[somber piano melody] ♪ >> male narrator: for americans, alaska has always represented a vision.

but for the people of alaska, one persistent vision was to become americans, a vision thwarted for 92 years by powerful commercial interests that ruled the territory from a distance and a federal government that seemed at best indifferent. in 1955, alaskans took a major step toward self-government when they wrote the constitution they hoped would help make the territory a state. this is the story of that constitution and how alaskans won the right to govern themselves. >> in retrospect, i think we did as good a job as could have been done, and i think that the constitution has fully stood the test of time. it was designed to be adaptable to the future, to be a lasting

document like the u.s. constitution. >> well, it was a big gamble, except it was a gamble we had to take because we wouldn't get another opportunity. they came here because they were trying to create, literally, a new world based upon "let's do it right this time." that was heard more times at the convention. "we don't care how you did it outside." that's another thing. >> kim owen was a professor at the state university of louisiana, and he became the consultant for the committee on style and drafting. i can hear him in his southern brogue: "the language must sing," and he helped to make the language sing. the clarity and the simplicity and the directness that you see expressed in the original constitution came largely from the work of george sundborg and kim owen. >> i think, not just because i was a member of it or because i'm one of the last five members of the constitution,

that it was a good document. i think that historians and i think people in the political arena have always said, since we got out of the convention in 1956, that it was a model convention, that it was a model structure. >> narrator: in 1867, secretary of state william henry seward negotiated the purchase of alaska from imperial russia, but few americans understood why. described as seward's folly and utterly worthless by opponents in congress and across the country, alaska was unknown and unwanted by all but a few. but seward had a vision for america as a great sea power in the pacific. he understood alaska was strategically located just off

the great circle route, the shortest distance to asia. >> ultimately, seward's notion was sort of the preeminent example of manifest destiny. now, the words manifest destiny have come into great disdain perhaps in recent years, but all it meant at the time was that the ultimate destiny, the manifest or obvious destiny of the united states, would be to be a continental nation from sea to sea. >> narrator: for the first 20 years after the purchase, the few americans who came north found a primitive region with virtually no economy and even less civil government and law. but the next act in alaska's history was far more dramatic. on july 14, 1897, the ss excelsior arrived in san francisco. on board was more than $750,000 of raw gold from a new discovery in the klondike region. what would follow was the last great mineral stampede in north america. >> you have one alaska before the gold rush.

you have a brand-new alaska after the gold rush, and then after the gold rush, alaska is populated with non-natives for the first time, and it's characterized, at least through 1920, by lots and lots of american investment. >> narrator: the influx of prospectors with the great klondike stampede led to smaller mineral discoveries in the alaska territory, including a frenzied gold strike on a remote beach in northwest alaska called nome. the nome gold rush included many of the original characters from the klondike stampede, but one of the new faces was alexander mackenzie, who, through political connections, installed a crooked federal judge in the nome district named arthur noyes. >> alexander mackenzie has to be the biggest crook who ever came to alaska. he masterminded this scheme largely to loot the mines of nome. the noyes-mackenzie scandal was resolved by a man named judge james wickersham, and james

wickersham actually is the first great political leader of alaska who would articulate the need for statehood. >> narrator: some of the most powerful investors of the territorial period were j.p. morgan and the guggenheim brothers. their operations included huge copper mines, a railroad to bring the copper ore to tidewater, and shipping companies to carry the ore south. the integrated monopoly became known as the alaska syndicate, and by the early 20th century, it accounted for the majority of alaska's economy. alaskans needed the jobs the investors brought, but many resented outside control over their lives. >> one of wickersham's great foes for much of his career were the guggenheims. now, early on, it's a little bit confusing because he appears like he initially wanted to work for them after he actually left his judgeship. and maybe it's actually because they sort of spurned him that it was really alaska

divided into two camps. it was the wickersham, or the wick camp, and the gug camp, and wickersham definitely threw himself in the anti-gug camp. >> narrator: in 1906, the u.s. congress created the office of alaska delegate, a purely advisory position with no vote. three years later, in 1908, wickersham ran successfully for delegate against the hand-picked choice of the guggenheims. >> wickersham has a long record of accomplishment in his time as delegate. one of the most important was the passage of the second organic act in 1912, which created the alaska territorial legislature. this was really the first time that alaskans really had a substantial say in controlling their own affairs. the legislature did have power to levy taxes, which was a power, by the way, that the salmon canning industry vigorously fought. >> narrator: throughout the territorial era, the powerful

salmon canning companies made every effort to block taxation. wickersham wrote that "they resent the suggestion that the people of alaska have any right or interest in the salmon of the fisheries, and they resent it when it is suggested that they pay some little portion of the tax for the building of roads or the development of the country." in 1916, wickersham introduced in the u.s. congress a bill to make alaska a state, a bill that he knew had no chance of passing. >> hard to tell how serious he was about that. is the united states congress going to create a state where you have 30,00 citizens, most of whom are probably not permanent residents? transiency was one of the issues that congress always considered when it was looking at statehood. the canneries come up every may. at the end of the season, they'd take the pack and go back, and the money was actually generated in seattle and san francisco. and of course, the salmon industry doesn't want taxation in alaska. they don't want

more stable government. they don't want statehood because that's going to mean regulation. that's going to mean taxation. so that's a big piece of the story. >> narrator: the dominance of absentee commercial interests in alaska would continue unchecked until 1939, when a very new territorial governor came north to assume his duties. ernest gruening was a new deal democrat from new york city. originally a graduate of harvard medical school, some said gruening had been awarded the job in alaska after offending his boss, secretary of the interior harold ickes. >> gruening, like wickersham, had a voracious intellect and enormous ambition and lots of energy, all at the same time that he had a medical degree. he was dr. ernest gruening. but all you have to know about gruening is, of course, the title that he gave to his autobiography, many battles. that's how he saw his life, was many battles. maybe the better title would've been many, many battles, because he battled wherever

he was of what he thought was injustice. >> there was a certain intellectual arrogance about him which didn't go down too well. he was dealing with pretty ordinary people. i come from a blue-collar background myself, and there's always a suspicion. he had the best interests of the people at heart. he was a great advocate of equality for the natives, which is not a popular thing to be in alaska--still isn't-- and things like that. he had a lot of new deal ideals which were not palatable to a lot of people. >> narrator: almost immediately, territorial governor gruening could see alaska's main problem. gruening wrote that alaska was in the grip of absentee interests and that the wealth of alaska was being drained off, and next to nothing was staying there for its needs. >> it was only with the arrival of ernest gruening as governor in 1939 that the governor's

office really became a substantial power center in alaska for the first time, because gruening is the man who essentially expanded the office, largely with the force of his will and the fact that he was going to make something of this job. >> narrator: some alaskans disagreed with gruening's message on principle and others because they simply disliked him personally. >> partisan politics weren't that keen when i first came here. it was either you were pro-gruening or anti-gruening. personalities were the big feature. >> he was visionary. he was not a politician. he didn't soft-soap people and stroke them. he called the shots the way he saw them, and it wasn't always done with grace. >> narrator: in the swirl of controversy surrounding ernest gruening's governorship of the alaska territory, perhaps the single event least expected but

most consequential began on december 7, 1941, with the japanese attack on pearl harbor. seven months later, imperial japanese aircraft carriers launched a dive bomber attack against the naval base at dutch harbor in the aleutian islands. a couple of days later, japanese marines landed on attu and kiska islands. no single event had as much effect on the territory of alaska as the second world war. the value of alaska's unique geography was suddenly and dramatically clear to the government of the united states. >> world war ii would revolutionize the demography of alaska in the same way that the klondike gold rush did, except multiplied 100 times. i mean, the war brought so many new people and different kinds of people than ever before. now, not just soldiers. obviously there was a vast increase in the military troop

strength, but the war would bring a huge increase in what would be the nucleus of the urban population of alaska. >> narrator: the territories' roughly 75,000 people were overwhelmed by the 300,000 military and construction personnel who poured in. in the spring of 1943, american-led forces retook attu and kiska islands in a brief but bitter struggle that concluded the only campaign of the war on north american soil. by war's end, alaska's population had grown by 1/3 to 100,000. and many of the thousands the war brought north liked what they had seen. alaska's burgeoning population also created new demands on the territory for schools, roads, and police. governor gruening knew the territory needed more money to solve the problem. alaska's territorial legislature had resisted

every effort to establish a modernized tax structure. even worse, the 1947 legislature left alaska with an enormous budget deficit that threatened the territory's solvency. gruening was incensed and campaigned successfully against many incumbents so that in 1948, alaskans elected a largely new territorial legislature. >> this is the sort of thing that he was up against. he said, "we've got to demonstrate to the citizens of the rest of the united states that we know how to run a business, a business of government." >> narrator: perhaps most importantly, the 1949 legislature responded to a proposal from governor gruening to create the alaska statehood committee, a citizens' group that would be charged with undertaking a public campaign for statehood. foremost on the new statehood committee was bob bartlett of fairbanks. bartlett had been elected to the office of territorial delegate to congress in 1944

and would go on to lead alaska's fight for statehood in washington d.c. in the 1950s, america was engaged in a new war, a cold war with the soviet union. and with only 55 miles separating the territory from siberia, the u.s. government recognized alaska's strategic importance. a long list of defense construction projects meant that federal spending would continue to dominate the territory's economy. alaskans were optimistic in the flush of a booming economy, but in many ways, little had changed in the federal government's approach to governing the territory. the eisenhower administration seemed indifferent to the statehood movement, and at the same time, dissatisfaction with the territory's administration and judicial system was reaching the boiling point. >> in 1954, it became very clear that congress again

hadn't acted on an alaska statehood bill and that something more needed to be done. >> narrator: territorial representative tom stewart was a young former assistant attorney general. >> i decided that there wasn't really anybody in alaska who knew much about how to set up, structure, and operate a constitutional convention. so i made a six-week-long trip across the country. i went to the university of washington; i went to the university of chicago; i went to yale, which was my school. and then i went to new jersey, and i went to princeton university, and new jersey had had a convention, a very successful convention in 1946 and '47. they had rewritten their constitution, and in trenton, i had an introduction to a woman named marie katzenbach. marie katzenbach was a vice

president of the new jersey convention. she said, "hold your convention at the state university." i said, "we don't have a state university; we have something called the alaska agricultural college and school of mines." she said, "well, hold it there instead of in the capitol because the capitol has entrenched lobbying interests, and they will be lobbying for their pet projects. and you go to the university, you'll have a library facility, and it's a much better scene." >> narrator: before the end of the 1955 territorial legislative session, stewart had drafted a final version of a bill proposing a constitutional convention that would take place at the university of alaska in fairbanks. the bill included an innovative method for electing the delegates that would sidestep the original gold rush-era rules that divided alaska into four enormous and awkward districts for elections. >> i was determined, as well as other committee members, that we needed to have broad

representation at the convention. so we had to conjure up some scheme to create special election districts from which the delegates would be elected. and what we ultimately ended up with--and this was a controversial proposition, but we got it through the legislature--we would create election districts that were defined by the recording districts. so we created these special election districts, and we ended up with by far the most representative governmental assembly that had ever convened. our primary purpose is to move toward statehood by proving we could write a good constitution. >> narrator: the constitutional convention bill was originally designated house bill number one to emphasize the number one priority legislators placed on statehood. the final version of the constitutional convention bill passed the legislature

in march of 1955. alaskans had set out on a course they hoped would make them a state. the winter of 1955 was a cold one even by fairbanks standards, and temperatures plummeted as the delegates trickled in from around the territory. for many statehood foes, alaska's constitutional convention was just an exercise in political theater. unauthorized by the u.s. congress and below the radar of mainstream media, most stayed at home and ignored it. >> the fact is that the media didn't show up because nobody thought we were serious. they thought we were just a group of people going through an exercise. >> not many people took the work that seriously, which is proven by the fact that there

were essentially no lobbyists. there was virtually no one from the salmon canning industry, no one from the incipient oil industry at that time. they didn't show up because it really didn't have the overriding concern that, you know, they sort of wondered, "is anything ever going to come of this?" >> narrator: on the opening day, congressional delegate bob bartlett made the keynote address to the convention. he laid out the major challenges. >> alaskans desire statehood because they are americans, and americans don't like to live forever as colonists. >> narrator: bartlett said that the story of alaska's natural resources had too often been one of exploitation with very little of the wealth extracted making it into the hands of the territory or citizens. former territorial governor ernest gruening spoke on the second day. as usual, he pulled no punches.

it was one of gruening's most impassioned speeches. he said, "we meet to validate the most basic of american principles, the principles of government by consent of the governed, because alaska is no less a colony, and taxation without representation is no less tyranny in 1955 than it was in 1775." >> they knew ernest gruening to be this accomplished, spellbinding speaker, but bob bartlett--i think everybody was just knocked out by what he said about the resources. >> bob bartlett really framed the key question for the convention with his keynote address and his discussion of natural resources because natural resources are at the heart of the alaskan economic and political equation: who controls, who decides, who gets to keep how much of what. >> narrator: but writing

a constitution would take more than speeches. it would take hard work and hard compromises. and it would take leadership. several politicians wanted to be convention president. >> various names cropped up for president of the constitutional convention. the most active one in pursuit of the presidency was vic rivers of anchorage. he had been a territorial senator. if you look around, you would identify him as a powerful politician, and he was lobbying actively to be selected for that post. many of us novices were suspicious of anyone of that sort, and there was quite a discussion going on about bill egan among a few delegates.

>> narrator: bill egan ran a grocery store in the coastal town of valdez and had served in the territorial legislature, where he had been an outspoken advocate for statehood. >> bill egan was a master, master politician. he was a guy who really believed in democracy, and he was recognized as somebody who really was an able politician but really an able representative of the people's interests. >> narrator: along with a reputation for fairness and ethics, bill egan possessed perhaps the ultimate talent for a politician: a photographic memory for names and faces. >> he was the most phenomenal guy for remembering people's names, remembering your family. he could come up and shake your hand and say--you could see-- then the name comes up. he says, "how is susie and joe and the other kids?" you know, things like this, he just had a-- he was such a natural. >> bill egan was from a small

town, but more than that, just a very fair person, not a forceful person, so that one could feel very comfortable with him. >> narrator: so the delegates selected the man who knew them all, the man they liked and trusted, bill egan. with only 75 days, the convention needed a solid structure and efficient procedures. most of the work would be divided among a set of committees, each committee responsible for either an element of state government or the procedure of the convention itself. >> bill egan was an organizational master, and what he did was that he said, "we're going to have the convention totally and fully organized in the first week." >> we had great advisors. we had people who knew about state government and what they ought to provide, you know.

and so anyway, the committees that were set up were the committee on the legislature, committee on the executive, committee on the judiciary, committee on public lands, and so on. they all met as committees and drew up an article for that part of the constitution. and they would bring it before the plenary session when it was finished, and we would discuss it upstairs and downstairs and all around and finally pass it. >> narrator: committee work meant reading and learning about important issues, hours upon hours of testimony and advice from experts, more hours debating, and more hours yet drafting language, modifying language, and modifying it again. how could so may people with so many regional and partisan perspectives get through it all? katie hurley was the chief clerk of the convention. >> what was so exciting watching it and having seen some of them

in the legislature, the same people who i had seen be just bitter about things, didn't--they buried that. >> actually, there were two things--the ten years of the great depression and then world war ii--that was the generation that came out, that wrote the constitution, the one i belong to. and there was just a--we had had those two great events that prepared us for a new world. and in 1945, the united nations was formed. and then the statehood movement picked up at that point and followed through. and then we had the convention, and it was--we were prepared. democrats and republicans alike were on the same wavelength. >> narrator: perhaps the most important committee work would take place in the natural resources committee. the delegates recognized that natural resources were the only

means at that time to create an economy and pay for government. the committee came up with two unique ideas that would set alaska apart. the first was defining who should benefit from alaska's resources. >> article 8, "the legislature shall provide for the utilization, development, and conservation of all natural resources belonging to the state, including land and waters, for the maximum benefit of its people." you won't find that in any other constitution. >> narrator: the second new idea was called sustained yield. it was clearly a response to the fish trap. renewable resources like fish, game, and timber should be used but only at levels and in ways that ensured they were sustained. >> the fish trap is a very efficient way of harvesting salmon, but the way the canneries operated: they would mine those salmon streams.

for local people, this meant that these are fish that we could be harvesting with our nets, with our gear, and for the indians, it was a disaster because they just ignored what the traditional rights of the indians were. the indians had no rights, as far as they were concerned. >> the concept of prudhoe bay was not even on anyone's horizon, but the resource article was written to provide the basis for any kind of resource development, and the general rules have applied very effectively to oil development in alaska. >> narrator: the natural resource article of alaska's new constitution presented a unique approach to the unique demands of a future state, an approach meant to reverse a long history of resource exploitation. >> to a large extent, the drafting of the alaska constitution was an attempt to reverse the tide of alaskan economic history. i think this was best expressed

probably by ernest gruening and james wickersham. both phrased it in different ways, but gruening once said, "the essence of the alaska problem is this: too much going out, not enough staying here." and that essentially was it, that the resources of alaska largely went one way. they went south. >> narrator: the convention had only 75 days to do its work, so egan knew he had to keep things moving. >> he'd recess if somebody was getting off on something. he'd recess and say, "come on; come up here. come up," and say, you know, "cut out the rhetoric. cut out all of this stuff. we've got just so many days." and of course, that was the drumbeat. the drumbeat was: you've only got so many days to do this convention. >> narrator: egan could be creative as well. >> i don't remember exactly what the debate was, but i know it was getting pretty heavy, and bill just said, "you know, it's 55 below out. i think it's time that we took

a break, and you go out and start your cars." >> success of the convention was very much due to the fact that bill egan was the president. he basically melded a bunch of individuals coming from different directions, be they fishermen or lawyers or big- time politicians, individuals who'd never participated-- he welded them into a body that worked extremely effectively together. >> narrator: the majority of the territory's population before the second world war had been composed of alaska natives who began wielding political influence at the beginning of the century. the major organization for alaska natives was the alaska native brotherhood and sisterhood. >> the oldest native organization in the united states, almost the oldest one that's on record, is the alaska native brotherhood, organized