On November 13, 1937, when today’s #stampoftheday was issued, Alaska was a territory, not a state. The stamp, which pictures the mountain formerly known as Mt. McKinley, was part of a four-stamp series celebrating Alaska and three other US territories: Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.
Today, Alaska and Hawaii are states. About 732,000 people live in Alaska, the nation’s largest state in terms of acreage while 1.4 million live in Hawaii. This means that both Alaska, which ranks 48th in population (ahead of only Vermont and Wyoming), and Hawaii (which is 40th) have significantly fewer residents than Puerto Rico, which is home to about 3.2 million people.
How is it that Alaska, which has two US Senators, one US Representative, and 3 electoral votes, and Hawaii which has two senators, two representatives, and 4 electoral votes, became states (in 1959 and 1960, respectively) while Puerto Rico has no senators, no representatives, and no electoral votes? Prejudice clearly is a factor. But so is politics, specifically Republican concerns that Puerto Rico would send Democrats to Congress and provide electoral votes for Democratic presidential candidates.
In the 1950s, somewhat similar concerns stymied efforts to admit Alaska, which the US had “purchased” from Russia in 1867, and Hawaii, which the U.S had annexed in 1898. After World War II, many key leaders in Alaska began pushing for statehood. Republicans, who feared that Alaska would be dominated by Democrats, generally opposed their efforts and argued that the territory, which only had about 200,000 residents didn’t even have enough residents to qualify as a state.
Statehood efforts in Hawaii, which had about 630,00 residents, faced the opposite problem because up until at least the mid-1950s, Republicans had dominated its territorial government. So Republicans generally supported Hawaii’s efforts to become a state. These included President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who called for making Hawaii a state in his 1954 State of the Union Address (which didn’t mention Alaska). But these efforts were stymied by Democrats, particularly powerful senators representing southern states, who feared that senators from Hawaii, where whites made up less than half the population, would support efforts to pass civil rights legislation. (Some southern Democrats expressed similar concerns about Alaska as well.)
In the mid-1950s, Democrats started to become competitive in Hawaii, which in 1956 elected John Burns to serve its non-voting delegate to Congress. Burns became close to both Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson (of Texas) and House Speaker Sam Rayburn (also of Texas) and lobbied both to support a compromise plan to admit both territories. His efforts coincided with Eisenhower’s push for a civil rights bill and Johnson’s concerns that if southern Democrats kept blocking civil rights laws, minorities in the North would abandon the Democratic Party and a coalition of northern Democrats and moderate Republicans would gain control of the Senate.
Johnson, who orchestrated passage of a mild civil rights bill in 1957, agreed to the compromise plan. Publicly, he claimed that Burns has persuaded him to change his mind. Others, however, contend that there was more to his decision. Historian Robert Dallek, for example, has contended “Johnson believed that Hawaii’s admission partly represented an opportunity to score propaganda points in the Cold War. The United States was showing the world that it ‘practices what it preaches’…He believed that Hawaii was a standing symbol of interracial harmony among Americans that could encourage peace in the South and improve America’s image in the under-developed regions of Asia, Africa and the Middle East.”
However, Johnson’s support came with a twist. Alaska would be admitted first and Hawaii would be admitted a year later, which is ultimately what came to pass. Alaska became the 49th state in 1959 and Hawaii became the 50th in 1960. Alaska elected two Democratic Senators; Hawaii elected a Republican and a Democrat. (Today, both of Alaska’s senators are Republicans; and both of Hawaii’s are Democrats.)
In 1964, Congress again took up a civil rights bill. After a 54-day-long filibuster, the bill’s backers moved to end debate. In his speech backing the motion, Senate Minority Leader, Everett Dirksen (R-Illinois), quoting Victor Hugo, said, “stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come.” Dirksen continued, “the time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing in government, in education, and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here!”
The clerk began to call the roll. When he said “Mr. Engle,” there was no response because Senator Clair Engle, a Democrat from California, had a fatal brain tumor that left him unable to speak. Instead, he signaled his support by slowly lifting his nearly crippled arm and pointing to his eye. As Southern Democrats feared, the Senators from Hawaii and Alaska all voted to end debate. The motion, which needed 67 votes, passed with 71 votes (27 of them from Republicans), suggesting it would have passed even if Hawaii and Alaska had not become states. Nine days later, the measure passed 73-27.
But what about Puerto Rico, which had more than 2.3 million residents in 1960? Why wasn’t it part of the statehood conversations? It appears that this was due to many factors, including the fact that unlike Hawaii and Alaska, there wasn’t an active push to make Puerto Rico a state at that time. Rather, there had been concerted efforts in support of independence. In fact, the first plebiscite on statehood didn’t come until 1967. No clear consensus emerged in that vote, and two subsequent measures in the 1990s. However, in a 2012 referendum, 54 percent voted against continuing the island’s status as a US territory. In a second question asking what they would prefer if territorial status ended, 61 percent supported statehood, 33 percent favored “free association” (similar to how the Marshall Islands and Micronesia are governed), and 6 percent backed independence.
The history of Alaskan and Hawaiian statehood suggest that notwithstanding Puerto Ricans’ seeming support for statehood, it may be some time – and require some carefully designed legislative compromises – before that change becomes “an idea whose time has come.”
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.