Digital Bob Archive

MARCH 1918 - PART 1:

Alaska's first Primary Election was to be held on April 30, with a filing deadline of February 28. The balloting would be strictly by party, with no cross-over voting, and the local interest was in the Democratic ballot. There were no local Republican filings, and no contest in the one territory-wide contest for Delegate in Congress.

The Republican candidate for Delegate was James Wickersham of Fairbanks, who was still contesting the 1916 election which had temporarily put Charles A. Sulzer in the seat. In his five previous bids for Delegate, Wickersham had run as an Independent.

Delegate Sulzer, who had served half a term in the Territorial Senate before going to Washington, was being opposed in the Primary by William Maloney of Nome, the Territorial Mine Inspector. He had come north to Nome in 1900 and had been appointed Mine Inspector by Governor John F.A. Strong in 1913.

Only one First Division seat was open in the Senate and two men filed for it. Herman T. Tripp, a mining engineer, had been a resident of the Juneau area since 1896. In 1912 he had been elected to the Senate on the Non-Partisan ticket and had drawn the short term. He had not run in the 1914 and 1916 elections. Opposing him in the Primary was F.B. Harrison of Juneau who had recently been elected secretary-treasurer of the local labor union.

Ten candidates filed for the House, eight of them from Gastineau Channel. The top four vote-getters would run in the fall. Four of the Juneau candidates were running on what one paper called the machine ticket of Delegate Sulzer. They were: W.W. Casey, hotelman, transfer company owner and incumbent member of the House; Isaac Sowerby, salesman and steamship agent, who was making his first election bid; James J. Connors, owner of the Juneau Motors Company, who was making his third run for a House seat, having been on the ballot at Nome in 1914 as an Independent and at Juneau in 1916 as a Democrat; and finally, E.J. \"Stroller\" White of Douglas, a former Skagway, Dawson and Whitehorse newspaperman who had moved to Douglas in 1916 and purchased the Douglas Island News.

What was called the anti-machine ticket included E.L. Cobb, electrician employed by the Alaska Electric Light & Power Co.; Leo G. Young, Douglas city councilman who was employed at Thane; W.W. Bacheller who owned a ranch at Salmon Creek and had a commission business in Juneau; and Grace Vrooman Bishop, formerly a Juneau school teacher, the wife of Harry Bishop who had recently resigned as U.S. Marshal for the First Division. She was the first Juneau woman to run for the Alaska Legislature, but a Ketchikan woman had been a candidate in 1914.

The other two House candidates on the Democratic ballot were E.A. Heath of Ketchikan, an unsuccessful candidate for the House on the Socialist ticket in 1912; and E.J. Shaw of Skagway.

The lone two Republican candidates were John H. Davies of Ketchikan and P.C.
McCormack of Wrangell.