Digital Bob Archive

When Alaska Democrats convene at Fairbanks next weekend for the state convention, it will mark the 100th anniversary of the first Democratic convention which was, in fact, the first political convention to be held in Alaska. Seven years earlier a non-partisan convention had been held at Juneau to set up the machinery for electing an unofficial delegate to Congress.

The 1888 Democratic Convention was held at Sitka on Saturday, May 5, 1888, and its main business was to elect two delegates to the National Convention which was to be held at St. Louis on June 5. Whit M. Grant, the U.S. Marshal for Alaska, presided. Arthur K. Delaney, the Collector of Customs, and A. Hew Gamel, a Juneau lawyer, were selected as delegates, with James Sheakley, the U.S.
Commissioner at Wrangell, and Jeff J. Keuhn, a Sitka mining man, as alternates.

Governor Alfred P. Swineford missed the Sitka convention because he was detained in Washington, D.C., where he had been on business. Swineford, a red hot Democrat, was devoting much of his energies to trying to rid Alaska of holdover Republican office holders, some of whom particularly irritated him. President Cleveland was defeated for reelection that fall by Republican Benjamin Harrison, and when word of that reached Sitka, the governor wrote a particularly apoplectic letter to Secretary of the Interior William F. Villas:

\"John G. Brady, U.S. Commissioner appointed by President Arthur and permitted to continue in office by President Cleveland, distinguished himself above all other republicans by hanging out an American flag over the news of Harrison's election, and at night illuminating his building in the exuberance of his joy over the defeat of the President who has permitted him to hold an office to which he is a disgrace.

\"I respectfully submit that the official head of this man Brady should be severed from the body even though he has not ten days of his term left. Excuse the expression, but he is a political skunk who by his action of yesterday and last night has insulted every Democratic appointee of President Cleveland here, and indirectly the President himself.\"

Brady, it can be reported, served for nearly two months after the Swineford diatribe and for three weeks after the expiration of his term.

What may have been the fastest political switch in Alaska history was recorded at Sitka four years later, when Cleveland again came into office. Election results arrived on the mail steamer and the captain had agreed to hoist the flag on the foremast if the Republicans won, at the main if the new President was a Democrat. That year the captain reversed the message and there was great rejoicing among Republicans on the wharf until the ship docked and the facts became known. Then, it was said, the ranks of Sitka Democrats increased immediately from a handful to some 200.