As Independence Day draws near, I’ve been thinking about the July 4 holiday and what it means for me.

Of course, it is a great day off to celebrate with family and friends, enjoy festivals and fireworks and reflect on the year 1776 when the Second Continental Congress declared our independence from Great Britain.

We were establishing the United States of America and to commemorate our freedom we made July 4 a federal holiday.

I think of my paternal grandmother, Isabella Shields, who came to the U.S. from Scotland many years ago and worked hard in the Connecticut mills to earn enough money to bring her siblings here as well.

Had it not been for her vision of a better life, hard work and persistence, I would not be here.

She had an independent streak and refused to settle for a mediocre life in Scotland while the opportunity to be more secure here presented itself. Yes, she would become homesick for her beautiful country and her family, but she forged forward.

I like to think I assimilated some of her spark for wanting more, and better.

Independence and independent thinking runs through my family’s veins, as it does in other Americans, I think.

Being an independent thinker means not taking things at face value. We must dig deeper.

Remember Atticus Finch in “To Kill A Mockingbird” saying we must not judge or pretend to know people until we have walked around in their shoes?

There’s an important lesson in that, as well as in the directive to not always follow the crowd. We must learn to think critically and promote such learning in schools. It is easy to go along with majority opinion without scrutinizing an issue ourselves, and vetting it.

In 1992, I covered Patrick McGowan’s campaign kickoff at the Canaan Grange Hall. A Pittsfield native, McGowan, a Democrat, was seeking to unseat Republican Olympia Snowe for the 2nd Congressional District seat.

In the audience were several prominent Democrats, including U.S. Sen. George Mitchell and Tom Allen, who later would become a U.S. congressman. There was also a prominent Republican who stood out among the rest — former U.S. Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, of Skowhegan, where I grew up.

I included names of attendees in the story I wrote and afterward Smith faced backlash from people who said she should not have been there because she wasn’t representing her party appropriately.

Smith was a longtime friend of the McGowan family and had every right to be there. Her independent streak went way back to her time in the U.S. Senate when, on June 1, 1950, she gave her Declaration of Conscience speech, denouncing Republican U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin for his anti-communist campaign. Americans, she said, had the right to criticize, protest, hold unpopular beliefs and think independently, albeit in doing so they risked being labeled communist or fascist.

After Smith was criticized for attending McGowan’s event, I wrote a column that appeared in the Morning Sentinel in which I basically said that as a woman who had worked hard for the people of Maine for many years, she could do anything she wanted, including sitting at a friend’s campaign kickoff, even if he was a Democrat.

Some time after that, I received a letter from Smith, typed on her personal stationery.

“Dear Amy Calder,” it began. “Your contribution to the Waterville Morning Sentinel was just called to my attention. I have read it and hasten to thank you for writing as you did. You are so right in your references to me and others and I commend you for your thoughtfulness. I commend you for sharing your thoughts with others.”

I keep Smith’s framed letter on my office wall as a reminder of what she stood for — respect, integrity and the courage to stand up for what is right.

On Independence Day, may we all embrace such American values.

Amy Calder has been a Morning Sentinel reporter 35 years. Her columns appear here weekly. She is the author of the book “Comfort is an Old Barn,” a collection of her curated columns, published in 2023 by Islandport Press. She may be reached at acalder@centralmaine.com. For previous Reporting Aside columns, go to centralmaine.com.

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