Smith Defies McCarthy: A Declaration of Conscience

Four months into Joseph McCarthy’s campaign to root out alleged Communists in the federal government, not a single Republican senator had publicly challenged him. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine broke that silence on June 1, 1950, rising on the Senate floor to deliver what she called a "Declaration of Conscience." She never mentioned McCarthy by name, but no one in the chamber misunderstood her target. Smith had won her Senate seat in 1948 as a moderate Republican from a state that valued independence over party loyalty. She watched McCarthy’s accusations grow wilder through the spring of 1950, troubled not by anti-Communist sentiment itself but by the recklessness of the charges. McCarthy had produced no evidence to support his claim of 205 known Communists in the State Department. The number changed with each speech, and the accused had no opportunity to defend themselves. Her address lasted fifteen minutes. She condemned the Senate for being "debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination" and attacked the exploitation of fear for political gain. Six fellow Republican senators co-signed the declaration, though several quietly withdrew their support after McCarthy retaliated. McCarthy stripped Smith of her Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations assignment and backed a primary challenger against her in 1954. She won that primary by a five-to-one margin. The Declaration of Conscience did not stop McCarthy. His influence continued to grow for another four years until the Army-McCarthy hearings and a formal Senate censure in December 1954 ended his dominance. Smith’s speech is remembered less for its immediate political impact than for its moral clarity at a moment when the rest of the Senate chose silence.