Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  The apocalyptic nature of the times caused widespread self-recrimination and depression. Newspaper editors invoked Pompeii, and the Biblical scale of the plague upon the land was inevitably interpreted as divine wrath.9 Citing the greed of suitcase farmers, one newspaper quoted Ezekiel 22:13, in which God reached out to smite man’s “dishonest gain.” Another survivor recalled “lots of talk that God was tormenting us because they plowed up that good sod.”10

  But the Dust Bowl was no act of god or freak accident of nature. It was one of the worst man-made ecological disasters of all time. Farmers had done this, and they had done it to themselves. It was small farmers, in particular, who were responsible, since they were more likely to cultivate intensively and less likely to employ any form of crop rotation or erosion control.11 As scholars have noted, settlers had boasted of their prowess in dominating the landscape, bragging of “‘busting’ and ‘breaking’ the land.”12 Well, now it was broken.

  Erosion transformed the southern plains into a desert, peeling off and whisking away two to five inches of topsoil from more than twenty-three million acres.13 In 1935, some 850 million tons of topsoil blew away.14 Much of it was blowing straight into Missouri; Lane wrote that “Kansas and Oklahoma dust is so thick in the Ozarks … that the sun looks like the moon.”15 Sixty-five percent of the Great Plains, once “so wide and sweet and clean,” in Wilder’s words, were damaged.16

  In response, soil scientists and ecologists would aid the federal government in developing a host of sophisticated conservation and reclamation measures, based on the most advanced research of the day. Experts planned on taking the most marginal land out of production and returning it to grassland, terracing and contouring to reduce erosion, and planting shelter belts. Virtually all the plans, however, relied on fundamentally changing the way farmers thought about their land and their lifestyle. Men and women hitched to the plow of productivity all their lives were being asked to step out of harness and admit the limitations of nature, a shift that felt not only counterintuitive but psychically impossible, even reprehensible. They were being asked to grow not more, but less.17

  American farmers had long been producing a surfeit of wheat, corn, oats, cattle, pigs, and sheep. At the same time, dozens of other countries were also exporting grain. To make matters worse, the U.S. birth rate during the 1930s was in decline. Somebody had to turn off the spigot.

  The Roosevelt administration, passing a raft of New Deal bills in its first hundred days, prided itself on the fact that many of the agricultural programs were crafted by an Iowa farmer. Henry Wallace, FDR’s secretary of agriculture, saw his production control plans as a rational response to the national emergency posed by mass foreclosures, low prices, and the desperate need of Dust Bowl–stricken farmers. (Some of them, on the brink of starvation, had resorted to eating pickled tumbleweeds, said to be high in iron.)18 But in practice, farmers often found his policies as traumatic as the conditions they meant to address.

  Using up commodities was one thing, but plans calling for the wholesale disposal of livestock proved radically unpopular, evoking grotesque images that would haunt Wallace for the rest of his tenure and eventually be immortalized in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.19 First, over the summer of 1933, farmers were paid $120 million to demolish a quarter of the country’s bumper cotton crop, virtually worthless due to overproduction. Then, in September, under orders from the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, two hundred thousand pregnant sows and six million piglets—defined as pigs under a hundred pounds—were slaughtered to kick off price stabilization. Wallace declared that billions of pounds of meat would be distributed to the poor, but many of the piglets were too small to process at packing plants and were instead rendered into grease or fertilizer.20 Rumor had it that thousands of animals had been dumped in rivers, and radio commentators excoriated the waste. A nation beset by hunger was outraged.

  In a speech he delivered, the aggrieved Wallace quoted one of many angry letters he had received, reading a screed from one woman who wrote: “It just makes me sick all over when I think how the government has killed millions and millions of little pigs, and how that has raised pork prices until today we poor people cannot even look at a piece of bacon.”21 Calmly and in painstaking detail, Wallace tried to lay out the rationale, pointing out that the low hog prices of 1933 were “ruinous to farmers” and that government intervention had helped stabilize the market. But he also lapsed into sarcasm, suggested that critics who were so concerned about pig slaughter “perhaps … think that farmers should run a sort of old-folks home for hogs and keep them around indefinitely as barnyard pets.”22 The speech captured the breakdown in the relationship between federal bureaucrat and farmer, one that, decades later, has yet to heal.

  Roosevelt himself took pains, in a 1935 radio address, to decouple homesteading and “free land” from the nostalgia and lofty expectations surrounding them for so long. “Today we can no longer escape into virgin territory,” he said:

  We have been compelled by stark necessity to unlearn the too comfortable superstition that the American soil was mystically blessed with every kind of immunity to grave economic maladjustments, and that the American spirit of individualism—all alone and unhelped by the cooperative efforts of Government—could withstand and repel every form of economic disarrangement or crisis.23

  To American farmers, who had nothing left but the dreams of their homesteading ancestors, these were fighting words. In response to outrage inspired by the killing of livestock, the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation was quickly organized to funnel commodities to the needy, salvaging everything from apples to pork. But the damage to the New Deal’s reputation, particularly in rural areas, had been done.

  The public relations disaster was only exacerbated by the creation in 1935 of yet more federal agencies. There was the Resettlement Administration, aimed at moving farmers off the most marginal and depleted land to planned, government-built cooperative communities. Roundly denounced as socialism by its congressional foes, the resettlement program was underfunded and affected relatively few, soon getting folded into another agency. Still, it spread alarm among farmers.24

  Then there was the Drought Relief Service, designed to buy up cattle in the worst of the drought-stricken areas. Many of these animals were dying anyway, too starved to slaughter for meat. But the process of dealing with them was brutal. Government agents showed up in the worst-affected regions, paid a few dollars a head, then killed the cattle—sometimes beloved family dairy cows—in front of their owners, burning or burying the carcasses in ditches. The experience was so distressing that it lingered for decades in the minds of those who witnessed it. In Ken Burns’s recent Dust Bowl documentary, a woman in New Mexico, who had been a child in the 1930s, breaks down weeping when she recalls her father asking permission to butcher his remaining calf for his family. The federal agents said no. One farmer summed up the general feeling: “The average person couldn’t stand it.”

  Laura Ingalls Wilder couldn’t stand it. She lamented the arrival of grasshoppers on her land but accepted it as divine retribution for the New Deal:

  The wild hoppers are here. They are eating up my tamarack, eating the bark and cutting off the tender tops with their feather leaves. We are doing what we can to kill them but what’s the use fighting a judgement of God. We as a nation would insult Him by wantonly destroying his bounty. Now we’ll take the scarcity and like it.25

  When she wrote that letter to Lane, Wilder was deep into the composition of what would become her fourth volume, On the Banks of Plum Creek. Once again, she had taken a Fifty-Fifty tablet; on the cover, beside a line for “Name,” she wrote “No One.”26 Then she had plunged in, beginning as Pa stopped the covered wagon near a dugout in the creek bank. If Lane had borrowed the place name for her own purposes in Hurricane, that wouldn’t stop her mother. Wilder set about taking Plum Creek back.

  Her grasshopper letter contained a hand-drawn map of the creek property, which Lane ha
d never seen. It located the dugout on the northern bank, labeling the stable, the swimming hole, the high “tableland” above the banks, her father’s fish trap, and the new house he built. For the first time, Wilder was putting down on paper ongoing editorial conversations with her daughter that—aside from brief marginal remarks on manuscripts—had previously taken place in person. “This was and is prairie country,” she told Lane, who had been thinking about the gorge on Rocky Ridge as a model. “Get these hills and our gorge out of your mind,” she said firmly. “The character of the place was altogether different.”27

  * * *

  BY this time, Lane had left Rocky Ridge for good. She had spent the first two months of 1935 there, writing in her diary in late February, “I can not stand this house, this sunk-in-muck way of living, any more. I must get out.”28 And she did, spending a couple of months in Springfield, then moving into the Tiger Hotel in Columbia, Missouri, where she would stay for much of the next year and a half. She had been commissioned to write the “Missouri” volume for a series of books about the states, and intended to do research at the university and the state historical society.

  It was a good time for her to get out of town. Old Home Town, her collection of stories set in a barely disguised Mansfield, was to be published that fall, a month after Little House on the Prairie, and it got all of Mansfield talking. The town still remembers it. It caused a “huge uproar,” says Kathy Short, a volunteer for the local historical society whose family ties to the region date back to before the Civil War.29 Lane’s stories of scandalous doings—girls getting jilted, a married woman running away with a traveling salesman, another woman quietly bumping off her aged husband—were transparently based on real people, just as Hill-Billy was clearly based on N. J. Craig. The map printed as a frontispiece might as well have been a scarlet letter pinned to the town square. “People knew exactly who she was talking about,” Short says.

  No record survives of Wilder’s reaction to Old Home Town, but her daughter’s removal to Columbia may well have been a relief. Although Lane was no longer prostrated by depression, she continued to be buffeted by moods, and she had grown so careless of her reputation and social expectations that Wilder may have felt pained by her presence.

  Perhaps most remarkably, Lane was having an affair. During the summer of 1935, she drove off on a two-month trip with Garet Garrett, a twice-married, twice-divorced reporter for the Saturday Evening Post. For a three-part piece he was writing for the Post, he and Lane were scouting out Midwest farmers chafing under New Deal policies. (Garrett wrote the Wilders anonymously into one of the pieces set in Illinois, saying that he had met “a woman, seventy, who had helped her man clear the ground by taking herself one end of a cross-cut saw.”)30 Like Lane, Garrett had grown up among farmers and fancied himself an expert on American agricultural woes.

  Former executive editor of the New York Tribune and a star reporter at the conservative Post, Garrett was notably eccentric. He had been shot three times at a speakeasy in New York City in 1930, damaging his vocal cords, and spoke afterward in a husky voice.31 The shooting was rumored to be a romantic dispute, though Garrett believed it might have been a retaliation for his political views.

  Whether Lane and Garrett became intimate on that trip or later is unclear, and keeping company might not have raised eyebrows in New York circles at the time. But Mansfield was full of strict Baptists, and the arrangement must have set tongues wagging. Gossips could hardly miss this salacious tidbit, written up in the Mansfield Mirror: “Mr. Garet Garrett … was in Mansfield over the week end, a guest at the beautiful country home of Rose Wilder Lane.”32 Lane told a friend at this time that her mother “does not much like my stuff,” and that it made her “furious” to be the mother of a celebrity.33 Wilder may have had other reasons to be furious, expressing concern to Lane about becoming “conspicuous” as a result of her daughter’s reputation.34

  The Missouri book, too, would have scandalized Mansfield, had it been published. Lane had never written expository nonfiction before; her biographies were all heavily fictionalized, and even The Peaks of Shala, the Albanian travelogue, was composed as a narrative, with fictional touches.35 Her Missouri history turned out similarly subjective, beginning with a first-person account of the Wilders’ 1894 journey, told from the perspective of her seven-year-old self. Taking perfunctory notice of key events on the state’s timeline, from Daniel Boone to Mark Twain, Lane filled out the history with long, personal, anecdotal passages about a local Ozark fox hunt, basket supper, and “play-party,” revisiting the style of her earlier hillbilly fare. Here, as in Old Home Town, she appeared to be writing about actual Mansfield folk, who may have had no idea they were starring in her prose; some names occur in both works.36 Her portrayal of backwoods society, doubtless meant to supply local color, was nonetheless subtly patronizing. Yet she expected no one to notice, writing resentfully, “Nobody here reads anything of mine. They know vaguely that I rate somewhere … below Harold Bell Wright,” a well-known author whose 1907 bestseller, The Shepherd of the Hills, was set in the Ozarks and drew from local lore.37

  Judging by diary and journal entries, Lane never fully recovered from the depression she experienced at Rocky Ridge. Even as she moved away from the extreme suicidal thoughts she had so often during 1933 and 1934, she began to indulge in violent bouts of rage expressed toward political figures, especially Franklin D. Roosevelt. She had no compunction about sharing these screeds with those least likely to enjoy them, including George Bye, who was FDR’s literary agent and admirer, and Virginia Brastow, an old friend. Brastow had gotten her start in journalism, as Lane had, from Fremont Older, who appointed her city editor of the Bulletin in 1900; her book about San Francisco, The Fantastic City, had been a bestseller in 1932.

  Lane began haranguing Brastow in the mid-1930s in dispatches that would run on, single-spaced, for pages, calling Roosevelt a dictator and comparing him to Lenin.38 In this, she was doubtless following Hoover’s lead. Still smarting from his rough treatment during the election, Hoover marshaled conservatives behind him by comparing Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies, many of them created by executive order, to fascist and communist bureaucracies, famously calling on Republicans to mount a “holy crusade” in defense of the freedom of the individual.39

  Hoover’s conviction that the president aspired to attain unprecedented powers during the emergency of the Great Depression received widespread exposure through the dozens of newspapers, magazines, and radio stations owned by William Randolph Hearst, which kept up a drumbeat against Communist infiltration. In Missouri and across the country, newspapers were full of editorials calling FDR a dictator, railing against the “alphabetical bureaus” and bemoaning the ballooning national debt.40 Lane needed to look no farther than the pages of the Mansfield Mirror for the prevailing conservative view. There, the “Modern ‘Liberal’” was lampooned as a petty thief plunging his hands into the pockets of the taxpayer.41

  Lane’s rhetoric undeniably aped that of Hoover, Hearst, and other New Deal critics, while her rejection of Roosevelt’s economic interventionism was rooted in a long-held distrust of authority. But there was also an emotional undercurrent to her most fervid outbursts. Lane’s letters seemed hectic and unhinged, as if she were frantic to change somebody’s, anybody’s, mind. “What is happening, Virginia, is a death-struggle between The Industrial Revolution and Medievalism,” Lane wrote. “Roosevelt is for Medievalism. He has to smash America to get it.”42 She told Brastow she was “moronic” to find Roosevelt sincere and well meaning, a leader doing the best he could:

  Doing what? Best for what? You can not speak of the world’s most absolute dictator, with this nation in his hands and more power than any former dictator in history, in the same terms you use about the puttering neighbor next door.43

  She fantasized about taking the president’s life, just two years after he survived an assassination attempt in which the mayor of Chicago was killed. “I could kill Roosevelt with pleasu
re and satisfaction,” she wrote to Brastow. “If living got too much for me so that I really wanted to die, I would go to Washington first and kill that traitor.”44

  As in political tirades to follow, Lane argued from authority, contending that what she had seen of Europe and Russia in the 1920s gave her the necessary experience to forecast what FDR’s rule was sure to bring about: rampant inflation, collapse of liberty, and the infiltration of the American educational system by Communists. Europe, she said, was a place where children died of rickets, their bodies “soft bits of sick flesh.” Soon, she predicted, a book of matches would cost $25,000.45

  She had sniffed out a Soviet-style “Terror” in Illinois the previous summer, where Garrett interviewed a few of the “millions of human beings” who he claimed the government intended to resettle, a charge so exaggerated that an agricultural expert at the University of Missouri later called the Post article “diatribe journalism.”46 Lane told Brastow: “You can smell a Terror … I told Garet Garrett ten minutes after we drove into it that it was a Terror, and he would not believe it.”47 The term harked back to the French Revolution, and the Jacobin plotters. During Lane’s association with Garrett, her anti–New Deal rhetoric would grow noticeably harsher. Soon even he would not be conservative enough for her. She was outraged that his Post articles about their trip were not more pointed.48

  She saw the Terror spreading to Wright County when a local farmer was discovered with “two pigs more than Wallace permitted,” a situation that nearly touched off a riot when federal agents arrived to count the litter. The “unlawful shoats” were ultimately seized and redistributed, she reported, given to “a nest of chicken-thieves and moonshiners who never could be induced to do a day’s work in their lives.”49