Not all politics is party politics. Nowhere is this fact more apparent than within the boundaries of South Dakota. Although the state is known for its agrarian conservatism, political tradition in the land of infinite variety is more than simply Republican or Democrat. An awareness of the influence of culture lies at the core of understanding the decisions of political leaders and voters alike. In this capstone volume of The Plains Political Tradition series, editors Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Paula M. Nelson gather essays from historians and other scholars who identify major influences on the political culture of South Dakota. Against a backdrop of agricultural ups and downs, varied religious beliefs, worldwide conflict, and powerful personalities, the authors examine ingredients critical to the success and failure of civic movements, legislation, and political campaigns and careers.

The Great Plains has long been home to unconventional and leading-edge politics, from the fiery Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan to the country’s first female U.S. representative and first female governor to the nation’s only single-house state legislature. Great Plains Politics provides a lively tour of the Great Plains region through the civic and political contributions of its citizens, demonstrating the importance of community in the region. Great Plains Politics profiles six men and women who had a profound impact on the civic and community life of the Great Plains: Wilma Mankiller, the first woman chief of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and a political activist at both the local and the national levels; Virginia Smith, an educator from Nebraska who served as a U.S. representative in Congress; Junius Groves, an African American farmer and community builder from Kansas; George McGovern, a South Dakota senator whose 1972 presidential campaign galvanized widespread grassroots support; Robert Dole, a Kansas congressman and longtime senator as well as the Republican candidate for U.S. president in 1988; and Harriet Elizabeth Byrd, the first African American elected as a state representative in Wyoming. The lives of these individuals illustrate the robust and enduring civic and community involvement of inhabitants of the Great Plains and presage a hopeful continuation of its storied political tradition.

American democratic ideals, civic republicanism, public morality, and Christianity were the dominant forces at work during South Dakota’s formative decade. What? In our cynical age, such a claim seems either remarkably naïve or hopelessly outdated. Territorial politics in the late-nineteenth-century West is typically viewed as a closed-door game of unprincipled opportunism or is caricatured, as in the classic film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, as a drunken exercise in bombast and rascality. Now Jon K. Lauck examines anew the values we like to think were at work during the founding of our western states. Taking Dakota Territory as a laboratory for examining a formative stage of western politics, Lauck finds that settlers from New England and the Midwest brought democratic practices and republican values to the northern plains and invoked them as guiding principles in the drive for South Dakota statehood. Prairie Republic corrects an overemphasis on class conflict and economic determinism, factors posited decades ago by such historians as Howard R. Lamar. Instead, Lauck finds South Dakota’s political founders to be agents of Protestant Christianity and of civic republicanism—an age-old ideology that entrusted the polity to independent, landowning citizens who placed the common interest above private interest. Focusing on the political culture widely shared among settlers attracted to the Great Dakota Boom of the 1880s, Lauck shows how they embraced civic virtue, broad political participation, and agrarian ideals. Family was central in their lives, as were common-school education, work, and Christian community. In rescuing the story of Dakota’s settlers from historical obscurity, Prairie Republic dissents from the recent darker portrayal of western history and expands our view and understanding of the American democratic tradition.

Territorial politics in the late-nineteenth-century West is typically viewed as a closed-door game of unprincipled opportunism or is caricatured, as in the classic film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, as a drunken exercise in bombast and rascality. Now Jon K. Lauck examines anew the values we like to think were at work during the founding of our western states. Taking Dakota Territory as a laboratory for examining a formative stage of western politics, Lauck finds that settlers from New England and the Midwest brought democratic practices and republican values to the northern plains and invoked them as guiding principles in the drive for South Dakota statehood.

The story behind the unseating of a Senate majority leader the race between Tom Daschle and John Thune in South Dakota was widely acknowledged as “the other big race of 2004.” Second in prominence only to the presidential race, the Daschle-Thune contest pitted the rival political ideologies that have animated American politics since the 1960s. In a sign of the ongoing strength of political conservatism, Daschle became the first Senate leader in fifty years to lose a re-election bid. Historian Jon K. Lauck, a South Dakotan who was an insider during that heated campaign, now offers a multilayered examination of this hard-fought and symbolically charged race. Blending historical narrative, political analysis, and personal reflection, he offers a close-up view of the issues that divide the nation—a case study of the continuing clash between liberalism and conservatism that has played out for more than a generation in U.S. politics. Daschle vs. Thune moves beyond the nitty-gritty of public policy to deftly show how the recent past continues to shape the ongoing political battles that animate pundits and bloggers. It is a compelling story told by a writer who knows both his home ground and how it fits into the wider U.S. context.

In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics--the politics of ethnocide--played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of aboriginal people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald's "National Dream." It was a dream that came at great expense: the present disparity in health and economic well-being between First Nations and non-Native populations, and the lingering racism and misunderstanding that permeates the national consciousness to this day. " Clearing the Plains is a tour de force that dismantles and destroys the view that Canada has a special claim to humanity in its treatment of indigenous peoples. Daschuk shows how infectious disease and state-supported starvation combined to create a creeping, relentless catastrophe that persists to the present day. The prose is gripping, the analysis is incisive, and the narrative is so chilling that it leaves its reader stunned and disturbed. For days after reading it, I was unable to shake a profound sense of sorrow. This is fearless, evidence-driven history at its finest." -Elizabeth A. Fenn, author of Pox Americana "Required reading for all Canadians." -Candace Savage, author of A Geography of Blood "Clearly written, deeply researched, and properly contextualized history...Essential reading for everyone interested in the history of indigenous North America." -J.R. McNeill, author of Mosquito Empires