It’s pretty dumb to buy property in Florida from a guy in a parking lot. This kind of happened on a grand scale in 1867 when the U.S. bought millions of acres of frigid, arctic land. It was called Russian America, and the fool was Secretary of State William Seward.
He offered Russia $7 million for this land right after the Civil War and its backbreaking national debt. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune said Russian America was useless, expensive, and remote, with “impassible deserts of snow.” Maine Senator William Fessenden called it a foolish expenditure on a frozen wilderness, joking that he’d vote for it only if William Seward had to live there.
The Louisiana Democrat asked, why buy a few icebergs and grizzly bears? Harper’s Weekly called it a national ice box. In 2019 historian Walter Stahr found four newspapers who at the time called it Seward’s “folly.”
Although 24 publications decried this dumb idea, surprisingly twice as many were neutral or supportive. History books falsely claim most Americans opposed the purchase; historian Michael Hill proves it was the opposite. Senate ratification took just two weeks on a vote of 37-2. How? Because of Senator Charles Sumner.
Though initially opposed, Sumner’s exhaustive research in the Library of Congress revealed vast timber, fisheries, and precious metals--all for just two cents an acre. His three-hour floor speech championed the land he and Seward called “Alaska.” In fact, the more people learned, the more they supported the deal. William Seward was convinced it was worth fifty million.
In 2024 the now State of Alaska contributed $70 billion to the U.S. economy. In real dollars, that’s a 50,000-percent return-on-investment--for that year alone. “Seward’s bargain” proves once again that some dumb ideas aren’t so dumb after all.
I’m Jeff Gentry
Best reference:
Hill, M. A. (2019). The Myth of Seward’s Folly. Western Historical Quarterly, 50(1), 43–64.
Dumb Ideas that Changed the World copyright 2025 by Jeff Gentry. All rights reserved.
