Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  With war looming on the American horizon, Lane redefined the seventy thousand farmers serving San Francisco as soldiers, “the real defenders of America … the great Continental Army.”68 Farming was portrayed as an epic, heroic national and international project. She ironically invoked a popular song whose refrain proclaimed that “Uncle Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm”; the sentiment had inspired pioneers to settle the West, only to discover, as her parents and grandparents had, that mortgages and natural disasters could ruin even the hardest workers.69

  After the last installment appeared, Lane was invited to give a talk to the Pomona Grange of Santa Rosa’s Patrons of Husbandry. Somehow she gave the audience the impression that she herself owned a farm, hundreds of miles away, which she was “managing” in absentia.70 She called for farmers to organize, an age-old Grange goal and exactly what the Federal Farm Loan Act was meant to support.

  The act allowed for the creation of community-based National Farm Loan Associations, distributing low-interest, long-term loans to farmers who joined them. Farmers could borrow from one hundred to ten thousand dollars, up to half the value of their land and 20 percent of the improvements made on it. Hundreds of associations sprang up nationally. One of them would be in Mansfield, Missouri.

  During the Wilders’ rooming-house days, a favorite boarder was Jeff Craig, a cashier at the Bank of Mansfield. He became a close friend; when he left his employer to help start a competitor, the Farmers and Merchants Bank, the Wilders had immediately switched their allegiance to that enterprise. In the fall of 1917, they joined Craig and other local farmers in forming a Farm Loan Association in town. Within a few years, a bold announcement appeared in the Mansfield Mirror:

  Mansfield National Farm Loan Association:

  Makes Federal Government Loans at 5½ per cent interest on 34 years time, with privilege of paying sooner if desired. For particulars inquire

  John W. Brentlinger, Pres.      Mrs. A. J. Wilder, Secy.71

  With nineteen members and more than $30,000 to lend, the association was on its way. Wilder would eventually publish the particulars in the Ruralist, and her article, “Here’s the Farm Loan Plan,” was widely distributed as a flyer in Wright County. In terms she would use to counsel hundreds of farmers over the coming years, she laid out the exact cost of a $1,000 loan from the association. At 5.5 percent interest, compared to a standard bank loan at 8 percent, a farmer would save $335.73 over the course of ten years once all the fees were accounted for.72 It was a good deal, administered by trusted friends and neighbors. In contrast to later federal programs, the association was organized, staffed, and run by the community. Its officers were locals, not outsiders.

  To borrow from the association, a farmer was required to become a dues-paying member and to buy a share of stock at $5 for every hundred dollars borrowed. The Wilders themselves applied for a loan from the program in March 1919, the same week that Wilder’s article on the plan ran in the Ruralist.73 They borrowed a thousand dollars at 5 percent interest, a slightly more advantageous rate than advertised, with the farm as collateral.74 They would owe payments of $32.50 every March and September for the next thirty-four years, unless they chose to pay the mortgage off earlier.

  Given the disastrous debts that cost them their Dakota homestead and tree claim, it was a notable risk, even though federal land banks were less prone to foreclose than private institutions.75 The Wilders were in their fifties. Perhaps they wanted to make improvements, or were concerned about future income; or the loan may have been a requirement of association membership and Laura Wilder’s position. Whatever the motivation, they placed all ninety-seven acres of their greatest asset, Rocky Ridge Farm, in the hands of the federal government.

  For much of the next decade, in the Odd Fellows Hall on Mansfield’s town square, Wilder would process loan applications, fill out paperwork, and write to applicants about their progress. She received a small percentage on every loan closed and a flat fee for preparing quarterly and annual reports. Once again, she was following in her father’s footsteps, working like he did as a civil servant. In a town every bit as insular as those where he’d worked, she found herself in a position of greater authority, handling what would ultimately amount to nearly a million dollars in loans, managing with discretion the hopes and fears of neighbors, acquaintances, and farmers who were weathering the same financial trials that she and Almanzo had faced. Friends and townsfolk remembered her as a strong promoter of the program. “She wanted everybody to borrow money like they did,” one recalled.76

  Local prejudice did not stand in her way: she shook hands with “our colored member,” scandalizing Mansfieldians.77 She made a joke of it to Lane, referring to rumors that one of President Warren G. Harding’s great-grandmothers was an African American: “If we have him for president, why not treat the colored brother kindly?”78 But she went on in a serious vein, emphasizing her idealism: “I’m a hero worshiper, you know, and likewise a bitter ender and almost all the other foolish things you can think of.” She closed by crowing about the 1921 Supreme Court decision that found the Federal Loan Act to be constitutional: “I’ll be one busy person then, for I think everyone wants a loan.”

  The job marked the period of Wilder’s greatest engagement in community. Having once found conviviality in spelling bees, singing school, and literary socials in De Smet, she now sought it by joining women’s clubs, advancing her Loan Association work at the same time. In 1916, she and Ella Craig, Jeff Craig’s wife, were among the founding members of the Athenian Club, a study group devoted to “cultural topics and the exchange of ideas,” named in honor of the Greek goddess of wisdom. Its membership consisted mainly of women from Hartville, the nearby town and county seat that Wilder visited on a weekly basis, filing loan paperwork at the courthouse.79 The club’s symbol was the owl, Athena’s attribute; its flower, the violet, “sacred to the city of Athens.” It would become a local legend.

  Wilder was also instrumental in organizing Mansfield’s Justamere Club. Groups by that name (often spelled “Just-A-Mere”) sprang up across the country at the time, but in Mansfield the Justamere was no mere club. It was a highly exclusive clique, limited to eighteen members, all personal friends dedicated to high-minded talks on “economic world conditions, politics, legislation, inventions, discoveries, new books, poems, drama, music, new fashions, prominent persons, history, religion, art and nature.”80 Each monthly meeting was presided over by a member who led the discussion while plying her fellows with creative refreshments. Wilder herself wrote the words to the club song.

  Wake Up and Get Busy

  Clubwoman, farm activist, member of a Masonic organization, secretary-treasurer for the Mansfield branch of the federal Farm Loan Association, and columnist for the Ruralist: by her fifties, Wilder had become a formidable figure, the embodiment of her teenaged ideal of “ambition.” Publishing twenty-one columns in 1916 and twenty-two the year after, she began developing her voice and themes.

  She probably had a role model. Among the books in her library was a biography of Fanny Fern, the pen name of Sara Willis, who had risen to fame in the mid-nineteenth century as a popular columnist for the New York Ledger, the weekly family journal whose thrilling fictional serials Laura had loved in Walnut Grove.81 Fern dispensed advice to women on everything from fashion trends to legal rights, becoming the first major woman columnist for a national newspaper, and eventually the highest-paid columnist in the country. Emerging as a regular contributor for the Ruralist, Wilder may have modeled her own voice on Fern’s relaxed, informal style. She certainly approved of women writers, fondly recalling that the adopted mother of her school friend Ida Brown neglected her housework for days on end in order to write for the newspapers, earning enough money to buy Ida a smart winter outfit.82

  Tentative at first, growing more relaxed as she got comfortable, Wilder’s farm columns contained the genesis of her later novels. Increasingly, she was developing characters, experimenting with sce
nes and dialogue, and reaching back in her memory for anecdotes from her Dakota days.

  The character who emerged most clearly was her husband, whom she referred to not by name but as “The Man of the Place.” Quirky, blunt, fond of pie, he wandered in and out of her pieces much as the actual man must have wandered in and out of her sight, going about his business in the barn and fields.

  He appeared in her first column of 1916, a meditation on how women were inevitably put in charge of poultry, considered too trivial for men, despite the fact that chickens and turkeys were valuable commodities. She quickly established their economic value, reporting that poultry and eggs brought $97,000 to Mansfield the previous year. Then she dramatized the “spice” of her record-keeping, with The Man of the Place complaining about the empty feed bin: “Those durn hens are eating their heads off!”83 At that point, she said, she would bring out her account book and quietly point out the bottom line, comparing the price of feed to her profit. Then, she said, a little smugly, “he will feel better about things in general and especially the hens.”84

  The Man played it straight later that year, when Wilder wryly revealed her own bad temper. Trying to please her, he had given her a “patent churn,” a newfangled take on the hand-operated model, meant to be attached to a small engine.85 They had no engine, though, and Wilder struggled to keep the lid on: as the cream thickened, it bucked and kicked. She found herself sitting on a board athwart the lid “in the correct mode for horseback riding,” turning the churn’s handle with one hand while trying to steady it with the other. What’s more, the sharp edges of the tin paddles cut her hands when she washed them. After a painful episode, she flew into a rage and threw the contraption out the side door, “as far as I could”—to her husband’s rueful astonishment, she confessed.86 But he made only the mildest of remonstrations.

  Among the most touching of the columns dedicated to him was one she wrote in the summer of 1917, “A Bouquet of Wild Flowers.” His habit of bringing her flowers from woods and fields was more welcome than the churn, recalling purple flags she had gathered from creek bottoms when she was a “barefoot child.”87 She remembered the wild Sweet Williams, whose pink hearts she had pressed against a pane of glass with her school friends, and the white daisies with “hearts of gold” that she and “Father and Sister Mary” passed on their walk to Sunday school that long-ago summer when her mother was staying home with their baby brother. “I was only a little girl,” she wrote, “but I can still plainly see the grass and the trees and the path winding ahead, flecked with sunshine and shadow and the beautiful golden-hearted daisies scattered all along the way.”88

  At last, she said, she was beginning to learn what mattered in life. Citing the Biblical wisdom her mother had quoted to her a few years earlier—“there is nothing new under the sun”—Wilder made a point that would serve as the moral heart of her later books:

  It is the simple things of life that make living worth while, the sweet fundamental things such as love and duty, work and rest and living close to nature. There are no hothouse blossoms that can compare in beauty and fragrance with my bouquet of wild flowers.89

  The rest of her family began to crop up in her columns too, with mentions of her father, mother, and Mary. But what began as an exercise in sentimentality and nostalgia soon became something more complex. She began airing unresolved issues, the rivalry and tensions between herself and Mary, left unsettled when Mary went blind and Laura married and left home.

  First, she tried to wring a moral from them, recalling that early occasion on Silver Lake when her father went out to shoot a goose for dinner and she and Mary quarreled over whether or not to season the dressing with sage or onion. Their father missed his shot; there was neither goose nor dressing; the girls were abashed. But in this telling, Wilder transposed the goose to Thanksgiving (in her memoir, it had been spring).90 A touch of fiction reinforced the lesson: be thankful for what you have.

  But the moral left her unsatisfied. She returned to the sibling conflict in a column about justice, revisiting an ancient wrong. Resurrecting the childhood spat over whose hair was prettier, Mary’s blond curls or her own brown locks, she refashioned it into a parable about nameless girls. For the younger girl, it was “a tragedy in her little life” that her “dark skin, brown hair and snub nose” made her feel homely beside her beautiful sister.91 Taunted by her bossy sibling, the “little brown girl” lashed out and slapped her. Compounding the injustice, the girl was then “soundly spanked and set in a corner,” where she glowered at “the parent who punished her.”92

  The tale revealed resentment suppressed for decades. “I hate to write the end of the story,” she said of her punishment and the “sense of injustice” it instilled. What began as a dispassionate exercise turned into an outburst: “No, not the end! No story is ever ended! It goes on and on and the effects of this one followed this little girl all her life.”93 Such primal feelings would compel her to rehearse the family drama yet again, casting herself as the heroine, attempting to wrest from the past the satisfaction life rarely afforded. The story was definitely not ended.

  Wilder was not always in full command of her material, but in turning out a column every two weeks she was learning how to tell stories, introduce characters, and craft dialogue. She was becoming comfortable in the public realm, serving up advice to a cohort of women who craved connection, encouragement, and sensible counsel. She was beginning to taste the gratification that came from seizing control of a narrative, summoning beloved figures, settling scores, and addressing grievances.

  Among her affectionate portraits and appreciative accounts of fellow farmers, her daughter stood out as a confounding personality. She popped up at frequent intervals but in a fashion invariably abrupt, formal, and distant, as if “Rose Wilder Lane” were a kind of deus ex machina, someone contrived as a plot device, a figure inexplicable and unknowable, liable to descend upon an unsuspecting rural populace and wreak havoc. During these years, at least as far as her mother was concerned, that is exactly what Lane was becoming.

  * * *

  BY the time the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, Rose Wilder Lane was thirty-one, and her burgeoning career as a celebrity biographer was causing friction with virtually every one of her major subjects. After the Bulletin released her articles about aerialist Art Smith in a paperbound booklet, she moved on to serialize the lives of Charlie Chaplin, Henry Ford, Jack London, and Herbert Hoover, all of which she attempted to publish in book form.94 All were controversial.

  Ghostwritten memoirs or autobiographies were common enough. After serving an apprenticeship at McClure’s Magazine, for instance, Willa Cather was hired by the publisher, S. S. McClure, to write his memoirs. McClure’s My Autobiography ran in the magazine in eight parts in 1913–1914 and was subsequently published as a book. In a note, McClure thanked Cather for her help “in the preparation,” but did not publicly acknowledge her authorship.95

  Lane, for her part, took a more underhanded approach. In the spring of 1915, she interviewed Charlie Chaplin just as The Tramp premiered, securing his global fame. Cobbled together in weeks, her serial—Chaplin in the first person, with no byline—appeared in the Bulletin in July, and was syndicated in other newspapers.96 Soon, the Bobbs-Merrill Company was poised to publish it as a book. A friend of Lane’s, the Associated Press reporter Guy Moyston, with whom she would later be involved romantically, acted as her agent in brokering the deal, made without Chaplin’s knowledge or consent.97

  The work’s fanciful title—Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story: Being the Faithful Recital of a Romantic Career, Beginning with Early Recollections of Boyhood in London and Closing with the Signing of His Latest Motion-Picture Contract—suggested a Dickensian novel rather than something that originated in a daily newspaper. (Indeed, it would ultimately be compared to Oliver Twist.)98 Lane was not named as the author. Instead, the copyright page included a note: “The subject of this biography takes great pleasure in expressing his
obligations and his thanks to Mrs. Rose Wilder Lane for invaluable editorial assistance.”99 Like the rest of the text, that acknowledgment was a fabrication. Scholars have described the book as a “flagrant autobiographical fake” displaying “great mendacity.”100

  When Chaplin learned of the book’s imminent publication, he threatened legal action, charging through his lawyers that it was “purely a work of fiction.”101 He and his brother were particularly disturbed by the portrayal of their father as a vicious drunk. Advance copies had already been distributed, but Bobbs-Merrill recognized that the jig was up and halted distribution rather than risk a lawsuit. Remaining copies were destroyed, although Stan Laurel had a copy, which he lent to another biographer.102 In this and other ways, Lane’s spurious works would continue to mislead the public for decades. (A recent book about the aviator Art Smith, for instance, accepts his “autobiography” as first-person gospel.103 Those familiar with Lane’s style, however, will recognize her voice overlaid upon his.)

  Lane urged Chaplin to reconsider, unapologetic about her attempt to capitalize on his fame. Even in a career characterized by audacity, her letter stands out as particularly unprofessional, impertinent, and shameless. “Truly, I don’t believe you realize how very well that story was written,” she ventured, going on to remark, casually, “You’ve lived a life which makes a corking book … whose popular appeal is greater than that of a book any other hack writer is apt to write.”104 She complained that he had put her in a “perfectly frightful position with the Bobbs Merrill people.”105 His objection to the hijacking of his life must be, she supposed, that he expected “some of the money.”106 She could scarcely offer that, she said, since it would amount to a few hundred dollars at most—a tone all paparazzi would recognize.