Maine History Online

Integrity

Beyond reform movements, Maine has had a number of leaders on the national political stage, one of whom, Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Skowhegan, came to represent integrity for Maine and the nation.

Margaret Chase was of humble pedigree. Her father was a Skowhegan barber, and her mother worked off and on in a variety of jobs in town while rearing six children. Margaret was the eldest.

Margaret Chase taught for a while, became a telephone operator, newspaper reporter, and business manager of a Skowhegan textile mill. She fell into politics by inclination and circumstance when she married Clyde Smith, a well-known local politician.

This relationship provided both experience in Republican circles, and an opportunity to convert his untimely death into her own political career when she won election to the House of Representatives in his stead in 1940. She served four terms there before moving on to the Senate.

Margaret Chase Smith was committed to military preparedness, and could have made a career out of that alone, serving on the House Naval Affairs Committee during World War II, and on the Senate Armed Services Committee after she was elected to that body in 1948. She also worked to secure permanent status for women in the military and co-sponsored the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1940s.

But it was Smith's unique combination of conservative and liberal beliefs expressed during the Cold War that brought her to the nation's attention.

The end of World War II left Europe and Asia broken and exhausted, and created a bi-polar world in which the United States and the Soviet Union competed for dominance.

The Cold War – an era that included military conflicts in Korea and Vietnam – also sparked a virulent anti-communist backlash in the United States. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy chaired a high-profile series of hearings to ferret out suspected communists in major American institutions, including the federal government.

The senator bullied and intimidated his way through these hearings, thriving in an atmosphere of fear and mistrust upon which post-war nuclear realities had conferred a deadly degree of urgency.

Senator Smith was appalled at McCarthy's excesses and tactics. She spoke on the Senate floor, expressing her displeasure.

"I think it is high time for the United States Senate…to do some soul searching," she exhorted, "[i]t is high time that we remembered that we have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution." Smith criticized the Truman administration, but was particularly disappointed in the Republican Party, and sickened by the depths to which it had fallen under McCarthyism.

Six fellow Republican senators agreed with Smith's "Declaration of Conscience," and added their names to her repudiation of McCarthyism, while a seventh quickly followed with his support after her famous speech. (Senator McCarthy sneeringly referred to the group of disaffected Republicans as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.) Newsweek devoted its cover to her the following week.

Smith gained the spotlight again in 1964 when she sought the Republican nomination for President and campaigned in New Hampshire and Illinois before going to the national convention in San Francisco, where her name was placed in nomination.

Environmental Activism

Edmund S. Muskie (1914-1996) represented Maine in the U.S. Senate from 1959 to 1980. He earned the nickname "Mr. Clean" for his work on clean air and clean water, among other environmental causes. He is especially known for pushing through legislation such as the 1970 Clean Air Act and the 1972 Clean Water Act, and changing the way Americans – and legislators – thought about environmental issues.

Muskie was far from the first Mainer to be concerned about the environment. Conservation voices had been heard among outdoors enthusiasts concerned about fish populations, tree cutting, and many other issues.

Among the best-known 20th century environmental spokespersons with a Maine connection was Rachel Carson (1907-1964), a marine biologist with an early interest in conservation. Carson began spending summers in Southport in 1952, close to the beach and tide pools that she studied. In 1962, Carson gained national fame and controversy when she published Silent Spring, which linked the use of chemical pesticides to biological disasters.

The campaign to save the Allagash waterway was fought on national and state battles and resulted in 1970 in the first designated National Wild and Scenic Rivers System site to be administered by a state.

Mainers fought the Dickey-Lincoln power project, which would have flooded 140 acres of wilderness along the Allagash and St. John rivers. Congress finally denied funding for the project.

Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in Wiscasset, built in 1972, provided what was touted as clean, efficient, and economical energy to the New England power grid. From the beginning, opponents, led by Citizens for Safe Power, tried to stop the project. Mainers rejected proposals to shut down Maine Yankee three times in the 1980s. Opponents continued to monitor the plant, however, drawing attention to any problems or threats that arose from its operation.

Despite its 40-year license to operate, Maine Yankee closed in 1996 after cracks were discovered in its steam generator tubes.

Mainers participated with energy and distinction in the major movements of the nation's past, and undertook as well efforts more closely tied to state or regional interests. They have continued that activity through protests, petitions, and referenda on issues such as civil rights, tax caps, gay rights, the war in Iraq, and immigration.

The state and nation came to rely on Maine leaders for a variety of endeavors – treaties, reform movements, peace overtures, and institutional change among countless others. And Maine continues to supply leaders nationally in Congress and other venues.