Jeanette Rankin, The Pacifist, Suffragette Representative

It is one thing to have voted against America’s entry into World War I. Although America had some justification for entering that war — including Germany’s sinking of the British ocean liner, Lusitania, which resulted in the death of 128 Americans — there was still strong public sentiment for staying out of what looked like another internecine European donnybrook that posed no real threat to isolationist America. And in fact, 50 members of the House of Representatives voted against a declaration of war against Germany when it came up for a vote in April of 1914.

But it is another thing entirely to have voted against America’s entry into war against Japan on December 8, 1941, the day after that nation had attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killing nearly 2,500 Americans, sinking or crippling 18 ships, including four battleships, and nearly destroying America’s naval operations in the Pacific. Just one member of either branch of Congress voted against America’s entry into what would become World War II, for which she was universally vilified.

Her name was Jeanette Rankin. She was born this week (June 11) in 1880 on a ranch in Montana, which at that time was not yet a state.

But when it did become a state, Rankin, who had been a social worker and a leader of the women’s suffrage movement, ran successfully for a House seat in 1916, becoming the first women in history to be elected to the U.S. Congress. Her political platform included women’s suffrage on a national level, legislation to combat infant mortality, and a demand that America stay out of the war then being waged in Europe by Germany and Austria-Hungary against France, Great Britain and Russia — what became known as WWI. (Her women’s suffrage platform was ironic given that she was denied her seat in Congress for an entire month while her male counterparts debated whether a woman could be admitted into the House of Representatives).

After serving one-term in Congress, and recording that memorable anti-WWI vote, Rankin ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate and returned to Montana, where she joined a number of suffrage organizations working for ratification of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. Rankin also stayed active in the pacifist movement, and when the U.S. began drifting toward war in 1940, Montana, then an overwhelmingly pacifist state, sent her back to Congress, where she recorded her historic vote against entering WWII.

Unsurprisingly, given the controversy over that decision, Rankin left the House after one term. She died in 1973, but not before forming the “Jeanette Rankin Brigade” to protest America’s involvement in yet another war, the Vietnam War — for which, given its own controversial standing, she was praised as much as vilified.

© Kauffmann 2008