“We won’t let a pesky crop of grasshoppers stop us.” Little House on the Prairie/NBCUniversal
Laura Ingalls Wilder was an American farmer and small-town farm journalist who rarely got involved in 20th-Century politics. She was not an activist for the vote and only entered in politics in old age, when she ran for a paid local office — and lost.
And yet for decades, conservative Americans have held up her series, the Little House books, which includes Little House on the Prairie, as a Bible of libertarianism: true examples of American self-reliance and independent spirit. The nine children’s books about a hard-working pioneer family warned about the encroaching power of the state, and heralded the rise of the modern Republican party. They are fiction, of course, but based on Wilder’s real childhood.
Published in the throes of the Great Depression, the Little House books were powerful allegories opposing President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programmes, which provided unprecedented financial support to struggling Americans. They also illustrated a major shift in Republican ideology that took place in the Thirties, as the party sought to widen its appeal. It shed its reputation as the party of elite business owners, and instead began to emphasise the power of the individual.
In one of the scenes in The Long Winter, a storekeeper is overcharging starving residents of De Smet, South Dakota, who want to buy the last grain in town. A riot seems imminent until the hero of the books, Charles “Pa” Ingalls, speaks up. “This is a free country, and every man’s got a right to do as he pleases with his own property,” he tells the storekeeper. “Don’t forget that every one of us is free and independent, Loftus. This winter won’t last forever, and maybe you want to go on doing business after it’s over.”
This impromptu speech is anachronistic: arguing about unregulated markets was a debate rooted in the Thirties, when this book was written, rather than the 1880s, when it was set. It hints at the secret lying at the heart of the Little House books: it was Wilder’s daughter and secret co-author, Rose Wilder Lane, who imbued the books with their political message.
Lane was one of the intellectual architects of the libertarian political movement in America: she was an influential free-market activist, writer, and acquaintance of the philosopher Ayn Rand. Her projection of her radical political views onto her mother’s pioneering childhood means that the series should be read as a double history: folk stories about the 1870s and 1880s woven through the vantage point of the Great Depression and the Second World War.
Pulsing through the books, meanwhile, are principles rooted in the Declaration of Independence. Thanks often to Lane’s revisions, characters occasionally quote that document, noting that they want to be “free and independent”. In Little Town on the Prairie, Pa takes Laura and her sister to the Fourth of July celebration in town. In Lane’s revision, Laura is transfixed by the reading of the Declaration of Independence and the singing of My Country Tis of Thee:
“The crowd was scattering away then, but Laura stood stock still. Suddenly she had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the Song came together in her mind, and she thought: God is America’s king. She thought: Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences.”
This is why the books are so beloved by conservatives today: these libertarian views formed the basis of the modern Republican Party.
Yet the books purposefully understate the difficulty of the American pioneer experience. It was in fact a brutally hard life of crop failures, isolation, and disease. Although the Little House books preserved in accurate and lyrical detail many of the skills that small farmers practiced in the 19th century, Lane recast many scenes as optimistic takes on tragedy that did not reflect how the family actually responded. In On the Banks of Plum Creek, Pa announced during a horrible plague of the Rocky Mountain locust that ate crops for two years: “We won’t let a pesky crop of grasshoppers stop us.” The locusts did, in fact, lead to their financial ruin. Two years later, according to Little Town on the Prairie, the family resorted to eating the blackbirds that had destroyed their first corn crop in Dakota Territory. The family sings Sing a Song of Sixpence at the table. And why not show some upbeat pluck in a children’s book?
But Wilder cautioned her daughter that the family was not an optimistic group. The quality they relied on was stoicism, putting up with the bad that came. That’s very different from hope. “I wish I could explain to you about the stoicism of the people,” she wrote to Lane in 1938, when they were halfway through writing the series. “You know a person cannot live at a high pitch of emotion. The feelings become dulled by a natural, unconscious effort at self-preservation.” Wilder insisted that the Ingalls family had never reacted to anything emotionally.
The divergence between Wilder’s real-life story and the Little House narrative was also apparent from what they left out: crime and tragedy. Gone from the books were stories Laura had written in early drafts: the death of a baby brother, a mournful episode running a tavern that ended with the family fleeing late at night to avoid paying its debts. The hardships that did stay in the books shored up tenaciousness as a value, such as sister Mary Ingalls going blind as a teenager. Laura then had to step in to help her and support the family by teaching at several schools.
The books also downplayed the various ways the government helped the family, spinning a myth of self-reliance. Like many pioneer settlers, they were given a free homestead through the federal Homestead Act, which granted tracts the government had taken from American Indians. Then there was sister Mary’s state-paid college for the blind in Iowa. The stories only talk of Laura having to teach to pay for Mary’s college expenses — perhaps her clothes.
The stories continue to exert a kind of power on the American psyche. The books have sold more than 60 million copies and were taught in classrooms for many decades; the series remains part of homeschooling curricula. “Laura Ingalls Wilder is the quintessential American pioneer,” says Wilder expert William Anderson in the PBS American Masters documentary Laura Ingalls Wilder: Prairie to Page.
And Lane’s legacy can still be felt in the Republican party. Lane only wrote political articles after publishing the Little House books and her libertarian treatise The Discovery of Freedom. But she campaigned for limited government in the last years of her life. In the Sixties, she took under her ideological wing a young man in Connecticut; he was Roger Lea MacBride, who became a champion of libertarian thought and ran for president for the new Libertarian Party in 1976. Later, MacBride took the libertarian ideas with him as he migrated back to the Republican party’s Liberty Caucus.
Lane also donated funds to help businessman Robert LeFevre launch an institution for adults in Colorado called the Freedom School, which named a building after Lane. Two of the early students who studied free markets and limited government there were Charles and David Koch, who went on to become members of the Libertarian Party in the Seventies and Eighties. Later, they returned to the conservative branches of the Republican Party and became hugely influential by donating money to Republicans promising to support free-market concerns, including such notions as refuting the science of climate change.
The myth of the pioneers, embodied by Laura Ingalls Wilder, inspired many conservative American values today. They were seen as the kind of independent, self-reliant Americans that the Second Amendment was designed to protect. But even they would have struggled with some aspects of modern Republican policy — gun control in particular.
Certainly, the Ingalls family owned and used guns. In one scene in Little House in the Big Woods, Pa Ingalls trudges with his rifle through the snow of northern Wisconsin, checking animal traps. Rounding a large pine tree, he meets a black bear, standing on its hind legs clutching a dead pig. Pa aims his gun, kills the bear, and immediately runs home for the horses and sled to take the meat home. There, it resides in frozen form in a shed. Pa hacks off pieces with an axe at mealtimes.
Even the mythical Pa Ingalls would not have thought today’s Americans needed guns in most situations, especially the range of weapons available today. He preached to his daughters the necessity of restraint. “You wouldn’t shoot a little baby deer, would you, Pa?” says Laura. “‘No, never!’ he answered. ‘Nor its Ma, nor its Pa. No more hunting, now, till all the little wild animals have grown up. We’ll just have to do without fresh meat till fall.’”
When baby animals were roaming the forest, it was time to put the rifle away.
Christine Woodside is the editor of Appalachia and teaches at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Libertarians on the
Prairie, published by Arcade Publishing in 2016.
chriswoodside 
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SubscribeI’m afraid Miss Woodside has profoundly missed the point of these books. They’re part of our origin myth, just like the first Thanksgiving, George Washington and the cherry tree, Lincoln walking miles return some customer’s change, or John Henry and the steam drill.
Origin myths are healthy and necessary parts of any society. The Hungarians believe they were all descended from Megyar tribe. The Russian Orthodox church traces their origins to Prince Vladimir of the Kievan Rus tribe. The Chinese consider themselves descended from the ancient Han. Modern Mexicans increasingly see themselves as Mayan descendants.
None of these are literally true stories (even Laura said “I don’t know I was writing history”), but like any origin myth, they contain important truths about who Americans believe themselves to be. Trying to dissect them and falsify specific pieces is missing the forest for the trees.
These myths allow a people (or peoples) to be bound together where they might otherwise fracture. It’s not accidental that those who hate Western Civilization today seek to undermine its origin myths.
I thought that was the point of the article. Despite these stories being myths and missing large amounts of important information, they seem to have inspired the thoughts and policies of the libertarian wing of government
She’s telling a origin story for the libertarian wing of the Republican Party (a story with is false even under those terms, since the libertarians go all the way back to the anti-federalists in 1787)
My point is that Laura is part of the myths not of a party, but of a nation. The other examples I gave are ethnic because the vast majority of nations in the world are ethnically based. America’s founding myths are even more important though, since we lack a common ethnic tie. Attacking them (by trying to falsify them) is misses their unifying role as myths instead of history.
J.R.R. Tolkien once described the Bible (the ultimate origin myth) as “the myth that really happened” to C.S. Lewis. He didn’t mean he’d investigated the historical location of Eden. He meant that even though it was a myth, it contained Truth universal to all human beings.
That’s what matters in an origin story: that the story has the power to shape and unify the mental architecture of a particular people. ‘Proving” that George never chopped down a cherry tree or that Laura wasn’t completely truthful in her account of prairie life is beside the point.
It is interesting to hear the Bible dismissed as myth by those who have no qualifications for doing so (ask those who’ve spent a lifetime studying it) nor have the experience of some of the Einsteinian dimensions hitherto undetectable to materialists. The Bible records the true history of mankind in astounding detail as – you put it well – the universal Truth.
If you wanted to defend the Bible as almost ur-myth, or as ‘true’ in the sense Jordan Peterson does, I’d go along with you. However so many American Christians are crashingly literal minded! No, the Bible does very much NOT tell an accurate narrative history of mankind, and was undoubtedly written by many authors over hundreds if not thousands of years.
Marcia, I don’t think Tolkien or Lewis are “denigrating” the Bible here, and I’m not either. It’s likely both of those men have forgotten more about the Christian faith than either you or I have ever learned. (Perhaps you’re an Oxford trained, doctoral theologian, but I am not.)
Without being too harsh, let me say that the Christian faith is far larger than the Dwight Moody derived, dispensational, fundamentalist, Protestant view you have articulated. Last year First Things magazine (a conservative, Catholic publication) wrote an article using genetics, archeology, and theology together to hypothesize about who Adam and Eve really were and when and where they likely lived. (https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/10/the-historical-adam) That’s what I mean when I say “the myth that really happened”, and that’s what I think Lewis and Tolkien meant too.
If you haven’t read Lewis’ Mere Christianity or The Problem of Pain, you really should. The Screwtape Letters is hilarious, until you see echoes of your world in it. Reading things outside of your denominational bubble isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of strength and a willingness to honestly seek God as He really is.
Libertarians are “inspired” by the works of people like Friedrich Hayek, Adam Smith and Frederic Bastiat, not children’s stories.
Mexicans certainly don’t consider themselves full Mayans (it’s more likely to be Aztecs anyway). If they did they would be trying to remove Spanish influence.
The Aztecs, though, were latecomers, brutal conquerors, somewhat analogous to the Zulu coming into South Africa.
The term ‘Aztec’ is now considered problematic. It was the ‘Triple Alliance’; of whom the Mexica were the dominant people (Tenochtitlan etc).
Mmm – myths which underly and support modern Hungarian, Russian and Chineses society. Now what do those three societies have in common? I suspect that ‘civilisation’ as defined by the vast majority of people would not be one trait! More likely authoritarianism and the suppression of democracy, surely the very antithesis of ‘Western Civilisation’?
Western civilisation is hardly a synonym for ‘democracy’, and long pre dates it in itsodern form by hundreds of years Most of the time the latter term was used an a completely negative way; it was taken for read that democratic societies would become dominated by the uneducated mob become unstable and lead to tyranny. Athens was seen in this light.
Oh give me a break. I grew up around ranchers who have always worked hard and struggled to get by. Their opinions and what I have learned from them means much more than a glamourized old bit of pop culture and some East Coast university professor. Here is the real lesson I learned from them. Local government can be very effective in addressing the needs of its citizens. The reason is they understand each other and know what they need. On the other hand every government scheme from some young cosmopolitan technocrat who could never be bothered to learn the details and livelihoods of the people they were supposed to be helping turned out poorly. These people are not so much for no government as they are for decentralization. Also FYI, most of those ranchers have gun collections in the double digits and many of those guns have been in their families for over a hundred years.
I suspect that the gun collections of ranchers are not the main contributor to the 45,000+ gunshot deaths p.a. in the USA today.
Most of the gunshot deaths are suicides. The next big category is gang shootings in big cities…
Yes, gang shootings in big cities with very illegal guns. And very strict gun laws.
The illegal guns in the big cities in Blue states, like Chicago, come from straw buyers that buy the guns in Red states, like Kentucky, and illegally sell them in the big cities to criminals.
FBI statistics say otherwise.
Stephanie, you are not supposed to talk about the gang shootings in big cities, their predominant victims, and how it’s all deliberately ignored by the mainstream media.
Mention BLM to them and they will talk for hours about the Bureau of Land Management.
Agreed! The author seems determined to reduce the books (and their appeal?) to raw libertarianism (the paper thin link to Ayn Rand was priceless as it was cheeky). She defines libertarianism thusly:
“ libertarianism: true examples of American self-reliance and independent spirit.”
Libertarianism is about limited government (especially federal), while “self-reliance and independent spirit” is related to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and is (was?) as American as apple pie. The opposite is looking for handouts, like FDR wanted us to. FDR and his policies extended the depression for almost 10 years.
As Milton Friedman famously demonstrated, the Federal Reserve’s policy of deflation was the root cause, FDR just made it worse.
Also, she (clearly left-wing Eastern college professor) had to sneak in an attack on the 2nd Amendment. If you want to undo the Second Amendment, there is a clear procedure in the Constitution- but you won’t get very far.
The left has very little chance of ever changing the U.S. via legal means. That’s why it has to pack the courts with leftist ideologues and steal elections. But it appears that many of the useful idiots are finally waking up.
Sounds like it’s time to tackle the New Deal myths as well.
Utterly on target comment. Let’s start with the idea that keeping generations of poor people enslaved with welfare is in their best interest.
And next should be the myth that the New Deal ended the Depression.
Lol yep
“…and now do the New Deal.”
Yes, Christene, what a great title for your article. Let’s paint conserving social structures that are not perfect but functional as myths and replace them with todays “progressive” ideology based on eshewing truth for “lived experience” and utopian, authoritarian social controls. Great idea.
The left needs to invade every institution in order to break things completely.
“And why not show some upbeat pluck in a children’s book?”
Said sardonically, of course. Does nothing matter anymore?
The books may well be “imbued” with a political message, and be “pulsing” with “principles rooted in the Declaration of Independence.” Certainly they could be imbued by all manner of things if a scene as plainly run-of-the-mill as the one referred to in The Long Winter is anything to go by. It could have featured in any old Western and looked good. As the decades have rolled by, customers arguing about unregulated markets in shops with shopkeepers has gone out of fashion entirely, surely. Tap and go now. Tap and be gone!
“The stories continue to exert a kind of power on the American psyche.”
Would that strange kind of power have something to do with the mere upbeat pluck that was aforementioned? The hope that can be derived from that? And would it have something to do with the somewhat consolatory aspect of the stories? As well as all these qualities when combined with the entertainment value?
The colour photo at the head of this piece of the family from the 70s tv series of Little House On The Prairie is just like something from the album that you intend to keep. Of good times. Or of good moments, more realistically.
The danger right now in America is that it wants to throw out its by now dusty photo albums because from now on, apparently, as the progressive movement would implore us, America should never be in a state or position from which it can look back fondly on past times and smile. Besides, aren’t there enough clever clogs telling us today that folk back in the 1880s never smiled for their portraits?
A kind of power on the American psyche? Did you ever! (How many countries around the world broadcast Little House back in the 70s and 80s? I suspect a lot. The tv series would have … delighted young and old alike, not indoctrinated them.)
The American psyche? It’s like a strange and awful affliction runs through much of America. Good old TV could be an antidote to that. I wish the young today would just watch plain old TV today. And smile and be proud.
“Her projection of her radical political views…”
Isn’t the entire premise of America a radical idea that the individual is bestowed with unalienable rights? And that our elected leaders are to represent the will of the people? Radical indeed. The left has been trying to reverse this for centuries now.
Exactly. 100 upvotes!
I’m sorry but the essay hints at a sad truth that made me laugh:
The Homestead Act gave land to anyone who wanted it and would work the land for 5 years. Despite the revisionism it wasn’t “socialist” as it was the opposite of collectivized farms, effectively giving a loan to each family to make their own fortune good or ill.
Modern progressives still hate this history, noted in the line “it was taken from American Indians.” The very projects the New Dealers used to emphasize to justify their own are now deemed racist and whites supremacist! Along with much of the New Deal itself mind you.
The sad truth was that the Native Americans were a Stone Age civilization defined by constant war and ethnic cleansing (especially on the Buffalo plains of the prairie, where the only way horse tribes could keep populations above replacement level was Mongol-esque kidnapping raids). Ending this bloodshed-as-social-system is today regarded as a cultural genocide, although one thing that set the Americans apart was not completely eradicating the tribes on the prairie that preceded us like the Sioux and Comanches had done.
Little House is a fable, but the self-sufficient, hard-working stoicism of early Americans is as real as the Earth itself. Woolly headed commentary by foolish academicians who never set foot in the wilderness notwithstanding.
Perhaps the author would like to mandate that every household in America be required to display a minimum of an 8×10 photo of our grand leader instead?
I’ve noticed that when academics don’t have an important thesis of their own, they go on a de-bunking trip. Oh so clever and up-to-date. So sophmoric. Anyway, Woodside started in the middle. I look forward to reading her backstory to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with all its political baggage.
I’m a libertarian, and I can honestly say I was never all that influenced by “Little House on the Prairie”. A lot of literature meant for public consumption but allegedly based on true events is highly romanticized or edited for the tastes of particular audiences. TV and movies are even worse. One could fill a small library with examples of historical details in literature and other media fudged for the sake of appealing to readers and selling stuff. Everyone does this and has been for a while. Why is this particular example worthy of such scorn? The answer is that the author doesn’t like the target audience, or at least who she thinks the target audience are. This is clearly an anti-libertarian hit piece, characterizing libertarians as anti-social, bearded, mountain men living off the grid in Wyoming cabins, trying to recreate an era of supposed self-sufficiency. Libertarianism has nothing to do with this and everything to do with returning the levers of power to individuals, towns, neighborhoods, and regions, rather than having everything dictated from a distant imperial capital. That’s inconvenient for a lot of people on both left and right who profit both politically and economically from using government power to ram their own agenda down everyone’s throat, and enforce conformity for the sake of what they claim is the ‘greater good’, so they sick their media dogs on anyone who would dare speak against the One True Faith of corporatized globalist capitalism, and they, in turn, churn out cheap and easy smear articles with barely tangential connections to the thing they’re trying to smear.
This is interesting, but I’d point out that ‘limited government’ isn’t ‘no government’ and that by no stretch of the imagination can it be argued that the United States has limited government today. And, a question really for the whole West, is why far MORE government support and subsidy and bureaucracy is needed in a much richer world, as it now undoubtedly is compared to either the 1880s or the 1930s?
Their answer would be to (i) shut up, (ii) get in the pod, and (iii) eat the bugs.
Ms Woodside wrote this article about the disparate impact of climate change on the LGBTQ+ community. I don’t have any specific gripe with the article, its pretty unremarkable as far as progressive pablum goes, but it does make me wonder how committed to objectivity she is on the topic of Libertarians.
Ahhh… I love the Rev. Lynch Mason- Dixon of the Nascar Free Church of The Holy Bigots, sponsored by Gatorade…
Abracadabra, Holmes.