Smith tome falls short> Maine senator’s negative `traits’ poorly supported

“POLITICS OF CONSCIENCE: A BIOGRAPHY OF MARGARET CHASE SMITH,” by Patricia Ward Wallace, Praeger Publishers, 245 pages, $24.95.

In a few days, Dec. 14 will move into history as always. But this year, it will be the first time in nearly a century that Margaret Chase Smith’s birthday will be noted without her.

What would have been the late senator’s 98th birthday will be marked in part by the arrival of a new biography, although it’s almost certainly not one she would have been pleased to read.

In the preface to “Politics of Conscience: A Biography of Margaret Chase Smith,” Patricia Ward Wallace hints at what’s to come. Smith, she writes, expressed displeasure when Wallace began to question her version of certain events.

On one hand, Wallace must be commended for taking on a task that has not yet been thoroughly accomplished: an objective portrait of perhaps Maine’s most beloved political matriarch.

But Wallace, a U.S. history professor at Baylor University in Texas, falls short of serious history on two counts. “Politics of Conscience” tends to be superficial in its review of Smith’s life and career, and Wallace suggests a number of negative traits that are not supported by even a trace of fact.

Among other things, for example, Wallace writes about rumors that the teen-age Margaret Chase — then dating the divorced and husband-to-be Clyde Smith — snuck away one weekend to have an abortion. Later, Wallace publishes speculation that Smith carried on a lesbian affair with a friend.

Even the centerpiece of Smith’s political career, the June 1, 1950, Declaration of Conscience floor speech in which she denounced fellow Sen. Joseph McCarthy, was made to appease her top aide and lover, Gen. William Lewis, Wallace writes.

It will be interesting to note how these allegations will play in Maine, although the book’s reception is nearly irrelevant given that the audience remains in love with Smith more than six months after her passing. What’s important, though, is that Wallace’s evidence is extremely skimpy — based, apparently, on the memory and speculation of contemporaries — and borders on irresponsible for a historian.

But the beginning of each chapter shows that Wallace was not about to let facts impede her search for new material. Each section starts with an anecdote meant to shed light on Smith’s thinking during a certain event, but Wallace acknowledges that the stories include fabricated dialogue.

This might work for historical fiction, but not for serious history.

And though the writing usually fails to capture the complexity of Smith’s character and the flavor of the times, “Politics of Conscience” does serve to show that the senator was more than simply a popular political maiden.

Smith, Wallace notes, used being one of the few women in political power to her advantage. Knowing that male senators and challengers were forced to treat her with kid gloves, Smith had strong political instincts and never hesitated to go for the jugular.

At home, Wallace writes, the senator was Margaret — kind, unassuming, feisty and frugal — and always in tune with constituent concerns. But in Washington, Sen. Smith could be shrewd and ambitious, and could make a general wither under her well-researched questioning during committee hearings. The late senator also could be thin-skinned and hold a grudge against those who didn’t appear to support her, Wallace writes, a charge that is well-sourced in the book.

Wallace also shows that while Smith might not have authored many pieces of major legislation, she was influential in other ways. During World War II, for example, a number of the bills she introduced to improve the armed services didn’t pass Congress but were adopted by the War Department.

While alive, Smith was the subject of about a dozen biographies and studies of her 32-year career in Congress. And now, with the passage of time, more are sure to follow as history considers her life in full.

Perhaps someday, a historian will take a long, cold look at Margaret Chase Smith and what she meant to Maine and the nation as a legislator and personality. While Wallace’s work will surely end up as an addition to that work’s bibliography, history remains wanting of a true account.