I’ve been out on the road for the past several days trying (and failing) to get a vacation. Aside from getting a few hundred miles away, only having to turn around, I did get to see my aunt who turns 89 soon, who I hadn’t seen in 5 years.
In the back & forth, I did manage to pick up some political items in my travels. One of the items I was really pleased to find (and picked up today) was a South Dakota Item I hadn’t seen before:
Slightly larger than a baseball card, as part of their campaigning, candidates would hand out blotter paper with their information on it, similar to today’s palm cards, with the opposite side being composed of absorbent blotter paper for people to use after they wrote something with a fountain pen (predating ball point pens).
Running out of Pierre, Burke was elected to the South Dakota House of Representatives in 1895 and 1897. He ran for the United States House of Representatives in 1898, won election, and remained in that position through 1907, losing the nomination for the 1906 election, although he won again in 1908 and remained in the House through 1915, serving as Minority whip from 1913 through 1915. In 1914, he received the nomination for the United States Senate seat from South Dakota and chose not to run for reelection to the House. (Via Wikipedia)
Burke actually lost this Senate race, but was later named Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the 1920’s. And the town of Burke, South Dakota is named for him.
Nice, and a relevant slogan, entirely correct unfortunately emotion sways most people more than logical reasoning. It would be interesting to know if he chose that because of something specific happening at the time. We’ve always had conflict and special interests, worth remembering rather than romanticizing the past, but by most accounts it’s just never been this bad.
Your post was interesting to me. My grandfather August Erickson lived South of
Reliance SD, North side of the White river during those dates. I’ve got his homestead deed dated 1901. He went back to Sweden to find a wife in 1897. He was unsuccessful. I was born in Burke, SD 1952.