Born in Cleveland on March 27, 1880, Ruth Hanna was a daughter of Mark Hanna and a niece of James Ford Rhodes. She attended the Hathaway-Brown School in Cleveland, the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and Miss Porter╒s in Farmington, Connecticut. She received an education in practical spheres by accompanying her father as he attended to business and labor problems and to the organization and campaigns of the Republican party.
In June 1903 she married Joseph Medill McCormick of the Chicago newspaper family. President Theodore Roosevelt attended the wedding. She and her husband shared an interest in progressive social ideas and reform and for a time lived at the University of Chicago Settlement of Mary E. McDowell. She was active in the National Civic Federation the Women╒s Trade Union League, the National Child Welfare Association, and the Illinois Consumers╒ League. In 1913 she lobbied the Illinois legislature to great effect on behalf of the bill to grant women the franchise, and in 1913╨1915 she headed the Congressional Committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She also lobbied the legislature on behalf of child-labor and minimum wage legislation.
With her husband McCormick supported Roosevelt╒s breakaway Progressive party in 1912, but she later returned to Republican regularity. She supported military preparedness before World War I and opposed the Versailles treaty and the League of Nations afterward. In December 1918 she was named first chairman of the newly established women╒s executive committee of the Republican National Committee, and in 1920 she became a member of the executive committee of the national committee. In 1924 she was chosen national committeewoman from Illinois. Following her husband╒s defeat for reelection to his Senate seat in 1924 and his death in 1925 she became yet more active. After organizing scores of local Republican women╒s clubs throughout the state she ran successfully for an at-large congressional seat in 1928; her 1.7 million votes (a 400,000 plurality) led the ticket in Illinois.
In 1930 McCormick entered and won the Republican primary for a Senate seat but was defeated by Senator J. Hamilton Lewis in November after a campaign marked by charges against her of political expediency and excessive campaign expenditures. She then turned to her business interests a group of three newspapers in Rockford, Illinois, that she had bought in the late 1920s and combined in 1930, and a radio station. In March 1932 she married Albert G. Simms, a former congressman from New Mexico. In 1934 she founded the Sandia School for Girls in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Much of her time was spent at her Illinois dairy farm and at ranches in Wyoming and later in New Mexico and then near Fort Garland, Colorado. She reentered active politics in 1939 as co-chairman of the preconvention Dewey for President Committee. In 1944 she again served on the Republican National Committee and again supported Thomas E. Dewey for the presidential nomination. She died in Chicago on December 31, 1944.
