The short Senate career of Gladys S. Pyle stood in marked
contrast with her long and influential participation in her
native South Dakota’s politics. A daughter of a leading
suffragist and state attorney general, Pyle was oriented
to public service from an early age. Her brief time as
Senator, nevertheless, stood as a signal moment in a life of
commitment to South Dakotans. “Citizenship,” she once
observed, “is service.”1
Gladys Shields Pyle was born on October 4, 1890, in
Huron, South Dakota, the youngest of four children of
John L. Pyle and Mamie Shields Pyle. Her father was a
lawyer, the South Dakota attorney general, and a patron
of Huron College. Mamie Pyle led the Universal Franchise
League, which eventually won the vote for South Dakota
women in 1918. Both parents fostered in their children a
commitment to public service from which young Gladys
drew for the rest of her long life. After graduating with
a liberal arts degree with a music emphasis from Huron
College in 1911, Gladys Pyle took graduate courses at the
American Conservatory of Music and the University of
Chicago. In 1912 she returned to Huron, where she taught
high school until 1918, when she accepted a position as
principal of a school in Wessington, South Dakota. Two years later she left teaching to work briefly as a lecturer
for the League of Women Voters, traveling to several
midwestern states to deliver talks on citizenship and voter
participation.2 Pyle never married.
Gladys Pyle made the transition to politics in order to
put into practice what she had preached in the classroom.
Years later she described her lifelong political philosophy as
being that of a Progressive, moderate Republican.3 “Politics . . . is like sailing a boat,” Pyle observed. “You have to learn
to tack, going from one side of the river to the other. It takes
a little longer, but you can make good progress.”4 Political
activism was requisite for her.5 Ironically, she embarked
on her new career against the advice of her mother, who
had reservations about Gladys running for elective office,
perhaps because she believed it would make her daughter
vulnerable to charges of riding her mother’s coattails.6
Undeterred, 32-year-old Gladys Pyle ran for the state
legislature in 1922, winning election to the South Dakota
house of representatives by a slender 350 votes. Pyle, the
first woman elected to the state legislature, served an
additional two terms and was instrumental in gaining South
Dakota’s ratification of the Child Labor Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution.7 During her time in the legislature, Pyle also served as assistant secretary of state. In 1926 she became
the first woman elected as South Dakota secretary of state.
She served for two terms from 1927 to 1931, introducing
some of the nation’s first safety codes for automobiles
and motorcycles.8
In March 1930, Pyle made national headlines
when she entered the GOP primary for South Dakota
governor against four men, including former Governor
Carl Gunderson and Brooke Howell, a favorite of state
financiers. Pyle refused to take to the campaign trail, citing
her responsibilities as secretary of state. She did, however,
launch a targeted public relations blitz at newspaper editors,
state delegates, and GOP county chairmen. Her campaign
centered on the issue of banking reform and tighter control
of miscellaneous state funds. Her slogan was, “Clean up
the banks.” Pyle surprised observers by winning more votes
than any of her rivals—and topping her nearest contender,
Gunderson, by about 1,600 votes. The 28 percent she
polled, however, fell short of the 35 percent minimum
required by law. The nomination was decided at a special
state GOP convention in Sioux Falls in May 1930. Howell,
Pyle’s chief rival, eventually withdrew from the race and
on the twelfth ballot threw his support behind Warren E.
Green, a dirt farmer who had won just seven percent of the
primary vote.9 Green prevailed. For Pyle, the episode revealed
that her public career had reached something of a political
glass ceiling, as the state’s political old guard refused to back
her.10 From 1931 to 1933, Pyle served by appointment as
secretary of the securities commission of South Dakota.11 As
secretary of the commission, she became the first woman
in the state to run an executive department and the first
woman permitted onto the floor of the New York Curb
Market.12 Except for her brief time in Washington, from
1933 until the 1980s, Gladys Pyle went into business as an
insurance agent for two national companies.
Pyle took a circuitous route to the U.S. Senate, shaped
by tragedy and peculiarities in South Dakota election laws.
In late December 1936, Progressive-Republican Senator
Peter Norbeck of South Dakota died after a long illness.
Outgoing Democratic Governor Tom Berry, who had
been defeated by a Republican in the November elections,
quickly appointed Democrat Herbert Emery Hitchcock to
fill the vacancy. However, by state law, Hitchcock had to
step down once the next regularly scheduled general election
took place in November 1938. While a new Senator would
be elected for the full term from 1939–1945, technically the seat would remain vacant from November 1938 until
a successor was sworn into office in January 1939. The
75th Congress (1937–1939) had adjourned in June 1938
to prepare for the elections, and it was customary that it
would not reconvene until the start of the 76th Congress
(1939–1941) in January 1939. Normally, such a vacancy
would provoke little concern. But as the 1938 elections
took shape, rumors swirled that President Franklin D.
Roosevelt (FDR) would call for a special session after the
elections to capitalize on the existing Democratic margins in
both chambers of Congress. In response, the South Dakota
Republican Party, which dominated the congressional
delegation, pushed for a special election and sought a
candidate to fill the two-month term. GOP candidate John
Chandler Gurney had won the nomination for the full
term, but state laws prevented his name from appearing
twice on the ballot.13
GOP leaders turned to Gladys Pyle because she had
enough name recognition and support to win without
the party having to invest considerable resources in the
race. She traveled the state to campaign on behalf of the
entire GOP ticket, with support from the Republican
National Committee, arguing that the New Deal had
not done enough for South Dakotans. Pyle also tapped
into a strong statewide network of Republican women’s
clubs.14 Recognizing that her term would be brief, voters
went to the polls on November 8, 1938, and chose the
48-year-old Pyle. She registered a resounding win over
Democrat John T. McCullen, 58 to 42 percent of the vote,
garnering nearly 10,000 votes more than the next-best vote
getter on the ticket—Gurney, who won the election for
the full term. It also made her the first Republican woman
elected to the Senate and the first woman from either party
to win election to the Senate in her own right, without
having first been appointed to fill a vacancy.
Because Congress already had adjourned, and FDR
never did call a special session, Pyle was never officially
sworn in to the Senate. Despite the lack of committee
assignments and legislative duties, she left Huron the
day after Thanksgiving and drove to Washington, DC,
with her mother and an aide and spent the next five
weeks in the capital as South Dakota’s Senator. She paid
her own travel expenses because Members only received
mileage costs if they were commuting to and from a
session of Congress.15 Once in Washington, she and an interim appointee from California shared an office space
customarily reserved for one Senator.16
Pyle did not lack for things to do. She rallied support for
her Depression-burdened state by pushing various highway
and Works Progress Administration (WPA) programs. Pyle
intervened with the Department of the Interior on behalf
of landholders on Indian reservations who had suffered
years of ruined crops and fallen far behind on mortgage
payments. She also handled cases with the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, investigated the sale of land inside a state park,
and worked to expand funding for WPA projects within
her state. Pyle tended to individual constituent needs
ranging from pensions and hospitalization to civil service
ratings.17 In addition, she persuaded Norwegian officials
to schedule a June 1939 visit to South Dakota of the
crown prince and princess of Norway during their North
American travels, delighting thousands of South Dakotans
of Scandinavian heritage.18 “I wish I had come the day
after the election,” Pyle admitted as her term expired. “Just
because the Senate is not in session is no sign a Senator
cannot be of service to her constituents.”19
In January 1939, Pyle returned to her insurance business
and stayed closely involved in public service work. At the
1940 GOP Convention in Philadelphia, she became the
first woman to nominate a presidential candidate, backing
South Dakota Governor Harlan John Bushfield.20 During
that same year, she also made an unsuccessful bid for
mayor of her hometown of Huron.21 From 1943 to 1957,
Pyle served on the South Dakota board of charities and
corrections. In 1947 she and five other women became the
first in state history to serve on a jury, as South Dakota
dropped its all-male requirement. Pyle lived in Huron and
was involved in numerous charities and civic organizations.
In 1980, on her 90th birthday, the town named Pyle its
“First Citizen.” At the age of 98, Gladys Pyle died on March
14, 1989, in Huron.
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