In the Northwest: Two new books that will stir your
progressive blood
'" If John Ashcroft is tapping your phone this winter -- as a
secret U.S. tribunal gave him expanded powers to do earlier
this week -- you can ply his minions with tales of how Wolf
and Rankin stood up to state power"
seattlepi.nwsource.com
By JOEL CONNELLY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST
An Alaska Airlines steward offered me the Wall
Street Journal, with its drum beat editorials
demanding lower taxes for the American rich, but
my airplane reading that day was the U-dub Press' new book,
"Hazel Wolf: Fighting the Establishment."
The Seattle Audubon Society's master organizer, who died a
couple of years back at age 101, was one tough old bird.
In this dreary season of discontent for Northwest progressives,
a pair of new biographies recount lives of women who
championed long-shot causes, fought corporate power and
stood for peace.
The second volume is "Jeanette Rankin: America's
Conscience," put out by the Montana Historical Society Press.
It chronicles the eventful 92-year life of a champion of
women's suffrage who was the first of her gender elected to
the U.S. House of Representatives.
Rankin voted against U.S. entry into World War I. Back in the
House nearly a quarter century later, she cast Congress' only
vote against declaring war on Japan. She would live to lead a
1968 march on Congress against the Vietnam War.
If John Ashcroft is tapping your phone this winter -- as a
secret U.S. tribunal gave him expanded powers to do earlier
this week -- you can ply his minions with tales of how Wolf
and Rankin stood up to state power.
Seriously, why read about these people?
Because, first of all, freethinking is in the blood of the West.
We need to keep it there.
Women won the vote here years before the Atlantic Seaboard.
In April 1910, Jeanette Rankin plastered the University
District with red and white posters proclaiming suffrage for
women. They won Washington in 1910, California a year later,
and Oregon in 1912.
As well, the impatient among us need lessons in
perseverance. Few tales can top Hazel Wolf's 14-year battle
against efforts by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service to deport her.
Eventually, she won.
The Victoria-born Wolf was a former member of the
Communist Party, emboldened to join by the Great Depression
and the economic struggles seen around her growing up.
In recent times, Wolf became Seattle's most adoringly
overpublicized old leftist. Young reporters penned adulatory
tributes at her 80th, 90th and 100th birthdays. Wolf cheerfully
joked about how venerable Seattle Post-Intelligencer
columnist Emmett Watson soft-pedaled her past membership
in the CP. "He did a nice job of pulling teeth from it," she
joked. "He made it sound like the Communist Party was a
gentle little program."
Wolf had no such illusion. She grew up class-conscious, didn't
like the rich or even the middle class.
When former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt declined to help in
her battle against deportation, Wolf observed:
"When asked to go against their class interests, the ruling
class is not going to stand up to it."
Hazel Wolf should have known Jeanette Rankin, product of an
upper-middle class family whose brother was one of Montana's
wealthiest men.
In 1917, on thin ice for voting against war, Rankin defied "The
Company" that ran Montana -- Anaconda Copper -- in a speech
to thousands of striking Butte miners. She scolded mine
owners for unsafe working conditions, low wages, and
blacklisting of union members in hiring. And she upbraided
the radical Industrial Workers of the World ("Wobblies") for
industrial sabotage.
Alas, the strike was broken. The affair was "a fiasco" for
Rankin, writes biographer Norma Smith. In her case, however,
political capital was to be spent -- not hoarded.
Rankin lost, retreating to rural Georgia and living in
near-poverty. Smith notes, "(The 1920s) was a bad time for
reformers. The Harding administration wanted to get back to
'normalcy.' President Calvin Coolidge said the 'business of
America is business.' . . . Reformers were not wanted. At best,
they hurt profits; at worst, they were Bolsheviks."
Sound familiar?
Ultimately, however, both women triumphed -- each in her
own way.
The early-20th century suffragette, Rankin, would live to see
a new women's movement grow late in the century, dedicated
to full economic and gender equality.
She would watch a revitalized peace movement force the
United States to de-escalate the Vietnam War.
Wolf would be transformed from a strident class warrior into a
persuasive, effective voice for protecting the natural world of
the Northwest.
She would help save the Nisqually Delta from becoming a log
export port. She would spearhead the drive to keep Bowerman
Basin at Grays Harbor -- key stopping point in birds' Pacific
flyway -- from being transformed into a landfill. She would
build bridges between upper-middle-class greens and
Northwest Indian tribes and labor unions.
At some points, one disagrees with these admiring biographies
(Wolf's largely told in her own words to author Susan
Starbuck).
As Jeanette Rankin fought President Franklin D. Roosevelt's
efforts to confront Hitler's Germany and Imperial Japan, this
reader rooted for FDR. Peace is a high value. Still, it must
never supplant America's commitments to democracy,
pluralism and freedom.
Hazel Wolf became a committed supporter of the Marxist
Sandinista government in Nicaragua, one of the Americans --
nicknamed "Sandalistas" -- ready to airbrush the regime's
flaws.
Yet, these were two great ladies. Each was courageous, classy
and tenacious. Neither -- ever -- was willing to give up.
And both were products of our part of the world.
P-I columnist Joel Connelly can be reached at 206-448-8160 or
joelconnelly@seattlepi.com
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