Word: alaska
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...despite its reckless attitudes, its raw wildernesses, its enormous distances, Alaska is also a country of homes, automobiles, electric stoves, housewives, grocery clerks, schools. It has two golf courses, a college (the University of Alaska at Fairbanks), and 14 chambers of commerce. The old order and the new clash; Alaska is racked by growing pains, wild adolescent dreams, horrible adolescent doubts, stirring memories, confusion and controversy...
...Governor. To Alaskans who pine for the old order, and to those who long for something new, one man symbolizes the Territory's turbulent stirrings. Throughout his 7½ years in office, chunky, jug-eared Dr. Ernest Gruening, 60, Alaska's New Dealish Territorial Governor, has been an advocate of change and a figure of controversy. He has been during most of his career...
Gruening told him. Roosevelt disregarded the advice, but the next year Gruening was appointed director of the Department of the Interior's Division of Territories and Island Possessions, became a vigorous and vocal New Dealer, began a fascinated study of Alaska and its problems...
...Roosevelt appointed him Territorial Governor. Alaska took the appointment with steady nerves. The Juneau Chamber of Commerce had the Governor in to lunch. He attended a gathering of Indians at Wrangell's Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall, responded politely when one Chief Shakes made him a member of the Tlingit Tribe and renamed him Kitchnahshch (meaning unknown to Governor Gruening). He shipped in dozens of watercolors by WPA artists to brighten the buff walls of the big, old-fashioned governor's mansion, picked a hot desert scene with violet clouds to hang beside his lace-canopied, four-poster...
Wild Williwaw. But the era of good feeling ended almost at once in the howl of Alaska's biggest, longest political storm. After World War I, the Territory had suffered a slow decline. Its population had dwindled, and did not begin to rise again until the 1930s. Its lopsided economy was tied almost completely to fish and gold-a salmon industry owned in Seattle and a gold industry owned in the East. Alaska had been administered chiefly from dusty Washington pigeonholes by bureaucrats who had never seen a skate of halibut gear or a dredge's tailing pile...