The Long Road to Statehood 

The modern statehood movement was begun by Alaska’s Delegate to the United States Congress (1933-1944), Anthony J. “Tony” Dimond. Historian Mary Childers Mangusso writes that Dimond’s increasing frustration with the federal government’s ability to discriminate against Alaska, the existing limitations upon territorial powers, and especially the power of special interests over the state, chiefly the salmon packers, prompted him to propose statehood. 

On December 1, 1943, Dimond issued an eleven-page press release explaining why Alaska should become a state. Americans, including Alaskans, he argued, believe in self-government, specifically statehood. Without self-government, he warned, “there is no reason why we should not join with the many people of the world who have yielded to the seductive ease and the personal lack of responsibility for government involved in a dictatorship.”  Dimond argued that Alaska was prepared for statehood both socially and economically. He reminded Congress that all Alaskans, including Native Alaskans, were loyal Americans. Dimond reasoned that Alaskans’ response to the war effort, coupled with the economic benefits brought by federal defense spending, insured that “Alaska is on the threshold of a great and far-reaching development.”

Dimond’s press release had the intended effect. Mangusso writes that “It opened a discussion of statehood within the territory.” In 1946 a ballot proposition provided the first opportunity for citizens to decide whether or not they wanted to upgrade from territorial status to statehood. The vote was 9,634 “yes” and 6,822 “no,” or 59 to 41 percent. Regionally, villages in the southeast and southcentral areas favored statehood by a ratio of 62 to 38 percent, while votes cast the western and northern, divisions were each over 60 percent in opposition. Powerful mining interests and their influence over the populace probably accounts for the negative views held by Alaskans living in the Fairbanks and Nome areas. 

Powerful outside interests represented by the commercial fishing industry in southeast and southcentral continued to opposed statehood, but rather than siding with them Native and non-Native Alaskans living in those regions joined forces with Alaska politicians in a battle for statehood. The 1946 referendum in favor of statehood led to the formation of the Alaska Statehood Association—an ad hoc group of concerned citizens—later that year. Statehood advocates claimed salmon canners imported their own cannery crews from the Lower 48, and employed traps that not only replaced local fishermen but prevented salmon from returning upriver to spawn. But influential lobbyists representing the industry in Washington D.C. established powerful opposition to Alaska’s statehood movement. 

Challenging this outside opposition were Alaska’s governor Ernest Gruening and Alaska’s non-voting delegate to Congress E.L. “Bob” Bartlett, who together, as historian Claus Naske writes, “Gave the statehood movement a vitality and dynamism which it had not possessed before.” Between 1943 and 1953, Gruening and Bartlett engineered numerous legislative efforts to achieve statehood. Delegate Bartlett introduced a statehood bill in April, 1948 which never came up for debate. Through the leadership of Governor Gruening, Alaska voters decided to reform the territory's tax structure to loosen the hold of the special interests and show that Alaska could pay for itself.

As the battle for statehood continued, Gruening used the fish trap as the chief symbol of absenteeism to rally Alaskans to wrest control by outside forces. In his book The State of Alaska Gruening wrote that “Salmon and Alaska have been as closely intertwined as cotton and the South.”

In 1948, Alaskans voted 19,712 to 2,624 in favor of removing the federally-allowed traps. A similar ratio in a 1952 vote favored giving Alaska control of its fishery resources. When Alaska’s salmon runs had dwindled to disastrous level by the mid-1950s, rhetoric against fish traps reached near hysterical levels. Alaskans blamed the decline on what they saw as a greedy salmon industry over-catching fish, and a federal government that neglected to appropriate enough funds for sound science and strong enforcement of regulations. 

With statehood fervor mounting, in 1949 the Alaska legislature approved the formation of the Alaska Statehood Committee, an eleven member group headed by Anchorage Times publisher Bob Atwood. The Committee pushed for Alaska statehood support from the nation at large. A bill for statehood passed the House by a vote of 186 to 146 early in 1950, but was killed in the Senate by a coalition of conservative Republicans and southern Democrats, backed tacitly by President Eisenhower. 

While Alaskans had become increasingly unified on statehood during the 1950s, congressmen in Washington D.C. were split on Alaska’s future and, as a result, partisan politics and civil rights became critical factors in the statehood battle. Joining Alaska in its request for statehood was the U.S. Territory of Hawaii. Both states were expected to support legislation on equal rights, non-discrimination, cultural respect, and other issues of national concern. These issues rallied opposition from Southern and conservative senators and representatives, the so-called “Dixiecrats.” 

Meanwhile, partisan politics was evident in President Eisenhower’s 1954 State of the Union address, in which he requested the immediate admission of Hawaii into the Union, but did not mention Alaska. Alaska was expected to be a pro-Democratic state and Hawaii pro-Republican, and the President was most likely concerned with preserving the narrow Republican margin in Congress. Congressional politicians took their stands accordingly. 

The territorial legislature provided for a constitutional convention to meet in 1955 to draft a constitution. The result was designed not only to lay the foundation for the future state, but also to demonstrate that Alaskans were ready for statehood.