The Jeannette Rankin Story

by Stephen Bender
by Stephen Bender

Jeannette Rankin was not only the first, but to the present day, perhaps the most principled and certainly most courageous woman ever to be elected to Congress – and before the dawn of national women's suffrage at that. Born on a ranch outside of Missoula, Montana in 1880, she grew up in a pioneer family with six younger siblings. Her early years marked her for an independent life in that – like many young women of the West – she played an active role not only in raising her siblings but also in assisting her father in his lumber and hotel ventures.

Her distaste for war came early as did her contrarian suffragist and feminist views. While studying at the University of Montana, where she would graduate in 1902 with a degree in biology, she was asked to read Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade."

Norma Smith in Jeannette Rankin: America's Conscience recounted her reaction. "This is hideous. I can't read it." Shortly after graduation, Rankin read The Story of Mary MacLane, a convention-attacking best-selling biography written by a young woman from Butte. Reviled in much of Montana, the author declared "may I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity – a virtuous woman."

After university, Rankin held a host of different jobs while helping the family around their increasingly prosperous ranch, particularly in the wake of her father's death in 1904. Restless at home, she jumped at the chance to visit her ailing brother Wellington at Harvard. During her trip back east she visited New York and Washington where she attended Teddy Roosevelt's inaugural ball. She would be struck most powerfully by the abject poverty of east coast cities amidst the opulence of the robber barons. A trip to San Francisco in 1907 and a visit to a settlement house – a sanctuary for poor immigrants most famously exemplified by Rankin's future friend Jane Addams and her Hull House in Chicago – cemented her desire to work for social change.

The following year she enrolled at the New York School of Philanthropy, a school for social workers which fought the rising tide of Social Darwinist thinking. Upon graduation, she moved to Washington to fight her first defining battle: women's suffrage.

Suffragette Cities

Most of the major suffrage organizations were based on the east coast; however, it was in her native mountain West that the right to vote was making progress. So, after a brief stint in the nation's capital, Jeannette embarked upon her fight for the right to vote in Seattle, working for the National American Woman Suffrage Association. There was always tension between the reality of success in the West and the institutional power of the East, not least because eastern suffrage organizations often overlapped with prohibition groups like the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Needless to say, this fact did not particularly endear the eastern wing of the movement to the average hard-drinkin' Western man. On this question, Jeannette tended to soft pedal her support for prohibition, appealing instead in her speeches to miners and loggers to the tradition of the self-reliant western woman.

In the end, Washington voted 63.8% in favor of women's right to vote in 1910, although over 40% of the male population refused to vote on the matter at all – a pattern that would repeat itself in future state suffrage votes. Jeanette continued to travel around the country for the movement, helping to secure victories in California (1911), Arizona, Kansas and Oregon (1912).

On the occasion of Woodrow Wilson's inauguration – the first Democrat so fêted in two decades – on March 3rd, 1913, suffragists organized a march 5,000 strong. Kevin Giles in Flight of the Dove: The Story of Jeannette Rankin related the events this way. "The parade started in an orderly fashion at the Capitol and was to proceed past the White House to Constitutional Hall… The police had dreadfully underestimated the number of officers needed for crowd control (later they were accused of doing it deliberately). The marchers fought their way from the start and took more than an hour to make the first 10 blocks. Half a million spectators poured from the sidewalks into the street, forcing them to squeeze through a small channel. Women were insulted, spat upon, pelted with cigar stubs and thrown to the street." The march caused such a stir that the inaugural procession was scarcely attended by contrast.

Shortly thereafter, Jeannette headed south to Florida where she made the first address promoting women's suffrage before that state's august legislature; it didn't come to much initially. She was painted as a Yankee carpetbagger interfering in a place where women didn't want the vote. And besides, as one legislator put it, according to Norma Smith's account, Southern men wanted "women of the South to remain in that realm of reverence which had been made for them by the men of the South."

She returned to Montana in 1914 to spearhead the ultimately successful campaign for suffrage in that state – barnstorming over 5,000 miles in five months from Big Sky ranches to far-flung, hard-scrabble mining camps. By making her appeal as broad as possible – fully 20% of the population of Montana was foreign born – and overcoming a state of martial law in left-leaning Butte due to open class warfare between miners and the Anaconda Copper Company, women's suffrage carried the day by a margin of four points.

The Run for Congress & the Great War

Now something of a statewide celebrity, Rankin decided to test the waters for the first successful woman's run for Congress. This move was not particularly welcome in many quarters. The leadership of the eastern-dominated women's movement was skeptical, as reflected in a patronizing letter sent to Jeannette by leading activist Carrie Chapman Catt. Jeannette was insufficiently experienced and intellectual for Catt's taste.

Undeterred, following a trip to New Zealand – which had extended the vote to women in 1883 – she declared for Congress as a Republican. This reflected Jeannette's pragmatism, as the Democratic Party was then dominant and the Republican ticket offered a much easier route to a major party nomination. In this effort, she would receive crucial support from her brother Wellington, who was by now a successful Montana businessman.

Like much of the country at the time, Jeannette advocated a foreign policy of "no foreign entanglements," so the election turned on domestic issues. She endorsed the platform of the Montana Society of Equity, a left-leaning farmers' group then powerful, the centerpiece of which called for a rise in mining taxes. To her good fortune, Anaconda – simply known as "The Company" in Montana and the usual arbiter of state politics – ignored Jeannette's run. She later recalled that The Company "let me win the first time…because they didn't think I amounted to anything."

On March 2nd, 1917, Jeannette gave a speech where she referenced the Ludlow, Colorado massacre of miners by Rockefeller agents in calling for "political democracy, business democracy, social democracy" thus challenging the state of affairs by which "a few people own most of the resources in every state."

Jeannette arrived in Washington in April of 1917 as President Wilson had called a special session to deal with the resumption of "unrestricted submarine warfare" against American merchant shipping by Germany. Her first roll call vote would be a choice between war and peace. When the time came for her to vote, Jeannette stated "I want to stand by my country but I cannot vote for war. I vote no," thus breaking 140 years of congressional tradition by which no member commented during a roll call.

The final vote, tallied on Good Friday, was 374 for war, 50 against. Norma Smith so related the atmospherics around the vote. "Jeannette retired briefly to her office for some rest. She had been under intense pressure all week. Wellington had told her she should vote a 'man's vote' in order not to jeopardize a bright career. Harriet Laidlaw, another high-profile suffrage activist, had made a trip from New York to urge her to support the war declaration."

In her corner were more militant feminists like Alice Paul, who pulled off an early banner-hanging coup in the gallery of the House of Representatives on the occasion of President Wilson's address to Congress. Smuggled in under their long skirts, the ladies pinned-together banner read: "Mr. President, what will you do for Woman Suffrage?

Like the great Randolph Bourne, Jeannette said later in a formal statement "that we were asked to vote for a commercial war [that] none of the idealistic hopes would be carried out, and I was aware of the falseness of much of the propaganda. It was easy to stand against the propaganda of the militarists, but very difficult to go against friends and dear ones who felt that I was making a needless sacrifice by voting against the war, since my vote would not be a decisive one. In trying to be fair, I said I would listen to only those who wanted war and would not vote until the last opportunity and if I could see any reason for going to war I would try to change."

Hannah Josephson captured in Jeannette Rankin: First Lady in Congress the double standard at work in Jeannette's dissenting vote. "Long years afterward, Jeannette remarked to a friend that none of the forty-nine men who voted with her were penalized as she was in consequence of her action. For almost immediately the super-patriots began their vilification of the lone woman representative. The home state Helena Independent soberly depicted her as 'a dagger in the hands of the German propagandists, a dupe of the Kaiser, a member of the Hun army in the United States, and a crying schoolgirl.'" Jeannette is reputed to have shed a pathetic tear at the casting of a vote on a resolution which would sew over 110,000 American corpses in the green fields of France.

The remainder of Jeannette's term in Congress has its moments as well. A reception was held in Washington for the First Lord of the Admiralty Arthur Balfour, who had just made his famous declaration that "His Majesty's Government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." Balfour, along with the State Department, was dismayed that Jeannette attended the soirée, as spouses were not invited, although members of Congress were.

While Rankin did vote for war appropriations once the fighting started she opposed the Espionage Act, which threatened 20 years imprisonment for interfering with the recruiting of troops. It was for violating the act that Eugene V. Debs was imprisoned. During her term, the House passed women's suffrage, barely squeaking by the necessary 2/3 majority, no thanks to the representatives of the old Confederacy who voted against as a bloc.

Not content to buck conventional wisdom on matters of war and peace, Jeannette also sided with struggling miners against "The Company" in the bitter mining strike of 1917, set off by continued union-busting efforts even after the deadly Speculator Mine fire which took 167 lives. At the behest of the miners, Jeannette traveled to Montana in an effort to mediate in the immediate aftermath of the lynching of Industrial Workers of the World organizer Frank Little. (Affixed to his nearly naked cadaver was a sign which read: "Others take notice. First and last warning.") She advocated for the federal government taking the mines out of the hands of "The Company," as a means of improving working conditions. Although she addressed a cheering crowd of over 10,000 in Butte, her efforts came to naught as "The Company," free from federal oversight, simply waited the miners out as winter descended.

Thwarted from running for her House seat again, she ran for the Senate, narrowly losing the Republican nomination; her third party bid won her a little over 20% of the vote.

In Between Wars

Free of electoral office, Jeannette set out to see the world a bit. She accompanied Jane Addams and other women peace activists – from both the Allied and Central Powers – to Zurich for the Second International Conference of Women for Permanent Peace (which would later morph into the still extant Women's International League for Peace and Freedom). The group denounced the "victor's justice" approach of the Versailles Treaty, and was vindicated by Wilson's 14 Points, which borrowed heavily from their first conference held in The Hague in 1915. Subsequently, the group criticized the intervention of allied troops in revolutionary Russia. After returning to the States, she took a position with the National Consumer's league, a forefather of the anti-sweatshop activist groups of our day.

In 1924 she returned to Montana to help with Wellington's latest campaign for the Senate. After he failed to secure the Republican nomination, Jeannette curiously moved to a 64-acre plot of land in rural north Georgia on which she built her own home, 8 miles from the university town of Athens. Here she would spend the next half century, venturing out into the world when she was so moved, frequently spending summers in Montana.

During this period, she kept up her friendship with a man who would become the most iconic mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia. In fact, the man who bestrode the Big Apple like a colossus from 1934–1945 proposed marriage to Jeannette in the mid-1920s, but she begged off. She would remain single her entire life.

Through the late 1920s and early 1930s, Jeannette worked with various national peace organizations and also founded the Georgia Peace Society in league with some faculty at the University of Georgia. Soon enough, her advocacy raised hackles in Dixie, with the Atlanta branch of the American Legion fulminating against her this way as recounted by Norma Smith. "Pacifists [were] closely akin to communists…no good could come [form allowing Jeannette] to preach un-American doctrines to the young womanhood of the South." Her status as a founding member of the ACLU, in response to her revulsion at the red-baiting Palmer raids of the Wilson administration, got her more of the same.

In 1934, in the wake of the publication of the seminal Merchants of Death, a chronicle of war profiteering by American companies in World War I, Jeannette returned to Congress to contribute research for the Senate's Nye Munitions Investigating Committee. She also testified for the 1938 Ludlow amendment, which would have mandated the approval of a majority of states prior to a declaration of war; it was defeated by a miniscule margin, at the behest of FDR.

With Hitler ascendant in Europe, Jeannette resolved to run for Congress, once again successfully in 1940. At home, with the Depression still raging away, Jeannette encountered the writings of the economist William T. Foster. As Norma Smith related, Foster called for "public enterprise with steep taxes on profits and inheritances… 'If anyone still doubts that our economic difficulties are mainly mental, let him consider what would happen if the United States would declare war today. Billions of dollars would be poured into the economy…Some day,' he [Foster] continued, 'we shall realize that if money is available for blood-and-bullets war, just as much money is available for a food-and-famine war.'" Running on a populist economic platform, Jeannette faced a labor-friendly Democrat named Jerry O'Connell. For the first time in Montana history, "The Company" was deprived of an electoral stalking horse.

Duly elected a second time, Jeannette, as fate would have it, would face another momentous vote on war in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. She alone, in all of Congress, suggesting the lone vote of Barbara Lee against the invasion of Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001, said no. In a rather salty rejoinder to the pro-war folk, Jeannette had this to say. "A year ago, one of my Congressional colleagues, having observed for months the adroitness with which President Roosevelt had brought us ever closer to the brink of war in the Atlantic only to be continually frustrated in the final step by a reluctant Congress, the President on December 7, 1941, with a magnificent moral categorical, right out of the blue – a causus belli beyond all criticism, exclaimed in despair: 'What luck that man has!'" And so it was that Jeannette ruined her political career for the last time.

A Defiant March into the Twilight

Out of step with the times, her congressional career in tatters, Jeannette returned to Montana to tend to her ailing mother for the duration of the war. For the next two decades, Jeannette would largely retire from public life, choosing instead a life of simple solitude and travel.

She was particularly fascinated by India – she would visit seven times over the decades – as Hannah Josephson explained. "She was drawn to India as a country where a Jeannette Rankin might be welcomed, since it was the home of Gandhi, who had toppled a mighty empire through the power of passive resistance. Jeannette found Gandhi's message precisely applicable to her own beliefs. An interaction between Indian and American thought had begun more than a century earlier when Henry David Thoreau, on taking out a membership in the Harvard Library, had drawn out as his first loan the sacred books of India. Reading such works as these brought Thoreau to his theory of civil disobedience, which in turn had prompted Gandhi to develop his theory of Satyahraha… Jeannette was coming to the conclusion that these men had found the only way in which wars between nations could be avoided. In 1941, it will be remembered, she still believed that the United States should arm for defense, not realizing to what uses a 'defense' establishment could be put. Now she was moving toward a belief in total universal disarmament, in the conviction that if you put a gun in a man's hand he will find some pretext to use it against his fellows."

By the late 1950s, at home in rural Georgia, tending to her modest home, to the extent that she was remembered at all, she was viewed by many as something of an enigma, if not an eccentric. "People could not understand why this famous woman, well along in years, who had a wealthy brother, lived the way she did. One magazine writer flew down from New York expecting to find an old southern mansion and had to be shown how to use the toilet. But Jeannette found she was comfortable; she knew most of the world's people lived in far worse circumstances. Her family said she was neurotic in her desire to appear poor, but Jeannette… saw herself as a living protest against establishment commercial values, [what she called] the 'stupid money system.'" In actual fact, Jeannette's modest lifestyle was something of a choice, as she was able to periodically sell parcels of her land as it rose in value with the growth of the nearby university town of Athens.

When she did venture out, often to the nation's capital, she would meet up with Sinclair Lewis and his wife Dorothy Thompson. As Norma Smith amusingly recounted, Jeannette maintained that Dorothy "should have overlooked Lewis's heavy drinking; he was a genius and Dorothy should have taken that into consideration. 'All she was interested in was her own career.' Strange talk from a feminist, but Jeannette was a complex kind of feminist. Also, her loyalties ran deep and strong, and she had known Lewis since 1916."

As Johnson escalated the Vietnam War in 1965, Jeannette began to reemerge in the public eye, making speeches against the war. She called for women to resist the war in particular, according to Smith. "We – women – should picket everything… Women remind me of the cows on our ranch in Montana. A cow has a calf and after a while some man comes along and takes the calf away. She bawls for a while, then goes on and has another calf. If we had 10,000 women willing to go to prison that would end the war. We've had 10,000 women sit back and let their sons be killed."

The most remarkable moment in the elderly phase of her life came with the establishment of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade. This group of about 4,000 women, clad in black, marched to the Capitol on January 15th, 1968 – the first day of Congress during the final year of the Johnson administration. They were forbidden to demonstrate on the Capitol grounds as the police invoked an obscure 1882 statute to that end. The march remained peaceful to the consternation of some and so was hardly a way to get "10,000 women arrested." In the end, perhaps the peaceful character of the march did widen the resistance to the war and it did ultimately result in a Supreme Court judgment legalizing demonstrations in the Capitol's shadow.

After the march, the press rediscovered Jeannette and her very quotable gift for plain speaking, as recounted by Josephson. "A reporter from the San Francisco Examiner quoted her as saying: 'War is nonsense – bring the boys back forthwith.' When it was suggested to her that this might be interpreted as surrender, she answered: 'Surrender is a military idea. When you're doing something wrong, you stop.' The Vietnam War, she held, was a unilateral war, and with a unilateral war you can have unilateral peace… But how were we to get the boys home, she was asked on another occasion. 'The same way we got them in, by ships and planes.' She was not alarmed by campus violence, she told a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 'If a nation sends boys halfway around the world to be shot, can you blame a few little boys for throwing stones?'"

As far as advocating for specific, institutional reforms to American democracy, Jeannette had remained remarkably consistent – and eerily prescient – over the years since her trailblazing speech at Carnegie Hall in 1917. She had called for the abolition of the Electoral College and the implementation of direct elections for president. Second, she advocated for what is now called "ranked choice voting," a system where the voter has the option of selecting in descending order three candidates for any one office. Since any of the three could end up with a majority of the votes in the finally tally, there would be no danger of "throwing away one's vote."

In an interview on the Dick Cavett show in 1972, at the age of 91, Jeannette responded this way to the host's question if enough women were fighting hard enough for their rights. "No. I think men and women have to work together. I want freedom for women, but we haven't freedom for men. And men and women have to work together for freedom. When I went to school, all the young men were planning on the independent life, the doctor, lawyer, store keeper, farmer, something. Today, they're asking for jobs. They're planning to get with a big company, and conform to that job… Now, I live in the pioneer West, and we never conformed. We did what we pleased. And today you have to conform. And as long as men have to hold their jobs, they aren't free. And women aren't free."

Jeannette Rankin died in Carmel, CA on May 18, 1973.

March 15, 2005

Stephen Bender [send him mail] is a writer based in San Francisco. You can find more of his work at his website.

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