The last two states to be admitted into the Union had the longest wait. The United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 and annexed Hawaii in 1898. Although periodic discussion of statehood occurred throughout the early 20th century, the campaign for each state did not begin in earnest until after World War II. Despite their own unique challenges, the Alaskan and Hawaiian statehood campaigns faced similar obstacles in the Senate stemming from their distance from the mainland, the old issue of power in the Senate, and even the fears of communist influence at the height of the Cold War.
Voters in Alaska and Hawaii approved statehood after World War II, but both campaigns were stalled by political conflicts of the late 1940s and 1950s. A coalition of southern Democrats and conservative Republicans objected to Hawaiian statehood. The southern Democrats feared that the new state, known for its racial diversity and tendency to support Republicans, would increase support in the Senate for civil rights legislation. The statehood debate also became intertwined with the global struggle against international communism. Staunch anticommunist Republicans, such as Hugh Butler of Nebraska, chair of the Senate Committee on Public Lands, alleged that communists held sway over powerful labor unions in Hawaii and claimed that statehood was "a primary objective of Communist policy in the territory," which came directly from "the Kremlin in Moscow." Republicans, meanwhile, objected to Democratic-leaning Alaska's statehood claim, arguing that it had not met population and economic benchmarks to support a state government nor the cost of maintaining security on the frontier.
The fact that the territories were not contiguous to the continental United States sparked debate in the Senate throughout the 1950s. Mike Monroney of Oklahoma contended that granting statehood would be "completely antagonistic to the original thoughts of our Founding Fathers." States separated by oceans and great land masses would be "breaking American tradition" and threatened to turn the United States into the "associated states of North America." For John Stennis of Mississippi, the question was of paramount importance, because "it involves a matter of disconnected areas coming into the Union and passing upon far-reaching policies concerning our foreign and domestic affairs." Monroney, Stennis, and other opponents of statehood preferred to grant the territories so-called commonwealth status, a form of self-government recently adopted for Puerto Rico.
Granting statehood to the two territories, supporters argued, would signal to the world the United States' commitment to freedom and self-government in an era of totalitarianism. New York Democrat Herbert Lehman suggested that with admission of Hawaii and Alaska, "We will tell the world that we are still an expanding nation, a dynamic nation, free, fluid, and flexible in our constituency of States."
It took years of political maneuvering in both the House and Senate to finally overcome opposition and achieve statehood for both territories. In the late 1950s, proponents of statehood also gained vital support from President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his Interior secretary, former senator Fred Seaton of Nebraska. At the same time, diligent lobbying efforts by prominent Alaskans, including future senator Ted Stevens, helped erode objections in the Senate. In the wake of marshaling a civil rights bill through the Senate in 1957, signaling that times were changing, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson succeeded in building a bipartisan consensus for two separate statehood bills—Alaska in 1958 and Hawaii in 1959.
