Smith takes the Senate floor; calls McCarthy's methods a 'forum of hate and character assassination'

Four months after Joseph McCarthy stood in Wheeling, West Virginia, and told a Republican women's club he had a list of Communists in the State Department, the Senate had done nothing to challenge him. On June 1, 1950, Maine Republican Margaret Chase Smith took the Senate floor and delivered a fifteen-minute speech that refused to name McCarthy directly but called his methods a debasement of the Senate into "a forum of hate and character assassination." She named four rights she called the pillars of Americanism — to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think independently — and warned her own party against riding "the Four Horsemen of Calumny: Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear." Six fellow Republican senators signed the Declaration; the rest of the Senate said nothing…