New Yorker Discovers the Little House Books' Libertarian Roots

Judith Thurman in the current New Yorker, in an article largely (and curiously) hooked off a now-16-year-old book, The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane, by William Holtz, uncovers what seemed (to anyone unfamiliar with modern libertarianism's history) like a fascinating and somewhat dark secret: that the hugely popular and influential Little House books were highly influenced, edited, maybe even "ghostwritten" to a significant extent, by Laura Ingalls Wilder's radical libertarian daughter and fellow novelist, Rose Wilder Lane.

Of their collaborative style, Thurman writes:

The cumulative evidence suggests that sometimes Laura stood her ground and sometimes she was cowed into submission, but most often she solicited and welcomed Rose's improvements. When Rose left the farm, in 1935, the editing of the five books yet to come was done by correspondence. "I have written you the whys of the story as I wrote it," Laura told her in a letter that accompanied a draft of volume four, "On the Banks of Plum Creek," "but you know your judgment is better than mine, so what you decide is the one that stands." Rose, for her part, could be an insufferable didact. She played down her authority, even as she hammered it home: "I'm trying to train you as a writer for the big market," she had told her mother in 1925. (Laura had written an article about her Ozark kitchen, which, heavily revised, had appeared in the magazine Country Gentleman.) "You must understand that what sold was your article, edited. You must study how it was edited, and why. . . . Above all, you must listen to me."

Of Rose's political work beyond working with her mother, Thurman writes:

In 1936, the Saturday Evening Post published Lane's own "Credo," an impassioned essay that was widely admired by conservatives. Her vision was of a quasi-anarchic democracy, with minimal taxes, limited government, and no entitlements, regulated only by the principle of personal responsibility. Its citizens would be equal in their absolute freedom to flourish or to fail.

Everything that Lane wrote after "Credo"—fiction or polemics—was an expression of that vision. She may have been the first to invoke the term "libertarian" (it dates to the eighteenth century) to describe the agenda of a nascent anti-statist movement of which she has been called, with Isabel Paterson and Ayn Rand, "a founding mother." To the degree that she is still remembered for her own achievements, it is mainly by a few libertarian ultras for whom her tract of 1943, "The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority," is a foundational work of political theory. (It was written "in a white heat," she said.)

As far as that "may have been the first," such attempts to pin down "firsts" is a mug's game; she was certainly early in using that term in what has become its main modern use, and also helped define what the term would come to mean.

Of the dual philosophies detectable in the Little House books, Thurman writes:

Last June, Anita Clair Fellman, a professor emerita of history at Old Dominion University, in Norfolk, Virginia, published "Little House, Long Shadow," a survey of the Wilders' "core" beliefs, and of their influence on American political culture. Two streams of conservatism, she argues—not in themselves inherently compatible—converge in the series. One is Lane's libertarianism, and the other is Wilder's image of a poster family for Republican "value voters": a devoted couple of Christian patriots and their unspoiled children; the father a heroic provider and benign disciplinarian, the mother a pious homemaker and an example of feminine self-sacrifice…..

Fellman concludes, "The popularity of the Little House books . . . helped create a constituency for politicians like Reagan who sought to unsettle the so-called liberal consensus established by New Deal politics." Considering the outcome of the November election, and the present debacle of laissez-faire capitalism, that popularity may have peaked. On the other hand, it may not have. Hard times whet the appetite for survival stories. 

Rose Wilder Lane could certainly have set Ms. Thurman straight on her absurd assertion that the current crisis is one of laissez-faire capitalism. Kate Harding at Salon chimes in with comments on Thurman's article, with some requisite modern liberal distaste, yet a hat tip to the undeniable power of Rose Wilder Lane as both character and phenomenon:

Even if she is partially to blame for a political landscape that's made me despair for most of my adult life, there's no denying that Rose Wilder's life story is compelling stuff—arguably far more compelling than her mother's nostalgic stories (and especially the Michael Landonized version of them). Given the mainstream American tastes that keep the Little House books perennially in print, perhaps it's not surprising that someone who simultaneously lived feminist ideals and righter-than-right politics has gone largely unnoticed, but it's a shame nonetheless.

Rose's story is also told at great length in my 2007 book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. She is also discussed in my review of a biography of Rose's good friend and ideological sister Isabel Paterson, from the February 2005 issue of Reason magazine.