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Senate Years of Service: 1949-1973 Party: Republican
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SMITH, Margaret Chase, (wife of Clyde Harold Smith),
a Representative and a Senator from Maine; born Margaret Madeline
Chase, December 14, 1897, in Skowhegan, Somerset County, Maine; attended the
public schools; taught school in Skowhegan, Maine 1916-1917; business executive
for country weekly newspaper and a woolen company 1919-1930; secretary to
husband while he was in Congress 1937-1940; lieutenant colonel, Air Force
Reserve 1950-1958; elected as a Republican to the Seventy-sixth Congress, by
special election, June 3, 1940, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of her
husband, Clyde H. Smith; reelected to the four succeeding Congresses and served
from June 3, 1940, to January 3, 1949; was not a candidate for reelection but
was elected in 1948 to the United States Senate; reelected in 1954, 1960 and
1966 and served January 3, 1949, until January 3, 1973; unsuccessful candidate
for reelection in 1972; chairwoman, Special Committee on Rates of Compensation
(Eighty-third Congress), Republican Conference (Ninetieth through Ninety-second
Congresses), ranking Republican member on Armed Services Committee (Ninetieth
through Ninety-second Congresses), ranking Republican member on Aeronautical
and Space Sciences Committee (Eighty-eighth through Ninety-first Congresses);
first woman to be placed in nomination for the presidency at a major party
convention 1964; visiting professor for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship
Foundation 1973-1976; awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on July 6,
1989; was a resident of Skowhegan, Maine, until her death on May 29, 1995;
remains were cremated, and ashes placed in the residential wing of the Margaret
Chase Smith Library, Skowhegan, Maine.
BibliographyAmerican National Biography;
Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives; Smith, Margaret
Chase.
Declaration of Conscience. New York: Doubleday, 1972; Sherman,
Janann.
No Place for a Woman: A Life of Senator Margaret Chase Smith.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000; Hutchison, Kay Bailey. Margaret
Chase Smith. In
American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country.
New York: HaperCollins, 2004: 210-243.
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