On that historic occasion Rankin was joined by 56 other Members of Congress. Contrary to popular accounts at the time, she did not cry, although some of the men who cast their antiwar votes with hers did. “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war. I vote no.” Later during the First World War she threw Wilson’s words back at him with the statement: “Small use will it be to save democracy for the race if we cannot at the same time save the race for democracy.”

Whatever her precise reasons, Rankin’s first antiwar vote had an enormous impact on her long public career. “It was not only the most significant thing I ever did,” she later asserted, “it was a significant thing in itself.” This single act publicly identified Rankin as a pacifist for the first time, and from then until her death 56 years later in 1973, she campaigned against U.S. involvement in all wars.

Before deciding to run again for Congress in 1940, she spent the 1920’s and 1930’s involved in a variety of peace and disarmament organizations. As early as 1915, Rankin joined the Women’s Peace Party. She subsequently belonged to the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, the Women’s Peace Union, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (W.I.L.P.F.), and finally the National Council for the Prevention of War (N.C.P.W.). With the exception of the Georgia Peace Society, which she founded in 1928, none of these organizations subsequently lived up to Rankin’s pacifist or organizational standards.

Often she opposed their political tactics or they refused to finance her grassroots plans for organizing. For example, Rankin left her position as field secretary with the W.I.L.P.F. in 1925 after it proved impossible to finance her elaborate plans for gaining western members. In 1929, she resigned in a dispute over tactics as a lobbyist for the Women’s Peace Union, whose sole purpose was to outlaw war through a constitutional amendment. Similarly, after a ten year association with the N.C.P.W., Rankin ended this affiliation in 1939, primarily because she had become much more critical than the National Council of the international policies of both Secretary of State Cordell Hull and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Economic views conditioned Rankin’s brand of pacifism between the two World Wars. As America became an urban and consumer nation, those who first experienced mass consumerism in the 1920’s tended to be more interventionist than those who did not. Rankin increasingly turned away from the consumer society and led a spartan life outside Athens, Georgia, without a telephone or electricity or running water until after 1943. Although she continued to vote and own property in Montana, Georgia became her second “home,” and the Georgia Peace Society remained her base for pacifist activities from the late 1920’s until its demise on the eve of World War II. From Georgia she pursued a lifestyle without modern conveniences, organized “sunshine “ clubs for local boys and girls to teach them “peace habits,” established a foreign policy study group for adults, and transformed the Georgia Peace Society into one of the first peace action groups in the country with perennial attempts to defeat the naval appropriations bills of Congressman Carl Vinson. The Atlanta American Legion Post labeled Rankin a “communist” for these efforts and prevented Brenau College in Gainesville from establishing a “Chair of Peace” for her.

© 2005, Allyson Adams • info@peaceisawomansjob.com