An Alaska Anthology: Interpreting the Past

The Governor Who Opposed Statehood: The Legacy of Jay Hammond

The Governor Who Opposed Statehood The Legacy of Jay Hammond JOHN WHITEHEAD John Simms Whitehead, Professor ofHistory at the University ofAlaska Fairbanks, earned his doctoral degree at Yale University in 7977. His works include Hydroelectric Power in Twentieth Century Alaska: Anchorage, Juneau, Ketchikan and Sitka (Fairbanks: University ofAlaska, Institute of Water Resources, 7983) and Separation of College and State: Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard and Yale, 1776-1876 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 7973). He recently completed Arrell Morgan Gibson's unfinished Yankees in Paradise: The Pacific Basin Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 7993). Several of Professor Whitehead's articles concern the Alaskan and Hawaiian statehood movements, as will much of his forthcoming work. In researching opposition to statehood within Alaska, Whitehead found that Governor Jay Hammond had opposed statehood in the 7950s, in part because he opposed the rapid economic development that advocates of statehood believed statehood would bring. In this selection examining Hammond's political career, Whitehead suggests that Alaska's Permanent Fund, now one ofthe single largest investment accounts in the world, is a legacy of the same views which led Hammond to oppose statehood. When Alaska became the forty-ninth state in 1959, one might have concluded that the political advocates of statehood, or the statehooders as they were known, had been the principal apostles of environmentalism and responsible management of the new state's natural resources. A major theme of the statehood movement, certainly in the words of the territorial governor Ernest Gruening, had been to free Alaska from the outside economic interests, particularly fishing This article appeared originally in Alaska History 7 (Fall 1992): IS-3D; it is reprinted here by permission. 364 The Governor Who Opposed Statehood 365 and mining, that had plundered its natural wealth and perpetrated a boom-and-bust economy for most of the twentieth century. As a territory Alaska had been denied the legislative control over its natural resources, particularly over commercial fisheries, that the federal government had given other western territories. Instead, the government, through a maze of dozens of separate agencies, managed Alaska's renewable and nonrenewable resources. Statehooders perceived, accurately by most analyses , that Seattle-based fishing interests and other lobbies were effective in gaining the kind of federal regulation-or lack of regulation-they wanted.1 To emphasize the exploitation of the past, statehooders pointed with outrage to the depletion of the territory's salmon-a phenomenon they connected directly to overfishing by Seattle-based canning companies that utilized the fish trap. Fish traps were outlawed in all forty-eight states; only in Alaska, where the federal government controlled the fisheries, were such devices legal. Fish traps were so hated by Alaskans that popular support for their abolition was stronger than for any other single issue in the territory. In a 1948 referendum, Alaskans voted to abolish fish traps by an 8-1 margin of 19,712 to 2,624-a margin greater than statehood itself would achieve. Despite this overwhelming popular mandate, the federal government, under industry pressure, refused to comply with the wishes of the people. The fishing industry exerted pressure locally as well as in Washington, D.C. Bill Baker, editor of the prostatehood Ketchican Chronicle, said the salmon industry tried to put his paper out of bUsiness after he supported fish trap abolition.2 In the winter of 1955-56 statehooders met in Fairbanks to draft a proposed constitution for the new state. A prime feature of this "model" document was an elaborate article on natural resources. Making use of the newest theories in resource management, the constitution mandated that the new state would manage renewable resources on a sustained yield basis, and it gave the legislature the power to reserve lands from the public domain as areas of natural beauty or scientific interest. When the statehooders presented this proposed constitution to the voters for ratification in April 1956, they also submitted an ordinance which would prohibit the use of fish traps once the constitution became effective. Both the constitution and the fish trap ordinance were ratified-the latter gaining a 5-1 majority compared to a 2-1 majority for the constitution.3 While presenting themselves as the true lovers of the land, the statehooders consistently portrayed their opponents, the antistatehooders, as 366 JOHN WHITEHEAD exploiters and degraders. Indeed, there was a basis for this attack. The most vocal, visible, and well-financed foes of statehood were representatives...