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7 Chapter One A WOMAN FROM EDDYVILLE “The fact that I’m a woman will be noticed,” Mary Louise Smith told reporters . Her understatement got a laugh. Everyone at the press conference knew that newspapers across the country would place the story on the front page. The next day, September 5, 1974, the Washington Post version led with: “Women made a quantum jump in Republican politics yesterday when President [Gerald] Ford selected Mary Louise Smith of Iowa as the first female to be Republican national chairman.” The Los Angeles Times editorialized: “Her role in the Republican Party is perhaps more difficult at the moment than any task confronting her male political contemporaries.”1 As unlikely as it seems in the early twenty-first century when Christian fundamentalists determine much of the Republican Party’s agenda, there was a time, from 1974 to 1977, when a moderate woman led the party. The only outspoken feminist chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), and the last moderate chair to date, Smith supported abortion rights and the equal rights amendment (ERA). These were not radical positions at the time. The Republican platform supported the ERA, and abortion had yet to become a defining issue for vetting Republican candidates. Smith also holds the distinction of being the only woman to chair the party. Some lauded Ford’s choice for party chairman; others questioned it. A grandmother whose résumé included two decades of grassroots experience and only six months on the national stage did not fit the image that many held of the politician needed for the job. Some Republicans appeared to comfort themselves with the notion that she would be an interim chairman, that she was disposable, and that she would graciously resign following the debacle that political observers predicted for the November midterm elections. The Republican Party was in a perilous condition in 1974. Twenty-two months earlier, Richard Nixon and his running mate, Spiro Agnew, had won 8 MADAM CHAIRMAN reelection, but both had since resigned from office, the results of separate scandals . The party’s poll ratings had plummeted; and the party chairman—George H. W. Bush, later the forty-first president of the United States—wanted out. The midterm elections posed a new set of problems: the scandals had made it hard to attract strong candidates and raising money for their campaigns was even more problematical. With the party, and especially its prospects for the upcoming elections, in a desperate situation, willing candidates for RNC chairman were few. It was a terrible time for any politically ambitious person to head the party. Successful party leaders win elections, and anyone with enough political savvy to be considered for the chairmanship knew that the November elections would be grim for Republicans and equally grim for the RNC chairman. Smith knew all of this, but her characteristic optimism convinced her she could lead the party out of its time of trial, and that she could rebuild it. She also knew that the post would not be offered her again. It was her time, and she intended to make the most of it. She wanted it. Over the next twenty-eight months, Smith reorganized the RNC staff, oversaw innovations in fund-raising, and planned the 1976 Republican national convention. After she left the chairmanship, she watched in dismay as her party moved increasingly to the right, abandoning its support for issues that she held dear. In 1996, Smith would become persona non grata and would be denied admission to the floor of the national convention she had chaired twenty years earlier. Mary Louise Smith’s unlikely story begins in Eddyville, a small farming community with a population of about one thousand in the 1910s in southeastern Iowa. Born on October 6, 1914, she was the daughter and granddaughter of community leaders who were regularly featured in the local newspaper for organizing local events and having social gatherings in their homes. The essay about her childhood that she wrote for Eddyville’s sesquicentennial in 1990 has at best an ambivalent air to it. She began the essay: “My childhood in Eddyville , as I recall it now, was not a period of high drama. I was not an abused child, I did not raise myself up out of poverty and deprivation, neither was I a child of the very rich and privileged and I did not suffer the trauma of a broken home.” She continues with a description of her family’s house and acknowledges...

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