Jeannette Rankin (1880–1973), the first woman to be elected to Congress, was one of only fifty members of the House of Representatives to vote against America’s entry into World War I, and the only vote against declaring war on Japan twenty-four years later. Connecting these distinctive accomplishments does not mean that women are inevitably peacemakers; it does suggest that exploring the connection between gender and war resistance may be meaningful, and in fact Rankin’s life and work centered on these two causes.
She started out her professional life as a social worker but disliked the tasks she was assigned; later, in 1910, she became an activist for women’s suffrage. She was elected to Congress as a Republican from Montana in 1916 (the state had extended the vote to women two years before), campaigning on, among other things, the slogan “preparedness for peace.” Her vote against the war in 1917 alienated some suffragists, who claimed it had set the movement back by years.
She was not reelected, at least partly in consequence of her antiwar vote, and like Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch, worked with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and with other peace and justice organizations. She was elected to Congress a second time in 1940, campaigning for American neutrality and American military preparedness. But after Pearl Harbor, when again a declaration of war came before her, she again voted no. Her explanation was as follows: “As a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.” Angry war supporters threatened her and reporters swarmed; at one point she had to take refuge in a telephone booth in the Capitol. But the journalist William Allen White wrote of her that “when in one hundred years from now, courage, sheer courage based on moral indignation, is celebrated in this country, the name of Jeannette Rankin, who stood firm in folly for her faith, will be written in monumental bronze not for what she did but for the way she did it.” (Her own account of these votes, included below, was first published in March 1958.)
In 1968, she led the Jeannette Rankin Brigade in a protest against the Vietnam War, joining with Coretta Scott King to present a petition on behalf of Women Strike for Peace.
AS the first woman to sit in the legislature of any sovereign nation, I cast my first vote in April, 1917 against the entry of the United States into World War I. As I said at the time, I wanted to stand by my country, but I could not vote for war. I look back with satisfaction to that momentous occasion.
I had been deeply involved in the preceding years in the struggle for woman suffrage. That struggle and the struggle against war were integrally related in my youthful thoughts and activities. After the World War had broken out and it had become increasingly clear that the United States was going to be drawn in, I was the angriest person you ever saw. I was in a rage because no one had ever seriously taught us about the nature of war itself or given us any inkling of the causes of this specific war. I was not so naive as to think that war just started in a minute. Behind the scenes preparation had to be made and was made for it. But nobody in school or later had talked to us about such things. Now we seemed, in 1914, suddenly and inexplicably to be on the eve of war.
Deep down, I guess I had always felt strongly about war. I remember that in college, when I was assigned to read publicly a poem glorifying war and soldiers, I told the professor: “But this is hideous. I can’t read it.”
As we went about in Montana in 1914 campaigning for the vote, we would see long lines of people before the newspaper bulletin boards in every town and city. A large proportion of these people were foreign born, eagerly scanning the notices for war news that would give them some notion as to what was happening to relatives in their native countries. War was on everybody’s mind. So we talked about suffrage in relation to war. I argued that women should get the vote because they would help keep the country out of war. It was a persuasive argument at that stage.
I do not want to give the impression that anti-war talk was universally popular. In a speech in Butte, Montana, I happened to suggest that, instead of sending youth into war, the old men ought to fight the wars. The papers picked up this suggestion and made a big thing of it. Then speeches began to be made and letters written to the papers on how presumptuous and shocking it was for an unmarried woman to consider herself competent to discuss such matters.
I recall one curious incident that made a great impression on me during a suffrage campaign. It illustrates how we never know what will evoke our deepest feelings. Minnie J. Reynolds of New Jersey, a prominent suffrage campaigner, and I were walking down a street in Seattle. We passed a window full of baby chicks. Minnie stopped, pointed to them and talked passionately for some minutes about the loveliness and helplessness of those little chicks and how everyone would be outraged if someone were to start wantonly to torture them. She then went on to talk about men, women, old people, children all over the world, and men in war going out to kill them.
In the Fall of 1916, I was elected Congresswoman-at-large from Montana. The women’s vote helped. It was an additional advantage that the state was not divided into Congressional districts, because candidates who stand for something are likely to have a better chance under this set-up, especially women. Everyone could vote for both a man and a woman. It is harder to manipulate and control the voters of a whole state than those of a single district. Also people were not subjected to a radio and TV barrage and we could go from town to town, speaking on the street corners and in the homes.
Several women ran for Congress in various states that year, but I was the only one who really had a chance, and I was elected. Under the procedures in effect at that time, the outgoing Congress carried over until the first Tuesday in March of the following year and the newly-elected Congress would not convene in session until autumn. I had plans made for an extensive and, I hoped, remunerative lecture tour on woman suffrage and peace, capitalizing on the curiosity about a “female” Representative. But Woodrow Wilson, who had been elected on the slogan that he would keep us out of war, had decided that it was the duty of all, and especially of good liberals and idealists, to support intervention. He called a special session of Congress early in April, read his famous war message, and appealed to the newly-elected Congress to declare war.
That time it took a week of tense debate to bring the matter to a vote, and in the House I was not the only one to vote “No.” Forty-nine men in the House voted against entry. Among them were all the veterans of the Civil War who were in Congress. Claude Kitchin, the floor leader of the Democratic majority, voted “No” and wept unashamedly as he cried out: “It takes neither moral nor physical courage to declare a war for others to fight.” It is one token of how the situation has deteriorated since that time that Kitchin was retained in the leadership in spite of this vote and the fact that he remained unenthusiastic about war measures. Champ Clark, the Speaker of the House, refrained from voting on this crucial measure. In the Senate, the elder Robert M. LaFollette made his brilliant and courageous speech and cast his negative vote, as did five other Senators.
I am sorry to have to say that the attitude of most of the leaders of the woman suffrage movement was far from sympathetic to my stand. They thought that the “cause” would have been much better off if I had taken what they considered a patriotic stand. They brought a good deal of pressure to bear on me. As a matter of fact, the war advanced the movement to give women the vote and undermined opposition to it, and there is no reason to suppose that my vote on the war declaration had any appreciable effect on this issue.
It did have an effect on my own career. Running for re-election to the House of Representatives in 1918 was out of the question. In the period between the two world wars, I devoted a great deal of time to the effort to achieve the object for which the war had ostensibly been fought—the permanent abolition of war. During part of that time I was on the staff of the National Council for Prevention of War, of which Frederick J. Libby was for many years the director. Some of my experiences in this work and reflections on them may be of use.
If any results in Congress are to be accomplished at all, it is necessary to get to the people—the grass roots, as the saying goes—and to do a lot of personal work with individuals and small groups. In dealing with Congress itself, you have to think largely in terms of the individual Congressman who is in a key position. In 1936 when the great struggle for the Neutrality Act was on, as part of our strategy to keep the United States from becoming embroiled for a second time in European conflicts, Roosevelt was confident he could defeat us. But at the very hour when he was assuring a House delegation in his office that the Senate would defeat the measure, the Senate passed it. Then the administration’s struggle to defeat the measure was intensified. The key man in the House was Democratic Representative McReynolds from Chattanooga, Tennessee, who was chairman of the Committee that was handling the bill. We took ten of his twelve counties in Tennessee and with the cooperation of women, clergy, and school superintendents held dozens of meetings, large and small. This was shortly before Christmas. McReynolds was abroad. We carefully refrained from attacking him, and simply urged people “to let Mr. McReynolds know what you think.” When McReynolds returned from his trip and learned what his constituents were thinking, he changed his mind and voted for the Neutrality Act.
People often ask what they can do in Washington. My answer is that, almost always, the only really effective thing people can do is to work with their own representatives. If they are going to write, they should write to their own Senators or Representatives. A Congressman seldom pays attention to anybody who is not a constituent. Don’t write him what you think or start out by telling him what to do. Ask him a question. When he answers, as he is almost certain to do, write again, thank him, and ask him another question. He is not likely to think that a constituent is really interested and will work in the district unless he has written half a dozen times.
On the other hand, in order to give a balanced picture, I ought to emphasize that just about everything possible is done to enable a Congressman to keep his constituents from knowing what he really thinks and even how he votes, and that in Congress itself free speech does not really obtain. In my earlier days, there was a lot of stir about the then czar of the House, Speaker “Uncle Joe” Cannon of Illinois. He decided who could or could not speak, for how long, and so on. There was a liberal revolt. With what result? That there is now a Rules Committee, which decides who can or cannot speak, and for how long. In a sense, the only place where uninhibited free speech still exists in the United States is—paradoxically—in the Senate when a filibuster is on. Procedures in Congress, let me add, are so arranged that with a little agility a Representative, if allowed to speak and in good standing with the powers that be, can make speeches on one side of an issue, and then vote on the other side. He can vote one way in a voice vote and the other way when the tellers are called—and can tell various types of constituents the part of the story that makes them feel good.
But let me resume the account of my own Congressional experience. In 1939, I began to think of running for Congress again the following year. The first move I made was to write a letter to all the high school principals in Montana, informing each that I would be at his school on such and such a date and available to address the students. I did not give a return address, lest some should reply that it would be inconvenient to have me. So I addressed virtually all the high school assemblies in the state on the subject of war. I explained the futility of the war method as a means of settling disputes between nations. I never directly attacked the Army or Navy; I just made fun of some of their doings. Thus, in discussing the talk about the Japanese coming to attack San Francisco, I would remark that the distance from San Francisco to Tokyo was exactly the same as from Tokyo to San Francisco. I told the children to write President Roosevelt letters about their ideas on war, but not to write the letters until they had talked it over with their parents. In this way, I made sure that a lot of voters in Montana heard my name and heard something about my ideas on war. I also told the children not to say how old they were—that I never did.
In this context, I told the students a story from my own high school days. We had in my class a boy who, as a baby, had been carried in a covered wagon across territory in which hostile Indians still roamed. Early one morning, the caravan heard Indians coming. There was a considerable number of them, women as well as men. The white men in the caravan ran for their guns. But the mother of the boy who was to become my classmate took her baby in her arms and walked ahead alone. When she reached the Indians, who had halted when they saw her approaching, she handed her baby to one of them; quite possibly, it was the first white baby they had ever seen. The Indians took this as a sign of trust and friendship. They handed the baby back to the mother, and went on their way. I would say to the children when I had finished the story, “You will not be able to hand your Senator a baby when he comes to your town, but you can do something to make him understand that you really care about abolishing strife and hatred among men.” The following year, when my candidacy had been announced and I was again going from town to town campaigning, I would meet these high school students, their parents and friends. That round of high school visits was undoubtedly an important element in the victory which sent me back to Congress for a second time, after the lapse of twenty-three years.
Once again, the nation was moving toward war. In November, 1941, and early December, many people assumed that we would go in any day. As late as Saturday evening, December 6, I still felt that the country was not ready and that therefore entry would be put off. I was scheduled to speak in Detroit at an important meeting on Monday. On Sunday, though the attack on Pearl Harbor had occurred, I left Washington for Pittsburgh, en route to Detroit. I took it for granted that Congress would debate the declaration of war for a week, as it had in 1917, or at any rate for several days. But on arrival in Pittsburgh, I learned that we were living in another time and that Congress was going to vote on Monday. I hurried back to Washington. I secluded myself. I did not want to talk with anyone. I was much more upset than I had been in 1917. Then I had been sad. But this time I was grieved at seeing the men who were as opposed to going into the war as I was slipping away from their position at the critical moment. There were some important Republicans who wished to have all the Republicans vote against entry, partly from conviction, partly, I suppose, to embarrass Roosevelt. Nothing came of it.
This time I stood alone. It was a good deal more difficult than it had been the time before. Yet I think the men in Congress all sensed that I would vote “No” again. If I had done otherwise, I do not think I could have faced the remaining days in Congress. Even the men who were most convinced that we had to get into the war would have lost respect for me if I had betrayed my convictions.
When the first anniversary of that vote came around, on December 8, 1942, I extended remarks in the record in which I brought out some points which may well be recalled at the present critical moment. I referred, for one thing, to a book by an English author, Sidney Rogerson, entitled Propaganda in the Next War. It had been published in London in 1938 but banned from export to the United States by the British censorship in 1939. Rogerson had stated in his book that it would be much more difficult to bring the United States into the war than it had been in World War I. “The position,” said Rogerson, “will naturally be considerably improved if Japan were to be involved . . . At any rate, it would be a natural and obvious object of our propaganda to achieve this, just as during the Great War they succeeded in embroiling the United States with Germany.”
I next reminded the Congress of Henry Luce’s historic reference in Life magazine for July 20, 1942 to “the Chinese for whom the U. S. had delivered the ultimatum that brought on Pearl Harbor.” I introduced evidence that at the Atlantic Conference, August 12, 1941, Winston Churchill had sought, and Roosevelt had given, assurances that the United States would bring economic pressure to bear on Japan. I cited the State Department Bulletin of December 20, 1941, which revealed that on September 3 a communication had been sent to Japan demanding that it accept the principle of “non-disturbance of the status quo in the Pacific,” which amounted to demanding guarantees of the inviolateness of the white empires in the Orient.
On the subject of economic pressure on Japan, I had sought data from both the State and Commerce Departments. I had received from both an identical response: “Because of a special Executive Order, statistics on trade with Japan beginning with April 1941 are not being given out.” There was, however, plenty of material from other sources to show that, in line with Roosevelt’s assurances to Churchill, the Economic Defense Board, under Henry Wallace’s chairmanship, had gotten economic sanctions under way less than a week after the Atlantic Conference. On December 2, 1941, the New York Times reported that Japan had been “cut off from about 75% of her normal trade by the Allied blockade.”
In this connection, I recalled a statement made on April 4, 1942 by a member of Roosevelt’s own party, Hatton W. Summers of Texas, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee: “This blaming the Pearl Harbor tragedy on the treachery of the Japs is like the fellow who had been tickling the hind leg of a mule trying to explain his bungled-up condition by blaming the mule for having violated his confidence.”
There was one other development preceding Pearl Harbor, of which I reminded the House, namely the statement of Lieutenant Clarence E. Dickinson, U. S. N., in a Saturday Evening Post article, October 10, 1942, to the effect that, on November 28, 1941, Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr. had given instructions to him and others to “shoot down anything we saw in the sky and to bomb anything we saw on the sea. In that way there could be no leak to the Japs.” Such orders could hardly have been issued without Presidential sanction. I raise now, as I did on that first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the question whether Roosevelt had not, at least nine days before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor without a declaration of war, authorized an identical attack upon the Japanese—also without a declaration of war.
And how much do the people and even the members of Congress know about the moves now being made by our government or other governments which may lead to another war? Our being kept in ignorance arouses my apprehensions today as it did more than forty years ago when World War I burst upon my world.