[cheerleaders chanting] [cheers and applause] [sports announcer speaking indistinctly] male narrator the comforts and pleasures of modern living were a Long Time Coming for the pioneers of alaska and for the native people whove been here for millennia. To win statehood in 20thcentury america, alaskans had to unite, tell their story to the nation, and convince a skeptical congress. Fortunately, this land bred people with drive and talent, and over the years, they and their spectacular homeland won a special spot in americas heart. Still, powerful forces that controlled alaskas vast wealth werent about to give up their influencenot without a fight. In 1939, a new yorker named Ernest Gruening headed north to be the new governor of alaska. Back in washington, he too often ignored the chain of command, infuriating his boss, secretary of the interior harold ickes. So he wanted to fire him, and roosevelt was not he didnt like to fire people, so he promoted him to make him governor of alaska, which was an appointive position. I think they felt they were sending him to the end of the end of the world, end of the earth, and that they would never hear from him again. Narrator as the editor of the nation magazine, he campaigned against powerful monopolies and against u. S. Gunboat diplomacy in latin america. President roosevelt brought him into the government, where gruening, fluent in spanish, was instrumental in developing the president s new Good Neighbor policy towards latin america. So perhaps gruening was predisposed to understand the alaskans who felt like secondclass citizens. They couldnt vote for the president and had no vote in congress. The injustices riled gruening. Alaska was in the grip of absentee interests and had been for a quarter of a century. They were violently opposed to any taxation that would lessen their profits or in any way interfere with their desire to take as much from alaska as quickly as possible. The wealth of alaska was being drained off, and next to nothing was staying there for its needs. Ernest gruening. Narrator the absentee investors owned canneries and installed floating fishcatching machines called fish traps right in the mouths of salmon spawning streams. It became pretty clear that the way the fish traps were operated was destroying the fish runs and would have if it had been allowed to continue that way, would have eliminated our salmon industry. The industry was not one of harvesting but of mining the resource. When they finished with this stream, they dismantled the cannery, put it on a barge, and went to another stream and did the whole same sort of thing. Narrator the absentees also owned the mines, the only industry with yearround jobs. The worldfamous guggenheim brothers and j. P. Morgan together owned canneries, mines, a shipping company, and a railroad. Called the alaska syndicate, these companies accounted for most of alaskas economy. So that you had a very powerful National Economic and banking interest that made up the syndicate itself, and they took over the transportation and had a stranglehold on the basic economy. Municipalities couldnt even issue bonded indebtedness, the normal things a city would do just to build a sewer system. And that would require an act of congress. Anything that had to do with government had to do by memorials to the president and to the congress. The last sentence in our memorial was, and the legislature of the territory of alaska forever prays to the congress of the United States that they will pass this request. It kind of struck me funny that we had to forever pray, that we had to go through god in order to get the congress of the United States to do something for us. Judge w. C. Arnold, director of the alaska salmon industry incorporated, a trade association, is considered by many to be the most powerful man in the territory. Fortune magazine. I guess the legislature was so small, you only needed to control a handful of votes in order to block anything from happening. And arnold was the man. He was the great stopper, handing out money to legislators to get them to vote the right way. He was on the witness stand, and one of the senators got up and said, judge arnold, do you have suggestions to us for what the appropriation bill should be . And he says, yes, i have. He took out of his vest pocket a draft of a bill, an appropriation bill, handed it to the senator. The senator turned around, handed that to the clerk, and introduced this as the appropriation bill without even reading it, and it passed. I was thunderstruck that this could have happened. And that typified the control, the stranglehold, that the lobbyists had on the legislature. And i remember meeting even before i became governor by some accident. I was at a Cocktail Party in new york when the man who had been the lobbyist for these absentee interests boasted how, with a few cases of liquor, he managed to persuade legislators not to tax the kennecott mine. But these absentee interests were able, in each legislature, to elect enough people so that they could prevent this reasonable taxation from being enacted. He was not popular with the press. Any chance they could attack gruening and kill any program that he was proposing, they did it through the press. And there was a lot of controlmoney controlof different newspapers that was still maintaining the old philosophy of the fish trap or the mining companies. And naturally, they didnt like methat is, these absentee interests denounced me and so forth and so on and tried to allege that i was a dangerous subversive for promoting these policies. When i arrived here, i said to my wife, this is not a twoparty system. The politics are divided by, you are proErnest Gruening or antiErnest Gruening. his supporters included some republicans. His detractors included some democrats. Narrator one of alaskas most staunch republicans agreed with democrat gruening bob atwood, publisher of the anchorage daily times. He had the potential of becoming an enemy. A liberal with a harvard background, gruening had all the qualities i had been accustomed to hate. When i got to know him, he became my leader, my main inspiration, and my mentor. Bob atwood. Narrator by 1941, however, atwood, gruening, and just about every other alaskan had something even more urgent on their minds. [distant gunfire] [all shouting] in the studies i have made of the application of military power on and across the pacific, alaska stands out as the key point. Its position, halfway between american and asia, is decisive. General Billy Mitchell. Narrator Billy Mitchell learned about alaska in 1901 as a young lieutenant in the Army Signal Corps helping to build a telegraph line across alaska. In 1935, alaskas strategic location fit in with mitchells ambition to make america an air power. He who holds alaska holds the world, because a great, expanding nation, if it becomes dominant in the air, can now achieve world dominion. General Billy Mitchell. He understood that alaska would be the air crossroads of the world. You couldnt fly from asia to europe without refueling. Narrator alaskas Strategic Value in the aviation age might have been apparent to Billy Mitchell, but congress and the top brass werent interested in air power or alaska. And he had a hard time bringing the rest of the country along with him and, in fact, was courtmartialed for having challenged his army superiors who told him to stop making this argument. Narrator however, half a world away, japanese strategists were looking at the globe the same way as mitchell. The aleutians are the storm pod of the western world, and this meteorological phenomenon constitutes one of the most dangerous weapons in the arsenal of our enemy. In the early days of june 1942, they employed this advantage in an allout attempt to secure absolute domination of the entire pacific ocean. Behind eastwardmoving storms, they dispatched two invasion fleets against two widely separated objectives, Midway Island and dutch harbor, an operation designed to break the american line of sea defense upon which the security of the Pacific Coast depends. [engines humming] narrator at midway, america dealt the Japanese Navy a devastating blow in the greatest naval air battle in history. [propellers buzzing] [engines humming] the Japanese Navy would never recover, losing threof four aircraft carriers along with their planes and pilots. [explosion] [siren blaring] but in alaska, japanese dive bombers badly damaged the navy base at dutch harbor. And to the westward, japanese marines landed on attu and kiska islands. They built fortifications and prepared to hold the islands. Almost a year later, in may 1943, a cold and wet American Invasion force landed on attu to oust the Japanese Forces who had entrenched themselves in the cloudshrouded mountains. [guns firing] [wind howling] it was a brutal 19day campaign in terrible conditions. Trench foot and hypothermia felled more g. I. S than japanese ammunition. The end was a desperate japanese charge out of the mountains to grab the american heavy guns at the beach. It failed, and nearly all the japanese who werent shot killed themselves with their hand grenades. [wind howling] world war ii took alaska from a isolated, remote, romantic frontier and turned it into a modern entity. By the end of the war, the permanent population was already pushing 100,000. In fact, probably the best thing that happened to alaska was world war ii. It was a bonanza. [machinery rumbling] the Second World War brought to alaska its first real airfields. It brought a Road Construction program. It brought housing. It brought community utilities, water and sewer works and school buildings. Ernest gruening. Mainly it was this massive investment of the United States government in alaska. But it was not just the money. It was also the people that came north. They would change the territory forever. [crowd roaring] narrator and once again, Rising International tensions pointed to even more dramatic change in alaska. Alaska did achieve military significance as soon as the soviets successfully tested nuclear weaponry, which they did in the fall of 1949. Alaska lies along the polar air routes between principal bases in soviet asia and chief u. S. Cities, distances well within the reach of swift, longrange modern bombers. Increasing activity of our armed forces in alaska has been one of the greatest single factors in the territorys recent remarkable development. America built top secret missile silos, jet interceptor bases, and the distant Early Warning system, or dewline, a farflung network of advanced Technology Radars across the arctic. And the words cold war were soon to become part of the vocabulary. Bob atwood. From 1946, the population usually quoted was 99,000. But by 54, its now up to about 200,000, 220,000, so, yes, thats a doubling. People were just coming into alaska any way they could. They were impatient with the restrictions of territorial life that oldtime alaskans had always taken for granted, that if you lived in the territory of alaska, you could not vote for the president of the United States; you did not have any voting representation in congress. You had no say in how your territory was being run. The new immigrants to alaska after the war, i think, almost uniformly favored statehood. Narrator during the 1940s and early 50s, congress failed several times to pass a statehood bill. So the frustrated alaskans decided to push the congress by creating a state constitution. The delegates who came to the university of alaska to write the constitution came from all sorts of different backgrounds and different parts of alaska. In the processright almost from the beginning, the drafting of the constitution there was a common cause. There was a common effort. Narrator on the conventions opening day, alaskas delegate to congress, bob bartlett, made the keynote address. The story of alaskas Natural Resources has too often been one of exploitation with very little of the great wealth extracted going to pay for necessary Governmental Services and for the Permanent Development of a sound economy for the people. The second danger is that outside interests will attempt to acquire great areas of alaskas public lands in order not to develop them until such time as, in their omnipotence and the pursuance of their own interests, they see fit. Narrator Convention Delegate bill egan had to hitch a ride to fairbanks on a truck because cars couldnt make it through the snowbound mountain passes from his home in valdez. He was not an educated man. He never went to college. But he had a lot of native, natural intelligence, and he was wellread and served in several sessions of the legislature and honed his political skills in those experiences. Bill egan was elected president because he essentially was seen as a very fair, decent human being who did not have a political agenda. He was always a good parliamentarian, a good chairman. With bill egans leadership, partisan politics was left at the door. There were some very heated discussions on the floor on issues, and it was bill egan who kept the decorum. And this must have been about 10 00, 11 00 at night, and bill egan just sort of interrupted the arguments and said, its getting very cold outside. The members better go out and start their cars so that theyll be able to drive them, and their cars wont freeze. And so there was a 10, 15minute recess, and by the time they came back, tempers had cooled down, and the convention went on with its business in a very friendly manner, and the arguments were taken care of. Narrator the very first article of the constitution was a bill of rights. It said, no person is to be denied the enjoyment of any civil or political right because of race, color, creed, or national origin. Unlike the federal constitution, where the bill of rights came after the constitution itself was written, well, here,the biln the beginning and fundamental to everything else. Narrator a few delegates also wanted to add language to article 1 to protect women from discrimination. Delegate Mildred Hermann said it was unnecessary. Alaska was the First Political subdivision under the American Flag to give the women the right of suffrage. That was accomplished in 1913, six years before the National Congress got around to amending the constitution to provide the same thing. I think alaska amply provided for the political and civil rights of its women. Narrator like most other alaskans, the Convention Delegates worried about how alaska could support itself if statehood came. Article 8 is the only constitutional provision on Natural Resources. It seeks to encourage the development of the resources, but it protects the public interests. No resource can be owned by some commercial venture. They can lease the right to develop them, but they cant own the oil. Alaska owns the oil, the citizens of alaska. The alaska constitution is the only state constitution that has such an article. In a way, the constitution and the state was designed to correct what Ernest Gruening said was the fundamental problem of alaska too much going out, not enough staying here. The state was designed to keep more here. The issue above all issues in the 40s and 50s was the abolition of fish traps. That was the whole symbol of alaska versus the outside interests. That was one issue that did get the interest of a lot of alaskans who didnt bother to vote on anything else, but they wanted to do away with the fish traps. Narrator so to get more people to the polls, the delegates added to the constitution ballot an ordinance that would abolish fish traps when statehood came. On february 5, 1956, the delegates voted unanimously to pass their constitution onto the voters for approval. One at a time, the delegates signed the constitution. When i started calling the roll for the last time. I got about three names out, and i got choked up. I could hardly say the names. Its hard to describe sort of all the emotions that went through ones head. The culmination of this big effort of working with everybody else a major experience of a lifetime. Narrator april 24, 1956, was a warm, sunny day throughout most of alaska. Voters came out in recordbreaking numbers and approved their new constitution by about two to one. The ordinance against fish traps passed nearly five to one. On new years eve, 1957, alaskas statehood delegation arrived in washington, d. C. , where alaskas congressional delegate, bob bartlett, received them. He, perhaps more than anyone, understood the huge mountain they still had to climb. He was a nonvoting member of congress. He could only be there to speak on behalf of alaska and alaskans. He had no vote to trade, no vote to negotiate. In other words, people could just ignore him if they chose, but bob didnt allow them to ignore him. I knew a professor when i was in law school at yale who did a study of the house of representatives, and he told me that bob bartlett was the single most popular member of the house, of all the 435 members. Bob was universally beloved. I mean, he was able to create relationships with members of congress, both republicans and democrats. He was able, as a voteless delegate, in his years to get nearly 400 measures passed. Narrator while bartlett could get congress to help alaska on some matters, statehood for alaska threatened to upset the senates balance of power in ways that could change the nation. The civil rights question was absolutely, completely intertwined. Its built into the dna, the civil rights issue, of the statehood movement. And you cant understand statehood without paying attention to the divisions of the civil rights issue. Alaska and hawaii were sort of new blood. They had significant minority populations, and they could just be expected to be in favor of civil rights. There were socalled dixiecratsthe southern democrats who were anticivil rights legislationand bringing in four new senators who would support civil rights bills was anathema to them, and they managed to kill it time and again. Howard smith was chairman of the rules committee very conservative democrat from the state of virginia. And he ruled with an iron hand who doesnt want to see statehood for either hawaii or alaska. Narrator the Washington Post observed, much of the politics of statehood lies in the assumption that hawaii would send republican senators to congress, whereas alaska would elect democrats. When Dwight Eisenhower was president of columbia university, he mentioned that granting statehood to alaska and hawaii would prove to the world that america practices what it preaches. Well, as a republican president , he issued statements in favor of hawaiis statehood but said that alaska was not ready. Eisenhower thought that alaska was not viable as a state, that it was simply being held together by the military. You got to remember the attitude at the time. This was the beginning of the cold war, the intense period of the cold war, and he felt very strongly from his experience in world war ii that he didnt trust the russians, that he really felt that if they ever came at us, theyd come at us through alaska. A chronological examination of the administrations attitude towards alaskas statehood indicates the opposition was there from the start, and the proposition of military security was dragged in by the heels, as it were, at a much later date. Bob bartlett. Critics of statehood claim that the military, which spends about 200 million annually, is alaskas principal source of business, that alaska just cant afford statehood. That was really what was behind the idea of congress putting the Land Endowment in the statehood act, the idea that the state could go select lands, lease the lands, and create an economic base. We have a situation in alaska now where over 99 of the land is owned by the federal government. We cant get that land into private ownership. And we want to have statehood so that our vast resources can be unlocked and be put to constructive use. Narrator so president eisenhowers newly appointed secretary of the interior would be critical. He was fred seaton from nebraska. A former newspaper publisher, seaton knew bill snedden, publisher of the fairbanks daily newsminer. Seaton contacted him and said, do you know of anybody who knows something about alaska who can help me highlight statehood . And snedden said, you have a man already working for you. Thats ted stevens. Ted stevens was known as mr. Alaska. He got this nickname because of his outright advocacy of statehood among the Agency People and in congress and working with alaskans who went back to washington mr. Alaska, the statehood advocate. The democrats themselves alonebecause they were divided on the question between north and southrepublicans were absolutely essential, and stevens and fred seaton and snedden supplied that sort of push. And it was a simple case of a republican was more inclined to open his door quickly and readily to talk to a republican. Narrator one senator opposed to statehood said it was only alaskan politicians and businessmen who wanted it. He came to alaska to learn what the little men average alaskansthought. So we organized the nonorganization little men for statehood. And we put together placards that said, im a little man for statehood. And several hundred of us met the committee when they arrived in anchorage, and we held these placards. Narrator it worked so well, they recruited even more people and changed their name to operation statehood. I can never forget it. We had a little scoop, and wed scoop forgetmenot seeds and put them in these little packets and seal them up, and then we wrote letters, and we would mail them to all of our friends in the United States, urging them to contact their congressmen and their senators, urging them to vote for alaska statehood. I know they did an effective job for alaska because of the many times when i was trying to persuade a legislator to vote for my bill, he would interrupt the conversation to comment on how many of his constituents felt the same way. Bob atwood. Narrator bob atwood and c. W. Snedden met with editorial boards of Major National newspapers. What snedden did with the editors and publishers in america was sell them on the virtues of alaska, of what alaska could add to the union, that alaska would be an economic boost to the country. The George Gallup poll in the late 1950s1956, 57, when congress was debating the alaska statehood bill was running in the high 80s for statehood. 80 anything in a gallup poll is eyebrowraising. Narrator yet a few powerful committee chairmen, mostly conservative southern democrats, kept the statehood bill bo