Rose's concern for her parents was genuine and well-meaning, but some of her motives for finding them a permanent place to live were selfish. She was as interested in her own freedom as she was in their welfare. One possible avenue of escape that occurred to her was to take her mother on a trip to Paris and then send her home to Mansfield while she proceeded to other places. “It wouldn't be like just packing up and leaving again,” she rationalized. Vague feelings of guilt no doubt intertwined with resentment, as Rose fretted about having to behave as her mother's “slavey,” dutifully “scrubbing floors and washing windows and hauling water and bringing in wood and washing dishes three times a day and peeling potatoes and waiting on the pigs, and all the rest of it. It's either do it, or see my mother—who's simply broken down under it and should be in a hospital. What the hell can one do? It's ridiculous.”5
Once the initial glow of being home with her parents wore off, life at Rocky Ridge quickly settled down to dull routine. Almanzo and Laura's days were brightened by Rose's presence. Despite church functions, Justamere and other club activities, occasional visits with neighbors, and trips to town for groceries and other business, living on the farm could be suffocating for someone like Rose. Laura relished having her daughter home with her and let her know it, but she also induced guilt feelings in Rose by reminding her of how lonesome it could be without her. Once, after a friend had departed, Laura commented, “Now can you imagine what it is like when you go, and there is nobody?” While her parents hoped that she might stay with them permanently, Rose quickly felt entrapped, considering life in Mansfield intolerable. Letters to distant friends sounded her litany of frustration, hopelessness, and resentment at her imprisonment on the farm. Generally, however, she managed to hide these feelings from her parents and from others with whom she interacted in the ordinary round of activities. Rose acted her part convincingly, leading people to believe that she was enjoying herself. She created a wall between her mundane interactions with people and her personal feelings and thoughts. She made it difficult to penetrate her carefully crafted facade of a gay, witty, happy-go-lucky extrovert who was interested in everything and everybody Only in her letters and in sporadically kept diaries and journals did she lay bare her darker moods and more irreverent speculations.6
Rose's presence at Rocky Ridge enlivened the household in many ways. A steady stream of her friends from New York and elsewhere passed through the farmhouse to visit her, some settling in to stay for extended periods of time. Catherine Brody, a newspaperwoman from New York whom Rose had met in Paris, stayed with the family for several days while on her way to California. At the end of March, Guy Moyston, who was headed in the other direction after working on a play in California, accepted Rose's invitation to visit and wound up staying for three months. The two mixed fun and work, going on a fishing trip, taking long walks, and bringing in the cows when the sun went down. In the meantime, they started collaborating on a magazine serial and a play. The relationship between them was more than professional. The two had met when she was working for the San Francisco Bulletin and he was a reporter for the Associated Press. They corresponded regularly throughout the 1920s, and she eventually turned down his marriage proposal. During the time that he was staying with the Wilders in Mansfield, he went out of his way to make friendly banter with Laura and Almanzo, and they were sorry to see him leave.7
On the first Sunday in July, Rose rode with her parents in the Craigs’ new Studebaker to attend the annual songfest at Hartville. Every year people drove in from all over to participate in the Wright County Singing Convention at the courthouse. The weather on this particular day was ideal, not as hot as it typically got in the Ozarks in early July, and Rose estimated the attendance at about two thousand people (the newspaper guessed perhaps three thousand). Songfests like this were popular all around the region. The annual event stood out among similar gatherings that were held in churches and other gathering places. The programs typically began with prayers and devotions, proceeding with solos, group performances, and audience sing-alongs. The Hartville songfest lasted for two hours in the morning and another two in the afternoon, with an hour and a half in between for a picnic lunch. Rose probably was thinking of this experience when she wrote a short story published later in Country Gentleman about a community songfest held at a church at “Prairie Hollow” in fictional Cedar County. She described the people and the songs and the abundant tables of food, overloaded with chickens, hams, platters of fish, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, peas, beans, corn, succotash, biscuits, jelly, and more. The general tone of the story, though not entirely, was condescending toward the God-fearing churchgoers about whom she was writing.8
Laura's social life continued to revolve heavily around the clubs she belonged to. Now she could take Rose along—sometimes willingly, sometimes not—to the meetings. The Justamere Club gathered monthly on Tuesday afternoons in members’ homes, and Laura seldom missed a meeting. Once or twice a year husbands were invited to join their wives for an evening get-together. One Thursday evening in early January 1924, a couple of weeks after Rose's return to Rocky Ridge and during Catherine Brody's stay with them, Laura invited her Justamere friends and their husbands over for a homecoming party. More than thirty guests packed the farmhouse and listened to their famous village daughter regale them with tales of her recent travels and inspected souvenirs from the countries she had visited. In June it was her mother's regular turn to host the group at their place, and Rose again provided the program, this time relating “some unique stories on European Battles.”9
The Mansfield Mirror faithfully reported the names of those in attendance at these sessions and often commented that the papers and discussions were “interesting” and that the dainty refreshments served afterward were “delicious.” Rose, for her part, complained about how boring they usually were in letters to friends, explaining that she tagged along with her mother only under duress. Nevertheless, she did find the meetings diversionary and sometimes even admitted that her companions at these sessions were worth getting to know better. It was raining on the morning of the scheduled meeting in July, which Rose hoped might serve as an excuse for not going. “But there are so many rows brewing that I will probably miss something if I don't,” she noted wryly to Moyston.10
Laura also continued to actively participate in the Athenian Club, which she had been a charter member of when it began in 1916. She rode with friends or had Almanzo drive her when the get-togethers were held in Hartville. In February 1925 she hosted a joint gathering for members and their husbands of both the Justamere Club and the Athenians. Guests were instructed to wear costumes from twenty years earlier, and they played old-fashioned games in rooms lighted by candles. Laura also continued her involvement in Eastern Star and usually was elected as an officer in yearly elections. She served as chaplain several times during the late 1920s, and also acted the role of associate conductor and filled other positions. In April 1925 she went to Mountain Grove with Rose and several other chapter members to attend an Eastern Star instructional school. The following year she and the other officers went to Mountain Grove for a district meeting.11
A local chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which had been active earlier in town, reorganized itself in 1925 with about two dozen members. Although Laura sympathized with the group's purpose, she apparently felt that she was too heavily involved in other activities to join. She sporadically attended meetings and activities staged by the Methodist Ladies Aid. Like similar organizations run by the Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, the group mixed Bible readings and devotions with refreshments, gossip, needlework, and planning for bazaars, chicken-pie suppers, and ice-cream socials. Laura brought Rose to a meeting in February 1925 when, following an informal hour of visiting over needlework, dainty refreshments consisting of hot coffee, cake, sandwiches, and pickles were served. To commemorate George Washington's birthday, the rooms of the home where the meeting was held were decorated with fl
ags and hatchets, and each guest received a tiny hatchet as a favor to take home with her.12
If Laura had any inkling of Rose's growing dissatisfaction with her situation and her disdain for many of the people around her, she likely kept that knowledge to herself. Rose, after all, was adept at masking her feelings, and she saved expression of her dark moods for letters to out-of-town friends such as Guy Moyston and Fremont Older, her former boss in San Francisco. She hated being saddled with housework—cooking, cleaning, scrubbing, dusting, and hauling water—although no doubt she exaggerated the amount and onerousness. She did have a tendency to make things harder than they had to be. While her dislike for household chores was genuine, her attitude toward the residents of Mansfield remained more ambivalent. She discovered few of them to be witty, knowledgeable, or intelligent enough to be very engaging. But she took a sort of anthropological interest in observing them and wrote some of them into her short stories in disguised form. Her condescending attitude toward Ozarkians in general showed through in the hillbilly stories that she began submitting to magazines. Occasionally, however, she was fully engaged in some of the local activities, such as fox hunting, and she found herself enjoying the company of people such as the Craigs or the Shorts, who took her on fox hunts.13
Part of Rose's trouble with “ordinary” people lay in her need to carve out enough time for herself to write. She could not afford too often to wile her days away in gossip and other diversions. When she was in the right mood, her output could be prodigious. During peak periods of production, she could pound away on the typewriter for ten to fourteen hours a day, and block out almost everything else. In 1924, as she labored on a variety of projects, including a novel based on Jack London's life, Rose's incessant typing may have driven her mother to distraction, or, more likely, stimulated her to think more seriously about her own writing career. After more than a decade of writing for farm papers, Laura had become a disciplined writer, able to produce thoughtful, readable prose for a general audience and to meet regular deadlines. What possibilities existed beyond that? Might she aspire to reach a wider audience, as her daughter already had?
Rose thought so, and she helped Laura publish in Country Gentleman two short articles describing her kitchen and her dining room as examples of ideal places for living and working in a farm home. Since her first national exposure in McCall's five years earlier, Laura had not written any more material for large-circulation magazines. Toward the end of 1924, while visiting friends in Croton-on-Hudson, north of New York City, Rose refashioned her mother's draft of the kitchen article, pulling a new lead for it from the second paragraph, pruning dry details, and organizing the material into several sections that made it easier for readers to follow. When it appeared, with photographs taken at Rocky Ridge, as “My Ozark Kitchen” in the January 17, 1925, issue of the magazine, once again it carried the byline “Laura Ingalls Wilder.” For her effort Laura received $150. The publication on June 13 of “The Farm Dining Room” netted her another $150. She told Rose that because Rose's work on it had ensured its sale, it took some of the joy out of the accomplishment, but Rose tried to reassure her that what modifications she had made in the piece were minimal. All she had done to the story, she contended, was “an ordinary re-write job.” Although Laura's Missouri Ruralist style of writing was not yet capable of gaining her acceptances from high-tone publications such as Country Gentleman, Rose sought to convince her that “you have just as much C.G. copy in you as you have Ruralist copy. It's only a question of learning how to handle it.” Six months’ work and practice, Rose promised, would give her “the hang of it,” but she indicated that Laura would have to listen carefully to her advice and then follow it.14
“What I am trying to do is to give you the benefit of these ten years of work and study,” Rose told her mother.
I'm trying to train you as a writer for the big market. You must understand that what sold was your article, edited. You must study how it was edited, and why, and just what was done. So that next time you can do the editing yourself. Above all, you must listen to me. I don't pretend that everything I say is pure wisdom, to be swallowed whole. But every darn word of it is worth good hard thought. If you don't do what I tell you to, you must at least have good reasons for not doing it, and know exactly what they are, and be able to show how and where and why your work is better because you didn't do as I said.15
It was good advice, hard-won from a decade of learning the writing trade herself. But Rose's sincere desire to transform her mother into a more professional writer, and thereby also enhancing her financial situation, was also inextricably tangled up with her own vague feelings of inadequacy in her mother's presence. Being an only child undoubtedly increased the protectiveness and concern that both parents exhibited toward her, but in the case of her mother the imperative to exercise control appears to have been especially prominent. Rose, in many ways, was just like her mother: ambitious, strong willed, cantankerous, and inclined to act on her beliefs. Both strongly desired freedom of action; both consciously understood the necessity of reining in one's own instincts and inclinations by practicing self-control. Such a personality, however, increases the likelihood that a person will periodically unleash her aggressive impulses on other people. In the case of Rose, whose letters, diaries, journals, and published writings testify eloquently to this pattern of behavior, the evidence is more conclusive than for her mother, because she left more traces behind.
Rose could not appreciate what she considered to be her parents’ excessively frugal mode of existence. She had experienced poverty while growing up, and hated it. Deprivation as a child had humiliated her, and the memory of it continued to cast a pall over her. Her parents’ penny-pinching habits made no sense to her. She did not understand why they should work so hard to save when it seemed much easier to earn a little extra income. “I never saw any human being so determined to be hideously and insanely extravagant,” she wrote her mother, “you will spend a hundred dollars, any time, for one dollar bill.” Able to earn as much as a thousand dollars for a short story that she could turn out in days or weeks, Rose could not understand the mentality of people—even if they were her own parents—who were so close with a dollar. She insisted that her mother, too, could—indeed, should—be earning four or five thousand dollars a year from her writing. But only if she would take Rose's instruction. This relationship between tutor and trainee cast Rose in the dominant position, something that she had not been able to assume with her mother before, despite the widespread acclaim that her writing talents had earned for her. Now, for her mother's own good, she would have to listen to Rose. “Just because I was once three years old, you honestly oughtn't to think that I'm never going to know anything more than a three-year-old,” she wrote her. “Sometime you ought to let me grow up.” Rose's resentment was palpable, but it was tempered by her genuine love for her mother. She offered Laura strong encouragement and reassured her of her love in closing the letter.16
Boosting her mother's writing career was the best way Rose could think of to assist her parents in becoming more financially independent. She did feel obligated for their welfare, but she hoped to escape getting physically tied down to them. She wanted to build up a large enough nest egg so that the interest on it would be sufficient for their needs. It would be helpful if her mother could derive a substantial income from her own writing. Few other alternatives came to mind. One possibility that may have been motivated as much by the income that was attached to it as by anything else was Laura's bid for political office during the spring of 1925. A three-hundred-dollar annual salary came with the post of collector of Pleasant Valley Township. Rose told Guy Moyston, “If she's elected, it will take quite a load off my mind, as the work will go in nicely with her Farm Loan work, and I think if she's once in office she'll stay there as long as she wants the job.”17
Laura ran on an independent farmers’ ticket. Her campaign for the office was largely limited to announcing her candidacy and payi
ng to insert a four-hundred-word statement for several weeks running in the Mansfield Mirror. In it she emphasized her character and her experience as an organizer of and as secretary-treasurer for the Mansfield branch of the National Farm Loan Association. “My character is known to neighbors and friends throughout the county,” the statement said. “I have been a busy farm woman and have not had time to do as much for the community as I would have liked to do, but wherever possible I have done my best.” In her seven years at the farm association she had carried out her duties competently and honestly, she asserted, which qualified her for the position of township collector. “I am not a politician and have no thought of entering politics,” she said, promising, if elected, to fulfill her obligations in the same fair-minded way that she had done for all the other community organizations with which she had been connected.18
The election was set for March 31, giving the candidates a little more than a month to conduct their campaigns. Rose reported that things were proceeding “fast and furious,” with all kinds of intrigues going on. A week before the election, she commented somewhat mysteriously, “Mama Bess’ campaign seems to be progressing favorably. Still, of course, all the whiskey element's against her, likewise the W.C.T.U. and the churches.”19
When the ballots were tallied, Laura had finished a distant third, garnering only 60 votes, compared with 266 for C. A. Stephens and 122 for Hugh Williams. Rose claimed that the election had been stolen from her mother; they knew for certain, she contended, of more than 100 votes that had been cast for her. “I'm rather much disappointed,” she wrote Guy Moyston, “but thank goodness Mama Bess doesn't awfully mind. The steal was so raw that everyone knows it. And of course will go on letting it happen, over and over again. The dear people don't really care a darn about self-government, in spite of all the Upton Sinclairs.” Just as likely, Laura's longtime Democratic affiliations and her more recent identification with the independent farmers’ movement worked against her, since the Republican Party dominated Mansfield and the area surrounding it. The victor, C. A. Stephens, was a Republican and a Royal Arch Mason to boot, making him a tough candidate to beat.20
Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder Page 19
