Alaska

ALASKA, having ratified the Statehood Act at its August 26 referendum and elected primary candidates for its new state and federal offices, now needs only the November 25 general election and the President’s subsequent proclamation to affix its star officially to those of the other fortyeight states. Alaskans have been getting more and more keyed up for statehood since March 30, 1916, the day the first Alaska statehood bill was introduced into Congress.

“Seward’s Folly,” which Andrew Johnson’s Secretary of State bought for $7.2 million from Russia in 1867, is a land of 586,000 square miles, more than twice the size of Texas and large enough to increase the area of today’s United States by almost one fifth. It is a land where caribou herds run to 300,000 and nature-caused forest fires can snuff out some five million acres of timber a year; a land whose present population is about 215,000, including military personnel; and a land which, contrary to popular impression, has a summer climate as temperate as San Francisco’s.

In obtaining Alaska, Seward also obtained a frontier. Although separated by the international date line and twenty-four hours, Siberia’s Big Diomede Island is only two and a half miles away from Alaska’s Little Diomede, a pleasant walk, in friendlier days, across the frozen Bering Strait. The narrow, shallow strait once linked the continents of Asia and North America. The Diomedes are the steppingstone vestige of that link. And even though the people on Big Diomede may have one dialect and those on Little Diomede another, they both speak Eskimo.

Alaska’s settlers

Who are the people who have settled on this frontier, and why did they go there? Bob Atwood is editor and publisher of the Anchorage Times, Alaska’s largest newspaper. Atwood, a native of Chicago and a former Connecticut newspaperman, migrated to Alaska in the Depression thirties and developed an early respect for his fellow immigrants: “I always figured that the lowest bum was a pretty high-calibered guy, because he needed $40 to make the two thousand miles steerage from Seattle. You might say the migration process had a straining effect.”

Now Atwood has a mansion built in the style of a hunting lodge overlooking Cook Inlet, complete with Hammond organ and mammoth polar-bear pelt. His Buick car is equipped with radio and telephone. He commutes to his modern newspaper building and, in off hours, he managed to head up Alaska’s Statehood Committee.

Wally Hickel is another Alaskan migrant who has been successful. Hickel had never heard of Anchorage when he arrived from Kansas in 1940. He remembers Alaska as “the last place on the list they gave me of places where I didn’t need a passport.” He began by washing dishes and workingon the government-owned Alaska Railroad. Now the 39-year-old Republican National Committeeman builds $30,000 to $40,000 homes in Anchorage suburbs and finds they are more popular than cheaper ones. He also owns motels in Anchorage and Fairbanks and has announced plans for a $1 million Anchorage shopping center.

Statehood: the pros and cons

In Juneau, the capital city, Elton Engstrom, a Republican territorial senator, native-born Alaskan, and the territory’s largest cold-storage fish exporter, explains some of the concern of the people for achieving statehood: “I’ve always had a feeling that I would like to vote for a President. I also can’t help but feel that if we have the same voting representation in the U.S. Senate as New York it is going to do a whole lot for the state. It’s bound to cost more money, but I still think the advantages will offset the extra cost.”

Engstrom was among those Alaskans who worked for years to attain statehood. Some Alaskans, particularly in the earlier-settled and more conservative southeast, are still opposed to it. Vic Guns, the Seattle-born attorney and president of the Ketchikan Chamber of Commerce, looks upon statehood as a matter of traps, Jones Act, and taxes.

By “traps,” he means the abolishment of the means by which the canneries are now catching fish by the dredgeful. The canneries fear that the first act of the new state legislature will be to outlaw this efficient and economic means of fishing.

By “Jones Act,” Guns means abrogation of Section 27 of the U.S. Maritime Act of 1920, which requires sea shipments between Canadian ports and Alaska to be carried in American bottoms. Many Alaskans feel that if foreign ships had a chance at bringing in Alaska’s imports— and nearly everything in Alaska is imported—a glass of orange juice would not have to cost seventy-five cents.

As for taxes, Guns fears that statehood will cost more money because the state will be footing a good deal more of the bills than the territory has had to do under the federal government, and instead of paying a territorial income tax of 14 per cent of that paid the federal Treasury, it may mean paying the state something like 20 per cent.

On one count, Guns is undeniably right. Instead of meeting every two years for a maximum of sixteen days, the new legislature will meet annually with no fixed term. And instead of sixteen territorial senators and twenty-four members of the House, the stale Senate will have twenty members and the House forty.

Territorial Treasurer Hugh Wade differs with Guns. Wade is a former FBI agent who came to Alaska in 1926 and now is running for secretary of state, the equivalent of lieutenant governor, on the Democratic ticket. He thinks “proper consolidation and reorganization” of the present territorial government should make the first state budget no higher than what it now is. Wade points out that Alaska, unlike many of the forty-eight states, now runs in the black with a $38 million biennial budget.

Wade also believes that a newstate court system will be able to take advantage of the windfall surplus of fines over costs which now blesses federal law enforcement in the territory. And he sees no immediate new construction costs, since Congress, in its Statehood Act, provided that the federal government building in Juneau. as well as the governor’s mansion, should be turned over to the new state.

In addition, the act provides the substantial dowry of 103,350,000 acres, which Alaska is free to select within the next twenty-five years and then sell off (all but 400,000 acres of National Forest land). The land sale, along with subsequent taxes on private property and mineral lease payments, should help this new state keep solvent. Even though the federal government will be retaining ownership of 70 per cent of the land, the forty-ninth state will be getting a greater quantity of land than has been granted to any other state.

Industry, old and new

Economically, serving the military is still Alaska’s biggest industry. Many Alaskans neither think this must be so nor want it to be. Nevertheless, the military contribution is immense. The armed services spent an estimated $1 billion in Alaska during World War II, another $1 billion during the onset of the Cold War, and now plans are going ahead for construction of a $250 million missile detection center station along the Alaska Railroad, between Anchorage and Fairbanks.

Fishing, traditionally Alaska’s chiel native industry, started to wane in 1936 and has experienced a pronounced drop since 1950, particularly in salmon. The salmon pack last year was the lowest since 1907. The Japanese, while violating no international treaty, are now catching immature salmon in the midPacific to compensate for the fishing grounds the Russians took from them following World War II. These fish no longer mature and return to Alaska to spawn. But where the salmon do swim, they bring 54 cents a pound for 15to 16-pound fish. It is possible to earn $1200 in four days of Alaskan fishing.

The gold which brought the sourdoughs to the Klondike, to Nome beach, to the Yukon, and to the Fairbanks river beds at the turn of the century now is no longer worth the trouble of extracting it. U.S. Smelting and Refining, the only sizable gold operation left in Alaska, plans to abandon its Nome dredging within the next three years and its Fairbanks works within the next four. The problem is the set price of gold ($35 an ounce) and the continuing rise in production cost. It now costs $1.25 to take out a dollar’s worth of gold.

Not only does Alaska’s gold-mining industry suffer from high labor costs, it also has to contend with ground which is frozen year-round at depths varying from five feet to one hundred. After several years spent in drill testing a gold-bearing river bed, great cliffs of soil must be hosed down with hydraulic pressure guns; then water must be piped through the frozen ground for thirty to sixty days to thaw it out. Finally comes the actual dredging and the mammoth sifting out of the minute gold grains from the muck and rock.

Overall, Alaska has thirty-one of the thirty-three strategic minerals that the United States needs in wartime. But until mining for most of these metals becomes really profitable, the deposits, like those of gold, are going to stay right where they are.

The discovery of oil

The big hope for the future is oil. Richfield Oil Company of California began a wildcat drill on the Kenai Peninsula, south of Anchorage, in April, 1957, and found during a brief twenty-four-hour test period In August of last year that the well would produce nine hundred barrels a day. This well was “shut in,” along with a second rigging two miles away. Then Standard Oil of California, Richfield’s partner, began a third well fifty-five miles further on. Great secrecy surrounds the finds, but it is known that the test sands show a very thick vein and that the strike is fabulous.

For the state itself, the discovery may prove fabulous too. Under new federal regulations, there is a 50cent-an-acre rental on unexplored fields and, more importantly, a 12.5 per cent royalty on producing wells — with nine tenths of all this going to Alaska.

Of Alaska’s 375 million acres, 110 million, almost one third, have been classified as geologically possible for oil. Some 26 million acres of the possible area are restricted by federal hands-off regulations, and 37 million of the remaining 84 million acres are now covered either by exploration leases or by offers to lease. This even includes 200,000 acres on the top of a glacier near the Canadian border.

Politics in the new state

In politics, Alaska is pretty solidly Democratic. The territorial legislature has a Democratic majority, and the most popular man in Alaska today is E. L. (Bob) Bartlett, the Democratic delegate to Congress for the past fourteen years. The party, desiring initial entrenchment, wanted Bartlett to secure the governorship for the Democrats because of the enormous appointive and organizational authority granted the first governor by the constitution. Bartlett, whose experience has been legislative, leaned toward the Senate and finally declared so officially.

To oppose Bartlett, the Republicans found R. E. Robertson, a Juneau lawyer. Territorial Governor Mike Stepovich, the Republicans’ biggest vote-getter, wall run for the Senate too — but in opposition to Ernest Gruening, territorial governor under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman.

When the 86th Congress is gaveled into session in January, Alaskans will have a chance to express their wants firsthand and see them acted upon. And when the people of the forty-nine states are asked to elect a new President in 1960, Alaskans will find themselves having an equal say with the people from the other fortyeight states on who should run the show.