They Come Big in Dakota

South Dakota, home of big open spaces and big open faces, got ready last week for a big, open Senatorial race. All the candidates were outsize. Seventy-three-year-old William J. Bulow, Democrat and present Senator, weighs about 180 lb. and would stand a gnarl-muscled six feet, if he squared his stooped shoulders. Known as a cracker-box humorist and a bull's-eye tobacco spitter, drawling, beaked Bulow won the moniker of "Silent Bill" by speaking on the Senate floor only six times in two terms. He was a pre-war isolationist and "horse-sense" appeaser. He was a sponsor of the illfated, ill-famed Pensions for Congress bill, later weaseled on it.

Bulow's chief worry in the primaries is "Cowboy Tom" Berry, 63, who is 5 ft. 10 in. without his sombrero, weighs 195 lb. Berry is a friend of Harry Hopkins; was Governor of the State during the lean years of drought and grasshoppers. Berry has backed much of the New Deal. Also known as a South Dakota wit, Berry is needling Bulow on his pensions record.

Best bet in the Republican Senate race is another big man, cold, close-mouthed Harlan J. Bushfield, 59, present Governor, who stands a craggy 6 ft. 2, weighs 195. Though mum about foreign affairs for the last year, Bushfield dislikes Willkie liberalism, in 1940 aspired to run for Vice President behind Ohio's Robert A. Taft. Dictator of the machine he built, Bushfield's main distinction is a record for economy in tax reductions. He might have had a clear field but for the determined person of his Secretary of State, Olive A. Ringsrud.

A Willkie-ish liberal, "Olive," as she is called in South Dakota, measures 5 ft. 10 in stocking feet, weighs a solid 193 lb., wears a size eleven shoe and seems, they say, "even larger than she is." With a peaches-&-cream complexion, a talent for mordant remarks, and a zest for riding the biggest horses available, Olive takes both conservatism and a thirst for reform from her Norse Lutheran heritage. Olive's attack on Bushfield is double-barreled. She pounds away with stories of past investigations of State G.O.P. funds, hammers at a current trial of three of Bushfield's State officers for embezzlement. Then she attacks his economy record: "He asks for advancement after . . . an administration whose only achievement has been in the field of dollars-&-cents economy in a world in which the dollar has lost its power to solve the tragic problems of human life."

Almost equidistant between two oceans, South Dakota has long been muffled in the wide spaces of its prairies, now green after the drought years. But today South Dakotans talk of the Battle of Burma, thirst after another raid on faraway Tokyo, seem less interested in the local issues which seem to dominate the campaign. The primary date: May 5.

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