Word: statehooder
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Yahoos & Tears. For years, the statehood theme had whisked like a williwaw across the territory, sweeping up the visionaries, tossing the stubborn into stormy waves of opposition. In Washington, Alaska's longtime (first elected in 1944) delegate to Congress, onetime Gold Miner Bob Bartlett, spent his days and nights trying to carve out a 49th star on an unrelenting congressional conscience. Another missionary was a former newsman and editor of the Nation, Dr. Ernest Gruening (TIME, June 16, 1947), appointed Governor of Alaska by Franklin Roosevelt in 1939. A diehard conservationist, crusty Ernest Gruening soon realized that Alaska...
...Interior Secretary Douglas McKay appeared similarly uninterested. It was only after McKay's resignation in 1956 that Alaska's hopes grew again. President Eisenhower appointed Nebraska's Republican ex-Senator Fred Seaton to McKay's job, and Seaton became the best friend Alaska statehood ever had in official Washington...
Stepovich's Alaska faces problems that will only become more intense with statehood. Once federal supervision and federal dollars are removed, Alaskans, who now pay a territorial income tax equal to 14% of their federal tax, will have to dig even deeper to pay increased costs of self-government. They are already strapped by what they call F.C.L.-fearful cost of living. Virtually everything Alaska uses is brought in by steamer and airplane, and because the territory produces so little for ships and planes to haul profitably back to the States, the freight charges boost retail prices to alarming...
...straggles with dingy, narrow streets from the roaring gold-rush times. Local phone service ends twelve miles from town, electricity 19 miles, the road 26 miles. In Juneau too, as if insulated from the rest of the territory by the mountains, are those who are most vocal against immediate statehood, led by the Juneau Empire's Publisher William Prescott ("Alamo"') Allen, a former Texan...
...tell you this," says John Butrovich, with the special kind of awe that seems to flourish in Alaskans, "a dynamic chemistry is working here." That chemistry is a passion for life and growth. To Mike Stepovich and the rest of Alaska's leaders, statehood is a birthright, and they have etched that declaration on the skylines of the cities and on the cold, unyielding glaciers of their land...