A book can be a very powerful agent; and where it may lead is unpredictable. Consider the case of Ruth Gruber, a remarkable woman who had an impact on post-WWII Alaska.
Born into an immigrant Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1911, after high school Gruber won a fellowship to the University of Wisconsin, and then another to the University of Cologne in Germany, where she completed her studies. In 1932, at age 21, she became the youngest doctorate in the world.
Opting for a career in journalism, she went to work for the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. The publisher sent her in 1935 to Germany and Soviet Russia for a series of articles on women under Fascism and Communism. The Soviets in particular claimed to have advanced dramatically the equality of women. Not one to leave stones unturned, Gruber often spent months, sometimes years, on her assignments. In Russia she eventually worked her way as far north and east as Igarka, a newly founded sawmill town on the Yenesi River in western Siberia. When she returned home, she wrote the book that would bring her to Alaska, "I Went to the Soviet Arctic."
In the late 1930s the U.S. Interior Department pondered how to develop Alaska. Officials there drew much from Gruber's descriptions of new Soviet development in the Arctic, and in the spring of 1941 Interior Secretary Harold Ickes hired her to go to Alaska and report on conditions and possibilities there. She would be his Alaska eyes and ears for a year and half, spanning the onset of World War II. She sampled life in both pre-war and post-war Juneau, in Anchorage and in Fairbanks. She also spent time in St. Michael, where reindeer herder Sinrock Mary Antisarlook befriended her, in villages along the Yukon River, in Nome and at King Island, on the Pribilof Islands, at Point Hope and in Barrow, among others.
What Gruber was most interested in, what Secretary Ickes had told her to investigate, was what it was like to actually live in Alaska, on a day-to-day basis, for ordinary people. What the Department needed to determine was the wisdom of encouraging new settlers to go there. Could they survive, would they be able to support themselves, would they thrive? Or were conditions too harsh and the infrastructure still too primitive, and would encouraging people to go there be irresponsible?
Gruber answered in the affirmative. She was an unabashed Alaska booster, enthusiastic about Alaska's potential for settlement and development, and about how adventuresome doctors, lawyers, druggists, salespeople, miners, restaurateurs and others could build up the territory. More interested in people than in structure, she paid no attention to how jobs for them would be funded. Nor did she provide much information on environmental protection, another significant matter Ickes had asked her to explore.
But Ickes was delighted with Gruber's work. He was so impressed with her enthusiasm for new settlement that he hired her after the war to work on Interior Department publicity for Alaska, aimed particularly at new veterans. Soon the department published several versions of a booklet titled "Mid-Century Alaska," touting Alaska's potential for young people just starting their careers. The works were slightly cautionary, but unmistakably affirming and positive. Gruber's observations were evident throughout. The booklets manifested the department's decision actively to promote new Alaska settlement and development.
Ruth Gruber would go on to a remarkable career as a journalist, photographer and humanitarian, leaving Alaska mostly behind her. Even before the war's end, she became involved in the plight of Jews searching for safe places to live. At one point Ickes had pushed for Congressional legislation that would have settled 5,000 Jewish refugees a year in Alaska, a bill that generated almost no support in Congress and vigorous protest from Alaskans. Through the late 1940s Gruber followed and wrote about Jewish refugees across Europe.
Author of eighteen books and graced with numerous prestigious awards, Gruber, now over 100, lives today in New York City. She included her Alaska adventures in "Inside of Time: My Journey from Alaska to Israel" (2003). Back in 1939, she could not have guessed how far her book on Igarka would take her, or Alaska.
Steve Haycox is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Steve Haycox
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