Last Monday was the birth date of Ernest Gruening, one of the most significant figures in Alaska's history, a history rich in larger-than-life characters. Gruening was territorial governor here from 1939 to 1953 and U.S. senator from Alaska 1958 to 1968.
Like other leaders of historical significance, Gruening was only too real a person: ambitious, arrogant, stubborn, sensitive, generous, compassionate. Born into a well-to-do Jewish family in New York City in 1887, he attended several exclusive private schools before earning a baccalaureate from Harvard College and a medical degree at Harvard Medical School in 1912. He was fully an elite.
But he was not interested in medicine and instead took up journalism, working for several Boston papers before moving to New York as a managing editor. Gruening was a committed Progressive from his earliest days. He embraced the idea that government has the responsibility to secure fairness for people taken advantage of by the insensitivity of those with economic and political power, or by circumstances that the powerful create.
Fair play was his watchword, which to him meant helping those denied opportunity through no fault of their own. He was a statist of the first order.
Gruening served in field artillery in World War I. Later he worked for a Spanish-language paper in New York, and then as editor of The Nation, the weekly current affairs magazine, where he supported the continuation of Progressive reforms.
A Wilsonian internationalist, he was deeply interested in Latin America and advocated true self-determination there. In 1928, he published a major book on Mexico that brought him to the attention of Franklin Roosevelt.
In 1933, Roosevelt appointed Gruening to attend an inter-American conference where the U.S. initiated a "good neighbor" policy. Impressed with his work there, FDR appointed Gruening director of a new Interior Department agency for American territorial possessions, which included Alaska.
Always strong-willed, Gruening often crossed swords with New Deal Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, and in 1939, Roosevelt appointed Gruening governor of Alaska, some said to get him out of Ickes' hair.
Gruening resisted the appointment, arguing that, consistent with his belief in self-determination, the governor should be an Alaskan. He also sensed, correctly, that the frontier-thinking Alaskans would resent a liberal statist as their governor.
In Alaska, Gruening found a colonial territory dominated by an overlapping, confusing and often obtuse federal bureaucracy, and by an inept territorial legislature manipulated by Outside capital investors in salmon harvesting and mining who used the threat of withdrawing from Alaska, together with some outright bribery, to get their way. Gruening took on all three. He was able to get the size of the legislature increased and maneuvered it into establishing the first effective tax policy for the territory. He helped to rationalize the bureaucracy. He had less success with the salmon canners.
Gruening understood that Alaska's economy would be dependent on natural resource development into an indefinite future.
Thus, he supported any and every development idea that crossed desk, including the Atomic Energy Commission's nefarious plan to blast out a harbor near Cape Thompson using nuclear explosions, and the Corps of Engineers plan for a high dam at Rampart on the Yukon River. He hoped pulp mills constructed in the Tongass National Forest, with the resulting logging industry, would weaken the hold of the canners, going so far as to betray his Native constituency on Indian land claims, though he supported Natives on issues that did not conflict with economic development.
As one would expect of a self-determinist, Gruening was a steadfast, aggressive advocate for Alaska statehood. Some have argued that in this, he had an ulterior motive: to return to Washington, D.C., as a senator. If so, he succeeded.
But there can be little doubt he also genuinely supported Alaska statehood and the independence he hoped it would bring. By statehood, Alaskans generally had grown to respect him highly.
Defeated for re-election in the Democratic primary and as a write-in in the 1968 general election, Gruening published an autobiography, Many Battles, in 1973. He died in Washington, D.C., in June 1974.
One of the best biographies is Alaska historian Claus Naske's "Ernest Gruening: Alaska's Greatest Governor" (2004).
Steve Haycox is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Steve Haycox
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