Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder

by John E. Miller

  Left unresolved in Laura's mind was the future of Rose's marriage and repayment of the loan. Gillette had been a gracious host to his mother-in-law, taking her to the fair several times, and he and Rose had put on a show of togetherness for her benefit. Their marriage, however, did not have long to last, and Rose soon left him permanently, making the divorce final in 1918. Part of the problem, at least, lay in Gillette's difficulty in finding a job and, with it, the many schemes he had concocted for real estate or other ventures. These seldom bore fruit, and Rose simply tired of them. Laura was told that she and Almanzo would receive their $250 once a real estate deal that Gillette was involved in was finalized, but the people he was doing business with apparently were unable to keep their end of the bargain. At this time, the parents were on both the giving and the receiving ends of the money equation. Later, as Rose achieved greater success as a writer and obtained bigger paychecks, they would increasingly be on the receiving end of her generosity until, in the end, she became heir to the accumulated royalties her mother would earn from her own books.

  Home in Mansfield, Laura settled back into her usual routine of cooking, keeping house, tending garden, caring for her flock of chickens, and helping Almanzo when he needed an extra hand. But San Francisco had made a big change in her life. As soon as she returned, she started writing on a regular basis for the Ruralist. Almost without fail after this her column appeared twice monthly, and Laura began to earn recognition as a farm-paper writer. Although it was not quite the career step she or Rose might have wished for, it was at least an improvement, and during the next several years her ability to write a column every two weeks that would appeal to a varied readership honed her skill with words, standing her in good stead later when she moved from farm journalism toward fiction writing. Meanwhile, she also became more heavily involved in club activity than she had been earlier, playing a central role in establishing two different study groups: the Athenians and the Justamere Club. In addition, much of her time was spent working with a farm-loan organization, and she continued to be active in church and lodge activities. Middle age became for Laura an occasion not for withdrawal but for increased involvement in the community.

  Laura's first Missouri Ruralist columns were all individually titled, and they indicated that their author was “Mrs. A. J. Wilder,” the paper's “Home” editor. “Life Is an Adventure: Voyages of Discovery Can Be Made in Your Rocking-Chair,” “Facts versus Theories,” “Haying while the Sun Shines,” “Learning to Work Together,” “Thanksgiving Time,” and “Keep the Saving Habit” were typical of the themes she developed. In May 1919 the column took the regular title of “The Farm Home,” and from June 1921 until she stopped writing for the paper three and a half years later, the column was called “As a Farm Woman Thinks.” The paper's twice-monthly schedule required versatility and creativity in conjuring up new subjects. Describing her own experiences at Rocky Ridge Farm could carry her only so far. She looked for interesting items in the newspaper, developments in agricultural methods, and general observations about human nature, based upon her own experience and reading. From time to time she culled something from her memory, perhaps a girlhood experience that might have some lesson to impart to her readers. Earlier, Rose had encouraged her to draw upon her own “life story” for material. The brief vignettes from her past that Laura now sometimes included in her column provided a start in this direction. Later, she would transform some of them into episodes in her novels.25

  The Ruralist columns generally ran between eight hundred and a thousand words. Almost always they described a situation, episode, or development and drew some kind of meaning or lesson from it for her readers. Before San Francisco, the few articles that she had published in the Ruralist were mainly geared to concrete descriptions of people (including herself and Almanzo) who had made successes in farming. Now, unencumbered by any particular formula, she turned her attention toward a variety of subjects. Mostly she advised readers about how to enjoy life more fully and how to become better people rather than instruct them about how to become better farmers or homemakers. In focusing her attention upon the values that people should live by, Laura was providing them with moral lessons in nonfictional form that she later would serve up in fictional form in her novels.26

  Most, but not all, of the values that she espoused served to reinforce tradition and convention. Hard work, honesty, thrift, and self-help were, not surprisingly, central themes. William Holmes McGuffey, Horatio Alger, and the self-help promoters of the 1910s and 1920s defined the essence of American character for many people, including Mrs. A. J. Wilder of Mansfield, Missouri. Her own experiences with her husband on Rocky Ridge Farm proved that hard work pays off. Work imparted meaning to life and made leisure enjoyable. Laura worried that the old incentive to work was breaking down and that more and more people were shirking their responsibilities. People needed to love their work—work with a capital W—for in meaningful labor they would “grow stronger and more beautiful of soul.”27

  Values such as industry, frugality, and independence were in themselves good, but, like anything else, they could be carried too far. Laura emphasized the need for balance in people's lives, because “every good becomes evil when carried to excess by poor, faulty mortals.” A frequent theme, based heavily upon her own practice, was the need for thrift, but she realized that economy, too, could be carried to extremes and become miserliness. Even excessive religiousness could turn into fanaticism and intolerance.28

  This emphasis on balance in Laura's thinking helped her to avoid some of the tendencies that inclined her daughter to shift moods abruptly and to swing wildly from the extreme left to the extreme right in her political views and to adhere fanatically to certain attitudes and principles. Laura, too, believed in self-help and independence. “A bird in a cage is not a pretty sight, to me,” she wrote, anticipating an image of free flight that she would later use to describe herself in The Long Winter. But self-reliance needed to be supplemented by neighborliness and a sense of community. Laura was especially partial to “workings,” where people traded labor with one another in harvesting crops, husking corn, and erecting buildings. One of her columns recounted how once, when a farmer became ill and was unable to plant his crop of oats, his neighbors did the work for him. This “spirit of helpfulness and comradeship” was something that Laura wanted to cultivate in people. Government should remain small and as unobtrusive as possible, she believed, but it did have valid functions to perform. Contrary to those who wanted to abolish federal regulatory agencies after the world war, Laura preferred to treat each department on its own merits. In citing the case of excessive sugar prices, for example, she observed, “If the sugar equalization board is any curb on the sugar trust, it is devoutly to be hoped that the board will be continued, especially when one remembers that five persons are said to control the sugar output of the world.”29

  Laura sometimes betrayed an antiurban bias in her references to the prevalence of noise, dirt, and danger in large cities, but she also appreciated some of the amenities of city life that remained in short supply in rural America. She accepted and approved of the benefits of modern technology, but she also preached the virtues of small-scale agriculture and, like Henry David Thoreau, urged people to simplify their lives. Both now and later when she began to write fiction, she concentrated on the ordinary occurrences of everyday life. In a Ruralist column in July 1917 the bouquets of wildflowers that Almanzo brought her put her in mind of the days of her childhood when she and Mary would walk to Sunday school with their father from their house on Plum Creek. “The little white daisies with their hearts of gold grew thickly along the path,” she recalled. “I have forgotten what I was taught on those days also. I was only a little girl, you know. 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.” These were the kinds of ordinary things that people might be expected to forget a
s time went by, Laura commented, “but at the long last, I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.”30

  These were some of the lessons that Laura had absorbed after a half century of living: there is beauty in everyday things if people will just look for it; people keep growing all the time; the word can't should be eliminated from our vocabularies; there are two sides to everything; don't worry; life is more interesting when we look below surface appearances; we learn by example, so children need to be taught well at home; and people always should be ready to grasp opportunity. Always on the lookout for deeper meanings and for lessons applicable to daily living, Laura understood well that the precepts to be derived from experience can be contradictory. One column, for example, examined the conflicting messages we sometimes receive, such as “a stitch in time saves nine” versus “it is never too late to mend.”31

  Many things drew Laura's ire, among them selfishness, overreliance on experts, the tendency to find fault with others, negative—as opposed to friendly—gossip, swearing, relativistic ideas, and the failure to follow Christian precepts. If a single lesson stood out, it was the necessity of love, a message she derived no doubt both from the warm and loving family environment that she had grown up in and from her own experiences as an adult. The commitment to love was strengthened by her religious beliefs. While seldom mentioned explicitly in her columns, biblical teachings lay at the core of her thinking. Once she observed, “As a child I learned my Bible lessons by heart, in the good old-fashioned way, and once won the prize for repeating correctly more verses from the Bible than any other person in the Sunday school.” As an adult she kept close at hand a handwritten list of Scripture verses that she found especially meaningful. Rejecting simple nostalgia as an adequate guide for living, Laura proposed a better approach: “Love and service, with a belief in the future and expectation of better things in the tomorrow of the world is a good working philosophy.” Love naturally grew and matured within the family setting and revealed itself in the willingness of family members to sacrifice for others. Love stood in opposition to anger, which was a destructive force in people's lives. But love had to be given freely; it could not “be demanded or driven or insisted upon. It must be wooed to be won.”32

  Laura's regular columns displayed the workings of her mind. She was engaged in the developments of the time—technological change, social and economic trends, war, and politics—but mostly concerned herself with everyday events. Just as she urged her readers to aim at a sense of balance in their thoughts and behaviors, Laura, in her approach to the world, had two opposing beliefs: a healthy regard for fact and experience on the one hand and a strong sense of idealism and wonder on the other. In warning people not to become overreliant upon experts, she expressed her strong belief that fact superseded theory. Experience, in her view, was the great teacher, and one had to be attentive to it and learn its lessons. But experience and surface appearances did not encompass everything. A developed sense of wonder was also conducive to a fully lived life. People needed to probe beneath the surfaces of things to search for deeper meaning; thus, her admonition to “look for the fairies.” Surely there was no harm in idealizing things, and in fact there was much to gain. “There are deeps beyond deeps in the life of this wonderful world of ours,” she wrote. Revising the metaphor, she encouraged her readers to emulate the lotus plant and to “strive toward light and purity into the sunshine of the good.” The wisdom Laura dispensed in her biweekly columns gave evidence of an active, searching intelligence and later found its way into her novels.33

  As soon as the United States became involved in World War I, Laura made the conflict a frequent topic in her columns. Rather than condemning American participation as un-Christian or inhumane, she gave her full support to the war effort and to President Wilson and other governmental leaders. In her first column in May 1917, one month after Congress declared war, Laura urged her female readers to do their part in “fighting for Uncle Sam” by taking their place on the battle line just behind the trenches. “Our work is not spectacular, and in doing it faithfully we shall win no war medals or decorations, but it is absolutely indispensable,” she asserted.34

  Soon young men from around the area were enlisting and registering for the draft. As elsewhere around the United States, Mansfield's residents organized farewell dinners for their “boys” and wished them well as they departed for boot camp from the Frisco train depot. After a farewell dinner at the park on the square in August, the soldiers-to-be lined up for people to shake their hands. Afterward the crowd joined in singing “America,” and Reverend John O. Stine pronounced a benediction before the train left the station. Laura observed that with so many local young men leaving, it brought the war closer to home. Evidence of its impact was everywhere. A representative from the State Agricultural College at Columbia came to Mansfield to discuss how farmers could increase their production. A local committee set up to coordinate these activities was chaired by the Wilders’ friend J. W. Brentlinger. As the bureaucratic wheels in Washington began to turn, a variety of emergency agencies sprang up to coordinate production and manage the economy.35

  Much of the initiative for converting to a wartime footing proceeded from local individuals, businesses, and organizations. The Frisco Railroad distributed copies of “The Frisco Man Creed” to all of its employees. It proclaimed, “I hereby affirm my loyalty to the United States and its flag. It is my flag and my country, and I am ready at all times to defend and serve it. I also attest my loyalty to the Frisco railroad, and will do my utmost to protect its property.” A number of churches designated the first Sunday in July as “Patriotic Sunday,” and their Sunday schools contributed their collections that day to the Red Cross. A local unit of that organization was formally put in place in Mansfield in August 1917. “Mrs. Bessie Wilder” was listed among its seventy-seven charter members. Women also had an opportunity to participate in the war effort by signing up with the Women's Committee of the Council of National Defense. Thirty-six women enrolled in Mansfield at the initial registration, and it is interesting that in reporting the sign-up the newspaper used their first names rather than their husbands’ names. In the reports of the activities of women's clubs, church groups, county-fair prize winners, and other women's organizations, the participants were usually identified simply as the wives of their husbands. World War I, therefore, can be seen as part of the transition from “Mrs. A. J. Wilder” to “Laura Ingalls Wilder.” But when Mansfield went “over the top” on the third Liberty Loan drive in April 1918, and the Mirror listed the names of all the bond purchasers, it was “Mrs. A. J. Wilder” who was named again.36

  The war became a pervasive presence in people's lives. Following directives from the Food Administration in Washington, Mansfieldians observed wheatless and meatless days as conservation measures. Daylight saving time went into effect as a means of conserving fuel. The newspaper frequently reprinted letters that had been sent home from men in the service. The Committee on Public Information dispatched “Four Minute Men” to deliver patriotic talks before movie showings and at community gatherings. School concerts included obligatory war tunes on their programs. In newspaper cartoons, in movies at the Nugget Theater, in church-service songs, and in a variety of other ways, the war constantly was brought home to people. “The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin” packed filmgoers in at the theater for two days in August 1918. The propaganda movie was advertised as “a picture which makes American blood boil and holds the audience with its dramatic intensity.” On New Year's Eve, at the end of America's first year of participation, an overflow crowd at the opera house enjoyed a “war entertainment” arranged by Dr. F.H. Riley, president of the Wright County Council of Defense, Mrs. W. M. Divan, chair of the Women's Committee, and Miss Bertha Miller. To open the program, the latter sang “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” accompanied by the Mansfield concert band. There followed in succession several other musical numbers, a drill performed
by twelve girls trained by Dr. Riley, a humorous skit titled “The Awkward Squad,” an address called “The War” by a local politician, appearances by two soldiers who were home on furlough, an “instructive talk” about the Council of Defense, a reading by Miss Miller called “A Voice from a Far Country,” and an appeal for contributions of time and money to the Red Cross.37

  Although Laura was seldom mentioned by the Mansfield Mirror as participating in community activities and events outside of her membership in study clubs and the Methodist Ladies Aid, the paper did mention her involvement in the Red Cross Society during the war, which led her to work with people outside her usual circle. For example, meetings at the Masonic Hall in April 1918 for making undershirts, hospital garments, and surgical bandages included study-club standbys such as the wives of N. J. Craig, Dwight W. Hoover, J. A. Riley, W. M. Divan, G. C. Freeman, J. A. Fuson, and P. W. Newton, as well as many other less familiar names. The following month people donated items for a Red Cross sale to raise funds for the organization. Almanzo was listed as contributing a brown Leghorn rooster, two hens, and a bushel of potatoes, while Laura provided fifteen thoroughbred brown Leghorn eggs and a rooster. Six hundred people were served dinner by the women before the auction, which netted $2,074.35 for the cause. In one of her Missouri Ruralist columns, Laura lamented that she had not been able to spend as much time on Red Cross work as some of her friends in town, but later, after thinking about everything that had been accomplished, she felt better.38