TERRITORIES: Promised Land

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After brief service in World War I, Gruening became publisher of New York City's Spanish language daily, La Prensa, developed a deep interest in Latin America. As managing editor of the liberal Nation, he clamored for recognition of Mexico's revolutionary Obregon government, railed against dollar diplomacy, U.S. intervention in Latin American affairs, later wrote Mexico and Its Heritage.

In 1933 Franklin Roosevelt called Gruening to the White House, greeted him with a grin, cried (although they had never met) : "Where have you been keeping yourself? I understand you know a lot about Cuba. Tell me what we ought to do."

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.

In 1939 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 bed.

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.

Dr. Gruening went on the warpath. He cried that Alaska, victimized by absentee government, was being gutted by an absentee industry served by seasonal labor. He urged the Territory to claim a bigger share of the wealth taken from its resources. He asked Alaskans to set up a general territorial property tax, corporate net income tax, a personal income tax which would tap the salaries of 12,000 migrant fish and cannery workers and thousands of other laborers who took their salaries to Seattle each autumn. He deplored the fact that Alaskans could not vote for a U.S. President, could not send Senators and a Congressman to Washington to fight their battles. He argued for statehood—and the abolition of his own job.