Without the Alaska Railroad, Fairbanks and Anchorage would be blank spaces on the map
If the federal government had not built the Alaska Railroad a century ago, Fairbanks would probably have disappeared from the map like so many other Alaska boomtowns of the early 20th Century.
And Anchorage, a town created by the railroad and for the railroad, would have had no origin story at all.
In today’s dollars it was a $1 billion to $1.5 billion project, a massive decade-long undertaking significant enough to lure President Warren G. Harding to the ceremony marking its completion 100 years ago Saturday.
Harding tapped the golden spike, which was promptly retrieved, then he missed a couple of times with the long-handled hammer before driving the steel spike into place at the Nenana bridge.
The government built the railroad, in part, as a political reaction to the excesses of the Alaska Syndicate, the private conglomeration that controlled resources, transportation and commerce in much of the territory.
J.P. Morgan & Co, and Guggenheim & Sons controlled the syndicate. They owned the Kennicott Mine, the Copper River and Northwestern Railway and the Alaska Steamship Company, which “gave them a share of nearly every dollar earned in Alaska,” as my brother wrote in his history of the Alaska economy.
James Wickersham, the nonvoting delegate to Congress, was not an easy convert to the idea that government ownership of a public utility was in the best interest of Alaska.
“His pioneer spirit of independence urged him in the opposite direction,’ biographer Evangeline Atwood wrote of him. “It was only when he became convinced that big business interests were out to take advantage of their weaker competition did he change.”
When Wickersham learned of the many interlocking corporations in the Alaska Syndicate owned by the Guggenheims and how they worked to eliminate competition, he accepted public ownership “as the only alternative powerful enough to remedy the evils of private greed.”
In 1914, Wickersham delivered a five-and-a-half hour speech to the House of Representatives, which Atwood said was the longest in history, and made the case for the government railroad.
When the state took over the railroad nearly 40 years ago, the legislation mentioned the “eventual transfer of the railroad to the private sector for its ownership or operation or both.” The law also required annal reports that would analyze potential sale arrangements.
A minority of elected officials have campaigned for unloading the railroad from time to time, but luckily they never got their wish. Under state ownership, the railroad helps hold down the cost of living and makes many enterprises feasible in Alaska that would otherwise be impossible.
Generations raised on the notion that private ownership is inevitably superior to public ownership don’t know about Alaska history.
