Margaret Chase Smith took on Joe McCarthy from inside her own party in 1950

It costs nothing to be principled against the other side. The hard version is to be principled at the next desk over, on the day your own party is winning with the thing you know is a mistake. Every movement faces that test when somebody on its own team starts doing something that works, that gets headlines and that makes the opponents squirm, and the question is whether anyone will still object when the methods are wrong. On June 1, 1950, a Republican from Skowhegan, Maine, in the second year of her first Senate term, took that test in front of the whole Senate, and she passed it.

Her name was Margaret Chase Smith, and the speech she gave is called the Declaration of Conscience. Conservatives should know it cold, not because it was a moderate's speech (it wasn't, quite) but because it was a conservative's speech about process, about the rule of law and about the difference between exposing an enemy and destroying a neighbor. It is also a practical lesson in how a party protects its own cause from its own excesses.

The woman who walked into the Senate

Smith did not arrive in Washington by an ordinary route. Her husband, Clyde Smith, a Republican congressman from Maine, died in April 1940, and she was elected in a special election that June to finish his term. Then voters kept sending her back. She served in the House through the 1940s, and in 1948 she won a Senate seat, taking it in January 1949. That made her the first woman elected to both the House and the Senate. Think about that for a second: voters in a state that is not famous for flash gave this woman repeated terms in the House and then promoted her, in an era when almost no women held federal office at all.

She was not a showboat. Her style was dry, Yankee and deliberate. She earned a reputation for reading the bill, a habit that is rarer in Washington than it ought to be. And she was no soft touch on national security. She spent her career around the armed services, defense budgets and the Navy, and she held the hard view of the Soviet Union that most Republicans of her generation held. Keep that in mind, because the usual telling of this story makes her sound like a gentle voice for tolerance. She was a hawk who objected to a man's methods, which is a different and more interesting thing.

What McCarthy had actually done by June 1950

To judge her, you have to put yourself in the spring of 1950, not the spring of 1954. Here is the world as Americans saw it that season.

• In August 1949 the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb, years before most experts expected it.
• In October 1949 the Communist forces of Mao Zedong won in China.
• On January 21, 1950, Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, was convicted of perjury in a case that turned on whether he had passed documents to a Soviet agent.
• In early 1950 the physicist Klaus Fuchs, who had worked on the Manhattan Project, confessed to passing atomic secrets to the Soviets.

Every one of those was real. None of them was a smear. Americans had good reason to be scared, and they had good reason to want a Congress that took espionage seriously. Then, on February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he claimed to hold a list of Communists working in the State Department. The exact number he cited changed from telling to telling, and the list never turned into the proof the headlines promised. By the time Smith rose in June, he had been making accusations for almost four months, and the pattern was already visible: a charge, a headline, a denial that nobody covered and a new charge. People's careers were ending on the strength of allegations.

The strongest case for staying quiet

Let me state the other side fairly, because the people who argued for silence were not fools or cowards.

One, the threat was real, and the Truman administration had been slow and defensive about it. Republicans had a legitimate political and national-security argument that the executive branch needed pressure.

Two, McCarthy was popular with the Republican base because he was doing something nobody else seemed willing to do. In politics, you do not quarrel with the one fighter who is landing punches.

Three, a party that has been out of the White House since 1933 cannot afford to eat itself. Unity wins elections.

Four, if you object to his methods, you will be accused of defending Communists. That charge was being thrown around freely, and a senator who invited it was taking a risk with her own career.

That is the strongest version, and it is not stupid. Plenty of serious Republicans held some version of it. The difficulty is that every one of those points is about what is convenient, and not one of them says that McCarthy was right. Here is why the argument fails.

What she said, and how she said it

Smith opened with a line that tells you everything about her approach: "I speak as a Republican. I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American." She did not claim to be neutral. She claimed her party membership as the reason she had the standing to speak.

Then she set out, in a few plain paragraphs, what she thought the Senate and the country were losing. She said that freedom depended on certain rights: the right to criticize, the right to hold unpopular beliefs, the right to protest and the right of independent thought. She said she did not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on what she called the Four Horsemen of Calumny: Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear. And she made the point that a charge of disloyalty, thrown at a person with no evidence, was itself an attack on the thing the country was supposedly defending.

Notice what she did not say. She did not defend any Communist. She did not say the Truman administration had been wise. In fact the Declaration criticized the Democratic administration for complacency about the Communist threat, and it said Republicans had every right to hold it to account. Her complaint was about the method: accusation as proof, immunity as a shield, and the Senate floor as a place to wreck reputations that could not be answered.

She did not do it alone. Six other Republican senators signed on:

1. Wayne Morse of Oregon
2. Irving Ives of New York
3. Charles Tobey of New Hampshire
4. Edward Thye of Minnesota
5. George Aiken of Vermont
6. Robert Hendrickson of New Jersey

Seven senators in all, from a Republican minority in the Senate. McCarthy's name for the group, which he is on record using, was "Snow White and the Six Dwarfs." It was a joke aimed at her and her colleagues for the offense of asking for evidence. Most of the Senate stayed quiet, and many Republicans who privately agreed with her stayed quiet too.

Why a hawk's speech belongs on a conservative shelf

I want to press this point, because the lazy version of this history says Smith was a "moderate" who was squeamish about fighting communism. The record says otherwise, and the reader who cares about the real conservative tradition should care about the difference.

Conservatism, properly understood, has two commitments that sometimes pull against each other. One is a firm view of the enemy: communism was an ideology that murdered millions, and it deserved to be fought. The other is a distrust of unchecked power, the same instinct that gave us the separation of powers and the Bill of Rights. A government (or a single senator) with the power to ruin anyone by pointing a finger is the sort of power the Founders feared. Equal Under the Law Means the Rule Applies to the People in Charge makes that case in general terms, and Why Conservatives Defend Due Process Even for People They Dislike explains why the principle matters most when it is least popular.

Smith held both commitments. That is the point. The fight against communism did not need McCarthy's method to succeed. Spies were caught by investigators, evidence and courts, as the Hiss and Fuchs cases show. Hiss was convicted by a jury. Fuchs was caught by intelligence work. Neither required a Senate floor accusation without proof. If anything, a movement that wanted real convictions had a stake in keeping its charges credible. Every false or unproven accusation made the next true one easier to dismiss.

Run the numbers on that, not in votes but in trust. Suppose a voter hears ten accusations and later learns that most of them collapsed. What does that voter do with the eleventh? He shrugs. That is the real damage of the reckless accuser: he spends the credit of everyone who tells the truth after him.

What it cost her, and how it ended

Her reward was hostility. McCarthy's allies in the press and the Senate were happy to mock the signers, and the mockery was part of the lesson to anyone thinking of joining her. What is clear is that her stand did not turn the Senate overnight. McCarthy remained powerful for years.

What changed things was time and evidence. Over the next four years the accusations kept coming, and the proof kept not arriving. In December 1954 the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, and Smith was among those voting for censure. The story of how that came about, and which Republicans finally said enough, is in McCarthy, the 1954 Censure and the Republicans Who Said Enough. The short lesson is that the Declaration of Conscience was early. Being early is expensive. But it is also what gives the later, larger vote its moral cover.

She stayed in the Senate until January 1973. In 1972 she lost her seat to Democrat William Hathaway, ending a congressional career that began in 1940. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H. W. Bush in 1989, and her papers and memory live on at a library in her home town of Skowhegan.

The 1964 run, and what it tells you

In 1964 she did something almost no one had done. She sought the Republican presidential nomination. She entered several primaries, kept her name before the convention in San Francisco and was placed in nomination there, which is regularly described as the first time a woman's name went into nomination for President at a major party's convention. Barry Goldwater won the nomination, as you know, and went on to lose in November. If you want that story, The 1964 Goldwater Campaign Lost 44 States and Won the Future tells it.

The lesson of the 1964 run is not that Smith could have won. She almost certainly could not. The lesson is that the party's moderate wing and its rising conservative wing were arguing about real things in public, and that a woman from Maine could stand in front of the delegates and argue her side with dignity. You can read the wider pattern of those fights in Seventy Years of GOP Insurgents Versus the Establishment, in Order. Parties that argue honestly tend to renew themselves. Parties that treat every internal critic as a traitor tend to fossilize.

One more thing about that campaign. Smith ran against the conservative wing's champion, and she did it as a Republican who had spent two decades voting with her party on defense and spending far more often than she broke with it. Nobody could say she was a stranger to the family. That is exactly why her objections carried weight, and it is a model for anyone who wants to argue inside the tent instead of from outside it.

What Republicans should take from her

Let me give you the verdict in the form of a short argument.

One, a movement's credibility is its most valuable asset, and credibility comes from being right about the facts. McCarthy spent his side's credibility on charges he could not prove, and Republicans paid for that for a long time.

Two, the way to protect a good cause from a bad ally is to say so early, in plain language, from inside the family. A rebuke from the other party is political noise. A rebuke from a member of your own party is information.

Three, you can hold a hard line on a real enemy and a hard line on due process at the same time. They are not in tension. They are the same instinct applied twice: that power ought to answer to evidence.

Four, courage in politics is usually lonely at the start. If you wait for a crowd before you speak, you are not leading, you are following.

There is a fair objection, and I will answer it. Some will say that McCarthy, for all his faults, exposed real problems and that the real lesson is that the establishment was too slow to deal with espionage. That is partly true. Espionage was real, and the government was slow. But the answer to a slow bureaucracy is a better process with better evidence, not a worse process with louder accusations. Smith never said otherwise.

And there is a second objection from the other direction. Some will say a Republican who criticizes another Republican is giving aid to the opposition. Folks, it is the reverse. The party that cannot police its own is the party that hands the opposition its best material. A rebuke delivered early, calmly and in the open is the cheapest insurance a political movement can buy. Smith bought it for her party in 1950, at her own expense.

The bottom line

• You can be a hard-liner on national security and a stickler for due process. The best conservatives have been both.
• When someone on your own side makes charges they cannot prove, say so early. It protects the cause, not just the accused.
• Read the Declaration of Conscience yourself; the Senate's own records and the Maine library that carries her name can take you to the text.
• Judge political fighters by their evidence, not their volume, and teach your kids to do the same.
• Next time your party is winning with a tactic you know is wrong, remember Skowhegan and be the one who speaks up.