Today is Jeannette Rankin’s birthday. If she were alive, she’d be 141, and she’d be for peace.
I don’t assume everyone recognizes Rankin’s name, although I’ve been on a long, slow, easily ignored multiyear crusade to make her amazing story more famous.
Rankin, a pacifist, was the first woman ever elected to Congress. She served two terms, more than two decades apart. She was first elected to a House seat from Montana in 1916, just in time to vote against U.S. entry into World War I. She also introduced a proposed constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote.
Her anti-war position was unpopular and she lost her bid for a second term, at least in 1918.
But, unbelievably, she made a comeback and won a second term in 1940, which enabled her to also oppose U.S. entry into World War II.
Considering that the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor, the House vote was 388-1 in favor of declaring war. (Guess who was the one.) This time, Rankin’s “no” vote was so well received that she had to take refuge from an angry mob in a Capitol Building phone booth until the police could rescue her. She was not reelected in 1942.
Asked later whether she regretted that vote, she replied: “Never. If you’re against war, you’re against war regardless of what happens. It’s a wrong method of trying to settle a dispute.”
Rankin remained a peace activist into her 90s and into the 1970s, which meant, of course, that she was around to also oppose U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and to inspire a group of anti-war feminists to create an umbrella peace organization called the Jeannette Rankin Brigade in her honor.
She was thinking about a third campaign for Congress, as a peace candidate of course, in 1972, but fell ill with cancer, which took her life in 1973, when she was 92.
R. I. P., Ms. Rankin. She’d have had multiple opportunities to campaign against military solutions in the decades since she died. We’re (very) slow learners.
All we know about Jeannette Rankin is that she voted against World Wars. She needs a biography.
Linked through Wikipedia:
“Jeannette Rankin, America’s Conscience
Norma Smith
Montana Historical Society, 2002 – History – 233 pages
Social worker, suffragist, first woman elected to the United States Congress, a lifelong peace activist, and a tireless advocate for political reform, Jeannette Rankin is often remembered as the woman who voted “No.” Elected to Congress from Montana on the eve of the United States’ entry into World War I, Rankin cast her first vote the first vote cast in the House of Representatives by any woman against the declaration of war against Germany. Reelected to Congress in 1940, she repeated her vote, becoming the only member of Congress to vote against the United States’ involvement in World War II.
Born in Montana in 1880, Jeannette Rankin’s life of activism spanned much of the twentieth century. A “first-wave” feminist who campaigned for women’s suffrage, she became a heroine to “second-wave” feminists in the 1960s and a living testament to the achievements of their foremothers. A peace advocate during and after World War I, she lead the Jeannette Rankin Brigade during the March on Washington in 1968 to protest the Vietnam War. A woman who lived her conscience, Jeannette Rankin became America’s conscience through her unflagging campaigns for children’s protective legislation, women’s rights, election reform, and most of all, peace.
Rankin’s determined voice shines in this biography, written by her friend, Norma Smith, who paints a convincing portrait of a complicated activist based on interviews with Rankin in the 1960s.”
A pacific vote against US involvement in WWI was certainly plausible, given the extremely complicated morality of responsibility for its commencement, as well as the unclear national danger presented by the Kaiser’s Imperial Germany in 1917. US involvement in 1918 decisively threw the war in the Allies’ favor. Arguments can certainly be made that the German defeat ultimately was a disaster for the continent.
But it took a real pacifist to register a “nay” vote against WWII. Perhaps this shows one can apply philosophical principles too rigidly. Saying that war was “a wrong method of trying to settle a dispute” with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan does not seem too sound a conclusion (after Pearl Harbor!), even if Rankin’s philosophy would be correct, say, 9 out of 10 times.
One also can’t imagine a politician today who would cast votes that would so obviously doom their political careers.