September 5, 2024
by Greg Pape, poetry faculty
On the campus of the University of Montana, where I taught from 1987 to 2016, one of the older buildings where I met classes was called Rankin Hall. At one time it had housed the law school; before that it was the University Library. The classrooms had character, old oak desks, railings, steps, and stages with the patina of decades of use. One entered the three-story brick-on-stone edifice, built in 1908, up a short flight of stairs to a concrete landing and through an arched doorway into the cool, dimly lit hall. On the wall beside the staircase to the second floor, there is a portrait of Jeannette Rankin, whose ghost was said to haunt the building. She stood straight and proud, dressed in a warm cloak, white lace collar, bold feathered hat, and elbow-length gloves. The first few times I passed her on my way to class she seemed, in a glance, a benevolent presence from the distant past, a charming old photographic portrait of a woman, composed and tolerant in the moment the camera’s shutter opened to capture her image.
As the days went on, I found myself nodding hello to her as I entered the building and giving her a look when I left. Her gaze was relaxed, unassuming, but if you gazed at her, she gazed back. I could see how the ghost story got started. I had no idea who she was, but I liked her, and she sometimes seemed to have a sisterly regard for me. “Wish me luck,” I’d say to her portrait on a day I’d enter a new class for the first time. “Give me the good words,” I’d say on a day the workshop might seem challenging. Sometimes she seemed, with her gaze, to say “Be patient, kind, and don’t forget, all the moments count.” After a while I developed a good sense of who she must have been. In town there was a small office and shop that sold hand-made imported items to raise money for women in need. The sign on the door said Jeannette Rankin Peace Center.
When I did a little research, I found out some startling things about the ghost of Rankin Hall. Why didn’t I learn about her in school? Here is a page from one of my journals, a draft of a poem I never finished:
In 1987 I met her ghost.
We have been friends now
for thirty years, or so I imagine
I have many friends among ghosts,
more and more as the years pass,
and when I am gone I hope
to have friends among the living.
This is not about me, it’s about
a woman who grew up on a small
ranch near Missoula, Montana Territory,
the oldest of seven children, with five
sisters, one who died in childhood,
and one brother. She was a caretaker
of children and animals, a ranch hand
who worked at carpentry, machine repair,
cleaning, cooking, and sewing. I read
how, at ten years old, she took needle
and thread and sewed up a gash
in the shoulder of a horse.
Early on she understood that women
without the vote were second-class citizens,
and that the lack of women’s presence
in the halls of government had much to do
with what was wrong with the world.
She would do all she could to fix things. She was the first woman to be elected to the U.S.
Congress. One of her first acts was to vote no on Woodrow Wilson’s resolution to enter World War I. “War is a stupid and futile way of attempting to settle international difficulties,” she said. “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” Her first term in Congress ended in 1919.
She continued to work for women’s rights and peace (as you can see at rankinfoundation.org), and in 1940 she was elected to a second term in Congress. On December 7,1941, she cancelled a speaking engagement in Detroit and prepared herself for the difficult moment in which she would cast the only no vote for entry into World War II. She was booed and jeered as she quickly retreated to the cloak room. She had to lock herself in a phone booth, where she called the Capitol Police to escort her to her office.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she still made an occasional visit to that office. I have heard recently from reliable sources that the good ghost of Rankin Hall may still be heard or glimpsed along the stairwells and in the classrooms, even in daylight.
Greg Pape is the author of A Field of First Things (Accents Publishing, 2023) and ten other books. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Colorado Review, Cutbank, Iowa Review, Kyoto Journal, The Louisville Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and others. Former Poet Laureate of Montana, he serves on the MFA poetry faculty of Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann School of Writing.
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