Change on the Range

They laughed at Clifford Hansen when he first declared for Governor of Wyoming in 1918. Admittedly, he was only six at the time. Nonetheless, it was not his precocity but his stutter that drew guffaws from cowhands on the 4,200-acre family spread near Jackson. Today Governor Clifford Hansen no longer stutters, and to many of his fellow Republicans his policies are no laughing matter, either. In a state where Republican Governors are traditionally ultraconservative, Hansen has been acting suspiciously like a moderate.

In the three years since he went to the Governor's mansion in Cheyenne as a far-right-winger, Hansen has driven through the legislature a herd of programs to which the state G.O.P. was fundamentally opposed. He asked for and got an urban-renewal plan, an increase in the state sales tax and a boost in the state minimum wage from 75-c- to $1. Under Hansen, appropriations for state programs to combat alcoholism and mental illness jumped by more than 50%. The going has not always been smooth. "My opposition," says Hansen, "seems to forget that this is the 20th century." By the opposition, of course, Hansen means the vociferous diehards within his own party.

"Main Street Meetings." The issue on which Hansen differs most sharply with his G.O.P. predecessors (and some Democratic Governors as well) is that of federal aid, from which Wyoming in the past has recoiled as if it were a one-way pass to perdition. Last year, nonetheless, Hansen persuaded the legislature to repeal a Wyoming law that prohibited the use of state funds to match federal grants for public education (the only nay votes in either house came from Republicans). Says Hansen: "I don't stand against federal programs. My job is to make all the elements of the federal program work as well as possible for Wyoming, even though I may not personally agree with the principles of the programs."

Democrats, as a result, openly express admiration for Cliff Hansen. "He has made a complete changeover since he became Governor," says Cheyenne Attorney Walter Phelan, a former Democratic state chairman and onetime state house speaker. "He has been striving mightily to get his party over from its far-right position, more toward center." Of course, he adds, "he isn't moving it a bit."

To drum up support for his programs and get ideas for new ones, Hansen has begun a series of day-long "Main Street meetings" in each of Wyoming's 23 counties, last week drew a talkative crowd of 100 at Lusk (pop. 1,890), the county seat of agricultural Niobrara County, which is steadily losing its young folk to livelier areas. "These are times of rapid change, and state government must be alert to all of its opportunities," he told them. "People expect more of their city and state governments, and I recognize that the things expected must be done if we are to entice new people here."

Cattleman's Establishment. For years, Wyoming--the name in Algonquian means "wide prairie place"--was content to entice summer tourists, who came to fish in the lonely magnificence of the Jackson Hole country, gaze at the golden splendor of the Grand Tetons at sunset, clock Old Faithful's split-second eruptions, or square-dance at the annual Cheyenne Frontier Days. Without neglecting the tourist, who brought in a record $100 million in 1965, the state's economy under Hansen has been experiencing a dramatic change. Though cattle still outnumber its 330,000 human inhabitants nearly 4 to 1, Wyoming is no longer simple cow country. It has become the fifth-ranking U.S. state in oil production and eighth-ranking in natural gas, also exports wheat, sulphur, iron ore pellets and uranium as well as cattle and sheep. Since 1963, its economy has been enriched by $225 million in new and expanded industrial investment.

Wyoming still proudly calls itself the Cowboy State, and its Establishment, if less than all-powerful these days, remains the conservative Stock Growers Association, whose members include twelve of Wyoming's 25 state senators. Hansen, who still maintains the family cattle ranch outside Jackson, worked his way up through the Association, was elected president in 1953, and used it as his springboard to power.

Rights of Responsibility. A lithe (5 ft. 9 in., 149 Ibs.), deeply religious Episcopalian, Hansen is of solidly Danish ancestry, but has the dark, high-cheekboned good looks of a Shoshoni or Arapaho brave. He neither smokes nor drinks, does 80 push-ups a day, invariably leaves the Governor's mansion on foot. As affable and unpretentious as Ben Cartwright, he is apt to answer his own office phone with a friendly "This is Cliff Hansen."

Hansen has said that he will seek re-election in November and has no desire to go to Washington. Even so, last week's announcement by Republican Senator Milward Simpson that a severe arthritic condition will force his retirement when his term expires next January caused a flurry of speculation in Cheyenne that Hansen might run for Simpson's Senate seat after all. Hansen, however, apparently feels that he can do more for Wyoming by staying on in the Governor's mansion. As he sees it, "Positive action to strengthen state government is the constructive way to oppose centralization. States' rights are without force unless they are coupled with state responsibility."

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