Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  More and more she relied on her agent, George Bye, to handle professional requests and the institutions vying for her attention. Lane had once acted as go-between, but over the years Wilder grew to welcome Bye’s generous response to her books and to rely on his judgment as he fielded requests for a litany of projects, including excerpts, a plan by the state of Ohio to produce a special edition of the Little House books for public school use, a scheme to sell Little House–inspired children’s clothing, and a CBS radio show drawn from The Long Winter.

  Unlike Lane, who could be peremptory with Bye, Wilder was always courteous. Even when he told her that he had shared bits of Little Town on the Prairie with Eleanor Roosevelt and her guests at a picnic at Hyde Park, she kept her opinion of the First Lady to herself, saying mildly that she was “flattered that you thought some of my anecdotes good enough to repeat to your friends.”4 If he wanted more such anecdotes, she suggested he ask Lane to tell him one of the amusing stories from her Detroit Book Fair talk, about an Easterner traipsing across the prairie after a mirage. “Like all my stories,” she told him, “it is true.”5

  It was with Bye that she shared mixed feelings about coming to the end of her career. “The days of Little Town were great days and at times I have a strong feeling of nostalgia for them,” she wrote.6 But she also felt relief about bringing her work to a close. When she finished reading proofs of These Happy Golden Years in the fall of 1942, apologizing for taking so long, she reported to Bye that her children’s story was “now complete in eight volumes.”7 That finality would be made clear to readers as well. On the last page of the last book, under a drawing of Laura and Almanzo seated on the stoop of their house, the caption read: “The End of the Little House Books.”

  Bye offered high praise for the “fundamental decency” of the series, predicting that it would become “an American fixture, something like Little Women and Little Men, but with sounder inspiration for better citizenship.”8 Due to wartime paper shortages, the last book could not be published until March 1943. Shortly after it appeared, Bye sent a telegram congratulating Wilder on winning the New York Herald Tribune’s award for “Best Book for Older Children.”9 He urged her to continue writing, suggesting she try a short story, perhaps a wartime colloquy between a woman of her age and a younger woman munitions worker.

  Wilder gently discouraged the idea, telling him she had no contact with modern working girls and suggesting Lane as a better prospect.10 “I don’t know what to say about my writing more,” she told him. “I have thought that ‘Golden Years’ was my last; that I would spend what is left of my life in living, not writing about it.” But she was tempted to revisit her “adult novel” again: “A story keeps stirring around in my mind and if it pesters me enough I may write it down and send it to you sometime in the future.”11 She promised her editor that she would try to concentrate on a new book, “mostly floating around in disconnected anecdotes,” in hopes that it would “jell.”12

  Perhaps she was doing more than thinking about it; perhaps she was researching. That fall, Wilder wrote to the De Smet Cemetery Association, trying to locate the grave of her infant son, whose death was described in her manuscript about the first few years of her marriage. But the deed could not be found.13

  However tempted to write more, she was tired. In 1943, she turned seventy-six. Almanzo was in his eighties and increasingly frail. In periods of illness, she was his only nurse. Although she continued to do all her own housework, as well as cooking, baking, and churning, she too suffered from bouts of weakness, complaining of breathlessness, possibly from asthma. The couple were divesting themselves of their hard-accumulated acreage, which they could no longer manage. That year, they sold the back forty and the Rock House to a younger couple. The prospect of wrestling with themes of a “grown up novel”—the sorrows and failures of early married life—must gradually have lost its appeal, proving too difficult, too draining, or too sad.

  A couple of years later, her editor would try to tempt her again, and Wilder apologized for lacking the time and the energy. “I am sorry too that I cannot see my way clear to writing another book,” she wrote. “My mind is filled with what might be written.”14

  * * *

  LITTLE wonder that Wilder took refuge in her fan mail and farm chores: the world situation was not going the way she and her daughter had hoped. The bombing of Pearl Harbor necessitated an immediate declaration of war, and the country’s protracted infatuation with isolationism came to an abrupt end. Culturally, though, Americans continued to turn away from the horrors abroad. What they turned toward was a glorified version of their pioneer past.

  The unprecedented savagery of early 1943 made any form of escapism welcome. January saw the culmination of the bitter urban warfare in Stalingrad. In February, Goebbels declared “total war” against the Allies, and Nazi courts beheaded student activists of the White Rose resistance movement. In March, the Germans continued liquidating the Krakow Ghetto in Poland while massacring entire Belarussian villages for collaborating with partisans. In April, the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion was brutally put down, while representatives of the British and American governments met at a resort in Bermuda and agreed that little could be done for the Jews of Europe. The British desultorily proposed that refugees might be sent to north Africa or the Isle of Man, while their American counterparts looked to neutral European countries or the Middle East. Few newspapers covered the failure in either country. “U.S. to Oppose More Refugees,” read one headline, far off the front page.15 “Can Do Nothing Now to Aid Hitler’s Victims,” was another.16

  As such barbarities were unfolding in Europe, the musical Oklahoma! opened on Broadway on March 31. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s show about the romance between a farm girl and a cowboy named Curley became a smash hit, running for more than two thousand performances. In addition to the title tune, many of its songs—“Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’,” “People Will Say We’re in Love,” “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top”—became instantly recognizable classics.

  Oklahoma! was based on Green Grow the Lilacs, a 1930 play produced by the Federal Theatre Project and written by Lynn Riggs, an Oklahoma writer who was part Cherokee. Both the original play and its musical adaptation were strikingly ahistorical, a singular irony given that Oklahoma had been the dark heart of Andrew Jackson’s genocidal Indian Removal policy. Riggs’s script set the scene in Indian Territory in glowing terms reminiscent of Wilder’s work:

  It is a radiant summer morning … the kind of morning which, enveloping the shapes of earth—men, cattle in a meadow, blades of the young corn, streams—makes them seem to exist now for the first time, their images giving off a visible golden emanation.17

  Wilder’s These Happy Golden Years was published the same month as the musical’s premiere, and both provided welcome respite to a harried nation. Both showcased the sunny, unsullied open plains as an American Eden. Both featured horse-drawn carriages as old-fashioned vehicles of romance and song-centered courting rituals of an earlier, more innocent time: box socials, square dances, and singing schools. Both involved dark confrontations and potential knifings, but ended with the laconic Almanzo and the reluctant Curley dedicating themselves to the wholesome pursuit of farming. And both offered wartime America a retreat from the internecine mechanized warfare that was consuming the planet.

  These Happy Golden Years was praised extravagantly in the New York Times Book Review as a fitting finale to “an invaluable addition to our list of genuinely American stories.” The reviewer singled out the “authentic background, sensitive characterization … fine integrity and spirit of sturdy independence.”18 Kirkus called it “splendid.”19 Wilder herself treasured a more personal reaction, that of her sole surviving sibling, telling a reader, “Sister Carrie writes me that after she read the book it seemed that she was back in those times again and all that had happened since was a dream.”20 As the previous four books had been, the novel was selected for a Newbery Honor. A triumphant conclusion to the s
eries, the book could not help but overshadow Lane’s last major work.

  The Discovery of Freedom

  Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, and Isabel Mary Paterson each published philosophical works early that year. Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom appeared in January 1943; Rand’s The Fountainhead followed in April; Paterson’s The God of the Machine came out in May. Three weird sisters in an antifeminist trifecta, they each celebrated in their books the strapping male as a hero, and exhibited a striking dissociation from what was happening around the world. Emphasizing free will as essential to liberty, the works laid the foundation for the libertarian political movement in the United States.

  Similar themes preoccupied them all. “Collectivism” was the enemy, empowering the group over the individual, an evil taking the form of governments, taxes, planned economies, education, and philanthropy. Free enterprise was invested with mystical Thorlike powers; self-reliance became a commandment, the lone wolf an idol. Howard Roark, Rand’s protagonist, was the quintessential individualist, a “prime mover” beholden to no one. Isabel Paterson looked to the past for her hero: “The solitary frontier trapper was an advance guard capitalist,” she wrote.21 Lane likewise hailed the frontier as “the god that created these United States and once made Americans strong and self-reliant.”22

  None of this was a coincidence. They all knew each other or knew of each other. Lane and Rand would not meet in person until a few years later, but they would soon become correspondents. Paterson was their mentor, and already an influential public figure.23 Since 1924, Paterson had been wielding considerable power with her weekly literary review column in the Herald Tribune. Her opinion could sell books or hold them up to ridicule. An author herself, by 1943 she had published eight novels to Lane’s five and Rand’s two. Ruthless in exercising authority, she could also be witty and entertaining. She illustrated her column with tiny humorous Thurber-esque line drawings, and rolled her own cigarettes. Her highest compliment, bestowed upon an individual who reliably pulled his weight, was “he rolls his own.”24

  Paterson had been working on The God of the Machine for years, a closely argued treatise about the historical evolution of power structures and financial systems, intended to demonstrate the machine- or godlike potential of the individual human mind, capable of harnessing and releasing vast economic energies if left unmolested by interfering institutions. During the 1930s she held forth on such topics while acting as Ayn Rand’s guru, a singular role: Rand acknowledged no other influence.25 Beginning with the Greeks and Romans, Paterson worked her way through human history up to the mistakes that led to the Great Depression and federal relief programs, which she condemned as “static” rather than dynamic.26 Whatever one thought of her conclusions, her work was scholarly and rigorous.

  Although Paterson’s book was published a few months later than the others, she had been discussing the same ideas and deploying the same images in her column for years. She may well have been startled to see those images and arguments appearing in Lane’s book without attribution.

  The Discovery of Freedom was profoundly derivative from Paterson. Lane had been reading her column regularly at Rocky Ridge and in New York, and after moving to Danbury she became Paterson’s neighbor and frequent companion.27 Lane’s diaries recorded passages of Paterson’s conversation, taken down more or less verbatim.28 “I.M.P. says…,” she wrote many times, including on November 5, 1940, when the pair spent a disconsolate night at Lane’s home listening to election returns as Roosevelt won his unprecedented third term.29

  Their books were conjoined at many junctures. Both began at the dawn of human history, touching on the Phoenicians.30 Both warned that important bodies of knowledge could be lost.31 Both celebrated the power of human energies. In her long-running campaign against philanthropy, Paterson proclaimed that “most of the harm in the world is done by good people.”32 Lane said that “in all history the earnest, sincere, hardworking ruler has done the most harm to his own people.”33

  Paterson’s central metaphor for the engine of human creativity was Henry Adams’s dynamo. (In The Education of Henry Adams, the forty-foot dynamo, or electric generator, displayed at the Paris Exhibition in 1900 was a symbol of new technologies, such as the steam engine and the telegraph, that were replacing older religious beliefs.) Paterson wrote, “Man is the dynamo, in his productive capacity.”34 Lane wrote, “A human being is a dynamo, generating energy.”35

  What was original in The Discovery of Freedom sprang from Lane’s well-worn personal anecdotes, but she marshaled these haphazardly and with little attention to accuracy. She venerated the American Revolution but never once mentioned the Civil War, overlooking the unfinished business of the country’s founding that nearly tore it apart. She was happy to discuss slavery among the Egyptians but not in the American South. It might have tarnished the shine on her golden calf.

  Out of a rag bag of historical scraps, she pulled her parents, convenient exemplars of pioneering thrift: “Sixty-five years ago my own mother was living in a creek-bank in Minnesota.… Living underground was nothing unusual; less than sixty years ago, American families were living in dugouts all over the prairie States.”36 Given her profound distaste for her mother’s parsimony, expressed in letters and journal entries, her celebration of it in the book seems hypocritical.

  She returned, as she often did, to the 1894 depression. To her mind, it established her authority on economic failures, proving that depressions were cyclical and could be weathered by anyone willing to work hard. She recalled the Russian community her family met on the journey to Missouri:

  I well remember the incredible abundance of food in the Russian Dukhaber commune in Kansas—or was it southern Nebraska?… when I and my parents were traveling among the hundreds of thousands of refugees, walking or riding in covered wagons along all America’s dusty or muddy roads, looking for work or food. I can see yet those sleek, unmortgaged cows, those brimming pails of milk, those jars of butter in the spring-house, and the smiling Russian woman with her hair in golden braids, who spoke no known language, but opened the front of her blue blouse and took from next her skin a slab of cold biscuits. That was abundance to most Americans fifty years ago.37

  The example, however, seemed to prove the opposite of what she intended, suggesting that communal living, rather than being “static” (another echo of Paterson), could in fact yield comfort and security.38

  Lane attacked taxation as if the government had been caught reaching into her blouse to take her biscuits. Taxes had brought down Rome, she said, and the force brought to bear by the state in collecting them spelled “the swift and violent death of … democracy.”39 Compared to Paterson’s original argument, Lane’s was radically simplified, a punitive version of rules inherited from her grandmother. Caroline Ingalls had always held to a notion of ethical responsibility: no gift, no matter how trivial (a meal, a day’s labor, a handful of nails), could be accepted without repaying or returning the favor. But Lane conveniently forgot to mention that the Ingallses did take help when they needed it, gratefully accepting Christmas barrels and donated turkeys, eating the Wilder brothers’ seed wheat in the Hard Winter, and receiving state aid to send Mary to the college for the blind. And, of course, there was the land in the Osage Diminished Reserve: they took that without ever paying for it. In Burr Oak, when they had debts they could not cover, they skipped out on them.

  Lane’s assumption of authority about economies, planned or otherwise, was perhaps the most unconvincing position she had ever taken. Economics begin at home, and as an adult Lane had never shown any mastery of money. She was constantly in debt to family and friends, to banks and her literary agent, frantically borrowing from one to pay the other. Her urge to play Lady Bountiful was so strong that she often gave away money she did not have. Until posthumous royalties from her mother’s books finally eased her way, she lived beyond her means. No one was less qualified to pronounce on financial matters.

  The only person in her family
who could claim financial expertise was her mother, who had responsibly handled federal loan transactions for a decade. But she never chose to stand on a soap box. Lane steadfastly refused to learn from her example.

  * * *

  PATERSON’S book was respectfully reviewed but little read. Lane’s attracted less flattering attention. Kirkus Reviews wrote that The Discovery of Freedom bore “the earmarks of long, long thoughts—and hasty execution … choppy, discursive, unorganized, and superficial.”40 After plowing through it, the reviewer concluded, “So what?”

  Of the three, the one that proved remarkably successful was, of course, Ayn Rand’s. The Fountainhead was loosely based on a rejected screenplay she’d written for Cecil B. DeMille in 1928, but the gobbets of turgid argument disgorged by its characters over the course of seven hundred pages showed Paterson’s heavy influence, especially in Rand’s treatment of philanthropy. Altruism was denounced as an ineffective “sacred cow” and a “weapon of exploitation.”41 Nothing was more loathsome than good intentions.

  Praised in future years as the “mothers” of the Libertarian movement, all three women publicly denounced Social Security. Rand nonetheless registered for it and accepted payments, arguing that she had paid into it and thus deserved the money. Paterson was content to stash her card in an envelope on which she had scrawled the words “Social Security’s Swindle.”42