A Woman's Conscience

The Senate's only woman member stepped firmly into the congressional ruckus over Communists-in-Government last week and offered her colleagues some advice. "I think," said Maine's earnest, handsomely grey Margaret Chase Smith, "that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some soul searching--for us to weigh our consciences --on the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America."

For the past six weeks, Republican Smith had searched her own soul and weighed her conscience. She had also talked things over with fellow members of a small group of Republican progressives in the Senate, and found that they agreed with her. She drafted what she called a "Declaration of Conscience," and got them to sign it with her--New Hampshire's Tobey, Vermont's Aiken, Oregon's Morse, New York's Ives, Minnesota's Thye, New Jersey's Hendrickson. Thus armed she took the floor to make her case.

Forum of Hate. The noisy debate of the McCarthy charges, she said, had reduced the Senate "to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity." Added Senator Smith: "I am not proud of the reckless abandon in which unproved charges have been hurled from this [Republican] side of the aisle. I am not proud of the obviously staged, undignified countercharges that have been attempted in retaliation.

"The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as 'Communists' or 'Fascists.' The American people are sick and tired of seeing innocent people smeared and guilty people whitewashed . . ."

Complacency Y. Calumny. It was a matter, she told the attentive Senate, that went beyond partisan politics. The Democrats could be justly accused of "complacency to the threat of Communism here at home and the leak of vital secrets to Russia through key officials of the Democratic Administration." But, said Margaret Smith, "I don't want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny--fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear. In fact, I doubt if the Republican Party could.

"It is high time that we stopped thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats about elections and started thinking patriotically as Americans ... It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques--techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life."

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