[250 years ago this past Saturday, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech to the Virginia Assembly. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that and four other patriotic speeches!]
On why we
shouldn’t misrepresent a 1950 Senate speech, and why it’s well worth
celebrating nonetheless.
Throughout
her long and impressive life and political career, Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995) was
two things in roughly equal measure: a groundbreaking woman in American politics,
including the first woman to serve
in both houses of Congress and the first to have her name placed in
nomination for the presidency at a major
party’s political convention; and a prominent figure and voice in the
Republican Party, both in her home state of Maine
and on the national landscape. There’s of course nothing wrong with her being
associated with both of those histories, and indeed I would say the opposite—too
much of the time we view our most pioneering figures as somehow outside of our
politics, and reversing that trend would help us understand how everything
in our history is political, even if (or rather especially because) it also
has the potential to transcend politics.
The single
most famous moment in Smith’s political career, her June 1, 1950 “Declaration
of Conscience” speech to the Senate, perfectly embodies both of those
layers. It most definitely represented a Republican Senator’s perspective on
both the Democratic Truman administration and the upcoming presidential
election, as illustrated by lines like: “The Democratic administration has
greatly lost the confidence of the American people by its complacency to the
threat of communism here at home and the leak of vital secrets to Russia
through key officials of the Democratic administration….Surely these are
sufficient reasons to make it clear to the American people that it is time for
a change and that a Republican victory is necessary to the security of the country.”
Smith, a moderate Republican throughout her career, had previously been an ally
of President Truman on various issues, and so these political and electoral
statements were significant ones and can’t be overlooked when we remember Smith’s
speech.
Yet Smith’s
speech also and crucially transcended
such partisan political concerns, offering one of the earliest public critiques of Senator Joe McCarthy
and in the process making a critical patriotic case for a very different vision
of the Senate, the US government, and American ideals. It did so through
perhaps her most famous lines, “As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist
just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist….They are equally dangerous to
you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation
recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead
of our ourselves.” But it also did so through her argument for “some of the
basic principles of Americanism,” including “The right to criticize,” “The
right to hold unpopular beliefs,” and “The right to protest.” Throughout Of
Thee I Sing I make the case for both criticism overall and protest
specifically as core characteristics of critical patriotism, and I’m not sure
anyone has made that case more potently in a political setting than did
Margaret Chase Smith on the Senate floor.
Last SpeechStudying
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Speeches you’d highlight?
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