Melissa Gilbert, who became famous as a child actress in the role of Laura Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie, is running for the House seat in Michgan’s 8th congressional district. She appears to be, I despair to report, a conventional Democrat, albeit of the Hollywood subspecies, which may give her some trouble in Michigan: Republicans already have seized upon the fact that she was paying a “dog stylist” while the IRS was attempting to collect some $360,000 in unpaid taxes from her. Other than valiantly trying to keep her money out of the clutches of the IRS, there doesn’t seem to be very much to like about her.
She would have done better to pay a little more attention to the politics of Little House, and to those of the woman who shaped the story, Rose Wilder Lane.
Lane’s exact contribution to Little House, a series purportedly written by her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, is a matter of literary dispute. Wilder had been an elementary-school teacher and was a columnist and editor for the Missouri Ruralist. Her daughter had already become a very successful writer. When Wilder was in her 60s, she wrote a memoir, originally titled Pioneer Girl, and Lane used her professional connections to try to help her mother publish it. (The family had been walloped by the Depression and needed the money.) The work was rejected, but at a publisher’s suggestion part of it was reworked into a children’s novel, which became Little House in the Big Woods. Lane would later write two novels of her own based on her family’s pioneering experiences, which were her largest commercial successes, earning her the equivalent of more than a half-million dollars in serialization rights alone.
(The Wilders, incidentally, seem to have had excellent taste in periodical journalism.)
Lane had a very successful career working as everything from an editor to a war correspondent, but her great literary love was political argument. She was one of the intellectual founders of what we now tend to call “libertarianism,” though her views were somewhat broader and less dogmatic than that word implies. A great deal of my own work has consisted of trying to answer her question in The Discovery of Freedom:
Why did families live six thousand years in floorless hovels, without windows or chimneys, then, in eighty years and only in these United States, they are taking floors, chimneys, glass windows for granted, and regarding electric lights, porcelain toilets, and window screens as minimum necessities?
One of those things that soon will be lost to time is the fact that the people of my own generation (I’m in my 40s) are the first Americans to have taken indoor plumbing for granted; many of our parents, especially those who grew up in rural areas, grew up in homes with outdoor pumps (or wells) and outhouses. The interval between outhouse and porcelain toilet in every home was much longer than the interval between the first tungsten lightbulb and the tablet computer.
She was insightful when writing about real-world politics (“In our ignorance, we could not see that the Kaiser’s Germany and the Communist International were merely two aspects of the Old World’s reaction against the new, the American principle of individual liberty and human rights”), hated the New Deal (“One thing I hate about the New Deal is that it is killing what, to me, is the American pioneering spirit. I simply do not know what to tell my own boys, leaving school and confronting this new world whose ideal is Security and whose practice is dependence upon government instead of upon one’s self”), and argued eloquently that the most valuable commodity in the world is human energy, the most humane policy unleashing that energy.
If only Melissa Gilbert had been paying attention. Instead she’s carrying the banner of a movement more informed by It Takes a Village, a work that is inferior in every way.