“Anchorage – All-American City” reads a sign hanging over Anchorage’s downtown main drag while President Eisenhower, riding in a convertible, stands and waves at the surrounding crowd of Alaskans. Once “synonymous with gold and glamor of the Yukon and Klondike; the home of sourdoughs and Eskimos” according to Eisenhower, Alaska was now “no longer an Arctic frontier” but a “bridge to the continent of Asia and all its peoples.” Now formally belonging to a State signed just months prior, Alaskans themselves reflected “courageous persistence in mastering natural resources for human good [and] boundless faith in country and in God.” Anchorage was symbolic of that modern State and mission – aesthetic representations of extravagance and material wealth pervaded the city, especially against the barren and wild depictions of Alaska proper. According to an article in The New Yorker, “[Anchorage] has not only parking meters but radar-controlled traffic lights and radio-equipped taxis, to say nothing of forty-four churches, and a high school that cost five and a quarter million dollars.” One Alaskan merchant bragged, “our Coke bottler has wall-to-wall carpets and a grand piano.” Another quipped, “we’re trying to make a Fifth Avenue out of the tundra.” An Alaska Native added a temporal dimension to these purely material narratives – remarking “we are jumping out of the stone age into the electronic age.”

Less than a decade earlier, a famed “Eskimologist,” Margaret Lantis, published an article in The Scientific Monthly noting “rapid changes on [their] frontier.” Clearly referencing rising concepts of a common territorial identity, largely in support of the Alaska Statehood movement, Lantis argued Alaskan residents were becoming “aware of their individual place in the history of their particular community.” The name of the article was “Where are the Social Sciences in Alaska?” and Lantis pointed out that, although the territory contained “nearly all the stages of modern American culture,” Alaska’s vast “transition” from nature to urbanity was largely neglected by social science experts.

From “State of Nature” to the Modern State

Since Alaska’s purchased from Russia in 1867, Lantis was correct about the great transformations that impacted the State – Americans’ imaginary of Alaska first began as a dull, barren wasteland; it was “Seward’s Folly” or “Seward’s Icebox” after William Seward’s pioneering role in the purchase from Russia. The newspaper The Nation mocked the deal, calling it a “frozen desert of a colony.” A large part of Alaska’s perceived barrenness reflected the little information on its landscape or inhabitants. This swiftly changed by the symbolic weight of Alaska’s goldrush, and the “Last Frontier” image that impressed concepts of a final refuge from urban industry society and fast bonanza riches unrestrained by oppressive, red-tape government and monopolists. Alaska’s 1880 census estimated (entirely inaccurately and by imaginative guesswork) 435 non-Native inhabitants in Alaska. By 1890, there were 671 white residents in Juneau alone. A decade later, Juneau boasted the largest gold stamp mill in the world: the Treadwell Mine.

During the same period, bourgeois tourists looking to “escape” the crowded urban city and inspired by Romantic ideals of a free and untapped American West, identified Alaska as a perfect luxury travel destination. Alaska symbolized a sublime and idyllic escape to nature – a “pure wilderness” according to John Muir’s acclaimed Travels in Alaska (1915), and a land “overabundantly-beautiful for description.” In the footsteps of Muir (and bringing his book with them), tourists en masse traveled to Alaska, and published their own travel accounts that became wildly popular among Americans at large. Rather than finding a pristine “state of nature,” however, many writers regretted that Alaskan Natives had been spoiled by modern American culture. One traveler, Eliza Scidmore, regretted that “there are no totem poles . . . to lend outward interest to the villages, and the Indians themselves are too much given to ready-made clothes and civilized ways to be really picturesque.” She concluded, they “were no longer picturesque, distinctive, or aboriginal.” Evidently, Alaska’s characterization as a pure and pristine wilderness included indigenous peoples.

These concepts were part of larger ideologies of primitivism and “civilization” rampant in classic Enlightenment texts – only rebirthed by texts like Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913). In fact, many of the founding texts of anthropology specifically envisioned universal transitions from potlatches and totems, to animism, polytheism, and eventually the highest cultural form, monotheism. This ideological legacy was not forgotten during Alaska’s development to Statehood.

George Rogers and Modernization Theory in Alaska

George Rogers, Alaska’s top economist who had studied at Harvard, served as a consultant for the Constitutional Convention for Statehood, and aided Governor Ernest Gruening develop the territorial revenue system and tax figures, reflected this marked tendency in his book, Alaska in Transition: The Southeast Region (1960). Penning the text only months into Statehood, Rogers prophesied that most of the “big” decisions of Alaska’s panhandle regional economy would revolve around the “economic role of the native Indians,” decrying their poor material conditions and posturing American employment as the remedy. Of course, the title Alaska in Transition wasn’t only referencing Statehood. As Rogers explained in his next book two years later, The Future of Alaska: Economic Consequences of Statehood (1962), Alaska Natives were an “essentially primitive people living close to the classic ‘state of nature.’” He continued, Alaska Natives were “characterized by the absence of any belief that the external world could be… manipulated and changed in any respect to the advantage of man, a characteristic typical of primitive societies.” For an economist who simultaneously lambasted abstract notions of “economic man” and who studied at Harvard alongside the radical sociologist Talcott Parsons, Roger’s antiquated notions of primitivism and a “transition” toward commercial society seems arcane at first. Yet, at the time, a radical movement of theory focusing cultural and social differences in economic success was beginning to define economics.

During the 1960s American social science experts advanced “modernization” theories concentrated on “economic progress” and its social, political, and even psychological ramifications, above all targeted at the global South. Modernization theory’s summa was Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth (1960) initially published as an article in 1959. Rostow sketched out a stadial model of economic growth reminiscent of Enlightenment philosophers, from “traditional” societies representing the lowest stage of economic growth – much like Rogers’ conception, “lack[ing] a systematic understanding of their physical environment capable of making invention a more or less regular current flow”– and culminating in the “Age of High Mass Consumption” through an Enlightenment moment, an “evolution of modern science and the modern scientific attitude.” Rostow even contextualized his model with examples that had clear relation to contemporaneous world affairs, including how economic success was transmittable and beneficial to others as “men in less advanced societies perceive that new positive choices were open to them.” In other words, “traditional” economies could achieve economic growth through confronting and internalizing advanced economies. 

Stages was paradigmatic of the short-lived “modernization” moment in economic theory, but other theorists also contextualized economic differences through culture. Social science in the 1960s was prior to Douglas North’s Nobel Prize winning Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (1990) that centered institutionsas lynchpins for economic difference; prior to Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000)challenge to at least two decades worth of scholarship on a unique European culture, like Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic, in diverging the West from East far before 1800; and when theorists like Alexander Gerschenkron (1962) pinpointed “virulent” ideologies’ role in “economic backwardness” and David Landes’ (1969) postulated a European culture of “rationality in means and activist, as against quietist, ends” that birthed the “modern industrial world.” Indeed, George Rogers’ thesis about primitive societies and culture’s role in economic conditions followed fashionable explanations advanced by Cold War social scientists that culture was preeminentfor economic difference.

Alaska in Transition’s place among cultural explanations of economic difference was evident in Rogers’ lengthy allusions to anthropologist and historical descriptions of Tlingit Native’s culture. Occasionally using amateur and off-handed accounts, Rogers concluded Tlingit viewed wealth accumulation fundamentally through prestige and status, a sort of Veblenian conspicuous consumption that neglected “productive investment.” Without rational investment and planning, their “fund of knowledge probably became static sometime prior to the actual decline of their civilization.” Rogers continued, improving Tlingit Native’s economic conditions pivoted upon their subjective “willingness and ability to adapt” to American employment, and that the situation wasn’t remediable “merely by the passing of special laws, the revamping or transfer of federal programs, the creation of new programs at the state level, or even the creation of a new state.” Instead of addressing structural factors affecting Tlingit Natives, such as their ambiguous legal status in Alaska, Rogers isolated mindsets and culture as the principal factors shaping their material conditions. 

Alaskan Modernization and the “Transition” Thesis

Alaska in Transition concerned Tlingit in the Southeast region, but Rogers soon expanded his conclusions to all of Native Alaska in The Future of Alaska (1962). Shifting his analysis to Native Iñupiat in Alaska’s North Slope Borough, the northernmost region of the United States, Roger’s cited Charles Hughes’ An Eskimo Village in the Modern World (1960) on the “metamorphosis, not a symbiotic relationship” of Natives confronting the “industrialized world.” Hughes continued, “The people who adapt themselves are no longer Eskimos, no longer people who retain a cultural tradition of their own.” And if Natives were “to attain that maximum of satisfaction from their life situation… if they are to adjust to the white world, they must become as much like white men as possible.” Rogers concurred with Hughes in that “the native must assume a new identity which means a breaking with past cultural patterns” since “Native Alaska… has been destroyed.” He insisted, “The further development of the native Alaskan as a self-reliant member of the new society represents one of the most important problems faced in Alaska today.” For both Rogers and Hughes, the inevitability of America’s economic and social forces invading Native Alaska meant that Natives themselves had to adapt, rather than America localizing and conforming to their culture. As Rogers put it, Natives “can become either a productive part of the new Alaska’s labor force, or a permanent welfare burden.”

Hughes and Rogers were exemplary of a distinct movement in Alaska’s scholarship around Statehood, which I term the “transition” thesis. Between the last decade as a territory and about the first decade of Alaska’s Statehood, a body of acculturation and modernization-themed studies on Alaska Natives were published, including James VanStone’s Point Hope: An Eskimo Village in Transition (1962), Valene Smith’s Kotzebue: A Modern Alaskan Eskimo Community (1966), Margaret Lantis’ “What is Happening to the Eskimos,” and many more PhD theses, surveys, and articles. I won’t survey this historiography thoroughly here, but it’s apparent many authors followed Cold War social scientists in focusing culture as the determining factor in material success. The anthropologist Norman Chance argued “What the future holds for the Eskimo largely depends on their own desires and goals and the opportunities for attainment,” and that “as these Eskimo step into the modern world, their identity as ‘Eskimo’ becomes weaker.” James Vanstone framed “transition” as a tension of northern Iñupiat between past tradition and future American life– a “caught between two cultures” bifurcation as “American mass culture” kindled desires only satiable with cash. Fredrick Milan even alleged that a pragmatist “Eskimo” culture, fostered as a Montesquieuian effect from their tough biological environment, was discernible in how they acculturated. 

Social Scientists and the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER)

George Rogers was pivotal in institutionalizing the growing collection of social facts of Alaskans – especially concerning Alaska Natives – by social science experts into one source: the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER). The ISER was a late arrival in the US –professional social science institutions enjoyed great funding already in the 1920s from capitalist-funded charities like the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. After World War II, the Ford Foundation became a major social science funder, nearly supplanting the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations from their dominant position. Although not wholly convinced of social sciences’ status as truly “scientific,” the Ford Foundation advocated for the “scientific study of man” and human behavior. In the Ford Foundation’s annual report of 1955, solving social problems by behavioral science was a major objective, particularly regarding “emotional maladjustment,” which was deemed the “most characteristic and widespread ill of our civilization.” In fact, the ISER’s first research publication – George Rogers’ Alaska in Transition – would be funded by a Ford Foundation subsidiary, Resources for the Future.

George Rogers himself convinced Alaskan legislators to supply the first $5,415 (roughly ~$50,000 today) to establish the ISER in 1961. The ISER immediately followed George Rogers’ intellectual lead. First, in the first decade after Alaskan Statehood, almost every Alaskan community received at least a preliminary economic and social analysis by social science experts. In the Pribilof Islands, for example, Rogers and colleagues analyzed subsistence collection histories, salaries, and even cultural beliefs and leadership hierarchies. According to the investigation, the latter were “paternalistic” and were allegedly not “conducive to encouraging an independent and self-governing spirit.” They continued, this “bred a spirit of dependence” among residents. This type of analysis was common in early ISER texts. Other ISER texts were less analytical, and bordered on openly propagandistic – aside from Alaska in Transition, texts like “Alaska’s Development – The Role of the Native People in the Future” spoke of a “new breed of leader” among Alaska Natives that were open to “outside” Western knowledge. Rogers was keenly familiar with such efforts – he pioneered a program for the fabrication and touristic sale of Alaska Native products, organized by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. Although he later lamented of the program’s limited success in the Pribilof Islands, Rogers was clearly impactful in the broader survey of Alaska by social experts.

The ISER today still persists as the State’s principal source of social and economic research. Rogers himself continued working with the institute into the 21^st century. Curiously, he was an influential ideological figure behind the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (a transfer of 44 million acres and $962.5 million settlement to Alaska Natives), even publishing key texts of the Native leader John Borbridge’s “Native Organization and Land Rights as a Vehicle for Change.” In the same volume, entitled Change in Alaska: People, Petroleum, and Politics (1970), Rogers himself penned the introduction and first chapter, and Norman Chance wrote on reconciling economic change and Alaska Native cultural identities. Nonetheless, the foremost historian of Alaska Native’s legal status in Alaska, Donald Craig Mitchell, explained that during the nine legislative hearings on Native land claims between 1964 and the achievement of ANCSA in 1971, “neither the Secretary of the Interior nor any other Department of the Interior witness, nor any Native witness, nor any attorney representing a Native organization, nor any other witness informed either Committee that they believed Alaska Native residents of Native villages were members of federally recognized Indian tribes whose governing bodies possessed governmental authority, or that Indian country existed in Alaska.”

The impact of the “transition” thesis and George Rogers’ ISER is largely ambiguous – the story behind these ideological and institutional forces have remained neglected, at least among scholars of Alaska. It is understandable, given that much of the information is kept in far out databases and archives, often difficult to decipher and engaged only by a rather small group of scholars even working on the State. The obvious difficulties lie within intellectual history as well – much of the historiographical dominance has remained on Russian-Alaska or the great Whig histories of the Statehood movement, rather than the intellectual and cultural project behind “Alaska” during the 20^th century. Nonetheless, there is clearly space for deep insights – insights into the relationship between American concepts of nature and urbanity, of primitivism and modernity, of national and Statal belonging, and of social science experts and the conceptual ordering of territories and peoples. The story of the ISER and Alaska social thought is largely only becoming – the historical meaning behind the Alaska Statehood movement, and the historical roots of our modern understanding of Alaska is yet so novel. In the case of Alaska Statehood and the ISER, George Rogers himself reflected decades later in an interview entitled Alaska Statehood Pioneers: In Their Own Words: “Statehood lifted us from the colonial status, because we had rights and we had things we could enforce. We could control our own destiny.” 

Bibliography

Amsden, Charles Wynn. “A Quantitative Analysis of Nunamiut Eskimo Settlement Dynamics: 1898 to 1969.” PhD diss. University of New Mexico, 1977.

Annual Survey of Native Foods, Kivalina, 1941-1967. Agricultural, Hunting, and Fishing Statistics, 1935–1972. Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. National Archives, Seattle, WA. 

Annual Survey of Native Foods, Noatak, 1933-1967. Agricultural, Hunting, and Fishing Statistics, 1935–1972. Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. National Archives, Seattle, WA. 

Annual Survey of Native Foods, Point Hope, 1941-1967. Agricultural, Hunting, and Fishing Statistics, 1935–1972. Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. National Archives, Seattle, WA. 

Mt. Edgecumbe Closure Materials – School Operations: Course Rosters, 1960-1961. Mount Edgecumbe Boarding School, 1947-1983. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs. National Archives, Seattle, WA.

Binford, Lewis R. Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology. New York: Academic Press, 1978.

Bittner, Elladean. Employment Opportunities for Women in Alaska: Related to Knowledge and Skills Useful in the Home which Provide Wage-Earning Opportunities. Juneau: Alaska State Department of Education, 1965.

Chance, Norman. The Eskimo of North Alaska. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1966.

Engerman, David C. “Social science in the Cold War.” Isis 101, no. 2 (2010): pp. 393-400.

Foote, Don and H. A. Williamson. “A Human Geographical Study.” In Environment of the Cape Thompson Region, Alaska, edited by Norman J. Wilimovsky and John N. Wolfe, chapter 36. Oak Ridge Tennessee: United States Atomic Energy Commission Division of Technical Information.

Foote, Don Charles. 1959. “The Economic Base and Seasonal Activities of Some Northwest Alaskan Villages. A Preliminary Study.” United States. https://doi.org/10.2172/4626508. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4626508.

Foote, Don Charles. 1960. “The Eskimo Hunter at Point Hope, Alaska. September 1959 to May 1960.” United States. https://doi.org/10.2172/4649598. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4649598.

Foote, Don Charles. 1960. “The Eskimo Hunter at Point Hope, Alaska. Part II. May to September 1960.” United States. https://doi.org/10.2172/4659944. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4659944.

Gerschenkron, Alexander. Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.

Gilman, Nils. Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Goldin, Claudia. “The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family.” American Economic Review, 96, 2 (2006): pp. 1-21.

Gubser, Nicholas J. The Nunamiut Eskimos Hunters of Caribou. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965.

Harvard University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Final Announcement of the Courses of Instruction Offered by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for the Academic Year, 1949-50. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University, 1949.

Heller, Christine A. and Edward M. Scott. The Alaska Dietary Survey 1956-1961. Anchorage, Alaska and Washington D.C: U.S. Dept. of Health Education and Welfare Public Health Service Nutrition and Metabolic Disease Section Arctic Health Research Center, 1967.

Hippler, Arthur E. Eskimo Acculturation; a Selected Annotated Bibliography of Alaskan and Other Eskimo Acculturation Studies. College: Institute of Social Economic and Government Research University of Alaska, 1970.

Hughes, Charles. An Eskimo Village in the Modern World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960.

Institute of Social and Economic Research. “ISER History.” Accessed December 10, 2022. https://iseralaska.org/about/. 

Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Lantis, Margaret. “Where Are the Social Sciences in Alaska?” The Scientific Monthly 77, no. 1 (1953): 24–30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/21310. 

Laughlin, W. S., “The Aleut-Eskimo Community,” Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska Vol. 1, No. 1 (1952). 

Milan, Frederick. “Demography and Population Parameters of the Present Inhabitants of Northwest Alaska.” In Eskimos of Northwestern Alaska: a Biological Perspective, edited by Paul Jamison, Stephen Zegura, and Frederick Milan, pp. 222-232. New York: Dowden Hutchinson & Ross, 1978.

Milan, Frederick. “The Acculturation of the Contemporary Eskim of Wainwright, Alaska.” Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska Vol. 11, No. 2 (1964). 

Mitchell, Donald Craig. “Alaska v. Native Village of Venetie: Statutory Construction or Judicial Usurpation? Why History Counts.” Alaska Law Review 14 (1997): 353-442.

Mt. Edgecumbe Closure Materials – School Operations: Course Rosters, 1960-1961. Mount Edgecumbe Boarding School, 1947-1983. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs. National Archives, Seattle, WA.

Mt. Edgecumbe Closure Materials – School Operations: Course Rosters, 1963-1964. Mount Edgecumbe Boarding School, 1947-1983. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs. National Archives, Seattle, WA.

Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

North, Douglass C. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Pomeranz, Kenneth. Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton N.J: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Rogers, George. Alaska in Transition: The Southeast Region. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1960.

Rogers, George. The Future of Alaska: Economic Consequences of Statehood. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1962.

Rostow, W. Walt. “The Stages of Economic Growth.” The Economic History Review 12, no. 1 (1959): pp. 1–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/2591077.

Saario, Doris and Brina Kessel. “Human Ecological Investigations at Kivalina.” In Environment of the Cape Thompson Region, Alaska, edited by Norman J. Wilimovsky and John N. Wolfe, chapter 35. Oak Ridge Tennessee: United States Atomic Energy Commission Division of Technical Information.

Skinner, Ramona Ellen. Alaska Native Policy in the Twentieth Century. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.

Training Center for Community Programs in Coordination with Office of Community Programs Center for Urban and Regional Affairs. Hippler, Arthur E. From Village to Town: An Intermediate Step in the Acculturation of Alaska Eskimos. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1970.

United States. Alaska Native Land Claims: Hearing Before the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, United States Senate, Ninety-first Congress, First Session, on S. 1830, a Bill to Provide for the Settlement of Certain Land Claims of Alaska Natives, and for Other Purposes. Washington D.C: Congress. Senate Committee on Appropriations, 1969. 

United States. Family Income in the United States 1955. Washington D.C: U.S. Dept. of Commerce Bureau of the Census, 1957.

United States. Federal Facilities for Indians: Tribal Relations with the Federal Government, Report by Mamie L. Mizen. Washington D.C: Congress. Senate Committee on Appropriations, 1966. 

United States. Selected 1970 Census Data for Alaska Communities: Part 2 – Northwest Alaska. Juneau: Alaska State Dept. of Community and Regional Affairs, 1974.

United States. Statistics Concerning Indian Education, Selected Years. U.S. Department of the Interior.

U.S. Census Bureau. Historical Statistics of the United States. [1789 to Present]. Washington: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1960.

U.S. Census Bureau. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970. Washington: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975.   P. 19.

U.S. Census Bureau 1960. Characteristics of the Population. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20160930013224/http://live.laborstats.alaska.gov/cen/histpdfs/1960ak.pdf.

U.S. Census Bureau 1970. Census of Population. Retrieved from https://live.laborstats.alaska.gov/cen/histpdfs/1970char.pdf.

U.S. Census Bureau 1970. Detailed Characteristics. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20160630013527/https://live.laborstats.alaska.gov/cen/histpdfs/1970det.pdf.

U.S. Census Bureau 1970. General Social and Economic Characteristics. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20161230015708/http://live.laborstats.alaska.gov/cen/histpdfs/1970socec.pdf.

United States Minerals Management Service Alaska OCS Region Alaska OCS Social and Economic Studies Program (U.S.) Kevin Waring Associates and Gillian Smythe & Associates. A Demographic and Employment Analysis of Selected Alaska Rural Communities I. Washington D.C.: Department of the Interior, 1988.

Vanstone, James W. “A Successful Combination of Subsistence and Wage Economies on the Village Level.” Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1960): pp. 174-191.

VanStone, James W. Point Hope: an Eskimo Village in Transition. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962.