After World War I, one of the hit songs asked the families of returning veterans, “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?” The question was even more poignant after the end of World War II. Upwards of 10 million men and women came marching home, many having been to the four corners of the globe and then some. There were those content to fit back into the America they had left, but to many others the Main Street to which they returned seemed less grand than the one they had spent so many lonely nights dreaming about in far-flung outposts. There was a new restlessness, a new sense of “can-do,” a new sense of adventure that saw a generation pull up the roots of its depression childhood and stride boldly toward the future. “In short,” as one contemporary writer put it, “the personal horizons of millions of young Americans have been widened.”2
Horizon was a word that Alaskans—and those who dreamed about Alaska—knew well. Victory was a long way off—and still not certain—when Ernest Gruening first wrote in September 1942 about servicemen returning to Alaska to make their homes. It was a theme to which he returned time and again, including in a January 1944 Reader’s Digest article that he titled “Go North, Young Man.”3
Gruening, of course, wasn’t the only one to beckon the swarm of servicemen who would soon call Alaska their home. Later in 1944, the Department of the Interior, which still had nonmilitary responsibility for Alaska in its Division of Territories and Island Possessions, published a guide for those interested in Alaska that dealt mostly with land settlement issues. This was followed in 1945 by a general information bulletin on the territory. The publication was supposed to sort fact from fiction, but to those who had spent time in muddy foxholes or stoking coal boilers on angry seas, its warnings about difficulties sounded more like calls to adventure. In its foreword, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes came across almost like a newspaper editor in some mining boomtown when he went on and on about the opportunities of “our last big land frontier.” Early in 1946, Ickes even raised the issue of settling refugees from wartorn Europe in Alaska in an article titled “Let’s Open Up Alaska!”4
Long before Germany and Japan surrendered, hundreds of letters a month flowed into the Division of Territories and Island Possessions seeking information on Alaska. Countless more were posted to towns throughout the territory. Not everyone was ready for the deluge. In Fairbanks, the large number of requests for information pouring into the Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce prompted the following reply postcard:
In answer to your inquiry about Fairbanks, Alaska:
Accompanied with return postage! In other words, come if you must, but pay your own way.
In anticipation of the boom of returning servicemen, Alaska’s territorial legislature created the Alaska Development Board in the spring of 1945 at Governor Gruening’s behest. Essentially, it was a fledgling statewide chamber of commerce. One of the related pieces of this effort was the book Opportunity in Alaska. Published in the fall of 1945 and written by George Sundborg, a newspaperman, technical writer, and planner for various government agencies, it quickly became the indispensable handbook for anyone thinking about moving to Alaska. Not surprisingly, Gruening wrote the foreword.
Gold nuggets were not to be found on the streets of Fairbanks, Gruening asserted, and fortunes would not be made overnight or even in a year or more. (That only happened a generation before in the Klondike or a generation later on the pipeline!) But opportunity, wrote Gruening, “is not lacking,” even if “Alaska’s opportunities are primarily potential rather than actual.” But indeed that potential opportunity was indisputable if for no other reason than Sundborg’s statement of the obvious: “Opened by the war, the North is going to stay open.”6
While not without its moments of boosterism, Opportunity in Alaska offered a reasonably objective look at the territory’s potential. In the section “A Thousand Careers in Ten Chapters,” Sundborg cataloged Alaska’s opportunities in forest industries, agriculture, livestock raising, fisheries, mining, out-of-doors (into which was put trapping, hunting, and guiding), construction, transportation and tourism, trade, service and the professions, and a miscellaneous catchall category.
Logging and sawmills were ripe for a boom, Sundborg reported. There were big postwar construction projects planned. Fishing would remain a mainstay. Now that the War Production Board’s 1942 order closing down gold mining as a nonessential activity had been rescinded, mining—ever the golden siren—would rebound. And while Sundborg confessed that “Alaska is not essentially an agricultural land,” location, location, and location still offered selective opportunities as a photo of dairy cows grazing in the meadows at the toe of the Mendenhall Glacier seemed to prove.
Sundborg had spent some time during the war writing about Project CANOL, so his take on the petroleum industry was particularly interesting. Acknowledging that there were no known Alaska oil fields capable of commercial production, he nonetheless reported survey work being performed near Barrow on the North Slope and a Navy Seabee expedition said to be studying “the feasibility of a 500-mile pipeline from the Barrow field to Fairbanks.” Meanwhile, the territory was importing $4 million of petroleum annually, although much of it was destined for military use.
It was obvious to link transportation with tourism. “Whatever it may be after the war,” Sundborg wrote, “the Territory will not again be isolated.” The future of the Alaska Highway was difficult to predict because it was still under military control, but it didn’t take too much foresight to see that route becoming a pipeline of commerce and tourism. There was talk of an automobile ferry linking Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg, Juneau, and Skagway with the highway connections at Haines and Prince Rupert, British Columbia. And there were even some who had not given up on either a highway or railroad route running north along the Rocky Mountain Trench from Prince George—the old Route A of the Alaska Highway. According to one survey by Time Magazine, 340,000 people said that they were planning trips to Alaska soon after the war’s end. Part of the surge in transportation facilities was a result of the military surplus airplanes that were beginning to fill Alaska’s skies.
So much had Alaska’s traditional isolation been reduced by its new transportation potentials that a joke made the rounds about a grizzled old prospector who ventured “outside” from his claims deep in the interior for the first time in years. When he returned to his old cronies on the creeks, all he could do was complain about the hustle and bustle of civilization, the heavy traffic, the incessant noise, and the great crush of people. “Goodness, how far did you travel?” exclaimed his friends. “Why all the way to Juneau!”
Among Sundborg’s boasts were the claims that there was no hay fever in Alaska and no snakes. Apparently, he said of the latter, the climate does not agree with them. His miscellaneous opportunities ranged from cranberry growing, peat harvesting, and souvenir manufacturing to well drilling and hydroelectric production. He stated unequivocally that the grinding of lenses for eyeglasses had to be done in Seattle, but wasn’t so sure about taxidermy. “I do not wish to state categorically that there is no taxidermist in Alaska,” he wrote, “but if there is, he is not of sufficient repute to be generally known.”7
There it was—a land not lacking in opportunity. And when one went through the list, a land not lacking in plenty of issues for future controversy. But as the Second World War ended, it was the opportunities that fired imaginations.
Sometimes the mood of an era can be summed up in one or two seemingly innocuous sentences. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Edna Ferber, author of such classics as So Big, Giant, and Cimarron, wrote her last novel about postwar Alaska. Called Ice Palace, it was far from her finest work, but in it she found those two sentences. Of her fictitious Alaskan town, Ferber wrote: “Every third woman you passed on Gold Street in Baranof was young, pretty, and pregnant. The men, too, were young, virile, and pregnant with purpose.”8 Such was Alaska as it gathered the offspring of victory to its bosom and crossed yet another frontier into the postwar boom.