James Wickersham, Alaska's territorial delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives, came before the chamber in 1914 to pose a question: “Shall the government or the Guggenheims control Alaska?” (15). Wickersham's query reflected the influence that the so-called Alaska Syndicate, led by the House of Morgan and the Guggenheim family, exerted over the territory. The Syndicate controlled much of Alaska's transportation infrastructure and key interests in the lucrative Kennecott mining district, and it held sway in the nation's capital. Wickersham and many other Alaskans feared that the Syndicate, rather than the people of Alaska, would determine the territory's future.
Thomas Alton's history of Alaska during the Progressive Era maps the interplay among progressive reformers (most typically federal bureaucrats and territorial representatives) Alaska's burgeoning population of settlers, and the prevailing corporate powers that viewed the expansive territory as little more than a place from which to extract profit. Alaska in the Progressive Age first details a debate among historians of Alaska: has Alaska been neglected by the federal government, or did it benefit from a peculiar level of federal largesse? Most contemporary historians affirm the latter and critique the notion of a particularly neglectful federal presence.Footnote 1 But Alton notes that the perception of Alaskans who lived through the latter years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth matter at least as much as the assessments of modern-day scholars. And on that score, Progressive Era Alaskans reported a rocky relationship with both private interests and the federal government.
Alton then moves into an extended discussion of the 1890s and the transformation of American politics around the issue of the gold standard. He skillfully places the Klondike Gold Rush and Alaska's rise to national prominence in the early 1900s in the context of the era's debates over the gold-backed currency, bimetallism, the 1890s financial panic, the populist challenge to the two-party system, and the wave of federal reform during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, William H. Taft).
According to Alton, the Gold Rush was a “watershed moment” that ushered in modern-day Alaska (57). Thousands of prospectors and others who wanted to get rich quick forever altered Alaska's economic and demographic composition. But if the Gold Rush was one central moment, so too was the construction of the Alaska Railroad. Throughout the book, James Wickersham who Alton confidently asserts “was the most influential Alaskan of the first half of the twentieth century” (236) looms large. To marshal evidence for this claim, Alton informs the reader that although Wickersham never possessed a vote in Congress, his advocacy led to federal legislation to establish a territorial legislature, the federally funded Alaska Railroad, and a series of measures to curb the power of the Alaska Syndicate.
Indeed, the railroad alone stands as a monument to Wickersham's efforts, but also to Progressive Era state planning and ambition. The railroad would be fully owned and operated by the federal government from the time of its completion in 1923 through the early 1980s when it was sold to the state of Alaska. The effort also exemplified the large-scale federal expansion into the nation's economy that would come to dominate debates about the role and scope of government in the generations to follow. Moreover, the railroad also ensured that Anchorage would become Alaska's economic and population center.
Alton's Alaska in the Progressive Age stands apart from previous studies for a few reasons. First, its tight focus on the twenty years between 1896 and 1916 presents a cohesive case for how formative progressivism was on Alaska's early political development. In addition, Alton spends considerable time discussing the national context in which to situate Alaska. The first third of the book is best summarized as a history of national politics in the turbulent 1890s and the germinal phases of Progressive Era reform at the turn of the century. Some readers may bristle at the meticulous national context Alton presents, but too often histories of Alaska fail to adequately locate its history amid an encompassing force such as progressivism. As a result, much of the historiography and popular history is plagued with provincialism, which has led to a pernicious myth of Alaskan exceptionalism whereby the key political and social movements of the United States are viewed as bypassing the state. Here again, Alton issues a useful corrective. Far from a backwater or region not influenced by national ideological and political currents, Alaska has just as often been at the center of federal planning, social movements, and tensions between environmental preservation and economic development.
That is not to say that Alton has written the definitive book on the topic. His reliance on the secondary literature of populist era on the 1890s and on Alaska's newspapers and archives naturally centers the voices of white settlers and political figures. Indigenous voices appear in Alton's text, but they are generally included as supplemental to the actions of Wickersham and a handful of others. It is at least worth noting that the Alaska Native population outnumbered its white settler population through the years of Alton's study. If Alaska's settler population grumbled over the lack of political representation in the early twentieth century, the Alaska Native population would not even gain American citizenship until 1924.
Alton's otherwise impressive study could have delved more deeply into such related topics as political radicalism and suffrage, both of which found heighted expression during the Progressive Era. Notably, the territorial legislature's first action in 1913 was to pass a suffrage bill to grant white women the ability to vote in territorial elections. Including the efforts of suffragettes like Cornelia Templeton Hatcher and Lena Morrow Lewis (the latter being one of the nation's foremost socialists who spent four years in Alaska as an organizer) would have enriched and balanced Alton's narrative. In fact, Lewis's name comes up only once, and it is with regard to her 1916 challenge to Wickersham (234). Nonetheless, Alton has masterfully positioned Alaska's history where it rightfully belongs. Far from a being “last frontier,” Alaska might better be viewed as a critical laboratory and a forerunner to the nation's ascent into the Progressive Era.
