two of whom did not live to adulthood. Her father traced his ancestry to immigrants to the original Thirteen Colonies in the 17th century. Her great-great grandfather had been the commander of an artillery company during the War of 1812, and her grandfather served in the Union Army during the Civil War. Her mother's family was French Canadian. That family immigrated from Quebec in the middle of the 19th century and Margaret's grandfather Lambert Morin changed his name to John Murray to avoid anti-French Canadian and anti-Catholic prejudice. George Chase was the town barber in Skowhegan, and Carrie Chase worked as a waitress, store clerk, and shoe factory worker.
Margaret attended Lincoln and Garfield Elementary Schools and began working at the age of 12, a local five-and-dime store. She was so forward-thinking that as a child she bought herself a life insurance policy. She also helped out at her father's barber shop, shaving customers when her father was busy or away from the shop. She graduated from Skowhegan High School in 1916 and while in high school, she played on the girls' basketball team, and was captain in her senior year. She also worked as a substitute operator with a telephone company. While working on that job In that position she met Clyde Smith, a local politician, who arranged a job for her as a part-time assistant to the tax assessor.
Following her high school graduation, Chase taught at the Pitts School, a one-room school near Skowhegan. She also coached the girls' basketball team at Skowhegan High. She went from being an operator to become a business executive for the Maine Telephone and Telegraph Company, doing that for a year before joining the staff of the Independent Reporter, a Skowhegan weekly newspaper, coincidentally owned by Clyde Smith. She became the circulation manager and served in that role from 1919 to 1928. She co-founded the Skowhegan chapter of the Business and Professional Women's Club in 1922, and served as editor of the club's magazine, called "The Pine Cone". From 1926 to 1928, she was president of the the Maine Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs. She also became treasurer of the New England Waste Process Company in 1928 and was also employed as an office worker with the Daniel E. Cummings Woolen Company, a local textile mill.
On May 14, 1930, Chase married Clyde Smith, the local politician, who was 21 years older than her. Smith was a Republican and Margaret Chase Smith became active in Republican politics. She was elected to the Maine Republican State Committee, on which she served from 1930 to 1936. Her husband Clyde was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Maine's 2nd congressional district in 1936, and Margaret Chase Smith accompanied her husband to Washington, D.C. to serve as his secretary, managing his office, handling his correspondence, conducting research, and writing some of his speeches. She was also treasurer of the Congressional Club, a group composed of the wives of congressmen and Cabinet members.
In the spring of 1940, Clyde Smith suffering a major heart attack, and asked his wife to run for his House seat in the general election the following September. He endorsed her in a press release in which he wrote" "I know of no one else who has the full knowledge of my ideas and plans or is as well qualified as she is, to carry on these ideas and my unfinished work for my district." Before the election, Clyde Smith died on April 8 of that year. A special election was scheduled on June 3 to complete his unexpired term. It was a solid Republican district and there was no Democratic challenger. Margaret Chase Smith won the special election and became the first woman elected to Congress from Maine. Three months later, she was elected to a full two-year term in the House in her own right, defeating Edward J. Beauchamp, the Democratic mayor of Lewiston, by a margin of 65%–35%. She was re-elected to three more terms over the course of the next eight years, and always received at least 60% of the vote.
While in the House, Smith developed an expertise in issues concerning the military and national security. After being appointed to the House Naval Affairs Committee in 1943, she was assigned to the investigation of destroyer production. She went on a 25,000-mile tour of bases in the South Pacific during the winter of 1944 and also became the first and only civilian woman to sail on a U.S. Navy ship during World War II. She was dubbed the "Mother of the WAVES" because she was the one who introduced legislation to create that organization. (The United States Naval Reserve (Women's Reserve), better known as the WAVES (for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), was the women's branch of the United States Naval Reserve during World War II.) She strongly supported legislation that created the special female military units during World War II and legislation that gave women permanent status in the military following the war.
Although she was a Republican, Margaret Chase Smith supported President Harry S. Truman's foreign policies, and Truman considered her as a possible candidate for Under Secretary of the Navy in 1945 and for Assistant Secretary of State in 1947. Smith became a member of the House Armed Services Committee in 1946, serving as chair of its Subcommittee on Hospitalization and Medicine. She sponsored the Women's Armed Services Integration Act, a bill to regularize the status of women in the armed forces that was signed into law by President Truman in June 1948.
Smith was a moderate Republican who often broke ranks with her party. She supported much of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal legislation. Her husband had done the same while he was in office. She voted in favor of the Selective Service Act in 1940 and in 1945, she voted against making the House Un-American Activities Committee a permanent body.
While a member of the House, Smith's trademark was her wearing of a single red rose, a daily part of her attire throughout her career in public office. She led a campaign to have the rose declared the official flower of the United States, which Congress eventually approved in 1987.
In August 1947, after three-term incumbent US Senator Wallace H. White Jr. of Maine decided to retire, Smith announced her candidacy for his seat. In the Republican primary, she ran for her party's nomination against incumbent Governor Horace A. Hildreth, former Governor Sumner Sewall, and Reverend Albion Beverage. She ran a poorly funded grassroots campaign, running on the slogan, "Don't change a record for a promise." She was asked by the wife of one of her opponents if a woman would be a good Senator. Her answer is classic:
"Women administer the home. They set the rules, enforce them, mete out justice for violations. Thus, like Congress, they legislate; like the Executive, they administer; like the courts, they interpret the rules. It is an ideal experience for politics."
On June 21, 1948, Smith won the primary election and received more votes than her three opponents combined. In the general election on September 13, she defeated Democrat Adrian H. Scolten by a margin of 71%–29% and she became the first woman to represent Maine in the Senate, and the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress.
Smith was sworn into the Senate on January 3, 1949. She soon gained national attention when she became the first member of Congress to condemn the anti-Communist witch hunt led by her fellow Republican Senator, Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin. She had been open to acting on McCarthy's accusations about Communists working in the State Department, but when McCarthy failed to provide any evidence to validate his charges, she saw McCarthy for what he was. On June 1, 1950, Smith delivered a fifteen-minute speech on the Senate floor, known as the "Declaration of Conscience," in which she refused to mention McCarthy by name, but denounced "the reckless abandon in which unproved charges have been hurled from this side of the aisle." She said McCarthyism had "debased" the Senate to "the level of a forum of hate and character assassination" and she defended every American's "right to criticize, right to hold unpopular beliefs, right to protest, the right of independent thought." She added, "I don't want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny: fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear." She was joined by six other moderate Republican Senators who signed on to her Declaration. They were: Wayne Morse from Oregon, George Aiken from Vermont, Edward Thye from Minnesota, Irving Ives from New York, Charles Tobey from New Hampshire, and Robert C. Hendrickson from New Jersey.
In response to the speech, McCarthy pejoratively referred to Smith and the six other Senators as "Snow White and the Six Dwarfs." He removed her as a member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and gave her seat to Senator Richard Nixon from California. He also helped finance an unsuccessful primary challenger during Smith's re-election campaign in 1954. Smith was always proud of her battle with McCarthy, later stating:
"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 junior Senator from Wisconsin had the Senate paralyzed with fear that he would purge any Senator who disagreed with him."
Smith voted in favor of McCarthy's censure in 1954.
In the 1952 election, Smith was mentioned as a vice-presidential candidate under General Dwight D. Eisenhower. She reacted to the rumors with good humor. She was asked by a reporter what she would do if she woke up one morning and found herself in the White House, and she replied: "I'd go straight to Mrs. Truman and apologize. Then I'd go home."
In 1960, Smith ran against and defeated Democrat Lucia Cormier, the minority leader of the Maine House of Representatives, the first time in American history that two women ran against each other for a Senate seat. During the administration of John F. Kennedy, Smith argued that the United States should consider the use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. This led Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to call Smith "the devil in disguise of a woman" and said that her position exceeded "all records of savagery." In response, Smith said: "Mr. Khrushchev isn't really mad at me. I am not that important. He is angry because American officials have grown more firm since my speech."
The morning after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Smith went into the Senate chamber before it convened and laid a rose on the desk Kennedy had occupied as a Senator.
On January 27, 1964, Smith announced her candidacy for President of the United States. In her speech declaring her candidacy, she said: "I have few illusions and no money, but I'm staying for the finish. When people keep telling you you can't do a thing, you kind of like to try." A songwriter named Gladys Shelley wrote a presidential nomination campaign song for Smith called “Leave It to the Girls,” which was sung by a singer named Hildegarde. Smith failed to win a single primary election, but did manage to win 25% of the vote in Illinois. At the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, she became the first woman to have her name be placed in nomination for the presidency at a major political party's convention. She placed fifth in the initial balloting, and denied unanimous consent for Senator Barry Goldwater from Arizona after refusing to withdraw her name from the final ballot. In spite of this, she campaigned for Goldwater in the general election, and appeared in a television ad defending his position on Social Security.
Smith was the first woman to serve as chair of the Senate Republican Conference, serving from 1967 to 1972. She was a strong supporter of the space program and served as a charter member of the Senate Aeronautical and Space Committee. NASA administrator James E. Webb once claimed that the United States never would have placed a man on the Moon if it were not for Smith. She voted in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1968, as well as the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. She held an all-time voting record in the Senate until 1981 with 2,941 consecutive roll call votes.
Margarer Chase Smith experienced a decline in health that required her to use a motorized scooter to get around in the Senate. It was rumors of her poor health as well as her support for the Vietnam War that led to her defeat for re-election in 1972. She lost to Democrat Bill Hathaway, the only election she ever lost in the state of Maine. A Republican primary challenger had accused her for being out of touch because she did not have a state office operating in Maine. Smith lost the election by 27,230 votes, a margin of 53%–47%.
In 1973, Smith was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and in 1995 Smith was awarded the Naval Heritage Award by the US Navy Memorial Foundation for her support of the US Navy, US Naval Reserves WAVES, and the military during her congressional career. After leaving the Senate in January 1973, Smith taught at several colleges and universities as a visiting professor. She returned to Skowhegan, and she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George H. W. Bush on July 6, 1989.
Margaret Chase Smith died in Skowhegan, the place of her birth, on May 29, 1995 at the age of 97, after suffering a stroke eight days earlier that had left her in a coma. Her body was cremated, and her ashes were placed in the residential wing of the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan.