Chapter 5

1. Shirley Norgard, interview, State Historical Society of North Dakota (hereafter SHSND), Missile Site Oral Histories (hereafter MSOH), 32314–00020. These interviews are only available on videotape. When audio is unclear, author transcription may contain slight errors.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid. Mrs. Norgard’s interviewer, former missileer Mark Sundlov, attempts to explain midway through the interview why SAC personnel may not have made good neighbors. He says, of his time in Minot, “I couldn’t even tell you if the sites had neighbors.” Shirley thanks him for explaining and adds, “Other people felt like I did.”

4. Catherine Lutz, “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis,” American Anthropologist 104 (September 2002): 726–35.

5. The term “national sacrifice zone” is found in Samuel H. Day Jr., ed., Nuclear Heartland: A Guide to the 1,000 Missile Silos of the United States (Madison, WI.: Progressive Foundation, 1988), 10.

6. “Command and Control: The Long-Hidden Story of the Day Our Luck Almost Ran Out,” PBS, American Experience, transcript, 3, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/command-and-control/.

7. North Dakota missileer Hans Heinrich remembered that the Titan was so slow they sometimes called it the “at last” missile. Hans Heinrich, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–0009.

8. The SHSND created a four-part video about the development of the Minuteman missile. See “America’s Ace in the Hole,” http://history.nd.gov/historicsites/minutemanmissile/oscarzeroexhibits.html. For technical history, see John C. Lonnquest and David F. Winkler, To Defend and Deter: The Legacy of the Cold War Missile Program (Rock Island, IL: Defense Publishing Services, 1996). The Soviets were not as far ahead in missile technology in the 1950s as Americans thought, but they rapidly caught up in the 1960s and 1970s. See David W. Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land: Fighting Communism on the Northern Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 200. John Lewis Gaddis suggests that nuclear weapons “exchanged destructiveness for duration” and thus kept the Cold War going longer than it otherwise would have. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 240, 291–92.

9. Ian Frazier, The Great Plains (New York: Picador, 2001), 200.

10. Sharon Cohen, “In Farm Belt Silos U.S. Sowed Are Being Reaped,” Washington Post, August 20, 2000, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/08/20/in-farm-belt-silos-us-sowed-are-being-reaped-missile-silos/1fd8d39f-2a87–4c4d-8d3e-e3f130451528/?utm_term=.a759bbad0e4e.

11. Gretchen Heefner, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 74–75.

12. Lutz, “Making War at Home in the United States,” 727–28.

13. For an explanation of the mix of “boosterism” and reportage provided in midcentury newspapers in the region, see Rebecca Berens Matzke, “Cold War Missiles Meet the Press: Local Newspaper Coverage of the Atlas F Missile Project, Lincoln Air Force Base, 1959–1961,” Great Plains Quarterly 35 (Summer 2015): 249–67.

14. Quoted in Gretchen Heefner and Catherine McNicol Stock, “Missiles and Militarization: How the Cold War Shaped South Dakota Political Culture,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Donald C. Simmons Jr., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political History, vol. 1 (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2011), 227–28.

15. Rapid City Daily Journal, January 17, 1961, p. 1. The other days the series ran were January 10 and 18, 1961.

16. “Minuteman Promises Economic Lift,” Rapid City Journal, January 5, 1961, quoted in Heefner and Stock, “Missiles and Militarization,” 228.

17. Ibid. For a more complete discussion, see Gretchen Heefner, “Missiles and Memory: Dismantling South Dakota’s Cold War,” Western Historical Quarterly 38 (Summer 2007): 185–87.

18. Grand Forks Herald, September 12, 1962, 22.

19. For images of the massive construction project, see National Park Service (hereafter NPS) Minuteman Missile Historic Site (hereafter MIMI), “The Missile Plains, Frontline of America’s Cold War: Historical Resource Study, Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, South Dakota,” https://www.nps.gov/mimi/getinvolved/upload/MIMI%20HRS%202006.pdf, 75–80.

20. Nathan A. Johnson, “The Economic Impact of North Dakota’s Minuteman Missile Silos,” (unpublished paper presented at the Northern Great Plains History Conference, Fargo, ND, October 2003), 5–6. Conversation with the author, October 2004.

21. Ted Hustead, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_TedHustead_2003.pdf, transcript, 8.

22. Quoted in Heefner and Stock, “Missiles and Militarization,” 228.

23. Quoted in Johnson, “The Economic Impact of North Dakota’s Minuteman Missile Silos,” 2–3.

24. Ibid., 3.

25. Quoted in ibid. During the potentially catastrophic accident at Damascus, Arkansas, Vice President Walter Mondale asked Vice Colonel Ryan of the 308th strategic bomber wing if the damaged silo contained a nuclear weapon. Ryan told him, “I can’t confirm or deny.” “Command and Control,” PBS, American Experience.

26. Milton Young to Mrs. Peter Peterson, 9/13/61, in Milton Young Papers (hereafter MY), Orin G. Libby Manuscript Collection 0020, Elwyn Robinson Department of Special Collections, Chester Fritz Library, University of North Dakota, Box 315, File 11.

27. Gretchen Heefner demonstrates that the “map-makers” in the nuclear security state made decisions long before interventions by congress members had even begun. The Missile Next Door, 49–76.

28. Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 203–5.

29. Ted Hustead, interview, NPS-MIMI, 9.

30. Shirley Norgard, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00020. Heefner demonstrates that the landowners group had relatively more impact on decisions during the deactivation stage in the 1990s. “Missiles and Memory,” 190–94.

31. Gene S. Williams, interview, January 7, 2003, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_GeneSWilliams2003.pdf, transcript, 4.

32. Ibid.

33. Shirley Norgard, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00020.

34. Quoted in Day, Nuclear Heartland, 9.

35. John Laforge, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_JohnLaForge_2003.pdf, transcript, 5.

36. Tom Brusegaard, conversation with author, October 4, 2018. By permission.

37. Heefner, “Missiles and Memory,” 202. See also Michael Brown, interview, SHSND, MSOH.

38. Rapid City Journal, November 27, 1983, 4.

39. Wendy McNiel, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_WendyMcNiel_2003.pdf, transcript, 13–14.

40. John LaForge, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_JohnLaForge_2003.pdf, transcript, 4.

41. Quoted in Day, Nuclear Heartland, 8.

42. “Minuteman III,” Fact Sheet, http://www.jonahhouse.org/archive/WMD%20Here%20Plowshares/WMD%20Here%20Fact%20Sheet.htm.

43. Shirley Norgard, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00020.

44. Ibid.

45. Steve Bucklin to Tim Pavek, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_TimPavek_1999.pdf, transcript, 27.

46. Mrs. Robert Lefevre to Milton Young, 3/28/1962, MY Papers, Box 169: File 1; Dennis Carter to Milton Young, 11/21/1962, MY Papers, Box 169, File 2.

47. Quoted in Karl Mundt to Milton Young, 4/1/1969; Milton Young to Karl Mundt, 4/2/1969, MY Papers, Box 342, File 13.

48. “Command and Control,” PBS, American Experience, transcript, 25.

49. Hans Heinrich, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32324–0009.

50. Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, The Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (New York: Penguin, 2013), 430–32.

51. http://www.atomicarchive.com/Almanac/Brokenarrows_static.shtml.

52. Seth Tupper, “South Dakota’s Secret Nuclear Missile Accident Revealed,” Rapid City Journal, November 3, 2017, http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/south-dakota-s-secret-nuclear-missile-accident-revealed/article_92b6722d-9cd5–5551–8831-f61964da70b2.html.

53. Ibid. There was also faulty wiring but the air force report blamed the accident on “airman error.”

54. Quoted in ibid.

55. Ibid.

56. Louis Brothag, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00005.

57. David Blackhurst, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_DavidBlackhurst_1999.pdf, transcript, 6.

58. Shirley Norgard, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00020.

59. Ibid. Colorado rancher Charlie McKay, whose outfit bordered the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility, remembered a similarly strange set of maneuvers taking place nearby: “I’m over here fooling with the calves and feeding…. And these Rambo idiots will get out and lie down on the ground and crawl up to the fence and pull out their binoculars and start watching me.” Quoted in Len Ackland, Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 1.

60. Shirley was right that some helicopter pilots flew as low as they could. Louis Brothag described an airman who tried to “buzz” the launch facility regularly. Louis Brothag, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00005. In northern Canada, Innu people have accused the government of “sonorous aggression” after four thousand test flights per year began to take off from large air force bases nearby; the constant noise made people and animals ill. See Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999), 53–58.

61. Heefner, “Missiles and Memory,” 188.

62. Some missileers mentioned that the local people were “stand-offish” toward them too. See Curtis Anderson, interview, SHSND, MSOH; Wade Bertrand, interview, SHSND, MSOH.

63. Mark Sundlov, a crew commander in Minot from 1999 to 2003, provides an overview of the many procedures the missileers followed every day. “The Atomic Age: North Dakota and the Cold War,” http://history.nd.gov/mediaroom/markSundlovPodcast.mp3. See also his explanations for crews’ unfriendly behavior in his interview with Shirley Norgard; Shirley Norgard, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00020. For a 2014 report on missileer culture, see Josh Harkinson, “Hanging Out with the Disgruntled Airmen Who Baby-Sit America’s Aging Nuclear Weapons,” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/11/air-force-missile-wing-minuteman-iii-nuclear-weapons-burnout-1/.

64. Michael Brown, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00006.

65. Ibid.

66. Tim Pavek, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_TimPavek_1999.pdf, transcript, 4.

67. David Blackhurst, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_DavidBlackhurst_1999.pdf, transcript, 4.

68. Wade Bertrand, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00004.

69. Mark Sundlov remembered his wife’s face as they drove out Highway 83 on their way to the Minot Air Force Base. Nearly in tears, she said, “I hope there are more trees to see soon. Or something!” Louis Brothag, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00005.

70. Curtis Anderson, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00002.

71. Aaron Bass and Chad Smith, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00003.

72. Hannah Rappleye, “The Missileers: Air Force Has Trained 247 Women for Nuclear Launch,” https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/missileers-air-force-has-trained-247-women-nuclear-launch-n822486.

73. Hans Heinrich called the air force a “classed system.” Hans Heinrich, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–0009.

74. Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 213.

75. Tim Pavek, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_TimPavek_1999.pdf, transcript, 24.

76. As Michael Brown put it, “We had to be a credible deterrent. We were part of what kept world peace.” Michael Brown, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00006.

77. Curtis Anderson, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00002.

78. Wade Bertrand, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00004.

79. Tim Pavek, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_TimPavek_1999.pdf, transcript, 27.

80. Dennis Almer, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00001.

81. Tim Pavek, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_TimPavek_1999.pdf, transcript, 12.

82. Tinhatranch Productions, “Oscar Zero: Conversations with a Minuteman Nuclear Missile Combat Crew,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLNTJ6LUuUk; Michael Brown, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00006.

83. Tupper, “South Dakota’s Secret Missile Accident Revealed.”

84. The smallest launch control centers were less than 336 square feet, and the crew shared space with a large number of file cabinets. Eric Leonard, email, Minuteman Missile Historic Site, July 7, 2019. The air force was well aware that the small quarters combined with the constant stress of attack, like the heavy bomber crew experienced in World War II, could create mental “emotional instability” in the crews, and categorized physical attraction or intimacy to be among these “mental health” problems. See Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power, 205–6.

85. Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 3.

86. Alan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 67–97. Berube describes how gay and straight servicemen in World War II could transgress gender lines because once they were soldiers, their masculinity was “established.” Furthermore, they could “reap the benefits of the … wartime relaxation of rigid gender roles (68).” After the war, however, these roles were far less relaxed.

87. For examples of the surveillance of sexuality in the military in the Cold War, see Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Several observers have argued that the crackdown on gays in the military actually worked to create a stronger gay community and more advocacy for change. Likewise, gays and lesbians in the service created opportunities for community-building with civilians in their base communities. Berube, Coming Out Under Fire, 271–76; Ross Benes, “How Exclusion from the Military Strengthened Gay Identity in America,” Rolling Stone, October 3, 2016, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/how-exclusion-from-the-military-strengthened-gay-identity-in-america-w441663.

88. Michael Brown, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00006. Of course, these masculinist performances had long histories in the military. For example, the practice of naming weapons, especially airplanes, for women was widespread in WWII. See Robert B. Westbrook, “ ‘I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl That Married Harry James’: American Women and the Problem of Political Obligation in World War II,” American Quarterly 42 (December 1990): 587–614.

89. Michael Brown, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00006.

90. Dennis Almer, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00001. Almer was not happy that his wife discussed this on camera.

91. Ibid. Dennis Almer described his first day: “There we were with our .38 calibers strapped on. Looking pretty tough and mean.”

92. David Blackhurst, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_DavidBlackhurst_1999.pdf, transcript, 32.

93. Ibid.

94. SHSND podcasts, “The Atomic Age in North Dakota: Interview with Mark Sundlov, Former Missileer,” http://podbay.fm/show/264349109/e/1194289200.

95. Aaron Bass and Chad Smith, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00003.

96. Dennis Almer, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00001.

97. Many missileers recalled the tight quarters in the Launch Control Facility. Eric Leonard, NPS-MIMI, conversation with the author, July 3, 2019.

98. Aaron Bass and Chad Smith, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00003.

99. Dennis Almer, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00001. In an interview with former missileer David Blackhust, historian Steven Bucklin asked what he thought of gays in the military. Blackhurst laughed and said, “That’s a hard one to answer. It really is.” David Blackhurst, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_DavidBlackhurst_1999.pdf, transcript, 15–16.

100. Senator William Proxmire thought missile work would be appropriate for women because they were “unlikely to be in the line of fire.” “Female Missileers,” https://www.nps.gov/articles/femalemissileers.htm.

101. The air force commissioned studies in 1980 and 1985. The 1980 study is summarized in the 1985 report: Strategic Air Command, “A Study of Females on Minuteman/Peace keeper Crews,” January 31, 1985, ii, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a584971.pdf. Military wives held a special place in all branches of the armed forces; thus their negative opinion of female missileers was taken quite seriously. A handbook for military wives from the Cold War era asserted, “When a married man entered the service, the government gained not just one—but two—the man and his wife.” Quoted in Lynne R. Dubrofsky and Constance T. Batterson, “The Military Wife and Feminism,” Signs 2 (Spring 1977): 675. In an interview years later, Dennis Almer’s wife remembered clearly what the wives’ objections had been. It was “tough enough” having a husband away from home on alert so much, she explained. If women were integrated into the crews, “your husband would be talking with the other woman for twenty-four hours a day and sharing everything and if there was anything wrong at home, you never know [what might happen].” She added later, “The wives basically killed it.” Dennis Almer, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00001. David Blackhurst’s jocular attitude toward female missileers demonstrated why wives might be concerned: “I’m not sure how my wife thought [about women coming into the missileers], but I thought it was OK. [Laughter from interviewer].” David Blackhurst, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_DavidBlackhurst_1999.pdf, transcript, 15.

102. No data was provided on risks during pregnancy. SAC, “A Study of Females on Minuteman/Peacekeeper Crews,” 3–12, 3–14.

103. Brooke L. Blower, “V-J Day, 1945, Times Square,” in Blower and Mark P. Bradley, eds., The Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 70–87.

104. Dennis Almer, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00001.

105. Wade Bertrand, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00004.

106. Gene S. Williams, interview, January 7, 2003, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_GeneSWilliams2003.pdf, transcript, 10.

107. Tim Pavek, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_TimPavek_1999.pdf, transcript, 10.

108. The Peace Studies program included, along with coursework and a proposed minor, a “student exchange program aimed at the Soviet Union and China.” According to President Clifford, the rationale for the program was based in the “dangers of this nuclear age and the need for peace within and among human communities.” Between 1988 and 1995 more than sixty-nine faculty members from different departments were affiliated with the program and as many as a hundred students, including those in ROTC. Janet Moen, “The History of the Center for Peace Studies at UND,” unpublished manuscript, with permission of the author.

109. Charles Ray, “Bucking the Trends: Black Hills Crusader Marvin Kammerer,” High Country News, September 27, 2004, https://www.hcn.org/issues/283/15021.

110. Heefner, The Missile Next Door, 153–57. See also North American Farm Alliance Education Program, “Farms Not Arms: Forging the Links Between Peace and Agriculture,” (Ames, IA: n.p., June 1988).

111. Gene S. Williams, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_GeneSWilliams2003.pdf, transcript, 7.

112. Ibid., transcript, 3.

113. Ibid., transcript, 21.

114. Curtis Anderson, interview, SHSND, MSOH, 32314–00002,

115. Grand Forks Herald, September 12, 1962, 22.

116. One possible consequence of the construction projects was the election of George McGovern to the Senate in 1962. Unionized out-of-state construction workers organized aggressively to support the Democrat, who won a very tight contest. Don Barnett, email exchange with Jon K. Lauck, June 26, 2018. By permission.

117. Mr. and Mrs. Nels Peterson to Milton Young, 2/16/67, MY Papers, Box 342, File 14.

118. George Johanssen to Milton Young, 2/15/67, MY Papers, Box 342, File 14.

119. Melvin Jensrud to Milton Young, 5/23/1970, MY Papers, Box 342, File 14.

120. Gene S. Williams, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_GeneSWilliams2003.pdf, transcript, 14–15.

121. David Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 216–35.

122. Matthew Gault, “America’s Abandoned $6 Billion Missile Pyramid,” https://me dium.com/war-is-boring/americas-abandoned-6-billion-missile-pyramid-398d2dfe40c9.

123. Quoted in Mills, Cold War in a Cold Land, 216.

124. “The Missile Flop,” Grand Forks Herald, 8/16/68, n.p., MY Papers, Box 342, File 14.

125. “Is This Protection?,” Devils Lake Journal, 8/15/68, n.p., MY Papers, Box 342, File 14.

126. Lawrence Woehl to Milton Young, 8/16/1968, MY Papers, Box 342, File 14.

127. Gene S. Williams, interview, NPS-MIMI, https://www.nps.gov/mimi/learn/historyculture/upload/MIMI-OH_GeneSWilliams2003.pdf, transcript, 9.

128. Ibid., 1–2, 6, 22.

129. Ibid., 16, 19.

130. Ibid., 2.

Chapter 6

Note to chapter title: The term “lost world” derives from Josh Garrett-Davis, “The Lost World of George McGovern,” New York Times, October 21, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/opinion/the-lost-world-of-george-mcgovern.html.

1. James M. Moon, interview, Public Broadcasting Service and Prairie Public Broadcasting (PBS/PPB), Prairie Memories: The Vietnam War Years, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_r7xkhqI8I.

2. In its introduction, the film purported to show how the war “changed the lives” of both “those who fought” and “those who protested.”

3. “Vietnam: Why Does This Matter?” https://www.ndstudies.gov/gr8/content/unit-iv-modern-north-dakota-1921-present/lesson-4-alliances-and-conflicts/topic-3-experience-war/section-4-vietnam-war. A “Summary of North Dakota History” on the State Historical Society of North Dakota’s website does not refer to the war at all. See http://history.nd.gov/ndhistory/summaryintro.html. At least one scholarly treatment of the region’s history also gives the war extremely short shrift. See Norman K. Risjord, Dakota: The Story of the Northern Plains (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

4. “William Janklow Dedicates the South Dakota World War II Memorial,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6rzELpPLVg.

5. Rounds said, “This is not about the war. This is not about politics. This is not about history. It is about you [the veterans].” “South Dakota Welcomes Home Vietnam/Era Veterans,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtCZVAts1m4. In a video produced for the “History Day” contest in 2012, South Dakota students Aimee Allcock and Amanda Greenmyer also erased the history of protest in the region. In “Hawks and Doves: South Dakotans React to the Vietnam War,” one “dove” apologizes, saying, “We didn’t really know what we were talking about.” Their video was selected for the national finals. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6p4LG28cOI.

6. Garrett-Davis, “The Lost World of George McGovern.”

7. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 1.

8. The strategies employed to evade or avoid the draft ranged from simply staying in college to feigning all manner of illnesses. See Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War and the Vietnam Generation (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).

9. Quoted in Jack Beatty, “Vietnam: Sorrow, Rage and Remembrance,” Washington Post, June 3, 1984, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1984/06/03/vietnam-sorrow-rage-and-remembrance/ca669d48–0358–4a4b-8e3e-7a1ae00e3cf7/?utm_term=.7b9b00f2e20c.

10. Tim O’Brien, “Writing Vietnam,” April 21, 1999, http://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/WritingVietnam/obrien.html, n.p.

11. Kyle Longley, “A Small Town’s Sacrifice to Vietnam,” New York Times, August 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/opinion/a-small-towns-sacrifice-to-vietnam.html.

12. “In Country: Tales of the Vietnam War from the Veterans Who Lived It,” South Dakota Department of Veterans Affairs, John Sweet, accessed October 16, 2019, https://vet affairs.sd.gov/memorials/Vietnam/incountry.aspx.

13. ”In Country,” Mark Young, accessed October 16, 2019, https://vetaffairs.sd.gov/memorials/Vietnam/incountry.aspx.

14. ”In Country,” Richard Decker, accessed October 16, 2019, https://vetaffairs.sd.gov/memorials/Vietnam/incountry.aspx.

15. ”In Country,” Anthony Rangel, accessed October 16, 2019, https://vetaffairs.sd.gov/memorials/Vietnam/incountry.aspx.

16. ”In Country,” Mark Young, accessed October 16, 2019, https://vetaffairs.sd.gov/memorials/Vietnam/incountry.aspx.

17. Ibid.

18. ”In Country,” Timothy Werlinger, accessed October 16, 2019, https://vetaffairs.sd.gov/memorials/Vietnam/incountry.aspx.

19. George Shurr, “Suspended Succession: How the Vietnam War Impacted a Family Farm in the Eastern Great Plains” (paper given at the Fiftieth Annual Dakota Conference, Center for Western Studies [CWS], Augustana College [AC], Sioux Falls, SD, April 20, 2018). George’s brother was ordered to take photographs in a dangerous mountain zone and was killed.

20. Bill Anderson, interview, PBS/PPB, Prairie Memories: The Vietnam War Years, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVw6jz-7KyE.

21. Andrew Maragos, interview, PBS/PPB, Prairie Memories: The Vietnam War Years, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYW7tJCaGmk.

22. Bill Rose, interview, PBS/PPB, Prairie Memories: The Vietnam War Years, www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgfVAsqUv1A.

23. “In Country,” John Sweet, accessed October 16, 2019, https://vetaffairs.sd.gov/memorials/Vietnam/incountry.aspx; see also “In Country,” Don Fechner, accessed October 16, 2019, https://vetaffairs.sd.gov/memorials/Vietnam/incountry.aspx.

24. “In Country,” Berwyn Place, accessed October 16, 2019, https://vetaffairs.sd.gov/memorials/Vietnam/incountry.aspx.

25. “In Country,” Robert Riggio, accessed October 16, 2019, https://vetaffairs.sd.gov/memorials/Vietnam/incountry.aspx.

26. Kristen Iverson, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats (New York: Random House, 2012), 12.

27. Darrell Dorgan, interview, PBS/PPB, Prairie Memories: The Vietnam War Years, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lnSdtPttxg.

28. Jon Hanna, interview, PBS/PPB, Prairie Memories: The Vietnam War Years, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR8sYQUwDng.

29. John Rootham, interview, PBS/PPB, Prairie Memories: The Vietnam War Years, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS3eHqhCXzg.

30. “In Country,” Jerome Cleveland, accessed October 16, 2019, https://vetaffairs.sd.gov/memorials/Vietnam/incountry.aspx.

31. “In Country,” Victor Robertson, accessed October 16, 2019, https://vetaffairs.sd.gov/memorials/Vietnam/incountry.aspx.

32. “In Country,” Calvin F. Olsen, accessed October 16, 2019, https://vetaffairs.sd.gov/memorials/Vietnam/incountry.aspx

33. “In Country,” Dennis Lau, accessed October 16, 2019, https://vetaffairs.sd.gov/memorials/Vietnam/incountry.aspx.

34. “In Country,” Leo Powell, accessed October 16, 2019, https://vetaffairs.sd.gov/memo rials/Vietnam/incountry.aspx.

35. http://www.nd.gov/veterans/news/north-dakota-vietnam-veterans-america.

36. Ahrar Ahmad, “War and Peace in South Dakota,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Donald C. Simmons Jr., eds., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays in South Dakota Political Culture, vol. 1 (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2011), 202.

37. “On Vietnam War: Public Split on McGovern’s Stand,” Sioux Falls Argus Leader, May 31, 1967.

38. Jon K. Lauck, “Binding Assumptions: Karl E. Mundt and the Vietnam War, 1963–1969,” Mid-America 76 (Fall 1994): 292. This data contradicts surveys taken by college groups with smaller data sets. At Northern State College in 1966, for example, 69 percent of students surveyed called themselves “hawks.” See Daryl Webb, “ ‘There Is No Place in Our Institutions for Radicals’: The Vietnam War on South Dakota Campuses, 1965–1973,” South Dakota History 45 (Spring 2015): 5.

39. Milton Young Papers (hereafter MY Papers), Orin G. Libby Manuscript Collection, Elwyn D. Robinson Department of Special Collections, Chester Fritz Library, University of North Dakota, 20–626–48.

40. MY, 20–626–113.

41. MY, 20–627–6.

42. MY, 20–276–7.

43. MY, 20–485–20.

44. MY, 20–276–6.

45. MY, 20–279–6.

46. MY, 20–276–6.

47. See, for example, MY, 20–276–7.

48. MY, 20–409–16.

49. MY, 20–276–6.

50. MY, 20–279–6.

51. MY, 20–409–16.

52. MY, 20–627–6.

53. The AP described the protest this way: “An Anti-War Sign That Included the Words, ‘America the Insane’ Was Hoisted in the Crowd by Two or Three Persons.” This report was used in papers across the state. See, for example, Harl Andersen, “Slight Ripples Mar Nixon Visit,” Rapid City Journal, June 4, 1969, 1.

54. John T. Schneider, “Pacifist Students Plan Anti-Viet Nam War Protest,” Spectrum, March 23, 1966, 1.

55. Webb, “ ‘No Place in Our Institutions for Radicals.’ ”

56. Ibid., 20.

57. Larry Peterson, email to author, June 18, 2018. Peterson requested and received his FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act.

58. Quoted in Webb, “ ‘No Place in Our Institutions for Radicals,’ ” 18.

59. John Rigert, “Dakota State’s ‘Silent Majority’ Is Upset over War,” Minneapolis Tribune, May 17, 1970, 43.

60. The broadest interpretation of the “Movement’s” critique of American society incorporated all forms of oppression—at least in theory. In practice it worked out quite differently. Sara Evans, The Personal Is Political: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Knopf, 1979).

61. Jenifer Wolf, “Comment,” June 2, 2017, in response to Kim Phillips-Fein, “The Two Women’s Movements,” The Nation, June 1, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/two-womens-movements/.

62. “Peace Rally Turns into Rap Session,” Spectrum, April 1, 1971, 1.

63. Ibid.

64. Jon K. Lauck, “ ‘It Disappeared as Quickly as It Came’: The Democratic Surge and the Republican Comeback in South Dakota Politics, 1970–1980,” South Dakota History 46 (Summer 2016): 139–40. For many more examples of this argument, see Cory Haala, “Replanting the Grassroots: The South Dakota Democratic Party from McGovern to Daschle, 1980–1986,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Paula M. Nelson, eds., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays in South Dakota Political Culture, vol. 3 (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2018), 202nn2,6.

65. “Peace Rally Turns into Rap Session.”

66. Richard M. Chapman, “The Black Campus Movement at Concordia College, Moorhead, 1968–1978” (paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the Northern Great Plains History Conference, Mankato, MN, September 21, 2018).

67. President Clifford and his successors would find this issue far more divisive than they imagined, especially after a conservative alumnus, Ralph Engelstad, donated over $100 million for a new hockey rink but threatened to destroy it if the mascot were ever changed. See Catherine McNicol Stock, “Reading the ‘Ralph’: Privatization in the New North Dakota,” in Jon K. Lauck and Catherine McNicol Stock, eds., The Conservative Heartland: A Political History of the Postwar American Midwest (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2020), 323–345.

68. Cara Beck, “ ‘Let Them Use the Back Seat of a Car’: The Fight for Co-Ed Living on South Dakota Campuses” (paper presented at the 49th Dakota Conference, CWS, AC, April 2017), 17. On a similar fight at the University of Kansas, see Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 205–11.

69. Beck, “ ‘Let Them Use the Back Seat of a Car’,” 17.

70. Shurr, “Suspended Succession.”

71. Ruth Ann Alexander, “South Dakota Women Stake a Claim: A Feminist Memoir, 1964–1989,” South Dakota History 19 (Winter 1989): 544–48.

72. Quoted in Matthew Pehl, “Gender Politics on the Prairie: The South Dakota Commission on the Status of Women in the 1970s,” in Lauck, Miller, and Nelson, The Plains Political Tradition, 3:163. Pehl argues that the triumph of conservative views on gender roles, beginning with the rescission of the ERA, was not “pre-ordained” in South Dakota. Perhaps not, but the ERA debate had striking parallels with earlier efforts to gain woman suffrage. As Pehl himself admits—or, in my view, understates—the highly valued notion of gender “complementarity” in rural settings was “not the quite the same as equality” (160, 162).

73. Garrett-Davis, Ghost Dances (Proving Up on the Plains) (New York: Little, Brown, 2012), 54. Josh recounts that there were also head shops in Fargo, Sioux Falls, and Rapid City.

74. Ibid., 56.

75. Ibid., 60. To be fair, Josh’s father, Jay Davis, says this was an “isolated incident” and that drug paraphernalia was but a small part of the store’s business. Jay Davis, email to author, July 3, 2019.

76. Ibid., 119–35. See also Garrett-Davis, “The Lost World of George McGovern.”

77. Garrett-Davis, Ghost Dances, 102.

78. Debra Marquart, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere (Philadelphia: Counterpoint, 2006), xii–xxiii.

79. Rick Perlstein, “I Thought I Understood the American Right; Trump Proved Me Wrong,” New York Times Magazine, April 11, 2017.

80. Historians have recently called attention to the importance of Bob Jones University v. United States (1983) and the cases that preceded it, arguing that they may have galvanized some Christian leaders more than Roe v. Wade (1973). Randall Balmer, “The Real Origins of the Religious Right,” Politico, May 27, 2014, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133.

81. In the 1980s and 1990s, several influential right-wing radio hosts emerged on the Northern Plains, including John Ruby of KFYR in Bismarck, Scott Hennan of KCNN 1590 in Grand Forks, and Ed Schulz, who would later become nationally known for his progressive views, on KFGO 790 in Fargo. Sarah Vogel, Darrell Dorgan, and Tom Brusegaard, email exchange with author, July 3, 2019.

82. Phyllis Schlafly’s Pro-Life Pro-Family rally in 1977 drew ten thousand conservative women to Houston. One of them was a Bismarck mother of nine who traveled to the rally with six other women in her yellow van. As she drove, “we felt we had the Lord knocking on the top of the van all the way down.” Quoted in Phillips-Fein, “Two Women’s Movements.”

83. Ibid.

84. Lauck, “Binding Assumptions,” 298–99n65.

85. Karl Mundt, “Another Opinion: Stop the Poor People’s March,” New York Times, May 12, 1968, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/05/12/issue.html?action=click&contentCollection=Archives&module=ArticleEndCTA&region=ArchiveBody&pgtype=article.

86. Quoted in Lauck, “Binding Assumptions,” 298.

87. “Sexuality in the Beat Generation,” https://qssfc.wordpress.com/2012autumn/sexuality-in-the-beat-generation/.

88. Quoted in Webb, “ ‘No Place in Our Institutions for Radicals,’ ” 4.

89. Herbert Schell, History of South Dakota, 4th ed. (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society, 2004), 322.

90. Webb, “ ‘No Place in Our Institutions for Radicals,’ ” 22. See also “Governor Wants No Nonsense Allowed in College System,” Pierre Daily Journal, February 21, 1969.

91. Daniel Spillman, “Combative Conservatism at the ‘Berkeley of the Midwest’: The American Spectator and Baby Boomer Conservative Intellectuals, 1967–1980,” in Lauck and Stock, The Conservative Heartland, 133–152.

92. Quoted in Webb, “ ‘No Place in Our Institutions for Radicals,’ ” 7.

93. Ibid., 9.

94. Quoted in ibid., 10.

95. Sioux Falls Argus Leader, October 19, 1969.

96. Quoted in Webb, “ ‘No Place in Our Institutions for Radicals,’ ” 2, 4, 9.

97. Ibid., 14.

98. Bonnie Meibers, “Zap Will Celebrate Fiftieth Anniversary of Zip to Zap,” Grand Forks Herald, March 4, 2019, https://www.grandforksherald.com/news/4579950-zap-will-celebrate-50th-anniversary-zip-zap.

99. Quoted in Beck, “ ‘Let Them Use the Back Seat of a Car,’ ” 10. See also Schell, History of South Dakota, 322.

100. Quoted in Beck, “ ‘Let Them Use the Back Seat of a Car,’ ” 17.

101. “Schlafly to Debate ERA,” Rapid City Journal, April 17, 1977.

102. Veronica Monique Lerma, “The Equal Rights Amendment and the Case of the Rescinding States: A Comparative Historical Analysis” (master’s thesis, University of California-Merced, 2015), https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7bg4s908.

103. Pehl, “Gender Politics on the Prairie,” 161.

104. Jon K. Lauck, “The Decline of South Dakota Democrats and the Fall of George McGovern, 1974–1980,” in Lauck and Stock, The Conservative Heartland, 247–266.

105. Quoted in Faye D. Ginsburg, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 79.

106. Two dozen evangelical ministers in the Fargo area were given a private showing of the antiabortion documentary Assignment Life. They reported that the stronger their admonishment of abortion the more congregants at other denominations began to “church hop” over to them. Ginsberg, Contested Lives, 85–87, 271–72n5.

107. Robin Huebner, “Site of Former Abortion Clinic, Major Protests, to be Demolished,” Fargo Forum, April 29, 2018, http://www.inforum.com/news/4438741-piece-fargo-history-site-former-abortion-clinic-major-protests-be-demolished.

108. Cory Haala, email to author, July 2, 2019.

109. Daniel T. Rodgers, The Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

110. Robert Griffith, “Old Progressives and the Cold War,” Journal of American History 66 (September 1979): 334–47.

111. Dan Rylance, Quentin Burdick: The Gentle Warrior (Fargo, ND: Institute for Regional Studies, 2007), 359.

112. Darrell Dorgan, interview, “The Legacy of Quentin Burdick,” Prairie Public Broadcasting, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNguPupHmj4.

113. Michael J. C. Taylor, “The Violence of War and the Mark of Leadership: The Significance of McGovern’s Air Force Service During World War II,” in Robert P. Watson, ed., George McGovern: A Political Life, a Political Legacy (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2004), 19–37.

114. George McGovern, Grassroots: The Autobiography of George McGovern (New York: Random House, 1977), 30–31.

115. George McGovern, interview with Jon K. Lauck and John E. Miller, Mitchell, SD, November 25, 2003, 8. By permission of interviewers.

116. Quoted in Taylor, “The Violence of War,” 31.

117. Mark A. Lempke, My Brother’s Keeper: George McGovern and Progressive Christianity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), 4–5.

118. Ibid., 5.

119. Ibid., 90. See also Daryl Webb, “Crusade: George McGovern’s Opposition to the Vietnam War,” South Dakota History 28 (Fall 1998): 161–90.

120. “Why as a Christian I Cannot Vote for McGovern,” George McGovern (GM) Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University (PU), Box 941, Folder: 1980 Senate Re-election Campaign.

121. In 1967 he said, “To remain silent in the face of policies we do not believe in is not patriotism; it is … a form of treason.” Robert Sam Anson, McGovern: A Biography (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972), 165.

122. Quoted in Thomas J. Knock, “George McGovern, Vietnam and the Democratic Crackup,” New York Times, December 5, 2017.

123. George McGovern, “On the Military Budget,” New York Times, June 10, 1980.

124. Rylance, Quentin Burdick, 286–87. See also PPB, “Legacy of Quentin Burdick.”

125. Rylance, Quentin Burdick, 288.

126. PPB, “Legacy of Quentin Burdick.”

127. Anson, McGovern, 160–71. In later years McGovern was still flabbergasted by the flyers that read “Target McGovern” when King and Kennedy had only recently been assassinated. McGovern, interview with Lauck and Miller, 15.

128. John Mollison, luncheon remarks, Dakota Conference, CWS, AU, April 6, 2018. See also http://ww2fighters.blogspot.com/2012/10/final-flight-george-mcgovern-455th-bg.html.

129. Lauck, “The Decline of South Dakota Democrats,” in Lauck and Stock, The Conservative Heartland, 247–266.

130. Lauck, “ ‘It Disappeared as Quickly as It Came.’ ”

131. Abourezk, a Lebanese American, was an outspoken critic of US foreign policy in the Middle East and an advocate for civil rights, including Native rights.

132. Cambridge Survey Research, “An Analysis of Political Attitudes in the State of South Dakota,” 1976, 18, GM-PU, Box 187, Folder “Surveys 1980.”

133. In the 1968 campaign, a retired air force general warned Republicans that they might lose Ellsworth Air Force Base if they reelected McGovern. Thomas J. Knock, The Rise of a Prairie Statesman: The Life and Times of George McGovern (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 429–30.

134. “B-1 Bomber,” GM-PU, Box 186, Folder “1980 Campaign Issues.”

135. “Cuba,” GM-PU, Box 186, Folder “1980 Campaign Issues.”

136. Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

137. Abdnor supported the B-1 bomber program, the MX missile system, the deregulation of the energy industry, and the expansion of the military budget. “James Abdnor, Former South Dakota Senator Dies,” https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/james-abdnor-former-south-dakota-senator-dies-at-89.html?_r=0. In a flyer he sent to voters, Abdnor listed each of his many local clubs and organizations, in contrast to McGovern, who likely belonged to none. “Jim Abdnor: A Senator for South Dakota,” GM-PU, Box 186, Folder “Abnor Ads.”

138. Target McGovern Committee, “Letter from Lt. General Gordon A. Sumner (RET),” no date, GM-PU, Box 941, Folder “1980 Re-election Campaign.”

139. Haala, “Replanting the Grassroots,” 184–85.

140. Leslie Bennetts, “National Anti-Liberal Crusade Zeroing in on McGovern in South Dakota,” New York Times, Monday, June 3, 1980.

141. Anthony Lewis, “Backlash in South Dakota?,” New York Times, October 13, 1980.

142. Mid-America Communications, “A Citizen’s Survey of South Dakotan’s [sic]Reaction to Senator McGovern’s Record,” n.d., GM-PU, Box 941, Folder “1980 Senate Reelection Campaign.”

143. Knock, The Rise of a Prairie Statesman, 417.

144. People for an Alternative to McGovern, “Texts of PFAMM Television Spots to Be Aired March 17–24,” n.d., GM-PU, Box 941, Folder “1980 Senate Re-election Campaign.”

145. Alan L. Clem, “The 1980 Election in South Dakota: End of an Era,” Public Affairs 80 (March 1981): 3.

146. Quoted in Lempke, My Brother’s Keeper, 176.

147. In a letter to the editor, Mrs. Charles Englert from Vienna, SD, wrote: “Our Constitution was based on the Ten Commandments. It is always a crime that calls to heaven for vengeance to kill an innocent person.” Sioux Falls Argus Leader, January 14, 1979, GM-PU, Box 187, Folder “Abortion Letters: Anti-McGovern Stand.”

148. George Zacher to George McGovern, January 22, 1979, GM-PU, Box 187, Folder “Abortion Letters: Anti-McGovern Stand.”

149. Quoted in Anson, McGovern, 165.

150. Clem, “The 1980 Election in South Dakota,” 3.

151. Haala, “Replanting the Grassroots,” 185. See also Lewis, “Backlash in South Dakota?”

152. Quoted in Anson, McGovern, 165.

153. McGovern, interview with Lauck and Miller, 11.

154. In the days after the election, McGovern admitted that he might have been out of touch with the values of his voters, saying “Maybe it’s true.” Clem, “The 1980 Election in South Dakota,” 4.

155. Patrick Springer, “Former Governor George Sinner Dies at Age 89,” Fargo Forum, March 9, 2018; Melissa Woinarowicz, “Sinner Should Not Be Honored for Vetoing Abortion Ban,” Fargo Forum, March 22, 2018, https://www.inforum.com/opinion/columns/4421285-woinarowicz-sinner-should-not-be-honored-vetoing-abortion-ban.

156. On Pressler see, Jon D. Schaff, “The Politics of Defeat: Senate Elections in South Dakota,” in Lauck, Miller, and Simmons Jr., The Plains Political Tradition, 1:325.

157. Haala, “Replanting the Grassroots,” 201. See also Jon K. Lauck, Daschle vs. Thune: The Anatomy of a High-Plains Senate Race (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).

158. Seth Tupper, “Campaign Flyer: Sen. Jensen Dodged Draft During Vietnam War,” Rapid City Journal, May 27, 2016, http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/election/campaign-flyer-sen-jensen-dodged-draft-during-vietnam-war/article_243a2e48–80c6–5886-a16f-e5c0c83879be.html.

159. Stan Adelstein, “While Others Served—Jensen Wouldn’t Wear Our Country’s Uniform,” May 24, 2016, https://way2gosd.com/2016/05/24/while-others-served-jensen-wouldnt-wear-our-countrys-uniform/.

160. James Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994).

161. “Mike from Iowa,” comment, Dakota Free Press, May 31, 2016, https://dakotafree press.com/2016/05/31/forty-years-later-draft-dodging-stirs-jensen-sly-primary-in-rapid-city/#comments.

162. The bifurcation of the Republican Party dates back organizationally to 2007 when a handful of local men, some of whom were military veterans, met to discuss the “leftward drift” of the Republican Party in the state. They had been disappointed, for example, that some Republicans “had hesitated” before casting a vote in favor of allowing students and teachers to carry guns in schools. In 2014 more than thirty ultraconservative candidates ran for state office. In 2018 both Republican candidates for governor, Jackley and Noem, supported the “bathroom bill” and other planks in the ultraconservative movement’s agenda. See http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/wingnuts-pledge-to-push-republican-party-further-right/article_6a0e13f4–8e3e-5f08–99e2–3af726f3803e.html; and http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/top-stories/mayor-elect-hanks-defends-use-of-wing-nut-mailing/article_6457337b-a364–5042-af50–43207a066be1.html. Some members of the “Wingnuts” also belong to a more conventional Tea Party style group called the South Dakota Citizens for Liberty. See http://www.sdcitizensforliberty.com/index.html.

Chapter 7

1. “We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee,” PBS, American Experience, transcript, 5, 9. Native people have had a long tradition of service in the US armed forces. For an overview of Lakota and Dakota (Sioux) experiences in Vietnam, see John A. Little, “Between Cultures: Sioux Warriors and the Vietnam War,” Great Plains Quarterly 33 (Fall 2015): 357–75.

2. To see the image, go to https://www.usmarshals.gov/history/wounded-knee/index.html.

3. As Alexandra Fuller writes regarding the military response to the AIM Occupation, “In the United States, domestic war looks a lot like a foreign invasion. It doesn’t hurt that the enemies … are almost always Black or Brown.” Quiet Until the Thaw (New York: Penguin, 2017), 125.

4. Phil Deloria, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, Mark N. Trahant, Loren Ghiglione, Douglas Medin, and Ned Blackhawk, “Unfolding Futures: Indigenous Ways of Knowing for the Twenty-First Century,” Daedalus 147 (Spring 2018): 6–7. White historians tend to be more critical of the Occupation, saying for example, that “Indians stood on more solid ground when they challenged injustices through legal cases brought in the court system.” Herbert Schell, History of South Dakota, 4th rev. ed. (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2004), 363. AIM contended that the judicial system was as much a part of the problem of injustice as a solution.

5. The National Council of Churches (NCC), an ecumenical organization of largely mainline Protestant denominations, was founded in 1950. See http://nationalcouncilofchurches.us/.

6. Quoted in Gail Richardson, “S.D.’s Social Conscience Prepares to Move On,” Sioux Falls Argus Leader, June 8, 1980, 1B.

7. Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (New York: Viking, 1980), 107–10. See also Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London: Verso, 2019), 197.

8. Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 16.

9. For an overview of the Occupation and events that preceded it, see Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1996); Mary Crow Dog with Peter Erdoes, Lakota Woman (New York: Grove Press, 1990); Dennis Banks with Peter Erdoes, Ojibwa Warrior: Dennis Banks and the Rise of the American Indian Movement (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005); Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future. For the view of the FBI, see Stanley David Lyman, Wounded Knee, 1973: A Personal Account (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).

10. In their interviews for the PBS account of the Occupation, “We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee,” the former hostages claimed they had not wanted to be called hostages and, furthermore, had not wanted to leave the village because then the FBI would begin killing the activists. But the FBI saw the matter very differently, calling AIM a terrorist organization. To see how controversial any discussion of the Occupation still is—even one at an academic conference—see Stew Magnuson, Wounded Knee 1973: Still Bleeding (Arlington, VA: Court Bridge Publishing, 2013).

11. “We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee,” PBS, American Experience,1.

12. Crow Dog, Lakota Woman, 161–64.

13. “We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee,” PBS, American Experience, 2–3.

14. AIM, only one organization within the Red Power movement, was founded in Minneapolis, where many Natives had been forcibly relocated in the 1950s and 1960s or displaced due to the flooding of Native land by the Oahe Dam. The Lakota connected with Native people from other nations there as well as with activists in the African American community, including members of the Black Panther party. Members founded “survival schools,” including the Little Red School House to preserve Native culture. The Occupation followed other well-publicized actions, including a protest march known as the Trail of Broken Treaties, the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building in Washington, DC, and smaller local actions at the Naval Air Station in Minneapolis, Sheep Mountain in the Badlands, and Mount Rushmore. Estes, Our History Is the Future, 169–80.

15. David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America Since 1890 (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019), 320.

16. Estes, Our History Is the Future, 38–39.

17. “We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee,” PBS, American Experience, 8; Estes, Our History Is the Future, 192.

18. “We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee,” PBS, American Experience, 11. For a new interpretation of the Ghost Dance and its role in the massacre, see Louis Warren, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

19. Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the West (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970). Another book of that era that gave voice to Native history and politics was Vine DeLoria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969).

20. “We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee,” PBS, American Experience, 7.

21. Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 59–61.

22. The habit of assaulting Indians was hardly limited to the border towns of the Northern Plains. A civil rights case was brought against the city of Farmington, New Mexico, after it was revealed that several intoxicated Navajo men had died after being “rolled” by local teenagers, a common practice in the area. New Mexico Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights, The Farmington Report: A Conflict of Cultures (July 1975).

23. “We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee,” PBS, American Experience, 7.

24. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 182–83. For a full description of the events in Custer and how they were later recalled see Justin C. Hammer, “Race and Perception: The 1973 American Indian Movement Protest in Custer, South Dakota” (master’s thesis, University of South Dakota, 2011).

25. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 183–86; Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 62–63; Hammer, “Race and Perception,” 58–61.

26. Bill Zimmerman, Airlift to Wounded Knee (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1976), 9.

27. “We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee,” PBS, American Experience, 18.

28. Ibid., 22.

29. Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 271–72.

30. John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War-Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

31. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2018).

32. Mark A. Lempke, My Brother’s Keeper: George McGovern and Progressive Christianity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), 178.

33. Quoted in David Treuer, Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 139.

34. Michael Lawson, Dammed Indians: The Pick Sloan Project and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944–1980 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994).

35. Sean J. Flynn, “Bicultural Conservatism: Native American Congressman Ben Reifel and the GOP,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Donald M. Simmons Jr., eds., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political Culture, vol. 2 (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), 179–208. See also Sean J. Flynn, Without Reservation: Benjamin Reifel and American Indian Acculturation (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2018).

36. Jonathan Ellis, “More Than 30 Years Ago, Another S.D. Politician Called for Abolishing Reservations,” Argus Leader, May 31, 2018, https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2018/05/31/more-than-30-years-ago-south-dakota-rep-clint-roberts-called-abolishing-reservations/660963002/.

37. Tom Brokaw, A Long Way from Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland in the Forties and Fifties (New York: Random House, 2002), 188–91.

38. Brokaw, A Long Way from Home, 107.

39. Harris Survey, Wounded Knee Legal Defense/Offense Committee: An Inventory of Its Records (hereafter WKLD/OC), Box 91, Jury Selection surveys, Minnesota State Historical Society, St. Paul, MN.

40. “Comments on the Main Purpose of AIM” and “Comments on Fair Trial in Custer County,” WKLD/OC, Box 6, Custer County Opinion Survey: Methods and Results with Comments. See also “Comments Made in Addition to Response to Survey,” WKLD/OC, Box 92, Juror Selection Surveys; “Minnehaha County Survey, Jay Schulman, 1975,” WKLD/OC, Box 91, Jury Selection Surveys. Mary Crow Dog did not need to see the survey data: she described Rapid City as “the most racist city in the country as far as Indian people are concerned.” Lakota Woman, 48.

41. Most stores on the Northern Plains ended the practice of selling or displaying Confederate flags in the 2010s, although it had been common practice until then. See Jerry Shaw, “Where You Can Find Confederate Flag Flying in South Dakota,” https://www.newsmax.com/fastfeatures/confederate-flag-south-dakota/2015/09/03/id/673513/; https://bismarcktribune.com/news/state-and-regional/flag-of-confederacy-flies-in-hebron/article_511855a7-c9bd-55fc-8f08-d704523368d5.html; Kevin Woster, “Confederate Flag Removed at Hot Springs VA Center,” https://rapidcityjournal.com/news/confederate-flag-removed-at-hot-springs-va-center-as-officials/article_bddac104-c6cd-5698–907e-52925ae7d80b.html. But there are important exceptions. A local internet radio host, Reb Rider, incorporates a Confederate flag into his logo. See https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100010268624131. In 2017 and 2018 a rumor circulated that the extreme left-wing group “Antifa” had planned to riot at the Sturgis rally because there would be “too many American and Confederate flags there.” See https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/antifa-protest-sturgis-2018/.

42. Matthew Prigge, “Dixie North: George Wallace and the 1964 Wisconsin Primary,” https://shepherdexpress.com/news/what-made-milwaukee-famous/dixie-north-george-wallace-1964-wisconsin-presidential-primary/#/questions.

43. Quoted in Ian Haney-Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16.

44. See map of Wallace vote on the Northern Plains in Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New York: Arlington House, 1969), 451. Of course, Wallace appealed to northern whites on issues other than race. He was also a critic of the federal bureaucracy, describing its officials as “pointy headed bureaucrats.” This appealed to anti–New Deal voters. Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 77–105. See also Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

45. Phillips, Emerging Republican Majority.

46. Rick Perlstein, “Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy,” The Nation, November 13, 2012, https://www.the nation.com/articles/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/.

47. Phillips, Emerging Republican Majority, quoted in James Boyd, “Nixon’s Southern Strategy,” New York Times, May 17, 1970, 215. On “dog whistles,” their origins, and their consequences, see Haney-Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics; and Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). Historians who argue that class rather than race and the experience of suburbanization drove southerners to the Republican Party are Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston, The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). This thesis does not help explain why Dakotans, from largely rural communities and very few affluent suburbs became attracted to the ideas of the New Right.

48. Phillips, Emerging Republican Majority, 410–51.

49. Boyd, “Nixon’s Southern Strategy.”

50. On “isolationism,” see Phillips, Emerging Republican Majority, 428–32.

51. In 1970, a Democrat, James J. Barnett, suggested a factor that most strategists had missed and which, in his mind, explained the growth of conservatism in the region: the presence of “national security military institutions.” Quoted in Boyd, “Nixon’s Southern Strategy.”

52. Brokaw, A Long Way from Home, 194.

53. Of course there were exceptions: letters and editorials that were openly racist. The editor of the Chadron, Nebraska, newspaper stated that “the Natives were getting restless.” Quoted in Kevin C. Abourezk, “From Red Fears to Red Power: The Story of Newspaper Coverage of Wounded Knee, 1890, and Wounded Knee, 1973” (master’s thesis, College of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of Nebraska, 2012), 60. George McGovern received an equally blunt letter. “I have had men tell me we are heading toward the same situation that is going on over in Ireland. Only the Indians and Collard [sic] people will be killing the white people.” Harold Waldt to George McGovern, March 22, 1973, George McGovern Papers (GM), Department of Special Collections, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University (PU), Princeton, New Jersey.

54. Richard Tate, for example, wrote, “Our country is a sad state of affairs when tax dollars are used to pay a radical revolutionary group to go around destroying property on any pretext they can think up.” Richard Tate to Richard Kneip, n.d., Richard F. Kneip Papers, Box 28, Mabel Richardson Collection, University of South Dakota (USD), Vermillion, South Dakota.

55. Raymond French to Richard Kneip, May 2, 1974, Kneip Papers, Box 28, USD.

56. Reverend Robert D. Wright to Richard Kneip, February 28, 1973, Kneip Papers, Box 28, USD.

57. Kenneth Munce to Richard Kneip, n.d., Kneip Papers, Box 28, USD.

58. H. Sanders to George McGovern, March 23, 1973, McGovern Papers.

59. Rex Witte to Richard Kneip, May 9, 1974, Kneip Papers, Box 28, USD.

60. Genevieve Layman to Richard Kneip, n.d., Kneip Papers, Box 28, USD.

61. Quoted in Rolland Dewing, “South Dakota Newspaper Coverage of the 1973 Occupation of Wounded Knee,” South Dakota History (1982): 54.

62. Vera Hullinger to James Armstrong, March 23, 1973, “Correspondence 1973–1974,” Church and Society Records, General Commission on Archives and History, The United Methodist Church, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey (hereafter CSR-UMC-DU).

63. Earl Allen to Richard Kneip, May 10, 1974, Kneip Papers, Box 28, USD.

64. Lyndsey Layton, “Palin Apologizes for ‘Real America’ Comments,” Washington Post, October 22, 2008.

65. Earl Allen to Richard Kneip, May 10, 1974, Kneip Papers, Box 28, USD.

66. Dan Gallimore to Richard Kneip, May 15, 1974, Kneip Papers, Box 28, 3, USD.

67. Vera Hullinger to James Armstrong.

68. Michael Gerson, “The Last Temptation,” The Atlantic, April 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-last-temptation/554066/.

69. David L. Peterson to Bishop James Armstrong, June 26, 1973, James Armstrong Papers, Correspondence 1973–1974, CSR-UMC-DU.

70. Harvey Hullinger to “whom it may concern,” March 26, 1973, James Armstrong Papers, Correspondence 1973–1974, CSR-UMC-DU.

71. Burnell A. Lund to James Armstrong, April 5, 1973, James Armstrong Papers, Correspondence 1973–1974, CSR-UMC-DU. See also “Church Suspends ALC Support over AIM Funding,” Rapid City Journal, April 7, 1973.

72. Richardson, “S.D.’s Social Conscience Prepares to Move On,” 1B.

73. Ibid.

74. Quoted in Dewing, “South Dakota Newspaper Coverage,” 56. Dewing also quotes the Right Reverend Walter Jones of Sioux Falls, bishop of the Episcopal diocese of South Dakota, “I am heartsick over the number of letters and telephone calls I have received full of hate and vindictiveness telling me how wrongly the Episcopal Church has acted” (56).

75. Majorie Hyer, “Peacekeeping Minister of Crisis Dies,” Washington Post, December 13, 1983, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1983/12/17/peace-keeping-minister-of-crisis-dies/f40d00cf-375a-47a8-a16b-4066f754c2bd/?utm_term=.478a42b94a8e.

76. Methodists in Sioux Falls signed a letter of protest when Armstrong publicly endorsed George McGovern for president. Mark A. Lempke, “Senator McGovern and the Role of Religion in South Dakota Political Culture,” in Lauck, Miller, and Simmons Jr., The Plains Political Tradition, 2:168–69.

77. Paul Boyer, “The Evangelical Resurgence in 1970s American Protestantism,” in Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 35.

78. Lempke, My Brother’s Keeper, 178–80.

79. Paul Boyer, “The Evangelical Resurgence in 1970s American Protestantism,” 33–35. While Pentecostals are a small subset of evangelicals, they are nationally organized enough to count—unlike many other evangelical churches that operate independently. Albeit small in real numbers, then, the relative growth of Pentecostal churches in the region beginning in 1970 is remarkable. By 2010 a higher percentage of religious believers in North Dakota affiliated themselves with Pentecostalism than with Presbyterianism or Congregationalism combined. In South Dakota they were neck and neck. See http://religionatlas.org/?page_id=18. Jay M. Price has recently documented the spread of evangelical Protestantism into Kansas and north into Iowa and South Dakota, arguing that it blurs regional boundaries between the South and Midwest and Great Plains. “Where the Midwest Meets the Bible Belt: Using Religion to Explore the Midwest’s Southwestern Edge,” in Jon K. Lauck, ed., The Interior Borderlands: Regional Identity in the Midwest and Great Plains (Sioux Falls, SD: The Center for Western Studies, Augustana University, 2019): 229–42.

80. Quoted in Lempke, My Brother’s Keeper, 35.

81. Gerson, “The Last Temptation.”

82. Joseph Crespino, “Civil Rights and the Religious Right,” in Schulman and Zelizer, Rightward Bound, 90–105.

83. Quoted in ibid., 91.

84. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Christian schools, radio stations, bookstores, and home-schooling organizations would also come in large numbers to the Dakotas. Weston Stephens, “Religious Institution Data, North and South Dakota, 1970–2000” (unpublished manuscript in author’s possession, 2017). By permission. For the 14 schools in South Dakota that belong to the Association of Christian Schools International, see https://www.private schoolreview.com/south-dakota/association-of-christian-schools-international-(acsi)-members. For an overview of the decline of mainline congregations and the growing dominance of evangelical Protestantism among Protestants as a whole, see Pew Research Center, “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” May 15, 2015, https://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/.

85. Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis with Komozi Woodard, eds., The Strange Careers of Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle Outside the South (New York: New York University Press, 2018).

86. In 1967 Huey Newton wrote, “There is a great similarity between the occupying army in Southeast Asia and the occupation of our communities by the racist police.” Quoted in Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 2.

87. Ibid., 72, 199.

88. John P. Adams, At the Heart of the Whirlwind (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 5.

89. Ibid., 6.

90. McGovern to Redmond, March 21, 1973, McGovern Papers, Princeton University.

91. “Forked Tongue?,” Lincoln Evening Journal, March 27, 1973, 4, quoted in Abourezk, “From Red Fears to Red Power,” 56.

92. Quoted in Heppler, “The American Indian Movement and South Dakota Politics,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Donald M. Simmons Jr., eds., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political Culture, vol. 1 (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014): 272.

93. Banks, Ojibwa Warrior, 44.

94. Ibid., 55.

95. “We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee,” PBS, American Experience, transcript, 1.

96. Ibid., 4.

97. Quoted in Abourezk, “From Red Fears to Red Power,” 64.

98. Quoted in Dewing, “South Dakota Newspaper Coverage,” 56.

99. Quoted in Hammer, “Race and Perception,” 61.

100. Quoted in Estes, Our History Is the Future, 191.

101. “Reverend John Adams Discusses Role of the FBI at Wounded Knee,” Minnesota Public Radio, http://archive.mprnews.org/stories/19740326/reverend-john-adams-discusses-role-fbi-wounded-knee.

102. Heppler, “The American Indian Movement and South Dakota Politics,” 276.

103. “We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee,” PBS, American Experience, 5.

104. Jill K. Gill, “Preventing a Second Massacre at Wounded Knee, 1973: United Methodists Meditate for Peace,” Methodist History 43 (October 2004): 45.

105. Quoted in ibid.

106. “We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee,” PBS, American Experience, 19.

107. Quoted in Andrew H. Malcolm, “Occupation of Wounded Knee Is Ended,” New York Times, May 9, 1973, 1.

108. “We Shall Remain: Wounded Knee,” PBS, American Experience, transcript, 23.

109. Peltier’s trial is covered in Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 83–102. In 1980, Governor Bill Janklow sued to stop the sale of Matthiessen’s book. After eight years of litigation, his case was thrown out by the South Dakota Supreme Court. See Elizabeth Mehren, “Suit Against ‘Spirit of Crazy Horse’ Ends,” L.A. Times, November 16, 1990, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990–11–16-vw-4902-story.html.

110. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr51/9791/2019/en/.

111. Estes, Our History Is the Future, 195.

112. James Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994); Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993).

113. Janklow won almost 71 percent of the vote in Pennington Country, home to Rapid City. Lorna A. Herseth, South Dakota Secretary of State, comp., “Official Election Returns for South Dakota: General Election,” November 5, 1974, 6, https://sdsos.gov/elections-voting/assets/74SDGEN.pdf.

114. Josh Garrett-Davis, Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains (Boston: Little, Brown, 2012), 41.

115. The most recent change to the state gun laws is the passage of “constitutional carry”—a law that permits carrying a concealed weapon without a permit. It was the first bill signed by the new governor, Kristi Noem. “South Dakota No Longer Requires Permit for Concealed Weapon,” Sioux City Journal, July 3, 2019, https://siouxcityjournal.com/news/state-and-regional/south-dakota/south-dakota-no-longer-requires-permit-for-concealed-carry/article_ca11c81b-0d9f-5374-a118–8c2a08895124.html.

116. Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 106.

117. Quoted in ibid., 107.

118. Quoted in Heppler, “The American Indian Movement and South Dakota Politics,” 278.

119. Mary-Lee Chai, Hapa Girl: A Memoir (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 120–24.

120. Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 108–9.

121. Ibid., 119. See also Garrett-Davis, Ghost Dances, 42.

122. Joshua Garrett-Davis, “The Red Power Movement and the Yankton Sioux Industries Pork Processing Plant Takeover of 1975,” South Dakota History 36 (Summer 2006): 197.

123. Ibid., 179.

124. Ibid., 180.

125. Ibid., 205.

126. Quoted in Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 194.

127. Ibid., 107, 132.

128. Wayne King, “Bradley Offers Bill to Return Land to the Sioux,” New York Times, March 11, 1987, https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/11/us/bradley-offers-bill-to-return-land-to-sioux.html.

129. Quoted in Garrett-Davis, Ghost Dances, 44.

130. Heppler, “The American Indian Movement and South Dakota Politics,” 286n48.

131. Bruce Selcraig, “Camp Fear,” Mother Jones, November/December 2000, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/11/camp-fear/.

132. Denise Ross, “Gina Score’s Parents Still Hurting,” Rapid City Journal, December 8, 2000.

133. “1980s Crime: From 8-Tracks to Stun Guns,” Mitchell Republic, February 8, 2014, www.mitchellrepublic.com/lifestyle/2226378–1980s-crime-8-tracks-stun-guns.

134. Arielle Zionts, “South Dakota Incarceration Rate Highest in Country,” Rapid City Journal, October 7, 2019, https://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/south-dakota-jails-most-per-capita-study-says/article_34584f2b-8a2f-52ec-8bdc-6c98b2484958.html.

135. “1980s Crime: From 8-Tracks to Stun Guns.”

136. Mary Garrigan, “Custer’s Sheriff’s Reserve Came Out of 1973 Riot,” Rapid City Journal, May 12, 2011.

137. Estes, Our History Is the Future, 197.

138. Ibid.

139. Nationally, Native people are incarcerated at a rate of 38 percent higher than national average. Native men are incarcerated at four times the rate of white men; Native women at six times the rate of white women. Jake Flanagin, “Reservation to Prison Pipeline,” Quartz, April 27, 2015; Lakota People’s Law Project, https://www.lakotalaw.org/.

140. Estes, Our History Is the Future, 190–91.

141. Steve Lapointe, conversation with author, October 2018.

142. Clayton C. Cramer and David B. Kopel, “ ‘Shall Issue’: The New Wave of Concealed Carry Permit Laws,” Tennessee Law Review 62 (Spring 1995): 679–757, http://www.davekopel.com/2A/LawRev/ShallIssue.htm#c1. See also Seth Tupper, “Concealed-Carry Bills Would Reverse 155 Years of State-Territorial Policy,” Rapid City Journal, January 20, 2019, https://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/concealed-carry-bills-would-reverse-years-of-state-territorial-policy/article_ceef18e9–7047–52d2–8977-b4ce2b6ddc82.html.

143. Steven Rosenfeld, “The NRA Once Supported Gun Control,” Salon, January 14, 2013; Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (New York: Norton, 2013).

144. Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded, 165. In 2016 military service was the best predictor of gun ownership. Kathleen Belew has shown how service in the military during Vietnam also led to the creation of new radical White Power organizations and the rise of paramilitary violence. Belew, Bring the War Home.

145. Quoted in Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded, 202. Simpson also boasted, “How steady you hold your rifle; that’s gun control in Wyoming.” In 2015 South Dakota had more than twenty-four guns per person; North Dakota had more than seventeen per person. See https://hunting mark.com/gun-ownership-stats/.

146. #24, September 20, 2015, https://www.thehighroad.org/index.php?threads/south-dakota.788366/.

147. “What Are South Dakota’s Firearms Laws?,” Argus Leader, February 22, 2018, https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2018/02/22/what-south-dakotas-firearm-laws/359387002/. See also the NRA site which links to specific state legislation: https://www.nraila.org/gun-laws/state-gun-laws/south-dakota/.

148. #25, September 21, 2015, South Dakota, The High Road, https://www.thehighroad.org/index.php?threads/south-dakota.788366/.

149. Estes, Our Past Is the Future, 33–35.

150. Ibid., 196.

151. Ibid., 4–5.

152. Ibid., 251.

153. Quoted in ibid., 48.

Chapter 8

Note to chapter title: This term used here and throughout the chapter is from Debra Marquart’s poem, “small buried things,” from Marquart, Small Buried Things: Poems (Moorhead, MN: New Rivers Press, 2015), 52.

1. Debra Marquart, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere (New York: Counterpoint, 2006), 97.

2. Michael J. Lansing, Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 149–51.

3. Marquart, The Horizontal World, 97–98.

4. Marquart, “small buried things,” 41.

5. Ibid., 42.

6. Ibid., 41.

7. Ibid., 49.

8. Debra Marquart, interview, Iowa Public Radio, https://www.iowapublicradio.org/post/debra-marquart-chin-whiskers-fracking-things-not-put-your-mouth#stream/0.

9. Marquart, “small buried things,” 53.

10. Todd Fuchs, “Oil Boom on the Bakken Helped Strengthen National Security,” Grand Forks Herald, May 10, 2018, http://www.inforum.com/opinion/letters/4443983-oil-boom-bakken-helped-strengthen-national-security.

11. Jeremy Miller, “The Shining: A Night in the Heart of Energy Independence,” in Taylor Brorby and Stefanie Brook Trout, eds., Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America (North Liberty, IA: Ice Cube Press, 2016), 250–51.

12. Quoted in David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm Americans and the World (New York: Henry Holt, 2017), 231.

13. In 2017 a nuclear bomb was flown across the country in error before any officials in Minot realized it was missing. In 2018 officials in Minot had to ask local people to help them find lost explosives and a machine gun. See “Air Force Base That Lost Explosives: We’re Also Missing a Machine Gun,” Washington Post, May 18, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2018/05/18/air-force-base-that-lost-explosives-were-also-missing-a-machine-gun/?utm_term=.39112e44b193.

14. Marquart, “small buried things,” 50–51.

15. Chris Hedges, “Live at Politics and Prose,” August, 2018, https://player.fm/series/live-at-politics-and-prose-2355583/chris-hedges-live-at-politics-and-prose.

16. Gretchen Heefner, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 155, 267n32.

17. Rev. L. J. Murtaugh, “Support Silos, Not Missiles,” letter to the editor, Argus Leader, March 20, 1985, 8.

18. Marquart, “small buried things,” 52.

19. Rates of child neglect and abuse, divorce, drug use, domestic violence, and suicide all climbed during the Farm Crisis. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, “Children of the Crisis: Farm Youth in Troubled Times,” Middle West Review 2 (Fall 2015): 11–25.

20. Richard Reeves, “The Ideological Election,” New York Times, February 19, 1984, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/19/magazine/the-ideological-election.html.

21. Harry C. Boyte, Heather Booth, and Steve Max, Citizen Action and the New American Populism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

22. In rural Minnesota, a farmer and his son asked their banker to come to their farm where they ambushed and killed him. Catherine McNicol Stock, Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), 87–90.

23. On “people-first principles,” see Sarah M. Vogel, “Advocate for Agriculture,” in Susan E. Wefald, Important Voices: North Dakota’s Women Elected State Officials Share Their Stories, 1893–2013 (Fargo, ND: Institute for Regional Studies Press, 2014), 65.

24. In 2019, the North Dakota legislature passed a bill redefining a “family” member to include second cousins. “Second Cousins Added to North Dakota’s Corporate Farming Law,” Fargo Forum, April 18, 2019, https://www.inforum.com/news/government-and-politics/1007441-Second-cousins-added-to-North-Dakotas-corporate-farming-law.

25. William C. Pratt, “Using History to Make History? Progressive Farm Organizing During the Farm Revolt of the 1980s,” Annals of Iowa 55, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 45.

26. William Greider, “The Last Farm Crisis,” The Nation, November 2, 2000, https://www.thenation.com/article/last-farm-crisis/.

27. Robert Wuthnow, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 94; “Days are Numbered for Pair of Weathered Grain Elevators,” Bismarck Tribune, May 6, 2007, https://bismarcktribune.com/news/state-and-regional/days-are-numbered-for-weathered-pair-of-grain-elevators/article_38301606–68d3–5467–9403–3cfac4ebad6b.html.

28. Scott Kraft, “Were Foreclosure Pressures to Blame? Family Farm Deaths Shock a Hamlet,” Los Angeles Times, January 10, 1986, http://articles.latimes.com/1986–01–10/news/mn-839_1_farm-crisis.

29. Quoted in ibid. See also “Broken Heartland,” The Nation, February 8, 1986, https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Broken+heartland.-a04129459.

30. Kathryn Marie Dudley, Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in the American Heartland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

31. Nathan A. Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki, “The Butz Stops Here: Why the Food Movement Needs to Rethink Agricultural History,” Journal of Food Law and Policy 13 (2017): 19–20.

32. Caroline Tauxe, “Family Cohesion vs. Capitalist Hegemony: Cultural Accommodation on the North Dakota Farm,” Dialectical Anthropology 17, no. 3 (1992): 297. See also Kristin L. Hoganson, The Heartland: An American History (New York: Penguin, 2019).

33. Rosenberg and Stucki argue that these infamous words were actually first uttered by President Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Ezra Benson. “The Butz Stops Here,” 17–19.

34. Iowa Public Television, “The Farm Crisis: Causes of the Crisis,” http://www.iptv.org/mtom/classroom/module/13999/farm-crisis.

35. F. Larry Leistritz, Arlen Leholm, and Harlan Hughes, “Coping with the Farm Crisis in North Dakota,” http://agris.fao.org/agris-search/search.do?recordID=US8866478, 56.

36. Ibid.

37. Tauxe, “Family Cohesion vs. Capitalist Hegemony,” 313.

38. Rebecca Stoll, “Desperate Farm Wives: Gender, Activism, and Traditionalism in the Farm Crisis,” Middle West Review 2 (Fall 2015): 33–49.

39. Jessica Giard, “Farm Crisis Unites a State,” Daily Republic, February 14, 2014, https://www.mitchellrepublic.com/news/2236577–1980s-series-farm-crisis-unites-state.

40. Herbert S. Schell, History of South Dakota, 4th rev. ed. (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2004), 351–53.

41. Ibid., 353.

42. Anna Jauhola, “During ’80s, Downtown Transitioned,” Mitchell Daily Republic, March 21, 2014, https://www.mitchellrepublic.com/news/2473044-during-80s-downtown-transitioned-cafes-retailers-niche-stores-coffee-shops.

43. Chris Mueller, “Population Decline Hits Rural Areas Hard,” Daily Republic, March 1, 2014, https://www.mitchellrepublic.com/news/2352700-population-decline-hits-rural-areas-hard.

44. Ibid.

45. Reeves, “The Ideological Election.”

46. Jay Ward, “Agriculture During the Reagan Years” (PhD diss., University of Missouri, 2015), 14–15, 297; Don Paarlberg, “Agriculture,” in Charles L. Heatherly, ed., Mandate for Leadership: Policy Management in a Conservative Administration (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 1981), chapter 1.

47. Quoted in William Greider, “The Education of David Stockman,” The Atlantic, December 1981, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1981/12/the-education-of-david-stockman/305760/.

48. Ronald Reagan, “Radio Address to the Nation on Agriculture and Grain Exports,” October 15, 1982, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/research/speeches/101582a. See also Jonathan Harsch, “Reagan Farm Policy Will Continue Bipartisan Effort to ‘Turn Farmers Loose,’ ” Christian Science Monitor, November 14, 1980.

49. Jason Manning, “The Midwest Farm Crisis of the 1980s,”http://eightiesclub.tripod .com/id395.htm.

50. Pratt, “Using History to Make History?,” 24–45.

51. Cory Haala, “Replanting the Grassroots: The South Dakota Democratic Party from McGovern to Daschle, 1980–1986,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Paula M. Nelson, eds., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political Culture, vol. 3 (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2019), 182–209.

52. Jim Hightower, “Saving the Family Farm,” Washington Post, October 1, 1985; James Risen, “Four Candidates Back Liberal Programs: Militant Farmers Wield Power in Iowa Caucuses,” Los Angeles Times, November 24, 1987, http://articles.latimes.com/1987–11–24/news/mn-24284_1_iowa-farm-unity/2.

53. Quoted in Manning, “Midwest Farm Crisis of the 1980s.”

54. Steven A. Stofferahn, “The Persistence of Agrarian Activism: The National Farmers Organization in South Dakota,” in Jon K. Lauck, John E. Miller, and Donald C. Simmons Jr., eds., The Plains Political Tradition: Essays on South Dakota Political Culture, vol. 2 (Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2014), 209–41.

55. Denise O’Brien, “Memories of the Crisis,” Middle West Review 2 (Fall 2015): 51–68; Stoll, “Desperate Farm Wives.”

56. Farm Crisis organizers would have been well aware of the stunning victory experienced by the United Family Farmers, which had brought a halt to the flooding of one hundred thousand acres of land by the Army Corps of Engineers at the Oahe dam. Rather than promote violence, they made coalitions with environmental groups, Native people, and local scholars to bring a new perspective to the plan. See Peter Carrells, Uphill Against Water: The Great Dakota Water War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).

57. “Jesse Jackson Donned a Farmers Cap,” April 1, 1985, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1985/04/01/Jesse-Jackson-donned-a-farmers-cap-Monday-climbed-aboard/2843481179600/.

58. Giard, “Farm Crisis Unites a State.”

59. Argus Leader, January 9, 1985, 1.

60. Argus Leader, May 30, 1985, 4.

61. Eric Steven Zimmer, Art Marmorstein, and Matthew Remmich, “ ‘Fewer Rabbis Than U.S. Senators’: Jewish Political Activism in South Dakota,” in Lauck, Miller, and Nelson, Plains Political Tradition, 3:112–39. Janklow’s father was Jewish, and although Janklow was a practicing Lutheran, he had close ties to Stan Adelstein, an important conservative organizer from Rapid City.

62. “South Dakota Governor Calls Out Troopers to Stop Canadian Hogs,” https://www.apnews.com/cd3d382cc1f05620bc26d52bfd081b09.

63. Quoted in the Spearfish Daily Queen City Mail, June 13, 1986, 1.

64. Emily Wanless, “Understanding South Dakota’s Political Culture Through the 1994 Election of Governor William Janklow,” in Lauck, Miller, and Nelson, Plains Political Tradition, 3:210–31.

65. “Governor Announces Sale of Core Rail Line,” https://siouxcityjournal.com/news/state-and-regional/governor-announces-sale-of-core-rail-line/article_877f97c5-d489–5336-a4f1-c688b26c0814.html.

66. Bill Harlan, “Legislators to Consider $252 Million S.D. Cement Plant Offer,” Rapid City Journal, December 23, 2000, https://rapidcityjournal.com/legislators-to-consider-million-s-d-cement-plant-offer/article_4eba44cc-5c32–574d-bb4b-2168f2d2b76f.html.

67. George A. Sinner and Bob Jansen, Turning Points: A Memoir (Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies, 2011), 30.

68. Ibid., 136.

69. Sarah Vogel’s grandfather, Frank Vogel, was a close associate of Bill Langer and, among other positions in the NPL, was the manager of the Bank of North Dakota.

70. Vogel, “Advocate for Agriculture,” in Wefald, Important Voices, 65, 88.

71. Curt Stofferahn, “Farm Advocate Elected Ag Commissioner,” North American Farmer, December 1988, 4. Vogel was inspired by her study of the legal actions taken by Governor Bill Langer and the North Dakota state legislature in 1933, including Langer’s halt to all foreclosures. She wrote that “the legal developments of the 1930’s are no longer simply of academic or historical interest” given the problems of the farm credit crisis in the 1980s. Sarah M. Vogel, “The Law of Hard Times: Debtor and Farmer Relief Actions of the 1933 North Dakota Legislative Session,” North Dakota Law Review 60, no. 489 (1988): 512.

72. Before Conrad was tax commissioner, Byron Dorgan was; he attempted to tax the missile silos as a state utility. Cory Haala, email to author, July 10, 2019.

73. North Dakota ultimately lost a second, somewhat similar case against an office retailer, Quill Corporation, because, the state supreme court ruled, the company maintained no physical presence in the state. In 2018 the US Supreme Court took up a similar question brought by the state of South Dakota regarding taxing internet companies, finding that states could charge taxes on internet sales in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc.

74. “Court Affirms State’s Way of Taxing Firms,” Bismarck Tribune, May 24, 1991, 9A.

75. Mary Summers, “From the Heartland to Seattle: The Family Farm Movement of the 1980s and the Legacy of Agrarian State Building,” in Catherine McNicol Stock and Robert D. Johnston, eds., The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 323.

76. Quoted in Haala, “Replanting the Grassroots,” 186.

77. When asked years later what she thought of the fact that nearly all the producer cooperatives she had begun had been turned into corporations, Sarah Vogel replied that, “You could have knocked me over with a feather on that one. That was pretty shocking because the spirit of the co-op was to have a plant that was subject to farmer control and ownership, and to compete. That’s been lost. And to a Canadian company? That’s unbelievable. On the other hand, it wasn’t a takeover. The farmers did the voting and gave up on their dream.” Quoted in “Sarah Vogel Remains a Force Outside Politics,” Grand Forks Herald, July 17, 2010.

78. Anonymous, email correspondence with author, August 10, 2018.

79. Cally Musland, “Jim Fuglie: What’s a Democrat to Do in North Dakota?,” February 9, 2016, http://kfgo.com/podcasts/news-views-with-joel-heitkamp/1703/jim-fuglie-whats-a-democrat-to-do-in-north-dakota/.

80. Quoted in Ward, “Agriculture During the Reagan Years,” 298.

81. Ibid., 297–98.

82. Ibid., 290–302.

83. Summers, “From the Heartland to Seattle,” 307.

84. Michael Stewart Foley, “ ‘Everyone Was Pounding on Us’: Front Porch Politics and the American Farm Crisis of the 1970s and 1980s,” Journal of Historical Sociology 28 (March 2015): 110. See also Barry J. Barnett, “The U.S. Farm Financial Crisis of the 1980s,” in Jane Adams, ed., Fighting for the Farm, Rural America Transformed (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 160–74.

85. Greider, “The Last Farm Crisis.”

86. Ibid. See also https://historyrat.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/the-1985-farm-crisis-what-one-hand-giveth-the-other-taketh-away/.

87. Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 16–17, 47, 187–88. Reding explains that it was “no accident” that the meth epidemic developed at the height of the Farm Crisis. He quotes rural sociologist William Heffernan who claims that “most rural economic development specialists discount agriculture as a contributor to rural development [after 2000]” (189). He also describes the low-wage work that has taken the place of farming or manufacturing in many Midwestern communities. One man used meth and made it in his home. “The way he saw it, life in Greenville was a prison anyway. It was better to live well for a time and go back to jail than to pretend to make ends meet on [the] two hundred dollars a week and no health insurance that [his friend] Sean said a job at Wal-Mart would get him” (17). He also points to the closure of military bases in the 1990s as a contributing factor to the epidemic (59).

88. Haala, “Replanting the Grassroots,” 187.

89. Lee Sigelman, “Economic Pressures and the Farm Vote: The Case of 1984,” Rural Sociology 52, no. 2 (1987): 151–65. Sigelman quotes a journalist’s conclusion that many farm ers had just “reconciled to their doom” (161).

90. Ibid., 153.

91. Ibid., 153, 155.

92. Quoted in Boyte, Booth, and Max, Citizen Action and the New American Populism, 17.

93. O’Brien, “Memories of the Crisis,” 62.

94. Summers, “From the Heartland to Seattle,” 304–5.

95. Paul Harvey, “On the Eighth Day, God Made a Farmer,” Altus Times (OK), May 19, 1986. For the 2013 Super Bowl ad which included Harvey’s own narration and depicted only two nonwhite farmers, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMpZ0TGjbWE.

96. Quoted in Haala, “Replanting the Grassroots,” 186.

97. Jon Lauck writes that the depiction of the Farm Crisis in Country (Pearce 1984) was so powerful that many South Dakotans who saw the film had to leave the cinema. See Jon K. Lauck, American Agriculture and the Problem of Monopoly: The Political Economy of Grain Belt Farming, 1953–1980 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), ix. Three of the lead actors from these films—Jane Fonda, Sissy Spacek, and Jessica Lange—testified to Congress about the Farm Crisis.

98. For the continued focus on the rural economy, but also a continued reliance on white performers (despite the use of the African American country star, Yola, on the first page), see https://www.farmaid.org/.

99. As of 2018 they still wore these stickers. Cory Haala, “ ‘America Needs Farmers’: Hawkeye Football and State Exceptionalism in 1980s Iowa” (paper delivered at the Midwestern History Association Annual Meeting, Grand Rapids, MI, June 6, 2018). Haala demonstrates that the Farm Bureau supported seemingly nonpolitical campaigns like ANF rather than the more radical Prairie Fire or Farm Aid programs. He argues that it set Iowa aside as an exceptional example of the crisis and of traditional values adding to the overall conservative nature of the media attention to and political outcomes of the crisis.

100. O’Brien, “Memories of the Crisis,” 65. O’Brien was especially disappointed when the funding for her organization’s women’s project dried up.

101. An example of privately funded aid for farmers is the Ralph Engelstad Foundation’s generous support for the Farm Rescue program, which uses volunteers to help farmers injured in accidents or who suffered weather disasters. See https://farmrescue.org/.

102. Summers, “From the Heartland to Seattle,” 316.

103. Stock, Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain, 143–76. See also Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). Belew argues that the experience of defeat in the Vietnam War inspired some white power radicals more than their experiences in the Farm Crisis.

104. Stock, Rural Radicals: Righteous Rage in the American Grain, 171–74. The tiny town of Leith, North Dakota, has been trying to fend off being taken over by a neo-Nazi group since 2012. See Samantha Schmidt, “The Mayor of Tiny North Dakota Town Shaken by Neo-Nazi Wants to Dissolve City Government,” Washington Post, June 27, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/06/27/the-mayor-of-tiny-north-dakota-town-shaken-by-neo-nazi-wants-to-dissolve-its-government/?utmterm=.474fcffec056.

105. Sinner and Jansen, Turning Points, 135.

106. Ibid., 137.

107. Terry Worster, “Crack Down Led to Proposed Amendment,” Rapid City Journal, October 12, 1970, 8.

108. Linda Lea M. Viken, email conversation with author, September 16, 2018. See also Bob Mercer, “State Legislators Decide Video Lottery Must Stay,” Rapid City Journal, February 16, 2018, https://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/state-legislators-decide-video-lottery-must-stay/article_2381ce9f-2b90–5326–91fa-b659e93c879c.html.

109. Bill Janklow, interview, “Secret History of the Credit Card,” PBS, Frontline, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/credit/interviews/janklow.html. Early signs of deregulation of the financial sector were also important to the Citibank deal: in 1956, Congress relaxed some provisions of the Depression-era Glass Steagall Act, including one that had prohibited banks from crossing state lines to set up branches.

110. In 2004 Ralph J. Brown completed a study that showed the difference the arrival of Citibank and other firms had made to the Sioux Falls economy by comparing it with his “sister city,” Sioux City, Iowa, eighty miles east on Interstate 29. See Brown, “A Tale of Two Cities: Sioux Falls and Sioux City,” South Dakota Business Review 62 (December 2004): 1–8.

111. Governor Dennis Daugaard, quoted in Wanless, “Understanding South Dakota’s Political Culture Through the 1994 Election of Governor William Janklow,” 214.

112. Janklow, interview, “The Secret History of the Credit Card,” PBS, Frontline,3.

113. Quoted in Wanless, “Understanding South Dakota’s Political Culture Through the 1994 Election of Governor William Janklow,” 213.

114. Janklow, interview, “The Secret History of the Credit Card.”

115. Ibid., 7. Janklow also blamed consumers for their “lack of sophistication” about handling their debt (6).

116. “South Dakota Voters Approve Interest Rate Cap on Payday Loans,” November 8, 2016, http://www.ksfy.com/content/news/South-Dakota-voters-approve-interest-rate-cap-on-payday-loans-400489561.html.

117. “More Military Families Struggle with Debt,” https://www.military.com/money/personal-finance/credit-debt-management/more-military-families-struggle-with-debt.html; “Department of Defense Issues Final Military Lending Act Rule,” https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/612795/department-of-defense-issues-final-military-lending-act-rule/.

118. Emily Gilbert, “Money as a ‘Weapons System’ and the Entrepreneurial Way of War,” Critical Military Studies 1, no. 3 (2015): 202–19.

119. https://www.ndstudies.gov/energy/level2/module-3-coal/where-coal-found.

120. Mike Jacobs, One Time Harvest: Reflections on Coal and Our Future (Jamestown: North Dakota Farmers Union, 1975).

121. Caroline Tauxe, Farms, Mines, and Main Streets: Uneven Development in a Dakota County (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 94.

122. Quoted in Tauxe, Farms, Mines, and Main Streets, 110.

123. Beulah Beacon (ND), March 8, 1979, quoted in Tauxe, Farms, Mines, and Main Streets, 106.

124. “Coal Land Reclamation,” https://www.ndstudies.gov/gr8/content/unit-iv-modern-north-dakota-1921-present/lesson-1-changing-landscapes/topic-5-energy/section-2-coal.

125. Tauxe, Farms, Mines, and Main Streets, 213.

126. Ibid., 224.

127. Beulah Beacon, December 10, 1987, quoted in Tauxe, Farms, Mines, and Main Streets, 229.

128. C. S. Hagen, “Master of Puppets,” High Plains Reader, August 1, 2018, hpr1.com/index.php/feature/news/master-of-puppets.

129. For two films about the Bakken boom, see The Overnighters (Moss, 2014) and My Country No More (Baghdadi and Hemmerling, 2018). See also Brorby and Brook Trout, Fracture. On the impact of fracking on women see John Eligon, “An Oil Town Where Men Are Many and Women Are Hounded,” New York Times, January 15, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/us/16women.html; Susan Elizabeth Shepard, “Wildcatting: A Stripper’s Guide to the Modern American Boomtown,” Buzzfeed, July 25, 2013, https://www.buzzfeed.com/su sanelizabethshepard/wildcatting-a-strippers-guide-to-the-modern-american-boomtow; “Native Leaders Bring Attention to the Impact of Fossil Fuel Industry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls,” Indigenous Environmental Network, May 3, 2017, http://www.ienearth.org/native-leaders-bring-attention-to-impact-of-fossil-fuel-industry-on-missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-and-girls/; Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long History of Indigenous Resistance (London: Verso, 2019), 32–33; Lisa Kaczke, “We Don’t Know How Many Native American Women Are Missing in South Dakota: That’s About to Change,” Argus Leader, June 26, 2019, https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/politics/2019/06/27/indigenous-women-missing-murdered-south-dakota-new-law-changes/1525751001/. On the struggle to maintain a balanced budget despite the fluctuations of the energy economy see “Burgum Vows to Curb Spending Despite Additional Oil Revenue,” KFGO, July 19, 2018, https://kfgo.com/news/arti cles/2018/jul/19/burgum-vows-to-curb-spending-despite-additional-oil-revenue/; Ernest Scheyder, “In North Dakota’s Oil Patch, a Humbling Comedown,” Reuters, May 18, 2016, www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-northdakota-bust/.

130. Hagen, “Master of Puppets”; Jim Fuglie, “600 Illegal Water Permits? Unacceptable Behavior by a State Agency,” https://theprairieblog.com/2017/04/17/state-agency-breaks-the-law-600-times-how-much-jail-time-do-you-get-for-that/.

131. Mark Trechock, “Down the Road,” in Brorby and Brook Trout, Fracture, 360.

132. Mike Jacobs, A Birthday Inquiry: North Dakota at 125; A Collection of Essays, ed. Steve Wagner (Fargo, ND: Forum Communications, 2014). Kindle only.

Appendix

1. https://diversity.defense.gov/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=gxMVqhkaHh8%3D&portalid=51.

2. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c567/b17bc58e83e93e68e28f1cfe270473593a48.pdf.

3. https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/661594.pdf.