Wilder's Politics

My inquiry into Wilder's politics was inspired largely by Anita Clair Fellman's Little House, Long Shadow.  This book has some interesting biographical information about Laura Ingalls Wilder, her husband Almanzo Wilder, and their daughter Rose Wilder Lane.  According to Fellman, Lane's role in organizing and writing the Little House books has been largely overlooked, even though the books would never have been written without her.  Fellman's somewhat questionable thesis is that the Little House books played a role in "normalizing" the constellation of political notions that came to be associated with Ronald Reagan. Although she admits that it is not possible to gauge the extent to which these books led to the election of Ronald Reagan, she believes that they may have had a large enough effect on the popular imagination to account partially for his election.

Fellman does not say that Wilder and Lane invented conservatism, but that they helped shape a particular type of conservatism that became prominent when children who grew up reading the Little House books came to be voting age.  Fellman says that there were two types of conservatism historically.  There was economic laissez-faire conservatism that wanted less government in all areas of American society and social conservatism that taught that the government should have laws restricting human behavior.  What made Reagan-style conservatism novel is that he united these two trends.  Reagan believed that government restrictions on business should be loosened, but he also put in place national speed limit laws (although he did this by threatening to restrict federal funds, and not by passing laws on the federal level).

Anyway, these are the same sort of values that Fellman finds implicit in the Little House books, as well as explicitly stated in editorial writings by Wilder and Lane.  Fellman believes that people were comfortable with Reagan because they had already seen these views advocated in the Little House books.

I don't want to spend too much time expanding on this thesis.  My current thought is that understanding the political viewpoints of these writers does shed some light on how they tell the stories, particularly in relation to which characters are described as admirable and which are criticized.  I find it plausible that, at least in some particulars, the Little House books were designed to show the importance of self-reliance and the "wickedness," if you will, of reliance on others.  At the same time these books were being written, Wilder and Lane were both vocal critics of the New Deal (so was Cather, to be honest - more on this later).  However, I also think it is a mistake to reduce these books to political commentary.

To be clear, then, I think that analyzing political presumptions helps us understand the Little House books, but actually stand in the way of understanding Cather.  I hope to deepen my thoughts on this issue more as I continue to explore.