Margaret Chase Smith Delivers Declaration of Conscience Against McCarthy Witch Hunt

On June 1, 1950, less than four months after McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith delivered a fifteen-minute speech on the Senate floor known as the “Declaration of Conscience.” As a freshman senator, a fellow Republican who considered herself a friend of McCarthy’s, and the only woman member of the Senate at the time, Smith felt reluctant to speak out publicly. However, after asking to see the documents McCarthy was citing as evidence and finding them irrelevant to his charges, she felt compelled to act. Friends in the media, including columnist Walter Lippmann, encouraged her to take a stand.

Without naming McCarthy directly, Smith denounced “the reckless abandon in which unproved charges have been hurled from this side of the aisle.” She declared that McCarthyism had “debased” the Senate to “the level of a forum of hate and character assassination.” She asked her fellow Republicans not to ride to political victory on the “Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.” Six other liberal-to-moderate Republicans endorsed her speech: Wayne Morse of Oregon, George Aiken of Vermont, Edward J. Thye of Minnesota, Irving Ives of New York, Charles W. Tobey of New Hampshire, and Robert C. Hendrickson of New Jersey.

After Smith finished, McCarthy quietly left the chamber. A few senators spoke in praise, but for the most part the Senate remained silent, fearing to engage McCarthy. In response, McCarthy referred to Smith and the six senators as “Snow White and the Six Dwarfs.” He removed her from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, giving her seat to Richard Nixon, and helped finance an unsuccessful primary challenger during her 1954 re-election campaign. Smith continued to oppose McCarthy at great personal cost for four years until the Senate finally censured him in December 1954. Bernard Baruch stated that if a man had given the Declaration speech “he would be the next President”—a recognition of both Smith’s courage and the gender barriers she faced.