Jeannette Rankin in Plains, Mt – 87 Years old – Says her father was a Hippie
Jeannette Rankin: Voice Against War
By Don Coe – Publisher, The Plainsman
Plains – It’s a woman’s privilege to change her mind, but concerning war and all its implications, Jeannette Rankin is not one to exercise that genetic right.
Possessed of looks and sparkle that belie her 87 years, Miss Rankin, the first woman to serve in the United States Congress, indicated in Plains this week that she still maintains the strong belief against war which prompted her to vote against United States participation in World War I – or the belief, 24 years later, which prompted her to join 55 colleagues in voting against her country’s participation in World War II.
Miss Rankin and her favorite traveling companion, Sam, a sleek dachshund, visited this week with her lifelong friend, Mrs. C. H. Rittenour[1] (Jimmie Wells) who might accompany her on a visit to Carmel, Calif.
She was in Plains for the dedication ceremony of the Rittenour Medical Clinic. She turned a spadeful of dirt around a spruce tree at the open house celebration. Following the dedication prayer, Mrs. Rittenour cut a ribbon officially opening the $50,000 clinic. Money for the clinic was provided by the Rittenours.
Today, Miss Rankin refers to the Vietnam conflict as a “unilateral war” or one in which aggression and escalation are one-sided.
“With a unilateral war, you can have unilateral peace,” she maintains. “In this ‘practice’ war there’s nothing to keep us from saying that we’ve run out of surplus war material and now it’s time to pack up and go home.”
It’s evident that retirement from public life has been of her own volition because Miss Rankin shows none of the afflictions common to her age with the possible exception of a well-placed wrinkle or two.
Sher traveled (with Sam, of course) from her home in Georgia to Chicago by plane, and from Chicago to Plains by train.
Recalls Suffrage
Keen of mind and memory, Miss Rankin recalls with apparent relish her days as chairman of the Montana State Suffrage committee which was instrumental in helping to win the right to vote for women in Montana in 1914.
That victory aided her four years later when she ran for Congress on a platform devoted to suffrage for women.
“it was our (her followers) contention that with a woman in Congress it would be very difficult for the men to say, we have a woman in our midst but you can’t vote,” she recalled.
Not entirely unforeseen, Miss Rankin ran headlong into the problem of war early in that first term. Amid the barbs of many of her colleagues she made a decision from which she has not wavered to this day. She voted against participation in the war.
She also sowed the seed for suffrage and during her term the vote in favor of the 19th amendment passed the house but failed by one vote in the senate. One term later it passed both houses overwhelmingly and the final state ratified the proposed amendment in 1921.
It was for peace that Miss Rankin successfully re-entered politics in 1940, and true to her convictions, she again voted against U.S. participation in a full-scale war.
Ghandi Disciple
An inveterate traveler, the former Montana resident has visited India six times and looks upon the late, great Indian, Mahatma Ghandi, as an ideal. She likens Negro Leader Martin Luther King as a disciple of Ghandi’s peaceful resistance ideas and is in sympathy with the Negro’s struggle to improve his lot.
Asked if the “hippie” movement could not be placed in the same category, Miss Rankin acknowledged that her only encounter with a “hippie” was when her niece had brought a girl friend to her home in Georgia for a weekend.
The girl was a university graduate but Miss Rankin was “appalled at her total ignorance of history, economics and geography.”
Miss Rankin noted that the hippies had no constructive answer for the ills against which they were protesting.
“But then, neither did I when I voted against war,” she admitted.
“Incidentally, my father was a hippie,” she said, whereupon she pulled from her purse an 1870 picture of a handsome young man, resplendent in long curly hair, plaid shirt and whiskers who would look not a bit out of place in Haight-Ashberry (sic) district today.
She didn’t say so, but presumably the resemblance of her father to a hippie ended with the looks.
Still very much in the news, Miss Rankin was interviewed early in April on a nationwide television news program, on the 50th anniversary of this country’s entry into World War I, and in one of the subsequent newspaper interviews an Associated Press writer remarked that the years “have wrinkled the brow but not the views” of Jeannette Rankin.
Even President Johnson has a certain kind of respect for the former congresswoman, as reported in a Newsweek magazine of Feb. 14, 1966.
After the President had called Mike Mansfield to the White House for a conference, the magazine reported, and had failed in an effort to persuade the Senate majority leader to change his attitude about Viet Nam, the President made a remark similar to this when questioned about the success of the conference:
“Mike is a cross between Burton K. Wheeler and Jeanette Rankin and I can get along without the advice of either of them.”
To which we add, not very well, though.
The above article appeared in The Daily Missoulian on July 21, 1967
https://www.newspapers.com/image/350004472/
[1] Jimmie Mills Rittenour was a 1901 graduate of U of M. She was a sister of Dr. W. P. Mills of Missoula.