From the Archives: Shin Kickers From History: Margaret Chase Smith
My Own True Love recently reminded me about this post, which originally ran in 2018. It seems like a good time to run it again, for reasons that I think need no explanation.
A blog post about Senator Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995) could easily consist of nothing more than a collection of the trenchant remarks with which she skewered political opponents, reporters, and occasionally herself:
- Speaking against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s scare tactics: “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny–fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.”*
- On her presidential campaign in 1964: “When people keep telling you that you can’t do a thing, you kind of like to try it.”
- In a speech on civil rights: “We should not permit tolerance to degenerate into indifference.”
- “Strength, the American way, is not manifested by threats of criminal prosecution or police state methods. Leadership is not manifested by coercion, even against the resented.”
- “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism, are all too frequently those who…ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism–the right to criticize, the right to hold unpopular beliefs, the right to protest, the right of independent thought.”
Known as the Quiet Woman from Maine and the “conscience of the Senate,” Smith was the first woman to be elected to both houses of Congress and to be nominated for president on the floor of a national convention. (She was supported by 27 delegates at the Republic National Convention in 1964.) She is best known for being the first Senator to denounce Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting tactics on the Senate floor.
Like many women who entered politics in the twentieth century, she took what political scientists have described as the “widow’s walk to power,” in which a woman steps into a position of political power after her husband’s death. The presumption is that such women will carry on their husband’s policies. Her husband was elected as the representative to the House from Maine’s Second Congressional District in 1937. When he suffered a serious heart attack several years later, he asked the voters to continue to his policies by electing Smith to replace him–a classic example of the “widow’s walk to power.” She was elected to fill the unexpired term in a special election. Thereafter she was elected in her own right. She served four terms in the House of Representatives, from 1941 to 1949, and then four terms in the Senate, through 1975. She was a staunch Republican, who voted her conscious rather than the party line and made enemies from both ends of the political spectrum.
It takes a special politician to piss off both the Communist-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy and Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev. We need more like you Maggie.
*Part of a speech known as the “Declaration of Conscience.” McCarthy responded by calling Smith and the six Republican Senators who joined her in speaking out against his tactics “Snow White and the Six Dwarves.”
1620: A Year In Review
Months and months ago I put a place holder in my blog editorial calendar* to write a “year in review” post for 1620, but I didn’t make any notes telling myself why 1620 mattered. That was probably because I assumed I would remember. Which I didn’t, because I tend to think about events in terms of their context rather than pegging them to an exact date. It’s not that I don’t have dates in my head, it’s just that 1620 wasn’t one of them. (I hear my friends who specialize in American history laughing in the distance.)
In fact, a pretty well-known event occurred in 1620: a group of straight-laced and opinionated English dissenters left the Netherlands, where they had taken shelter, set sail for the New World on a ship called the Mayflower, and landed at a place they named Plymouth Rock. Their story has taken a disproportionately large and highly mythologized role in the shorthand version of American history. Working backwards from 1620: The first English settlers arrived in Jamestown in 1607. The French founded Port-Royal in 1604, and began the fur trade in the 1530s. The Spanish established settlements in Latin America as early as 1508, and founded their first North American settlement, St. Augustin in 1565. **
It turns out that the desire for religious freedoms, or at least religious dissent in the technical sense, was a recurring theme in 1620.
The Battle of White Mountain
- One event that I suspect is not on most Americans’ historical radar*** popped up over and over on my historical timeline sources. On November 8, the Catholic League under Johann Graf von Tilly defeated the Palatinate-Bohemian army of the Protestant Union at White Mountain near Prague. I must admit, my first thought was to ignore it, because I generally don’t include individual battles in these posts. (A tinge of historical parochialism on my part may have contributed as well.) On closer inspection, the battle turned out to be a key event in the 30 Years’ War,**** which was certainly did not get a lot of print inches in the world history textbooks of my youth but was not a small event. (Roughly twenty percent of the population of the German states were killed over the course of the war.) The Catholic victory at the Battle of White Mountain allowed the Hapsburg dynasty to claim the crown of Bohemia, which had previously been bestowed on a ruler elected by his fellow princes of Bohemia. The Palatine-Bohemian phase of the Thirty-Years’ War would continue through 1623, but the Battle of White Mountain effectively ended constitutional rule in Bohemia, such as it was, and established an authoritarian government in its place that would last until the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismembered at the end of World War I.
- A series of rebellions against royal authority by the French Calvinist Protestants known as Huguenots began late in 1620. As is often the case, the rebellion was rooted in the loss of previously enjoyed rights. King Henri IV (1553 -1610) had issued the Edict of Nantes in 1589, giving French Protestants civil rights that had previously been denied them, including the freedom to worship in their own way.***** His successor, Louis XIII, and more importantly Louis’s mother, Marie d’Medici, were less tolerant of Protestantism and began unraveling those protections. In December 1620, the Huguenots gathered in La Rochelle and decided to form an independent state within a state, modeled on the Dutch Republic’s successful resistance against Spanish rule. The rebellion did not end well. Neither did the two that followed. The Huguenots were actively persecuted under the rule of Louis XIV and the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685. As a result, thousands of Huguenots workers fled France and established themselves in Protestant cities across Europe that were happy to welcome literate, highly skilled workers.
In short, religious intolerance benefits no one.
*A rather grandiose name for a Scrivener file with a lot of separate documents in which I capture ideas that may or may not become blog posts. Sometimes all I have is a subject, not a story. And as any freelance writer will tell you, that’s a hard sell. Even when the editor you’re pitching is you.
**If you’re interested in looking at the Pilgrims’ story from the perspective of the people who were already living in what is now Massachusetts when they arrived, I recommend this article: https://time.com/5911943/thanksgiving-wampanoag/
***Including mine.
**** Here’s the short version: Reformation vs Counter-Reformation. Here’s a slightly longer version: The Third Year’s War was actually a series of wars, in which Protestant and Catholic princes battled for control of the Holy Roman Empire. The conflict began when the Protestants of Bohemia rebelled against Emperor Ferdinand II, but soon spread throughout the empire and included most of the European powers at one point or another.
*****Henri had himself been a Huguenot prior to converting to Catholicism in order to secure his hold on the crown. He is reported to have justified this by saying “Paris is well worth a mass.” Like Marie Antoinette’s supposed statement “Let them eat cake,” there is little reason to believe he said it/
1520: A Year in Review
I started writing A Year in Review posts in December, 2014. It felt like an appropriate way to wind up the year. The 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I (1) had dominated the discussions in Historyland and I wanted to talk about some of the other things that had happened during that year. That led me to look at 1814, which proved to look remarkably similar to 1914.
I’ve been writing A Year in Review posts every December since then. Some years are obvious choices. (I’m looking at you, 1920) But even the years that don’t include big historical anniversaries, with related commemorative exhibits and revisionist articles aimed at thoughtful readers, are worth a look.
Consider the year 1520:
Suleiman I—also known as the Lawgiver and, appropriately as far as I’m concerned, the Magnificent— took the Ottoman throne at the end of September. (And I do mean “took”. Ottoman succession was a blood-soaked “winner takes all” contest between male family members. (2)) Arguably the greatest of the Ottoman emperors, he defended Islam against Christendom to the west and Shiite “heretics” to the east and expanded the empire’s boundaries from Budapest to Basra. Ottoman expansion to the west ended when Suleiman laid siege to Vienna in 1529. The Hapsburg emperor Charles V summoned troops from across Christendom to successfully defend the city. Suleiman retreated at the end of the campaign season.(3) He never attempted to conquer Vienna again, but battles between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans were a recurring event throughout the sixteenth century.
Charles V (see above), the young ruler of the enormous Hapsburg empire,(4) was dealing with problems on the home front. Charles was the grandson of Isabela and Ferdinand of Castile and Aragon, but he had been raised in Flanders, which was his father’s home kingdom. The royal sixteen-year-old knew little, and apparently cared less, about the Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile when he was named co-regent with his mother, Juana the Mad, in 1516. (5) He arrived in Spain accompanied by a large retinue of Flemish nobles, which did not please the local nobility, and immediately began to raise taxes of all sorts, which did not please anybody. In 1519, Charles was elected Holy Roman Emperor after some spirited and expensive campaigning, which was paid for largely by Spanish taxes. When he left for Germany to cement his position there, he put his former tutor, Dutch bishop Adrian of Utrecht, in charge. In February 1520, cities across Castile rose up in what became known as the Comuneros Revolt. By November, the kingdom of Castile was in the grips of a full-scale rebellion. In addition to reduced taxes and a bigger role in government, the comuneros, who controlled eighteen cities throughout the heart of Castile, wanted to name Charles’ mother sole ruler, mad or not. At a minimum, they wanted Charles to live in Castile. The Comueros Revolt was finally defeated in April, 1521, but even though they lost the war they won the peace. Charles V began to spend more time in Spain, learned Spanish, and appointed Castilians to important positions in his government.
On June 7, Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France began an 18-day celebration/political summit meeting that became known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Intended to celebrate the newly formed Treaty of Universal Peace which the European powers had signed in 1518, the event was extravagant even by the standards of 16th century royals. Peace treaties not withstanding, competition and ambition were the ruling (ha!) motivations between the young (-ish) rulers. And compete they did, not only in sporting events but in the kingly sport of extravagant spending. Each of the kings attempted to dazzle the other court with feasts, tournaments, masquerades, dazzling costumes and elaborate tents. A year later, the idea of peace was already crumbling at the edges.
But 1520 wasn’t entirely about young male rulers:
In December, Luther burned a Papal Bull excommunicating him, thereby finalizing his break with the Catholic Church. (This was a grand gesture, but did not actually stop his excommunication, which went into effect on January 5. ) The Protestant Reformation was on!
(1) Talk about the shot heard ‘round the world!
(2) The Ottomans weren’t alone in this. Primogeniture was not the only, or even the most common, form of royal succession.
(3) Most wars were fought in summer and fall in the pre-modern world. Not only was fighting in winter miserable, but roads were bad and it was difficult to supply troops. For that matter, forage wasn’t great in spring before crops began to grow. Hungry armies don’t fight well.
(4) He inherited Burgundy and the Netherlands from his father, Philip of Burgundy; Castille, Aragon, Naples, and big chunks of the Americas from his mother, Joanna of Castile and Aragon; and much of Germany, Austria, and Northern Italy from his grandfather, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian
(5) The question of whether Juana was mad or not is a question of historical debate. One thing is certain, her husband and father worked together to have her imprisoned as a madwoman only after she inherited the throne of Castile in 1516—a throne they then competed with each other to control. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.