40 years after statehood, Alaska still battles feds
ANCHORAGE - It was the fight of their political lives, and many of them are still around to talk about it.
Their mission was to persuade a skeptical Congress and an uninterested public to accept a remote, thinly populated territory, widely considered a frozen wasteland, as equal to every other state in the union.
It took some time and a lot of long trips to Washington. But in the end they made their case - 40 years ago Sunday, Alaska became the 49th star on Old Glory.
Gone was the indignity of not being able to vote in presidential elections. No longer would Alaskans have to pass through U.S. Customs upon arrival in the Lower 48. And many governmental decisions would now be made locally, not thousands of miles away.
Statehood was seen as the way for Alaskans to take charge of their own destiny and to solve the problems that came with direct federal control. But 40 years later, some of the same conflicts that drove the statehood quest are yet to be settled.
``It all comes back to resources,'' said U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. ``And it's going to remain a problem for a long time.''
Stevens, now 75, was part of the 1950s statehood struggle as a young Interior Department lawyer in charge of the agency's relations with Congress. Once the Eisenhower administration lined up behind statehood, he became the middleman for determined Alaskans making the two-day flight to Washington.
Former Gov. Walter Hickel, then a go-getting Anchorage developer, says he made at least a dozen trips back East to lobby. It didn't take long to figure out who he had to convince.
``It was really the senior members of the Senate that gave us what we needed,'' recalled Hickel, now 79. ``You had to get the seniority to win.''
Clark Gruening, grandson of former U.S. Sen. Ernest Gruening, remembers from his teenage years that the issue was a staple at his family's dinner table in Juneau.
``It was a crusade for him,'' said Gruening, himself an unsuccessful Senate candidate, of his grandfather, a New York native who had been editor of The Nation magazine before his appointment as Alaska's territorial governor in 1939.
Ernest Gruening was sold on Alaska statehood before he arrived in Juneau, and he didn't hesitate to use the connections he developed as a journalist to advance the campaign.
At the same time, E.L. ``Bob'' Bartlett, the territory's non-voting delegate in Congress and later U.S. senator, was pushing for statehood on Capitol Hill.
``Gruening had loads of friends in literary circles and he had press friends, and Bartlett had a wonderful rapport with Congress,'' said Katie Hurley of Wasilla, a former state legislator who worked for Gruening for 12 years when he was territorial governor. ``A lot of the (statehood success) happened because of the personalities.''
Alaska won in Congress by a comfortable margin in 1958 and thought it was getting out from under the federal thumb when it came to its resources.
When Alaskans talk about resources, what they usually mean is land - the right to hunt and fish on it, access to mine it and drill it, the desire to preserve it in its natural state.
The amount of land in Alaska is not the problem. At 586,000 square miles, there's nearly a square mile for every man, woman and child living here. The problem is how that land is used.
The new state government was granted about 28 percent of the land - an area larger than California. The federal government, however, kept 64 percent of Alaska. Most of the rest in Native-owned, while private ownership totals only 0.3 percent.
The statehood deal called for much of the federal land to be opened to resource development, with the state getting 90 percent of the revenue generated. But over the years, as environmental protection has become a greater value to Americans, more and more of the federal land has been closed off to development.
Billions of barrels of oil could lie under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but the area is off-limits to drilling. Logging has been cut back sharply in the Tongass National Forest in recent years and many gold miners seethe about rules that make it hard to even cross federal land to reach their claims.
More wilderness and park land has cheered Alaska's growing legion of conservationists.
``We have to realize that 60 percent of Alaska belongs to all of the people in the United States, including us, and we don't have jurisdiction over these lands,'' said Claus Naske, a statehood expert at the University of Alaska.
But that view isn't held by the state government, which in 1993 filed a $29 billion lawsuit against the federal government for lost revenue and other damages.
``We have a few battles and we'll win 'em,'' said Hickel, who filed the lawsuit. ``But we have to fight 'em.''
The federal government has also riled many Alaskans with its threat to take over fisheries management in most of the state.
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has insisted that the state match federal law by giving rural dwellers a subsistence priority for fish and game. But the Alaska Legislature has refused to change state law and has sued the federal government over the issue.
Along with squabbling with the feds, today's Alaska harkens back to the early days of statehood in other ways.
In 1959, the state didn't know how it was going to pay for government services it would have to provide. Now, with the price of oil in the tank, the state is having a similar debate.
While Alaska's boom-and-bust economy has stabilized over the decades, it still remains heavily dependent on natural resources. Back then salmon was king, now it's oil.
``In many ways we're still a colonial economy,'' Naske said. ``Most of what we produce goes to the contiguous states and elsewhere for processing.''
And still, albeit rarely, mail-order shoppers in Alaska are told their order can't be filled because the company doesn't ship outside the United States.
But there have been a number of significant changes, many but not all traceable to discovery of the mammoth Prudhoe Bay oil field in the late 1960s.
The population at statehood, just over 200,000, has tripled. National news and sports are broadcast live on television, not a week or two later. The state has a $24 billion Permanent Fund that threw off enough income to pay almost every resident more than $1,500 last year.
In 1958 Democrats were elected to every statewide office and 50 of the 60 legislative seats. Now those offices are Republican in nearly the same proportions.
And a state that started 1959 with rookies in Congress now boasts considerable clout. The three Republicans representing Alaska all chair committees important to the state's future - Stevens at Appropriations, Sen. Frank Murkowski at Energy and Natural Resources and Rep. Don Young at Resources.
``None of us could have thought that we would develop that kind of seniority in 40 years,'' Stevens said.
Forty years hasn't been long enough to solve all of the troubles of territory days, and new ones have come along in the meantime. But those on the front end of statehood remain optimistic that Alaska will achieve the vision they held in January 1959.
``I'm not disillusioned at all,'' Hickel said. ``I say it's going to be great. We just have to make it work.''