Almanzo continued to be largely a private person. According to Rose, he never used the telephone. He did serve as an officer for the Wright County Fair and Stock Show in September 1926 as one of three superintendents in change of the horses, mules, sheep, and goats. Laura, meanwhile, kept busy with club activities while Rose was gone. A new study group called the Interesting Hour Club was formed toward the middle of 1926, and from the beginning Laura was an active participant. Its membership overlapped somewhat with that of her other clubs; for the most part these were the wives of lawyers, doctors, Main Street store owners, and other town notables. Topics for their monthly discussions were intended to be interesting and instructive and, occasionally, useful to the community. A session on the Panama Canal might be followed by one on Russia; one on “Prominent People” might precede one with papers about the geography social customs, Methodist missions, and birds of South America. When the topic “Interesting Places” came up in July 1927, Laura read a paper on “Western Views,” while three of her fellow club members talked about places they had visited. Several months later Laura presented a talk on “the possibilities of the Ozark country.” In March 1927 she was on the program again with a discussion of “Mexico and Her Relations with the United States.”40
Popular culture proliferated rapidly during the 1920s in the form of radio, movies, sports, music, and other entertainment, but it largely passed by the Wilders. A year and a half after F. H. Riley closed the Nugget and moved to Mountain Grove, the theater was resurrected under the name of the Bonny in November 1925. If Laura and Almanzo went to see Clara Bow in It or to any other movies during these years, the fact is not recorded. Laura, who according to Rose hated anything having to do with sex, would certainly have disapproved of the ad that ran on the first page of the Mirror in July 1927 for the hit movie: “Some girls have ‘IT,’ millions wish they had ‘IT.’ What is ‘IT’? Soon you'll know!” Further signs of the times could be discerned in advertising for Ankles Preferred, which showed at the Bonny five weeks later: “She thought it was her brains that was making her success in business—BUT—It was her pretty ankles.” By 1928 Mansfieldians could drive to Springfield to take in one of the new “talkies.” Meanwhile, the local theater manager purchased a new projection machine, enabling continuous showings rather than making moviegoers wait between reels, and a new Wurlitzer pipe organ was installed for their listening pleasure.41
The Mansfield band went through one of its cyclical periods of inactivity in 1926, but it reorganized at the end of the year and again performed in the bandstand on the town square the following year and then performed concerts in surrounding towns in 1928. The Mansfield Grays reorganized their baseball team, too, in 1927, but it seems unlikely that Laura and Almanzo took any interest in it. And it is impossible to imagine their getting involved in the rapidly proliferating sport of golf, which was so appealing to their good friend N.J. Craig. Golf courses sprang up outside of towns all over during the decade. One was built in Mountain Grove in 1927. Mansfield obtained its golf links, located two miles north of town on Highway 5, the following year. In addition to entering local competitions, Craig drove to Springfield to play in tournaments with like-minded enthusiasts.42
Automobiles, sound movies, and golf courses represented modernizing forces during the 1920s. People in places such as Mansfield grew increasingly aware of the need to make improvements in their towns if they were to remain competitive with their rivals and avoid economic decline. After a decade of rapid increase during the 1910s, Mansfield's population growth rate leveled off during the 1920s, increasing by a relatively modest 13.7 percent to 861. Perhaps because the general economic prosperity fostered complacency during the years before the stock market crash of October 1929, town-boosting efforts lagged during the latter part of the decade. The chamber of commerce lapsed into inactivity, only to be resuscitated after the economy entered its downward slide. Promotional efforts sputtered, as some residents volunteered their time and money for organizations such as the Highway 60 Association, the Ozark Playground Association, and the Missouri Development Association, which was headquartered in Springfield. Campaigns to promote construction and stimulate new industry in the community obtained limited results. After a bond issue had earlier been rejected by the voters, Mansfield proceeded to build new water mains and a new waterworks in 1927. The city also purchased a new fire truck. Concrete curbs were installed along Commercial Street, and the possibilities of putting in a swimming pool, a new city park, and other improvements were discussed. A new railroad depot, built in 1927 after the original one—dating back to the 1880s—burned to the ground, further dressed up the town. The Mirror proudly reported that the structure “is one of the best depots between Springfield and Memphis, and is a credit to the progressiveness of our thrifty little city.” Another significant development during the decade was school consolidation, which proceeded after voters approved it in a special election in 1926.43
But nothing could hide the fact that, a half century after its founding, Mansfield was essentially stagnant, struggling to hold on to its position in competition with surrounding towns and was in danger of losing ground if it did not promote itself more effectively. By the end of the 1920s, the “problem of the country town” was growing increasingly urgent as economic and social changes that had been unleashed during the nineteenth century by the Industrial Revolution continued to erode old habits and attitudes. Counteracting modernizing tendencies that were transforming almost every aspect of life, a wave of nostalgia gained momentum during the decade, stirring memories of bygone days and fostering resistance to trends that were steering people away from their old moorings. Old-time fiddlers contests, a chicken-calling contest on the square in February 1927, and historical columns in newspapers reflected this tendency. Another manifestation was the Mansfield Mirror's front-page reproductions of the syndicated poems of O. Lawrence Hawthorne, whose verses re-created a romantic vision of an earlier homespun, small-town America. One of his offerings, “There's No Place Like Home,” typified Hawthorne's rosy, nostalgic, determinedly positive tone:
Home is a garden of beautiful flowers.
Home is a playground with love keeping score.
Home is a haven of rest and contentment.
Home is a harbor on joy's golden shore.
Language could never portray its endearment;
Only the heart knows what Home truly means.
Memory treasures the pleasures of childhood,
Taking us back to its radiant scenes.
Home is the secret of manhood's achievement.
Home is our comfort when shadows draw near.
Home is a temple of endless devotion,
Growing more sacred with each passing year.
In their syrupy evocation of everyday things, Hawthorne's poems presaged the kind of treatment Laura would later give to her own experiences when she started writing her autobiographical novels.44
Two years in Paris and Tirana failed to advance Rose any closer to her goal of publishing significant material and achieving personal fulfillment. In a letter to Clarence Day she complained, “More and more, I am oppressed by the sense of emptiness, of not-worth-whileness. Of all my days going.” She was gripped by a sense of wanting to accomplish something more. “What is there to accomplish?” she wailed. “It's like being cursed with a mad desire to print an impression on running water.” By early 1928, she was ready to return to Rocky Ridge to live with her parents and to churn out more salable stuff so that she would be able to escape once again to someplace else.45
In New York in mid-February on her way home to Mansfield, she lingered for several weeks visiting friends and having some work done on her abscessed teeth. Seven years after striking up her relationship with Guy Moyston, she decided to break it off. She had loved him, she insisted, but she valued her freedom too much to marry him. In a farewell letter she quoted from Robert Frost's poem “Diverging Roads,” saying that she had chosen to take the road “least t
raveled by.” That statement could have served as her epitaph.46
Back at Rocky Ridge by late April, she wrote Fremont Older that she found it hard to understand why she had come home. A lot of little reasons could be adduced, but they did not add up to a logical explanation. Already she was homesick for Albania, but she could see many things that needed repair and refurbishing in the farmhouse. She tried to explain to Older the compulsion that drove her to want to build things, “I dream of lavish water-systems and oil-burning central heating plants with vapor and vacuum heat, and stone walls—miles of ‘em—and other insanities. I suppose I'll probably carry ’em out. You know, I would be an entirely different woman if it weren't for the pernicious influence of houses. My intelligence sees their perniciousness clearly enough, but I have no character. I can't take ’em, and I can't leave ‘em alone.”47
For someone who spent so much time in the realm of words and abstractions, the chance to do something concrete—to build something permanent—constituted an irresistible urge. Much of her time in Albania had been spent planning and working on her house in Tirana. Rose recognized the “uncontrollable passion” she possessed for houses. “I should have been an architect and decorator, instead of a writer,” she laughed. Houses, she admitted, were her vice; she loved to remake them. Two other factors came together in 1928 to launch her on another house-building venture—one positive, the other negative. The positive development was the ten thousand dollars she received for another Ozarks novel she had written, which she considered to be mere trash. Acknowledging that Cindy was competent so far as it went, Rose told a friend that it was “utter rot.” The money from it, however, was now available to build a house for her parents.48
On the negative side, 1928 turned out to be a difficult year in many ways for Rose, most important in that she continued to be unable to latch onto a subject that she felt was truly worthy of her talents and one that would elevate her beyond the hackwork level at which she considered herself to have been working. Telling her agent, Carl Brandt, that she was really not a good writer, she categorized herself as only a fair writer who managed to sell things by writing better than average prose and being vividly pictorial about it. She also recognized in herself a tendency to overwrite. She consoled herself by noting that at least her stories would do nobody any harm. Her real trouble, she told Clarence Day, was that she had not yet figured out where she stood in the “literary business” or where she wanted to go. Instead, she had let circumstances jostle her in every direction. All of her book ideas had come from other people; she possessed too little experience of her own to draw upon for subject matter. With this in mind, she briefly considered writing stories about pioneer America, like the ones her mother and father had told her when she was a child, but the subject held little appeal. “Don't dislike it, and I readily admit all the admirable qualities,” she told Day. “I'm simply not interested. I was brought up on pioneer stories, and never a spark from me.”49
She continued to grasp for significance but, not being able to find it, turned her attention to building a house. Perhaps the idea to build an English-style cottage for her parents related somehow to her earlier fantasy of moving them permanently to England. It is unlikely that Laura and Almanzo encouraged her in the undertaking or even went along with it willingly. The best evidence for this is that as soon as they had a chance to move back into their old farmhouse, after Rose left Rocky Ridge permanently in 1935, they quickly did so. That the daughter was ministering more to her own needs than to those of her parents in building the house seems apparent. Perhaps her motive—either consciously or unconsciously—was to exercise an amount of control over them. No doubt she felt that she was doing it for their own good, but since her mother, at least, was reluctant to accept the favor, the construction venture was emblematic of the power struggle that went on continuously between mother and daughter, at least in the latter's mind.
By the time Helen Boylston returned to Rocky Ridge in June to resume residence once again with the family, Rose had already progressed considerably with her plans not only for the new house but also for a tenant house that could be used by a hired man. Once Laura and Almanzo were installed in their new house on the other side of the hill, Rose and Troub could take over the old farmhouse and modernize it for themselves. A cook/housekeeper could be hired, allowing them more time for writing. All of Rose's plans seemed to make perfect sense to her. While the work was proceeding, she was so busy with arranging and supervising the details that little time was left to worry about her own writing.
Originally estimating that the house would cost four thousand dollars, Rose eventually paid about eleven thousand. Between the start of construction in August and final completion just before Christmas, Rose had dozens of details to attend to. Based on a design described as a “sort of modified English cottage” in style, the five-room house sported a fieldstone exterior and brick windowsills. It was well built, with steel door casings, steel-casement windows, and French doors. Most of the suppliers were located in Springfield, and Rose spent a considerable amount of time corresponding with them and the contractors and driving back and forth to talk to them. Everything else was set aside for the duration. Explaining to Fremont Older why he had not received a letter from her in two months, Rose reminded him of how engrossing such a task could be. “I've thought, ate, dreamed, nothing but House,” she noted.50
Meanwhile, Laura refused to visit the construction site until the work was completed. “She wanted a new house, but didn't want to bother with it in the building stages,” Rose told Older. But how much Laura really wanted a new house is hard to say. She had always taken great pride in the farmhouse that she and Almanzo had built and expanded over the years. She had written lovingly about it in the Missouri Ruralist and the Country Gentleman. Through its picture windows she could look across the countryside and toward town. Perhaps when Rose offered to build her and Almanzo a new house, she felt that they could not refuse it, but that did not necessarily mean that she had to like the idea either. Rose remained curious about what her parents’ reaction would be to the finished product. “I do hope the family will like it,” she wrote Older. When Laura and her friend Mrs. Craig went over the hill to inspect the new house on December 22, Rose recorded in her diary, “Mama Bess delighted.” Afterward, however, she described the scene somewhat differently in a letter to Older: “Certainly I should have thrilled all over when my mother walked into the new house. I expected to, and would have done, but for a strange but unexpected turn of events, which I might tell you about, but won't write. The longer I live, the more I am amazed and fascinated by the endless variety of living.” We might infer that Laura's first reaction to her new home was less than enthusiastic.51
This was a time of transition for both mother and daughter. Rose experienced mental upheaval in 1928; her mind was going through “a series of geological adjustments,” as she put it. “Earthquakes and volcanoes and tidal waves accompanying.” She was in a state of confusion, struggling with conflicting attitudes and points of view. In a few years’ time, her opinions would find a firm resting place: on the far right of the political spectrum. At this time, however, she continued to play with ideas and test them against her own experience and knowledge and against the opinions of people such as Older. Crime and punishment, cultural decadence, eroding values, religious belief, the ultimate nature of reality—these were among the topics Rose was struggling with. While reacting favorably to Herbert Hoover's victory over Al Smith in the presidential race that year, Rose was unengaged in politics at this time, at least not interested enough to write much about the subject.52
Laura, whose interests and concerns spanned a much narrower range, was likewise moving in a new direction. After serving for a decade as secretary-treasurer of the Farm Loan Association, she resigned the position in April, shortly after Rose returned to Rocky Ridge. Having her daughter back home again filled up more of her days. She also spent considerable time in several kinds of club activity,
taking Rose with her. Around August 1927 Laura became involved in the Embroidery Club, which had been going strong for several years. Rose also joined the group, attending their Thursday afternoon get-togethers with her mother and Troub. Laura did not simply drag them with her against their wills, because sometimes when she was unable to attend the sessions, they went to them on their own. Beginning in 1929 the two also accompanied Laura to Wednesday and Thursday evening Bridge Club parties held in various homes. The Mirror reported Laura entertaining “her bridge club” one Wednesday evening in September 1930 while Genevieve Parkhurst, a friend of Rose's, was passing through town on one of several visits she made to Rocky Ridge. Rose herself invited the members to the place to play on another occasion.53
Laura gave little sign at this time that she was working on or seriously contemplating any major new writing effort. Her household chores, club involvements, and church and other activities consumed most of her energies. Around Christmastime and during the first several weeks of the new year, the whole household became caught up in a chess craze after receiving a set as a present. For days on end, everyone's schedule revolved around the game. Mostly, though, life continued along well-charted paths; there was no need to worry much about money, even if Rose was not selling many articles, so long as the stock market remained buoyant. At times, three—or even four—typewriters could be heard pounding away in the old farmhouse as Rose and Troub were sometimes joined by their friends from the East, Catherine Brody and Genevieve Parkhurst.54
With the completion of the new cottage and her parents’ move into it, Rose had more time to concentrate on writing; still, no great ideas emerged as subjects to write about, so she resumed producing pieces for Country Gentleman, Ladies’ Home Journal, and other publications. Living in the Ozarks did provide her with material that she could transform into fiction, but there were few people she felt able to identify with and engage in meaningful relationships. One person she grew increasingly close to was Corinne Murray, who ran a laundry in Mansfield with her husband and who shared her liking for bridge. More frequently she considered the people whom she encountered every day to be provincial and ignorant. Ambivalence characterized her attitude, because while in the abstract she tended to romanticize people, individual specimens of humanity frequently inspired her pity or contempt. She expressed her mixed feeling in her journal entry for May 28, 1929: “I believe that most lives are exciting, intensely emotional daily, about little things; that most Americans are vaguely decent persons, vulgar, self-centered, insensitive, stupid, but well-meaning.” Two months later she wrote Fremont Older, “People mostly lead such dull lives. It's horrible to contemplate, really, the dullness, the stupidity, of living, for most people. In this little town I see it every time I'm with a group for any length of time, for an afternoon.” She admitted that things were little different anywhere else. San Francisco was just as dull—even New York—but she noticed it more in Mansfield because she knew the dull people there better.55
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