Ruth McCormick Simms was a United States Representative from Illinois and active in the women's suffrage movement.
Background
Ruth Hanna McCormick was born on March 27, 1880 in Cleveland, Ohio, the second daughter and youngest of three children of Marcus Alonzo Hanna, Ohio business and political entrepreneur, and Charlotte Augusta (Rhodes) Hanna. Her mother, a sister of the historian James Ford Rhodes, was a daughter of Daniel Pomeroy Rhodes, a wealthy coal and iron merchant who had come to Ohio from Vermont.
Education
Ruth Hanna attended the Hathaway-Brown School in Cleveland, the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and Miss Porter's School, Farmington, Connecticut.
Career
Through her father she was early exposed to politics, but her active involvement followed her marriage.
The presence at the wedding of President Theodore Roosevelt, two weeks after his endorsement by the Ohio Republican convention had dashed Mark Hanna's purported presidential ambitions, attracted additional attention to the elaborate event. Both Mrs. McCormick and her husband actively supported Roosevelt's bid for the presidency in 1912, and Medill McCormick, running as a Progressive, was elected that year to the first of two terms in the Illinois legislature.
Ruth McCormick now became a lobbyist before the legislature for a number of causes, among them the child labor law sought by the Consumers' League in 1915 and minimum-wage legislation sponsored by the Women's Trade Union League. Her greatest success came during the legislative session of 1913, in which the Progressive bloc held the balance of power, when she worked successfully for the passage of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Act, extending to women the right to vote in municipal and presidential elections. After this victory, she served for two years (1913 - 15) as chairman of the Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the major body lobbying for a federal suffrage amendment.
Her husband, who had followed a similar with her political course, was elected to Congress in 1916 and to the Senate in 1918.
When the Republican party in December 1918 created a Women's National Executive Committee, she was appointed its first chairman. In 1920 she was placed on the party's regular National Executive Committee.
During her tenure she consistently argued against separation of the sexes in political affairs, even opposing the League of Women Voters as "a political fifth wheel. " In 1924, when the Republican National Committee was reorganized to include one committeeman and one committeewoman from each state, she was unanimously elected to represent Illinois.
Medill McCormick was defeated for reelection in the Republican primary in 1924, the year before he died. Convinced that his defeat was partly the result of a low level of political activity by Republican women, Ruth Hanna McCormick over the next four years organized effective women's Republican clubs in 90 of Illinois's 102 counties. In so doing she created for herself a potent statewide political "machine. "
Refusing in 1928 to join the drive to overthrow the dominant Republican faction led by Mayor William Hale Thompson of Chicago, she skillfully avoided the pitfalls and blandishments of factional politics by becoming a candidate for one of the state's two at-large Congressional seats, on a platform of "no promises and no bunk. "
Now a professional politician in her own right, she topped a slate of eight candidates in the April primary and led the Republican ticket in the general election, garnering 1, 700, 000 votes.
She thus became the first woman in the United States to win a statewide election. Announcing her candidacy for the Senate shortly after this election, she swamped the incumbent Senator, Charles S. Deneen, in the 1930 primary, only to be defeated in November by former Senator J. Hamilton Lewis, whom Medill McCormick had unseated in 1918.
Lewis in his campaign made an issue of her previously strong support of prohibition, as well as the Republican party's economic failures. During the 1930's Mrs. McCormick devoted herself largely to her personal affairs. Three Rockford, Illinois, newspapers that she had purchased in the late 1920's were merged in 1930 into the Rockford Consolidated Newspapers, Inc. , which also acquired a radio station.
Mrs. Simms owned a ranch in the Jackson Hole country of Wyoming, which she had used as a summer retreat. After her second marriage, she moved to a ranch near Albuquerque, New Mexico, and her activities increasingly became centered in the Mountain States.
Since 1912 she had also owned Rock River Farm in Byron, Illinois, which she had helped develop into a model in the production of certified milk, the raising of Holstein dairy cattle, and the growing of alfalfa.
She sold this property in 1937 and acquired the 250, 000-acre cattle- and sheep-raising Trinchera Ranch near Fort Garland, Colo.
In 1934 Mrs. Simms founded the Sandia School for Girls at Albuquerque, which she ran until 1942. As a memorial to her son, killed in a mountain-climbing accident in 1938, she also endowed the Fountain Valley School in Colorado. A bitter opponent of New Deal domestic and foreign policies, Mrs. Simms reemerged on the national political scene in 1939 as co-chairman of the Dewey for President Committee. In 1941 she identified herself with the principles of "America First. " She rejoined the Republican National Committee in 1944 as committeewoman from New Mexico, and served the same year as leader of the Mountain States division of the Draft Dewey Committee.
In October 1944 Mrs. Simms fractured her right shoulder in a fall from a horse and entered Billings Hospital in Chicago. On December 4, three days after her release, she returned to Billings and underwent emergency surgery for acute hemorrhagic pancreatitis. She died there on December 31 and was buried in Fairview Cemetery, Albuquerque.
Achievements
Politics
Unbridled as a youth, in political appearances she affected a rather severe air in dress and mien, dramatically offset by her vivacity and sharp repartee in conference or on the platform. Despite her early association with the Progressive party and later with Midwestern agrarian liberalism (she was an active floor leader for Frank O. Lowden at the 1920 and 1928 Republican conventions and a supporter of the McNary-Haugen farm bills), Mrs. McCormick was essentially a highly partisan Republican regular.
Mrs. McCormick advocated military preparedness before America's entry into World War I and later bitterly opposed both the League of Nations and the World Court.
Personality
In appearance Mrs. McCormick was tall and slender with prominent dark eyes.
Connections
On June 10, 1903, she married to Joseph Medill McCormick of Chicago who was to serve briefly as publisher of the Chicago Tribune before entering a political career. The McCormicks had three children: Katherine (Katrina) Augusta, John Medill (1916), and Ruth Elizabeth (1921).
On March 9, 1932, she married Albert Gallatin Simms, a New Mexico banker and former Congressional colleague, in Colorado Springs.