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How Would Rankin have Voted on Iraq?

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Legislator's stand drew catcalls but had support at home
By MARY PICKETT
Of The Gazette Staff

Letters sent to Jeannette Rankin after she voted against the U.S. entering World War I showed that at least some Montanans thought the war was being fought for Wall Street and big business at the expense of the poor.

Although Rankin was vilified for her 1917 vote, she received substantial support from many Montana constituents, Mary Murphy said during a Thursday lecture at the Western Heritage Center.

Murphy, the Michael P. Malone professor of history at Montana State University in Bozeman, delivered the first in a series of five lectures about how war affected Montanans at home. Murphy specializes in history of the American West, labor and American women.

Rankin, a native of Missoula, was not only the first woman elected to Congress but also the first woman elected to any major legislative body in the world. On April 2, 1917 - her first day on her new job - a joint session of Congress heard President Woodrow Wilson ask its approval for the U.S. to go to war.

Two days later, Rankin joined 49 other House members and six U.S. senators in voting against the war.


Although she wasn't alone in her vote, she drew more than her share of attention from newspapers because of her gender.

There were inaccurate reports of Rankin "throwing a female fit of hysterics" and of swooning on the floor of the House.

She was criticized in Montana, too. But the 300 responses she received to a June 6, 1917, form letter she sent to Montana women revealed that many agreed with her.

Some women spoke as mothers concerned about their sons and sons of other women. Others, particularly those in rural parts of the state, were worried that conscription laws would leave the family farm without men to work it.

Wives of ranchers, farmers and miners didn't want to sacrifice sons and husbands for a war that would ultimately benefit capitalism, munitions makers and shipbuilders, Murphy said.

"This is a money war," one woman wrote.

Residents of Butte, which was suffering through a strike after the 1917 Speculator Mine fire, which killed 165 miners, saw the war in terms of class divisions. "Butte, not France, was the battleground of working people," one wrote.

Some letter writers protested laws that harshly punished perceived acts of sedition.

Although Rankin's vote against the war and her support of the striking Butte miners sabotaged her campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1918, her term in Congress inspired women back home and around the country.

Rankin would be elected to a second congressional term in 1940 and cast the only vote against the nation entering World War II. She died in 1973, at age 92.

Murphy wrote "Hope in Hard Times: New Deal Photographs of Montana, 1936-1942," which was published by the Montana Historical Society Press and is a companion book to an exhibit by the same name of photos taken by the Farm Security Administration to document the effects of the drought and Depression.

The exhibit is at the WHC until March 8.
 

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