December 8 · This Day in America
The day after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt walks into a packed House chamber and asks for war. The vote is a formality; the country is already certain. The Senate is unanimous. The House is 388 to 1. The one is Jeannette Rankin of Montana — the first woman ever elected to Congress, a lifelong pacifist who had also voted against entering the First World War. "As a woman I can't go to war," she says, "and I refuse to send anyone else." Colleagues hiss; she has to take refuge in a phone booth until the Capitol police can escort her out. She knows the vote will end her career, and it does. America goes to war with near-total unity, as it must. And the system that demands that unity still leaves room, just barely, for one citizen to stand alone and say no. Both things are the country.
Source: history.house.gov
Also on this day · 1980
A little before 11 p.m., John Lennon returns to his apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side and is shot by a man he had signed an autograph for hours earlier. He is forty. Within days, hundreds of thousands gather in Central Park and around the world in silence to mourn a man who had spent the back half of his life singing, sometimes naively and sometimes unbearably well, that peace was a thing people could simply choose. The grief is enormous, and quiet, and global.
Source: www.loc.gov
“As a woman I can't go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.”Rep. Jeannette Rankin, 1941