And my expense runneth over
Surely unemployment and poverty shall follow me,
All the days of my life and
I will live in a mortgaged house forever.90
In Roosevelt’s second inaugural, he spoke of seeing a third of the nation “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” and called the country to action, saying that “the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”91 It was a humane response to the suffering of those most affected by the Great Depression. In cities, thousands of homeless were still living in shantytowns and shacks cobbled together from scrap lumber, orange crates, or cardboard; others occupied rusted cars. The suicide rate had peaked in 1932, and after dropping briefly was on the rise again.92 Malnutrition rose among children, leading to rickets. With tax revenue plummeting, schools closed, and some children ended up supporting their parents, working in meatpacking plants or sweatshops—at least until another New Deal law, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, put a stop to it.
But Roosevelt’s rhetoric changed nothing about the way Wilder and her daughter defined the nation’s priorities. They were political supporters of a local Ozark boy, Dewey Jackson Short, who had been born near Branson, not far from Mansfield. A World War I veteran, former pastor at a Methodist Episcopal church, and an excoriating orator in the tradition of Clarence Darrow, Short had begun serving as a congressman for Missouri’s 7th District in 1935. A few weeks after starting his term, he memorably defined the U.S. Congress as a “supine, subservient, soporific, superfluous, supercilious, pusillanimous body of nitwits” who had turned over their powers to the New Dealers—“tax-eating, conceited autocratic bureaucrats, a bunch of theoretical, intellectual, professorial nincompoops out of Columbia University.”93 Wilder and her daughter loved him.
In the spring of 1937, Lane decamped to New York City, permanently removing herself to the East Coast. Almost immediately, her parents began to reclaim their farmhouse, repairing the damage left by former tenants. Airing and disinfecting—Lane and many of her guests were smokers—Almanzo patiently restored the woodwork in the front room, sanding it to remove stains and burned spots. In his humble fashion, he wrote: “I told Bessie I was not a goin to moove till I got the smell out.”94 Sometime that summer, the Wilders moved back to the farmhouse they had built, leaving the Rock House, their daughter’s stony gift to them, empty.95
* * *
IN letters in 1937, the two women traded admiring remarks about Dewey Short’s wisdom while plotting how to cheat on their taxes. That March, Wilder urged her daughter to continue to claim the “head of the household” exemption at Rocky Ridge, even though she’d moved away.96 She knew it was wrong, scrawling at the top of the page: “I’ll burn your letter and you burn this.”97 During these feverish reckonings, she made a bald admission. “God knows the farm is not self supporting,” she told her daughter, who had reason to know. “You have contributed to keeping it up. You don’t have to pay rent,” she added, in belated acknowledgment of Lane’s overgenerous, even self-sacrificial support of the family.
Both women grew markedly more agitated by New Deal social engineering that year, and their rhetoric waxed harsher. “Truman is a liar,” Wilder wrote of the new Democratic senator from Missouri, a keen supporter of Roosevelt’s programs who had come under fire earlier for accepting a Civil Works Administration patronage job from a Kansas City pol. “People drive me wild. They as a whole are getting just what they deserve,” she concluded, before breaking off to thank Lane effusively for sending her a new suit. She had so many new clothes, she said, there was no need to “make over the old ones” in her usual thrifty way. Instead, she would let Almanzo cut them up to braid into rag rugs, a favorite pastime in winter. “As for giving them to anyone,” she wrote, the lazy sods “would go on relief before they’d make them over.” She was “fed up” with giving things to people, she said, not noticing the irony in her position.
The stress caused by the Depression manifested itself in myriad ways, sparking a preoccupation with frugality that would last a lifetime for many Americans. But for Wilder and Lane, the spectacle of extreme poverty and near-starvation must have triggered their own deep-seated anxieties and shameful memories. They themselves had faced such existential threats before and survived, barely. Wilder had long been intensely frugal; her daughter, on the other hand, exhibited the kind of voracious spending that is another symptom of those who have experienced extreme privation. The two women coped with recurring fears by belittling the needs and anxieties of others.
Wilder had plunged into work on her Silver Lake book that year, expounding to Lane on what drove them to Dakota Territory: the Ingallses’ harrowing time in Burr Oak and Walnut Grove, when she worked as a child to help support her parents. She veered from rationalizing her father’s financial mistakes to severely criticizing those of her neighbors. Of her father, she wrote that he was always “getting the worst of the bargain,” and ended up owing so much money to William Masters in Walnut Grove that he left town in debt, as he had in Burr Oak. He had no choice, she argued: “There were no jobs lying around to go begging while the government hired men as now. Interest was high. A man once in debt would stand no chance of getting out.” Ever his defender, she excused his shortcomings, despite knowing full well that farming required sharp business skills. “Pa was no business man,” she told Lane, summing up his character. “He was a hunter and trapper, a musician and poet.”98
She made no such excuses for Bruce Prock, the Rocky Ridge handyman, who had three cows but always seemed short of ready cash:
If we had such opportunities when we were young we would have been rich. How they can keep from it I can’t see, nor what they do with the money they can’t prevent themselves from making.… And still Bruce is always hard up.… But I find my heart is getting harder. I can have no least sympathy for people any more who can do and will only holler that there is no chance any more. I wish they all might have the opportunities we had when I was young and no more. Wouldn’t it be fun to watch ’em?99
Her own family was not immune to what she called “disgrace.”100 Back in De Smet, Nate and Grace were on relief, she learned, receiving surplus commodity food and payment for leaving their land fallow, part of the New Deal’s conservation plan.101 Carrie wrote asking if Rose could spare any old clothes, and Wilder passed on the request. Knowing how her older sister felt about such matters, Carrie had insisted: “above all things don’t send me any of yours. I can get along.”102 To her credit, Wilder ignored that.
Such emotionally tangled issues of being beholden, of owing and being owed, had troubled Wilder all her life. She had helped support her own family, working since she was nine. She had turned over the money she made teaching school to her parents, to help send her sister Mary to college, a chance she never got herself. She was now beholden to her daughter, and had been for years.
Exhausted by cross-currents of guilt and resentment, she seemed to have no measure of sympathy left. She could not extend herself further. Her attitude toward the New Deal was hardly unusual, reflecting the convictions of Mansfield and rural farmers across the country. But it was also profoundly, painfully, and ineradicably personal.
All I Have Told Is True
By this time, Wilder was becoming a local celebrity. The publication of Little House on the Prairie had been applauded on the front page of the Mansfield Mirror: “Every chapter has a thrill.”103 The newspaper also covered the Wilders’ golden anniversary, and an item reported her finishing the Plum Creek manuscript.
Since their return to the farmhouse, Wilder had been writing in a nook, “a corner between my bedroom to the east and the living room at the north,” she wrote to a fan. “It is a very small room with a window to the west and one to the south, looking out into the big trees around the house. The room is filled with my desk and a table, couch and small bookcase. It is usually a mess
with papers and books and mss. scattered around.”104 The beautifully carved wooden desk was fitted with cubbyholes and drawers. The walls were papered in a delicate floral pattern. The most fanciful element was an old-fashioned fainting couch under the window: Wilder was accustomed to getting up in the night, awakened by recollections. “I can’t work … in the evening,” she told Rose, “because if I do, I can’t sleep. My brain goes right on remembering and it’s H—.”105
A train on the track, she was writing continuously, sometimes round the clock. Exhausted or no, she had the look of a woman who was professionally hitting her stride. On Lane’s advice, she had publicity photos taken in Springfield to promote Plum Creek, and she had grown into the role of sophisticated author: serious but not severe, white hair swept back from her face, long drop earrings accenting the line of her jaw, her customary brooch at her collar. Lane told her she looked like a “lovely [literary] lion,” and it was true.
She was asked to give talks to admiring groups, and addressed the Sorosis Club in nearby Mountain Grove, the local chapter of a national women’s organization, on “My Work.” She spoke of how gratifying it was to hear that schoolchildren across the country devoured each book and called for more, reminding her of her own daughter: “Oh tell me another, Mama Bess! Please tell me another story.”106
She mentioned trying to nail down facts about Indian chiefs and grasshoppers, and described how concentrating on specific memories could bring long-forgotten details to mind. She concluded with a statement of her philosophy: “Running through all the stories, like a golden thread, is the same thought of the values of life. They were courage, self reliance, independence, integrity and helpfulness. Cheerfulness and humor were handmaids to courage.” Describing her parents’ travails, she wrote:
When possible, they turned the bad into good. If not possible, they endured it. Neither they nor their neighbors begged for help. No other person, nor the government, owed them a living. They owed that to themselves and in some way they paid the debt. And they found their own way.
Their old fashioned character values are worth as much today as they ever were to help us over the rough places. We need today courage, self reliance and integrity.107
In October 1937, she refined that manifesto. On the Banks of Plum Creek was published that month, and Wilder was invited to give a talk at a book fair held at a department store in Detroit. In coming years, she would be invited to ever more illustrious public events, but would invariably turn down the invitations. The Detroit fair was the first and last national stage on which she would appear. She had something to say, and once she said it, that was enough.
It was a long trip to Detroit, but Almanzo had befriended a young garage owner, Silas Seal, who had impressed him by cleaning his windshield and checking the air pressure in the tires without being asked. Worried about the arduous drive, Almanzo hired Seal (who had once lived in Detroit) to ferry the Wilders there and back. It was the beginning of a long friendship.
They arrived at the city’s Statler Hotel to find a letter from Lane, offering her mother paragraphs of detailed instructions on how to call the front desk—“You always have to say names slowly and clearly to hotel operators, and spell them after you pronounce them.”108 She spelled out Ida Louise Raymond’s name, in capital letters, to drive the point home.
Instead of wishing her mother luck, Lane supplied a passage from the Koran, Sura 99, pleading for the Lord’s protection “from the mischief … of the night … from the mischief of women blowing on knots; from the mischief of the envious.”109 In case Wilder was baffled, Lane insisted that “a lot of people are envying you.”
Envy may not have been uppermost in her mind, but Wilder was nonetheless intimidated, telling her editor, “I am just a hillbilly.”110 The massive Statler, eighteen floors tall, stood only a few blocks from the book fair venue, the J.L. Hudson Department Store, an even grander establishment of thirty-two floors. Serving the Motor City at its most posh, Hudson’s had once been the tallest emporium in the country. Only Macy’s in New York had more floor space.
The book fair, “A Week of Authors,” featured events for both adults and children. A star-studded roster included Klaus Mann (son of Thomas) and the bestselling pulp-adventure writer Talbot Mundy, a friend of Lane’s. Among the children’s authors were Marjorie Flack, promoting Angus and the Ducks, a popular picture book about a Scottish terrier, and Kurt Wiese, the German-born illustrator whose titles included the first English version of Bambi, translated by Whittaker Chambers.
Wilder was the last speaker on the fair’s last day, hailed for harnessing “the experience of her pioneer past to solve the problems of the present day.”111 She had written the speech without assistance from her daughter, and she began where she always had, with her parents: “Many years ago, in the Little House in the Big Woods, Sister Mary and I listened to Father’s stories.”112 To an audience of children who had grown up with radios and movies, she stressed that her family had had to be “self-sufficient for its own entertainment as well as its livelihood.” She talked about her mother, descended from Scots of legendary thrift, and her father, whose ancestors had arrived on the Mayflower. “He was always jolly, inclined to be reckless, and loved his violin,” she said.
After her first book was successful and she received pleas from children around the country to continue the story, she said,
I began to think what a wonderful childhood I had had. How I had seen the whole frontier, the woods, the Indian country of the great plains, the frontier towns, the building of railroads in wild, unsettled country, homesteading and farmers coming in to take possession. I realized that I had seen and lived it all—all the successive phases of the frontier, first the frontiersman, then the pioneer, then the farmers and the towns.
Then I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history. That the frontier was gone, and agricultural settlements had taken its place when I married a farmer.
It seemed to me that my childhood had been much richer and more interesting than that of children today, even with all the modern inventions and improvements.113
She described the idea of writing a series about her childhood, “a seven-volume historical novel for children covering every aspect of the American frontier,” as a unique plan. “Someone has to do a thing first,” she said. “I would be the first to write a seven-volume novel for children.” (She had not yet realized that the series would stretch to eight.)114
She laid out the existing volumes, one by one, and sketched out those to come, adding that her husband, introduced in Farmer Boy, would reappear in the fifth volume, which she had already begun. She asserted what she had been saying all along, but with one startling addition:
Every story in this novel, all the circumstances, each incident are true.
All I have told is true but it is not the whole truth. There were some stories I wanted to tell but would not be responsible for putting in a book for children, even though I knew them as a child.115
She then proceeded to relate some of what she had left out—beginning with the story of the Bloody Benders as embellished by Lane, including Charles Ingalls’s supposed participation in a vigilante posse that hunted them down. She even put herself into the tale, saying that her family had stopped outside the Benders’ tavern on their way to find their own property. “I saw Kate Bender standing in the doorway,” she said.116 Invoking the courtroom oath—“the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”—she told a story that was embroidered, if not downright false.
Wilder’s “truth” was less a matter of fact than of her memories, feelings, and convictions. Her work was based on facts but not factual. It was historical fiction, not history. Its chronology, and certain incidents and characters, were invented, altered, and fictionalized.
Of course, her speech had explicitly described her work as a novel, acknowledging that she was writing fiction. Yet emblazoned on the pale yellow covers of the books she was selling at t
he fair, above the title and the cover image of Mary and Laura wading in Plum Creek, appeared these words: “The True Story of an American Pioneer Family.”117
Like Wilder herself, the assertion contained multitudes. It had come about when Wilder pressed her editor the year before to emphasize the autobiographical element. Ida Louise Raymond had immediately agreed: “I think you are quite right in saying we have not sufficiently stressed the fact that these stories are true. We shall do so in the future.”118
It was this ambiguous relationship to the truth that enabled Wilder to transform her family’s lifelong struggles into a sterling portrait of indomitability, security, and success. The freedom she took with the facts was the creative act of a novelist, enabling her to achieve something beyond the flat recitation of the autobiographical “Pioneer Girl.” But that fictional freedom jibed oddly with her insistence that “all the circumstances, each incident” were true.
Privately, to friends such as Aubrey Sherwood, editor of the De Smet News, she would acknowledge the full extent of her fictionalizing.119 Publicly, and to children, she hewed to a different line. She seemed ever more invested in presenting her idealized view of her parents as factual, fulfilling a deep longing within herself not only to preserve their legacy but to elevate it, elevating herself in the process. She wanted to have it both ways.
Her ambiguity would become a source of confusion in years to come, exacerbated by Lane’s brittle assertions that her mother was not “a liar.”120 The two women’s defensiveness would play into the mythology growing up around the series. In years to come, the autobiographical authority of the books would lend considerable power to their influence as chronicles of pioneer triumph.
Wilder would later instruct readers that it was “best to be honest and truthful.”121 But midway through her fictional journey, she found herself in a dark wood. Chronicling her family’s frontier days, she was obscuring the truth even as she worked to reveal it.
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