Under fire from congressional critics on the House Un-American Activities Committee, the WPA, months earlier, had shut down the production (directed by a very young Orson Welles) during previews. Its broad allegory of pro-union steelworkers pitted against heartless captains of industry had spurred accusations of Communist influence. Shut out of the theater just as the musical was slated to open, the actors and hundreds of audience members had then marched twenty-one blocks to another venue, where the show went on.
Lane had to have known the play’s reputation. Her former beau Garet Garrett had written a piece fulminating against the FTP for the Post in 1936. Still, she was so horrified by the play and “the vicious fury of its attack on everything respectable” that she staged a melodramatic protest of her own, walking out during the first act. For years she had inveighed against the hidebound respectability embodied by Mansfield and her mother, but the play’s “sneers at America, at liberty, at law” were going too far, she told a friend. When she got home she “burst into tears,” sickened to know that “the American government is actually spending hundreds of millions of my money … on such propaganda.”72 Weeks later, she was still fulminating: “I knew it was a Red Revolution play,” she wrote, but “could only feel as if I were seeing a dog lift his leg at every decent value in this wretched world.”73
At the moment, Lane’s only public outlet for such feelings was “Free Land,” which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in eight installments beginning in March 1938.74 It was a huge success, being published in book form two months later and becoming a bestseller, although Kirkus noted “too close a resemblance to Let the Hurricane Roar in general pattern and some details.”75 Privately, however, Lane took no joy in it, seething about politics. “Free Land” elevated the self-reliant pioneer to the status of hero, but funneling her anger into fiction was no longer satisfying. To friends, she railed about income taxes, state taxes, and the “destruction” of America.76 George Bye pleaded with her to set aside these preoccupations and keep writing, saying that he was cross with her for indulging in the politics of paranoia. “I deeply believe you need have no fears of communism, fascism or regimentation,” he wrote, adding, “Please, darling, get back in line and do your stuff.”77
Around the same time, Lane also took the reckless step of sending a significant sum—$2,850 in Albanian gold francs, worth nearly $50,000 today—to Rexh Meta, to purchase undeveloped land on the outskirts of Tirana, Albania.78 Meta and his wife had named their first child, born in 1937, Borë-Rose, “Snow Rose” in Albanian. The property was intended to provide Meta and his family a place to live and, one day, in Lane’s recurring Oriental daydreams, an exotic retirement villa for herself. Beyond the dubious prospect of investing in eastern Europe on the brink of war, the maneuver, according to Lane’s biographer, imperiled Meta himself.79 Due to Albania’s laws, the property had to be bought in his name. Working at a government ministry post, unable to afford it on his salary, he was forced to acknowledge to authorities that he was backed by a powerful, wealthy American “mother.” In the volatile climate, that exposure could not have served him well.
Alarmed by Lane’s improvident spending, an old friend from European days, Isaac Don Levine, a Russian-born journalist and Hearst columnist, urged her not to let all the “Free Land” money slip through her fingers. He and his wife squired her around their neighborhood in Connecticut, showing her likely properties.80 She ended up buying a Depression bargain startlingly reminiscent of the original Rocky Ridge: a few hilly acres studded with apple trees and an old farmhouse in Danbury, for twenty-six hundred in cash and a nine-hundred-dollar mortgage. It was the first time in her life that she owned her own house.
Tellingly, when she wrote to her mother with the news, she buried it in paragraphs about other matters. It was as if she still felt an ineradicable sense of shame or guilt associated with possessing her own house, having (so she believed) burned down theirs. “I have bought some land in Connecticut,” she wrote, “and am going to build a little house on it.”81 Was she sounding out her mother? If so, she quickly moved on, saying she had to live in Connecticut because it had no state income tax. She could not reside in either Missouri or New York State, with their tax burdens. Ironically, the reason she could afford the Danbury house was that it was in foreclosure, its owners unable to pay their taxes or mortgage.82
Even then, she could barely bring herself to go through with it. She was so concerned about inheritance taxes that she was going to have the deed made out to both herself and John Turner, or perhaps solely to John. He was now eighteen, and Lane had never formally adopted him.83 Wiser heads must have prevailed: when the sale went through, hers was the only name on the deed. She was already planning to gut the place. In coming years, she would rebuild and renovate exhaustively.
Her parents continued to be concerned about her mental health and finances. Upon receiving a five-hundred-dollar check Lane sent in early 1938, Wilder gingerly asked if there was anything special she wanted done with it at Rocky Ridge, and whether Lane could really spare the money. “If not,” she suggested, “I’ll send it back and no one need know.”84 She pressed on to say:
Neither of us want you to work so hard because you feel you must help us. You are a dear, sweet thing to us all the time. You and your comfort and well being are more to us than anything else. So please take good care of yourself for us.85
* * *
THE Wilders were gradually reestablishing their own independence. The Little House books were bringing in a small but steady income. On the strength of that, they set off on a monthlong road trip in early May 1938, driving throughout the West—crossing the southern plains of Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, and on through Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and South Dakota—before heading back to Missouri. Almanzo would finally see the sights he had missed when his wife visited Lane by train in 1915 and when the women drove to California a decade later. They planned to stop in De Smet on the way home, where his wife could see her sisters and check details about the Hard Winter.
Again, they prevailed on Silas Seal to drive. This time his wife, Neta, came along. Thirty-three years old, Neta Seal was a sweet country girl, who had grown up near Mansfield earning money the way Wilder’s father had, trapping rabbits and possums. Despite the age difference, she and Laura recognized each other as kindred spirits, and they sat together in the back seat, singing what Neta called “crazy little songs” to pass the time. Among these were “Waltz Me Around Willy” and a racy, rollicking old-time country blues number, “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do,” recorded in the 1920s by Bessie Smith and in the 1930s by blind country singer Riley Puckett:
She drives a Ford machine, I buy the gasoline,
Ain’t nobody’s business if I do
It’s nobody’s business, nobody’s business
Nobody’s business if I do
That’s where my money goes,
Buying my baby clothes,
Nobody’s business if I do
She rides a Cadillac,
Oh boy she makes the jack,
Nobody’s business if I do
That’s where my money goes,
Buying my baby clothes,
Nobody’s business if I do.86
“I learned to love her on that trip,” Neta would say, and later photographs bear that out, with the taller young woman standing beside Wilder, a protective arm around her.87 They had a wonderful time, crossing Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle, where dust storms had once swept the countryside. They saw the Painted Desert at the Four Corners and the Petrified Forest in Arizona. They celebrated Gold Rush days in Barstow, enjoying a parade and period costumes, and posed in front of a snowdrift at Yellowstone.
The Wilders covered gasoline, and each couple paid fifty cents a night for a cabin along the way, as the Wilders had done in 1931. Almanzo collected branches to whittle into canes and a hunk of Joshua tree to fashion into a lamp. They took in the Grand Canyon,
snapping pictures that showed Almanzo as a dignified older gent in sweater and tie, his handlebar mustache now white, his wife peering shyly from beneath a turban or scarf wrapped around her hair, plump and somehow still girlish. Silas drove the Buick through the famous “Chandelier” tree, a 315-foot-tall coast redwood with a passage cut in the trunk. When Neta took the picture, Laura was seated demurely on a root, her pocketbook in her lap.
Wilder kept a travel diary, noting down her favorite vistas, delicious picnics, lousy cabins (“a rotten place to stay!”), and funny road signs: “Honestly now, what’s your hurry?”88 All her life she had loved rivers, and on the way from Grants Pass to Portland she found her heart’s desire when they followed the Smith River, a tributary of the Umpqua, up into the mountains “through Big Trees.” The vista held some special meaning for her: “Blue water with white riffles. Lovely, never saw anything more beautiful. The dream of blue & white water fulfilled.”89 They drove alongside it until the stream turned into a rivulet high in the Coast Range, and ate lunch perched there, gazing on the snow that fed it.
On the high plains of Montana, between Billings and Sheridan, they encountered a familiar sight: hordes of grasshoppers and crickets. But the Dust Bowl and its horrors were receding. On the same grasslands, Wilder noted, were grazing “lots of fat cattle and pretty horses … scattered over the uplands. All fat and shining.”90 In a museum, she was amused to find on display a relic of her own past, a side saddle like the one she had used to ride Trixy.
The trip may have been tied, in part, to Carrie’s recent loss: her husband, David Swanzey, had died a month earlier, in April 1938, at the age of eighty-four, and the stop in Keystone may have been intended to pay respects and comfort the widow. Wilder doubtless also used the opportunity to talk over old times in De Smet, sharpening her recollections, and she helped her sister by paying the taxes owed on Swanzey’s mining claims.91 Her travel diary concluded in Keystone with four lines of a song she jotted down “for Prairie Girl,” the title she was considering for the book to follow “Hard Winter.”92 It was an old-fashioned courting song: “Somebody’s coming when the twilight falls. / Somebody’s coming for a twilight call. / He will be welcome to the best of all. / And I’ll keep a little kiss for him.”93 Once she was finished with Hard Winter, she would revel in the nostalgia of sleigh rides, parties, and romance.
In her hometown, she visited Grace and Nathan Dow, earning a front-page headline in the De Smet News: “Mrs. Wilder, Author … Checks Material Here.” Basking in the association with the Little House books, the newspaper reported that Wilder’s next book, about the Hard Winter, was “awaited with interest in the state, following as it does her daughter’s story, Free Land.”94 The reporter made it clear that it was the mother who had “the advantage of first-hand experience in the pioneering of Dakota Territory.”95 Lane had never been back, an interesting omission given how many of the family’s former haunts she had previously sought out. When it came to De Smet, locus of the family’s own free land and the house lost to fire, she kept clear. Once burnt, twice shy.
God Help the Poor Taxpayers!
In September of 1938, as Neville Chamberlain met with Adolf Hitler, American anxieties over whether the United States would be pulled into another war in Europe ratcheted up. Pacifist organizations such as World Peaceways ran thousands of radio spots and magazine advertisements that year. One depicted a mother joyfully lifting a baby boy above her head; scrawled across the child in bloodred letters were the words “To Be Killed in Action.” The America First movement led by antiwar students and Charles Lindbergh would not be organized until two years later, but editorialists and cartoonists were already promoting isolationism.
Lane, a devoted isolationist, spent significant time that year campaigning for the Ludlow Amendment to the Constitution. Named for Louis Ludlow, the Indiana congressman who introduced it in 1935, the amendment would have required a national referendum to be held before Congress could issue a declaration of war, except in cases of direct attack or invasion. The notion had first been suggested during World War I, but achieved its highest popularity during the mid-1930s, when a Gallup poll showed that 75 percent of Americans were in favor of it.96
Roosevelt and his long-serving secretary of state, Cordell Hull, adamantly opposed the measure as a crippling check on presidential powers. When it came up for a procedural vote in the House of Representatives in January 1938, it was narrowly defeated, 209–188. After that—and with increasingly alarming news out of Europe—support for the amendment began to erode, but Lane was not giving up.
On September 26, 1938, four days before Chamberlain would deliver his infamous “peace for our time” proclamation defending the Munich accord that allowed Hitler to annex the Sudetenland, Wilder responded to a letter from her daughter urging her to support the amendment. She enthusiastically took up the cause, although in terms that suggested she was not familiar with the particulars, since she misspelled the amendment’s name as “Laidlaw.”97 Nonetheless, she assured Lane that the local Athenian Club was already on the case, planning to send multiple letters to their congressional representatives.
Nannie Davis and her husband, Oliver B. Davis, longtime Ozark newspaper publishers who had owned and edited the Mansfield Mirror for years, were among those involved in organizing the local effort.98 To the Athenian Club’s latest meeting, the Davises had brought a letter addressed “To American Mothers,” a copy of which, in Wilder’s handwriting, survives in her papers. (In that copy, too, Wilder used the “Laidlaw” spelling, and perhaps did not send it out because she noticed the error.)99 For some years, the letter was believed to have been written by Wilder herself, but her note to Lane casts doubt on that assumption.100 Still, it expressed the collective antiwar view, prevalent at the time.
To American Mothers
Write your candidates for Congress. Tell them you are in favor of the [Ludlow] Referendum bill. Ask them to let you know before November election how they expect to vote on this bill making it necessary to submit to a vote of the people the matter of a declaration of war, except for defense or invasion of our home-land.
Make copies of this letter and send to ten of your friends, American Mothers, asking them also to write ten letters to their friends.
Your failure to do this may bring disaster to your home and your loved ones and leave the way clear for the War Gods to call your sons to the trenches, to face the Hell of shot and shell.
Pray that God may save us from another war.101
Conceived as a chain letter, a popular form at the time, the missive was unsigned. That was O. B. Davis’s idea, Wilder wrote, as was its alarmist tone. “That sort of ballyhoo,” she told Lane, might “appeal to lots of people … the kind … that nothing else would reach.”102 She had a list of twenty-four people to send it to, rounding up friends and neighbors to make their own copies, and soliciting her daughter’s praise for her efforts: “Don’t you think I have done very well for the short time since you wrote?”103
Wilder’s active involvement may have ended there, but Lane stayed in the fight. She published an opinion piece, “Why I Am for the People’s Vote on War,” in Liberty, a magazine that calculated the reading time for its articles. Lane’s piece (“9 Minutes, 5 Seconds”) employed rhetoric reminiscent of the World Peaceways advertisement: “We know this is coming. The whole world knows it.… Hold your babies in your arms, see the helpless small things toothlessly laughing.”104 The article was illustrated with a “war god”—a Viking-like figure with a dagger at his waist—pounding at the door of an American mother, her son behind her, their only protection a stout padlock labeled “Ludlow Amendment.” In response, Eleanor Roosevelt (“6 Minutes, 50 Seconds”) criticized the histrionic element of Lane’s argument, saying “this does not seem to me a very realistic viewpoint.”105 Wilder thought her daughter’s view “plain and fair and true,” and gnashed her teeth over Mrs. Roosevelt’s perfidy, saying she “evaded the truth.”106
The same month, i
n Woman’s Day, Lane took part in a roundtable feature on “War! What the Women of America Can Do to Prevent It,” alongside Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Dix, Norma Shearer, and other prominent figures. She hammered home her message: every woman, she said, should spend three cents to send a postcard to Congress, demanding the Ludlow bill.107
As a prominent face of the amendment, Lane appeared before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on May 10, 1939. The only other witness testifying in support was a New York attorney, Morris L. Ernst, known for co-founding the American Civil Liberties Union and for successfully defending James Joyce’s Ulysses against pornography charges. He confined himself to explaining how the Founding Fathers had failed to anticipate the need for such a measure. But Lane took no such temperate route. Looking older and wearier than her fifty-two years, clad in a pinstriped suit, corsage, and shiny black beribboned hat, she declared herself, according to the New York Times, “a revolutionist.”108 When a senator tried to convince her to retreat from that radicalism, she refused.
Lane took an equally hard line with her old friend Dorothy Thompson, who appeared on the cover of Time magazine a month after Lane’s congressional appearance.109 By now, Thompson was the most famous woman journalist in the world, an expert on the European situation. Once a skeptic when it came to Roosevelt, opposing Social Security and criticizing his Supreme Court ambitions in her column, Thompson had switched her allegiance to him when it became clear that he was no pacifist. She warned continually about the rise of Hitler and the dangers of refusing to take him seriously, calling Charles Lindbergh “America’s number one problem child.”110
Just after the appeasement in Munich, Lane wrote to Thompson, praising it as good diplomacy. Hitler was right, she told her friend, and was “simply stating an obvious fact when he said that … defeat of the Chamberlain policy would endanger European peace.”111 As Lane saw it, the true threat to democracy lay in the expansion of Roosevelt’s political powers. “A man is free only to the extent that he is NOT governed,” she wrote, and “the death-blow to liberty on earth would be America’s fighting any war.” In such an event, she said, “this country would instantly be a dictatorship, and no matter how the war ended, it would remain a dictatorship.”112 Ruthless as Hitler and Stalin might be, she concluded breezily, they could not “destroy personal freedom on earth … Don’t be alarmed, darling.”113
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