Alaskans are celebrating the 50th anniversary of statehood. How strange the moment in which we honor our founders and reflect on the past half-century.
Sen. Ted Stevens is on trial in Washington, D.C.; Don Young, our lone Congressman, is under federal investigation; state legislators and local businessmen have been indicted for political corruption, several have pled guilty, others have been convicted by juries; Gov. Sarah Palin is the Republican candidate for vice president; and every Alaskan is receiving a $3,269 check from the state just for being an Alaskan.
"We're In," the huge headline with which the Anchorage Times announced the arrival of statehood in the summer of '58, now means we're indicted, we're in jail, we're in the limelight or we're in the money.
I was a 13-year-old boy in Fairbanks, at fewer than 10,000 Alaska's second-largest city, when Alaska joined the union. The New York Times reported, "Bars threw open their doors here tonight owners shouting 'drinks are on the house,' " but I have a hard time believing it. Fairbanks bar owners never gave away anything.
If they did offer drinks, my dad, Fabian Carey, would have said "No thanks." He opposed statehood.
Fabian found change hard to accept and rejected the idea of progress. If he had had his way, Alaska would have remained as it had been in 1937 when he arrived a greenhorn from Minneapolis: An isolated frontier, home to the few hardy souls who, like my Dad, lived in the woods where they trapped, fished or mined.
"Town," an old-timer told him, " is a place to get drunk, get outfitted and get the hell out of."
Fabian also was a political pessimist. When he heard Alaska had oil, he said, "Michael, if you want to see your future go to Oklahoma, Texas, or Louisiana." By that he meant watch what happens to democracy when oil-rich reactionaries have unchecked power.
Men like oil-field service company executive Bill Allen, confessed serial briber of Alaska legislators, who is a star witnesses against Ted Stevens.
As a kid, I never met anyone employed by Big Oil. Our neighbors typically were construction workers, many of whom worked on military projects in the summer. Juneau economist George Rogers estimates that in the late '50s between 40 and 50 percent of Alaska workers were seasonal. One-third of all income, Rogers continues, came from military payrolls and civilian defense employment generated by the Cold War.
Despite my Dad, the '50s were an era of great optimism. "We had been through the Depression, we had been through the war," George Rogers told me, "and now we were going to do something special with statehood. We were building a brave new world -- we even used that term. Faith in statehood was bipartisan too."
Yet even the most ardent supporters of statehood frequently worried the new state could not support itself. Where would the money come from if the federal government did not provide? What happened if military spending declined?
Citizenship meant paying taxes, and in the early '60s the fledgling state struggled financially -- the struggle reflected in the turnover in the Legislature. Politicians were rewarded for statehood; they were punished for raising taxes.
Today, oil taxes pay for most of state government, and the Alaska Permanent Fund is a $34 billion savings account providing a dividend check to every Alaskan every fall. Plus, this year Gov. Palin and the Legislature gave us a $1,200 energy rebate.
We have no state sales tax, no state income tax.
If Alaskans of the '50s were idealists, it's hard to idealize the '50s. Construction workers made good money, but poverty was the lot of many Alaskans, especially Alaska Natives. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, in which Natives gave up their aboriginal claims in exchange for land and cash, has created tremendous economic opportunity for Alaska's first peoples.
More generally, the affluence produced by oil is astonishing to the boy whose dad lectured him on oil's dangers. Gone are the tiny cabins and small frame houses on the dusty streets of my youth. Some Anchorage and Fairbanks suburbanites have garages almost as big as the house my parents owned. And four cars to roar down broad highways that once only existed in our imagination.
My mother, Mary Carey, was a public health nurse who, like Sarah Palin, juggled home and office responsibilities. But my mother, a New Yorker who had been to Yale and Columbia, would never have voted for her.
My parents were Franklin Roosevelt Democrats; the people we knew were Democrats who elected Democrats. The first state Legislature was overwhelmingly Democratic: All the statewide office holders elected in '58 were Democrats.
Today, the Roosevelt Democrats are long gone, replaced by Alaskans who have adopted the Republican mantra of less government and typically vote Republican.
Alaskans wanted to live on Easy Street and now many of us do. But as we accumulated wealth, we permitted the oil industry excessive influence over our political and economic life. And we permitted Ted Stevens and Don Young to continue in power long after they should have retired.
As we reveled in the big money produced by Big Oil and our congressional delegation through appropriations and earmarks, our conscience withered, and we lost the ability to question our behavior and the behavior of our elected officials.
When the smell of corruption permeated the state, we didn't have the will to investigate the source of the stench. Only when federal prosecutors and the FBI began walking up and down Easy Street asking questions did we begin to wonder if, 50 years after entering the union, we had gone wrong.
Michael Carey is the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.
By MICHAEL CAREY
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