A Legacy of Innovation by Sribnick Ethan G.;

Author:Sribnick, Ethan G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

South Dakota Courts the Credit Card Industry

William John Janklow, routinely dubbed “Wild Bill” in media accounts, was one of South Dakota's most successful and most controversial politicians. A U.S. Marine and a lawyer, he got his professional start defending Native Americans involved in criminal cases on the Rosebud Sioux reservation. Janklow then changed sides and drew attention for prosecuting twenty-two people, mostly associated with the American Indian Movement, for rioting in an incident leading up to the 1973 standoff between the group and law enforcement at Wounded Knee. At one point, his house was firebombed. Elected attorney general in 1974, he often boasted that he slept with an M-16 assault rifle beside his bed—and a 1976 incident lent support to his story. As Janklow later explained it, he was working at home when he heard that a man had taken hostages at the state capitol, where several of his secretaries worked. He grabbed a machine gun and headed over. But when he was told that the hostages were not his employees, he backed off and let the police handle it. “That was it,” he told the New York Times, “no drama in the reality. My machine gun days are over.”18

Elected governor in 1978, he ultimately served four terms as South Dakota's governor in two eight-year stretches with a break in the middle because of the state's term limit law. A populist who routinely decried the federal government, Janklow had a reputation for colorfully blunt language—he changed the name of the state's “correctional facility” to “prison” and said that as a youth, he had been “your average juvenile delinquent.”19 A rapid, and by some accounts reckless, driver, he amassed speeding tickets and dozens of police warnings, and he also lounged around the governor's mansion in pajamas with feet and, by some accounts, a bunny tail sewn on. Between his stints in the governor's mansion, he irked the Republican Party by challenging a sitting GOP senator, James Abdnor, saying the incumbent was ineffective and couldn't win. “Every problem we have here is the result of federal government policies or lack of them—high interest rates, trade, farm foreclosures, water,” he said to the Washington Post during that campaign. “Those good old boys in Washington got us into this mess, and they're like a team in last place that never drafts new guys because they like the old guys.”20 Though Janklow lost—his only loss in seven statewide races—he so wounded Abdnor that Democrat Tom Daschle won the fall election. Janklow returned to the governor's mansion in 1995 after knocking off the Republican incumbent, Walter Dean Miller, in a primary and served two more terms.

At the end of his fourth term as governor in 2002, he ran for Congress and won, but then his passion for fast driving caught up with him and all but wrecked his career. South Dakotans had known of his driving troubles for years—he even alluded to it in his 1999 state of the state address. “Bill Janklow speeds when he drives—shouldn't, but he does,” Janklow explained speaking in third person.

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