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Debra Spark is the Zacamy Professor of English at Colby College.
This weekend is the 75th anniversary of Margaret Chase Smith’s “Declaration of Conscience” speech, and if you don’t come from Maine, you may not be aware of the date’s significance or why a group of concerned citizens (led by the novelist Lily King and long-term Portland educator Derek Pierce) decided to use the occasion to make a point. They’ve asked Maine friends (and friends of friends) to mail Sen. Susan Collins a postcard to support this vision: bags and bags of missives arriving at the senator’s Augusta address to remind her of what her hero, then a freshman senator from Maine, did three-quarters of a century ago.
Not that Collins is liable to forget, as King and Pierce’s email encouraging others to pick up a pen makes clear. Collins’s website mentions Smith 38 times, and Collins and former Sen. Olympia Snowe co-sponsored a resolution to make June 1, 2010, “Declaration of Conscience Day.”
Quick history lesson: On June 1, 1950, Margaret Chase Smith, then a freshman senator from Maine, called out Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s “unchecked anticommunist smear campaign” (Collins’s words, not mine) in a 15-minute speech. It’s a bit of United States history that has not been wiped from the Senate website, so you can look the details up yourself.
Despite living in Maine for 28 years, I didn’t know the story until I saw Joe DiPietro’s play “Conscience” at Portland Stage last year. The play depicts the moment of courage, making you think one person could finally say the right thing, stand up to a bully, and then all’s well that ends well.
OK, not so, McCarthy kept at it for another four years. But resistance has to start somewhere, right? What good did Smith’s words do? Eventually, a lot. And McCarthy, rather than staying in power and destroying lives, is a black spot on our collective history.
What does it take to stop corrupt and immoral governance, especially when the leader is duly elected? It is going to take the people who wanted him in power, or who currently enable him to maintain unchecked power, to speak up.
And that means Republicans of conscience. I think they are out there, but they aren’t speaking up. Smith spoke up when it was not politically expedient to do so. She was no fan of the Democratic Party but did not want to see her own party “ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”
President Donald Trump’s favorite horsemen, it seems to me.
What does Lily King hope the campaign will do? She doesn’t want to shame or blame Collins. She wants to show that one voice can truly, truly change things in this country.
I’m a crabby cynic and don’t believe that. We’ve had that voice, but it’s come from the wrong side. From Cory Booker, J.B. Pritzker, and our other Maine senator, Angus King. But it’s not coming (aside from Lisa Murkowski admitting she’s afraid) from the Republican Party, and the Republicans in Congress are the only ones, I believe, who can save us from Trump’s reign, especially given Trump’s stacked the Supreme Court, and his ignoring the federal courts.
Historically, as Chicago’s Field Museum noted in a press release about 2020 study, “‘good’ governments are ones that provided goods and services for their people and did not starkly concentrate wealth and power” and adds that a “common thread in the collapse of good governments: leaders who undermined and broke from upholding core societal principles, morals, and ideals.”
As I see it, you can’t uphold America by standing by as people are fired for spurious reasons, as a man equates his personal desires with federal law, as racism and inequity (rather than equity and inclusion) become principles by which decisions are made, as due process is denied multitudes, as the history of minorities is literally scrubbed from the record, as education, business, the arts, legacy media, Hollywood, law offices, the environment, healthcare, libraries, and the pocketbooks of ordinary citizens are all threatened by an unwell man, who floats unconstitutional ideas (like a third presidential term) routinely.
And yet here we are. We’ve protested, we’ve called our leaders’ offices, and we’ve watched as Trump largely avoids the legal checks to his power. We need Collins and her Republican colleagues to exercise their power.
We can have different opinions about policy. Of course we can. We can thoughtfully trim the budget and make hard decisions about resources. What we cannot do is let one man destroy our country with willy-nilly decisions that harm us all.
My hope for June 1 is that Susan Collins, and not just her, but all Republicans of conscience, speak up.
