Maine Humanities Council

Margaret Chase Smith

by Jim Melcher

Margaret Chase Smith, who served Maine in Congress for 32 years, is still one of the most iconic figures in Maine political history over 15 years after her death in 1995. She remains a significant figure in American national political history as well. What can we still learn from “The Red Rose of Skowhegan”’s experience in politics almost three decades after she left the Senate in 1973? As a scholar of American politics, I tried my hand at this question at a conference titled “The Politics of Conscience: Margaret Chase Smith and Today’s Political Climate” hosted by the Maine Humanities Council at G.W.-Hinckley (formerly Good Will-Hinckley) this past September. (The podcast available here on the MHC website is from a later presentation on this topic I made in Professor Amy Fried’s class on Women and Politics at the University of Maine). I argued that not only are there ways in which we can learn from Margaret Chase Smith’s experience still holding valid today, but that there are other ways in which her experience offers a contrast to the way American politics works now.

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The tragic events of September 11, 2001 have evoked complicated responses from Americans and also the rest of the world. Now, ten years later, we are reflecting on how we at the Maine Humanities Council have responded. In summary, I think it is fair to say that we have tried to learn from the events of 9/11 and to promote understanding of how people in other parts of the world live, what they believe and want, and how they view the United States. 9/11 also caused us to reflect on how Americans see themselves, and we’ve created a number of programs and given grants that explore that as well.

In this post, we’ll present programs that look outward, towards the rest of the world, and in October focus on programs and activities that have encouraged us to reflect upon ourselves as Americans.

The Council’s immediate response to 9/11 was our quickly organized statewide reading and discussion program Let Freedom Ring! On October 11, 2001, nearly 1,000 Mainers came together in 63 libraries to share thoughts on W.H. Auden’s ”September 1, 1939” and Franklin Roosevelt’s speech, “The Four Freedoms”, and to reflect on the events of September 11. As one participant wrote afterwards, “There was freedom and respect in this circle – it models what we wish for in the larger world.”

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by Thomas A. Desjardin

In late September 1775, an army of 1,150 Continental soldiers disembarked from eleven ships in the Kennebec River and transferred their arms, food, and other gear into 220 small boats made ready for them by local settlers under the direction of Reuben Colburn, a member of the Committee of Safety in Gardinerstown, now Pittston.

By the time this army, under the command of then-patriot Colonel Benedict Arnold, reached the walls of Quebec, it had dwindled to just 450 men. Along the way, this band of Colonial revolutionaries suffered from disease, freezing, drowning, desertion, starvation, and eating too quickly after starving. They had marched, paddled, and slogged through a wilderness country that most thought impenetrable, and won the admiration of even British subjects within the walls of Quebec City.

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