The Regionalist is the regular column of Bill Kauffman.

We live in an age when hall monitors patrol the dank corridors of American political discourse, and tattletales squeal if ever a candidate has exchanged friendly words with someone who misfits the ideological straitjackets of Fox News and the New York Times. Thus the final six weeks of another depressingly inane presidential race was punctuated by shrieks of horror that Barack Obama knows a former Weatherman and Todd Palin was for several years a member of the Alaskan Independence Party, to whose 2008 convention Governor Sarah sent a taped greeting. Come quick! Come quick! The vapors overtake me!

As it happens, I have at various times exchanged cordialities, even drained cordials, with New Left militants and Alaska secessionists. So inhale those smelling salts, faint hearts, for we are about to meet the godfather of Alaskan secession.

Alaska came into the union in 1959 with 170,000 people and the lowest population density of any state. In exchange for the privilege of paying federal taxes and enmeshing itself even deeper into the federal regulatory state, Alaska gained a real live countable vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, giving it 1/435th of a voice in the people’s house, as well as an admittedly better 2 percent of a say in the Senate. Then again, its territory is one-fifth the size of the 48 truly United States.

The sheer size of Alaska—586,400 square miles, with 26,000 miles of coastline; the second (Texas), third (California), and fourth (Montana) largest states would all fit inside her—staggers the mind. Alaska itself is larger than any country ought to be, let alone a state. Juneau, Nome, Fairbanks, Prudhoe Bay: in what way, beyond a certain boreal brotherhood, are the residents thereof bound? Why should the people of any one of those places make the laws under which those of the others live? And why should Alaskans take orders from outsiders who know nothing at all of life in what critics of William Seward’s 1867 purchase called WalRussia?

The force of one man’s personality injected the i word—independence—into Alaskan politics. He was Joe Vogler, who conceived Alaskans for Independence in 1973 over lunch with members of the informal “Cuss and Discuss Club” in his mining-equipment repair shop. A handsome craggy sourdough in a “ruffled gray fedora,” Joe Vogler was something of a nut, but then I suppose a cautious burgher would have said the same thing about Sam Adams in 1775.

John McPhee includes a warm profile of Vogler in his Coming into the Country, though he does not whitewash what must have been one cantankerous old coot. “He is a roamer, a garrulous companion,” wrote McPhee, as well as “a sort of cartoon Alaskan, self-drawn,” a screw-you-I’ll-do-it-my-way gold prospector who carried a derringer .22 magnum in his pocket just in case a weasely bureaucrat should try to block him from bulldozing a trail across federal land. He was not a let’s-split-the-difference kinda guy: he once told the mayor of Fairbanks: “You son of a bitch, get ready to look at this town for the last time, because I’m going to close your left eye with one fist and your right eye with the other.” Man and cartoon eventually merged into symbol.

Joe Vogler considered himself an exile from an America that he believed was no longer worth loving. A Kansas farmboy who studied law at the University of Kansas, he was working at Dow Chemical in Texas when, in his view, FDR— “a dirty rotten sonofabitch communist traitor”—maneuvered us into the Second World War by provoking Japan. Vogler, a man not given to keeping his impolitic opinions to himself, unburdened himself of this contention at work, which led, in his account, to a tap on the shoulder from a representative of J. Edna Hoover’s FBI and an invitation to leave the patriotic premises of the Dow company. Ad hominem remarks had no place in a corporation dedicated to improving the quality of life through napalm.