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164 Owning It All in Alaska The Political Power of a Rhetorical Paradigm stephen haycox O n a warm summer night in 1958, civic leaders, businesspeople, and politicians took turns putting a torch to an enormous bonfire that workers had been assembling all day. At a park along the southern edge of downtown Anchorage, under a slightly overcast but near-daylight sky because of the “midnight sun,” twenty-five thousand people (a third of the town’s residents) stood about cheering and talking animatedly. The air was electric with energy and excitement. The flammables —warehouse pallets, cardboard boxes, and the like—rose nearly three stories before being ignited. Red, white, and blue bunting hung from office buildings adjacent to the park, and nearby a military band played snappy, martial music and some of the popular tunes of the day. Several portable concession stands sold hot dogs and Coke. A National Guard howitzer crew fired off forty-nine rounds, and forty-nine civilian aircraft flew over as the fire burned. Fireworks boomed late into the night.1 But it was not the Fourth of July these Alaskans were celebrating. It was June 30, and these elated Alaskans were celebrating passage of the Alaska statehood bill in the U.S. Senate; Alaska would become the forty-ninth state in the union. the paradigm Alaskan statehood was the culmination of a long and difficult struggle. Alaskans had overcome immense odds; their hard-won victory had never Owning It All in Alaska 165 been assured.2 As in many western territories before Congress enabled their statehood, in Alaska the issue was the people’s right to free access to the fruits of economic exploitation of the region’s natural resources. Those contesting that right were considered the enemy. Both the federal government and the canned-salmon industry earned that label during the territorial period, but the federal government surpassed private enterprise as the more egregious, for its history in the area was longer and its power greater. Not only did the public lands agencies seek to retain jurisdiction over as much acreage as possible, but even the military opposed statehood , viewing the territory as critical in Cold War defense.3 The conservative Congresses of the 1950s would have happily turned over large sections of the territory to residents and investors, but the question of financing the new state constituted a significant impediment, one for which statehood advocates had no satisfactory answer. Traditional extractive industries in Alaska—primarily fish, some gold, and pulp timber —would not generate sufficient tax revenues. Nor would oil, which had recently been discovered along the shore of Cook Inlet, but not in quantities that could pay for statehood. To overcome these obstacles, Alaskans needed a strategy, a battle plan that could unify territorial residents and at the same time mobilize national public opinion. Several years before the vote in Congress, a particularly astute politician had worked out such a plan, a clever if perhaps obvious one. He was Ernest Gruening, an old Progressive, a liberal Democrat who served as Alaska’s appointed territorial governor from 1939 to 1953.4 A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Gruening had become managing editor of the liberal weekly The Nation. Brought to Washington , D.C., by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, he had been exiled by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to Alaska in 1939 because he was viewed as too independent and thus unreliable as a team player. Once there, he became an ardent supporter of statehood.5 Gruening began constructing his plan by asking what would be the value of statehood. Aside from tracing to completion the familiar pattern for new communities in the American West, fulfilling a traditional ritual, the obvious benefit would be independence. From the time there had been any appreciable number of non-Native immigrants in the territory (that is, since the Klondike gold rush), Alaska residents had resented regulation and had chafed at the federal government’s heavy hand and the stephen haycox 166 monopolistic power of absentee corporate control over the extraction of their natural resources. In the 1910s the Guggenheim Corporation’s Alaska Syndicate had developed the only viable railroad in the territory, on which transportation to the interior was highly dependent. In the political rhetoric of the time, this monopoly was seen as an example of corporate “interests” who held the “little guy” hostage to whatever freight rates they wished to charge.6 The Guggenheims soon were followed by a government “lord,” the conservationist...

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