Shelley Hughes and her clueless claim about Alaska's giant land grant

Alaska entered the union in 1959 with a land grant that exceeded the size of California, more than 100 million acres.

But Republican gubernatorial candidate Shelley Hughes, 68, is claiming that Alaska got shafted under the deal negotiated over many years by Alaskans and members of congress who led the charge to create the state.

She claims that the only thing to do now is get the Trump administration to increase the land grant approved in 1958 by about 5 percent.

This is one of the issues on which she is clueless.

Had she taken the time to educate herself, she would not be constantly saying: “We got the shaft. We got the shaft at statehood in 1959 because the federal land grab took 62 percent of our state.”

“That was what we had to pledge and hand over to join the union,” Hughes claims.

“We” didn’t hand over any land.

“There’s something called the equal footing doctrine that all the states were supposed to be brought into the union on equal footing. We were not. And if you look as an example, the state of New York, less than 1 percent of New York, is owned by the federal government,” Hughes has repeatedly claimed.

She doesn’t understand the equal footing doctrine.

Or that the Alaska Statehood Act, approved by Congress on June 30, 1958 and signed by President Eisenhower a week later, declares that Alaska “is declared admitted into the Union on an equal footing with the other States in all respects . . .”

Hughes claims that “part of my plan is to work to get some of that federal land grab that happened in 1959 when we became the 49th state, to try to get some of that back. And I think the current federal administration, it’s very keen on supporting small and family farms and food independence.”

All that uninformed big talk and Hughes wants just 5 million more acres of federal land, tying “negotiations to national security priorities.”

“This will be based on challenging the unequal footing of our statehood compact compared to other states through congressional pressure and legal action,” she claims.

According to Hughes, with Trump and the current Supreme Court, “we have a chance” to get more federal land.

No candidate for governor who claims that the story of Alaska land centers on how much land remains with the federal government is worth listening to.

The real challenge for every Alaska governor and legislator is dealing with the vast holdings of state land, which is a great deal more difficult than pontificating about federal land transfers that are not going to happen.

She could learn a thing or two from historians Claus-M Naske, Herman Slotnick, Bill Hunt, Steve Haycox and others, including my twin brother.

As to the size of the federal land grant, the advocates for Alaska statehood in Alaska and across the nation in the 1950s were not as stupid or blind as Hughes seems to think.

My brother Terrence summarized it this way in “Fighting for the Forty-Ninth Star: C.W. Snedden and the Crusade for Alaska Statehood.”

Since about 1953 the general consensus had been that in order to support itself financially the state of Alaska would need a vastly larger federal land grant than any previous new state in American history, in the neighborhood of about 100 million acres of choice land, an area larger than the state of California.

All previous Western land grant states had received designated one-square-mile sections of land in a checkerboard pattern, but to ensure Alaska did not end up owning thousands of square miles on random glaciers and mountaintops, it would be permitted to select the lands it wanted in larger parcels as necessary.

In 1957, Doc Miller (a Nebraska Republican)—who had long championed making the land grant as large as possible—temporarily succeeded in raising Alaska’s proposed share of the public domain to 182 million acres, thereby adding an area almost the size of Montana on top of the California-sized grant.

The wary Alaska delegation unanimously opposed Miller’s largesse and were fine when it was dropped back down, believing 103 million acres was more than enough. There was a lingering suspicion that perhaps Doc was simply trying to insert a ‘poison pill’ in the bill, or as Ted Stevens put it, ‘to love us to death.’

(Rep.) Leo O’Brien told Miller that too much land for the new state would be too much of a good thing. “I know that milk is very good for kittens,” O’Brien said. “I also know that you can drown a kitten in milk.” More certainly the fear was that too large a land grant would bring the wrath of conservationists and prompt the cry of “giveway.”

“There are a great many people especially in the East,” (Ernest) Gruening warned, “who would oppose the federal government getting rid of a much larger portion of the public domain in Alaska. I think that (182 million acre) provision, which I doubt whether Alaskans would want, might jeopardize the bill.”

In short, Hughes is wrong. Alaska was not shafted with its statehood land grant.

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