In history classes on early America, students often read a portion of a 1782 book written by a French farmer, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, who lived in New York during the Revolutionary era.
1782 was in between the Revolution and the writing of the Constitution, when fundamental forces and circumstances were shaping American character. Crevecoeur asked a very basic question: "What then is the American, this new man?"
Fifty years after Alaska statehood, the character of our new society is still being shaped, and Crevecoeur's is a fair question to ask here: "What then is the Alaskan, this new citizen?"
Alaskans nearly universally believe themselves to be different, unique. And they are confident they know what's exceptional here: Alaskans are convinced that they're more independent, more self-reliant, more impatient with institutional restraints.
Professor Judith Kleinfeld of UAF has studied this phenomenon. She concludes that Alaskans have an aggressive approach toward life, that they are more willing than their fellow citizens elsewhere to take risks, to throw off restraint and "Go For It," the name of her book on the subject.
In a recent article titled "How the Frontier Imagery of the Alaskan North Shapes the People Who Come," printed in The Northern Review, an academic journal published by Yukon College in Whitehorse, Yukon territory, Kleinfeld reports on 75 interviews she conducted with people who came to Alaska between 1959 and 1990.
This was a monumental undertaking, and Kleinfeld's interviewees confirm that coming north gave them opportunities to do things they might not have done otherwise, be it relying more on themselves, making substantial amounts of money, or going from bad to good.
Life, Kleinfeld concludes, is more dynamic here. Such things as the "unfinished" and remote character of settlement, the exotic grandeur of the wilderness, and especially the "frontier ethos," i.e, the conviction of a higher level of individual freedom -- all these engender or release the Alaska dynamism, producing a "can-do," "will-do" outlook.
But motivation, attitude, mind-set and spirit are hard to measure. They're highly subjective. That in no way invalidates them; it just makes them harder to pin down. So it's difficult to determine their role in frontier life.
For example, Alaska has no corner on risk-takers; one finds them everywhere, and also people making money, turning their lives from bad to good, manifesting perseverance, and doing the unusual.
Would the people who have done remarkable things with their lives in Alaska have done them elsewhere? There's no way of knowing, of course, for they did them here. Still, many people hold a deep sense that they wouldn't have. But, believing is not proof.
Certainly the context of their lives would have been different: It would not have been frontier. So they would have been courageous or daring or persistent in different circumstances, perhaps in different ways.
It's fair to ask just how "frontier" we are in Alaska. It's somewhat problematic to argue that Alaskans are a frontier people when 70 percent of us live in sophisticated towns with all the amenities of all other American towns, living lives that are nearly perfect imitations of the lives lived in those other towns, with high gas prices, high Starbucks prices, high-rise office towers and high jinks in our politics.
At the same time, underlying constraints significantly limit Alaska independence. These include a narrow, natural resource-based economy funded by absentee corporate investors; a high rate of transiency in the non-Native population; and economies of scale that defeat commercially profitable agriculture and manufacturing.
These elements may generate a sense of exceptionality but not one of independence. And they must somewhat circumscribe the sense of freedom. The celebration last week of the Conoco Phillips-BP announcement of $600 million for preparation for a gas pipeline, for example, was uncannily paradoxical. It clearly manifested the high level of Alaska dependence on forces essentially outside our control but pointedly in charge of our future.
Surely professor Kleinfeld is correct in arguing that most Alaskans' adoption of the frontier ethos of romanticized individualism generates in many a previously unrevealed confidence, perhaps even competence. But such individual capacities do not eliminate the very real constraints that limit Alaska's institutional independence, constraints that belie the romance of frontier freedom.
Steve Haycox is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
STEVE HAYCOX
COMMENT