¶ That rodeos are "brutal, demoralizing"; that they are "commercialized cruelty," the worst features of which are overadvertised to attract attendance from "mentalities below the average"—these accusations were put before President Coolidge by the Chicago Anti-Rodeo League. The League respectfully, earnestly requested the President not to attend the Tri-State Rodeo at Bellefourche.
To Bellefourche went the President and Mrs. Coolidge, sat in a box with Senator & Mrs. Peter Norbeck, saw the rodeo. They saw 13 steers bulldogged. In bulldogging, the cowboy gallops up to the steer, seizes its horns, slides from his horse and throws the steer on its side by leverage on its horns. Mrs. Coolidge looked away as a steer bulldogged by one Nowata Slim of Oklahoma broke its leg, was shot, dragged off.
¶ Readers of the many words written about the President's vacation at Custer Park might, until last week, have almost concluded that South Dakota sent only one Senator to the U. S. Senate. Thousands of U. S. citizens who previously had hardly heard of Senator Peter Norbeck found his name an almost daily feature in South Dakota despatches. Visitors and delegations to the State Lodge are introduced to the President by the Senator; at the Bellefourche round-up last week the Senator & wife shared the box of honor with the President & Mrs. Coolidge. The State Lodge has, indeed, been located in the shadows of Harney Peak and the shadow of the Senator.
Nevertheless, South Dakota has two Senators, equal in the eyes of the law. Last week the missing Senator appeared. He is William H. McMaster and he came bearing no gifts, singing none of the songs now so popular in the Black Hills about Cal and his gal being his pals. The Senator said that farmers were still determined on the passage of the McNary-Haugen bill or its equivalent; that the Republican tariff was not doing the western farmer any good; that it took more than one good year to alleviate farm distress. Most significant, he said that candidates for South Dakota's endorsement in the presidential primaries would be judged in the light of their position on the McNary-Haugen bill.
Senator McMaster failed to see the President on the first day of his arrival at Rapid City, because the President was visiting a Government Indian school (where he asked the Superintendent if the little Indian girls did not get homesick sometimes). The next day, however, the Senator asked the President to call on some of the South Dakotan cities in the eastern part of the state and the President took the invitation under consideration.
Farsighted politicians predicted that if Senator McMaster tried to secure the South Dakota presidential nominating delegation for one-time (1917-21) Governor Lowden of Illinois or for Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska while Senator Norbeck favored President Coolidge, the State might see a hot inter-Senatorial battle. But there always remained the possibility that Senator Norbeck's association with the President has been personal rather than political and that South Dakota's two Senators, who stood side by side when the McNary-Haugen bill was put through Congress, would continue their alliance long after the President should have returned to the East.