Alaska: New Lead for the Sled

“When a lead dog of a sled team grows old, the Eskimos shoot him,” an Alaskan had warned grimly. And though he still begins his day at 6 a.m. with 30 minutes of calisthenics and an icy bath, Alaska’s Ernest Henry Gruening is 81. No matter that for nearly three decades he has pulled his state’s sled as territorial governor, statehood advocate and, since 1959, U.S. Senator. Last week, borrowing a tradition from the Eskimos, Alaskan Democrats delivered the coup de grāce to Gruening’s long and vigorous political life. In the state’s primary, they gave 53% of the vote and the Democratic senatorial candidacy this fall to a 38-year-old rival named Mike Gravel.

Few political observers expected Gruening’s defeat. He was a formidable candidate with a distinguished and remarkably varied career as editor, author, historian and statesman. The son of a prominent New York physician, Gruening earned an M.D. at Harvard Medical School but abandoned that profession to become a newsman. At 27 he was managing editor of the Boston Traveler, one of the first editors in the country to demand that his writers treat Negroes fairly in their stories. At the end of World War I he became managing editor of The Nation, used the magazine’s liberal platform to rail against U.S. imperialism in Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and champion recognition of Mexico’s revolutionary Obregon regime.

Flip of the Coin. He found other liberal causes in the ’20s—a turn as national publicity director for Robert La Follette’s 1924 Progressive Party presidential candidacy, a scholarly and sympathetic history of Mexico, an angry expose of private utility companies’ propaganda (The Public Pays) that began a long career of defending public power programs. Later, when F.D.R. came to power, Gruening was appointed to the 1933 Inter-American Conference at Montevideo and helped hammer out the New Deal’s Good Neighbor policy. The following year, Roosevelt appointed him to head the Interior Department’s new Division of Territories and Island Possessions, a post he held until 1939, when the President named him territorial governor of Alaska.

Gruening protested that the appointment ought to go to an Alaskan, but once on the ground he quickly became one himself. He worked tirelessly to make his territory a state, began by promoting the famed Alcan Highway, outlawing discrimination against natives (Eskimos, Indians and Aleuts), starting to collect taxes from companies doing business in the territory. After he retired from the governorship in 1953, he urged statehood in a 600-page book (The State of Alaska) and dozens of magazine articles.

When statehood finally came, he and longtime Congressional Delegate E. L. Bartlett were elected as the state’s first U.S. Senators, Gruening becoming the junior by a flip of the coin.

Youngest Speaker. It was no coin flip, though, that gave Mike Gravel (pronounced Grah-vel) the nomination that Gruening sought last week. A dark-haired, lean-faced real estate developer, he brings some political experience of his own to the November contest. A native of Massachusetts who drove taxicabs in New York City while earning his degree at Columbia, Gravel did not even arrive in Alaska until 1956. But he won such quick approval after election to the state’s house of representatives in 1962 that in his next term, he became its youngest Speaker.

Though Gruening was one of the nation’s earliest and most outspoken doves (he and Wayne Morse were the only two Senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution), the hawkish Gravel did not make Viet Nam a big issue, concentrated instead on Alaska’s domestic problems and saturated the state with a well-made 30-minute campaign film. Only Gruening’s age was held against him: he was the oldest U.S. Senator seeking reelection.

Youth is still in Gravel’s corner. His Republican opponent, also chosen in last week’s primary, will be Elmer E. Rasmuson, 59, a native son and board chairman of the National Bank of Alaska. No lightweight, Rasmuson has already been shown a likely November winner—even in Democratic Alaska—in polls that matched him against Gruening. But Gravel will be a far tougher challenge. In a state with one of the nation’s youngest populations and a voting age of 19, it may well be that the new Senator will be the candidate who is able to promise the most years in harness.