Friday is the day of the week when I pass along a quotation meant to be elucidating or inspiring. Today's words come from a pioneering politician from the great state of Montana, which Abraham Lincoln designated as a U.S. territory on this date in 1864.
When Jeannette Rankin was born in 1880 at a place outside Missoula called Grant Creek Ranch, Montana hadn't yet been admitted to the union. The oldest of seven children (only one of whom was a boy) she was a seeker from the start. In 1904, while on a trip to see family in San Francisco, she volunteered at a Telegraph Hill settlement house. She went to college in New York, graduating in 1909 with a degree in social work, then headed back out West for a job in the university town of Spokane, Wash., where she worked with at-risk children and took graduate school classes.
Washington state was a suffrage movement hotbed at the time, and Rankin threw herself into the cause. A successful statewide referendum (in a male-only electorate, it should be noted) made Washington the fifth state to enfranchise women. Her home state had not yet followed suit, an oversight Rankin sought to correct. As a field organizer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, she repatriated herself back to Montana, where in 1911 she became the first woman to address the state legislature. She reignited the suffrage campaign there, which in 1914 became the 11th state to grant women the vote.
Two years later, Rankin decided to push the envelope by seeking one of Montana's two at-large congressional seats. Running as a Republican, she finished second to incumbent Democratic Rep. John Morgan Evans, meaning that both were elected to Congress.
"I may be the first woman member of Congress," Rankin noted. "But I won't be the last." Her colleagues seemed to understand the point. On April 2, 1917, as the 65th Congress convened, Rankin was escorted by Rep. Evans into the House chamber. And when the Montana duo was sworn in, the chamber broke into sustained applause.
The honeymoon wouldn't last long. Only hours, actually. That night, the House debated President Woodrow Wilson's formal request to declare war on Germany. Rankin had campaigned against U.S. entry into the Great War (for that matter, so had Wilson), but her suffrage movement allies worried that if she took too high a profile, it would tarnish their cause as being unpatriotic. Urged to lay low, Rankin did not speak during the debate - and did not cast a vote on the first reading of the roll.
Former Speaker Joseph G. Cannon (no kin to me) approached her on the House floor. "Little woman, you cannot afford not to vote," he said. "You represent the womanhood of the country in the American Congress. I shall not advise you how to vote, but you should vote one way or another - as your conscience dictates."
Rankin knew he was speaking the truth. She had said so herself upon being elected. "I am deeply conscious of the responsibility, and it is wonderful to have the opportunity to be the first woman to sit in Congress," she said. "I will not only represent the women of Montana, but also the women of the country, and I have plenty of work cut out for me."
And so she rose to cast a vote - the first ever by a woman in Congress - against Wilson's declaration of war, even breaking protocol to make brief remarks. "We cannot settle disputes by eliminating human beings," she said. "I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war. I vote no."
As war fever swept the country, suffragist leaders distanced themselves from her, saying that she represented Montana, not the national women's movement. The largest newspaper in Montana's state capital called her "a dupe of the Kaiser" and compared her to "a crying schoolgirl." The New York Times editorialized that Rankin demonstrated "almost final proof of feminine incapacity for straight reasoning."
She never wavered, however, even in World War II, which was a principled (yet in my view deeply misguided) stance that even her fellow pacifists and isolationists couldn't follow.
As we approach Memorial Day, we laud the men and women - living and dead - who have ensured our freedoms by risking everything. And sometimes paying everything. But among those freedoms is the right to disagree with government and with the prevailing winds of public opinion, as Jeannette Rankin did all her life. And she never wavered on war.
She lived long enough, however, that former adversaries forgot their old enmity. And generations of Americans unborn when she made history decided they had something to learn from her. In 1968, a delegation opposed to the Vietnam War chose her to present a petition to congressional leaders. In 1970, the House hosted a dinner in honor of her 90th birthday. Two years later, she was proclaimed by the National Organization for Women to be the world's "outstanding living feminist." At the time of her death in 1973, Rankin was nearly 93, living in Carmel, Calif., and was contemplating running for a House seat as a peace candidate.
"You can no more win a war," she once said, "thank you can win an earthquake."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
