Eisenhower signs Alaska into the union; the territory has waited forty years for this moment
For nearly forty years, Alaska had been a territory in waiting, its statehood bids dying quietly in Congress since James Wickersham first introduced one in 1916. On July 7, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Alaska Statehood Act into law, after the House passed it 210-166 and the Senate 64-20 in the preceding months. The act cleared the way for Alaska to become the 49th state. Six months later, on January 3, 1959, Eisenhower made it official.
QWho tried to get Alaska statehood passed more than forty years before Eisenhower signed it?
A territorial delegate named James Wickersham introduced the first Alaska Statehood Act back in 1916, decades before the idea gained any real traction. The bill went nowhere, partly because Alaskans themselves showed little interest in the idea at the time, still a scattered territory with a tiny population and no organized push for self-governance. Alaskans had sought statehood since as early as the 1920s, though the vision was not realized until the decade after World War II. Wickersham never lived to see his idea succeed.
QWhat did Alaskans do in 1956 to prove they deserved a seat in Congress before Congress agreed to give them one?
Under a strategy called the Tennessee Plan, Alaskans held an election in 1956 and chose Ernest Gruening, Bill Egan, and Ralph Rivers as an unofficial congressional delegation, even though Congress had never agreed to seat them. The plan borrowed its name from Tennessee's own 19th-century strategy of electing shadow representatives to press a statehood claim. Egan, Gruening, and Rivers traveled to Washington anyway and lobbied as if they already held the offices. Two of the three, Gruening and Rivers, went on to hold real seats once statehood passed in 1959.
QHow did Alaska's statehood bid get past Senators who wanted to block it?
Southern Democrats in the Senate worried that a new state would upset the existing political balance, and their opposition stalled the bill for years. Advocates found a workaround by tying Alaska's statehood bid to Hawaii's, making it harder for any one bloc of senators to oppose both without looking selective. The pairing shifted enough votes that the Senate ultimately passed the Alaska bill 64 to 20 in 1958, shortly before Eisenhower signed the Act into law on July 7, 1958. Hawaii followed Alaska into the Union less than eight months later.
