Lane, Rose Wilder (1886–1968)

American journalist, fiction writer, and proponent of individualist political philosophy. Pronunciation: Layne. Born Rose Wilder on December 5, 1886, in De Smet, Dakota Territory; died in Danbury, Connecticut, on October 29, 1968; daughter of Almanzo James Wilder (a farmer) and Laura Ingalls Wilder (a farmer and author); high school graduate; married (Claire) Gillette Lane (a journalist and merchant), in 1909 (divorced 1917).

Family moved to Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri (1894); after schooling, left Mansfield to workat a series of jobs around the country (1904); married Gillette Lane in San Francisco; traveled with him promoting various products; became reporter and feature writer for the San Francisco Bulletin (1915–18); published first novel Diverging Roads (1918); sailed to Europe to write on behalf of the Red Cross (1920); remained overseas until late 1923, traveling in the most remote corners of Europe and parts of the Middle East; published Peaks of Shala, a travel book about Albania (1923); returned to live with her parents, helping her mother with article writing while two books of her own were published; lived in Tirana, Albania (1926–28); returned to Rocky Ridge Farm (1928–36); in these years, began helping her mother write the "Little House" books and published many magazine articles and two books of her own; wrote one final work of fiction, Free Land, a bestseller (1938), after she left Missouri; settled in Danbury, Connecticut (1938); opposed American entry into World War II; refused a ration card; continued to help her mother with the "Little House" books; wrote her most extensive political treatise, The Discovery of Freedom (1943); became public opponent of social security and income tax; edited National Economic Council Review of Books (1945–50); became influential among other individualist thinkers (1950s–1960s); traveled to Vietnam for Woman's Day magazine (1965).

Selected publications:

The Story of Art Smith (1915); Henry Ford's Own Story (1917); Diverging Roads (1918); The Making of Herbert Hoover (1920); Peaks of Shala (1923); He Was a Man (1925); Hill-Billy (1926); Cindy (1928); Let the Hurricane Roar (1933); Give Me Liberty (1936); Free Land (1938); The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943); The Woman's Day Book of American Needlework (1963).

In late 1932, a two-part novella by Rose Wilder Lane, a well-known journalist and magazine fiction writer with famous friends on several continents, was published in the Saturday Evening Post, a prestigious place for popular fiction. Her work, entitled Let the Hurricane Roar, would appear as a book in 1933, and despite the dampening effect of the Depression, would sell relatively well. Earlier that same year, Lane's mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder , had published her first book, Little House in the Big Woods, a children's story based on the early years of her own childhood in Wisconsin in the early 1870s. It was owing to Lane's contacts in the publishing world and to her role in conceptualizing and polishing the manuscript that an unknown writer like Wilder managed to interest a major publishing company in a book based simply on one year in the life of a child in a pioneer family.

Eleven years later, in 1943, Wilder published the eighth and final book in what had come to be known fondly as the "Little House" series. Laura Wilder had become a beloved figure in the world of children's literature, and for the first time in her life, owing to her handsome royalty checks, was enjoying economic security. Lane, who secretly had collaborated on this book as she had on the seven others in the series, also published a book that year. By then, she had ceased writing fiction, and her lucrative magazine-article writing career was over. Her new book, The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority, published by a relatively minor publisher who gave her little publicity, was a political treatise arguing for individual responsibility and rights against the incursions of state and society. Although her political writings would be important in the post-World War II American revival of the type of individualist thinking described as libertarianism, Lane had slipped into obscurity, a fate not uncommon to those whose fame comes primarily from the ephemeral forms of magazine writing, private correspondence, and sparkling conversation, and whose political convictions are at odds with the dominant ideas of the time. She and her mother had already changed places in terms of fame, accomplishment, and financial success.

Years after both their deaths, Wilder's continuing popularity, bolstered by a television series based on her books, camouflages the accomplishments of a daughter who was once more famous than her mother, was a more skilled writer, and had a far more dramatic and interesting life. Ironically, Lane's most significant contributions to American ideas and letters are those for which she is least widely known.

Rose Wilder was born to Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo ("Manly") Wilder on their farm near De Smet, Dakota Territory, in 1886. In Rose's early years one disaster after another, personal and financial, struck her family. By the time she was three, the Wilders had given up the idea of farming in South Dakota. Rose, a precocious child, seems to have perceived the anxiety her parents felt about their situation, which she transformed into a vague but persistent sense of guilt, especially toward her exacting mother.

After a four-year period of flux, the Wilders migrated in 1894 to Mansfield, Missouri, in the Ozark Mountains. There, they put a down payment on a farm that they appropriately called Rocky Ridge and that they developed over a long period of time, often living and working in town to acquire capital to put into the farm. Growing up as a bookish only child to poor parents in a town with well-developed social distinctions made Rose an outsider in Mansfield. She escaped the town's "narrow relentless life," as she would later characterize it, as soon as she could, initially to her aunt's house in Crowley, Louisiana, to finish high school, and then in 1904 to Kansas City to be a telegraph operator, the first of her many adult residences and careers.

Individual liberty is individual responsibility. Whoever makes decisions is responsible for results…. The question is whether personal freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden and the risks of individual self-reliance.

—Rose Wilder Lane

In the tradition of her family, Rose Wilder became a pioneer, but of a new sort. Although she perceived early that she was not suited for the conventional life of wife and mother, she did not take the common route, followed by her grandmother and mother before their marriages, of becoming a schoolteacher. Instead, she switched from job to job and place to place, using her wits, doing whatever work would pay best. In the 11 years that followed her departure from Mansfield, she had at least five different types of jobs before she began newspaper writing for the San Francisco Bulletin. In 1909, in the midst of this period of trying her wings, she married Gillette Lane, a reporter who found himself drawn increasingly to advertising and promotional work; together, he and Rose pursued commissions with mixed success. By early 1915 when she was offered, through a friend's contacts, the job on the Bulletin, their marriage had faltered. From that point, writing would be her career and marriage would be something she no longer believed in, later describing it as "the sugar in the tea, that one doesn't take, preferring a simpler, more direct relationship with tea."

The three and a half years when she was on staff at the newspaper would be among the most stimulating of her life. She progressed at the Bulletin from the women's pages to writing serial stories of a somewhat slippery blend of fiction and biography, a few of which were also published as books. This writing and her freelance work for Sunset magazine gave her recognition in San Francisco and beyond. Through her job, she became friends with a group of intellectuals, artists, and bohemians in whose company she honed ideas derived from years of reading, listening, and observation. Lane's first novel, Diverging Roads (1918), emerged from the musings induced by the end of her marriage, the role of career in an independent woman's life, and the discussions among her like-minded female friends of the effects of women's freedom on conventional marriage.

In May 1920, she sailed to Europe as a writer on behalf of the Red Cross for the first of several extended periods of residence overseas. This first sojourn, undertaken while Europe was still reeling from the effects of war, revolution, famine, and inflation, marked her as a traveler as intrepid as anyone in her family had been in their migrations across the Great Plains in covered wagons. In addition to the expected sites in Western and Central Europe, she traveled to Albania three times (writing a book, Peaks of Shala [1923], about her experiences in that country with which she had fallen in love), to Yugoslavia and Constantinople, to the Transcaucasus Peninsula, to Cairo and Damascus and then across the unmarked desert by car to Baghdad. Along the way, she acquired and lost several lovers and friends, continued writing fiction and biography in addition to her travel articles, contracted a fierce case of malaria, and for the moment, had her fill of the exotic.

Her observations during these years laid the groundwork for a personal philosophy cynical about the inherent cruelty of human beings, skeptical about the well-meaning efforts of ideologically motivated governments that meddled beyond their competence in individuals' lives, such as that in the Soviet Union, and admiring of the practicality and accomplishments of American relief workers whom she found in the remotest corners of Europe and the Near East.

An ephemeral homesickness for Rocky Ridge Farm and a tenacious sense of responsibility toward her parents drew her back to Mansfield in December 1923. Her goals, once the claustrophobia and mindlessness of the life there reasserted themselves, were twofold: to earn and save enough money from her own writing and from the stock market to enable her parents to retire from farming, and to continue the training of her mother, begun in the 1910s, in the writing and marketing of mainstream magazine articles. With Lane's rigorous editing and reworking, her mother was able to sell a few articles to national magazines.

In two years, Lane had moved close enough to her goals by publishing two books, one of them Hill-Billy, an Ozarks-based story collection, that she felt justified in leaving her parents'

farm to take up residence in Albania. Her stay there turned out to be just 15 months long, owing both to personal difficulties and to the increasing precariousness of Albanian independence. The end of the Albanian adventure brought her back to Rocky Ridge Farm in early 1928, ostensibly just long enough to arrange for her own and her parents' permanent financial independence so that she could leave Mansfield with a clear conscience. In fact, she remained there for eight momentous years during which the investment company holding her money failed after the 1929 stock-market crash, her creative energies for the kind of popular fiction at which she made most of her living became ever more sporadic, the country underwent a serious economic depression, and her mother wrote an autobiography that she expected Lane to help her polish and sell.

Having no luck in marketing her mother's manuscript, Lane successfully split off part of it to sell as a children's story. She worked closely with her mother on the requested revisions and had the satisfaction of seeing the manuscript accepted and published as Little House in the Big Woods to good reviews and sales. Seven more books, most culled from the original autobiography and transformed into forms suitable for children, followed over the next 11 years. Lane had a clearer sense than Wilder of how to shape a book overall and how to weave each volume's theme in and out of the individual incidents and descriptions her mother was so good at writing. It became apparent that what had been originally conceived of as a temporary period of tutelage of the mother by the daughter would be a permanent collaboration, one that neither of them was happy with, but that each required for complex psychological as well as creative reasons. Even after Lane left the farm in 1936, at odds with her mother, she continued working on the "Little House" books.

Nothing that Lane had written under her own name had given her satisfaction on as many levels as her mother was receiving from her books, written with Lane's crucial but unacknowledged help. The obligations to her mother took time and energy away from her own writing and left her feeling depressed and trapped. She was helping her parents achieve financial security, but at a considerable price to herself, as she gradually realized.

Nonetheless, the process of piecing together a narrative of Ingalls family experiences in order to write the "Little House" books in the midst of the Depression and the New Deal helped both women rethink the meaning of their family history in the context of changing conceptions of the role of government. Lane came more and more to believe that lucky circumstance had initially propelled Americans into rejecting the inherent right of authority figures to control or take care of them. This repudiation of authority and acceptance of responsibility for oneself, she decided, had released the energies that Americans were able to give to the settling of a continent and to solving problems in innovative and pragmatic ways, much as her parents and grandparents had managed throughout their lives. The New Deal, she concluded, was a reversion to regressive European models of the infantalizing relationship between government and individual.

Just as she gradually infused the "Little House" books with individualist principles, Lane put her politics and her fiction-writing skills together in her last piece of fiction, her ironically titled 1938 novel, Free Land, based loosely on her father's experience as a homesteading farmer. The book, well reviewed, was a bestseller, enabling Lane to buy a house in Connecticut, far away from her parents. After she lost her interest in writing fiction and became more preoccupied with her political views, outlets for her ideas shrank to a few sources with limited readerships. Her fascinating, knowledgeable conversation and witty, learned letters that had once bound friends like writers Dorothy Thompson and Floyd Dell to her, increasingly were reserved for people who shared her political convictions.

By the 1950s, however, there was evidence that she was not alone in believing the American experiment to have been temporarily derailed by the inheritance of the New Deal, and that she had been influential in convincing others of her perspective. Among other markers of her intellectual impact, the Freedom School in Colorado, founded on individualist principles, named a building after her. Perhaps most significant, she served not only as surrogate grandmother but also as mentor to Roger Lea MacBride who ran in 1976 for U.S. president on behalf of the Libertarian Party, which uses her Discovery of Freedom as a handbook.

Although she may have been more hostile to government than many ordinary Americans in the 1960s, certainly Lane's anti-communism was in step with the mood of the country. In 1965, Woman's Day magazine, for which she had written for years, asked her to go to Vietnam on assignment. At the age of 78, she spent almost a month in the war-torn country. Her appetite for international travel was not sated by this experience; in the fall of 1968, she was set to leave on an ambitious trip to Europe and the Middle East when she died at home several days before the scheduled departure.

sources:

Fellman, Anita Clair. "Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Politics of a Mother-Daughter Relationship," in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Vol. 15, no. 3. Spring 1990, pp. 535–561.

Holtz, William. The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.

MacBride, Roger Lea. Little House on Rocky Ridge. NY: HarperTrophy, HarperCollins, 1993.

suggested reading:

Anderson, William. "Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Continuing Collaboration," in South Dakota History. Vol. 16, no. 2. Summer 1986, pp 89–143.

——. "The Literary Apprenticeship of Laura Ingalls Wilder," in South Dakota History. Vol. 13, no. 4. Winter 1983, pp. 285–331.

——. A Little House Sampler. NY: Perennial Library, Harper & Row, 1989.

Holtz, William, ed. Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Friendship: Letters, 1921–1960. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991.

——, ed. Travels with Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford: A Journal by Rose Wilder Lane and Helen Dore Boylston. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983.

collections:

Correspondence, journals, diaries and manuscripts are located largely in the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, with valuable additional correspondence to be found in the Fremont Older Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley; the Floyd Dell Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago; and the Hader Papers, University of Oregon Library.

Anita Clair Fellman , Director of Women's Studies and Associate Professor of History, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia