Jeannette Rankin: The Only Vote Against Both Wars

The woman who broke the highest barrier in American politics came from a ranch right outside Missoula. Jeannette Rankin was born here in eighteen eighty, and in nineteen sixteen Montana sent her to Washington as the first woman ever elected to the United States Congress. Stop and consider the timing. She became a member of Congress four years before the nation as a whole would even grant women the right to vote. She helped write the very amendment that gave women the vote, and she once said that if she was remembered for nothing else, she wanted to be remembered as the only woman who ever voted to give women the right to vote.

She was also a lifelong pacifist, and it cost her dearly. In nineteen seventeen she voted against entering the First World War. That vote ended her first congressional term. Twenty-three years later the voters of Montana sent her back to Congress, specifically because she had campaigned as a pacifist. On December eighth, nineteen forty-one, the day after Pearl Harbor, the House of Representatives voted three hundred eighty-eight to one to declare war on Japan. Jeannette Rankin cast the single no vote. The chamber jeered her. She had to be escorted by Capitol Police to a phone booth for her own safety. As a woman, she said, I cannot go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.

She lived to ninety-two years old. She continued marching against the Vietnam War in her late eighties. She is the only person in American history to have voted against both world wars. The Montana State Capitol, where that piece of history originated, is just ahead.