Long ago -- in the mid-'60s -- my political science professor assigned his students "Who Governs?" by Robert Dahl.
"Who Governs?" was read all over the United States, not just the eastern liberal enclave where I attended school. Dahl, a Yale government professor, was one of the best known academic political analysts of his time -- and his time lasted decades. He died in 2014 at age 98.
The premise of his book was brilliant -- the eternal question of who governs could be answered, at least in the United States, through an examination of one community, New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is located.
Dahl was a classic pluralist. He believed anyone could become a participant in the political system although participation took differing forms and yielded varying amounts of influence. Some people wrote checks, others contributed their time and their energy. "Political man," Dahl wrote, "can use his resources to gain influence, and he can then use his influence to gain more resources. Political resources can be pyramided in much the same way that a man who starts out in business sometimes pyramids a small investment into a large corporate empire."
Dahl saw New Haven committed to stability. Political actors with "deviant" ideas, whether of the left or right, were doomed to marginalization because they were destabilizing.
From Dahl's pluralist perspective, New Haven was a competitive democracy. Competitive democracy was an ideal especially admired in the mid-'60s when the United States was challenged by communism. Dahl was well aware of competitive democracy's "warts," as he put it, but still Americans could look in the mirror with pride.
Today we hear far more about the warts, which have become disfiguring, than the pride.
I became re-interested in Robert Dahl when I discovered he had lived in Alaska as a boy. This spurred me to read his self-published memoir "After The Gold Rush: Growing up in Skagway."
Dahl came to Alaska from rural Iowa in 1926. He was 10. His father was a doctor who discovered, as did many late 19th century and early 20th century doctors, the economics of medicine were dismal. Many patients were impoverished. Few patients had savings. Fewer still had insurance. Rural doctors often engaged in barter -- medical services for bacon, poultry and greens, their dinner.
Dr. Peter Dahl took a job as the salaried staff physician for the White Pass and Yukon Railroad. He was Skagway's local doctor for 25 years. He and his wife became pillars of the community of 500; his three boys came of age there before heading stateside to college.
Skagway had been shaped by the gold rush, and the Dahls lived in the shadow of the gold rush. Many of their neighbors had been drawn north by dreams of wealth and stayed on long after their dreams vanished.
Skagway was not a ghost town but ghosts hovered in the alleys. Legendary con man Soapy Smith was the most celebrated.
By the late 1920s, tourism already was important to the local economy. There wasn't much else to generate money other than the railroad extending to Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory.
In his memoir, Dahl takes us through the making of a young Alaskan, formally in school, informally on the streets and docks of Skagway and the mountains nearby. A reader is reminded of how isolated Skagway was in Dahl's youth. Contact with the outside world, even Juneau, was infrequent and Western Alaska existed only on maps. For the Dahls, Alaska was a few hundred miles surrounding their home.
Dahl had to be familiar with historian Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis," which maintained the roots of American democracy could be found on the rough-and-tumble frontier where imported European institutions perished. Dahl never refers to Turner in his memoir, but he does tell us he admired Skagway's egalitarian practices. (And he tells us this egalitarianism did not fully extend to the Alaska Natives who lived there in informally segregated housing.)
I am not sure how much influence Alaska had on Dahl's adult political views. But I am sure, after reading his memoir, that Alaska had a role in making him a self-confident young man prepared for the challenges he faced as a student, scholar, soldier and family man. Alaska made him ready, ready to become a citizen contributing to the realization of American democracy.
Michael Carey is an Alaska Dispatch News columnist. He can be reached at mcarey@alaskadispatch.com.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com