An American Stand: Senator Margaret Chase Smith and the Communist Menace, 1948–1972 by Eric R. Crouse (review)

The political career of Margaret Chase Smith is difficult to characterize. On the one hand, until Barbara Mikulski surpassed her record in 2011, Smith was the longest-serving female senator in U.S. history. She remains famous for the “Declaration of Conscience,” which made her one of the first senators to take on Senator Joseph McCarthy, and her tenure as the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee made her a key player on Cold War defense policy.

On the other hand, despite her 24 years in office, Smith had few significant legislative accomplishments to her credit. She played almost no role in key domestic debates of the day, such as the Civil Rights Act or the Great Society, and in 1964 she launched a tactically and ideologically incoherent bid for the Republican presidential nomination that seemed all but designed to present a negative caricature of female politicians.

These contradictions make Smith an unusually challenging senator to study. In An American Stand, Eric Crouse focuses on one aspect of Smith’s public career—her attitude toward the Communist threat. (He also has written an interesting book analyzing the letters about the Vietnam War that grassroots Maine citizens wrote to Smith.) Crouse concludes that, despite Smith’s moderate reputation, she adopted a hardline approach on national security issues: “If she did not embrace an ‘inherently evil’ argument [about Communism], she came awfully close” (p. x).

First elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1940 to succeed her late husband, Smith was elevated to the Senate in 1948 after defeating the state’s sitting governor and a former governor in the Republican primary. For most of her tenure, Maine remained a strongly Republican state, and she thrice won easy reelections before losing her seat to Democratic representative William Hathaway in 1972.

The book focuses on four national security issues that characterized Smith’s Senate career—domestic anti-Communism, the Korean War, the Soviet nuclear threat, and the Vietnam War. Smith is best known for the “Declaration of Conscience,” which Crouse, in line with conventional wisdom, portrays as an act of political courage penned by a senator willing to speak up as like-minded colleagues remained silent, fearful of the political cost of challenging McCarthy. More originally, Crouse tracks down how many in the media—for good or ill—framed Smith’s speech by stressing her status as the Senate’s only female member.

An American Stand presents Smith as the first “female Cold Warrior”—a woman in a mostly male world, yet someone who was wholly comfortable championing an aggressive national security policy. (In her brief 1964 presidential campaign, Smith declared that, if necessary, she would have no hesitation in authorizing the use of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union and that anyone who feared she would hesitate because of her gender was sadly mistaken.) In this respect, the book complicates the simplistic and often faddish new historiography that attempts to reinterpret the Cold War through gender or gendered language.

Those who recall Smith only for her opposition to McCarthyism, as Crouse correctly notes, might be surprised by her fervent support for U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. In Smith’s mind, however, the two positions were easily reconcilable: she attacked McCarthy not because she sympathized with domestic Communists but because she considered his specific allegations baseless and his behavior reckless. Neither of those problems applied to Vietnam, which Smith interpreted through the prism of the Cold War. In a private letter written in 1969, she bluntly asserted her firm belief in the domino theory, contending that “we are in Vietnam to stop the communists from conquering the world” (p. 111).

Smith long had considered Asia to be the principal site in the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union. In 1964, she joined the overwhelming majority of senators who voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution, a vote she defended for the...