Battleground Alaska

Fighting Federal Power in America's Last Wilderness

Stephen Haycox

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780700622153
• eBook ISBN: 9780700622733
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

No American state is more antistatist than Alaska. And no state takes in more federal money per capita, which accounts for a full third of Alaska’s economy. This seeming paradox underlies the story Stephen Haycox tells in Battleground Alaska, a history of the fraught dynamic between development and environmental regulation in a state aptly dubbed “The Last Frontier.” Examining inconvenient truths, the book investigates the genesis and persistence of the oft-heard claim that Congress has trampled Alaska’s sovereignty with its management of the state's pristine wilderness. At the same time it debunks the myth of an inviolable Alaska statehood compact at the center of this claim.

Unique, isolated, and remote, Alaska’s economy depends as much on absentee corporate exploitation of its natural resources, particularly oil, as it does on federal spending. This dependency forces Alaskans to endorse any economic development in the state, putting them in conflict with restrictive environmental constraint. Battleground Alaska reveals how Alaskans’ abiding resentment of federal regulation and control has exacerbated the tensions and political sparring between these camps—and how Alaska’s leaders have exploited this antistatist sentiment to promote their own agendas, specifically the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Haycox builds his history and critique around four now classic environmental battles in modern Alaska: the establishment of the ANWR is the 1950s; the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s; the passage of the Alaska National Interests Lands Conservation Act in 1980; and the struggle that culminated in the Tongass Timber Reform Act of 1990.

What emerges is a complex tale, with no clear-cut villains and heroes, that explains why Alaskans as a collective almost always opt for development, even as they profess their genuine love for the beauty and bounty of their state’s environment. Yet even as it exposes the potential folly of this practice, Haycox’s work reminds environmentalists that all wilderness is inhabited, and that human life depends—as it always has—on the exploitation of the earth’s resources.

CHAPTER 1 ANTISTATISM IN ALASKA

In her reaction to President Obama’s call in spring 2015 for Congress to designate the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge a wilderness area, Alaska’s senator Lisa Murkowski charged that the president’s action constituted an assault on Alaska’s sovereignty. The senator’s assertion is representative of a widespread and tenaciously held conviction among Alaskans that the federal government exceeds its constitutional authority in implementing federal policy in Alaska, particularly in regard to the management of federal land in the state and especially in regard to environmental regulation. Complaints about what locals label “federal overreach” are frequent. When asked by a reporter how the federal government’s relationship to Alaska’s state sovereignty is different from that with other states, Murkowski averred, “We’re just a little more sensitive to it.”¹ In this the senator was correct, while perhaps implicitly acknowledging that there is no constitutional difference, for Alaskans are much more sensitive to perceived attacks on their state’s sovereignty than are other states’ citizens. Moreover, politicians often argue that the manner in which the federal government manages its land and resources in Alaska violates promises made at statehood, which came late to Alaska, in 1959. Such protest is not uncommon in the western states, but in Alaska unique historical, economic, and social circumstances exacerbate the sense of injustice and persecution felt by many, perhaps a majority, of the state’s citizens.² Analysis of the state’s political reaction to President Obama’s 2015 announcement helps to explain Alaskans’ long history of resistance to and condemnation of federal management of Alaska’s resources.

This book attempts to explain the vehemence of Alaskan antistatism, the resistance to federal activity in the state, and the conclusion by many Alaskans that Alaska has been subjected to more federal oversight and coercion than other states. Although there are tangible artifacts of Alaska’s antistatism, the subjectivity of its intensity and how it is felt by the resident population and Alaskan political leaders obviates any conclusive or definitive finding. Nonetheless, analysis of the phenomenon is useful, for it helps to identify and explicate the unique factors of Alaska’s history and political economy that do set it apart and give its residents their claim to exceptionality. Resistance to federal management of Alaska lands long predates statehood, reaching back at least to the years immediately following the Klondike and Alaska gold rush at the end of the nineteenth century, when the first appreciable number of non-Native migrants arrived in the territory.

Although Senator Murkowski’s claim of federal trampling of state sovereignty is of particular interest, the claim that the federal government has reneged on promises made at statehood is more specific and, in the frequency with which it is used as evidence of the claim, unique to Alaska. An examination of both contentions is revealing. Theoretically, these claims rest on the compact theory of American government, the idea that the states formed the federal government through the ratification of the 1787 constitution and therefore have the authority to impose limits on the exercise of federal power. Contract theory, the idea that the nation, dating from the 1776 Declaration of Independence, is older than the states and in actuality created them and therefore has authority over them, save for such powers as the US Supreme Court has found are reserved to the states, seems the more dominant explanation of the nature of the American founding.³ Practically, most references by Alaska politicians are to what is often called the “statehood compact,” a supposed binding agreement between Congress and the new State of Alaska that limits what either party can do without the approval of the other.⁴ This notion is based primarily on a plebiscite mandated by Congress in 1958 that asked whether Alaska voters approved the Alaska Statehood Act; the measure passed by a vote of 40,452 to 8,010. Subsequently, in 1969 the attorney general of Alaska issued a formal opinion holding that, based on the results of the plebiscite, “the federal government may not unilaterally amend the Statehood Act.”⁵ That opinion, however, has not prevailed in federal court cases, most critically in Alaska v. U.S., filed in 1993 and decided in 1996, in which the state sued in the US Court of Federal Claims specifically for violations of the “statehood compact.”⁶ This case is discussed in detail in chapter 7. The court found against the state, the judge ruling that only one portion of the statehood act can be viewed as unilaterally unalterable—namely, the grant of state title to 104 million acres of Alaska—but that other portions cannot, and the act as a whole cannot be so understood.⁷ The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision; the US Supreme Court declined to take up the case. But that has not prevented state leaders from repeatedly and reflexively invoking the “statehood compact” as if it were an entity with the force of law that should guide the state in its relations with the federal government.⁸

Alaska leaders protesting federal actions in Alaska also often argue that they violate explicit promises made at statehood. Usually they note that Congress intended that Alaska use the land and resources of the state to support itself through economic development. Article VIII of the state constitution, concerning the state’s natural resources, states explicitly that “it is the policy of the State to encourage the settlement of its land and the development of its resources by making them available for maximum use consistent with the public interest.”⁹ Moreover, the same article states that “wherever occurring in their natural state, fish, wildlife and waters are reserved to the people for ‘common use.’” This reservation is unique among the fifty states. Section 6 of the Alaska Statehood Act grants the land for the purpose of providing economic support for the state.¹⁰ Before Congress approved Alaska statehood, many members of Congress expressed concern that the territory did not have a sufficient tax base to support the costs of state government.¹¹ Both Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn of the Eighty-Fifth Congress had expressed reservations about the region’s economic future, as had many others. Alaska’s congressional delegate E. L. “Bob” Bartlett had persistently worked for the inclusion of a generous grant of land for state title with the expectation that mineral development on such land would provide both state revenue and jobs.¹² To ensure that the land grant would be used for that purpose and not to enrich private owners, Congress forbade the new state to sell or otherwise dispose of the mineral land given to it.¹³ The state can only lease exploration and production on such lands; it must retain ownership. Walter J. Hickel, who served as Alaska governor from 1966 to 1970 and again from 1990 to 1994, turned this provision to positive advantage in calling Alaska an “owner state,” meaning that, unlike other states, Alaska retains ownership of the natural resources on its lands. With the discovery and development of the Prudhoe Bay and associated North Slope oil fields, Alaska has fared well as an “owner state.”

Alaska leaders’ complaints about federal activity in Alaska must be placed in the broader context of American and Alaskan exceptionalism. The story of America is most often told as the triumph of individual freedom and equal economic opportunity over strong central authority, authority justified in the name of security and restraint of human licentiousness. Property, contract, and freedom of expression are understood as the constitutional framework that facilitates the free market, an active civil society, and democracy. It’s a story of self-reliance, voluntary associationism, free labor, and the free market, all of which release human creativity, ingenuity, and initiative, which in turn nurture the full realization of human potential and happiness. It is an article of national, cultural faith that no other political system so encourages freedom, equal opportunity, individualism, and the realization of human potential. It is a celebration of national exceptionalism.¹⁴

The story begins with classical liberalism, the assertions of Enlightenment liberals, most particularly John Locke and Adam Smith, who posited the fundamental equality of all; the self-evident right to life, liberty, and property; the sanctity of private property; and the necessity of a free market. The founders of the American republic, Louis Hartz wrote in 1955 in The Liberal Tradition in America, were all “Lockean liberals.” American exceptionalism, Hartz contended, was the product, as William Novak summarized, “of a persistent preference for society over polity, individual initiative over collective action, and private competition and voluntarism over public regulation and state direction.”¹⁵ Early celebrants of American exceptionalism include J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Alexis de Tocqueville, and, above all, Thomas Jefferson. From these beginnings American historians such as Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., among many others, fashioned a tale that praises American individualism and the self-made man and glorifies his unaided conquest of nature and construction of a modern civilization in which government plays at best, and grudgingly, merely a supporting role. A good deal of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis has found its way into the story, the absence of government and amenities on the frontier necessitating the ingenuity and individualism Turner took to be the essence of the new American man, perfectly capable of fashioning a society and a culture without the guiding, heavy hand of the state. Politicians from Andrew Jackson to Ronald Reagan made themselves heroes of a vocal, aggressive antistatism. The problem with government, they said, is government.

It’s an ascensionist story, uplifting and noble. But it is, as any number of perceptive scholars have pointed out, mostly a false one or, at best, one representing only one aspect of a complex cultural identity.¹⁶ It flies in the face of a national history of strong central government with “broad interventionist, regulatory and coercive power at home as well as abroad.” The American government has always been “powerful, capacious, tenacious, interventionist and redistributive,” a fact poorly recognized by many American historians and barely at all in the imaginative reconstruction of their history taught to and embraced by most of the nation’s citizens.¹⁷ Among others, Hannah Arendt pointed out that the objective of the new US Constitution in 1787 was not to limit power but to create it, much to the consternation of the anti-Federalists.¹⁸ In the early national period, as Americans defined in practice what democracy might mean, the federal government put in place a comprehensive structure of administrative law and bureaucratized basic public functions such as the postal service, the telegraph, and later the telephone. The Civil War and its aftermath saw a remarkable growth of government intervention, from the abolition of slavery and management of the money supply to engagement in intercontinental railroad construction and the curtailment of labor unionization, the latter culminating in the Lochner decision in 1905, which, ironically, relied on the authority of the federal judiciary to protect the “right and liberty of the individual to contract.” The substantial expansion of governmental power at the federal and state levels is a familiar motif of general US histories, an expansion accelerated by America’s involvement in World War II. One of the enduring political conversations since the 1980s has been the widespread resistance to the power and reach of government. Contrary to President Clinton’s proclamation in his 1996 inaugural address, the era of big government is not over; it is part and parcel of the practical administration of American life, as it has been since the beginning of American national government.¹⁹

But the mythology of a limited American government, constrained in favor of the nourishment of individual initiative and private enterprise, persists as the national identity narrative.²⁰ That narrative fuels the antistatist rhetoric so prevalent in American politics over the past thirty-five years. “Running against Washington” has become a staple of contemporary journalism, as has the conservative attack on “federal overreach.”²¹ One of the more familiar quotations in American discourse is from Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem.” Such formulations rest on the underlying assumption that the government is acting inappropriately and ahistorically, that the current exercise of government power is unique, a departure from both the intentions of the framers and the manner in which that government has been administered in the past. It is a convenient fiction that flatters individual capability and an economy free of constraint and justifies attacks on virtually all government regulation.

Antistatism characterizes Alaska’s self-identity to an exaggerated degree. The state’s governors and legislators and its congressional delegation maintain a persistent plaint of persecution by an overweening, abusive use of federal power in the state that illegitimately usurps state sovereignty while it threatens personal freedom. The expressions of discomfiture in Alaska over President Obama’s recent announcements on managing the Arctic Refuge, NPR-A, and offshore drilling are only the latest in a long history of such protests. In Alaska there is a symbiotic relationship between several substantive historical factors and the tenacious grievance that constitutes the framework of daily conversation and political discourse. First is the set of physical conditions that describe Alaskan daily life: separation from the contiguous states by 1,500 air miles and by another sovereign nation; the vast size of the state together with its sparse population; the long, dark, and somewhat cold winters with permanent snow on the ground that necessitate extra effort for daily activities. All of these contribute to a sense of both isolation and exceptionalism and encourage the notion of a personal pioneer experience. As Americans are convinced of the exceptionalism of their country, so Alaskans are even more persuaded of the exceptionalism of Alaska, even though 70 percent of the population is urban and has unencumbered access to the material norm of contemporary American culture and most of its amenities. More than half the total population lives in the general area of the largest city, Anchorage.

The second factor is a mischaracterization of the state’s history. In a perceptive essay on Alaska exceptionalism written a generation ago, historian Jeannette Paddock Nichols warned of the dangers of embracing a false history.²² Forging a false history inflates and distorts identity; it occludes a realistic and usable vision of the future. But much historical treatment of Alaska has favored heroic tales of resilient individualism; has adopted the interpretation that Alaska was disadvantaged by its long territorial history because of insensitive federal management; and, somewhat paradoxically, has embraced the idea that the federal government neglected Alaska when it should have nurtured the region’s development.²³ A more realistic history of Alaska acknowledges the essential and continuing role of federal support for a population without a self-generated economy that demanded all the services and amenities of contemporary American culture.²⁴

There were few Americans in the territory before the Klondike gold rush in the winter of 1897–1898. A few hundred flocked to Sitka immediately after the purchase in 1867, hoping to be in the vanguard of a new western economic boom. They were soon disappointed, for no economic base developed, and what little resources the earliest settlers brought with them were soon exhausted. The climate was not conducive to surplus agricultural production, and even if it had been, any market was too far distant. Furbearers were not plentiful in accessible areas. Only with the discovery of gold in 1880 at what became Juneau did anything resembling a modern economy begin to develop, dependent on corporate investment from San Francisco businesspeople to fund development of the largest gold stamp mill in the world. But the several thousand attracted by the new jobs created easily imagined themselves as pioneers, pushing back the frontier and throwing up an outpost of civilization. In the meantime, a few hundred intrepid souls did brave the harsh conditions of the interior river basins to trap furbearers; prospect the mountains for mineral riches; and establish among the indigenous peoples, upon whom they were heavily dependent, tenuous footprints of American culture. Both of these groups of immigrants to Alaska freely harvested the game resources; took possession of the minerals, which the indigenous people could not legally do because they were not citizens; and manifested an individualist’s sense of ownership and right. They were, however, dependent upon the US Army for exploring the land and cataloging its resources and providing aid and comfort in times of emergency and on the federal territorial system for establishing security by enforcing and adjudicating basic law.

The US Census in 1900 counted 30,000 non-Natives, people who had been attracted to the territory by the Klondike gold rush, the same number as the enumerated indigenous people. Nearly all of the immigrants had settled in new towns in the territory, most of which were funded by absentee investors in various mineral prospects and most of which were short-lived. These second-wave non-Native immigrants also treated the land as their own, harvested its resources without let or hindrance, and thought of themselves as self-reliant and self-sustaining.²⁵ Yet the federal government provided communication (federally financed and operated telegraph connection to the contiguous states), transportation (federally constructed, owned, and operated railroad), public safety (US Army; federal court system and constabulary), health care (federal hospitals, circulating medical and dental staff), education (federally funded non-Native and indigenous schools), civil administration, and eventually a federally authorized bicameral legislature. Federal expenditures continued in Alaska during the Great Depression, including a creative rural rehabilitation project in the Matanuska Valley. During World War II, 300,000 military personnel served in the territory. As one Alaska historian cataloged their impact, the federal government serviced localities with airfields, radio stations, hospitals, maps, coastal surveys, roads, housing, utilities, an...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• prologue
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Antistatism in Alaska
• Chapter 2. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
• Chapter 3. Native Claims and Alaska Statehood
• Chapter 4. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline
• Chapter 5. The Alaska Lands Act
• Chapter 6. Unfinished Business: Subsistence and the Tongass
• Chapter 7. Antistatism Persistent
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Gallery
• Back Cover