Margaret Chase Smith, 97; Former Maine Senator, Presidential Hopeful

Former Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress and the first woman to be elected to four full terms in the Senate, died Monday in Skowhegan, Me.

Mrs. Smith, 97, succumbed to complications from a stroke eight days earlier that had left her in a coma.

The Maine Republican was the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for the presidency at a national convention of one of the two major political parties. That was in 1964, when she made a bid for the Republican presidential nomination and actively campaigned in the New Hampshire, Illinois and Oregon primaries.

She trailed in all three of those contests and wound up losing the nomination overwhelmingly to Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.).

Sixteen years earlier, in 1948, Mrs. Smith had become something of a national figure by defeating three men in a bitter Republican primary and winning election to the Senate. But she gained even more prominence June 1, 1950, when she became the first senator of either party to openly condemn on the Senate floor the Communist-hunting tactics of the late Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.).

Mrs. Smith--a striking figure with immaculately groomed silver hair and a trademark red rose on the left lapel of her dress--was a tiny woman, just over five feet and weighing barely 100 pounds. But she was noted for a fierce and sometimes imperious independence and a profound sense of duty--as in her condemnation of McCarthy.

In her book, “Declaration of Conscience,” published in 1972, Mrs. Smith said she first thought the Wisconsin Republican was on to something big when he opened his crusade early in 1950 by declaring he had a “photostatic copy” of the names of dozens of card-carrying Communists in the State Department.

But as time went on and McCarthy was unable to substantiate his charges, Mrs. Smith said she became convinced that he was using “the cloak of senatorial immunity” to smear State Department officials and others with “guilt-by-accusation tactics.”

When she rose to speak against McCarthy on the Senate floor, a hush fell over the chamber.

“I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition,” she said. “It is a feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear.”

She accused Democrats of failing to provide effective leadership against McCarthyism. But she also assailed Republicans who had encouraged McCarthy as a weapon against the Democrats.

At no point did she mention McCarthy by name. She didn’t have to. During the speech, McCarthy sat ashen-faced at a desk a few feet behind her.

The speech did not end McCarthy’s rampage, but it was a start. Finally, in 1954, the Senate censured McCarthy for his conduct. He died a short time later.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Smith went on to win reelection in 1954, 1960 and 1966 by such lopsided margins that she came to be regarded as all but invincible. Reelection came so easily that she seldom spent much time or money campaigning.

But in 1972, complacency, advancing age (she was then 74) and a feeling that she had lost touch with her state caught up with her. She was defeated by Rep. William D. Hathaway, a 47-year-old Democrat who had represented one of Maine’s two House districts for four terms.

Mrs. Smith, the eldest of six children, was born in Skowhegan on Dec. 14, 1897, to working-class parents.

Unable to afford college after completing high school, she worked variously as an $8.50-a-week teacher in a one-room rural school, as circulation manager of Skowhegan’s weekly newspaper and as office manager of a woolen mill.

In 1930, she married Clyde Smith, a prosperous businessman and successful Republican politician who was 22 years her senior. Smith was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1936 and his wife joined his office as his secretary.

Smith died of a heart attack in 1940 and Mrs. Smith won a special election to succeed him. She was reelected in her own right the next November.

After four terms in the House, where she gained distinction as a champion of women serving in the military, Mrs. Smith moved up to the Senate--and the beginning of her career as a national figure.

Largely because of her 1950 anti-McCarthy speech, she tended to be regarded as a Republican moderate. Actually, her voting record was more on the conservative side.

She was an unswerving supporter of the Vietnam War, which led her to an ugly confrontation with anti-war students at Maine’s Colby College in May, 1970.

On June 1, 1970, 20 years to the day after her McCarthy speech, she took to the Senate floor to warn the radical left that it was inviting repression from the radical right. As with the 1950 speech, the second one brought her widespread acclaim.

Several years after her defeat in 1972, Mrs. Smith told an interviewer that she missed the Senate immensely. It was a poignant reaffirmation of what she said frequently when she was still in it:

“The Senate is my life.”