Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Lane was more militant. Listening to the conservative radio of her day, she had expressed as early as 1940 her concerns about the FBI’s gaining “Gestapo powers.” Refusing Social Security, to her mind, qualified as resisting the secret police, and she leapt at an opportunity to say so in print.

  In the summer of 1943, she sent a postcard to Samuel Grafton, a radio commentator and liberal supporter of the New Deal who wrote for the New Republic. “All these Social Security laws are German, instituted by Bismarck and expanded by Hitler,” she wrote. “Americans believe in freedom, not in being taxed for their own good and bought by bureaucrats.” Oddly, the card was signed with a name Lane had not used in decades: “Mrs. C. G. Lane.”

  Delivered to Grafton, the postcard somehow ended up in the hands of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Authorities dispatched a state trooper to Lane’s home to look into the matter. He found the perpetrator on her knees, weeding dandelions on her front lawn. When confronted, she was only too eager to tell him off. According to her account, she told him, “I am an American citizen. I hire you, I pay you. And you have the insolence to question my attitude? The point is that I don’t like your attitude. What is this—the Gestapo?” To ensure that the incident received the widest possible audience, she published a pamphlet titled “What Is This—The Gestapo?,” distributed by the National Economic Council, Inc., an organization that supported the fascist government in Spain and promoted the idea that Jews were plotting the “complete destruction” of American constitutional government.43 She accused the FBI of interfering with the U.S. Mail. J. Edgar Hoover’s flunkies began compiling a fat file on the whole affair.

  Lane claimed that she had used her married name because she wanted to avoid publicity, but she relished the attention when she got it. She told the Associated Press: “Social security is National Socialism. No one could hate the Germans more than I do. I have two boys in the service, one of whom I believe to be in a concentration camp.”44

  That last remark was questionable at best. John Turner had joined the Coast Guard, but she had broken off contact with him around 1940. The concentration camp referred to Rexh Meta, with whom she had lost touch around the same time, having no word where he might be reached. She feared for his life, with good reason. Rebecca West, in her monumental 1941 study of the Balkans, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, closed on a death knell for Lane’s beloved country: “I told you it was bad with Albania. It is very bad. It is a massacre.”45 As the war drew to a close, Lane struggled to learn Meta’s whereabouts and to aid his family, urging Herbert Hoover to query the State Department for her, to no avail.46 She feared that her own “vindictive personal enemies among communists” would prove his undoing.47 Soon she lost all hope of saving him, bitterly remarking to the former president that for Meta’s sake, she hoped he was dead. (In fact it appears that he was sentenced to death after the war, possibly on charges of treason, and later had that sentence commuted to twenty-seven years in prison.)48 Lane was sure he could have been rescued if only she had been a member of the Communist Party.49

  But as her other adopted sons faded away, Lane found a new protégé. Reader’s Digest was preparing a condensed version of Let the Hurricane Roar, and during the editing process she met with the Digest’s senior editor, Burt MacBride, at a restaurant north of Danbury. He brought his fourteen-year-old son, Roger, with him. Over the coming years, as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy and then at Princeton, Roger MacBride would regularly spend evenings and weekends with Lane, imbibing her philosophy.

  With others, Lane seemed increasingly incapable of maintaining relationships. Intemperate rhetoric, coupled with acting out, was becoming commonplace. In a New York City apartment she was renovating, she chased a building inspector down the stairs, calling him a “storm trooper.”50 She described herself to Jane Burr, her former landlady in Croton-on-Hudson, as “a hurricane in a teaspoon,” digging ditches and canning dozens of jars of string beans, peas, beets, and berries in her pressure cooker, explaining that those who gave in to rationing would “starve to death.”51 Burr would dismiss this as “completely absurd,” calling her old friend a “strange, erratic girl.”52 Journalist and editor Ernestine Evans, who had known Lane during her Greenwich Village period, told Berta Hader that she always imagined Lane “floating between sanity and a bedlam of hates.”53

  Increasingly, she was inflating minor issues into major affronts. She railed to George Bye about magazines requesting “all rights” to articles in exchange for payment, saying that this was “undermining … the human right of ownership of property” and amounted to an attack on “individual liberty.”54 Her ambitions were grandiose, too: she was planning a sequel to The Discovery of Freedom, to be called “The World Is Round.”55 She asked Bye to write to foreign embassies, asking for a “complete set of books” about their history, politics, and economies. “Letter head is very important to foreigners, as you know,” she advised.56

  In 1943, she had started writing a column, “Rose Lane Says,” for the Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper that she learned about when her black housekeeper left a copy in the Danbury house.57 Discovering the “tragic fallacy” of bigotry, she called on Americans to “renounce their race,” asserting that the notion of different races was a “fantastic belief.” Wartime rationing was “economic slavery,” she told her readers, not recognizing that they were the true experts on that topic.58 Urging insurrection, she assured them that the Founding Fathers wanted citizens to rise up and overthrow the state: that’s what the Second Amendment was for.59 She was fired from the Courier in 1945, which she attributed to its pro–New Deal sentiment.

  Profiled in the New York Times as “on strike against the New Deal,” Lane portrayed herself as a Revolutionary War hero, opposing George III’s onerous taxation to the end.60 She spoke of herself as having “two sons in the Army,” refusing a ration book, and stockpiling hundreds of pounds of pork and jars of preserved fruits and vegetables, not for the war effort but as a one-woman resistance movement. She had given up writing fiction, she said, to avoid taxation.

  Described as a “plump, motherly woman … the type that crossed the plains in covered wagon days,” she spoke darkly, as if Dust Bowl policies still prevailed, of neighborhood farmers’ killing hogs and “burying them in the ground” since there was no feed and they “weren’t allowed” to sell them. She knew someone working in a Bridgeport defense plant, she said, who was “penalized for producing.” She ushered a reporter down to her cellar to inspect the ranks of home-canned food on her shelves. “That’s social security,” she declared.

  The New Republic took up the challenge, fact-checking her accusation about the hogs, among other charges. Danbury representatives of the Department of Agriculture denied that there was a feed shortage in Connecticut. The Bridgeport plant likewise pronounced itself baffled. The magazine concluded that “Unfortunately, to Mrs. Lane the truth seems to be identical with any allegation that will further her own little private revolt against the war effort.”61

  But there was one member of Lane’s close circle who was neither perturbed nor alarmed by her politics, who in fact supported her beliefs wholeheartedly. That was her mother.

  * * *

  LAURA Ingalls Wilder rarely commented on her daughter’s work. Except for a few disparaging remarks about Let the Hurricane Roar, Wilder kept her own counsel about Lane’s fiction. She apparently enjoyed the Ozark novel Cindy, keeping a copy in her library, but her thoughts on Old Home Town, in which she appeared as the waspish mother of the protagonist, went unrecorded.

  The Discovery of Freedom was different, however. A month after it was published, Wilder wrote to Aubrey Sherwood in De Smet, to whom she had earlier confided news about Lane’s nervous breakdown, saying she found it “the best work [Rose] has ever done … fascinating reading.”62 She sent along the name and address of the publisher in case he wanted to order a copy for himself.

  In coming years, Wilder would recommend the book widely, along with La
ne’s pamphlet “Give Me Liberty.” In 1945, she sent the booklet to Clarence Kilburn, the conservative Republican congressman from Almanzo’s hometown of Malone, New York, and urged him to track down Discovery, saying: “Rose stopped writing fiction in 1937 and has done nothing but American propaganda since. She says she doesn’t think this is the time for any American to do anything else.”63 Wilder sustained that propaganda in other ways, too, donating generously to the National Economic Council.64

  Describing the family’s difficult early days at Rocky Ridge, she assured Kilburn that “What we accomplished was without help of any kind from any one. There was no alphabetical relief of any description and if there had been we would not have accepted it.” She resented the fact that others took advantage of such programs:

  Now here we are at seventy-eight and eighty-eight … paying taxes for the support of dependent children, so their parents need not work at anything else; for old age pensions to take care of those same parents when the children are grown, thus relieving the children of any responsibility and all of them from any incentive to help themselves.65

  Wilder even went so far as to claim that she had stopped writing to avoid increasing her tax burden, as her daughter had. She told the Kansas City Star in 1949: “The more I wrote the bigger my income tax got, so I stopped. Why should I go on at my age? Why, we don’t need it here anyway.”66 A Social Security number was never issued to her.67

  She never sought to explain the contradiction between her denunciation of New Deal programs and her praise of the Federal Farm Loan program she had worked for and borrowed from. Favorable terms on those loans were themselves federal assistance, subsidized by the government. And again, so were the lands given away by the Homestead Act, one of the largest federal handouts in American history.

  Why were homesteads and federal loans acceptable, while programs sponsored by the Roosevelt administration were not? Wilder’s inconsistency may be explained in part by the stark contrast of ambitions and scale. The Farm Loan program was a model of modest, community-based effort, hiring local bankers and, at least in Mansfield, a secretary-treasurer who was herself a paragon of rural farming. On the other hand, the massive New Deal programs brought in intimidating outsiders intent on inflicting top-down discipline, typified by the officious note-taking bureaucrat whom Almanzo ordered off his property with the threat of his shotgun.

  Yet Wilder never came to terms with what FDR saw and explained so clearly: the land had limits, and no solitary, undercapitalized farmer could ever hope to overcome them. She had seen those limits with her own eyes, time and again. But just like her father and his Populist brethren, she clung to the notion that an individual could wrest a living from it nonetheless, without government support.

  Her uncompromising, even dogmatic attitude suggests that her abhorrence of dependency was rooted in the humiliations she had worked so hard to leave behind. She herself had been dependent before, on a father forced to accept flour from the state of Minnesota, on a husband forced to sell his land after failing on his homestead. She had borne her own dependent child, someone who claimed to be supportive while actually needing support. For her, the very idea of dependence was wreathed with shame, the most deranging of human emotions.

  But a purely psychological explanation may not be adequate. Wilder wrote that her mother was fond of a saying: “What’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh.” If anything was bred in her family’s Congregationalist bones, it was their exemplary devotion to self-sufficiency. Samuel Ingalls, the “Unlearned Poet,” loathed Thomas Jefferson’s interference in free trade, every bit as much as his descendants loathed Roosevelt. For generation upon generation, all the way back to Edmund Ingalls—or for that matter to Richard Warren, Mayflower ancestor of the Delanos—Puritan identity was based on redemption through mastery of self, and the rigid application of principles including frugality, diligence, and, above all, independence.

  Wilder never wavered in reflecting those values. But late in her life, the language in which they were expressed was increasingly shaped by her daughter. Her uncritical acceptance of Lane’s most startling conspiracy theories grew more marked as she grew older. Writing to a niece and nephew in 1946, she caught them up on family news:

  The New Dealers are in control of most publishing houses in New York and because they think Rose’s “Discovery of Freedom” teaches ideas contrary to their plans, they are working against its publication and distribution. Even the publishers of the book are trying to stop it, so I doubt if you can get it from them.68

  * * *

  FORTUNATELY, the New Dealers held no sway over Wilder’s own readers, who continued to clamor for attention. As if to assuage them, Wilder began to distribute some of the iconographic objects associated with the Little House books. In 1944, she wrote to the South Dakota State Historical Society, which maintained a museum in the state capitol building in Pierre, asking if the state might wish to display her father’s violin. It did, arranging the gift.69 She sent along an inscription of her devising:

  Nicolas Amati violin

  Owned and played by Charles P. Ingalls before and during the settlement of De Smet Dakota Territory, later De Smet South Dakota from 1879 until his death in June 1902.

  Presented to South Dakota Historical Society by his daughters Laura Ingalls Wilder and Caroline Ingalls Swanzey and his granddaughter Rose Wilder Lane.70

  She requested that the fiddle be played several times a year, to keep it in good shape. (The instrument did have an “Amati” label pasted inside, but examination later showed it to be an inexpensive model, not a work of the famed seventeenth-century Italian violin maker.)71

  Other things passed out of the family’s control. Wilder saw her sister in October 1944, when Carrie Swanzey took the train to Mansfield for a visit. That same year, Carrie had sold, for $800, the last of the little houses their father had built. A room upstairs was still packed full of jumbled Ingalls possessions—books, photographs, and furniture—when the sale was completed.72

  A year and a half later, the little sister Wilder once fought so hard to protect fell ill. Born on the Kansas prairie, Carrie had modeled her adult life on her parents’, working quietly and patiently enduring what could not be changed. In May 1946, she began suffering from pain in the abdomen, perhaps related to the gallbladder. On June 1 she was found unconscious in her Keystone home, wrapped in a blanket on her couch, after worried friends pried open the door.73 Taken to a hospital in Rapid City, she died the following day.

  Like her father, Carrie Ingalls Swanzey had juggled many odd jobs, trying to get by. She had been a pioneering newspaper woman, a homesteader, and a miner’s wife. Like her father and husband, she left barely enough to pay her bills. Eastern Star, the Masonic group to which she had belonged throughout her adult life, helped arrange memorial services in both Keystone and her hometown. Her body was sent on the old familiar Chicago & North Western line to De Smet, where she would be laid next to her parents, her sister Mary, and the infant son of the Wilders. Grace and Nate Dow were only steps away.

  Wilder offered to pay outstanding expenses from the memorial service, expressing distress and regret that her own health prevented her from attending.74 The lawyer handling things in Keystone assured her that Carrie’s stepdaughter, family, and friends would be present at the Congregational Church in Keystone, from which Mount Rushmore was visible. Both there and in De Smet, he said, the services would be “fittingly and lovingly performed.”75 After the burial, he passed along a report from De Smet of a “lovely” evening ceremony.76 Wilder’s family was now reunited in the town they had helped found, in the wooded cemetery on a rise, with a view of the fields and prairie beyond. She was the only one left.

  * * *

  AS time went on, the kindness of Mansfield friends and neighbors, Silas and Neta Seal and others, was becoming increasingly important to the Wilders. Neta was busy with church and volunteer work, but the younger couple visited every Sunday afternoon, and the Wilders stop
ped by to see them when in town. At their service station on the main street, the Seals had torn down an old building, and—borrowing money interest-free from the Wilders—built a new home, adding a few smart apartments to rent out.77 Almanzo grew so fond of the idea of living in town that he wanted to leave the farmhouse and move into one of the apartments, until his wife told him to go to his workshop and decide what tools he wanted to get rid of. Wilder told Neta that he silently pondered that for a few hours and never brought it up again.

  Indefatigably, Wilder continued responding directly to readers year after year, throughout the 1940s and well into the next decade, fielding requests for autographs or photographs, and answering endless questions, ranging from the innocent and amusing to the offbeat: Did she have pets? Was she interested in insects? What was it like to ride in a covered wagon? Could she come for a visit and bring Almanzo? Some wrote to say that their grandparents remembered the grasshoppers or the blizzards.

  She had a significant adult readership, too. Parents, grandparents, teachers, and librarians read the books to children and found themselves drawn into a pioneer world they half-remembered or had heard of from their own elders. Boys as well as girls treasured the novels, responding to the Almanzo of Farmer Boy and his adventures and hardships.

  Always, readers were interested in whether the characters were real or fictional and whether the stories were true. And everyone wanted to know what had happened next. What became of Nellie Oleson? What became of Mary? Whatever became of Laura and Almanzo? Wilder shared with adult correspondents that some of the names were made up, but kept up the fiction that “Nellie Oleson” was a real person rather than a composite character, saying vaguely that she had moved back east.

  Universally, readers wanted her to know how much they loved her books. One child told her she’d wept when she came to the end of the series, so sorry there would be no more.78 Others offered stories, drawings, and poems of their own. Teachers sent photographs of class projects, such as a replica of the little house on the prairie constructed from orange crates and paper, a real pot hanging before the fireplace and a doll seated beside it.79 One photo captured children dressed as Pa, Ma, Laura, and Mary, with Ma towering over the rest, and Pa sporting a pasted-on beard.80 Another class dressed as Little House characters, boys donning Indian headdresses made of construction paper, girls clutching quilts, baskets, and dolls.81