Margaret Madeline Chase Smith was an American politician. A member of the Republican Party, she served as a U.S. representative (1940–1949) and a U.S. senator (1949–1973) from Maine. She was the first woman to serve in both houses of the United States Congress, and the first woman to represent Maine in either. A Republican, she was among the first to criticize the tactics of Joseph McCarthy in her 1950 speech, "Declaration of Conscience".

Joseph Raymond McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death at age 48 in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in the United States in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread communist subversion. He alleged that numerous communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers had infiltrated the United States federal government, universities, film industry, and elsewhere. Ultimately, he was censured for refusing to cooperate with, and abusing members of, the committee established to investigate whether or not he should be censured. The term "McCarthyism", coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy's practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities. Today, the term is used more broadly to mean demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.