Richard F. Pettigrew

Richard Franklin Pettigrew (July 23, 1848 - October 5, 1926) was an American lawyer, surveyor, and land developer. He represented the Dakota Territory in the U.S. Congress and, after the Dakotas were admitted as States, he was a U.S. Senator from South Dakota.

Biography

Pettigrew was born in Ludlow, Windsor County, Vermont, and moved with his parents to Wisconsin in 1854. The family settled in Rock County, near Union, Wisconsin. [ Wayne Fanebust, "Echoes of November", p. 6 ] He studied law in Iowa, and entered the law department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1867. He moved to Dakota in 1869 to work with a United States deputy surveyor.

Pettigrew settled in Sioux Falls, where he practiced law and engaged in surveying and real estate. He was a member of the territorial House of Representatives and served on the Territorial council. He was elected as a Republican to the U.S. House, serving from March 4, 1881 - March 3, 1883. He was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1882, but returned to the territorial council from 1885 to 1889.

When South Dakota was admitted as a State, Pettigrew was elected as South Dakota's first Senator to the United States Senate. He served from November 2, 1889 to March 3, 1901. He was re-elected in 1894, but left the Republican party on June 17, 1896 to join the Silver Republicans, a faction of the Republican Party which opposed the party's position in support of the monetary gold standard. He was an unsuccessful candidate for reelection in 1900.

In the Presidential Election of 1900, while still in the Senate, he was a delegate and a major figure in the national political convention of the Populist Party held in Sioux Falls that convened on May 9, 1900 and lasted three days. The party endorsed William Jennings Bryan as its candidate. [ Wayne Fanebust, "Echoes of November", pp. 332-334 ]

After his time in the Senate, Pettigrew first practiced law in New York City, but soon returned to Sioux Falls and was active in politics and business until his death in that city. He was interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in Sioux Falls.

Pettigrew left his home to the city of Sioux Falls in his will. Pettigrew's home is maintained by the city of Sioux Falls to this day. The Pettigrew museum is designed to emulate how a person of Pettigrew's stature would have lived at the turn of the century. The house is filled with antiques from the early 1900s and Pettigrew's personal collection of artifacts. The latter because Pettigrew was an amateur archaeologist.

Books

* "The Course of Empire". New York: Boni & Liveright, 1920. (Anti-imperialist speeches)
* "Imperial Washington: The Story of American Public Life from 1870 to 1920". 1922. Reprint. New York: Arno Press, 1970. Originally published as "Triumphant Plutocracy: The Story of American Public Life from 1870 to 1920".

Quotes

All quotes are from Pettigrew's book "Triumphant Plutocracy"

* "Capital is stolen labor and its only function is to steal more labor"
* "The early years of the century marked the progress of the race toward individual freedom and permanent victory over the tyranny of hereditary aristocracy, but the closing decades of the century have witnessed the surrender of all that was gained to the more heartless tyranny of accumulated wealth"
* "Under the ethics of his profession the lawyer is the only man who can take a bribe and call it a fee"
* "The sum and substance of the conquest of the Philippines is to find a field where cheap labor can be secured, labor that does not strike, that does not belong to a union, that does not need an army to keep it in leading strings, that will make goods for the trusts of this country"
* "It had come into being as a protest against slavery and as the special champion of the Declaration of Independence, it would go out of being and out of power as the champion of slavery and the repudiator of the Declaration of Independence." --–On the Republican Party.
* "The Russian Revolution is the greatest event of our times. It marks the beginning of the epoch when the working people will assume the task of directing and controlling industry. It blazes a path into this unknown country, where the workers of the world are destined to take from their exploiters the right to control and direct the economic affairs of the community."

Bibliography

Fanebust, Wayne, "Echoes of November, The Life and Times of Senator R. F. Pettigrew of South Dakota", Pine Hill Press, Inc., Freeman, South Dakota, (1997)

Notes

External links

* [http://shmore.no-ip.org/tiki-download_file.php?fileId=1 Triumphant Plutocracy]
* [http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/1949/feb/x01.htm A Forgotten Fighter against Plutocracy] , an article about Pettigrew by George Novack