Like her politics or not, Rankin's place in history is undisputed

Two important anniversaries converged in the past month that provide a significant vantage point on Montana’s penchant for independence and darned cussedness — as personified by one lone congresswoman.

I am talking, of course, about Jeannette Rankin, who is the only woman ever elected to Congress from Montana and who infamously became the only member of Congress to vote against America’s entry into both World War I and World War II.

November was the 100th anniversary of Rankin’s election as the first woman in Congress in 1916, just two years after Montana gave women the right to vote and four years before the 19th Amendment guaranteed that right for all American women.

For that reason, of course, Rankin is a historical figure of major significance, and emblematic of Montanans’ willingness to flout tradition and try something new.

But that is not the end of the story. As most of you know, Rankin went on — just a few months after being elected, and just four days after being sworn in as the nation’s first congresswoman — to join 49 other members of the House of Representatives to vote against President Woodrow Wilson’s request for a declaration of war against Germany.

It is no wonder that 40 years later, Sen. John F. Kennedy, the author of “Profiles in Courage,” selected Rankin as one of three women of courage in an article he penned for McCall’s magazine.

But it wasn’t simply Rankin’s vote against World War I, nor her role as the first woman in Congress, that led Kennedy to write that “Few members of Congress since its founding in 1789 have stood more alone, more completely in defiance of public opinion” than Jeannette Rankin.

That honor must surely rest with Rankin’s status as the one and only member of Congress to vote against declaring war on the empire of Japan despite the universal outrage at Japan’s perfidy that had led to the death of nearly 3,000 people at Pearl Harbor.

This being the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, I had started researching Rankin earlier this month after I found a brief item on Page Five of the Daily Inter Lake from Dec. 8, 1941, the day after “the date that will live in infamy.”

An Associated Press dispatch datelined Cut Bank reported that Dan Whetstone, the Republican

national committeeman for Montana, had telegraphed Rankin and asked her to “redeem Montana’s honor and loyalty” by changing her vote on the declaration of war.

Mind you, this wasn’t just partisan rancor. Rankin had been elected as a Republican. It’s just that her pacifism did not match the mood of the party, the country or the state — at least not after Pearl Harbor.

A few days later, on Dec. 11, the Inter Lake published a statement by Rankin in which she justified her vote based on concern about the hastiness of the vote (after “a debate which lasted only 18 minutes”), worries that the vote was based only on “brief, unconfirmed radio reports,” and the promises she had made during her campaign “to do everything possible to keep this country out of war.” Ultimately, she told our readers that she felt she had “voted as the mothers would have had me vote.”

This was nothing new for Rankin. She had already tested her mettle in 1917, when she stood up against a war that she had warned against and that she felt would serve no American purpose. Even though she was not alone in opposing World War I, Rankin’s vote drew more than the usual attention because she was the first woman elected to Congress and this was fated to be her first vote. More tension could not be imagined by the best Hollywood screenwriter.

As reported by the United Press, “A woman furnished the most dramatic scene of the most dramatic session in the history of this nation’s house of representatives. The woman is Miss Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman to ever sit in either body of the country’s legislature ... When the long but always thrilling debate had at last been concluded a stillness that seldom marks house proceedings settled over the chamber ... The clerk drawled out the list of names, recording members’ votes ... Miss Rankin’s name was reached. The first woman was to vote on war. Amid an embarrassing silence, weeping, she advanced half-way down the aisle from her seat. A storm that had rippled like a noisy horde of cavalry and that equaled even the intensity of the storm that continued throughout the president’s address to the joint session Monday, was on. ‘I want to stand by my country,’ said this woman, choking, ‘but — I cannot vote for war.’ “

Interestingly, the United Press reporter concluded that “Thunderous applause from pacifists and war side alike greeted this frank admission of a woman’s first official vote in the house. One had to yell to jam down the lump in his throat. But the lady from Montana had slipped out by a side door, grief-stricken, and she heard but little of the ovation.”

The details of exactly how Rankin’s vote proceeded vary in different accounts, but all agree on her momentous quote, “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war” and on her sobbing or weeping. The Associated Press account adds that Miss Rankin made her assertion on the second roll call “after failing to answer to the calling of her name twice on the first roll call,” and that her defining statement was not considered a true vote, so “half a dozen of her colleagues wearied by the protracted debate, demanded ‘vote,’ ‘vote,’ in raucous voices. Sinking into her seat, Miss Rankin whispered ‘No.’ Jerry South, chief clerk, went to her seat to corroborate her vote.”

The casual reader might assume that the reason Jeannette Rankin was not re-elected to the House in 1918 was because of her unpopular vote, but that is not the case. The Montana Legislature had decided to eliminate the practice of having two at-large representatives for the entire state and instead divided the state into a Western District and an Eastern District. Rankin would have had to run in the heavily Democratic Western District and instead opted to run for the statewide U.S. Senate seat. Although she lost in the Republican primary, she accepted the nomination of the National Party and finished third in the general election.

It is certainly ironic that when Rankin finally returned to politics in 1940, she would serve as Montana’s representative from the Western District and would once against be called upon to cast a vote on a declaration of war after Pearl Harbor. Though her choice to vote against war a second time may not have brought honor to Montana, it certainly did establish once and for all that Rankin was a woman of honor, who voted based on her belief, as she told Flathead students in 1937, that “war is a system, and systems can be changed whereby disputes may be settled without resort to armed conflict” (as paraphrased by an Inter Lake reporter).

Although her argument doesn’t hold true across the board, and few could find an alternative to self-defense when a nation is viciously attacked, it would certainly behoove all of us to avoid war whenever an alternative is practical. In her later years Rankin became a vocal critic of the Vietnam War, and even considered yet another run for Congress when she was in her 90s “to bring the issue of peace in Vietnam to the people.”

Who could argue with her emotions, at least, when she told the Associated Press in 1970, “There are better methods for settling disputes than killing young men, but we — the public — have only ourselves to blame that they aren’t being used.”

Those words cut across partisan lines, as did Rankin’s significance in both Montana and U.S. history. It is no surprise therefore that Montana’s current Republican senator and representative are being joined by Montana’s Democratic senator in proposing to honor Rankin on the 100th anniversary of her becoming the first woman elected to Congress.

The 100 Years of Women in Congress Act would pay tribute to Rankin by renaming in her honor a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) program that provides grants to colleges and universities that encourage women and minorities to pursue degrees and careers in STEM fields.

Rankin, who grew up near Missoula, graduated from what is now the University of Montana with a degree in biology. Her pacifism may be what she is most noted for, but her role as a trail-blazer for women exemplifies Montana’s pioneer spirit and is an inspiration for us all.

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•Frank Miele is managing editor of the daily Inter Lake.