Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder

by John E. Miller

  Despite the self-doubts that she spilled into her journals and diaries, Rose remained a fiercely individualistic person, proud of having made it “on her own.” In this way she reflected her parents’ own sternly independent spirits. Because Rose's and Laura's royalty checks arrived at opportune times, the family never had need of government relief. Somehow they managed to get by with little money. What they refused to acknowledge was that most families did not have the luxury of periodic checks arriving in the mail paying them hundreds or thousands of dollars, and many did need government handouts merely to survive. Rose and her parents, however, held fast to the belief that anyone with gumption and wit and a little persistence could make it without having to take government charity.

  On August 12, immediately after depositing her serial in the mail, Rose resumed working on her mother's manuscript of “Farmer Boy.” Only four more days were needed to finish the task, and it was ready to be mailed on August 15. Despite the success of Laura's first book, however, Harper's initially turned the manuscript down. Book sales were plummeting, and they wanted more work done on the story to ensure healthy sales. Meanwhile, the country was sliding deeper and deeper into the economic doldrums, leaving millions of people destitute and desperate. Missouri suffered along with every other state. One advantage that many Ozarkians had, however, is that they were used to poverty and more self-sufficient than others.14

  Manufacturing collapsed in Missouri after the stock crash; value added by the sector dropped 51 percent between 1929 and 1933. Unemployment statewide exceeded the national average, jumping to 16 percent of the labor force in 1930, 27 percent the following year, and 38 percent in both 1932 and 1933. The relief load was especially burdensome in the Ozarks. Among the hundreds of miles of railroad track that were abandoned in the state during the decade, the twelve-mile-long short line of the Ozark Southern Railroad between Mansfield and Ava was torn up and removed in 1935. Happily, Mansfield's two banks, the Farmers and Merchants Bank and the Bank of Mansfield, managed to weather the maelstrom and stay in business at a time when three hundred of their counterparts around the state were forced to close their doors.15

  Farm receipts plummeted even faster than those of other products. The index of prices paid to farmers declined from 146 in 1929 to 65 in 1932. Farmland values nose-dived, along with agricultural prices, from an average of $53.23 per acre in 1930 to $31.36 per acre five years later. Drought compounded the agricultural problem, as devastating heat and lack of rain turned 1930, 1934, and 1936 into especially difficult years for farmers. Temperatures topping one hundred degrees wilted plants, livestock, and people for days on end. Springs and streams around Mansfield went dry. Crops burned up, and animals shriveled up and died. Almanzo had to haul water to the farm. In July 1934, Rose—her nerves on edge—was suffering from nausea and agonizing headaches. She wrote Adelaide Neall that everyone was on the verge of insanity. Further adding to people's miseries was an infestation of army worms and other pests that damaged crops, and worse.16

  The depression drove Republicans for cover in Missouri, as elsewhere, and 1932 was a big year for the Democrats. Mansfield, traditionally safely in the Republican fold, granted New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt a slight margin over President Herbert Hoover in that year's election contest, 362 votes to 303 (54 percent to 46 percent). Democratic candidates for other offices obtained similar margins over their Republican opponents. Countywide, Roosevelt and his Democratic running mates did slightly better, garnering 56 percent of the vote, 8 percent less than he obtained in the state as a whole. It did not take long for historical patterns to reassert themselves, however. In the off-year elections in 1934, Mansfield reverted to form, casting only 33 percent of its ballots for Democratic newcomer Harry Truman, who obtained 59 percent statewide in a successful bid for the U.S. Senate. Straight-ticket voting continued to be the norm, as candidates for the various offices obtained almost identical vote totals. District Seven, which included Wright County, sent conservative Republican Dewey Short back to Congress in 1934, after a four-year hiatus, and for the next twenty-two years he vociferously spoke out against liberal, New Deal–type programs in Washington in terms virtually identical to the conservative, antigovernment rhetoric spouted by Rose Wilder Lane and her parents. In 1936, Roosevelt's big year nationwide (with 61 percent of the major party vote), he garnered only 37 percent in Mansfield and 41 percent in Wright County. Although compiling a victory margin of almost two to one statewide, the president trailed his opponent, Gov. Alf Landon, throughout most of the Ozarks region.17

  Government programs initiated by President Roosevelt and Congress to try to cope with the problems brought on by the depression may have failed to convert most Ozarkians into Democratic voters, but the New Deal did exert a major impact on people's lives. A considerable number of farmers and unemployed workers obtained jobs under the auspices of the Public Works Administration, building roads and working on other construction projects. The Civil Works Administration pumped $17,500 into Wright County in November 1933, with $3,500 of the total set aside for Mansfield. Work-relief jobs continued to be provided under the massive Works Progress Administration (WPA) appropriation of 1935, while direct relief payments came to a halt early the following year. The most dramatic visual evidence of WPA activity in Mansfield was the new grade-school building that was erected at the end of 1936. Several dozen women obtained employment in WPA-sponsored sewing rooms and workshops in Mansfield, as well as in Hartville and Mountain Grove. Meanwhile, other programs, including the National Youth Administration, supplemented welfare families’ incomes in return for work done in the schools. Through early 1936, federal dispersals of relief funds totaled $265,000 in Wright County.18

  Of the two major programs that were designed to foster economic recovery, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) made by far the bigger impact on the county. Its counterpart, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), had little impact because it exempted stores having five or fewer employees in towns of less than twenty-five hundred people. J. E. Craig became the chairman of the local NRA committee and went to a meeting in Springfield to be briefed on the organization's operations, but apparently the agency had little or no effect on Mansfield. The AAA and other agricultural programs, on the other hand, proved to be much more important in this mainly agricultural region. The program paid farmers to induce them to reduce their production in an effort to raise prices. County wheat committees were inaugurated in September 1933 to help administer allotment contracts. A corn-hog program was also set up. Missouri farm prices rose 80 percent between 1932 and 1937. During the summer of 1934, as drought and heat ravaged the area, a cattle-buying program went into effect, and emergency crop and feed loans also were extended.19

  Like their good friend N.J. Craig, the Wilders remained loyal Democrats as late as the 1920s, but the philosophy behind Roosevelt's New Deal rubbed them the wrong way. The idea of granting government “handouts” to the needy and of extending the regulatory reach of federal agencies into local communities and businesses went against notions of individualism and self-reliance that they had grown up with. Although Laura had worked for almost a decade with the federally sponsored Farm Loan Association, now she, Almanzo, and Rose all perceived the intrusive hand of government as having become far too powerful and meddlesome.

  Almanzo's knee-jerk reaction against government interference in people's lives was told humorously in a story that Rose related to Mark Sullivan, a literary friend. Because of the thin clay subsoil and hilly terrain on Rocky Ridge it was impossible to plow most of the acreage. Nevertheless, her father did like to turn up an acre or so of relatively level land for oats or millet for bird feed, and he also liked to grow a little popcorn for the family. One day while he was plowing with old Buck, his thirty-year-old Morgan, a young agent from the Department of Agriculture parked alongside the road and walked into the field to ask some questions about his farm operation. When he informed Almanzo that federal regulations prohibited him fro
m planting more than two acres of oats, the farmer retorted that if the fellow did not immediately leave his property, he was going to go get his shotgun. The agent, who was writing this down, offered Almanzo an opportunity to change his words for the record. At that point the old man made his meaning perfectly clear, in Rose's telling of the story. He said, “God damn you, you get to hell off my land and you do it now. I'll plant whatever I damn please on my own farm, and if you're on it when I get to my gun, by God I'll fill you with buckshot.”20

  As the 1930s wore on and government activities continued to expand, the family grew ever more resolute in their opposition to Roosevelt and his claque of New Dealers. Within weeks of the president's inauguration, Rose began referring to him as a dictator, and her parents agreed. All three of them mutually reinforced each other's suspicions about FDR and his minions. Rose eventually would devote her energies to attacking the direction in which the government was being taken by the liberals in Washington. In the meantime, she and Laura continued their literary pursuits, with their subject matter increasingly converging. But just as Laura was beginning to win some recognition for her children's novels, Rose was sinking into the depths of depression, burdened by a sense of personal powerlessness and inadequacy.21

  Rose's journal entries during 1933 reveal her at her lowest point. Growing older, suffering from various health problems, lacking friends to whom she could fully relate, searching for some significant project that would elevate her above literary hackwork, and sensing that she would never discover love again, Rose turned morose and suicidal. At least some of her depressed state of mind revolved around frustrations emanating from her close proximity to her mother. They seemed to grate on each other's nerves when they lived too close to each other. Having to take precious time from her own writing to devote to her mother's books nagged at her, but her sense of duty compelled her to do it. Their main points of conflict revolved around money and power. Rose considered her mother to be manipulative in trying to extract money from her, even though she often showered her parents with expensive and not-always-wanted gifts, like the house that she built for them. Ultimately, power and control lay at the heart of their disagreements. Rose never had been quite able to cut the knot that bound her to her mother, and now, as she was approaching fifty, her mother still sometimes seemed to view her as a little girl, while Rose, for her part, seemed to want to establish her own control over her parents’ lives.

  What Rose successfully hid from other people, she set down at length and in explicit detail on paper at night. Starting a journal in January 1933, she admitted, “So far, I am almost superlatively a failure. There has been no success in personal relationships, in adjustment to the world, in work, or in money.” Attempting to understand her own sense of failure, Rose pondered, “I have never really felt that I am I; I feel no identification with myself. My life is not my life, but a succession of short stories and one-act plays, all begun by chance and left unfinished.”22

  Rose's years of living at Rocky Ridge had all been wasted. “Since 1927 I have spent most of my time and about $15,000 on it, without pleasure or any satisfaction. I do not like the place, I do not like to live here, and I see no prospect of ever leaving.” What may have prompted Rose to start writing this journal was her sense of being tied down to working on her mother's second novel, “Farmer Boy.” When Harper's asked for a revised version of the manuscript, Rose spent two and a half weeks in January 1933 working on it and then most of February retyping it. By March 2 she was finally finished. In the middle of all of this, her dog, who was named Mr. Bunting, was killed by a car. This, combined with all of her other worries and concerns, prompted long crying jags over the next several months. In addition, she was pessimistic about the likely sales of Let the Hurricane Roar, which had been published in book form. It should not have been too surprising, therefore, that she directed, either consciously or unconsciously, many of her accumulated frustrations against her mother.23

  Rose did not count what she was doing for her mother as being important. “I am getting nothing whatever done,” she wrote in her journal on January 27. “Preparing to rewrite my mother's second juvenile, Farmer Boy. Work on it every day till teatime, going over first typed mss. with pen. Would like to finish it this month, but can't possibly. Meantime my own work stagnates: I do not even think about it.” Rose recognized “a curious half-angry reluctance” on her part to help other people with their writing: “I say to myself that whatever earnings there may be are all in the family. Also I seize upon this task as an excuse to postpone my own work. But there can be no genuine pleasure in generosity to my mother who resents it and does not trouble to conceal resentment.”24

  Rose's journal became a record of her mental illness during her depressed period in 1933. Displaying great insight into her own personal pathology, Rose nevertheless found it difficult to translate self-knowledge into transformed behavior. A day after being traumatized by Mr. Bunting's death, she recorded, “I can not love. That's what's wrong with me. I give everything except real warmth, myself. Living is hell and all life is to be pitied.” One week later: “Why am I such a monster? I am a monster. I always have been. There is no true warmth in my nature. I have no heart.” In late March: “My mind is paralyzed, not any longer by fear and worry, but by exhaustion. Day after day, I am simply motionless. Not even waiting, any more.” At the end of the month: “I am mentally sick. Can't stop crying.” And one month later: “All these days I have been sick in my mind. I haven't yet stopped crying. I read all day and am ashamed because it is only a way of trying to escape.”25

  During the midst of all this, Rose acknowledged the pent-up resentment that had been accumulating in her against her mother. Describing a scene that took place at her parents’ home on April 9, when Laura suggested that they turn off their electricity in order to cut down on expenses, Rose let all of her animus out. “It's amazing how my mother can make me suffer,” she wrote. “Implicit in every syllable and tone, the fact that I've failed, fallen down on the job, been the broken reed. But never mind, (brightly) she's able to manage nicely, thank you!” Once again, money—or Rose's impression that her mother was dunning her for money—triggered her outburst. She recognized that Laura was reaching out for some kind of companionship and wished she could be friends with her. Yet, in her view she had “not the faintest notion what she's doing to me…. She made me so miserable when I was a child that I've never got over it. I'm morbid. I'm all raw nerves. I know I should be more robust. I shouldn't let her torture me this way, and always gain her own ends, thro implications that she hardly knows she's using. But I can't help it.”26

  Such words need to be considered in context and against Rose's own contradictions of them. She recognized herself that she was not thinking straight during this period of time. On May 20, she wrote in her journal, “I have been mentally sick ever since Bunting died. But quite suddenly one day I was whole again, though shaky. I am now almost sane once more.”27

  Laura signed a contract for “Farmer Boy” that month. Harper's had agreed to take the new revised manuscript in March, two weeks after Rose mailed it, but at only a 5-percent royalty for the first three thousand copies and thereafter the standard 10 percent, which is what Laura had received for Little House in the Big Woods. Rose was upset at being forced to take the reduced rate, but she followed the recommendation of her agent, George Bye, who told her, “If you can get a first class publisher to take a routine seller like a juvenile, with little chance for a flash sale, these days, at only slightly offish terms, I'd accept.” By June 1 proofs were in hand, and Laura went to Rose's place to check them.28

  Reviews again were favorable, although there were fewer this time. Calling the story of Almanzo “a delightful tale,” the Boston Transcript, like other publications, located its appeal in its faithful description of farm life before mechanization, radio, movies, and other modern trends transformed the rural way of life. The New York Times praised it as “a genuine bit of American life, viv
idly and charmingly described and centering about a very real and natural small boy.” Books noted, “Altogether there is reason to be grateful to Mrs. Wilder for another light thrown on our domestic past.”29

  Even before Farmer Boy was published, Laura was working on another volume to carry her own story forward. She intended to focus on her family's brief stay on the Osage Indian Reserve in southeastern Kansas when she was only two or three years old. To try to pin down some of the facts and hazy details that had been lost to time, Laura and Rose began to research them, writing to libraries and historical societies and even making a trip to Kansas to see if they could find the location of the rude cabin where her family had lived. Let the Hurricane Roar, meantime, went into its third printing, and Publishers Weekly reported that it was a best-seller in Chicago. Rose worried that she should be taking advantage of momentum generated by the book's sales to get more short stories published, but she had a hard time getting started. “I should be giving editors pioneer stories,” she told herself. Working on her mother's first two novels and on her own Saturday Evening Post serial set in Dakota Territory had turned her attention toward the frontier. Both before and after publishing Hurricane, she recorded efforts to write a story she was calling “The Hard Winter,” and in 1937 she would rely on her parents’ accounts to write another Dakota pioneer story, Free Land. Now, however, she began to concoct a grandiose and highly unrealistic scheme for a multivolume novel that would chronicle the entire westward movement of the United States, with a great cast of characters representing all phases of American economic and social life. This would be a grand, sweeping panorama of national history, echoing American themes with which she now identified. The leftist critique of American values and mores that she had formulated during the early 1920s now gave way to celebration of them. It took her only a few days to realize that her fantastic plan was only a mirage. To some degree, however, her historical impulse found realization in the frontier novels that she helped her mother write, and several years later Rose would make another attempt at writing a historical book, this time about the state of Missouri.30