Daily Archives: February 7, 2017

Laura Ingalls Wilder as a schoolteacher, c. 1887. (Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Born on the American frontier on February 7, 1867, Laura Ingalls Wilder turned her memories of being a pioneer girl into the Little House on the Prairie books, one of the most popular childrens series of all time. Unknown to many, however, is that Wilder didnt write the books alone. On the 150th anniversary of Wilders birth, learn about her secret collaborator on the Little House on the Prairie books and her little-known connection to the Libertarian Party.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wasnt your typical debut novelist when her first book, Little House in the Big Woods, was published in 1932. She was 65 years old, decades removed from the childhood memories that provided the foundation for her colorful story of hardship, adventure and survival on the Wisconsin frontier that struck a chord in Depression-era America.

Children devoured the wholesome tales celebrating family, self-reliance, hard work and neighbor helping neighbor. There had never been anything like this for children, telling them what the pioneer daysa time in history that was still pretty recentwere like, says Christine Woodside, author of the new book Libertarians on the Prairie: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House Books.

Wilder authored seven more books over the next 11 years, including Little House on the Prairie, which chronicled the exploits of the itinerant Ingalls family as they endured everything from blizzards of grasshoppers to plagues of snow as they rattled westward in their covered wagon across the wilderness and plains of the upper Midwest in the late 1800s before finally settling in the Dakota Territory.

While only the name of Laura Ingalls Wilder was emblazoned on the book covers of one of the most popular series in American literary history, scholars researching her family papers slowly came to the conclusion in the decades following her 1957 death that the beloved stories of Pa, Ma and sisters Mary, Carrie and Grace were the product of not just one womanbut two.

Unknown to readers at the time, Wilder secretly received considerable assistance from her only adult child, Rose Wilder Lane. While Wilder was an unknown author when Little House in the Big Woods was published, Lane was one of the most famous female writers in the United States, having penned novels, biographies of Charlie Chaplin and Herbert Hoover and short stories for magazines such as Harpers, Cosmopolitan and Ladies Home Journal.

Unlike her mother, however, Lane had little affinity for the hardscrabble life of the American heartland and left the familys Missouri farm as a teenager, eventually moving to San Francisco. Able to speak five languages, she traveled extensively and by the 1920s was living in Albania in a large house staffed by servants. Although she always had a tense relationship with her mother, Lane began to long for home and returned to the family farm in 1928.

Knowing a good story when she heard one, Lane prodded her mother to put her childhood experiences to paper. Wilder, however, had little literary experience outside of pieces that she wrote for rural newspapers. Lane, though, knew how to make a manuscript sing and hold chapters together, and she used her contacts in the publishing industry to sell Little House in the Big Woods.

Laura had lived the life. She had the memory. However, she didnt have any experience making a novel, Woodside tells HISTORY. Rose knew how to do that. They were each crucial to the book. Laura couldnt have written the books without Rose, and Rose couldnt have written them without Laura.

Lane not only polished her mothers prose but infused Wilders stoic outlook with the joy and optimism that connected with many readers. The authors secret collaborator also sanitized Wilders real-life experiences for an audience of children, scrubbing away the hard edges such as the death of a baby brother at 9 months of age and replacing stories of murders on the frontier with images of swimming holes and bonneted girls in dresses skipping through tall grasses and wildflowers.

Woodsides book also shines light on the political views of Wilder and her secret collaborator that were below the surface of the Little House series. Like many Americans, the Wilders were hit hard by the Great Depression. Both mother and daughter were dismayed with President Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal and what they saw as Americans increasing dependence on the federal government. A life-long Democrat, Wilder grew disenchanted with her party and resented government agents who came to farms like hers and grilled farmers about the amount of acres they were planting.

They both hated the New Deal, Woodside says of Wilder and Lane. They thought the government was interfering in peoples lives, that individuals during the Depression were becoming very whiny and werent grabbing hold of their courage. The climate of America was really irritating them. The New Deal, for a lot of farmers and definitely the Wilders, made them change their politics.

An acquaintance of Ayn Rand and a critic of Keynesian economics, Lane would become an early theorist of the fledgling political movement that would eventually form the Libertarian Party in 1971. Neither woman set out to indoctrinate children with their political views, but their beliefs in individual freedom, free markets and limited government can be seen in the pages of the Little House books. Lane didnt explicitly use it as a political manifesto, Woodside says. She was being who she was, and they both felt strongly that the pioneers should be examples to people. It was inevitable she was going to flesh out the story by focusing things like free-market forces at work in the general store and farmers being free and independent.

While the Little House books emphasized self-reliance, at least two instances of government assistance that benefited the Ingalls family were downplayed. In addition to receiving their land in the Dakota Territory through the Homestead Act, it was the Dakota Territory that paid for the tuition of Mary Ingalls at the Iowa School for the Blind for seven years. Its an inconvenient fact, Woodside says. Rose suppressed that detail.

Ultimately, close quarters and close collaboration caused the fault lines between mother and daughter to reappear. The pair became estranged, and Lane moved to Connecticut, where in 1943 she wrote The Discovery of Freedom: Mans Struggle Against Authority, considered to be a libertarian manifesto. By World War II, Lane refused a ration card, grew and canned most of her food and deliberately curtailed her writing in order to pay as little tax as possible.

After inheriting the royalty rights to the Little House series after Wilders death in 1957, Lane donated money to the Freedom School in Colorado, a free-market academy that taught libertarian theory. When she died suddenly in 1968, future Little House royalties were bequeathed to her sole heir and political disciple, lawyer Roger Lea MacBride. In addition to becoming the first person to cast an electoral vote for a Libertarian Party ticket in 1972, MacBride was the Libertarian Party candidate for president four years later.

Both mother and daughter carried the secret of their collaboration to their graves. By the time a new generation of children were becoming exposed to Wilders stories through the Little House on the Prairie television show, on which MacBride served as a co-creator and co-producer, scholars were learning of the partnership from the womens letters and diaries. Laura and Rose were very clearly collaborators from day one on these books, Woodside says. Our understanding and celebrating that is essential to understanding why these books are so wonderful.

Continue reading here:

Little Libertarians on the Prairie: The Hidden Politics Behind a ... - History

UPDATED (2:20 P.M.): The Texas state senator in question below turns out to be a complicated matter; it could be as many as four, three of whom are Republicans. Scroll down for new information.

Donald Trump campaigned as "the law and order" candidate, so it's not surprising that he is likely to govern as one, too.

Still, when it comes to the issue of civil-asset forfeiture laws, even the dirtiest of Dirty Harry wannabes will grant there's something really creepy about the cops and the courts having the ability to take your stuff without even charging you with anything, much less convicting you of anything.

But here's an exchange via the Twitter feed of CNBC's Steve Kopack that should send chills down the spineand bile up the windpipeof every American who gives a damn about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and whether or not Lady Gaga included "under God" during her satanic Super Bowl incantations (she did).

Civil-asset forfeiture, which often doesn't require any sort of criminal charge, is big bucks. As Scott Shackford has noted, in 2014, the FBI alone snatched up $5 billion in seized assets. It's common for local police departments to grab whatever they can from whomever they can (often, the relatives or friends of people assumed to be drug dealers and the like). C.J. Ciaramella took a long, disturbing look at the way the state of Mississippi gilds its budget with seized assets.

Again, we're not talking about drug lords who are charged, have their assets frozen, are found guilty, and then have their assets sold at auction to pay reparations, or anything like that. The way a ton of asset forfeiture works is that the cops, or a prosecutor, or somebody else takes your stuff, claiming that it's connected to some sort of illegal activity. You may or may not be involved in anything illegal, but it's on you to get your stuff back. The likely next attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, is a big fan of asset forfeiture, so it's likely to be an issue, even in states that are trying to rein it in. And it should be reined in, like a crazy horse: It's not about law and order, it's about unaccountable power.

Konni Burton, Texas ObserverThe Texas state senator referred to in the video above appears to be Konni Burton of Colleyville. Get this, too: She's a libertarian-leaning Republican and here's how she explained the situation to the Texas Observer:

"Right now, law enforcement can seize property under civil law, and it denies people their basic rights," said Burton, who sits on the Senate Criminal Justice Committee. "There's a basic problem with this process that I want to correct."...

Now it's uniting politicians who might not otherwise be willing to break bread, according to Matt Simpson, senior policy strategist for ACLU Texas.

"It's an issue that crosses party lines; it's not Democrat versus Republican or liberal versus conservative," he told the Observer, adding that he hasn't "seen a bill we wouldn't support in relation to civil asset forfeiture reform, especially some of the stronger ones."

Local police departments and other law enforcement agencies in Texas get about $42 million a year from seized assets, creating a moral hazard that even Donald Trump would recognize. And as far as ruining Burton's careeror that of anyone else involved in the effortthe president might want to consider that regular Americans understand that there's been a massive decrease in violent and property crime over the past couple of decades. These days, people are often worried about how bullying authorities are likely to act, creating a bipartisan push for all sorts of criminal-justice reform.

Hat tip: BalkansBohemia's Twitter feed.

Update: Various Texas media sources say that it's not actually clear whom Trump and Sheriff Harold Eavenson are discussing in the video clip above. Eavenson has refused to name the senator directly and now the Dallas Morning News reports that in addition to Burton, other possible senators include en. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa (D-McAllen), Bob Hall (R-Rockwall), and Don Huffines (R-Dallas).

"He was just being emphatic that he did not agree with that senator's position," Eavenson said, adding of the senator in question, "I'm not into assassinating his character."

Eavenson will become president of the National Sheriff's Association in June. He has been active in the Sheriff's Association of Texas.

Well, sure, maybe. Then again, the fact that there are so many suspects underscores how unpopular civil-asset forfeiture is across traditional political parties.

See original here:

Updated! Meet the Libertarian-Leaning GOP Texas State Senator[s] Whose Career[s] Donald Trump Wants To Destroy - Reason (blog)