Governor #14: Thomas Matthew Berry

Pierre, South Dakota

In office 1933-1937

Tom Berry became South Dakota governor in 1933. As a Democrat he was swept into office along with President Franklin Roosevelt, and oversaw the end of Prohibition and the introduction of unemployment insurance and other forms of federal assistance. He owned a 30,000-acre ranch, and was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners (which is in Oklahoma), the only South Dakota governor so honored.

Berry's statue, by sculptor John Lopez, shows him with a big smile and a cowboy hat, holding a hatchet, which Berry would swing around in public to show his commitment to cutting state spending. We imagine that he probably would have gone into a hatchet-chopping frenzy if he'd known that South Dakota would one day spend $72,000 to erect a statue in his memory.