Originally published November 2007.
In a ninth-grade history class in Athens, Georgia, a teacher asserts that the lone member of Congress who voted against U.S. entry into the Second World War was never made known to the public. The teacher lied: that person was of course Jeannette Rankin, who served two terms in Congress [1917-1919; 1941-1943] and who, because of the fateful timing of those two stints, also ranked among the larger number who voted against getting into the First World War.
What would motivate a teacher to lie to students in such a blatant, yet peculiar, fashion? Ideological bias could have made the teacher, or perhaps the historian who had given her the misinformation, inclined to present the individual as a coward who would not make his stance known and defend it if called to do so. Since the teacher in question is a woman, perhaps she did not want the girls in the class to know that the first female member of Congress was the "guilty" party, a textbook example of conservative perversion of feminism, because for Rankin pacifism formed part of a larger shift in human consciousness and society of which feminism too was part.
Only twelve years later did I realize another plausible explanation: Rankin, longtime Montanan, had retired to Oconee County, Georgia, adjacent to Athens; at the time, a rural county, now increasingly suburban. She had first moved to Georgia--near Bogart, a small town to the west of Athens--in the Thirties, before her notorious second turn in Congress, and returned in her old age to enjoy its mild winters. The Jeannette Rankin Foundation provides scholarships for young women in the area. Perhaps then the teacher did not want to remind anyone of the "traitorous" anti-war stance of this local women of some repute. But I only assume, as I certainly don't want to find out what the teacher was thinking, or that she is still telling the same lie to students today. Why did I not know of Rankin's time in Georgia until 2005? I'd have to write an autobiography to answer that question appropriately. As for how I become aware of it… that is a story more pertinent to our task at hand. Working part-time at a telemarketing operation, listening in on salespersons who barely speak English (because the are Americans) try to sell various "services" on the sly to "customers" who were actually persons who'd just called to activate a credit card or buy a ticket, in conversations with a co-worker, Roger Milford, I discover that in the late Sixites he lived in a house owned by Rankin. The "round house," as it was known because of its distinguishing shape, is located in Watkinsville, the Oconee county seat, and was originally built to house elderly women in a communal setting; but it was unfinished, even still had dirt floors--in other words, the old and infirm would not find it too comforting. So instead it was rented to local members of Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.) and the Southern Students Organizing Committee (S.S.O.C.). In turn, it was busted by cops who did not want any "pot-smoking hippies" in "their" county. A liberal judge later threw out the charges, and Rankin showed her support (after all, well into her eighties, she'd continued her pacifist activism by joining protests against the Vietnam war). The young men who'd been renting from Rankin, though, did not stay on much longer. The "round house" still stands, a relic of a time when the county was still country, and hadn't had many of its rough edges and charming quirks ironed out by the suburban love for smooth surfaces and clothes that look and feel like they have never been worn before.
I relate this personal "reception history," as academics like to call it, to broach a larger subject: the tendency of Americans to demur from serious discussion about the pacifist, neutrality, and anti-intervention movements of the Thirties that led, as far as many are concerned, to a shameful belated response to the Second World War. We will discuss three individuals besides Rankin: Gerald Nye, the leader of the neutrality movement in Congress; Kenneth Patchen, the poet and "anti-novelist" who put everything on the line to continue to voice his pacifist beliefs even when many of his peers (such as Henry Miller) disagreed with him; and Charles Lindbergh, the famed aviator, in the late Twenties-early Thirties arguably the most famous and renown man in the world, who became an infamous spokesman for the America First Committee. Granted, with Lindbergh, we stray away from the pacifism/ Neutralism/ anti-interventionism nexus into segments of U.S. society whose motives in keeping the nation out of war were disreputable, if not frightening (such as Henry Ford's anti-Semitism and the German-American Bund). But the extent of Lindbergh's questionable or repugnant actions has been exaggerated by some historians, and of late even been subject to crass exploitation in Philip Roth's historical novel The Plot Against America. But such historical mischaracterizations extend even to those anti-war activists who are not dismissed as Nazi-sympathizers or ignorant dupes. For Americans, the neutrality period that lasted for slightly more than the first two years of the European war, and for considerably longer in East Asia (dependent upon when one designates the beginning-point of the war there) is the "elephant in the room" they strain to avoid, a significant facet of U S history that most would simply like to go away. Alas, in doing so, Americans also dismiss essential lessons and inspiring stories of the period, 1892-1941, what we could call the Long Progressive Era, stretching from the rise of the People's Party through the defeat of the Neutralists in Congress, in contrast to the truncated version of Progressivism often employed by historians.
As suggested above, Rankin's first vote against war hardly distinguished or defined her. She had not been a pacifist during the time of the First World War, largely focusing on the concerns of her western Montana constituents, especially the working-class men of Butte, a mining center at the time one of the most populous and economically-significant cities of the West. In fact, moderate and conservative Montanans turned against her en masse not because of her vote against the war, but because she didn't adamantly oppose the Metal Mine Workers' Union (M.M.W.U.) in its 1917 strike against the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. With the nation at war, and the M.M.W.U. commonly linked to the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W., or the "Wobblies"), Rankin tried to work out a deal, but ended up being smeared as a supporter of the I.W.W., an organization that in those dark years suffered greatly at the hands of jingoist oppression. She was also known primarily as a suffragist who had been instrumental in getting women the right to vote in Montana. Even when she emphasized her pacifist beliefs during her second term, she did not stand out as much as her lone vote suggests. The First World War made pacifists of innumerable Americans. Although many progressives opposed Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations, many others looked with optimism to the internationalist efforts to maintain peace, whether it be the League, the World Court, or the Washington Conference of 1922. The oft-ridiculed Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war reflected a sincere hope, and an absolute demand, that war as it developed in the industrial age could not continue to be a regular feature of international relations. In the time between her two terms, Rankin worked with Jane Addams's Women's Peace Party (which aligned with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom) the Women's Peace Union, and Frederick Libby's National Council for the Prevention of War, and started her own Georgia Peace Society. She also campaigned for Florence Kelly's National Consumers' League on issues like the minimum wage and child labor. But for her, pacifism overshadowed all other issues.
To understand why, we rely on James L, Lopach and Jean A, Luckowski, in Jeannette Rankin: A Political Woman, the best book on Rankin. They appropriately emphasize the radical feminism underlying Rankin's pacifism. Living in New York as a suffragist in the period before returning to Montana to run for Congress the first time, Rankin befriended members of a women's club known as Heterodoxy, which interested itself in a myriad of issues: birth control and sexual freedom, anarchism and socialism, labor legislation and social reform; the combined effect of which impelled members such as Lillie Devereux Blake, Winnifred Harper Cooley, Mary H. Ford, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to imagine utopian societies to replace the degraded one they knew, where, as Lopach and Luckowski put it, the "victimization of women" resulted from "the male world of individualism, militarism, sexual dominance, and unsafe work conditions." Rankin often tried to translate the visions of change found in these utopias into the practical world of party politics, in which she was from the outset an outsider. Years later, post-politics, the "round house" in its original conception also mirrored what her feminist peers had once hoped for. Lopach and Luckowski also note the influence on Rankin of the British sociologist Benjamin Kidd, who believed in the centrality of women to pacifism--that it was a special responsibility women held. Kidd's The Science of Power [1918] "had been an epiphany. Depressed by her fall from power [after her first term in Congress], she discovered that Kidd's woman-based theory celebrated her antiwar vote." Jane Addams also strongly influenced Rankin toward pacifism, both intellectually and personally: Addams had inspired Rankin's earlier goal of being a social worker, and Rankin accompanied Addams throughout the Women's International Conference for Permanent Peace held in Zurich in 1919 (which launched the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom).
Compared to Kidd and even Addams, though, Rankin excelled in campaigning and speechmaking, apparently at the expense of her ability to work well with her peers and put her feminist ideas into practice in her own life: as Lopach and Luckowski address, Rankin relied upon the financial support of her wealthy brother, Wellington, and often conformed to conservative standards of proper women's behavior and clothing when in public. But such compromised positions also suggest both the remarkable position Rankin held as not only the first female member of Congress, but also the first female member of any national elected assembly in the world, and the pressures she faced because of said position. The relatively conservative National American Women Suffrage Association (N.A.W.S.A.), led by Carrie Chapman Catt, and its rival, the Congressional Union (later, the Women's Party), led by Alice Paul, bid for Rankin's support. The Congressional Union wanted a national suffrage amendment while Catt's group supported state-level amendments; they also split over the war, with the N.A.W.S.A. joining Woodrow Wilson's side in the debate. Most of all, she was seen not as Jeannette Rankin, Montana Representative, but as a stand-in for women everywhere, the embodiment of their hopes and fears. That she usually chose the radical course, forever linking feminism and pacifism in the annals of history, suggests that she deserves her place as someone who in our memory is not inexorably linked to these varied women's and pacifist groups, or to Congress or any particular government; who instead stands tall as an exemplary case of a genuine individual at work for the collective, with all the contradictions that thus ensue.