Digital Bob Archive

A Delegate in Congress, someone who could speak for the people of Alaska with an official voice, was the goal of non-partisan political conventions held at Juneau in 1881, 1890 and 1899. Each sent a representative to Washington to plead for a non-voting seat in Congress. None was successful. Congress had never seated a Delegate from an unorganized territory and was not about to start with Alaska.

Although there was controversy, in and out of Alaska, as to whether it should become a territory, there was general unity on the desire for representation in Congress. On March 4, 1905, his inauguration day, President Theodore Roosevelt received a telegraphed resolution from Valdez: \"On behalf of 60,000 American citizens in Alaska who are denied the right of representation in any form, we demand, in mass meeting assembled, that Alaska be annexed to Canada.\"

That got some attention. Later that same year the Supreme Court decided that Alaska was actually a territory even though it did not have a legislature and the Organic Act of 1884 had called it a district. After that things moved with relative speed; both houses of Congress passed a Delegate in Congress bill for Alaska and on May 7, 1906, President Roosevelt signed it into law.

The law set the second Tuesday of August for Alaska's first territory-wide election. The voters would be electing not just one Delegate, but two; one for a short term to fill out the remainder of the 59th Congress, the other for a full term in the 60th Congress. The three U.S. District Courts, at Juneau, Nome and Fairbanks, were assigned the formidable task of setting up the election machinery such as establishing polling places, printing and distributing ballots, and hiring clerks and judges.

The candidates of 1906, before airplanes, radio, television and widely circulated newspapers, and with less than three months to campaign, had some problems, too. Campaigning consisted mostly of speeches at gatherings in their home districts and statements that could be telegraphed to newspapers in other areas.

For the short term the candidates were C.D. Murane, Republican and Nome lawyer; A.P. Swineford, Democrat, who had been the second governor of Alaska and had recently retired as editor of a Ketchikan newspaper; and Frank H. Waskey, Labor candidate and Nome area miner. Murane also filed for the long term. He was opposed by Thomas Cale, a Fairbanks miner and Labor candidate; and by Henry W. Mellen, Democrat, Juneau lawyer and former U.S. Commissioner here, who in 1906 was president of the Alaska Copper Company which had a mine and smelter on Prince of Wales Island.

Alaska's two big population districts in 1906 were the mining areas around Nome and in the Tanana Valley around Fairbanks, and it probably surprised nobody that the two Labor candidates, one from each of those areas, drew the heavy votes on August 14. Waskey received 4,849 votes to 2,252 for Murane and 1,572 for Swineford. Tom Cale won the long term with 5,459 votes to 2,324 for Murane and 1,083 for Mellen. The two Delegates in Congress from Alaska were seated, successively, in the House of Representatives and served their terms, but neither ran for the office a second time.