My childhood was marked by the legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder. We read her books, we wore sunbonnets and wrote on slates, we played at homesteading outside—a specifically Oregon-Trail-inflected style, often dying of cholera and hunting Buffalo stampedes—visited her home on Lake Pepin, and followed recipes from her cookbook.
Laura Ingalls was my first introduction to American culture, and imparted many lessons slowly unlearned.
Four years after purchasing the book and six years after its publication, I have finally finished Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires, a—no pun intended—rather scorching biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose, whose only offspring was the reams of yellow journalism she committed to typewriter ink (unauthorized autobiographies of Herbert Hoover, Charlie Chaplin and Jack London?? Talk about audacity).
I picked up Prairie Fires back when I had disposable income and lived within walking distance of a bookstore. (Which, if you live in Manhattan is everywhere, and if you live in Chicago is nowhere.) As I walked through Book Culture on 112th Street on some bone-chilling January Saturday, I was collecting discounted books with reckless, bourgeois abandon. One of my favorite sections of Book Culture are the book displays on the stairs, because they are charmingly hoarderesque—who keeps or displays books in piles on the stairs? We know who. I saw “Laura Ingalls Wilder” on a book cover, and, since I was feeling unmoored, and there’s nothing like a bit of Midwestern pioneer mythology—and its puncturing—to root you, I picked it up and added it to the growing collection in the crook of my arm.
For the past four years, I did not get past the first 18 pages of Prairie Fires, which tell the story of the Dakota Massacre in Minnesota. They are vital context to the story of the Ingalls, but sort of stand-alone in its content, and appalling history to chew over (pair with Dances With Wolves to really bring the point home), so maybe a brief pause between the prologue and the biography itself is warranted.
As someone who writes and thinks a lot about Dorothy Day, I can’t help but regard Laura Ingalls Wilder as the antithesis to Dorothy Day.
Laura Ingalls Wilder, as Caroline Fraser records, wrote the stories of her childhood during the Depression and World War II, when America needed a patriotic reminder of its pioneer culture—and how brave individuals roughed it out on the American “frontier,” surviving harsh conditions to find freedom and economic stability.
The problem was that within ten years of the Homestead Act of 1862, Fraser estimates, most of the arable land was already claimed by farmers. The upper Midwest and the Northeast were much more suitable for agriculture than the arid Great Plains, Kansas Territory or Dakota Country. And in the 1870s, climate scientists on the East Coast were warning about further expansion into Big Sky country.
Charles Ingalls—better known to readers as “Pa”—did not venture away from their Wisconsin farm life surrounded by family and out into homesteading until 1869, heading down to Osage territory in Kansas. Their first farming experiment failed, and as it began, so it continued.
The family’s Minnesota years were blighted by the Great Locust Plague of 1873 and the ensuing depression. After much cajoling, the state of Minnesota gave out flour to farmers whose wheat (and most everything else) had been chewed to dust by the now-extinct Rocky Mountain locust, Charles Ingalls among them. Despite this necessary lifeline—and despite serving as the secretary for Mansfield, Missouri’s Federal Farm Loan Association for most of her fifties—Laura and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane (a friend of Ayn Rand’s) would despise welfare and the welfare state created by the New Deal for their entire lives.
Wilder’s teenage years were spent in Dakota Territory, as she and her family followed the Chicago-Northwest Railroad company west. The railway was a fickle lifeline, shutting down during the vicious winter of 1880-81 that Laura immortalized in her book The Long Winter. The trains stopped running, the snow drifts reached nearly 100 feet in height, and the prairie wind whipped through the quickly-built homes. The town would have starved without the intervention of Laura’s future husband, Almanzo Wilder (a homesteader with two of his siblings in De Smet, Dakota, who was like, like Laura’s father, from a farming family in upstate New York who had moved west after 1862) who went with their friend Cap Garland to purchase wheat from a farmer forty miles out of town in blizzard conditions.
When Laura married Almanzo in 1885, she married a farmer rich in land and burdened with debt. Four years into their marriage, their second child, a son—unnamed—died less than a month after his birth. Two weeks later, a kitchen fire burned their house to the ground.
Shortly after these disasters, Laura and Almanzo left Dakota. Eventually, they settled into a farm in Mansfield, Missouri, where they lived through the roar and the crash, depression and dustbowl, and two world wars.
Laura’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who was three when their house burned down, left home after high school for Kansas City and San Francisco, where she found her way into journalism.
Laura’s daughter was ten years older than Dorothy Day, but may have in fact met her at some point, as Rose spent 1918 in New York City hanging out in Greenwich Village with friends who worked at The Masses. But, despite their skepticism about the federal government’s largesse, their politics couldn’t be more different. Rose Wilder Lane was skeptical about largesse. Dorothy Day was skeptical about what would happen to our hearts and our communities if we outsource largesse as someone else’s job. When generosity is the sacred duty of each and every one of us.
Caroline Fraser shares a telling anecdote: a migrant family of five coming to the Mansfield farm, looking for food and work. Almanzo was prepared to give them the last of the family’s salt pork and cornmeal. “Manly, no! We’ve got Rose,” Laura cried, her hand on the revolver in her pocket.
Almanzo ignored her worries and gave the family their provisions. The man helped him clear lumber to sell in town, bringing in a small windfall.
Laura Ingalls Wilder is the distillation of America’s secular values into a person. She was lauded as such in her lifetime, and her books continue to inform many young Americans’ (certainly my own) understanding of their history.
The problem was, as Fraser painstakingly records, that there are large doses of propaganda and wishful thinking in Wilder’s novels. And Wilder’s accounts elide her family’s unpaid debts, the federal government, true poverty and desperation, and eventual abandonment of the dream of being “independent farmers.” Much like Didion’s stories about the settling of California, at the center of the white settlers’ narrative was a federal-government-shaped lacuna. The myth they told themselves was about wilderness and pulling riches out of the land with their bare hands and determination, but it was simply that: a myth. The farming techniques suitable for the wet climate of New England and the Atlantic seaboard had no place in the prairie. And the farming of homesteaders led directly to the disaster of the dustbowl in the 1930s. There was little to no understanding of the land, its ecosystems, and how to exist on it and with it.
But, for some pioneers who could listen, the land worked its spell on them. Laura Ingalls wrote with deep love for the stillness and motion—the constant motion of wind and sand and snow—on the prairie:
The whole great plain of the earth was shadow. There was hardly a wind, but the air moved and whispered to itself in the grasses. Laura almost knew what it said. Lonely and wild and eternal were land and water and sky and the air blowing.
Absent from much of Ingalls’ stories are tales of cooperation—besides Wilder’s feat of heroism in DeSmet—and although hospitality and generosity abounds in anecdotes, it is never adulated in the way that determination, perseverance and stoic courage are. Certainly, Ingalls possessed extraordinary stoicism and courage among her peers. Women who bore fewer sorrows than she—a blind sister, dead brother, dead baby, house in ashes—went stir-crazy or “shacky-wacky” on the isolated prairies.
Rose Wilder Lane became one of the “foremothers” of the libertarian movement in the United States and wrote with great invective against the New Deal and Roosevelt. Wilder Lane edited much of her mother’s work, and Fraser notes where Lane injects her politics into her mother’s prose.
Despite many of Lane’s libertarian children invoking Dorothy Day’s resistance to federal government relief, Day’s critiques of the New Deal are nothing like Lane’s harsh, unsympathetic excoriation of the poor.
Harry Murray writes—in an excellent article that is turning 25 next year—that most protests of welfare come from the petit-bourgeois, who wonder why their taxes should have to pay for someone else’s life, when they pay their own expenses on their own, thank you very much. “The present program places all the responsibility on the poor, relieving the upper classes of the burden of personal responsibility that Day would place upon them.” But Dorothy’s critique of government welfare is not that it provides, but that it keeps us slotted into our roles as consumers and producers and divides us rather than binds us into a community of care and dependence upon one another. We are called to create a community of charity.
But who is to take care of them if the government does not? That is a question in a day when all are turning to the state, and when people are asking, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Certainly we all should know that it is not the province of the government to practice the works of mercy, or go in for insurance. Smaller bodies, decentralized groups, should be caring for all such needs.
And, certainly, Rose Wilder Lane was not about to call, like Dorothy for an embrace of lady poverty:
We must keep on talking about voluntary poverty, and holy poverty, because it is only if we can consent to strip ourselves that we can put on Christ. It is only if we love poverty that we are going to have the means to help others.
It is only if we love poverty that we are going to have the means to help others. It is necessary to be poor to have the means to help others. And what I mean by that is, if you are poor, you know what you need and you know the difference between what I want and what I need. That is very clarifying. And when you see someone asking for help, you are not overwhelmed (I mean, we often all are! It is so overwhelming!) but I think what poverty frees you is to see a person in front of you with a request instead of another manifestation of the faceless and distressing social class known as The Poor.
And if you are poor, you realize how much it means for someone to give you a little. When you are poor, you realize that you can afford to give a little and that that little will actually make a difference to the person who needs something. A little does indeed go a long way.
Reading about Laura Ingalls’ and her family’s constant economic failures, I wonder if it’s not so much user error rather than the United States economy really being a load of hogwash. This economy has never lived up to its rather inflated promises, certainly not while also hewing to ideals of liberty and justice for all—after a couple of centuries of chattel slavery, the failure of 1873 led to the panic of 1892, which led to the fantasy of 1920 and the long slog of depression, interrupted and reversed only by the economic activities of war, which has led to a long rampage of consumerism that doesn’t actually produce a thriving economy. Are we all just Laura Ingalls and Pa, chasing a pipe dream of riches?
Dorothy Day’s words and wisdom show us the way to be holy, but also show us the only rational way to make a society in a land that is weary with destruction: to strip ourselves of the myths and pipe dreams of the prosperity Gospel and put on Christ.
Her message—to personalism and community, not consumerism, to hospitality and generosity rather than our own material comfort— is a call to good sense. Something Americans, sons and daughters of so many desperate immigrants that we are, have lost. Dorothy’s life and her message is thoroughly American, but it’s also a call to come back to something more rooted and rational than the American Doctrine of Manifest Destiny, any man for himself, or putting on your own oxygen mask before assisting your neighbor, lover, or child—the actual Gospel.
If [our] jobs do not contribute to the common good, we pray God for the grace to give them up. Have they to do with shelter, food, clothing? Have they to do with the works of mercy? Fr. Tompkins says that everyone should be able to place his job in the category of the works of mercy. This would exclude jobs in advertising, which only increases people's useless desires. In insurance companies and banks, which are known to exploit the poor of this country and of others. Banks and insurance companies have taken over land, built up farms, ranches, plantations .... and have dispossessed the poor. — Dorothy Day, February 1945