Rankin the humane office director?
Today’s Old News is half-baked, but at least I know it, unlike all the other times when Gentle Reader has had to clue me in via email:
“Actually, my dear, [that person’s] life is well documented. But an amusing effort as always.”
I know I haven’t done sufficient research this time. I write this during Thanksgiving week, when Style meets reasonable but early deadlines. Deadlines! From the words “dead” and “line.”
Just now, as I dragged my eyes into the archives, they bumped into what Spidey sense suggests is a fascinating dead Arkansan. In the Nov. 24, 1921, Arkansas Gazette, next to an ad with a border of Christmas bells (on Nov. 24!), I read:
Refuses to Leave Old Statehouse
A controversy over possession of offices in the old statehouse likely will result over the action of the Board of Trustees of the Arkansas War Memorial yesterday in requesting W.M. Rankin, state humane officer, to vacate his offices in the old building.
An act of the last legislature placed the building in charge of the Board of Trustees to be fitted up as a memorial building. Mr. Rankin holds a state office and contends that he is entitled to use of offices in the old building.
This board meant to collect donations statewide to beautify the Old State House grounds. Then convicts would remodel the building, using donated materials.
My first thought was, “Didn’t all the state employees fit into the new Capitol?” My second thought was, “What’s a state humane officer? Could the Humane Society possibly have been a state agency?”
Turns out, from (I don’t know when) until about 1921, Arkansas had a statewide Arkansas Humane Society, and for many years its director, Rankin, appointed county humane officers. State statutes gave him authority to suppress cruelty to animals and the right to wear a gun.
But he also tried to help abused, abandoned and runaway children and abused women and prostitutes. He dared to investigate cruelty to prisoners at prison farms, but the state attorney general opined that he did not have authority to suppress cruelty to people.
In 1908, he shared a space in the Martin Building. Also in 1908, he survived appendicitis.
In March 1913, the state Legislature granted the Humane Society rent-free offices at the Old State House, along with the U.S. Agriculture Department, the University of Arkansas law and medical departments, and the State Historical Museum Association. They and other agencies paid the cost of maintaining their areas, which by the way saved the Old State House from being razed. (See “A Pictori
al History of Arkansas’s Old State House,” University of Arkansas Press, 2011.)
Mister Google has loaned me his digital copy of “The Humane Movement in the United States, 1910-1922” by William J. Schultz, PhD, published in 1924 by Columbia University in New York. (See arkansasonline.com/1129handy). Schultz explains that some state humane societies arose after the Civil War in a national concern about cruelty to farm animals, and meanwhile, separate societies sprang up to deal with child abuse. In 1877, delegates from these states got together to create the American Humane Society. In short order, the state chapters merged their animal and child concerns.
“As a single example,” Schultz writes in 1924, “the Arkansas Humane Society, now inactive, was originally organized for the protection of animals. In 1909 after a startling case of brutality to a child, it was given jurisdiction over children as well, and was reincorporated as a statewide organization. From then until the entry of America into the World War, it struggled to maintain both fields with varying success until its demise.”
Rankin appears to have made a few enemies by being an ally of progressive city leaders who wanted to focus on reforming the (shockingly) vile red light district downtown. In 1910, just as future Mayor Charles Taylor was beginning his amazing career in city politics, Rankin caused a dust-up by writing to a board member of the Little Rock Florence Crittenton Home that there were 100 starving children in Little Rock. Then-Mayor William R. Duley vetoed a resolution that would have added Humane Officer Rankin to the regular police force, accusing him of maligning the city (see arkansasonline.com./1129FCH).
Rankin ran for Big Rock constable in 1911 and lost in a nasty campaign.
During Prohibition, he was state humane officer and state Prohibition officer. He attended raids on stills and stored confiscated booze in his offices at the Old State House. (I haven’t figured out yet when he left those offices.)
In the 1930s-40s, as United States Commissioner, he judged all kinds of cases that seem to have in common one element: crossing state lines. One doesn’t read much about U.S. Commissioners these days, but they sound like people who could keep busy in 2021. The post was judicial and federal, and its duties related to enforcing federal laws in states that weren’t sufficiently eager to do that themselves. See arkansasonline.com/1129next.
Commissioner Rankin adjudicated a lot of cases in which a stolen auto crossed a state line. Also, he judged people for failing to report to the draft board, violating the Mann Act, violating the National Juvenile Delinquency Act, stealing a roll of poultry wire and selling it for $7, forgery, fraudulently applying for a family allowance while being in the U.S. military, unlawful flight to avoid arrest, impersonating a federal officer, illegally wearing a U.S. Army uniform, attempted robbery from a common carrier, default on a bond, being a convict who carried a piston from one state to another, receiving a government allotment check meant for one man while married to another, harboring a draft evader, stealing two cases of cigarettes … taking government property, stealing an engineer’s truck, misuse of supplemental gasoline … selling tires without surrender of tire ration certificates, kidnapping, withholding taxes, cattle theft … obtaining money under false pretenses … violating federal narcotics laws, transmitting unauthorized instructions at Adams Field … .
One time he arraigned a bank robber in the bank robber’s hospital room.
From an article in the Sept. 3, 1944, Gazette, we know he was born in Louisiana and came to Arkansas in his boyhood. He was deputy sheriff at Lake Village before becoming in 1909 Arkansas’ first probation officer and serving four years. He was state humane officer for the next 12 years. He served three terms as U.S. Commissioner, resigning in 1946.
William Melvin Rankin (1878-1948) was married to Ruth Hornor Rankin (18821952), and they had four children. A member of the Arkansas Pioneers Association, she was active in the United Daughters of the Confederacy and conducted at least 46 annual Christmas parties for elderly residents of the Arkansas Confederate Home at Sweet Home. She lived briefly in that home before her death. She also helped found Goodwill Industries in Arkansas.
There’s much more in the archives about the Rankins, but my deadline has arrived. I await your gracious and gentle corrections.