♂Christian Leslie Jensen

Christian Leslie Jensen (15 September 1892 – 14 December 1964), known as Leslie or Les Jensen, was the fifteenth governor of South Dakota, serving from 1937 to 1939, and a career officer of the South Dakota National Guard who commanded the 147th Field Artillery in the Second World War. In December 1941 his regiment was at sea west of Hawaii, bound for the Philippines, when word came of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was turned south to Australia instead. Between his public posts he ran the telephone company his father had founded at Hot Springs. He was the nephew of Bothilda Catharina Jensen (1851–1925), the great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007).

Early life

He was born on 15 September 1892 at Hot Springs, South Dakota, the son of Christian Lauritz Jensen (1855–1930), a Danish-born stage-line operator from Schleswig, and Lillie May Haxby (1864–1926). His father built the family’s brick house at 309 South Fifth Street in 1899, and founded the People’s Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1895. A history of the state’s governors, published in 1987, describes him as a “fast growing, lanky, blond Danish boy” who did well in the Hot Springs public school. His father sent him to Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana, where, in the same history’s words, he developed “his penchant for guns, outdoor life, and Henty books”. On his return he helped his father run the telephone company and joined Company K of the Fourth South Dakota Infantry, a National Guard unit organized at Hot Springs in 1908.

The border and France

When the Guard was called out for service on the Mexican border in June 1916, he went to Camp Hagman at Redfield as a sergeant, and was commissioned second lieutenant when the regiment was mustered into federal service on 30 June. He served in the commissary of the regimental supply company through seven months of border duty at San Benito, Texas. In October 1917 the regiment was reorganised as the 147th Field Artillery at Camp Greene, North Carolina, and he was promoted first lieutenant. He went overseas in January 1918, took over a vacancy in the regimental adjutant’s office, and held it through the regiment’s service in the Toul and Château-Thierry sectors and the Argonne offensive. After seventeen months in France he came home a captain of field artillery.

Aberdeen and the law

In the autumn of 1919 he entered the law school of the University of South Dakota at Vermillion. Before he had finished, he was appointed Collector of Internal Revenue for North and South Dakota, a post he owed to Peter Norbeck, whom he admired. He took office at Aberdeen on 2 January 1922 and held it until he resigned on 1 July 1934. He finished his degree while in office, spending one day a week away from Aberdeen at classes in Vermillion, and took his LL.B. in 1926. His class voted him the Edwin Mitchell prize as the member “most likely to succeed as an attorney”, yet he never practised law.

On 19 December 1925 he married Elizabeth Ward (1895–1985) at Aberdeen. She had been born there, and had gone to school at Aberdeen and at Nashville, Tennessee, and to Sweet Briar College in Virginia. Friends called him “the Big Swede”, though he was of Danish descent. The couple had three children, a son, Leslie Ward Jensen (1931–2021), and two daughters. His father died at his house in Aberdeen in January 1930, while on a visit. Between the wars the 147th Field Artillery was rebuilt, and he commanded its Second Battalion as a major.

Governor

In the early 1930s he ran for Congress from the West River district and lost. In July 1934 he returned to Hot Springs to take over the full management of the telephone company. In 1936 the Republicans chose him, unopposed in the primary, to run against the Democratic governor Tom Berry, who was seeking a third term. The campaign was a bitter one: Berry’s side charged him with drawing two federal salaries at once, as Collector and as a Guard major. He won by 151,659 votes to 142,255, in a year when Franklin D. Roosevelt carried the state.

He took office on 5 January 1937. The governors’ history calls him “a moderate governor with progressive views”. His programme centered on the state’s finances. The legislature raised the tax on ore from 4 to 6 per cent at his request, wrote in a homestead exemption from the property tax, and created a Department of Social Security so that the state could take part in the federal old-age assistance programme. It refused his proposals to exempt food from the sales tax and to rename Custer State Park after Peter Norbeck. The last stretch of U.S. Highway 16 was surfaced during his term, completing the first hard-surfaced road across the state. He removed the Democratic chairman of the Board of Charities and Corrections, Leo Craig, for misconduct in office, and the state Supreme Court upheld him. By the end of his term he had cleared a state overdraft more than twenty years old and left a balance in the general fund. His obituary also credits him with refinancing the Rural Credit debt and with a law that kept the gasoline tax for highways.

By the governors’ history’s account, “all signs pointed toward Jensen’s reelection in 1938”. He chose instead to run for Norbeck’s old seat in the United States Senate, and lost the Republican primary to Chan Gurney, by about 49,000 votes to 40,000. The history reads the result as the end of the progressive wing’s influence in the state party. He served a single term, which ended on 3 January 1939. His wife, the history adds, had never been happy with his political life.

The Second World War

Throughout his term he had remained lieutenant colonel and executive officer of the 147th Field Artillery. The regiment was called into federal service in November 1940 and trained at Fort Ord, California. In November 1941 he was promoted colonel and given command of the regiment, which was then ordered to the Philippines. It was at sea west of Hawaii on 7 December 1941. Diverted to Australia, it was, in the governors’ history’s words, General Douglas MacArthur’s “first troops” there after his escape from the Philippines. The regiment later moved north against the Japanese. He commanded Alamo Base Number Two in the jungle of north-eastern New Guinea, where his health gave way, and on 10 March 1944 he was reassigned to MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia as liaison officer for General Walter Krueger and the Sixth Army. He was sent home for treatment of tropical illness and, after several months in Army hospitals, was discharged in 1945 as a colonel, after more than thirty years of military service.

Later life and death

After the war he went back to Hot Springs to manage the telephone company, which served the south-western corner of the state and was still owned by the family at his death. He remained in demand as an after-dinner speaker at political rallies. On the night of Friday 11 December 1964 he was a passenger in a car that a truck, sliding on a curve, struck on Highway 79 south of Rapid City. He suffered head injuries and underwent emergency surgery, and died in a Rapid City hospital on 14 December 1964, aged seventy-two. After a funeral at the United Churches of Christ at Hot Springs on 18 December, he was buried in Evergreen Cemetery there. The house his father built was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987 as the Governor Leslie Jensen House.

Notes

The South Dakota Bar Journal’s memorial of 1965 says he began his Guard service as a private and that he was “on his way to Pearl Harbor” when it was attacked. The governors’ history, which gives the fuller account and is followed here, has him starting as a sergeant and his regiment already west of Hawaii, bound for the Philippines. One published summary of his life gives his law degree as 1921. Both the memorial and the governors’ history place it after he became Collector in 1922, and the memorial gives 1926. The memorial dates his management of the telephone company from 1939, and the governors’ history from July 1934. The 1940 census gives the family’s residence in 1935 as Aberdeen. The governors’ history describes him as the second child in a family of one girl and two boys. That count leaves out an elder brother who died in infancy in 1891. The Register nomination calls the Hot Springs house his “lifelong home”, although he lived at Aberdeen from 1922 to 1934.