The GOP’s “Four Horsemen of Calumny”- Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear”

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Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

June 1, 2026

On June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, stood up against Republican Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and his supporters, who were undermining American democracy in a crusade against “communism.”

Margaret Chase was born in Skowhegan in 1897, the oldest child of a barber and a waitress, and became a teacher and a reporter before she got into politics through her husband, Clyde Smith, who was a state legislator and newspaperman. Soon after they married in 1930, she was elected to the Maine Republican State Committee and served until 1936, when Maine voters elected Clyde to Congress.

Once in Washington, Margaret worked as her husband’s researcher, speechwriter, and press secretary. When Clyde died of a heart attack in April 1940, voters elected Margaret to finish his term, then reelected her to Congress in her own right. They did so three more times, always with more than sixty percent of the vote. In 1948 they elected her to the Senate with a 71% majority.

When she was elected to Congress, the U.S. was still getting used to the New Deal government that Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt had ushered in first to combat the Great Depression and then to fight for victory in World War II. Smith’s party was divided between those who thought the new system was a proper adjustment to the modern world and those determined to destroy that new government.

Those who wanted to slash the government back to the form it had taken in the 1920s, when businessmen ran it, had a problem. American voters liked the business regulation, basic social safety net, and infrastructure construction of the new system. To combat that popularity, the anti–New Deal Republicans insisted that the U.S. government was sliding toward communism. With the success of the People’s Liberation Army and the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, Americans were willing to entertain the idea that communism was spreading across the globe and would soon take over the U.S.

Republican politicians eager to reclaim control of the government for the first time since 1933 fanned the flames of that fear. On February 9, 1950, during a speech to a group gathered in Wheeling, West Virginia, to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, an undistinguished senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy claimed that he had a list of 205 communists working for the State Department and that the Democrats refused to investigate these “traitors in the government.”

The anti–New Deal faction of the party jumped on board. Sympathetic newspapers trumpeted McCarthy’s charges—which kept changing, and for which he never offered proof—and his colleagues cheered him on, while congress members from the Republican faction that had signed on to the liberal consensus kept their heads down to avoid becoming the target of his attacks.

All but one of them did, that is. Senator Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation. She had seen the effects of his behavior up close in Maine, where the faction of the Republican Party that supported McCarthy had supported the state’s Ku Klux Klan. Clyde and Margaret Chase Smith had taken a stand against them.

On June 1, 1950, only four months after McCarthy made his infamous speech in Wheeling, Smith stood up in the Senate to make a short speech.

She began: “I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear…. I speak as a Republican, I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States senator. I speak as an American.”

Referring to Senator McCarthy, who was sitting two rows behind her, Senator Smith condemned the leaders in her party who were destroying lives with wild accusations. “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she pointed out. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic American principles. “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” Senator Smith said. “It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.”

Senator Smith wanted a Republican victory in the upcoming elections, she explained, but to replace President Harry Truman’s Democratic administration—for which she had plenty of harsh words—with a Republican regime “that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to the nation.”

“I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

“I doubt if the Republican party could do so,” she added, “simply because I do not believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans are not that desperate for victory.”

“I do not want to see the Republican party win that way,” she said. “While it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican party, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people. Surely it would ultimately be suicide for the Republican party and the two-party system that has protected our American liberties from the dictatorship of a one-party system.”

“As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist,” she said. “They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”

Smith presented a “Declaration of Conscience,” listing five principles she hoped her party would adopt. It ended with a warning: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”

Six other Republican senators signed onto Senator Smith’s declaration.

There were two reactions to the speech within the party. McCarthy sneered at “Snow White and the Six Dwarves.” Other Republicans quietly applauded Smith’s courage but refused to show similar courage themselves with public support. In the short term, Senator Smith’s voice was largely ignored in the public arena and then, when the Korean War broke out, forgotten.

But she was right. Four years later, the Senate condemned McCarthy. And while Senator Smith was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, McCarthy has gone down in history as a disgrace to the Senate and to the United States of America.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Private equity is in your bed, and other tales of how profit broke America

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Senator Chris Murphy’s incisive new book on the cultural consequences of hyper-capitalism — and how to revive the common good

By  Anand Giridharadas

Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, set out some time ago on an unlikely project: to diagnose America’s ailments beyond the usual-suspect answers.

Politicians are paid to enact policies. So typically when they describe what’s wrong, they speak of policies that got us into our messes and policies to get us out.

Murphy’s inquiry took him somewhere else — beyond the familiar territory of prescription-drug prices and block-grant funding, into the substrate of our inner life.

What he found in his interactions with constituents and conversations with scholars and reading was a spiritual rot, a death of relationship, a connection recession.

To be clear, in his analysis and that of others, the causes of much of this affliction are very much political, very much in the realm of policy. But what Murphy’s thinking and now writing make clear is that what happens in politics and policy doesn’t stay there. It ultimately trickles down into our relationships, our marriages, our stress hormones, our childhoods, our neighborhood vibes, our hangouts, our conversations with the barista, our block parties, our friendships.

This week Senator Murphy pushed “Crisis of the Common Good,” a book-length investigation of how capitalism and other forces in American life have cut into our civic dance with each other and wormed their way into every last fiber of our culture.

It is a project I’m fascinated by, because it involves someone in a position of political power widening the scope of inquiry to ask how the things he works on affect other things not typically regarded as political.

So I was thrilled to have this conversation with the senator today. We talked about:

— Why he thinks America’s real problem is much deeper than Trump

— How private equity is coming between married couples

— Whether Republicans or Democrats will be first to pull off a potential political realignment that is there for the taking

— Whether Bernie Sanders was right all along (and where he fell short)

— Why the Democratic Party refuses to introspect

— And whether he will run for president (cameo: the other presidential contenders who have been texting him this week

WATCH THIS IMPORTANT INTERVIEW : Private equity is in your bed, and other tales of how profit broke America

‘Bowie compared us to T Rex. Couldn’t get any better’: the Mekons on how they made Where Were You?

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‘It’s about loneliness, really. It was the total opposite of that “It’s Friday night, let’s have sex” macho mentality that was in most rock music at the time’

Tom Greenhalgh, guitar

Most of the people who started the Mekons and Gang of Four were on the same fine art course at Leeds University. In December 1976 we went to see the Anarchy tour at the nearby polytechnic. I liked the Sex Pistols but the Clash, in their paint-spattered clothes, sounded particularly great. It was the first time I saw a band and thought: “That could be me up there.”

Soon afterwards, Jon King and Andy Gill started Gang of Four, rehearsing at the university’s film society, and whenever they took a break, we started messing around on their equipment. At our first gig – well, half a gig really – we didn’t have a rhythm section so Andy played drums. Then after one and a half gigs Bob Last from the Fast Product label said he wanted to do something with us. We told him, “You should record Gang of Four, not us” – which he would do later. But he was adamant: “You’re exactly what I’ve been looking for.”

We recorded our first single, Never Been in a Riot, on a two-track tape recorder in a living room, but for Where Were You? Bob put us in Spaceward in Cambridge, a proper studio getting a reputation for recording unconventional stuff. Where Were You? came together very quickly in rehearsal. Kevin Lycett strummed two chords, I played the choppy counter-melody and Jon came in on drums. Mark White wrote the lyrics, Andy Corrigan sang them, and that was it.

John Peel played it a lot and it sold more than 27,000 copies straight away. It was a huge amount for an independent label, but we certainly didn’t think we were at the forefront of postpunk DIY culture, or that we’d be playing the song live almost 50 years later. It started to become kind of a classic after David Bowie played it on a Radio 1 programme called Star Special and compared us to the young Marc Bolan. Bowie comparing us to T Rex? You couldn’t get any better, really.

Jon Langford, drums

I missed the first gig because I’d gone home to Wales for the weekend, but legend has it they had a sofa with a spaceship drawn on it and were called Dan Dare and the Mekons. After Tony Parsons in the NME said the name was shit, we became the Mekons. They wanted me in the group because I had a drum kit. Where Were You? was probably written in the first three days of the band’s existence. We thought we had funnier, crazier and more elaborate songs, so it was going to be the B-side, but when we slowed it down it had more of a groove and really clicked.

Spaceward studio had great old amplifiers, so Kevin spent a lot of time getting the first chord to sound like a death knell. For the drum roll, the soundman had to stand next to me to slow me down, so we played it over and over again until I was less eager to speed up. It’s a freakishly good performance from us, considering, and a really good cut. It jumps out of the speakers.

Mark’s lyrics were very influenced by Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley’s confessional love songs. Where Were You? is about loneliness, really. “I was buying you a drink, where were you?” Then he goes back to his flat and cries. We’ve always had women in the Mekons – Mary Jenner, a classically trained violinist, played bass on Where Were You? – and feminism was important to us. Where Were You? was the total opposite of that “It’s Friday night, let’s shag” macho mentality that was in most rock music at the time.

For the sleeve, I cut up an old Gary Glitter annual: the gold discs on the cover are Glitter’s, not ours, but wisely enough I Tipp-Exed his name out. The gold discs were meant to be ironic – we certainly weren’t celebrating our millions of sales! But after it was single of the week in all the music papers and became our best selling record, the joke was on us.

About 10 years ago, we received a fairly substantial amount of money after it was used in an advert for Honda’s Acura cars. Mark said: “The only reason we’ve got this is because you guys [the current lineup including Greenhalgh and Langford] have kept playing it.” And so the original lineup shared some of the money with the current band. It was really nice because it linked everyone together: Merry Christmas from Where Were You?

 Horrorble, a dub version of the Mekons’ album Horror, is released on 5 June

Source: ‘Bowie compared us to T Rex. Couldn’t get any better’: the Mekons on how they made Where Were You? | Music | The Guardian