Margaret Chase Smith Dies At Age 97 Maine Lawmaker First Woman To Serve In Both House, Senate

Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve in both the U.S. House and Senate and a voice of conscience for fellow Republicans when she spoke out against the anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, died Monday. She was 97.

Smith died at her home from complications from a stroke that had put her in a coma eight days earlier, said a spokeswoman from the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan.

“The Lady from Maine,” known by her trademark red rose, emerged as one of the most powerful and respected figures in Congress in her three decades there. She ran for president unsuccessfully in 1964.

Smith’s knack of mirroring the views of the common people - and expressing them clearly and succinctly - endeared her to voters of both parties.

She got into politics as secretary to her husband, Clyde H. Smith, and won election to his House seat after he died. She served four terms in the House, 1941-49, and four in the Senate, 1949-73.

Smith, a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee from 1967-1973, was the first woman elected to the Senate without having been appointed to fill a vacancy and was the first GOP woman senator.

She staked out a position in the middle of the American political spectrum. In widely hailed speeches two decades apart, she warned of the threat of extremism from both the left and the right.

Her 1950 “declaration of conscience” was a repudiation of the “smear tactics” of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wis. Though she didn’t mention the anti-communism crusader by name, she told the Senate it was time to stop “character assassination” behind the cloak of congressional immunity.

Twenty years later, as the nation

was being jolted by often violent student protests against the Vietnam War, Smith delivered a Senate speech updating her declaration.

Extremists, fomenting divisions in American society, are forcing “the great center of our people” to make a “narrow choice between anarchy and repression,” she said.

“And make no mistake about it,” she said, “if that narrow choice has to be made, the American people, even if with reluctance and misgiving, will choose repression.”

As the women’s liberation movement gained momentum at the close of the 1960s, Smith refused to be labeled a feminist.

“Women are people,” she said. “They should expect office only on the basis of personal qualifications.”