Pleading for Alaska statehood, Ernest Gruening, later a U.S. senator, argued in 1955: “Alaska is no less a colony than were those thirteen colonies along the Atlantic seaboard in 1775. The colonialism that the United States imposes on us and which we have suffered for 88 years, is no less burdensome, no less unjust, than that against which they poured out their blood and treasure.”
For more than 200 years, the 700,000 residents of the District of Columbia have been denied the full voting representation that comes with statehood. Washington, D.C., is still treated by Congress as a territory and is subject to congressional oversight of its local laws, funding and operations. No other democracy denies full voting rights in its legislature to the residents of its nation’s capital.
Similarly, James Wickersham, Alaska’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, opined in 1912: “There actually exists today a Congressional government in Alaska more offensively bureaucratic in its basic principles and practices than that which existed here during the 70 years of Russian rule under the Tsar.” Wickersham introduced the first Alaska statehood bill in 1916, which went nowhere. Alaskans had to struggle for another 43 years to attain statehood.
To Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s credit, in a 2001 NBC interview, she emphasized that the Alaska statehood movement “was something driven by the residents, and whether we are talking (Washington) D.C. or Puerto Rico, as long as it’s driven by residents, I’d pay attention.”
Driving the residents’ statehood campaign, nonvoting D.C. House Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton emphasized that “Congress controls D.C. laws and budget.” She added: “D.C. residents can’t vote on any of the federal laws that govern them” and “pay more federal taxes per capita than any state and more total federal taxes than 21 states, but have no voting representation in Congress.”
Through the 1950s, a congressional coalition of conservative Republicans and southern Democrats blocked Alaska admission. Only in 1959 did President Dwight Eisenhower sign the official proclamation granting Alaska statehood, paired with the admission of Hawaii.
Sixty-three years later, in April 2021, the House of Representatives passed a Washington, D.C. statehood bill, but the legislation was stymied in the Senate. Like Alaskans through the first half of the 20th century, Washington, D.C., residents are now campaigning for their full political rights in a democracy and have suffered their ups and downs. Like Alaskans in 1959, Washington, D.C., will one day achieve its full complement of two voting U.S. senators and one voting House representative.
— Robert Rudney
Washington, D.C.
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