Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Fans, however, appeared indifferent to Lane’s philosophy. Many of the letters regarding both the articles and the book instead eagerly inquired as to how they might visit the Wilder Home Museum, where crocheted tablecloths and knitted afghans pictured in the photographs were said to be on display.39

  Lane should have been proud of the publication. Despite its eccentricities, the Woman’s Day Book of American Needlework was (and remains) an important historical resource on American fabric arts. But she resented the project, at one point threatening to take her name off it.40 Perhaps the reason was this: no matter what she did, it all came back to her mother.

  An Army of Principles

  In 1962, Roger MacBride ran for a seat in the Vermont State House of Representatives and won. He was thirty-four. By this time, his mentor was being hailed by other libertarian-minded conservatives. The Freedom School near Colorado Springs, where Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises would lecture, named a building for her that year.41

  Lane cautioned her protégé against having high expectations of elected office. At the start of the session, from a rented home in Montpelier, he lamented sorrowfully that he found it much as she had told him.42 Disgusted by backslapping colleagues and their “socialist-interventionist” bills, he began plotting to convince Vermont to ratify the “Liberty Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution: a favorite of the John Birch Society, it was aimed at repealing the personal income tax, along with estate and gift taxes. He also sponsored bills designed to reduce Vermont’s state income tax by 10 percent, claiming its citizens were the most heavily taxed in the country.43

  The state’s governor accused MacBride of trying to “eliminate Vermont.”44 Indeed, his cuts would have demolished subsidies to the state symphony, the Vermont Recreation Board, the Arts and Crafts commission, Vermont Life magazine, and Middlebury College’s forestry department, as well as the Morgan Horse Farm, serving the state animal that was the darling of Almanzo Wilder’s heart. He did not prevail, but told a local paper he was delighted to have caused a stir. An article reported that he was being talked up as a “GOP gubernatorial candidate.”45 MacBride cut out the clipping and sent it to Lane, scrawling across it, “Your grandson Strikes Again!”46

  In November 1963, eight days before John F. Kennedy’s assassination, MacBride delivered a blistering address to Citizens for Goldwater attacking the president’s civil rights bill. The landmark legislation, which would be passed the following year, outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. MacBride saw it as evidence of a “Communist shadow,” representing “forces of darkness.”47 He may have been angling for further recognition within the Republican party, or even a vice presidential nod.

  While politicking, he found time to reopen hostilities on the Little House front, excoriating Ursula Nordstrom for failing to place advertisements of Wilder’s books during the Christmas season and Children’s Book Week. He regretted to inform her, he said (not sounding in the least regretful), that this constituted a breach of contract, which meant the reversion of all rights to his client, Rose Wilder Lane. Harper was not to print any further copies of the books.

  Lane applauded the action, praising MacBride’s chilling tone and urging him to hold out for high cash penalties. The issue wasn’t the money, she said; it was publishers’ contemptuous treatment of authors. She herself knew a book designer who could do a far better job than Harper had done.

  By telegram, Nordstrom hastened to assure them that large advertisements had in fact been placed in the Herald Tribune’s Christmas issue, among others. The whole affair blew over, with MacBride smoothly attributing the accusations to his “enraged” client.48 But the exchange showcased the kind of bullying invective of which Lane and her attorney were proud. Her mother had never expressed anything but appreciation toward her publisher.

  In the spring of 1964, MacBride announced he was running for governor of Vermont, as a Republican. Lane was supportive, heartily denouncing his rivals. In one of her last major editing jobs, she revised his rough draft of a pamphlet on taxes, and donated the money to print it. MacBride’s rhetoric mirrored his mentor’s. “Not since King George III” had rulers been pushing Americans around so officiously, he said of a personage who served as a favorite whipping boy in Discovery of Freedom and Lane’s angry New Deal interviews.49 In another homage, he singled out farmers as the constituents he hoped to win over.50

  But as his heavy campaign schedule ate into the time available for her, Lane grew pettish, complaining that he had no time to spare for his clients. She urgently needed advice on the copyright of The Discovery of Freedom, she told him—could he refer her to another attorney?51 As Rexh Meta and John Turner had learned, Lane’s maternal favor came at a price.

  Soon she found the whole political process distasteful, suggesting that even if MacBride were elected governor he would have limited exposure and little access to real power. She had told him before: joining a gang was no way to defeat gangsters. She felt that the only way to cripple socialist enemies was to attack them by force, as the American Revolutionists had attacked the British.52 Those she most admired, she said, were the members of the John Birch Society, which promoted limited government and opposed socialism and collectivism with an ardor matching her own.

  At times, she seemed to be wearying of the fight. Her letters to the MacBrides kept reverting to domestic pursuits: the exploits of her dogs, the baking of cupcakes, the excitement of new Teflon pans. Occasionally she lectured Susie on topics she considered her expertise, revisiting her admiration for Islam and her conviction that powerful Jews had manipulated the world wars.53 Youthful musings that verged on anti-Semitism had hardened into something nastier. She told another friend that Fountainhead had become a bestseller because Ayn Rand was a Jew, and “that makes a difference in New York.”54

  MacBride’s gubernatorial campaign turned into something of a farce as he committed neophyte blunders. He sent postcards to potential supporters showing disquieting cartoon figures of himself and Susie wielding knives in their backyard, pursuing rabbits labeled “Income tax,” “Gas tax,” and the like. He criticized economic excess while offering free liquor and sandwiches at campaign events; newspapers sneered that the new “golden boy” of Vermont politics was “no penny pincher.”55 In a three-way Republican primary, he predicted he would win by a landslide but instead came in last.56 Only a minority found his anti-tax, anti-government message appealing.

  In a final effort to put the world right, Lane set domestic politics aside and embarked in 1965 on a trip to Vietnam, sent by Woman’s Day. She was seventy-nine, scowling in her passport photo, hair covered by a lofty turban. In the lounge of Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel, she ran into the son of her old friend and neighbor Isaac Don Levine, as she surprised a crowd of swaggering male war reporters who were astonished that “somebody’s grandmother” had turned up to do their job.57 The article she wrote for Woman’s Day promoted the domino theory, warning that the evils of Communism, left unchecked, would soon wash up on the shores of Hawaii.58

  Back home, she painted a gory little portrait for the town newspaper of what Danbury might look like once the approximately one thousand Communists she estimated were already in residence rose up and murdered the mayor, local ministers, teachers, and the editor of that very paper.59 Foretelling roadblocks and sniper attacks on Route 6, she compared Dien Bien Phu to Yorktown, returning to her favorite war, the American Revolution. She saw no contradiction in her call for the elimination of taxation and her support for a tax-funded controversial war half a world away.60

  While in Vietnam, she had located another needy recipient for her charity: the sister of her interpreter, a young woman named Nguyen Tho Hong Phan. Lane would support Phan’s attendance at a college in Illinois, and host her at Harlingen, Texas, where she had acquired a second home near the Gulf of Mexico. She enjoyed Harlingen’s warm climate and southern neighbors, whose politics and values matched her own.

  Onc
e again, she was spending money nearly as fast as it came in. For the past several years, she and the MacBrides had been planning the construction of an elaborate, two-story fireproof library at the MacBrides’ Vermont home, designed to house Lane’s ten thousand books. She wanted custom-built shelves, sending sketches of them to her puzzled acolyte, as well as an elevator, powder room, coat closet, and a handsome view.61 She planned to spend time there, studying her volumes.

  But she was not content to stay in Vermont, Texas, or Connecticut. Soon she was planning another ambitious travel itinerary, this time across Europe and beyond. To drive her on the continent she had adopted yet another youth, the twenty-three-year-old son of a neighbor in Harlingen, asking him to pose as her “grandson” in order “to avoid questions as to why an elderly lady would be in the company of a very young man.”62 Lane and her new companion were preparing to embark in November 1968.63

  She was about to turn eighty-two but had long neglected her health. Despite having had a face lift and cosmetic surgery on her hands, she distrusted doctors, preferring fad diets such as those promoted by Adelle Davis, an advocate of dangerously massive vitamin supplementation.64 She resisted being tested for diabetes, which ran in the family. She ordered MacBride never to let her die in a hospital, asking for a provision in her will that would redirect her wealth to homeless dogs should he dare to allow it.

  On the journey from Texas, she stopped in Danbury, planning to rest for a few days before her trip across the Atlantic. On the night of October 30, 1968, she baked some bread, then went to bed. She never woke up.

  Among the many papers Lane left behind was an unpublished story about her childhood, titled “Grandpa’s Fiddle.”65 Written in the first person, it appeared to contain recollections of her grandparents, recounting the night the Wilders took their leave from the Ingalls family and De Smet before their long, sad 1894 journey. It was, however, yet another one of Lane’s many conflations of truth and fiction. Laura was called “Carrie,” Carrie was called “Aunt Susan,” and Grace was dispensed with entirely. Mary remained Mary. Little Freddy died in Wisconsin.

  After Lane died, as if channeling her spirit, William Anderson—the former teen pamphleteer, who had become a leading researcher and writer on Wilder—found the story, split it in two, restored the actual names, tweaked some of the details, and published it in a university press anthology, A Little House Sampler, as if it were an autobiographical, nonfiction “account” in which “Rose graphically recalled her childish memories.”66 He did not explain what he had done.

  Notwithstanding all that dissembling, the story is among the finest Lane wrote, unsparing of herself and accepting of her parents’ frailties. Perhaps only in fiction could she achieve that equilibrium. In the end it was her life, more than her father’s, that seemed to be “mostly disappointments”: her fears and frustrations, her anguish and suicidal depressions, her struggles with money and inability to carve out a creative life that could yield lasting joy or satisfaction. But all of that was washed away in the heartfelt words she summoned to describe her mother’s beautiful brown braids and high forehead, “curving innocently, like a baby’s,” and her father’s cheerful blue eyes and “capable” hands: “He knew how to handle anything, and how to meet people and circumstances … he had a kind of gaiety in his independence.”67 The story formed a fitting epitaph to Lane’s once rich talents, buried somewhere under all her windy rage.

  But it would not be her epitaph. She was laid next to her parents, in the Mansfield cemetery, and the marker on her grave contrasts sharply with the spare silence of her parents’ stones. It is covered in militant verbiage, shouting capitals chosen by Roger MacBride. The inscription reads, after Thomas Paine:

  AN ARMY OF PRINCIPLES

  WILL PENETRATE WHERE

  AN ARMY OF SOLDIERS

  CANNOT. NEITHER THE

  CHANNEL NOR THE RHINE

  WILL ARREST ITS PROGRESS.

  IT WILL MARCH ON THE

  HORIZON OF THE WORLD

  AND IT WILL CONQUER.68

  The irony cannot be overstated. MacBride chose a quotation much bandied about by conservatives like himself, who had not read the original. Paine’s “Agrarian Justice,” a pamphlet issued in 1797, argued that those who owned private property should be taxed to create “a national fund” benefiting the blind, lame, and elderly, as well as young persons just starting out in life. It was the first argument for Social Security.

  How Affluent Is My Prairie?

  Wilder’s will seemed straightforward: after Lane’s death, the copyrights to Wilder’s books were to pass to the Mansfield branch library, which bore Wilder’s name. But despite the apparent clarity of those instructions, they would not be carried out.

  During her lifetime, Lane had renewed copyright in the first six Little House books in her own name. The law at the time required copyright to be renewed within twenty-eight years of a book’s publication, so Lane’s renewals were prudent: without them, the copyright to Little House in the Big Woods, for instance, would have expired in 1960. But wittingly or unwittingly, they also set in motion a legal sleight of hand. By renewing the copyrights in her own name, she effectively made them part of her estate. And Lane’s will left her entire estate “to my friend Roger Lea MacBride.”69

  By 1972, acting as executor of Lane’s estate, MacBride had transferred the copyrights to Wilder’s first six books to himself. He had also convinced the Wright County probate court to let him renew the copyrights for the last two books in the series, which he transferred to himself as well. And by 1974, he had registered in his own name the copyrights to her posthumously published work as well. His literary takeover of the Wilder estate was complete.70

  One of those posthumously published books would be Wilder’s abortive attempt at “one grown-up story of Laura and Almanzo.” Five months after Lane died, on April 1, 1969, MacBride arrived at Ursula Nordstrom’s office with news of Wilder’s handwritten manuscript of “The First Three Years.” Nordstrom was exultant: “A voice from the grave!… How thrilling it would be to have a new Wilder book!”71 She wrote to Zena Sutherland, a pioneering scholar in children’s literature studies at the University of Chicago, saying that MacBride

  casually mentioned that there is, among Mrs. Lane’s papers, THE MANUSCRIPT OF A NINTH WILDER BOOK IN LAURA’S OWN HANDWRITING!!!!!! At first I thought wildly Oh he is playing an April Fool joke on me. But no, it IS TRUE!!!!! Mrs. Lane hadn’t wanted to send it in to us because it covers the first year of the marriage of Almanzo and Laura and “there is a faint note of disillusion in it that Mrs. Lane thought didn’t fit in with the eight published books.”72

  MacBride, she surmised, was open to Harper’s publishing the manuscript. He was having his secretary type it.

  When Nordstrom read the manuscript, however, she was taken aback by its unfinished nature and somber subject matter. She was determined to publish, but agonized over the question of editing, revising, or adding to it. She noted that the only manuscripts in her entire career that had required no editing, “no repeat absolutely no editorial suggestions from me or anyone else,” were Wilder’s and E. B. White’s.73

  In the end she opted to make only a few changes, most of them superficial. Among substantive cuts was MacBride’s deletion of Wilder’s account of the pain she suffered in childbirth, deemed too graphic for children. Removed as well was the highly suggestive question Wilder had posed to herself: “How much could she depend on Manly’s judgment, she wondered.”74

  Published in February 1971 as The First Four Years, the book inspired in its audience a reaction similar to Nordstrom’s own. Initially there was excitement and anticipation, then confusion and in some cases dismay. Readers were struck by both its similarity to the previous novels and its divergence from them. It opened with a beautiful lyrical passage describing Laura and her beau taking a buggy ride in the gloaming; but the Wilders’ engagement, wedding ceremony, and the little house on Almanzo’s tree claim were described in terms n
otably different from passages covering the same material in These Happy Golden Years. (Neither Nordstrom nor MacBride realized that the book had been composed before Golden Years; in his brief introduction, MacBride speculated that it was written in the late 1940s.)75

  Astute readers immediately noticed the gulf between the polished series and the harsher adult perspective of the new volume. This Laura was initially joyful in her marriage, then fearful, doubtful, haunted, on occasion even petulant. During her pregnancies and the couple’s disastrous bout with diphtheria she endured terrible suffering without the cheerful moral uplift reliably provided in the prose of previous volumes. The once stalwart and reassuring Almanzo appeared reticent to a fault, his wife stung into mistrust upon learning of his undisclosed debts.

  The gauzy scrim placed before pioneer life by the collective efforts of Wilder and Lane was beginning to dissolve. Beyond it, questions loomed about the autobiographical sources of Wilder’s fiction and the creative process that had transformed her life into an American success story. But as if to obscure things again—erecting a phantasmagorical display to distract from what was coming into focus—Roger MacBride made a fateful move. He decided to bring the Little House to television.

  * * *

  BACK in 1959, when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s request to adapt a scene from Little House on the Prairie prompted a dispute over agent commissions with George Bye’s estate, Lane and MacBride had claimed that “the family” had a policy of never licensing television rights for Wilder’s work.76 There was too much potential for “distortion of the context of the books,” they said. But by 1971, when Ed Friendly approached MacBride about TV rights, MacBride’s earlier objection was long forgotten.

  Friendly, producer of the counterculture hit Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, was searching for a new project for his Los Angeles production company. His wife, who had read the Little House books to their children, had once urged him to construct a series around them. When Friendly caught his teenage daughter rereading the novels—something she did every year—he realized the devotion they inspired. On a flight to New York, he took one of his daughter’s Little House books with him, concealed inside a Time magazine. By the time he crossed the country, his mind was made up.77