Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder
Page 28
Toward the end of 1938 and into the new year she spent a lot of time campaigning for the Ludlow Amendment, a proposed Constitutional change that would have required a national referendum before the nation could go to war except in the case of an outright attack on American soil. Named after Indiana Democratic congressman Louis Ludlow, the proposed amendment became a rallying cry for isolationists who feared that Roosevelt was leading the country toward war. Rose's personal antipathy to the president reinforced her dislike of his interventionism abroad. Strongly critical of New Deal domestic policy, Rose found the administration's approach to foreign affairs equally repugnant.28
In this, as on most political issues, Laura was in full accord with her daughter. To advance the isolationist cause, Laura drafted a letter before the off-year congressional elections addressed simply “To American Mothers” and intended for circulation in newspapers and elsewhere. It encouraged its readers to write their congressional candidates and ask where they stood on the war-referendum issue, and it urged each of them to send copies of the letter to ten friends, who in turn would continue the chain by sending it to their friends. The message concluded, “Your failure to do this may bring disaster to your home and your loved ones and leave the way clear for the War Gods to call your sons to the trenches, to face the hell of shot and shell. Pray that God may save us from another war.” Laura told Rose that all of the members of the Athenean Club at Hartville were writing their congressman, urging him to vote in favor of the referendum. Laura planned to send her letter to people she knew in other states. She was not sure if it would do any good, but in her opinion it could hardly do any harm.29
The “Silver Lake” manuscript took longer than usual to get ready for the publisher, not being delivered until May 1939, past the deadline for the fall book list. By now Laura had become so popular that the people at Harper's told her not to worry about it and simply to get the finished copy to them as quickly as possible. Laura told Rose that she was afraid that so much time had elapsed since her last book that her stories would be forgotten. In considering a name for the book, Laura thought that while homesteading was its central theme, using that word in the title would mislead readers since the book discussed so much more than that. On the Banks of Plum Creek had gone over so well that using a similar title would be desirable, so they settled on “By the Shores of Silver Lake.”30
This, her fifth volume, for some reason attracted fewer reviews than the previous ones had. As usual, however, the ones that did appear were generally glowing. “Touching, unsentimental, and real Americana,” commented the New Yorker. Horn Book Magazine noted, “While all the people are so real that they seem to be next-door neighbors, as it were, Laura is nearest to our hearts.”31
Laura was already finished with the next volume, tentatively titled “The Hard Winter,” by the time “Silver Lake” was sent to the publisher. She wanted to get her new effort into Rose's hands quickly, because she and Almanzo were planning to take another trip to De Smet. “I would rather you had it,” Laura wrote her daughter, “so if anything should happen on our trip you could finish it.” Unlike their route of the previous year, this one was more direct, and this time Almanzo would do the driving himself. They planned to take it easy on the journey and to stop early when they got tired. And they planned to “not drive at all on Sunday when every crazy loon is drunk and on the road,” Laura told Rose. One advantage of going by themselves was the reduced expense and the chance to go at a more leisurely pace. More important from Laura's point of view was the feeling that “if we are by ourselves we will be independent.”32
The previous year they had arrived in De Smet just before Old Settlers’ Day, which was held every year on June 10. This time they planned their visit to coincide with the big celebration. Sixty years had passed since the railroad crews first arrived at Silver Lake, and in 1940 the town itself would celebrate its sixtieth anniversary. Laura and Almanzo drove up from Missouri through Council Bluffs, Sioux City, and Yankton. In De Smet they again visited with old friends and visited Aubrey Sherwood's newspaper office, where he took a picture of them that ran on the front page the following week. Afterward they visited with Grace and Nate in Manchester, then drove west across the state to see Carrie again in Keystone. From there they traveled through Colorado before returning to Mansfield.33
There would be no more long trips like this for Laura and Almanzo, but they did like to make shorter excursions to places around Mansfield. Silas Seal frequently drove them to Springfield, where Laura regularly had her hair cut by a former Mansfield hairdresser. Almanzo often drove them around, too. Once they went to West Plains, sixty-five miles to the southeast, to visit some old friends.34
Almanzo was in his eighties now. Never very vigorous since his early bout with diphtheria, he had to take things slowly. The farm was hardly self-supporting; Rose's income supplements had helped enable the two of them to live comfortably during the 1920s and early 1930s, before royalty payments from Laura's books began to build. Laura was grateful to her daughter for what she had done for them and thanked her, “You have contributed to keeping it [Rocky Ridge Farm] up for years.” Almanzo no longer had his Morgan horses. But he did keep a donkey and a few goats for milking and planted the garden, growing potatoes, peas, lettuce, radishes, and turnips, among other things. He also liked to make rugs from yarn and old rags. He and Bruce Prock sometimes drove to auction sales.35
Almanzo kept the car in running order and liked to loiter around Silas Seal's service station when he drove Laura into town. As their contacts with the Craigs and other friends gradually diminished, their relationship with the Seals grew closer. The couples often ate meals together or took little trips around the countryside. Neta liked to cook Swiss steak for Almanzo when the Wilders came because it was his favorite. She also looked out for Laura, sometimes staying overnight when Laura was not feeling well. The Wilders even loaned the Seals some money when they decided to build a new rooming house in town.36
Health problems multiplied as Laura and Almanzo aged. Bouts with the flu were common, and other ailments slowed them down. Almanzo had an ear problem, requiring attention from a specialist, and rheumatism increasingly bothered Laura. She also suffered from asthma and eyestrain. In early 1937 she told Rose that her eyes had “gone on strike,” but the following year she noted that they were doing so well that she had gone back to using a pair of six-year-old eyeglasses.37
Laura was conscious of the aging process. She told Rose that she preferred to wear long-sleeved dresses now because her arms were not pretty anymore. She got rid of her laying hens but kept her flower beds. Her frugal ways persisted. Silas Seal observed that Laura was able to get more for her money than anybody else he ever met. She economized by saving scraps of paper to write notes on, and she even had the electricity in the house cut off once in a futile effort to get the power company to reduce its rates.38
Laura remained involved, although to a lesser degree, in club activities. The local newspaper made little mention anymore of the Athenians or of Laura attending their meetings. It did note, however, when she was reelected as second vice president of the group in January 1939. From 1937 through 1941 she regularly attended meetings of the Friday Afternoon Book Club. Most of its members were friends from other clubs and organizations. At the March 1938 meeting, Mrs. N. J. Craig gave a review of Rose's Let the Hurricane Roar. The book up for discussion when Laura hosted the group at Rocky Ridge in February 1940 was The Escape, by Ethel Vance. By 1942, however, Laura's name no longer appeared in reports of those attending the meetings.39
Laura also became a regular for a while in a new study club organized in March 1937 at the home of the wife of newspaper publisher O. B. Davis. The names on its roster, once again, were familiar. Laura was chosen, along with two others, to select a suitable name for the club, apparently deciding that nothing more than “Study Club” was necessary. They also developed a program for the first year's meetings, selecting the subject of contemporary American li
terature. The first book chosen for review was Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. When Laura's turn came to host the club in September 1937, Mrs. Warren Davis gave a review of the twin operas Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, by Pietro Mascagni and Ruggiero Leoncavallo, respectively. Laura continued to remain an active member of the club through 1940.40
Laura no longer participated much in church or lodge activities, either. The Methodist Ladies Aid Society that she had belonged to reorganized itself as the Women's Society of Christian Service in October 1940. The Mirror noted her attendance at some of their meetings in 1942 and 1943. There is little record of her activity in Eastern Star, but the paper did report her election in January 1939 as chaplain again for the coming year. The newer members of these organizations were a generation or two younger than she, and that made her feel strange. “I can't fit in with the old crowd someway,” she wrote Rose. “Never could very well and now I am tired of them more than ever.” She indicated that she probably would have to go with “the old church crowd, Burney, Rogers, Hoovers.”41
Sometimes the Wilders invited guests to Rocky Ridge for a meal or for an evening get-together. On the Saturday after Laura's seventy-third birthday they hosted a Valentine's Day party for five other couples. As reported in the society section of the newspaper, “The rooms were beautifully lighted and a bright gleaming fire in the fire place where wood was piled high, around which guests were seated and elsewhere about the large living room.” After some games, cake and coffee were served. In 1943 the Wilders were honored on their fifty-eighth wedding anniversary at a dinner held at the Methodist church.42
Despite growing older and having to slow down her pace, Laura did not feel bored or consider herself useless. She kept busy with housework, club activity, and, of course, writing. In December 1937 she told Rose, “The days are so short it takes me all the time to do what work I must to keep a livin’.” She still enjoyed crewel work, baking bread, and just puttering around the house. Her sweet tooth craved candy as much as ever, and she especially enjoyed it when Rose sent a box on her birthday, which was just a week before Valentine's Day. “I may wear store teeth,” she laughed, “but my old sweet tooth has never been extracted.”43
As Laura entered her seventies, the world around her continued to change, and she had a growing sense that she was living in the past. While writing her novels, she literally took up residence in her memories. Mansfield's community leaders continued to confront change, encouraging their fellow residents to make the town a better place. Success in this endeavor would be measured by their ability to avoid a major population loss, rather than necessarily making big gains. Fundamental forces—economic, social, and cultural—were accelerating to drive rural residents to larger population centers, and every small town was forced to compete with its neighbors in order to attract business and customers.
Signs of change ranged from an ordinance requiring the licensing of dogs in 1937 to formation of a Lions Club affiliate three years later. The new unit was designed to replace the Business Men's Club, whose purpose, along with that of several different predecessors, including the Commercial Club and the Mansfield Chamber of Commerce, was to promote the growth and progress of the town and its businesses. Two projects that demanded immediate attention were digging a sewer system and blacktopping the principal streets in town that remained unpaved. The former project had earlier been approved, but then was scrapped when WPA financing was lost. Main Street businessmen also worked, with meager success, to attract new industry into the community. New streetlights, bargain days, band concerts on the square, Santa Claus days, citywide clean-ups: these and a variety of other ideas were implemented in efforts to lure business into town. The Mansfield Mirror also observed that getting rid of drunks on the streets would improve the atmosphere of the community. A sign of the times was Mansfield's participation in a 1937 beauty contest to select a Miss Wright County, who would then go on to participate in the state pageant at Sedalia.44
If times were changing, reminders of previous ways of life also cast their shadows. In April 1940 the Mirror reported the first runaway team of horses in several years in Mansfield. Mansfield poet J. Lon Dennis, whose work appeared from time to time in papers around the area, submitted a poem titled “What Makes Mansfield Grow.” In addition to “signs of push and progress,” he observed, it was things like “the cow's soft low” and “fruits and berries, cows and chickens” that contributed to a town's growth.45
Although many Mansfieldians anticipated their town's population topping a thousand in 1940, the final census tally showed an increase of only 61 since 1930, to 922, amounting to a gain of only 7 percent. Afterward the newspaper editor commented, “The town has grown slightly but not nearly so much as it should have. It is sleeping on the job while other towns are building. It might nap too long.”46
Time and circumstances led the Wilders to stay more to themselves, cutting them off in significant ways from the wider community. They also now were far removed from their only child, who stayed in contact with them only by mail. Although Rose did not return to Mansfield for more than a decade after finally leaving Missouri in 1937, she was never far from her parents’ thoughts. The distance physically separating mother and daughter ironically seemed to draw them closer together in spirit. Resentments and animosities that had sometimes boiled over when they were living close together now dissipated.47
Mother and daughter frequently expressed their love for each other in letters sent back and forth as they worked together on the novels. Laura always began her letters “Rose Dearest” and ended them with “much love,” “very much love,” or “loads and loads of love.” Almanzo, the reticent one, addressed his daughter simply as “Dear Rose.” In return, Rose wrote back to her “Dear Mama Bess,” ending her missives with “much love” or “much, much love.” Laura told her, “You are a dear, sweet thing to us all the time. You and your comfort and well being are more to us than anything else. So please take good care of yourself for us.” After Laura expressed her love and thanked Rose for sending some birthday candy in 1938, the latter responded humorously, “I love you a lot, too, and hope you are making yourself sick on your birthday candy, you and papa. Isn't that a loving wish?” Laura frequently expressed a sense of humor, too, as in her reply to Rose's flattering comment about a picture taken of her: “Thanks my dear. I am glad you think I am nice to look at, even at this late day in the afternoon. It must be my lovely character showing in my face that people see. And knowing me, I can't see that.”48
Laura wanted to be certain that Rose was aware of how much both parents appreciated the financial help that she had been giving them. It seemed unbelievable to her how comfortably they were situated now. They had Rose to thank for all of their good fortune, Laura indicated, ticking off the many things they had reason to appreciate: rent money for the house she had built, dividend checks, royalties from her books, furnishings in their house. Laura said that she went to bed thinking “what a wise woman I am to have a daughter like you.” Once, after Rose had advised her on how to handle some details with Harper and Brothers, Laura thanked her, saying, “Sometimes I have a suspicion that you are a nice kind of a person.”49
Another factor that drew mother and daughter closer together was their mutual antipathy toward increased government intervention in people's lives and their common opinion that President Roosevelt and the New Deal had been disastrous for the country. Laura complained about gas taxes they had to pay to run their car and about the scarcity of farm labor, a condition she attributed to FDR's work-relief programs. She referred to first-term Democratic senator Harry Truman as “a liar” and stated her admiration for their district's conservative Republican anti-New Deal congressman, Dewey Short. She “gnashed her teeth” at an article of Eleanor Roosevelt's in Liberty on the Ludlow Amendment and was gleeful when a local Democratic gathering at the Masonic Hall to celebrate the president's birthday failed to sell many tickets. Laura was glad that she had quit the Democratic Part
y when she did. As war loomed in Europe in 1939, she wrote Rose, “There is no use in trying to say anything about the news. We probably are thinking alike about things.”50
Laura's sisters were so far away that contacts with them were few. She and Almanzo had visited them on their trips to South Dakota in 1938 and 1939, but her correspondence with them at other times seems to have been sporadic. Laura received a letter from Grace in January 1938, indicating that she had not heard from Carrie for months. Neither had Laura, even at Christmastime. When Laura mentioned anything about her sisters to Rose, it seems often to have been in an unhappy context. In late 1937 she observed that Grace and Nate were on relief, receiving surplus food commodities from the government in addition to conservation checks. It could not have been something she was proud of or approved of, with all her insistence upon self-reliance and keeping government out of people's affairs. Laura also seemed embarrassed in passing on a note from Carrie in May 1939, asking whether Rose had any old clothes that she might be planning to donate to charity. Carrie indicated that she could use them.51
Although Laura waited to send Rose her manuscript of “The Hard Winter” until she and Almanzo left to attend the Old Settlers’ Day celebration in De Smet in June 1939, she had started working on it a year and a half earlier, during the time that she and Rose were wrangling over the “Silver Lake” manuscript. Both Almanzo and Laura had frequently discussed with Rose the events in De Smet during the storm-filled winter of 1880–1881, and the latter, of course, had read her mother's account of it in her “Pioneer Girl” manuscript, which contained all of the essential features of the book that later was published as The Long Winter. No episode in the early history of white settlement in the region inspired more stories or legends than this one. With rail traffic cut off for almost five months and devastating temperatures, along with some of the heaviest snowfall eastern Dakota ever received, people who lived in brand-new railroad towns such as De Smet were literally on the verge of starvation, even though they were situated only a few miles west of more “civilized” places. Whenever old-timers gathered together or wished to impress the uninitiated with the rigors of frontier living, it did not take long for the subject of the hard winter to spring up.