Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms was born March 27, 1880, in
Cleveland Ohio. Although attending private schools she received most of her
education from her father. He sent her
to investigate living conditions among streetcar employees when she was
sixteen. Later that year he became
William McKinley’s presidential campaign manager and she accompanied him on a
national tour. In 1898 he was elected US
Senator and she served as his personal secretary.
Ruth married Medill McCormick, a newspaperman, in 1903 and
the settled in Chicago and had three children. They shared an interest and
politics and she helped him get elected to the US House of Representatives in
1916 and to the Senate in 1918. Ruth was
selected as the first chairman of the Women’s Executive Committee of the
Republican National Committee. In 1924
she became the Republican National Committee woman from Illinois and organized
a network of statewide women’s Republican clubs with several thousand members.
After Medill died in 1925, Ruth ran for Republican
congressman-at-large from Illinois, declaring, “I am no longer a suffragette or
a feminist, I am a politician.” She won
the election but after only two months in office decided to run for the Senate
in 1930. She won the primary but lost
the election and sought an elected position again.
In 1926 she bought control of a newspaper in Rockford,
Illinois and four years later added a second newspaper and a radio station.
In 1932 she married Albert Simms a retired Congressman from
New Mexico. After this marriage Ruth
withdrew from politics and founded a girl’s school in Albuquerque, and maintained
a large sheep and cattle ranch in Colorado.
She returned to the political life for a short time to help Wendell
Wilkie in his presidential campaign in 1940 and Thomas E. Dewey’s in 1944.