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On May 18, 1973, Jeannette Rankin, American politician, first woman elected to Congress (R-Montana), women's rights advocate, and pacifist, died at the age of 92. She was elected to Congress when women still did not have suffrage. From the article:
"Jeannette Rankin was a Montana politician who made history in 1916 as the first woman ever elected to the United States Congress. She was also the only member of Congress to cast a vote against participation in both world wars. Unafraid to take controversial positions on several inflammatory issues, Rankin was a leader in the women’s suffrage movement and a lifelong pacifist."
"Jeannette Rankin was a Montana politician who made history in 1916 as the first woman ever elected to the United States Congress. She was also the only member of Congress to cast a vote against participation in both world wars. Unafraid to take controversial positions on several inflammatory issues, Rankin was a leader in the women’s suffrage movement and a lifelong pacifist."
Jeannette Rankin
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Jeannette Rankin: The First Woman Member of U.S Congress | Unladylike2020 | American Masters |...
Official website: http://www.pbs.org/unladylike2020 | #Unladylike2020PBSJeannette Rankin (1880-1973) made history as the first woman elected to the U.S. Cong...
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on May 18, 1973, first woman elected to Congress (R-Montana), women's rights advocate, and pacifist, Jeannette Rankin, died at the age of 92.
Jeannette Rankin: The First Woman Member of U.S Congress | Unladylike2020 | American Masters | PBS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb4jVQvFWjY
Images:
1. As the only member of Congress to vote against declaring war on Japan, Montana’s Representative Jeannette Rankin raised such ire she had to call for an escort
2. 1914 l-to-r in car Mrs Grace Catterill, 'Colonel' Ida Craft, Mrs. C.P. Irsih, Allan Margaret Lindeley, std. Miss Jeanette Rankin - chairman of the state suffrage association
3. Jeannette Rankin 'I worked for suffrage for years, and got it. I’ve worked for peace for 55 years and haven’t come close.'.
4. Three days after her infamous “no” vote, Rankin did not take a position at the December 11, 1941, vote to declare war on Germany and Italy
Background from {{https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/20147?]}
"RANKIN, Jeannette
1880–1973
OFFICE Representative
STATE/TERRITORY Montana
PARTY Republican
CONGRESS(ES) 65th (1917–1919), 77th (1941–1943)
Biography
Jeannette Rankin’s life was filled with extraordinary achievements: she was the first woman elected to Congress, one of the few suffragists elected to Congress, and the only Member of Congress to vote against U.S. participation in both World War I and World War II. “I may be the first woman member of Congress,” she observed upon her election in 1916. “But I won’t be the last.”1
Jeannette Rankin, the eldest daughter of a rancher and a schoolteacher, was born near Missoula, Montana, on June 11, 1880. She graduated from Montana State University (now the University of Montana) in 1902 and attended the New York School of Philanthropy (later the Columbia University School of Social Work). After a brief period as a social worker in Spokane, Washington, Rankin entered the University of Washington in Seattle. It was there that she joined the woman suffrage movement, a campaign that achieved its goal in Washington State in 1910. Rankin became a professional lobbyist for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Her speaking and organizing efforts helped Montana women gain the vote in 1914.
When Rankin decided in 1916 to run for a House seat from Montana, she had two key advantages: her reputation as a suffragist and her politically well-connected brother, Wellington, who financed her campaign. Some national woman suffrage leaders feared she would lose and hurt the cause. The novelty of a woman running for Congress, however, helped Rankin secure a GOP nomination for one of Montana’s two At-Large House seats on August 29, 1916.
2 Rankin ran as a progressive, pledging to work for a constitutional woman suffrage amendment and emphasizing social welfare issues. Long a committed pacifist, she did not shy away from letting voters know how she felt about possible U.S. participation in the European war that had been raging for two years: “If they are going to have war, they ought to take the old men and leave the young to propagate the race.”
3 Rankin came in second, winning one of Montana’s seats. She trailed the frontrunner, Democratic Representative John M. Evans, by 7,600 votes, but she topped the next candidate— another Democrat–by 6,000 votes. Rankin ran a nonpartisan campaign in a Democratic state during a period of national hostility toward parties in general. And this was the first opportunity for Montana women to vote in a federal election. “I am deeply conscious of the responsibility resting upon me,” read her public victory statement.
4. Rankin’s service began dramatically when Congress was called into an extraordinary April session after Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare on all Atlantic shipping. On April 2, 1917, she arrived at the Capitol to be sworn in along with the other Members of the 65th Congress (1917–1919).
5. Escorted by her Montana colleague, Rankin looked like “a mature bride rather than a strong-minded female,” an observer wrote. “When her name was called the House cheered and rose, so that she had to rise and bow twice, which she did with entire self-possession.”
6. That evening, Congress met in Joint Session to hear President Woodrow Wilson ask to “make the world safe for democracy” by declaring war on Germany. The House debated the war resolution on April 5th. Given Rankin’s strong pacifist views, she was inclined against war. Colleagues in the suffrage movement urged caution, fearing that a vote against war would tarnish the entire cause. Rankin sat out the debate over war, a decision she later regretted.
7. She inadvertently violated House rules by making a brief speech when casting her vote. “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war,” she told the House. “I vote no.”
8. The final vote was 373 for the war resolution and 50 against. The Helena Independent likened her to “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,” even though Montana mail to Rankin’s office ran against U.S. intervention.9NAWSA distanced the suffrage movement from Rankin: “Miss Rankin was not voting for the suffragists of the nation—she represents Montana.”10 Others, such as Representative Fiorello LaGuardia of New York, were quick to defend her.11
As the first woman Member, Rankin was on the front lines of the national suffrage fight. During the fall of 1917 she advocated the creation of a Committee on Woman Suffrage and, when it was created, she was appointed to it.12 When the special committee reported out a constitutional amendment on woman suffrage in January 1918, Rankin opened the very first House Floor debate on this subject.13 “How shall we answer their challenge, gentlemen,” she asked. “How shall we explain to them the meaning of democracy if the same Congress that voted for war to make the world safe for democracy refuses to give this small measure of democracy to the women of our country?”14 The resolution narrowly passed the House amid the cheers of women in the galleries, but it died in the Senate.15
Rankin did not ignore her Montana constituency in the midst of this activity. She was assigned to the Committee on Public Lands, which was concerned with western issues. When a mine disaster in Butte resulted in a massive protest strike by miners over their working conditions, violence soon broke out. Responding to pleas from more-moderate miner unions, Rankin unsuccessfully sought help from the Wilson administration through legislation and through her personal intervention in the crisis. These efforts failed as the mining companies refused to meet with either her or the miners.16 Rankin expected the mining interests to extract a cost for her support of the striking miners. “They own the State,” she noted. “They own the Government. They own the press.”17
Prior to the 1918 election, the Montana state legislature passed legislation replacing the state’s two At-Large seats with two separate districts, and Rankin found herself in the overwhelmingly Democratic western district.18 Faced with the possibility of running against an incumbent or running in a district controlled by the other party, she decided to run for the U.S. Senate. Rankin ran on the slogan “Win the War First,” promising to support the Wilson administration “to more efficiently prosecute the war.”19 In a three-way contest, Rankin came in second in the Republican senatorial primary, less than 2,000 votes behind the winner.20
Charges that Republicans were bribing her to withdraw compelled her to undertake what she knew was an impossible task—running in the general election on a third-party ticket. “Bribes are not offered in such a way that you can prove them, and in order to prove that I didn’t accept a bribe I had to run,” she would later recall.21 The incumbent, Democratic Senator Thomas Walsh, did not underestimate Rankin: “If Miss R. had any party to back her she would be dangerous.”22 In the end, Rankin finished third, winning a fifth of the total votes cast, while Walsh won re-election with a plurality. Ironically, the Republican candidate for Rankin’s House district narrowly won.23
Afterwards, Rankin divided her time between pacifism and social welfare. She attended the Women’s International Conference for Permanent Peace in Switzerland in 1919 and joined the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1928, she founded the Georgia Peace Society after purchasing a farm in that state. Rankin became the leading lobbyist and speaker for the National Council for the Prevention of War from 1929 to 1939. She also remained active in advocating social welfare programs. During the early 1920s she was a field secretary for the National Consumers League. Rankin’s activities largely consisted of lobbying Congress to pass social welfare legislation, such as the Sheppard–Towner bill and a constitutional amendment banning child labor.
It was the looming war crisis in 1940 that brought Rankin back to Congress. She returned to Montana with her eye on the western House district held by first-term Republican Representative Jacob Thorkelson, an outspoken anti-Semite.24 Rankin drew on her status as the first woman elected to Congress to speak throughout the district to high school students on the issue of war and peace. When the Republican primary results were in, Rankin defeated three candidates, including the incumbent.25 In the general election, she faced Jerry J. O’Connell, who had been ousted by Thorkelson from Congress in the previous election. Rankin went into the race confident that the mining industry no longer carried the hefty political influence she faced earlier.26 Eminent Progressives endorsed her: Senator Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., of Wisconsin and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York City.27 On Election Day Rankin won re-election to the House with 54 percent of the votes cast for a second term, just less than a quarter of a century after she was elected to her first term.28 “No one will pay any attention to me this time,” the victor predicted. “There is nothing unusual about a woman being elected.”29
As it had 24 years earlier, the threat of war dominated the start of Rankin’s new term. She gained appointments to the Committee on Public Lands and the Committee on Insular Affairs, two lower-tier committees that, nevertheless, proved useful to her western constituency. By the time of Rankin’s election, the war in Europe was in full force and a debate about U.S. involvement had broken out. In this raging debate, Rankin had taken an arm's-length attitude towards the leading isolationist group, the America First Committee. Largely made up of opponents to the New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt, Rankin found herself out of sympathy with much of their domestic agenda.30
Nevertheless, Rankin made her pacifist views known early in the session. During deliberations over the Lend-Lease Bill to supply the Allied war effort, she offered an unsuccessful amendment in February 1941 requiring specific congressional approval for sending U.S. troops abroad. “If Britain needs our material today,” she asked, “will she later need our men?”31 In May she introduced a resolution condemning any effort “to send the armed forces of the United States to fight in any place outside the Western Hemisphere or insular possessions of the United States.”32 She repeated her request the following month to no avail. That Rankin’s stance was not an unusual one was demonstrated by the close margin granting President Franklin Roosevelt’s request to allow American merchant ships to be armed in the fall of 1941.33
Rankin was en route to Detroit on a speaking engagement when she heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. She returned to Washington the next morning determined to oppose U.S. participation in the war. Immediately after President Roosevelt addressed a Joint Session of Congress, the House and Senate met to deliberate on a declaration of war.34 Rankin repeatedly tried to gain recognition once the first reading of the war resolution was completed in the House. In the brief debate on the resolution, Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas refused to recognize her and declared her out of order. Other Members called for her to sit down. Others approached her on the House Floor, trying to convince her to either vote for the war or abstain.35 When the roll call vote was taken, Rankin voted no amid what the Associated Press described as “a chorus of hisses and boos.”36 Rankin went on to announce, “As a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.”37 The war resolution passed the House 388 to 1.
Condemnation of her stand was immediate and intense, forcing Rankin briefly to huddle in a phone booth before receiving a police escort to her office.38 “I voted my convictions and redeemed my campaign pledges,” she told her constituents.39 “Montana is 100 percent against you,” wired her brother Wellington.40 In private, she told friends, “I have nothing left but my integrity.”41 The vote essentially made the rest of Rankin’s term irrelevant. Having made her point, she only voted “present” when the House declared war on Germany and Italy.42 She found that her colleagues and the press simply ignored her. She chose not to run for re-election in 1942, and her district replaced the isolationist Republican with an internationalist Democrat who had served in three branches of the military, Mike Mansfield.
Rankin continued to divide her time between Montana and Georgia in the years after she left Congress. India became one of her favorite excursions; she was drawn by the nonviolent protest tactics of Mohandas K. Gandhi. During the Vietnam War, she led the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, numbering 5,000, in a protest march on Wash¬ington in January 1968 that culminated in the presentation of a peace petition to House Speaker John McCormack of Massachusetts. Her 90th birthday in 1970 was celebrated in the Rayburn House Office Building with a reception and dinner. At the time of her death, on May 18, 1973, in Carmel, California, Rankin was considering another run for a House seat to protest the Vietnam War."
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick SGT Denny Espinosa LTC (Join to see)Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant SPC Woody Bullard TSgt David L. SPC Michael Terrell SFC Chuck Martinez CSM Charles HaydenSMSgt Tom Burns SP5 Jeannie Carle SMSgt Mark Venzeio
Jeannette Rankin: The First Woman Member of U.S Congress | Unladylike2020 | American Masters | PBS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb4jVQvFWjY
Images:
1. As the only member of Congress to vote against declaring war on Japan, Montana’s Representative Jeannette Rankin raised such ire she had to call for an escort
2. 1914 l-to-r in car Mrs Grace Catterill, 'Colonel' Ida Craft, Mrs. C.P. Irsih, Allan Margaret Lindeley, std. Miss Jeanette Rankin - chairman of the state suffrage association
3. Jeannette Rankin 'I worked for suffrage for years, and got it. I’ve worked for peace for 55 years and haven’t come close.'.
4. Three days after her infamous “no” vote, Rankin did not take a position at the December 11, 1941, vote to declare war on Germany and Italy
Background from {{https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/20147?]}
"RANKIN, Jeannette
1880–1973
OFFICE Representative
STATE/TERRITORY Montana
PARTY Republican
CONGRESS(ES) 65th (1917–1919), 77th (1941–1943)
Biography
Jeannette Rankin’s life was filled with extraordinary achievements: she was the first woman elected to Congress, one of the few suffragists elected to Congress, and the only Member of Congress to vote against U.S. participation in both World War I and World War II. “I may be the first woman member of Congress,” she observed upon her election in 1916. “But I won’t be the last.”1
Jeannette Rankin, the eldest daughter of a rancher and a schoolteacher, was born near Missoula, Montana, on June 11, 1880. She graduated from Montana State University (now the University of Montana) in 1902 and attended the New York School of Philanthropy (later the Columbia University School of Social Work). After a brief period as a social worker in Spokane, Washington, Rankin entered the University of Washington in Seattle. It was there that she joined the woman suffrage movement, a campaign that achieved its goal in Washington State in 1910. Rankin became a professional lobbyist for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Her speaking and organizing efforts helped Montana women gain the vote in 1914.
When Rankin decided in 1916 to run for a House seat from Montana, she had two key advantages: her reputation as a suffragist and her politically well-connected brother, Wellington, who financed her campaign. Some national woman suffrage leaders feared she would lose and hurt the cause. The novelty of a woman running for Congress, however, helped Rankin secure a GOP nomination for one of Montana’s two At-Large House seats on August 29, 1916.
2 Rankin ran as a progressive, pledging to work for a constitutional woman suffrage amendment and emphasizing social welfare issues. Long a committed pacifist, she did not shy away from letting voters know how she felt about possible U.S. participation in the European war that had been raging for two years: “If they are going to have war, they ought to take the old men and leave the young to propagate the race.”
3 Rankin came in second, winning one of Montana’s seats. She trailed the frontrunner, Democratic Representative John M. Evans, by 7,600 votes, but she topped the next candidate— another Democrat–by 6,000 votes. Rankin ran a nonpartisan campaign in a Democratic state during a period of national hostility toward parties in general. And this was the first opportunity for Montana women to vote in a federal election. “I am deeply conscious of the responsibility resting upon me,” read her public victory statement.
4. Rankin’s service began dramatically when Congress was called into an extraordinary April session after Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare on all Atlantic shipping. On April 2, 1917, she arrived at the Capitol to be sworn in along with the other Members of the 65th Congress (1917–1919).
5. Escorted by her Montana colleague, Rankin looked like “a mature bride rather than a strong-minded female,” an observer wrote. “When her name was called the House cheered and rose, so that she had to rise and bow twice, which she did with entire self-possession.”
6. That evening, Congress met in Joint Session to hear President Woodrow Wilson ask to “make the world safe for democracy” by declaring war on Germany. The House debated the war resolution on April 5th. Given Rankin’s strong pacifist views, she was inclined against war. Colleagues in the suffrage movement urged caution, fearing that a vote against war would tarnish the entire cause. Rankin sat out the debate over war, a decision she later regretted.
7. She inadvertently violated House rules by making a brief speech when casting her vote. “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war,” she told the House. “I vote no.”
8. The final vote was 373 for the war resolution and 50 against. The Helena Independent likened her to “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,” even though Montana mail to Rankin’s office ran against U.S. intervention.9NAWSA distanced the suffrage movement from Rankin: “Miss Rankin was not voting for the suffragists of the nation—she represents Montana.”10 Others, such as Representative Fiorello LaGuardia of New York, were quick to defend her.11
As the first woman Member, Rankin was on the front lines of the national suffrage fight. During the fall of 1917 she advocated the creation of a Committee on Woman Suffrage and, when it was created, she was appointed to it.12 When the special committee reported out a constitutional amendment on woman suffrage in January 1918, Rankin opened the very first House Floor debate on this subject.13 “How shall we answer their challenge, gentlemen,” she asked. “How shall we explain to them the meaning of democracy if the same Congress that voted for war to make the world safe for democracy refuses to give this small measure of democracy to the women of our country?”14 The resolution narrowly passed the House amid the cheers of women in the galleries, but it died in the Senate.15
Rankin did not ignore her Montana constituency in the midst of this activity. She was assigned to the Committee on Public Lands, which was concerned with western issues. When a mine disaster in Butte resulted in a massive protest strike by miners over their working conditions, violence soon broke out. Responding to pleas from more-moderate miner unions, Rankin unsuccessfully sought help from the Wilson administration through legislation and through her personal intervention in the crisis. These efforts failed as the mining companies refused to meet with either her or the miners.16 Rankin expected the mining interests to extract a cost for her support of the striking miners. “They own the State,” she noted. “They own the Government. They own the press.”17
Prior to the 1918 election, the Montana state legislature passed legislation replacing the state’s two At-Large seats with two separate districts, and Rankin found herself in the overwhelmingly Democratic western district.18 Faced with the possibility of running against an incumbent or running in a district controlled by the other party, she decided to run for the U.S. Senate. Rankin ran on the slogan “Win the War First,” promising to support the Wilson administration “to more efficiently prosecute the war.”19 In a three-way contest, Rankin came in second in the Republican senatorial primary, less than 2,000 votes behind the winner.20
Charges that Republicans were bribing her to withdraw compelled her to undertake what she knew was an impossible task—running in the general election on a third-party ticket. “Bribes are not offered in such a way that you can prove them, and in order to prove that I didn’t accept a bribe I had to run,” she would later recall.21 The incumbent, Democratic Senator Thomas Walsh, did not underestimate Rankin: “If Miss R. had any party to back her she would be dangerous.”22 In the end, Rankin finished third, winning a fifth of the total votes cast, while Walsh won re-election with a plurality. Ironically, the Republican candidate for Rankin’s House district narrowly won.23
Afterwards, Rankin divided her time between pacifism and social welfare. She attended the Women’s International Conference for Permanent Peace in Switzerland in 1919 and joined the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1928, she founded the Georgia Peace Society after purchasing a farm in that state. Rankin became the leading lobbyist and speaker for the National Council for the Prevention of War from 1929 to 1939. She also remained active in advocating social welfare programs. During the early 1920s she was a field secretary for the National Consumers League. Rankin’s activities largely consisted of lobbying Congress to pass social welfare legislation, such as the Sheppard–Towner bill and a constitutional amendment banning child labor.
It was the looming war crisis in 1940 that brought Rankin back to Congress. She returned to Montana with her eye on the western House district held by first-term Republican Representative Jacob Thorkelson, an outspoken anti-Semite.24 Rankin drew on her status as the first woman elected to Congress to speak throughout the district to high school students on the issue of war and peace. When the Republican primary results were in, Rankin defeated three candidates, including the incumbent.25 In the general election, she faced Jerry J. O’Connell, who had been ousted by Thorkelson from Congress in the previous election. Rankin went into the race confident that the mining industry no longer carried the hefty political influence she faced earlier.26 Eminent Progressives endorsed her: Senator Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., of Wisconsin and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York City.27 On Election Day Rankin won re-election to the House with 54 percent of the votes cast for a second term, just less than a quarter of a century after she was elected to her first term.28 “No one will pay any attention to me this time,” the victor predicted. “There is nothing unusual about a woman being elected.”29
As it had 24 years earlier, the threat of war dominated the start of Rankin’s new term. She gained appointments to the Committee on Public Lands and the Committee on Insular Affairs, two lower-tier committees that, nevertheless, proved useful to her western constituency. By the time of Rankin’s election, the war in Europe was in full force and a debate about U.S. involvement had broken out. In this raging debate, Rankin had taken an arm's-length attitude towards the leading isolationist group, the America First Committee. Largely made up of opponents to the New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt, Rankin found herself out of sympathy with much of their domestic agenda.30
Nevertheless, Rankin made her pacifist views known early in the session. During deliberations over the Lend-Lease Bill to supply the Allied war effort, she offered an unsuccessful amendment in February 1941 requiring specific congressional approval for sending U.S. troops abroad. “If Britain needs our material today,” she asked, “will she later need our men?”31 In May she introduced a resolution condemning any effort “to send the armed forces of the United States to fight in any place outside the Western Hemisphere or insular possessions of the United States.”32 She repeated her request the following month to no avail. That Rankin’s stance was not an unusual one was demonstrated by the close margin granting President Franklin Roosevelt’s request to allow American merchant ships to be armed in the fall of 1941.33
Rankin was en route to Detroit on a speaking engagement when she heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. She returned to Washington the next morning determined to oppose U.S. participation in the war. Immediately after President Roosevelt addressed a Joint Session of Congress, the House and Senate met to deliberate on a declaration of war.34 Rankin repeatedly tried to gain recognition once the first reading of the war resolution was completed in the House. In the brief debate on the resolution, Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas refused to recognize her and declared her out of order. Other Members called for her to sit down. Others approached her on the House Floor, trying to convince her to either vote for the war or abstain.35 When the roll call vote was taken, Rankin voted no amid what the Associated Press described as “a chorus of hisses and boos.”36 Rankin went on to announce, “As a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.”37 The war resolution passed the House 388 to 1.
Condemnation of her stand was immediate and intense, forcing Rankin briefly to huddle in a phone booth before receiving a police escort to her office.38 “I voted my convictions and redeemed my campaign pledges,” she told her constituents.39 “Montana is 100 percent against you,” wired her brother Wellington.40 In private, she told friends, “I have nothing left but my integrity.”41 The vote essentially made the rest of Rankin’s term irrelevant. Having made her point, she only voted “present” when the House declared war on Germany and Italy.42 She found that her colleagues and the press simply ignored her. She chose not to run for re-election in 1942, and her district replaced the isolationist Republican with an internationalist Democrat who had served in three branches of the military, Mike Mansfield.
Rankin continued to divide her time between Montana and Georgia in the years after she left Congress. India became one of her favorite excursions; she was drawn by the nonviolent protest tactics of Mohandas K. Gandhi. During the Vietnam War, she led the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, numbering 5,000, in a protest march on Wash¬ington in January 1968 that culminated in the presentation of a peace petition to House Speaker John McCormack of Massachusetts. Her 90th birthday in 1970 was celebrated in the Rayburn House Office Building with a reception and dinner. At the time of her death, on May 18, 1973, in Carmel, California, Rankin was considering another run for a House seat to protest the Vietnam War."
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick SGT Denny Espinosa LTC (Join to see)Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant SPC Woody Bullard TSgt David L. SPC Michael Terrell SFC Chuck Martinez CSM Charles HaydenSMSgt Tom Burns SP5 Jeannie Carle SMSgt Mark Venzeio
(10)
(0)
LTC Stephen F.
Charlie Russell and Jeannette Rankin Go to War
Once the United States entered War World I in the spring of 1917, no Americans were more committed to the cause than Montana’s Cowboy Artist Charlie Russell ...
Charlie Russell and Jeannette Rankin Go to War
Once the United States entered War World I in the spring of 1917, no Americans were more committed to the cause than Montana’s Cowboy Artist Charlie Russell and America’s first female member of the U.S. Congress. How were celebrities like Charlie Russell supporting the war? What was Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin doing after she voted against the U.S.’s entry in the conflict? Author and historian Ken Robison addresses these questions in his new book, World War I Montana: The Treasure State Prepares. The surprising answers are an exciting part of the story in Montana and the U.S. as they moved rapidly from peace to war
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5ZZ50n_HwQ
Images:
1. Jeanette Rankin leaving Washington on a speaking tour for peace in 1932.
2. Jeannette Rankin 1917
3. Jeannette Rankin 'You take people as far as they will go, not as far as you would like them to go.'
4. Jeannette and Wellington Rankin were influential political figures of their time. He was an attorney and owned vast tracts of land. She was the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress.
Background from {{http://archive.umt.edu/montanan/s99/votes.html]}
The Jeannette Rankin Brigade, the first large group of women to protest the Vietnam War, marched from Union Station to the U.S. Capitol on January 15, 1968, the opening day of the ninetieth Congress. Rankin is in the center, wearing glasses. Today the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center in Missoula works to continue Rankin's efforts toward peace.
The Legacy of Jeannette Rankin by Megan McNamer
In a burst of Western chivalry, members of the Montana Legislature presented Jeannette Rankin with a small bouquet of violets on February 1, 1910, after she addressed the state House of Representatives on the subject of women's suffrage.
"This condescending gesture was not lost on Jeannette," wrote Hannah Josephson, in her 1974 biography, Jeannette Rankin: First Lady in Congress. "She wanted votes, not violets."
The flowers might have been more welcome if the Montana legislators had been ready to decide that women should have equal power with men at the ballot box. As it was, suffrage amendments, introduced in the Montana Legislature since 1902, were "regarded as something of a farce," according to Josephson, "comic relief for the tedium of the serious business...calling for sparkling displays of wit."
Rankin's efforts saw fruition when women received the right to vote in Montana in 1914. Soon after, she cast her own first vote for herself in a successful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1916. She was the first woman elected to Congress at a time when not all states allowed women to vote.
Her decision to run had been seen by many of her supporters as audacious at this early point in women's emancipation. Suffragists wanted a woman in office, certainly, but they had aimed for something less lofty. Political organizers in the Republican party, Rankin's ticket, had begged her brother Wellington, a prominent lawyer in Missoula, to stop her from embarrassing herself.
The Making of a Pacifist
Rankin was born on a ranch at Grant Creek in 1880, when Montana still was a territory and wide open with possibility for people like her parents, John Rankin and Olive Pickering, who came to this frontier from Canada and New England. They passed this sense of promise on to their children.
But the big skies were not always matched by big minds. After Rankin's "no" vote to the war resolution on April 6, 1917, the Helena Independent Record vilified 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."
Rankin was one of fifty members of Congress opposing the war resolution; her mail from
Montana against U.S. involvement ran sixteen to one. But as the first and only woman in Congress, she paid extra for her pacifism. Her opponents said she wasn't up to the demands of public office. Her suffragette supporters felt she had betrayed them by appearing weak.
Rankin's abiding belief, though, was that war was a futile means to resolve disputes among nations. While early feminists felt that gaining votes for women would almost automatically ensure peaceful solutions to conflicts between governments, Rankin distinguished between longing for peace and resolutely opposing war.
"The truth is that she was aggressive and pertinacious as a pacifist, a person to be reckoned with," Josephson wrote. "[T]o her mind people everywhere were overwhelmingly against war . . . [but] they were led into battle primarily because the political system did not allow them to express their views directly and secondarily because governments misled them as to the issues involved. . . She wanted someone who would talk back to the government."
Concern about the poor and disenfranchised, who most often are the victims of war, became a central part of Rankin's campaign for peace. She had grown up with the story of Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce leader who tried to lead his people through the Bitterroot Valley to Canada three years before she was born. Despite his ultimate defeat, he provided an inspiring example of courageous resistance to systematic persecution. "Looking back on her long struggle for women's rights," Josephson wrote, "Jeannette would sometimes say she wished she had given her energies to the cause of the Indians."
Education reform was another of Rankin's concerns. The Rankin family spent every summer on its ranch at Grant Creek, and Jeannette dreaded the return to school each fall. She found learning by rote a tedious bore, preferring the hands-on approach that became popular years later. After four years at the newly opened University of Montana in Missoula, she wrote a dutiful senior essay on snails, a topic that somehow seems antithetical to the admonition in her journal to "Go, go, go!" After Rankin graduated from UM in 1902 with a degree in science, she taught briefly, but felt at odds with the rigid educational practices she was expected to follow.
A Politician Born
Rankin was meant for politics, for the world of organizing and action. Her college education, though rare for a woman in the early 1900s, was useful in that regard. She was better educated than most of the other freshmen during her first stint in Congress, a fact that surely helped her gain favor for her views.
Rankin was not re-elected to the House after her first term but twenty-two years later in 1936. During the interim, she traveled, lobbying for peace. Although she frequently visited Montana, staying at her brother Wellington's ranch, she spent most of her adult life replicating the independent summers of her youth in a cabin in Georgia with no electricity or running water.
On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the House held a roll call vote to declare war on Japan. This time, Senator Rankin's "no" vote stood alone and was greeted by a chorus of hisses and boos from the floor and gallery. After she voted, she retired to a phone booth and called the capitol police for an escort.
Although she held fast to her central belief that war would never settle disputes among nations, Rankin's peace activism was forced underground during World War II. On January 15, 1968, however, she was on the front lines of the peace movement, when at age 88 she led the Jeannette Rankin Peace Brigade to protest the Vietnam War. In the early 1970s she was giving interviews to Life and The New York Times and attending National Organization of Women conventions.
"Women must devote all their energies today in gaining enough poliical offices to influence the direction of government away from the military-industrial complex and toward solving the major social disgraces that exist in our country," she said when she became the first member of the Susan B. Anthony Hall of Fame in 1971. "We are here together to work for the elimination of war."
Rankin's message was not always easy for Montanans to hear. She warned that they were in a dangerous situation because of their country's military orientation. Pointing to the hundreds of missile silos that dotted the countryside, she said Montanans were a population considered "expendable" by the U.S. government, an eerie echo of the government's early attitude toward Indians.
Rankin, who died in 1973, never received the Nobel Peace Prize, and her historic "no" votes didn't achieve in her lifetime what she'd hoped for-the abolition of war as a means of settling international disputes. But she hammered on the subject of peace relentlessly. Like Chief Joseph's dogged and despairing pacifism, she kept the idea of peace alive, even if its realization is a long way off.
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Once the United States entered War World I in the spring of 1917, no Americans were more committed to the cause than Montana’s Cowboy Artist Charlie Russell and America’s first female member of the U.S. Congress. How were celebrities like Charlie Russell supporting the war? What was Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin doing after she voted against the U.S.’s entry in the conflict? Author and historian Ken Robison addresses these questions in his new book, World War I Montana: The Treasure State Prepares. The surprising answers are an exciting part of the story in Montana and the U.S. as they moved rapidly from peace to war
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5ZZ50n_HwQ
Images:
1. Jeanette Rankin leaving Washington on a speaking tour for peace in 1932.
2. Jeannette Rankin 1917
3. Jeannette Rankin 'You take people as far as they will go, not as far as you would like them to go.'
4. Jeannette and Wellington Rankin were influential political figures of their time. He was an attorney and owned vast tracts of land. She was the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress.
Background from {{http://archive.umt.edu/montanan/s99/votes.html]}
The Jeannette Rankin Brigade, the first large group of women to protest the Vietnam War, marched from Union Station to the U.S. Capitol on January 15, 1968, the opening day of the ninetieth Congress. Rankin is in the center, wearing glasses. Today the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center in Missoula works to continue Rankin's efforts toward peace.
The Legacy of Jeannette Rankin by Megan McNamer
In a burst of Western chivalry, members of the Montana Legislature presented Jeannette Rankin with a small bouquet of violets on February 1, 1910, after she addressed the state House of Representatives on the subject of women's suffrage.
"This condescending gesture was not lost on Jeannette," wrote Hannah Josephson, in her 1974 biography, Jeannette Rankin: First Lady in Congress. "She wanted votes, not violets."
The flowers might have been more welcome if the Montana legislators had been ready to decide that women should have equal power with men at the ballot box. As it was, suffrage amendments, introduced in the Montana Legislature since 1902, were "regarded as something of a farce," according to Josephson, "comic relief for the tedium of the serious business...calling for sparkling displays of wit."
Rankin's efforts saw fruition when women received the right to vote in Montana in 1914. Soon after, she cast her own first vote for herself in a successful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1916. She was the first woman elected to Congress at a time when not all states allowed women to vote.
Her decision to run had been seen by many of her supporters as audacious at this early point in women's emancipation. Suffragists wanted a woman in office, certainly, but they had aimed for something less lofty. Political organizers in the Republican party, Rankin's ticket, had begged her brother Wellington, a prominent lawyer in Missoula, to stop her from embarrassing herself.
The Making of a Pacifist
Rankin was born on a ranch at Grant Creek in 1880, when Montana still was a territory and wide open with possibility for people like her parents, John Rankin and Olive Pickering, who came to this frontier from Canada and New England. They passed this sense of promise on to their children.
But the big skies were not always matched by big minds. After Rankin's "no" vote to the war resolution on April 6, 1917, the Helena Independent Record vilified 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."
Rankin was one of fifty members of Congress opposing the war resolution; her mail from
Montana against U.S. involvement ran sixteen to one. But as the first and only woman in Congress, she paid extra for her pacifism. Her opponents said she wasn't up to the demands of public office. Her suffragette supporters felt she had betrayed them by appearing weak.
Rankin's abiding belief, though, was that war was a futile means to resolve disputes among nations. While early feminists felt that gaining votes for women would almost automatically ensure peaceful solutions to conflicts between governments, Rankin distinguished between longing for peace and resolutely opposing war.
"The truth is that she was aggressive and pertinacious as a pacifist, a person to be reckoned with," Josephson wrote. "[T]o her mind people everywhere were overwhelmingly against war . . . [but] they were led into battle primarily because the political system did not allow them to express their views directly and secondarily because governments misled them as to the issues involved. . . She wanted someone who would talk back to the government."
Concern about the poor and disenfranchised, who most often are the victims of war, became a central part of Rankin's campaign for peace. She had grown up with the story of Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce leader who tried to lead his people through the Bitterroot Valley to Canada three years before she was born. Despite his ultimate defeat, he provided an inspiring example of courageous resistance to systematic persecution. "Looking back on her long struggle for women's rights," Josephson wrote, "Jeannette would sometimes say she wished she had given her energies to the cause of the Indians."
Education reform was another of Rankin's concerns. The Rankin family spent every summer on its ranch at Grant Creek, and Jeannette dreaded the return to school each fall. She found learning by rote a tedious bore, preferring the hands-on approach that became popular years later. After four years at the newly opened University of Montana in Missoula, she wrote a dutiful senior essay on snails, a topic that somehow seems antithetical to the admonition in her journal to "Go, go, go!" After Rankin graduated from UM in 1902 with a degree in science, she taught briefly, but felt at odds with the rigid educational practices she was expected to follow.
A Politician Born
Rankin was meant for politics, for the world of organizing and action. Her college education, though rare for a woman in the early 1900s, was useful in that regard. She was better educated than most of the other freshmen during her first stint in Congress, a fact that surely helped her gain favor for her views.
Rankin was not re-elected to the House after her first term but twenty-two years later in 1936. During the interim, she traveled, lobbying for peace. Although she frequently visited Montana, staying at her brother Wellington's ranch, she spent most of her adult life replicating the independent summers of her youth in a cabin in Georgia with no electricity or running water.
On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the House held a roll call vote to declare war on Japan. This time, Senator Rankin's "no" vote stood alone and was greeted by a chorus of hisses and boos from the floor and gallery. After she voted, she retired to a phone booth and called the capitol police for an escort.
Although she held fast to her central belief that war would never settle disputes among nations, Rankin's peace activism was forced underground during World War II. On January 15, 1968, however, she was on the front lines of the peace movement, when at age 88 she led the Jeannette Rankin Peace Brigade to protest the Vietnam War. In the early 1970s she was giving interviews to Life and The New York Times and attending National Organization of Women conventions.
"Women must devote all their energies today in gaining enough poliical offices to influence the direction of government away from the military-industrial complex and toward solving the major social disgraces that exist in our country," she said when she became the first member of the Susan B. Anthony Hall of Fame in 1971. "We are here together to work for the elimination of war."
Rankin's message was not always easy for Montanans to hear. She warned that they were in a dangerous situation because of their country's military orientation. Pointing to the hundreds of missile silos that dotted the countryside, she said Montanans were a population considered "expendable" by the U.S. government, an eerie echo of the government's early attitude toward Indians.
Rankin, who died in 1973, never received the Nobel Peace Prize, and her historic "no" votes didn't achieve in her lifetime what she'd hoped for-the abolition of war as a means of settling international disputes. But she hammered on the subject of peace relentlessly. Like Chief Joseph's dogged and despairing pacifism, she kept the idea of peace alive, even if its realization is a long way off.
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LTC Stephen F.
From Montana to Washington, DC: Jeannette Rankin's Iconic Adventure in Conscience.
Father Patrick Beretta presents “From Montana to Washington DC - Jeannette Rankin's Iconic Adventure in Conscience." It is a very dramatic narrative of event...
From Montana to Washington, DC: Jeannette Rankin's Iconic Adventure in Conscience.
Father Patrick Beretta presents “From Montana to Washington DC - Jeannette Rankin's Iconic Adventure in Conscience." It is a very dramatic narrative of events immediately preceding Rankin's arrival in DC and the hours leading to and culminating with her momentous vote in the spring of 1917.
Father Beretta has degrees in philosophy, theology, and ethics; has written and lectured on the history of science and philosophy, and is currently conducting research on how communities recover from devastating tragedies. His research topics include Montana after Mining Disasters and the 1918 Flu Pandemic, Europe in the Wake of the Great Plague (1347-49), and Ireland’s Recovery from the Great Famine (1848-50).
Father Beretta is the Parish Priest at St. Patrick and Immaculate Conception Churches in Butte, Chaplain at Montana Tech, and Chair of Academic Affairs on the Board of Carroll College in Helena.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRq3GA2laDY
Images:
1. Jeannette Rankin Brigade marched from Union Station to the U.S. Capitol on January 15, 1968, opening day of the 90th Congress. Rankin is in the center, wearing glasses.
2. Jeannette Rankin in Washington D.C., with Mr. Pickering of Massachusetts, superintendent of capitol grounds and building.
3. Jeannette Rankin 'Men and women are like right and left hands - it doesn’t make sense not to use both.'
4. Jeannette Rankin 'What one decides to do in crisis depends on one’s philosophy of life, and that philosophy cannot be changed by an incident. If one hasn’t any philosophy in crises'.
Background from {{https://www.historynet.com/jeanette-rankin-no-vote.htm]}
Jeanette Rankin: The Congresswoman Who Voted NO to WWII
Daniel B. Moskowitz
In the days after Japan’s December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, one woman was subjected to more intense vituperation than any other American. Letters and wires called her “a disgrace and a traitor”; one stated, “when concentration camps open you should be occupant number one.” The object of this vilification was Republican Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, the representative of Montana’s First District.
In Dillon, in the southwest corner of the state, the Kiwanis and the Rotary Club fired off a joint telegram to Rankin, reading: “You have done a great disservice to the state of Montana and to the American People.” The Pioneer newspaper in Big Timber suggested “she be publicly spanked on the floor of the House.” Radio commentators used such harsh language in denouncing her that some stations masked their broadcasts with music.
The transgression that earned Rankin, 61, such calumny happened just after 1:00 p.m. on December 8 in the Capitol in Washington, as Irving Swanson, a clerk in the House of Representatives, read members roll call, recording their votes on the fateful resolution declaring war against Japan. “Yea” after “yea” came in like an echo as Swanson read the names at a pace of 20 per minute until he got to Rankin, who in a firm voice announced her stance: “No.” Other House members began hissing.
It was the only vote in either house of Congress against the declaration of war for which President Roosevelt had asked.
For Rankin it was a repeat performance. She was then in her second term in the House. Her first had begun on April 2, 1917, when she was sworn in as the first woman to serve in the United States Congress. Five days later—on April 7—Congress voted on a resolution for entry into World War I and she had voted “no” then as well.
In 1917, however, ambivalence about the country going to battle in Europe was not uncommon. The mood in the United States following the Pearl Harbor attack was quite different. On the Sunday of the attack, Rankin and her sister Edna were on a train from Washington to a speaking engagement in Detroit when she learned that Roosevelt would be addressing a joint session of Congress the next day. She got off the train in Pittsburgh and returned to the Capitol. At her home the phone rang nonstop. The first call was from her brother Wellington, her top political adviser and fundraiser for her political campaigns, urging her not to repeat her World War I “no” vote. So many other callers and visitors repeated that message that Rankin felt she had to escape.
“I didn’t let anybody approach me,” she later told her biographer, Hannah Josephson. “I got in my car and disappeared. Nobody could reach me. I just drove around Washington and got madder and madder” until it was time to go to Congress for the presidential address.
A lifelong pacifist, Rankin did not waver in her determination to vote against the war resolution. But on the day after the shocking and devastating Pearl Harbor attack, the country was in no mood for pacifism. Rankin’s “no” subjected her to such an immediate onslaught from reporters that she retreated to the members’ cloakroom where she hid in a phone booth and called for Capitol Police to escort her back to her office.
RANKIN’S OPPOSITION TO WAR should not have been a shocker. Her anti-intervention position was a key reason for her 1940 campaign for Congress. “If I don’t run,” Rankin said 44 years later to a student writing his master’s thesis about her career, “the women who don’t want war will have no one to vote for.”
Rankin had been an ardent advocate for women’s suffrage; it was largely through her efforts that women won the right to vote in Montana in 1914—two years before she was elected to Congress. In 1910, Denver news reporter and women’s rights activist Minnie J. Reynolds had persuaded Rankin that pacifism was an inherent part of feminism. “The women produce the boys and the men take them off and kill them in war,” Reynolds argued. Rankin’s reading of Benjamin Kidd’s 1918 book, The Science of Power, solidified her commitment to Reynold’s feminist-pacifist ideology. Kidd found in men a natural inclination to battle while he found in women a preference for peaceful settling of disputes. Rankin called Kidd’s opus the “most important book” she had ever read.
Not only had she opposed American participation in World War I, but in the interwar years she was active in pacifist organizations; she was the chief lobbyist for the National Council for the Prevention of War from 1929 until she left the job to campaign for reelection to Congress in 1940. The antiwar slogan under which she successfully ran was “Keep Our Men Out of Europe.”
As soon as Rankin got back to Congress in January 1941, she organized a grassroots campaign of letters from mothers opposing American entry into the war then raging abroad. Two months later, she opposed Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease legislation. And in May, she gave a Mother’s Day speech on the House floor in which she declared: “There is nothing in the world the mothers of this country would like on this Mother’s Day so much as an assurance that their sons are not going to war.”
Knowing her stance was a lost cause, she nonetheless pressed her anti-intervention views. In June, she offered an amendment to budget authorization legislation for the War Department that read: “no appropriation in this act shall be used to send our army or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas or our insular possessions except in case of attack.” Rankin’s other fruitless legislative initiatives to counter the nation’s drift toward war included attempts to stall the draft until voters had approved conscription, to ban the arming of civilian ships, and to remove the death penalty for wartime sabotage.
She was an astute enough politician to know that in her solitary “no” on the declaration of war she was bucking the mood of her constituents. Shortly after she got back to her office, she hastily drafted a statement trying to explain her vote. “I believed that such a momentous vote—one which would mean peace or war for our country—should be based on more authentic evidence than the radio reports now at hand,” she wrote in the communication to Montana newspapers. “Sending our boys to the Orient will not protect this country…. Taking our army and navy across thousands of miles of ocean to fight and die cannot come under the heading of protecting our shores.”
On December 11 she let the record show she was in the House but not taking a position by saying merely “present”—in such a whisper that the clerk had to ask her to repeat her vote—on the resolutions of war against Germany and Italy. She was not in Washington in June 1942 when Congress declared war on Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania.
As she served out her term through 1942, Rankin had lost her political clout. She often appeared to be going through the motions without much commitment. While in 1941 she had virtually never missed a vote, by the fall of 1942 she was absent for 80 percent of recorded votes in the House. On the first anniversary of the vote declaring war on Japan, she entered into the Congressional Record a long analysis of how the United States was, in her view, essentially tricked into World War II by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. “Three years before Pearl Harbor, Britain’s imperialists had figured out just how to bring the United States once more to their aid,” she wrote. She saw as part of the plot Roosevelt’s 1940 decision to impose sanctions on Japan in hopes of fomenting retaliation.
HER DECEMBER 8 “NO” VOTE did draw some admiration for the courage she displayed. “Lord, it was a brave thing,” famed Kansas editor William Allen White wrote in his Emporia Gazette, “and its bravery somehow discounts its folly.” But Rankin’s views found little support.
It had not been that way before. Forty-nine other House members voted along with her 24 years earlier when she cast her vote against American participation in World War I. She received extra protection then against political retaliation when the leader of the House Democrats, Claude Kitchin of North Carolina, also voted “no,” as well as six senators. In 1917, opposition about sending Americans to fight in Europe was particularly strong in Western states like Montana. As a result, Rankin’s anti-intervention stance did not hurt her politically in the 1918 election. But a bad decision did.
Rankin had originally been elected to Congress as one of Montana’s two at-large House members. Before the 1918 election, the legislature changed the process and set up two separate congressional districts. Rankin would have had to run in the Second District, where she felt a Republican had no chance of winning, so she set her sights on the U.S. Senate, hoping to defeat incumbent Democrat Thomas Walsh. After losing the Republican primary for the Senate seat, she ran as an independent, coming in third with about 20 percent of the vote. The irony: a Republican, Carl Riddick, won the House seat Rankin had feared to compete for.
Rankin knew that the second vote in her political career against a declaration of war was political suicide. Her brother Wellington had warned her “Montana is 100 percent against you.” So she did not even try to run for reelection in 1942. Her replacement in the House was Mike Mansfield, who went on to serve 34 years in Congress, the final 16 as Senate majority leader.
While her elective career was over, her efforts as a crusader were not. She continued to preach pacifism, traveled frequently to India to confer with Mahatma Gandhi, and found an increasingly receptive audience for her antiwar rhetoric as the United States became mired in the Vietnam War. In fact, before she died on May 19, 1973, at age 92 she was considering emphasizing her opposition to the war by running for Congress again."
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Father Patrick Beretta presents “From Montana to Washington DC - Jeannette Rankin's Iconic Adventure in Conscience." It is a very dramatic narrative of events immediately preceding Rankin's arrival in DC and the hours leading to and culminating with her momentous vote in the spring of 1917.
Father Beretta has degrees in philosophy, theology, and ethics; has written and lectured on the history of science and philosophy, and is currently conducting research on how communities recover from devastating tragedies. His research topics include Montana after Mining Disasters and the 1918 Flu Pandemic, Europe in the Wake of the Great Plague (1347-49), and Ireland’s Recovery from the Great Famine (1848-50).
Father Beretta is the Parish Priest at St. Patrick and Immaculate Conception Churches in Butte, Chaplain at Montana Tech, and Chair of Academic Affairs on the Board of Carroll College in Helena.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRq3GA2laDY
Images:
1. Jeannette Rankin Brigade marched from Union Station to the U.S. Capitol on January 15, 1968, opening day of the 90th Congress. Rankin is in the center, wearing glasses.
2. Jeannette Rankin in Washington D.C., with Mr. Pickering of Massachusetts, superintendent of capitol grounds and building.
3. Jeannette Rankin 'Men and women are like right and left hands - it doesn’t make sense not to use both.'
4. Jeannette Rankin 'What one decides to do in crisis depends on one’s philosophy of life, and that philosophy cannot be changed by an incident. If one hasn’t any philosophy in crises'.
Background from {{https://www.historynet.com/jeanette-rankin-no-vote.htm]}
Jeanette Rankin: The Congresswoman Who Voted NO to WWII
Daniel B. Moskowitz
In the days after Japan’s December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, one woman was subjected to more intense vituperation than any other American. Letters and wires called her “a disgrace and a traitor”; one stated, “when concentration camps open you should be occupant number one.” The object of this vilification was Republican Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, the representative of Montana’s First District.
In Dillon, in the southwest corner of the state, the Kiwanis and the Rotary Club fired off a joint telegram to Rankin, reading: “You have done a great disservice to the state of Montana and to the American People.” The Pioneer newspaper in Big Timber suggested “she be publicly spanked on the floor of the House.” Radio commentators used such harsh language in denouncing her that some stations masked their broadcasts with music.
The transgression that earned Rankin, 61, such calumny happened just after 1:00 p.m. on December 8 in the Capitol in Washington, as Irving Swanson, a clerk in the House of Representatives, read members roll call, recording their votes on the fateful resolution declaring war against Japan. “Yea” after “yea” came in like an echo as Swanson read the names at a pace of 20 per minute until he got to Rankin, who in a firm voice announced her stance: “No.” Other House members began hissing.
It was the only vote in either house of Congress against the declaration of war for which President Roosevelt had asked.
For Rankin it was a repeat performance. She was then in her second term in the House. Her first had begun on April 2, 1917, when she was sworn in as the first woman to serve in the United States Congress. Five days later—on April 7—Congress voted on a resolution for entry into World War I and she had voted “no” then as well.
In 1917, however, ambivalence about the country going to battle in Europe was not uncommon. The mood in the United States following the Pearl Harbor attack was quite different. On the Sunday of the attack, Rankin and her sister Edna were on a train from Washington to a speaking engagement in Detroit when she learned that Roosevelt would be addressing a joint session of Congress the next day. She got off the train in Pittsburgh and returned to the Capitol. At her home the phone rang nonstop. The first call was from her brother Wellington, her top political adviser and fundraiser for her political campaigns, urging her not to repeat her World War I “no” vote. So many other callers and visitors repeated that message that Rankin felt she had to escape.
“I didn’t let anybody approach me,” she later told her biographer, Hannah Josephson. “I got in my car and disappeared. Nobody could reach me. I just drove around Washington and got madder and madder” until it was time to go to Congress for the presidential address.
A lifelong pacifist, Rankin did not waver in her determination to vote against the war resolution. But on the day after the shocking and devastating Pearl Harbor attack, the country was in no mood for pacifism. Rankin’s “no” subjected her to such an immediate onslaught from reporters that she retreated to the members’ cloakroom where she hid in a phone booth and called for Capitol Police to escort her back to her office.
RANKIN’S OPPOSITION TO WAR should not have been a shocker. Her anti-intervention position was a key reason for her 1940 campaign for Congress. “If I don’t run,” Rankin said 44 years later to a student writing his master’s thesis about her career, “the women who don’t want war will have no one to vote for.”
Rankin had been an ardent advocate for women’s suffrage; it was largely through her efforts that women won the right to vote in Montana in 1914—two years before she was elected to Congress. In 1910, Denver news reporter and women’s rights activist Minnie J. Reynolds had persuaded Rankin that pacifism was an inherent part of feminism. “The women produce the boys and the men take them off and kill them in war,” Reynolds argued. Rankin’s reading of Benjamin Kidd’s 1918 book, The Science of Power, solidified her commitment to Reynold’s feminist-pacifist ideology. Kidd found in men a natural inclination to battle while he found in women a preference for peaceful settling of disputes. Rankin called Kidd’s opus the “most important book” she had ever read.
Not only had she opposed American participation in World War I, but in the interwar years she was active in pacifist organizations; she was the chief lobbyist for the National Council for the Prevention of War from 1929 until she left the job to campaign for reelection to Congress in 1940. The antiwar slogan under which she successfully ran was “Keep Our Men Out of Europe.”
As soon as Rankin got back to Congress in January 1941, she organized a grassroots campaign of letters from mothers opposing American entry into the war then raging abroad. Two months later, she opposed Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease legislation. And in May, she gave a Mother’s Day speech on the House floor in which she declared: “There is nothing in the world the mothers of this country would like on this Mother’s Day so much as an assurance that their sons are not going to war.”
Knowing her stance was a lost cause, she nonetheless pressed her anti-intervention views. In June, she offered an amendment to budget authorization legislation for the War Department that read: “no appropriation in this act shall be used to send our army or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside of the Americas or our insular possessions except in case of attack.” Rankin’s other fruitless legislative initiatives to counter the nation’s drift toward war included attempts to stall the draft until voters had approved conscription, to ban the arming of civilian ships, and to remove the death penalty for wartime sabotage.
She was an astute enough politician to know that in her solitary “no” on the declaration of war she was bucking the mood of her constituents. Shortly after she got back to her office, she hastily drafted a statement trying to explain her vote. “I believed that such a momentous vote—one which would mean peace or war for our country—should be based on more authentic evidence than the radio reports now at hand,” she wrote in the communication to Montana newspapers. “Sending our boys to the Orient will not protect this country…. Taking our army and navy across thousands of miles of ocean to fight and die cannot come under the heading of protecting our shores.”
On December 11 she let the record show she was in the House but not taking a position by saying merely “present”—in such a whisper that the clerk had to ask her to repeat her vote—on the resolutions of war against Germany and Italy. She was not in Washington in June 1942 when Congress declared war on Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania.
As she served out her term through 1942, Rankin had lost her political clout. She often appeared to be going through the motions without much commitment. While in 1941 she had virtually never missed a vote, by the fall of 1942 she was absent for 80 percent of recorded votes in the House. On the first anniversary of the vote declaring war on Japan, she entered into the Congressional Record a long analysis of how the United States was, in her view, essentially tricked into World War II by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. “Three years before Pearl Harbor, Britain’s imperialists had figured out just how to bring the United States once more to their aid,” she wrote. She saw as part of the plot Roosevelt’s 1940 decision to impose sanctions on Japan in hopes of fomenting retaliation.
HER DECEMBER 8 “NO” VOTE did draw some admiration for the courage she displayed. “Lord, it was a brave thing,” famed Kansas editor William Allen White wrote in his Emporia Gazette, “and its bravery somehow discounts its folly.” But Rankin’s views found little support.
It had not been that way before. Forty-nine other House members voted along with her 24 years earlier when she cast her vote against American participation in World War I. She received extra protection then against political retaliation when the leader of the House Democrats, Claude Kitchin of North Carolina, also voted “no,” as well as six senators. In 1917, opposition about sending Americans to fight in Europe was particularly strong in Western states like Montana. As a result, Rankin’s anti-intervention stance did not hurt her politically in the 1918 election. But a bad decision did.
Rankin had originally been elected to Congress as one of Montana’s two at-large House members. Before the 1918 election, the legislature changed the process and set up two separate congressional districts. Rankin would have had to run in the Second District, where she felt a Republican had no chance of winning, so she set her sights on the U.S. Senate, hoping to defeat incumbent Democrat Thomas Walsh. After losing the Republican primary for the Senate seat, she ran as an independent, coming in third with about 20 percent of the vote. The irony: a Republican, Carl Riddick, won the House seat Rankin had feared to compete for.
Rankin knew that the second vote in her political career against a declaration of war was political suicide. Her brother Wellington had warned her “Montana is 100 percent against you.” So she did not even try to run for reelection in 1942. Her replacement in the House was Mike Mansfield, who went on to serve 34 years in Congress, the final 16 as Senate majority leader.
While her elective career was over, her efforts as a crusader were not. She continued to preach pacifism, traveled frequently to India to confer with Mahatma Gandhi, and found an increasingly receptive audience for her antiwar rhetoric as the United States became mired in the Vietnam War. In fact, before she died on May 19, 1973, at age 92 she was considering emphasizing her opposition to the war by running for Congress again."
FYI LTC John Shaw 1SG Steven ImermanGySgt Gary CordeiroSMSgt Tom BurnsSgt Jim BelanusSGM Bill FrazerSGT Randell Rose[SGT Denny EspinosaA1C Riley SandersSSgt Clare MaySSG Robert WebsterCSM Chuck StaffordPFC Craig KarshnerSFC (Join to see)SPC Nancy GreenePVT Mark Zehner Lt Col Charlie BrownSP5 Dennis Loberger SSG Robert Mark Odom 1LT Peter Duston
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She stood for what she believed in...we saw a big display about her when we were in Montana
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