TERRITORIES: Promised Land

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To the Seattle salmon interests, and to the gold industry, this meant war. To many a plain Alaskan, it sounded like poppycock dished up by a theorizing carpetbagger from the thrice-damned Department of the Interior. Men who had come to Alaska to grab what they could—and who had remained because the country grew on them, and the Outside seemed cramped and artificial—could see no particular sin in big profits by big companies. Sourdoughs who had made their stake and settled down were against new taxes. Many an Alaskan who had "mushed" dog teams and helped beat back the teeming wilderness rankled at advice—even good advice—from an outsider.

Gruening was unabashed. After legislative sessions in which his tax programs were blocked by minority groups, he issued stinging rebukes, named names and pulled no punches. He shouted that the salmon and mining interests were "unpatriotic and unenlightened." He encouraged the campaigns of territorial candidates who favored his program. His enemies called him a Communist, a dictator. Twice, legislative minorities asked the President to fire him. All over Alaska the words, "What do you think of the Governor?" were a fighting question.

Gruening refused to compromise —often against the advice of his friends. In a sense, this was bad politics. After 7½ years the major points of his legislative program have not yet been adopted. He has made unnecessary enemies. But his bullheaded insistence on a new and more independent Alaska has also won him friends. Governor Gruening has given many a citizen of the Territory an insight into issues he had never considered before. Alaska's 3-to-2 vote for statehood, last fall, was also a vote for Gruening.

Congress is in no hurry to speak up on the subject of Alaska's admission to the Union (TIME, May 5). But Alaska has taken the first, and most important, step toward statehood.

Old Problems. Alaska is still beset by old, grave problems. In an area twice as big as Texas, a fifth as big as the U.S., there are still, even with its boom expansion, only 90,000 people. Of these, 30,000 are tuberculous Indians. Alaska is not one but several countries: the mild, humid southeastern coastal Panhandle, where it rains about 364 days a year; the barren, fogbound reaches of the Aleutian Islands ; the interior Yukon watershed with its searing summer sun and its Montana-like winters; the desolate wastes of the Arctic, where the soil thaws to swamp in summer, but is white, frozen and sterile during the long polar night.*

Despite the airplane, Alaska is still far from markets, still burdened with exorbitant freight rates. It is still at the mercy of shipping tie-ups, like last fall's three-month waterfront strike. Alaskans com plain, as they have for years, about service from the monopolistic Alaska Steam ship Co. But Alaska's chief problem is distance (Alaska needs roads — the air plane is simply an expensive substitute for them), and the fact that vessels which come north loaded go south empty, with no industries to give them cargo.