To start, "University of Alaska" redirects to University of Alaska System, which is an administrative entity that educates no one. Since we're talking about the 1950s, University of Alaska Fairbanks would be the correct target. This specific problem has existed on Wikipedia for 15+ years and I'm tired of constantly cleaning it up.
As for the claim that he was elected to office, it appears to be another case of believing WP:RS boils down to "Why, I found this on such-and-such website, so therefore...", rather than anything having to do with fact checking. News archive sites are everywhere. Between the Anchorage Daily News, the Anchorage Times and the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, it came up with a grand total of eight hits for 1958. Quite pitiful for a so-called elected official. Looking over those hits, it's pretty clear that it was a primary election, meaning he wasn't actually elected to anything. Butler and Jim Doogan (constitutional convention delegate) were in a close, back-and-forth contest for the last of three Democratic nomination slots for territorial senator in the election. The last mention was on May 20, where Butler took the lead with some of the last precincts reporting. The territorial legislature was apportioned differently than the state legislature, so the district had lots of rural communities in an age where communications and transportation infrastructure weren't exactly well-developed. Anyway, there's no reporting of a final outcome. R. N. DeArmond, who was the preeminent 20th-century authority on Alaska, called this "The Lost Primary". I'm not sure if this was poetic license, or if the passage of the Alaska Statehood Act resulted in the loss of election records by officials who were now free to disregard those results as they prepared for elections for state offices.
While on the subject of those news hits, the FDNM on January 21 identified Butler as a member of the Farthest North Confederate Detachment in a story on a local event commemorating Robert E. Lee's birthday. Can we infer from the story that Butler, as a Southerner, joined this organization for shits and giggles as college students were apt to do, or was he a bonafide Confederate sympathizer? As I show above, I'm not eager to use the mere existence of a reliable source to make a statement whose factual accuracy could be called into question. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 23:05, 24 August 2025 (UTC)Reply
