Of all the Democratic Victories on November 3, my favorite was not a victory of a DSA candidate over a full-blown MAGA type. It was not flipping Texas blue after thirty years of frustration and usually-not-near misses. Nope- it was the final, long-overdue reckoning of the biggest phony in the United States Senate, the Senior Senator from Maine.
Still, I could have just accepted her concession and let her leave in peace, had she not dropped a line in an interview with The New York Times a few days later. It wasn't that she whined "you can never do enough."- that was bad, but it would not have inspired me to write this post. It was her painful, misplaced decision to compare herself to another woman who once represented Maine in the United States Senate as a Republican, a certain Margaret Chase Smith.
Margaret Chase Smith was elected to the first of four terms in the United States Senate in 1948- at the dawn of the Cold War and the early days of the Second Red Scare, which would dominate the rhetoric on Capitol Hill for the entirety of her first term. She was the ONLY female member of the Senate at that time, serving alongside 95 men in a Senate divided almost dead-even between the major parties. All of the leaders of her own party were full-throated Superpatriots demanding draconian restrictions on freedom of speech in service of "fighting Communism" and regularly endorsed, or at least were complicit in, violations of basic Civil Rights if they were being committed by dedicated Defenders of Capitalism and the "American Way."
While Smith was still a Freshman member of the Senate the most rabid and reckless of this group, Joseph McCarthy, engaged in a full-blown crusade to smear anyone- politicians, teachers, Hollywood actors, directors and screen-writers- who didn't bow to his brand of Toxic Americanism and agree that Censorship and Groupthink were the Order of the Day. The Senate Majority Leader and most if not all Committee Chairmen were so terrified of the modern Torquemada that they fell over themselves to pledge fealty- and the President of the United States, the leader of McCarthy's own party, gave aid and comfort to his inquisition.
Margaret Chase Smith stood up in the Senate and issued her famous Declaration of Conscience, in which she gave a full-throated defense of Freedom of Speech and in which she declared "I do not to see the Republican Party ride to victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny- Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear." She was attacked by her own party. For the remainder of her political life she would face primary challenges from the right wing. When she ran for President in 1964 she was ignored by the big donors in her party and by the press.
In 1972 Margaret Chase Smith- now in her seventies- was defeated for election to a fifth term by a younger opponent who successfully convinced a solid majority of her constituents that she had lost touch with the people of Maine and had become too much a creature of Washington. And this is the ONLY similarity she shares in common with Susan Collins.
Over the course of thirty years, Susan Collins has been a reliable vote in the Senate for the Republican Party, supporting tax cuts and wars while "accepting" cuts in social services while "regretting" them at the same time. For the first twenty of those years, this made Collins little more than a cipher, valued by Maine for her ability to turn her seniority into extra funds for the home state. Despite a reputation for being a moderate she was never primaried from the Right like Smith was.
Then came the Trump Era, and the return of the "Four Horsemen on Calumny- Fear Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear"- lead not by her fellow Senators, but by her fellow Republican in the White House. Collins did not respond with her own Declaration of Conscience. Instead, she responded with an endless parade of platitudes about "working to moderate" bad legislation and "expressing regret" over the 100 percent predictable results coming from votes to confirm people like Bret Kavanaugh and Robert F. Kennedy. Maybe there was no Declaration of Conscience because, in the end, she never had any?
Mrs. Collins, in today's parlance, keep the name of Margaret Chase Smith out of your mouth. You are both Republicans, both women, both represented Maine in the Senate- and that's it. If ONLY you had truly admired and worked to be more like Margaret Chase Smith. Instead, you have to settle for these surface-level comparisons that end with one more- ultimately being shown the door. Smith is in the history books for standing up and showing courage, putting her political career on the line when it had barely started. You could not stand up to brutality and ignorance on an even greater scale near the END of yours. Smith is an icon. You'll be forgotten before spring. And there's your real legacy.
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