Margaret Chase Smith: Beyond Convention

Margaret Chase Smith is best remembered for her courageous 1950 stand against Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy and as a woman who succeeded in the public domain. Margaret Chase Smith’s long career--from her election to the House of Representatives in 1940 through her upset victory in the 1948 Maine Senate race and her run for the presidency in 1964--was intertwined with the fundamental issues of her times: gender and fairness, anti-Communism, nuclear war, order and anarchy, the relationship between a grass roots citizenry and elected representatives--issues that continue to have importance in the twenty-first century.

Patricia L. Schmidt’s biography presents Margaret Chase Smith as a focused, ambitious, and complex public figure. The author shows how Smith’s mainstream “conventional” persona was the primary means by which she was able to escape forties and fifties boundaries of gender and class which would ordinarily have held her back. In a narrative which carries the reader well beyond a catalogue of congressional votes and bills, Margaret Chase Smith: Beyond Convention illuminates the largely unknown private side of Smith’s life, from her childhood and adolescence in rural Maine, through her troubled marriage to the politically astute Clyde Smith, her later relationship with companion and administrative assistant William C. Lewis, Jr., and her forced 1972 retirement when she faced aging and the loss of power. Clearly focused on fundamental ideas of private ethics and public morality, of persona and private self, rural and urban modes of existence, qualities that led to success in public life and foibles that led to personal and public embarrassment--Margaret Chase Smith: Beyond Convention is also a “page turner.” Author: Patricia L. Schmidt. Hardcover; 446 pages.