Speaking of Alaska
By Stephen Cushman
INTRODUCTION
Writings about Alaska predate the purchase of its 587,878 square miles by the United States in March 1867 for 7.2 million dollars in gold, a sum that works out to about two cents an acre. When the second Vitus Bering expedition landed on the Alaska islands in 1741, record-keeping Europeans were generating documents about what came to be called Russian America, and the paper trail, which I have not followed there, probably extends back into the vicinity of 1648, when Semen Dezhnev sailed with a group of Russians through the strait that later took Bering's name. For the limited purposes of this brief discussion, however, I will focus on various ways in which the speeches and writings of a few influential citizens of the United States, influential because of their public positions or the prominent publication of their remarks or both, have treated Alaska verbally from 1867 to the present.
This highly selective survey, which begins with speeches by two major figures in the forging of the original purchase agreement and ends with testimony about drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, makes no attempt to maintain generic purity or consistency in its samples. Political speech, congressional testimony, journalistic writing, travel writing, nature writing, personal memoir, private or public letter, official web site copy: all these genres and sub-genres, often overlapping in the same document or piece, potentially have something to tell us about how people have spoken about Alaska, as well as about the place of Alaska in the minds and imaginations of those living in the lower forty-eight, a very small percentage of whom will ever visit the forty-ninth state but a very large percentage of whom live and think and vote in ways that directly or indirectly affect its air, water, land, creatures, and people. In a country that takes as its motto the Latin tag e pluribus unum, inevitably individual states will feel the effects of actions and policies originating outside their borders, but nowhere else in the United States does this peculiar situation exist in such an extreme, and highly publicized, form.
Thirty-one years before the purchase of Alaska, Ralph Waldo Emerson published his little first book, Nature, and although it makes good sense to invoke Emerson's legacy in this context, since it passes to Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, John Muir, the Sierra Club, and others, I turn to him not for his help in thinking about the natural world, which he tended to see from an unremittingly anthropocentric perspective, but for his help in organizing the different ways people speak about the natural world, in this case Alaska. Whether or not the various subheadings he gave to his rambling, quasi-scientific, quasi-religious, quasi-philosophical, quasi-poetical utterance illuminate the natural world for us, many of his headings in fact do describe the dominant tendencies of various utterances about Alaska. In what follows, then, I am proposing to take some of Emerson's categories as rhetorical guides, if not philosophical ones. In particular, his four classes of what he calls the “multitude of uses” human beings can make of nature in their efforts to comprehend “the final cause” or purpose of the world offer us a useful starting point. Emerson's four classes are Commodity, Beauty, Language, and Discipline, and though they slip and blur and overlap, they still can help us sort and differentiate.
Writings about Alaska predate the purchase of its 587,878 square miles by the United States in March 1867 for 7.2 million dollars in gold, a sum that works out to about two cents an acre. When the second Vitus Bering expedition landed on the Alaska islands in 1741, record-keeping Europeans were generating documents about what came to be called Russian America, and the paper trail, which I have not followed there, probably extends back into the vicinity of 1648, when Semen Dezhnev sailed with a group of Russians through the strait that later took Bering's name. For the limited purposes of this brief discussion, however, I will focus on various ways in which the speeches and writings of a few influential citizens of the United States, influential because of their public positions or the prominent publication of their remarks or both, have treated Alaska verbally from 1867 to the present.
This highly selective survey, which begins with speeches by two major figures in the forging of the original purchase agreement and ends with testimony about drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, makes no attempt to maintain generic purity or consistency in its samples. Political speech, congressional testimony, journalistic writing, travel writing, nature writing, personal memoir, private or public letter, official web site copy: all these genres and sub-genres, often overlapping in the same document or piece, potentially have something to tell us about how people have spoken about Alaska, as well as about the place of Alaska in the minds and imaginations of those living in the lower forty-eight, a very small percentage of whom will ever visit the forty-ninth state but a very large percentage of whom live and think and vote in ways that directly or indirectly affect its air, water, land, creatures, and people. In a country that takes as its motto the Latin tag e pluribus unum, inevitably individual states will feel the effects of actions and policies originating outside their borders, but nowhere else in the United States does this peculiar situation exist in such an extreme, and highly publicized, form.
Thirty-one years before the purchase of Alaska, Ralph Waldo Emerson published his little first book, Nature, and although it makes good sense to invoke Emerson's legacy in this context, since it passes to Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, John Muir, the Sierra Club, and others, I turn to him not for his help in thinking about the natural world, which he tended to see from an unremittingly anthropocentric perspective, but for his help in organizing the different ways people speak about the natural world, in this case Alaska. Whether or not the various subheadings he gave to his rambling, quasi-scientific, quasi-religious, quasi-philosophical, quasi-poetical utterance illuminate the natural world for us, many of his headings in fact do describe the dominant tendencies of various utterances about Alaska. In what follows, then, I am proposing to take some of Emerson's categories as rhetorical guides, if not philosophical ones. In particular, his four classes of what he calls the “multitude of uses” human beings can make of nature in their efforts to comprehend “the final cause” or purpose of the world offer us a useful starting point. Emerson's four classes are Commodity, Beauty, Language, and Discipline, and though they slip and blur and overlap, they still can help us sort and differentiate.
