Rankin, Jeannette (1880-1973) suffragist, pacifist,
U. S. representative
Born in 1880 in Montana, Jeannette Rankin was the oldest of 11 children born to John Rankin and Olive Pickering. Her father was a rancher, and her mother had worked as a teacher. Attending college at Montana State University, Jeannette earned a degree in biology in 1902. That same year, her father died, leaving Jeannette with an inheritance. After college, Rankin experimented with several vocations including teaching and social work. Her employment experiences eventually directed her into the WOMAN suf-ERAGE movement, as she believed that women needed to be part of the electorate in order to pursue social reform.
Rankin’s background in social work in Washington State convinced her to participate in that state’s 1910 women’s suffrage campaign. Three years later, she was hired by the National American Woman Sueerage Association to campaign for the passage of state suffrage laws. In her home state of Montana, Rankin’s grassroots experience and eloquence helped women’s suffrage to pass in 1914. Two years later, she ran for a seat in the House of Representatives as a Republican and won, making her the first woman elected to Congress. Her victory was partially the result of women’s new enfranchisement. Rankin’s pacifism, moreover, likely attracted votes from citizens who worried about the war in Europe.
Rankin’s historical fame would come as a result of her time in Congress. In 1917, she voted against Woodrow Wilson’s request for a declaration of war. Although this vote gained her the most attention, Rankin also worked on labor law reform, civil liberties, and a federal women’s suffrage amendment; the latter passed the House in 1917 and the Senate in 1918. Her first term in Congress, however, was overshadowed by her antiwar vote. After redistricting cost Rankin her seat, she ran for the Senate and eventually lost.
Her interwar activism was dedicated to peace through the Women’s International League eor Peace and Freedom and to civil liberties through the American Civil Liberties Union. She continued to travel the country giving antiwar speeches. On the eve of World War II, she decided to run for Congress on a neutrality plank. She won. After the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Rankin again voted against an American declaration of war. She was widely condemned but, as a pacifist, voted her conscience.
After Rankin left Congress, she traveled, cared for family members, and then became an antiwar activist once again. As social protest developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s around a variety of issues including racial discrimination, the nuclear arms race, and student rights, Jeannette Rankin was rediscovered. Rankin’s blending of feminism and pacifism inspired a new generation of women’s rights advocates and antiwar activists. In 1968, at the age of 87, Rankin led the Jeannette Rankin Brigade of 5,000 women in a dramatic protest against the war in Vietnam.
Further reading: James J. Lopach and Jean A. Luckowski, Jeannette Rankin: A Political Woman (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2005); Norma Smith, Jeannette Rankin: America's Conscience (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 2002).
—Natalie Atkin
Rauschenbusch, Walter (1861-1918) Baptist theologian, educator, social reformer Baptist minister and social reformer Walter Rauschenbusch was born in 1861. His father was a German immigrant
Clergyman in Rochester, New York, and Walter graduated from Rochester Theological Seminary in 1887. He went on to study economics, theology, and industrial relations in Germany and Britain in the 1890s. Named pastor of the Second German Baptist Church in New York City’s “Hell’s Kitchen,” he witnessed the struggles of the urban immigrants firsthand. Rauschenbusch believed that industrialization eroded workers’ religious commitment.
As a prominent figure in the Social Gospel movement of the Progressive Era, Rauschenbusch sought to apply the principles of Christianity to urban reform. Influenced by the Christian Socialism he saw in Germany and Britain, he critiqued the economic and social conditions that dehumanized urban immigrants and isolated them from religion. Broadening the context of sin, he saw social ills as a form of evil. Purifying democracy required Christians to infuse the spirit of Christ into the secular world. Like many other Social Gospel advocates, Rauschenbusch believed that the state should play a role in rectifying injustice. He also argued that Protestantism needed to become more socially relevant by addressing the problems of the urban poor. Salvation for the human race came through civic activism and social service.
Rauschenbusch was one of the first to undermine the social and intellectual assumptions of his time by arguing that Social Darwinism need not be a fierce competition among humans. Rather, evolution required the religious and social awakening of humanitarianism. In such works as Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) and A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917), Rauschenbusch rendered religious social reform a mainstream movement in the United States. In his 1910 prayer book, For God and the People (1910), he declared the Lord’s Prayer the great prayer of social Christianity. His works had a wide readership.
In 1897, Rauschenbusch left parish work to become a professor of church history at Rochester Theological Seminary and devoted himself to a career of writing, public speaking, and active social reform. It was only when World War I stirred anti-German sentiment that he withdrew from public life. He died in 1918.
Further reading: Donovan E. Smucker, The Origins of Walter Rauschenbusch’s Social Ethics (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994).
—Natalie Atkin
World History
