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To respond to the challenging times we are living through, physician, humanitarian and social justice advocate Dr. Paul Zeitz has identified “Revolutionary Optimism” as a new cure for hopelessness, despair, and cynicism. Revolutionary Optimism is itself an infectious, contagious, self-created way of living and connecting with others on the path of love. Once you commit yourself as a Revolutionary Optimist, you can bravely unleash your personal power, #unify with others, and accelerate action for our collective repair, justice, and peace, always keeping love at the center.
Announcer - 00:00:03:
Welcome to Revolutionary Optimism. Issues like economic hardship, political violence, and the rise of authoritarianism have left many Americans feeling more despair than ever. Fortunately, physician, humanitarian, and social justice advocate Dr. Paul Zeitz has identified revolutionary optimism as a new cure for that hopelessness and cynicism. Once you commit yourself as a revolutionary optimist, you can bravely unleash your personal power, hashtag unify with others, and accelerate action for repair, justice, and peace. On this podcast, Dr. Zeitz is working to provide you with perspectives from leaders fighting for equity, justice, and peace on their strategies for overcoming adversity and driving forward revolutionary transformation with optimism. In this episode, Dr. Zeitz is talking with Lorissa Rinehart. Lorissa Rinehart is a celebrated women's historian, author, and public speaker. Her writing explores the powerful intersection of women's history, politics, and war. Her debut book, First to the Front, The Untold Story of Dickie Chappelle, trailblazing female war correspondent, received rave reviews from The Wall Street Journal, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Publishers Weekly, and numerous other publications. Her upcoming second book, Winning the Earthquake: How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become America's First Congresswoman, is set for release by St. Martin's Press in November of 2025. Through her weekly newsletter and podcast, The Female Body Politic, Lorissa offers insightful analysis of contemporary events, drawing on 250 years of women's engagement in American politics. Here's your host, Dr. Paul Zeitz.
Paul - 00:01:40:
Welcome, Lorissa. Thank you so much for joining the podcast today. It's an honor.
Lorissa - 00:01:45:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so thrilled to be here with you.
Paul - 00:01:49:
Okay, great. Well, I've had the great pleasure and honor to get a pre-read of Winning the Earthquake, your forthcoming book that's coming out in early November. And I must say, I read a fair amount of books. And this is the best book I've been reading this year. So by far, I'm totally captivated by your writing and by the story and the life of Jeannette Rankin. And I strongly recommend that my readers pick up this book and immerse yourself in it. So today's show will be to whet your appetite and to give you a sense of Lorissa and then dig into the life of Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress ever in U.S. history. Extraordinary story. I also have to admit, I did not know who Jeannette Rankin was when you first reached out to me. And I felt really ignorant, actually, and really felt like I have an opportunity and a responsibility to educate myself about leaders like Jeannette. And thank you. Thank you for bringing this forward. I'm sure I'm not the only one. So tell me, why did you write this book about Jeannette?
Lorissa - 00:03:04:
Well, I just want to first address that I'm sorry you felt ignorant. You shouldn't. Most people don't know who Jeannette Rankin is. And it's not our fault. It's the fault of an education system that doesn't prioritize the equally important histories of marginalized people, including women. And in fact, I didn't know who she was until I started researching my next books. And I was looking for, you know, I wanted to write a book about an American female politician. And that's how I came to learn about Jeannette. It was not before then, even as a women's historian. So to answer your question about why I wanted to write this book, as soon as I found out about Jeannette, the very little I could discover about her online and in previous biographies, which for various reasons are not as comprehensive as this one, largely because of the reality of archives before as opposed to right now. Knew immediately that her story, her legacy, and her voice were incredibly relevant to our own moment and needed to be elevated at this particular junction in our democracy and our history. And I started writing this before the election of 2024, of course, and actually I had finished before that election. But at the same time, our democracy was still under threat, was still vulnerable. And Jeannette had insights as to how to address those and strengthen American democracy that I felt were not being talked about enough.
Paul - 00:04:42:
We're going to come back to that. So then you started really unearthing a lot of really interesting sources of data, like letters that she had written to various people. Could you share a little bit about that research effort and what was the most surprising thing that you came upon? That you didn't expect would come your way as you were writing the book.
Lorissa - 00:05:11:
Well, I'm very fortunate in that we live in an age where digitization is possible and relatively easy. So I was very fortunate to work with a number of graduate students all across America who helped me digitize her archives, right? Because I, as a mom of two and a writer, cannot afford to go to Montana, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Boston where her archives are sort of broken up. And so I was able to work with graduate students in all of those areas to digitize her archives. And so that was the first time that they were all brought together in one book. Then the other part of the puzzle for me was, maybe this is a bit wonky, but the recent digitization of newspapers dating back to, right, the 1850s. And they're keyword searchable. And what happened with Jeannette, which is what happens with a lot of women, is that actually much of her archives were destroyed because universities and other institutions did not want them at the time that she was alive. And so many of her papers were actually lost when her brother's basement where she had been storing them in Montana flooded. So a lot of the... Material in this book comes from secondary sources of newspaper reporting, which added a lot of texture and color and nuance, I hope, to the writing. Then the third aspect of it were the newly donated oral histories by a graduate student many, many years ago who spent days and months with Jeannette Rankin recording her story, asking her about her entire life in ways that were incredibly in-depth. And again, I was able to access these just very easily because the University of Georgia sent the digital files to me. So her voice really is included in this biography, again, for the first time.
Paul - 00:07:12:
Wow, that's extraordinary. I felt like when I was reading the book, that somehow you were channeling Jeannette. I felt like, her energy and her presence and her clarity and her, she was a driven woman. Somehow you were capturing all that. So did writing the book affect you in any way?
Lorissa - 00:07:38:
Yes, writing the book affected me immensely and deeply. In regard to channeling her, before I even wrote a single word, I spent six months reading everything she had written, listening to all of her oral histories, reading every newspaper article, basically, that was written about her, and just really trying to build her universe in my imagination. And then from there, I, you know, and then taking notes on that, making outlines and so on and so forth. But from there, once I had this greater understanding of her and her world, I was really able to write that book in six months. And it just really came out of me.
Paul - 00:08:21:
It flew through you.
Lorissa - 00:08:23:
Yeah, it flew through me. And it was interesting. I love my editor. My editor is very rigorous, as I know, for my first book, which required a great deal of editing. But this book, she sort of came back with the comments of, this is really ready to go. Here are a few notes. And it was very much unchanged. Don't get me wrong, her edits were integral to this book. But it was just sort of this natural process of writing. And then in terms of how this book changed me, it was a real education in American history. My, and we can get into this later, but my son's middle, my first son's middle name is Roosevelt. That is how much I love FDR and Eleanor. When I was growing up, I wanted to be Lauren Bacall and to have and have not. I wanted to fight Nazis and sing in a jazz club. I do hope I fight fascism in my own way, and I married a jazz musician, so I'm as close as I can get. But it really, researching Jeannette really made me consider or rather reconsider the inevitability of World War II. And this sort of crux in American history deserves to be looked at more closely and questioned as we are approaching a crucial moment in. World conflict at this point and we have to understand that the machinations of the industrial military-industrial complex in bringing about war. And whether or not, I mean, of course, course, the aims and the desire and the goals and the outcomes of World War II and America's participation and all the participation of the allied forces and all the sacrifices made were the right thing to do. But did we have to do that? And the answer, and I think as, as embodied in Jeannette's legacy is no, there could have been a better way. There could have been a way of peace.
Paul - 00:10:30:
Great. Well, let's come back to that as well. The path of peace is key. I want you, if you could explain, where did Winning the Earthquake, how did that title emerge as the title? And what is the context of that?
Lorissa - 00:10:45:
Yeah, so her, this ties directly to what we were just talking about, which is her famous phrase was, you can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. And her point was, there's no winning. You might have a victor of war. You might have one side that triumphs over the other, but war only perpetuates more war. And so the only way to win the earthquake, the only way to win the war is through a path of peace, to never fight it and to prepare for peace rather than prepare for war.
Paul - 00:11:16:
Excellent. Yeah, I wanted you to explain that. And so we need a peacequake is what I think you're saying.
Lorissa - 00:11:23:
Yes.
Paul - 00:11:24:
So now I want to shift gears a little bit. Thank you for sharing that. Really interesting. And congratulations again for the work that you did and for the. The craft, the writing craft that you demonstrate in this book. It's super important book. And I definitely see the movie as well. I was reading and going, Oh, this is a movie for sure. So, uh, I'm sure that may happen for you as well. But Jeannette, let's talk about her because she was fascinating. I mean, her early life in Montana and then her adventures and- I mean, she was like the prodigal daughter of her father. And I'm just I was trying to figure out, like, what drove her to be so committed to social justice and causes like the women's suffrage movement, like our improving our democracy and bringing peace to the world. Like there was something in her that drove her like in a relentless way. To pursue these causes. And I was trying to figure out what exactly that might have been from her childhood that made her so clear. And I couldn't quite get it. I don't know if you have an insight.
Lorissa - 00:12:40:
I think some people have that born within them and then it's fostered or it's not. And for Jeannette, it was perfectly fostered. So she grew up between two worlds. She was born in a rural ranch in Montana. She helped bring the cows in. She rode, you know, through the canyons. She helped raise her six other siblings. So she worked very hard. But she was also the daughter of a businessman. And so she had a great deal of privilege and she had a great deal of education, particularly for women of that time. Her parents, they had five daughters and one son and all but one survived until adulthood. And they made sure that all of their children went to college. That was rare. And then she also just was, I think, born with an abiding love of democracy. She would sit by the fire and read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as a child at night, the way that, you know, I would read Harriet the Spy or something to that degree, you know. And in addition, she was exposed at an early age to the injustices. Against the indigenous peoples in Montana. And she had a real visceral reaction to that. She knew immediately as a young girl that this was not acceptable and morally reprehensible. And she said so as a girl and throughout her adulthood, far before most white Americans even had a conception of the genocide waged against Native peoples of this country. So those things in combination of understanding hard work, having the privilege of education, an abiding love of democracy, and seeing true oppression up close as a young girl, I think came together in Jeannette to forge, as you said, this irrepressible desire to make her country and the world a more just and equitable place.
Paul - 00:14:54:
Yeah, exactly. I think that is the right analysis from what I gathered from your book, but also like she had what I call Revolutionary Optimism. She was so relentless and in her pursuit of justice. On these issues that you mentioned. It was extraordinary. So let's dig in a little bit. How did she first get involved in the women's right to vote? And this is such an important story that I didn't know anything about. She played a key role in the women's suffragette movement. I want you to share the story of how that emerged and how she became a national leader. And then ultimately where that led with her introducing the Susan B. Anthony amendment in the House of Representatives as the first ever woman of Congress. Oh, my God. What a trajectory.
Lorissa - 00:15:50:
What a hero's journey, right? And it starts in the best place possible. She was going to school for social work at the New York School of Philanthropy. And one of her assignments was to work at night court where women often exploited and forced into sex work, were being tried and convicted and sent to jail. And her job was to find first-time offenders that she could help and mentor and find alternative employment for. And if she could do that, then they would sort of be given a second chance. Her supervisor at night court was a woman and a suffragist and introduced her to the idea of suffrage. And even though Jeannette was in graduate school, already had a college degree, and was by all accounts a radically intelligent and educated woman, she had never heard that women had been fighting for their vote since Seneca Falls and before. And upon hearing this, Jeannette was so incensed that she immediately, not immediately, but very quickly devoted herself to the cause of women's suffrage because she really saw that universal enfranchisement was the cure for the ills of democracy. As she and several other suffragists would say, The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. And then that meant granting women the right to vote. So she went on to be instrumental in the suffrage campaigns in Washington, Oregon, and California. Now, I do want to preface this by saying a lot of folks don't know that before the 19th Amendment, women in various states had the right to vote. And it was actually those campaigns that tipped the balance when the sort of, formula of a majority in the Electoral College. Had granted women the right to vote, then they could push it through Congress, the Senate, and the electorate. Because if a party didn't support a woman's right to vote, and more than half the women had the right to vote, you could bet on never seeing the inside of the Oval Office again. So Jeannette was instrumental in changing this math. And then she went on to work for the National Association of Women's Suffrage. She was the field secretary, which is really sort of the main organizer, field organizer, right, doing grassroots. Campaigning in almost every state in the union, except in Hawaii and Alaska. And then she really felt called to spearhead independently the campaign in Montana. And at the time, and is now, Montana is incredibly rural. And it required a different type of... Organizing to get it done. And so what she was really uniquely capable of doing was empowering other people, men and women, to run their own local campaigns, not report back to her. She would give them advice and materials as was necessary, but she would empower them and trust them to do whatever they thought was needed then and there. And this was exceptionally successful. She gave a speech, I believe if I have my dates right, in 1911. On the floor of the Montana State House, where she was laughed and booed and jeered at. And both chambers overwhelmingly voted against women's suffrage. She was determined to have the last laugh. In two years, flipped both houses so that a mere two members in each voted against women's suffrage. The rest voted four. It then passed the Montana electorate with a sweeping majority, despite interference by the main sort of oligarchic corporation at the time, Anaconda Copper. And was then enshrined and, the Montana state constitution. It was then this political machine that she had built that she redirected to her own congressional campaign two years later that made her the first woman in Congress.
Paul - 00:19:59:
That was unbelievable, that story. It was so amazing the way she organized around the country. I mean, she would go to rural, remote areas. She would walk around with a soapbox and stand on a broken platform and talk to anyone, anywhere. And what I found really spectacular was her ability to tune into the various audiences and understand where. Their perspective might be coming from. And then she would adapt her message strategy to meet them where they were at. And it was like that gift of her, that was what made her a powerful advocate and politician, because she could really tap into people's own experience and make her call for women's suffrage relevant to them. And the thing that she did, which I so admire, was that she linked women's suffrage to the protection of women and women's reproductive health, as well as child rights and child protection, as well as worker rights and worker protection. And her advocacy around getting women the right to vote was linked to benefiting all men and women and all children. And she was able to articulate that. In a way that I think was likely instrumental in getting the tide to turn.
Lorissa - 00:21:29:
It was instrumental. And one of my favorite stories that I got to learn from the book was when she took a stagecoach to a small town in the Shasta Mountain region called French Gulch. And it was a mining town, much like Montana, the Montana town she grew up in. And she didn't have any way to call attention, right? It was just a stagecoach stop. It wasn't where she was going. But she got her soapbox and she stood in the middle of this town, which was composed of a hotel, a brothel, and six saloons. And she began making her speech. And she talked about specifically how she knew minors. She had grown up around minors. She knew how they were exploited. She knew that their wages were too low, that there weren't enough safety precautions, that they spent their lives in the service of making someone else's fortune while they were impoverished by that work. And that the women's vote, if they voted for women to be enfranchised, would help them. In their own journey for justice. And that town voted by 95% for women's suffrage. And this was true of many other places and particularly rural places that she would go to.
Paul - 00:22:48:
And that was before California had the women's suffrage, right?
Lorissa - 00:22:51:
That's right. This was in the women's suffrage campaign. Yes. So only men were voting.
Paul - 00:22:55:
Right. That's important.
Lorissa - 00:22:57:
Yes, it's incredibly important. I really think that's another thing that speaks to our moment today, right? Where we... Are wondering why folks in rural areas are voting against their interests so many times. And it's because... We need to channel Jeannette and go there and talk to them and listen to what they need and then reflect that back to them in the policies that we're proposing and enacting.
Paul - 00:23:25:
Well said. I agree with you on that for sure. So, I mean, she became a member of Congress and it was really like kind of extremely fascinating to me about how. The day she was sworn in within days, uh, the vote, uh, that President Wilson brought to Congress to go to war in World War I was brought to the House of Representatives. And her ability... To lead from the perch in Congress, the suffragette cause became immediately entwined with her, uh, call for peace. And the, there, there was like opposing forces that were pressuring her. And what I was struck by was her. Strength of her moral compass like she had an internal clarity an internal moral compass where she could handle all these wins. So could you explain that moment? And then that's a bridge to the- So she voted against World War I, not alone, but, share that story and then we'll go to the next one.
Lorissa - 00:24:40:
Yes. So yeah, her first day in Congress. Was as follows. She gets to Congress. Everyone gets up in the chamber. They all arrive before her. They applaud her. You know, every man in Congress and all the people in the gallery recognize this moment as incredibly important in American history. And there is this celebration across the aisles, across the political divide, whether or not they agree with suffrage or not. It's really, truly one of the most incredible moments of political unity, I think, that this country has ever seen. Then, she brings the articles for the 19th Amendment, the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. She introduces those to Congress. Then they adjourn for a short break. Wilson comes and asks for a declaration of war. Now, Jeannette has campaigned both in suffrage and her own congressional campaign on a staunch platform of peace, non-intervention, and disarmament. And for a long time, most suffragists agreed with her, and they were sort of all on board with the peace platform. But what happened was the American public, after a number of U-boat attacks, and not just the Lusitania, but ongoing U-boat attacks, the American public shifted, right? They shifted their opinion, and this was also due to, you know, sort of corporate newspaper reporting, moving public opinion in that direction for years. And so with that, Carrie Chapman Catt, who was the leader of sort of the largest suffragist organization, realized that if she trimmed her sails to the winds of war, then she would get women's suffrage faster, right? Because then women are on the patriotic, you know, ship. Meanwhile, Alice Paul, who is another one of the major, figures in suffrage is a Quaker. And so she's adamantly against war. And while the Senate is debating, these two figures, along with many, many others, are in Jeannette's office lobbying her to vote one way or the other. Jeannette said to all of them, well, to the ones lobbying her for war, I will wait to the last moment. And if I can see a reason to vote for war, I will. But all along, she knew that she would see no reason. She was just saying this really to placate them and as a way to buy herself some time. And When the vote came, it was a fear that her voting against the war would be seen as voting against American power and interests, and that it would damage the suffrage cause.
Paul - 00:27:42:
Do you think it did?
Lorissa - 00:27:45:
That's a complicated question, and I'm happy to talk about that. However, she, as you said, had a strong moral compass. And would not be swayed. Now ask your question, did that damage suffrage or not? It did not clearly damage suffrage getting through. However, and this is Jeannette's other... Sort of... Moral center is that she knew that war was antithetical to democracy. And so while women got the right to vote, perhaps more quickly because they supported the war or suffrage, the suffragists supported the war. What followed was the complete eradication of the rest of their agenda, right? As soon as they got the vote, the suffragists before the war planned on getting women's health funding passed through Congress, on getting reproductive rights, birth control, more child welfare, universal education, on and on and on. All of these things disappeared in the firestorm that was World War I. And so while in the short term it might have helped women's suffrage, in the long term it did not help America or, I believe, World War I or our democracy in general. Because all of these reforms were just absolutely swept away.
Paul - 00:29:14:
Yeah, at the peak of the progressive era.
Lorissa - 00:29:17:
Yes.
Paul - 00:29:18:
Thank you for that. Really, really important history. There's a lot more in the book, folks. Lorissa is giving you a quick overview of a really fascinating tapestry of history, intermovement battles, cross movement battles, like things that I experienced like regularly. It felt like it's the same thing going on today, like in civil society, how, you know, these conflicts and personalities and competing perspectives, you know, affect what happens in advocacy and campaigning now. It was so relevant. I was really struck by, like you said earlier, her long commitment to the vision of democracy. I think it was really interesting to me that she was clear that our democracy was a work in progress. She never saw it as being complete. But she did believe in the vision of liberty and democracy for all. Obviously, her work on the amendment to get women's suffrage was she understood that we needed to amend the Constitution as part of that. She then went on later in life and found the American Civil Liberties Union and continued to work on- Actually it was very interesting to learn that she worked on ranked choice voting and other, uh, popular vote, you know, shifting from, uh, to a popular vote, national popular vote. These are aspects of advocacy that are still going on today. Uh, so I just wondered if you could give like, uh, you know, help us understand the trajectory of her life around democracy and constitutional transformation, because she really understood that.
Lorissa - 00:31:02:
Yeah, she really understood that. And again, it was very, her experience was unique in that it led her to understand these on a visceral level. So actually, when she was elected in 1916, from Montana. Montana was an open state, which means everyone in Montana voted for both of their congresspeople. And so what this translated to was a multiple-member congressional district and rank-choice voting. And so what she was able to do was she would campaign and she would say, vote for your local man and Jeannette Rankin. And so she campaigned not on animosity, but on civility. And she found something in common with whoever the frontrunner was, right, wherever she was, complimented them. Tried to get them to compliment her. And then in that way, she was many, many people's number two, if not number one, candidate. And so she was able to get elected in this way. And as we look now, right, on many people's minds are these attempts to gerrymander red states and also now blue states. I'm not going to get into whether or not fighting fire with fire is a good idea or not. But in the end, voters are... Disenfranchised by these gerrymandering techniques. And what we really need to do once we're past this moment in our political history, and I do believe we will get past it, is take a look, a serious look at how we can actually hear the voice of the people. Because we're not hearing it now in the way that our elections are constructed. The other tenet of Jeannette's democratic reform was abolishing the Electoral College. I think to a lot of people that might seem totally insane and pie in the sky. But to me and to most other contemporary democracies, the Electoral College is. Not only anachronistic, but very problematic in that you have millions of people's voices who are excluded from the democratic process. And it also disincentivizes people from voting, right? How many people didn't vote in this last election?
Paul - 00:33:18:
37% of eligible voters, yeah.
Lorissa - 00:33:20:
Yeah, because they didn't think that their voice would matter, that if you live in Arkansas, it's going to go red. But if you abolish the Electoral College, your vote actually matters. It's one person, one vote. And so those are the three main tenets, ranked choice voting, multiple member congressional districts, and abolishing the Electoral College. And I'll conclude by saying... In order for democracy to grow, or rather, in order for democracy to survive, it needs to grow. Right now it's being suffocated. And that is why we're seeing all of these ruptures and crises because we're literally suffocating our democracy.
Paul - 00:34:03:
Yes, and what's exciting to me or interesting to me is that Jeannette had the foresight and understanding that the reforms that you're describing, that many activists and movements are working on even today. She was working on this 100 years ago.
Lorissa - 00:34:20:
Yeah, in 1916.
Paul - 00:34:22:
And over the course of the last century. It's a way for us to know now today that we're on the right trail. That we didn't figure this stuff out ourselves. It was an ongoing march towards making our democracy actually more representative with the people's voice. You mentioned something that I wanted to just quickly touch on, which is that other states had women had the right to vote before the 19th Amendment. Jeannette did not know that women were fighting for that. What I recently learned is that in the original 13 colonies, that under the Articles of Confederation, some of the states, actually, women had the right to vote, even back in the day. And then when the Constitution came into power after 1787, once it was ratified in 1789, those states where women had the right to vote lost it. Did you know that?
Lorissa - 00:35:21:
Yes, I did know that. And it is a never-ending source of disappointment and rage to me.
Paul - 00:35:27:
Rage? That's what I feel like. I was shocked when I learned that. I was angry, yeah.
Lorissa - 00:35:33:
A lot of why they lost it has to do with, deeply seated racism, fear of the other, and the impulses of the framers to preserve some of the monarchy's control over the people. And that was expressed both in, you know, revoking, right, the women's right to vote. At a federal level, taking that away from states, and also in the Electoral College and numerous other policies that were enacted by. You know, that founding government. And I always love to go back to Abigail Adams' famous letter to her husband, Remember the Ladies. But, um... The next line is rarely quoted. Which is, to paraphrase, if you don't, we will be determined to foment a rebellion. And I think we are still seeing that rebellion being fomented today in that women continue, even though we have the vote. We do not have representation, fair or equal or equitable representation in the government on any level.
Paul - 00:36:51:
Yeah, for 100 years of women having the right to vote, we have less than 25% female representation in Congress. And that ripples out through the, you know, the whole society, that inequity. So some countries actually, we're getting down a rabbit hole now, but some countries actually include in their constitution gender parity as part of establishing the future structure. So I'm imagining that is something we'll be debating here in the United States very soon.
Lorissa - 00:37:24:
Well, I just do want to say on your note of radical optimism, 33% of state houses, women now represent 33% of state house elected officials. And many studies show that this is a real tipping point in terms of a minority being able to affect change is that 33%.
Paul - 00:37:44:
This is over 100 years after women got the right to vote.
Lorissa - 00:37:47:
I know. I know, Paul. But let's go to radical optimism. And that once you write, revolutions happen over a long period of time and then flip. And even though we're in a very dark time. I actually think we are on the cusp of real revolution. And there are a number of factors that support this theory of mine. And one of them is that we are reaching this tipping point in women's representation in this country, despite how long it indeed has taken.
Paul - 00:38:19:
Okay. Well, I want to follow up immediately with that because I also agree with you that we are on the cusp of a transformational possibility. I even think it could happen in the next year. I don't know, but... What I wanted to share with you and my listeners is that as I'm reading this book, about Jeannette Rankin winning the earthquake. But it really affected me personally. And I kept, I was like, I'm doing my work on my advocacy and campaigning. And I was like, well, what would Jeannette do? I started asking the question, what would Jeannette do under these circumstances? So I wanted to ask you to really synthesize what we were just talking about. Like if we're on the cusp of a revolutionary transformation, like you and I agree, then what would Jeannette do? What advice does she have for us or would she have for us? And what are our marching orders? What's our assignment? You know that Jeannette would have like clarity I'm sure so I'm just like curious as to I'm just still in the questioning mode about like, what would Jeannette do? I'm still learning about her and learning about how she thought and acted. She was relentless and fearless. It was quite extraordinary.
Lorissa - 00:39:40:
So she was very close with her brother, Wellington. They were really allies and they accomplished a great deal together. And he wanted her to vote for World War I. And, but he supported her in her vote. And he said, they're going to crucify you, Jeannette. And she said, I don't care what they say about me today. I care what they say about me in 50 years. So when we are looking at our actions today, It's not about Are they... Venerated today or are they popular today? It's what is correct on the long moral arc of history. That's where our actions should be rooted. The other thing that I think Jeannette would ask us to do is to actively listen. In her first campaign, yes, she went out and she campaigned. But what she did first was her and her brother, Wellington, would conduct these very in-depth sort of listening tours on the trains coming into Helena.
Paul - 00:40:50:
He did polling. I mean, he did for the poll, yeah.
Lorissa - 00:40:52:
He did polling. Right. And so because these trains were coming in, they had access to sort of the entire population of Montana. And then it was on that information that they gathered that they based her platform. And so we need to stop telling the people what they should do and what they should want and how they should get it and start listening to them and then synthesizing that and reflecting it back. You know, our elected officials are not megaphones. They are the sum total of our voices. And that means to-
Paul - 00:41:29:
Theoretically, they should be is what you're saying.
Lorissa - 00:41:31:
Yes. Theoretically, they should be. And we need to start reflecting that. And then the third thing I think she would tell us to do is stay the course. Just have radical optimism, as you say. And that it doesn't matter if we see that change occur in a year or our lifetime. We just have to keep on marching.
Paul - 00:41:54:
Okay, final question. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. Final question was, she voted against World War I. She wasn't the only one, though. There were other 50 other members of the House that voted along with her about that. But then fast forward. Well, you didn't you didn't share the part of the story where she was a one term senator for in 1916 to 18. Then the state, the oligarchs reject is to introduce gerrymandering. And so she lost. But then later on in 19, I think you said 39.
Lorissa - 00:42:26:
39. Yeah,
Paul - 00:42:27:
She was able to win again and return to the House of Representatives. And there she faced another historic vote around World War II. If you could just end us with that story about her vote.
Lorissa - 00:42:42:
So I'll try to keep this brief, but so often in history, it's just represented that she voted no and she was an ornery woman and she didn't understand what the stakes were and what was happening. And from my research, I discovered that was, it was far more complicated than that, and she knew exactly what the stakes were. So from 1919 to 1939, Jeannette was deeply involved with the disarmament and peace movement. She was part of the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom delegation that went to Zurich to craft alternatives to the Tria Versailles. Nine of their resolutions Woodrow Wilson adopted into his 14 points that became the League of Nations, which became the United Nations. Should have adopted more, one of which was universal suffrage for all women across the world and the right to self-determination for colonies, right? This is something that they proposed in 1919, among other things. And unfortunately, not all of their... Proposals were adopted and all of them were rejected by the Treaty of Versailles, which of course paved the way for World War II in more ways than one. In addition, you know, I think is often forgotten in world and U.S. history is that there was this huge sense that the arms, global arms, the global arms race should be deterred and limited. And there were a number of different treaties throughout this period that tried to do just that. But the military industrial complex, not just the United States, but in Europe and Japan specifically, were not interested in abiding by those treaties and did everything they could to undermine them. And Jeannette, again, was instrumental in lobbying both in the United States and internationally on trying to get those treaties written, ratified and adhered to. And she did so to the point of personal impoverishment. She lived in a former sharecropper's cabin in Watkinsville, Georgia, for most of those years so that she could both be in touch with the rural population while being close to Athens and the intellectual community there, but be able to drive to Washington, D.C., where she did much of her lobbying work. And she didn't even have an indoor bathroom. So, and she famously used, I believe it was the New Republic as, old issues of the New Republic as toilet paper, as reported by her nieces and nephews. So she knew. She knew that the path to war leads to war, that if you prepare, she said, if you prepare for war, you will get war. If you prepare for peace, you will get peace. And so she had spent her whole life. Really, in the service of peace and democracy. And when it came to the moment, she could not sacrifice those morals, even though she knew she was sacrificing really her life. And she was a persona non grata for decades after that. And really walked off the stage as gracefully as you can. I would also say that she was not an idealist for the sake of idealism. Whenever a vote came up to supply... You know, the armed forces with munitions, blankets, food, what have you. She voted yes every single time. And in fact, she would race back to D.C., if she wasn't in the area to vote yes. Because she wanted to be on the record as supporting the people who are putting themselves in harm's way. And her legacy and her voice was really disappeared until the Vietnam War. When people started gravitating towards this sense of international peace again. And I'll just conclude by saying she led the first all-women peace march on Washington called the Jeannette Rankin Brigade in 1969, I believe. And this was really a turning point in the peace movement to see so many women from all walks of life demanding peace immediately.
Paul - 00:47:07:
Wow. What a contribution you're making, Lorissa. Thank you so much for bringing Jeannette Rankin back into our lives and into our consciousness and our hearts. I really hope this book takes off and many, many people read it. I think it's essential reading for anyone that cares about our history and the future of our country. So thank you again for this hard work that you did. And I'm so grateful that you shared it with us here today on Revolutionary Optimism.
Lorissa - 00:47:34:
Well, thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
Paul - 00:47:43:
Wow, I'm so excited to have had that interview with Lorissa Rinehart, the author of this forthcoming book, Winning the Earthquake, about the first ever woman elected to Congress, Jeannette Rankin. And I would say very clearly that Lorissa is a revolutionary optimist in that she dug into this history so deeply and presented it back to us to digest in a way that can inspire how we take action today. Like the book left me with asking the question, what would Jeannette Rankin do? And by any measure, Jeannette Rankin is a revolutionary optimist during her whole long 93-year life. Posthumanously, she is inspiring me and I'm sure many others by her legacy of action for justice, pro-democracy, women's rights, and standing up for the regular people of our country and making sure they had their basic needs met. Thank you, Jeannette. Thank you for all you did and all you're doing and all you will do going forward.
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