Photo courtesy of the Margaret Chase Smith Library
A Newsmaker’s Beginnings
1925, Skowhegan
Newspapers were a man’s world in 1925, but apparently nobody told Margaret Madeline Chase and the five other women staffers pictured outside the Independent Reporter. Standing in the back row on the right, the future U.S. Congresswoman and Senator Margaret Chase Smith was still just Maggie, the efficient 27-year-old office executive at the Skowhegan weekly.
“While [I was] in charge of circulation,” Smith wrote in 1947, “the paper reached a total of 4,500 subscribers at $2 a year, on a paid-in-advance basis … This was the largest circulation of any New England country weekly and the largest in the country on a $2-a-year, paid-in-advance rate.” This is partly because, with the same drive that defined her 32-year congressional career, Maggie Chase had managed to get her weekly onto newsstands nationwide.
She also married the publishing company’s president and political leader, Clyde H. Smith, in 1930. When Clyde Smith, Maine’s U. S. representative to the second district, died a decade later, his wife ran for his House seat and won. When she was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1948, Margaret Chase Smith became the first woman elected to both houses of Congress.
“She worked at the Independent Reporter for eight years, and I’m sure it must have had some influence on her approach to politics,” says Angie Stockwell, Senator Smith’s secretary from 1983 until her death in 1995. Stockwell also is collection specialist at the Margaret Chase Smith Library in Skowhegan, where visitors can experience the library, Smith home, and collection year-round.
In addition to newspaper staffer, Smith’s early resume included telephone operator, one-room schoolteacher, and textile mill worker. She also served as president of the Maine Business and Professional Women’s Club. All this from the tiny, no-nonsense woman who declared her conscience against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts.
You must log in to post a comment.