Almost exactly 75 years ago, a Republican rose on the Senate floor to denounce the leader of a popular political movement that had swept across America. The speech delivered by Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine — the first woman to serve in both the House of Representatives and the Senate — was courageous in 1950, and it remains instructive today.
Months earlier, Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisc.) had made an outrageous claim in Wheeling, W.V.: that there were 205 communists working within the State Department. McCarthy’s inflammatory remarks rocketed him to fame (and later infamy) and precipitated an era of political persecution, investigation and fear. Suddenly, any American holding opinions even mildly against the conservative mainstream was deemed suspect.
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The latest in politics and policy. Direct to your inbox. Sign up for the Opinion newsletter SubscribeIt is hard to overstate the political earthquake caused by McCarthy’s accusations — and the fear it struck in members of Congress. In the 1950 elections, two prominent Democratic senators who opposed McCarthy — Millard E. Tydings of Maryland and Scott W. Lucas of Illinois — lost their seats. According to historians Adam J. Berinsky and Gabriel S. Lenz, this sparked a pervasive belief by politicians that McCarthyism was too popular to defy. Yet their research shows that politicians vastly overestimated McCarthy’s strength. In fact, they write that there is “little evidence that McCarthy reliably influenced the outcomes” of those elections.
And yet members of Congress cowered in fear of McCarthy. In one chilling anecdote — first described by journalist Joseph Alsop — Sen. Herbert Lehman of New York (and the prominent Lehman banking family) tried to give a speech against McCarthy, only to be told by him, “Go back to your seat, old man.” When Lehman realized that no other senator would rise to his defense, he gave up.
And yet Margaret Chase Smith refused to stay quiet. While at first sympathetic to McCarthy as a fellow Republican, Smith soon grew troubled by her colleague’s lies. Even though she was “reluctant” to challenge McCarthy — especially as he promised to ruin her hopes to be selected as vice president in the 1952 election — Smith chose integrity over expedience.
Much of Smith’s speech reads as though it could have been written today, as she articulated “a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear.”
As U.S. political culture in 2025 likewise often feels defined by “fear and frustration,” politicians would be well-served to remember the “basic principles of Americanism” laid out by Smith in her speech: “the right to criticize,” “the right to hold unpopular beliefs,” “the right to protest” and “the right to independent thought.”
While neither political party can truly claim to have mounted a full defense of these principles in recent years, it is hard not to hear strong echoes of McCarthyism in Trumpism.
The “right to criticize” is scoffed at by an administration that revokes press credentials from media outlets that refuse to use the term “Gulf of America.” The “right to hold unpopular beliefs” is crumbling, as Trump repeatedly cracks down on law firms that have sided against him in legal proceedings. The “right to protest” is threatened each time ICE agents disappear a foreign student from campus for having participated in protests — even ones we may disagree with. The “right to independent thought” is gone when Ivy League universities, long held up as the greatest in the world, are told by the government that they can no longer write their own curricula.
Today, giving a speech like Smith’s would be a tall task for a Republican in Congress, as they fear primary challenges and the fury of the MAGA base (even the risk of violence). It wasn’t easy for Smith either, as McCarthy quickly worked to bully all those who sided with her after the “Declaration of Conscience” speech. McCarthy kicked Smith off a prominent Senate subcommittee and proceeded to tag her and the speech’s other co-signers with the juvenile moniker “Snow White and the Six Dwarfs.” (If social media had been around then, perhaps McCarthy would have first tested his insult there.)
No single speech, talking point or campaign can fix the ills of our political era. While Smith’s speech made a real impact, it didn’t immediately return McCarthy to the path of “decency.”
But in an environment where politicians live in fear of their voters and the larger-than-life political figures that animate them, Smith’s bold act of defiance reminds us that courage pays dividends. Where other politicians who refused to stand up to McCarthy faded into obscurity, Smith served in the Senate for another 23 years.
And four years after first rising to give her “Declaration of Conscience” in 1950, Smith voted in favor of McCarthy’s censure — in the words of the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), “effectively ending his campaign of falsehood and intimidation.”
Steve Israel represented New York in the House of Representatives for eight terms and was chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015.
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