Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder ought to be really good. It’s well-researched; it’s about an interesting subject; Fraser obviously really admires Wilder and writes passionately about her. But the book suffers a major flaw that makes it ultimately a failure: Fraser’s political agenda intrudes time and again into the book and infects her judgments on both Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane. By the end of the book, it’s become an almost monomaniacal focus condemning Lane, even for petty things, and this feature is so distracting that it contaminates Fraser’s biographical judgment. “At the extremes of left and right,” said William Holtz in his own biography of Lane, “political discourse tends toward caricature of its representative figures, who become dieties and demons in a mythology of ad hominem arguments.” It’s almost like he had Fraser in mind.
Fraser’s a liberal, who has no compunction about making statements such as “Socialism…helped” farmers on the 19th century frontier, or portraying the New Deal solely in terms of compassion for the poor. That’s fine—she’s entitled to her political viewpoint. But it leads her into making omissions no competent historian would make, such as entirely ignoring the critique of the New Deal as a system of cartels for big business. This is a critique even liberals have acknowledged, at least a little bit. The Progressive Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis agreed with it, striking down a major part of the New Deal in the Schechter Poultry case, for instance. But it appears nowhere in Fraser’s book.
That’s important because both Laura Wilder and Rose Lane were intense critics of the New Deal. Lane, particularly, is a major figure in the history of libertarianism. But Fraser never, in her 500+ pages, even attempts to address Lane’s substantive criticisms of the New Deal—even to refute them. Instead, she just asserts that “more discerning” people support government welfare—and she resolutely portrays Lane’s political views as a function of alleged mental illness. Thus we’re told that Lane wrote against the New Deal out of “a personal sense of grievance against the federal government,” or that she opposed FDR because “she found it easier to locate villains outside herself.”
This sort of psychologizing is simply infantile. No doubt Lane was a complex and cantankerous figure, perhaps even unlikable. But to ascribe her political beliefs to that does a disservice not just to Lane, but to Wilder, who, after all, agreed with her daughter. Fraser recognizes this, so she is forced time and again to portray Wilder as having not really believed in free markets and limited government, or of having somehow been duped by her daughter—which is a demeaning and fundamentally antifeminist perspective, not to mention flat-out wrong. Laura Wilder was no pushover. Fraser’s hostility to Lane transforms into misogyny, in fact; Lane was a remarkably modern figure—a world-traveling independent journalist who refused to compromise her career dreams to settle down to married life; she deserves recognition at least as one of the pioneering female intellectuals of the 20th century—yet Fraser manages to transform this into a character flaw that springs from Lane’s lack of a conscience and failure to act out stereotypically female versions of compassion. This, Fraser says, proves there was something wrong with her. No ’20s chauvinist could’ve said it better. (This is also false; Lane sponsored, at considerable personal expense, the educational and careers of several young people she “adopted” as her own. Fraser manages somehow to make this still more proof of her lack of charity.)
Fraser’s portrayal of opposition to the New Deal as a psychological disorder also does a disservice to those who believe the New Deal was a good idea. That’s because it’s not coupled with any substantive discussion or defense of the New Deal. It makes no effort to address its merits, but rests upon an emotionalistic caricature of history, with good guy New Dealers against the Snidely Whipash capitalists. And that leads her into some real whoppers—such as when she quotes Rose Lane’s saying that “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God endow you with a right to life and liberty”—and then calls this a “nationalistic” statement, which is simply the opposite of the correct adjective, whatever one’s own opinion might be. Or her statement that the 1930s was “a time of the most widespread food insecurity Americans had ever known.” Assuming “food insecurity” means anything, surely Americans in, say, 1863 or 1837 or 1873 or 1620 faced worse, no? Or her statement that the Nineteenth Amendment “was the most important advance in civil rights in America since Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” So much for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875. She says that the Ingallses failed as homesteaders—a debatable claim—and then says their generation were essentially duped into homesteading because nobody could really have succeeded at it—also dubious—but then praises Progressive era banking laws that “would have provided a lifeline” to the Ingallses by giving them “low-interest loans”—after just telling us what terrible credit risks they were. And she even claims that “the Chicago Tribune [in 1877] urged homeowners pestered by [the homeless] to spike handouts with ‘a little strychnine or arsenic’ and poison men as if they were vermin.” This is just not true. That article was a satire. But because it supports her cartoonishly stereotyped notions of the Gilded Age, she falls for a hoax.
As for historical issues of greater subtlety, they’re far beyond Fraser’s ken. She criticizes Lane for giving Mussolini and Hitler some measured approval in the 1920s and early 30s—ignoring the fact that many conservatives did so, including Winston Churchill. Hardly proof she was a fascist. She praises Laura Wilder for saying that “If I had been the Indians I would have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left [the prairie],” by saying that this “was a startling statement for a woman of her day.” It wasn’t. Such sentimentalism and romanticism—which was certainly well-grounded—was commonplace throughout Wilder’s lifetime and before; see the works of James Fenimore Cooper, for instance.
Her vendetta against Lane also blinds her to biographical issues of greater subtlety. Time and again she condemns Lane (and more gently, Wilder) for introducing false or inaccurate anecdotes into their writing—most notably the anecdote about Almanzo narrowly escaping the notorious Bender family of serial killers. But she never addresses the way in which people tell family stories over the years. Families tell stories back and forth and often forget what actually did happen; they don’t always double check their records for factual accuracy. Over generations, these tales evolve and expand, and become treasured, so that they become “lore.” We’ve all seen this happen. Maybe Wilder and Lane knew that the Bender story wasn’t true, but it’s also possible that these tales were told back and forth for so long that they became lore, and they themselves didn’t know what was true or not. In the 1930s, Laura openly said it wasn’t true. But by the 50s, did she even remember this? Maybe, maybe not—and the point is, Fraser makes no effort to address this. She simply takes the fact that it wasn’t true as proof of Rose’s dishonesty. (The fact that Laura also repeated the story? That’s just proof of Rose’s nefarious influence.)
This sort of sloppiness—even cattiness—ruins the book, which degenerates into a redundant, superficial attack on Lane and on the libertarian political movement in general. That’s nothing new to libertarians, of course—always the red-headed stepchild—but it’s so poorly done that it not only fails to persuade, but it ends up as neither a satisfying biography nor a satisfying critique of the ideas. I mean, for example, on pages 498-99, she criticizes, of all things, Rose Wilder Lane’s gravestone—which includes a passage from Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice—for being written in all capital letters. Seriously, she calls this “shouting,” and then says that Lane’s dear friend who chose the words, Roger Lea MacBride, “and conservatives like him,” “had not read” Agrarian Justice, which, she says, was an argument in favor of a welfare state. Even putting aside the petty nastiness of such comments, and this dubious characterization of Agrarian Justice, and her misrepresentation of MacBride as a conservative, when he was actually a libertarian, what proof does Fraser have that MacBride and Lane didn’t read Agrarian Justice? She certainly doesn’t provide any.
This book features page after page of such millimeter-deep partisanship. What it ultimately is, is a failure of imagination. Fraser just can’t conceive of how someone could have opposed the New Deal in the 30s, and thinks it must just prove that Rose hated poor people, was mentally ill, and didn’t know anything about history (and that she manipulated or brainwashed her otherwise independent-thinking mom). What it really proves is that Fraser doesn’t know, and doesn’t care to learn, about the context of the subject she’s writing about or to understand Laura Ingalls Wilder or Rose Wilder Lane as they understood themselves. That’s a disservice to them and to the reader—and it’s a disappointment, because we all deserve better.
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