Ruth Hanna McCormick

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Ruth Hanna McCormick (March 27, 1880–December 31, 1944) was a United States Representative from Illinois.

Ruth Hanna McCormick was the daughter of Mark Hanna and the wife of Sen. Joseph Medill McCormick and later Albert G. Simms, hence her maiden name Ruth Hanna and name upon death Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms are also seen in the literature. McCormick took an active role in the women's suffrage movement.

McCormick was born in Cleveland, Ohio where she attended Hathaway Brown School. Later, she attended the Dobbs Ferry School in New York and the Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. She owned and operated a dairy and breeding farm near Byron, Illinois and was the publisher and president of the Rockford Consolidated Newspapers in Rockford, Illinois.

McCormick was the chairman of the first woman’s executive committee of the Republican National Committee, and an associate member of the national committee 1919-1924, in the latter year becoming the first elected national committeewoman from Illinois and served until 1928. She was an active worker for the suffrage amendment from 1913 until the United States Constitution was amended. She was elected as a Republican to the Seventy-first Congress (March 4, 1929-March 3, 1931) (House of Representatives, Illinois, At Large) but was not a candidate for renomination in 1930 as she had received the Republican nomination for United States Senator in which election she was unsuccessful. She resumed her newspaper interests. She married Albert Gallatin Simms, of New Mexico, who was also a Member of the Seventy-first Congress and resided in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She died in Chicago, Illinois in 1944 and was buried in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

[edit] Bibliography

Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
Miller, Kristie. Ruth Hanna McCormick: A Life in Politics, 1880-1944. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992.
Miller, Kristie. “Ruth Hanna McCormick and the Senatorial Election of 1930.” Illinois Historical Journal, 81 (Autumn 1988): 191-210.