ABSTRACT
On June 1, 1950, the freshman senator from Maine and the first woman to become an influential member of the male-dominated club rose in the upper house to issue a “Declaration of Conscience.” It focused on the paranoia sweeping the country since Senator Joseph R. McCarthy delivered his speech to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, in February waving a list of “205” members of the Communist Party working in the U.S. State Department. “I speak as a Republican. I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States senator. I speak as an American,” she said. Recently, she maintained, the Senate “has too often been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination, sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity.” She reminded the nation of
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.
