My book report: Snakes on the plain

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires:  The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Henry Holt and Company, 2017

I have never read a Wilder book.  My parents were not concerned with introducing me to the "children's classics" -- Beatrix Potter, Winnie the Pooh, the Oz books, Dr. Seuss, all the stuff we're supposed to look back on with moist nostalgia.  Once I could read, they turned me loose on their books; I remember a special affinity for The Merck Manual, a guide to diseases and their treatment with, I imagine, hints about the products of Merck Pharmaceuticals.  I read Lewis Carroll in high school, just before Alice was taken up by the drug culture of the 1960s.  I was an odd child.  All that log-cabin-pioneer stuff never appealed to me.

Caroline Fraser's biography is essential reading for anyone, plowing a long furrow through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and turning up fascinating information about Wilder herself, her restless father and his quest for a farm that would make him independent, her troubled daughter Rose Wilder Lane and life in the middle of the country, beset by weather, fire, plagues of insects and the frequent hostility of displaced indigenous people (Fraser uses the word "Indians" as Wilder did).  If you don't know, or don't know enough, about Little Crow, the great Peshtigo (Wisconsin) fire, Coxey's Army, John Wesley Powell, the Bloody Benders, the 1862 Homestead Act or the Panic of 1893, this is a very good place to start.   

Laura Ingalls was born in 1867 and it wasn't until the 1930s that she began to write her books.  Her memories were sharp and vivid, and when they weren't she asked her mother and sisters for details.  By then her only surviving child Rose had been married and divorced and earned her living as a writer, her outlook and ethics shaped by William Randolph Hearst.  Years later she would wonder "what people meant by a conscience...why don't I have one, whatever it is?"  Fraser says she suffered from depression but it sounds as if she was bipolar, either unable to function or bouncing around the world squandering money she frequently had to borrow from her frugal parents.  But she was a professional writer who knew how to shape and edit her mother's reminiscences into fiction, though they both insisted the books were utterly factual.  

Rose Lane also had a political agenda that would now be called libertarian with shadings of fascism (she compared Roosevelt unfavorably with Mussolini and Hitler and at one point avowed in writing that she would gladly assassinate the president).  She and her mother agreed that the New Deal was the worst thing ever to happen to this country and that no real American would take "hand-outs" from the government.  But few pioneers, and certainly not Charles Ingalls, could get by on their own and Wilder knew it.  Beginning in 1918 she helped to organize and run the Mansfield (Missouri) National Farm Loan Association, dispensing nearly a million dollars in federally backed low-interest loans to local farmers and earning a salary which kept her own farm from going under.  She was proud to mention it when she ran (despite early misgivings about the Nineteenth Amendment) for county tax collector.  She lost, getting 56 votes to the winner's 256.  And Rose fumed, "The steal was so raw that everyone knew it.  And of course will go on letting it happen, over and over again."  Both were women full of deep contradictions, but Rose sounds a note that still echoes, aggrieved to the point of paranoia.  

It's startling to find, so early in our history, so much of today's Republican base:  resentment of intellectual elites, eagerness to believe the railroad hucksters selling land they got for nothing ("The rain follows the plow"), freedom defined as doing just as you want in every situation without regard for others,  more than a trace of survivalism.  Rose Wilder Lane's associations with Charles Lindbergh, Ayn Rand, Roger MacBride and other curiosities of the far right would make a book of their own.  But the myth of the self-sufficient Ingalls family in their snug little house was central to the story both women told and sold, and when it got burnished even more for network television, Ronald Reagan was a regular viewer.  Laura Ingalls Wilder would have nodded when he read from the teleprompter, "The most terrifying words in the English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."

Now Wilder is an industry, all the surviving houses where she lived are shrines, and there's a Midwestern conference called LauraPalooza.  Mansfield, Missouri, where she settled with her disabled husband Almanzo, is now "one of the hundred poorest towns in the country," with a median household income of $17,750.  Needless to say, it is reliably Republican.  They still want a government that will not try to help them.  When I closed Caroline Fraser's engrossing book I was as confused as Alice.