I was probably the only 3-year-old in
South Dakota to own a “Janklow Sucks” t-shirt during Bill Janklow’s
second of four terms as governor. Janklow served two terms from
1978 to 1986 and two more from 1994 to 2002; in 2002 we elected him
to represent our state — which has fewer people than metro Tucson
— in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Our longtime
leader inspired strong reactions from nearly everybody in South
Dakota, ranging from disgust to adulation. Judging by the length of
his career, most felt admiration. My parents who outfitted me so
outrageously stood with the minority. So I’m not the best
constituent to write an elegy for my representative’s political
career. Here goes nothing.
On Aug. 16, Janklow’s Cadillac
hit a Harley-Davidson and killed its rider–a farmer, volunteer
firefighter and Vietnam veteran. Janklow drove through a rural stop
sign at 71 mph. On Monday, Dec. 8, a jury in his hometown convicted
him of second-degree manslaughter and reckless driving. After the
verdict, he resigned from Congress, leaving South Dakota
unrepresented in the House until he is replaced sometime next
year.
Janklow’s tragic flaw was his arrogance. That road
was his, and no motorcycle had any business being there. Though no
police officer dared give him a ticket while he was governor,
Janklow collected a dozen speeding tickets in one four-year period
between terms. But in that flaw gleamed his allure to voters. The
rationale was something like, “He’s a little harsh, but by God he
gets things done.” More importantly, he talked a tough
line.
You could hear it in the 1970s, when, as a newly
elected attorney general, he complained, “Ten years ago a person in
this state didn’t have to lock his car door.” Many South Dakotans
mourned the same small-town paradise lost, and at the time followed
Janklow in blaming it largely on the radical American Indian
Movement. Only months before he was elected attorney general in
1974, Janklow famously remarked, “The only way to deal with the
Indian problem in South Dakota is to put a gun to the AIM leaders’
heads and pull the trigger.” His most significant victory over
Indian activists, however, was a tear gas attack on some young
Yankton Sioux activists — not involved with AIM — who occupied a
pork-processing plant for a day.
As governor, Janklow
created the illusion of lowering crime rates by converting the
University of South Dakota at Springfield into a prison, and later
by building juvenile boot camps in the state. In 1999, at one of
those camps, a young girl collapsed and died during a summer
training regimen. Janklow blamed low-level officials and rolled
through the scandal.
In his 2002 legislative agenda, he
updated his fear-baiting: “It will blow your mind to see how
quickly perverts jump on the Internet with kids…. (W)e need
to get them locked up.” Locks on the prison, he hoped, would end
the need for locks on cars.
The first time I saw Janklow
in person, I was eight, dragged by my dad to a political meeting.
The governor wore a gray suit. My chest tightened in my sweatshirt;
it was not as if I’d glimpsed a movie star or the president — he
was more like a bogeyman.
In a state like South Dakota, we
often spot our politicians standing in line at the movie theater or
wiping chocolate sundae off their chins at the Zesto. Bill Janklow
was different. In high school I lived in the state capital, Pierre,
during his third term as governor. One day in physics class, my
friend Matt related an odd encounter from the night before. He’d
been cruising at 28 mph in a 30 mph zone along Pierre’s main
artery, when a Cadillac’s headlights surged up behind. The car
tailgated Matt past the capitol, then roared up beside him. The
impatient driver barked, “Too damn slow! You’re driving too damn
slow!”
The driver, of course, was Gov. Janklow. His desire
to control the road, and the state, looks much darker now in
retrospect. But we should have seen this tragic accident coming.
South Dakota’s voters gave Janklow the right to drive like a
tornado, and, in such a small-town state, it was only a matter of
time before he swept someone down. Maybe the jury recognized the
small role they as voters played in Randy Scott’s death; I hope my
fellow South Dakotans have come to see that Janklow’s crusade for
order finally resulted in disorder.
Janklow’s fall marks
the end of an era in my state’s history, a full quarter of South
Dakota’s statehood and a reign older than I am. Though I was raised
to rail against him, I can’t deny that Janklow shaped me more than
any other politician probably ever will.
Josh
Garrett-Davis is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service
of High Country News (hcn.org) in Paonia, Colorado. He is an
editorial intern at the paper.
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