Rose Wilder Lane (December 5, 1886 – October 30, 1968) was an American journalist, travel writer, novelist, and political theorist. She is noted – with Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson – as one of the founding mothers of the American libertarian movement. Lane’s mother, Little House author Laura Ingalls Wilder, had been a farm girl born and bred who believed a farm was the one place where a man and woman could work in equal partnership. But her daughter, Rose, abandoned that life. She left the land at 17, found work as a telegrapher, then become a reporter in San Francisco. Eventually she traveled to Europe, writing for the American Red Cross. During the roaring 1920s, growing ever more successful as a writer of magazine fiction, she lived the high life and even had a big house and servants in Albania for a time. She made enough money to renovate the Wilders’ old farmhouse in Missouri—where she then returned to live—and built her parents a retirement cottage nearby. In the farmhouse, she entertained cadres of writers from New York who arrived by steam train. She hired a cook, housekeeper, and farm hands.
Lane was the first child of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder (and their only one to survive into adulthood), who had moved from the Great Lakes region into the Dakota Territory in the late 1870s, determined to homestead “free land” offered to new settlers who would work it and live on it for a minimum period of time. Lane was born in the Dakota Territory in 1886. She grew up there and in rural southern Missouri, on a farm her parents bought in the Ozarks after the climate of the Dakota Territory proved too much for them. Her early years were difficult ones for her parents, the result of successive crop failures, illnesses and chronic economic hardships. During her childhood, she moved with her family several times, living with relatives in Minnesota and then Florida, briefly returning to De Smet, South Dakota, before they finally settled in Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, where her parents eventually established a dairy and fruit farm. Lane attended high schools in Mansfield and Crowley, Louisiana, (where her father’s sister, Eliza Jane Wilder Thayer, had settled), graduating in 1904 (there were seven graduates in total that year).
The young Rose Wilder was a star student in the small-town schools she attended in Missouri and in the cajun country of southwestern Louisiana, but there was no money for her to attend college. Her intellect and ambition were demonstrated by her ability to compress three years of Latin into one, and by graduating at the top of her high school class in Crowley. Despite her academic success, she was unable to attend college due to her parents’ financial situation. Keenly aware of her lack of a formal education, during this time Lane read voraciously and taught herself several languages. Her writing career began around 1910, with occasional freelance newspaper jobs that earned much needed extra cash.
So in the summer of 1904, just after her graduation from high school, she studied telegraphy informally at the local railroad station, under the tutelage of the station master, who was the father of a school friend. By fall, still not yet 18 years old, she was living on her own in Kansas City, working for Western Union. For the next five years, Rose operated telegraphs in Missouri, Indiana, and California. Then, at the age of 22, in 1909, she met and married Gillette Lane, a young man who traveled around the country having a good time, supporting himself as he went by his gift of gab and his flair for the written word. Later that year she gave birth prematurely to a stillborn son. Complications from subsequent surgery appear to have left her unable to bear any more children. The details of her son’s death remain vague; the topic is mentioned only briefly in a handful of existing letters, written years later to express sympathy and understanding to close friends who were also dealing with the loss of a child.
Sometimes Gillette took writing or editing jobs on newspapers. Sometimes he sold ads for newspapers. Sometimes he sold real estate; sometimes he wrote brochure and display ad copy for real estate developers. Whatever you needed done, if being glib would answer your needs, Gillette Lane was your man. Rose followed him around the country for several years, learning a lot in the process — acquiring, for example, some useful familiarity with newspaper offices. Letters to her parents described a happy-go-lucky existence with both she and Gillette traversing the US several times and working a variety of jobs, both together and separately.
Between 1912 and 1914, she – one of the earliest female real estate agents in California – and Gillette sold farm land in what is now the San Jose/Silicon Valley area of northern California. It made sense for them to work separately to earn separate commissions, and she turned out to be the better salesperson of the two of them. The marriage foundered; there were several periods of separation, and eventually an amicable divorce. Her diaries reveal subsequent romantic involvements with several men in the years after her divorce, but she never remarried. However, in diary entries and subsequent published autobiographical pieces concerning this time, she described herself as depressed and disillusioned with her marriage, caught in the tension arising from the recognition that her intelligence and interests did not mesh with the life she was living with Gillette. One account even had her attempting suicide by drugging herself with chloroform, only to awake with a headache and a renewed sense of purpose in life. About six years after their romance began, it was over. In 1915, Lane’s mother visited for several months. Together they attended the Panama-Pacific International Exposition; many details of this visit and Lane’s daily life in 1915 are preserved in Wilder’s letters to Almanzo and are available in West from Home, published by Lane’s heir in 1974. Although Lane’s diaries indicate she was separated from Gillette in 1915, Laura’s letters do not indicate this. Gillette was recorded as living with Lane, although unemployed and looking for work during Laura’s two month visit. It seems the separation was either covered up for it, or had not yet involved separate households.
The threat of America’s entry into World War I had seriously weakened the real estate market, so in early 1915 Lane accepted a friend’s offer of a stopgap job as an editorial assistant on the staff of the San Francisco Bulletin and quickly progressed from editing other people’s copy to writing her own and seeing it published under her byline, not infrequently with a photo. In those days, big city newspapers ran fiction as well as non-fiction, and Rose wrote it all — novels for serialization, short stories, profiles of famous men based on extensive interviews with those men and with those who had known them and worked with them, feature articles, you name it. Her articles and stories were often picked up for syndication to other papers around the country. The stopgap turned into a watershed. She immediately caught the attention of her editors not only through her talents as a writer in her own right, but also as a highly skilled editor for other writers. Before long, her photo and byline were running in the Bulletin daily. She easily churned out formulaic romantic fiction serials (she was an early Armistead Maupin) that would run for weeks at a time. Her first-hand accounts of the lives of Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, and Jack London, were published in book form. Lane was also the first biographer of Herbert Hoover, writing The Making of Herbert Hoover in 1920 in collaboration with Charles K. Field, editor of Sunset magazine. She was a friend and defender of his for the remainder of her life, and many of her personal papers are now in the Rose Wilder Lane Collection at the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa. Her papers contain little actual correspondence between him and her, but the Hoover Post-Presidential Individual series contains a file of Lane correspondence that spans from 1936–1963.
By 1918, Rose had decided that her talent was larger than the San Francisco Bulletin. She would freelance, write articles and books for a national audience. And so she would, for the next 25 years. Throughout the ’20s and ’30s her byline would be everywhere — in the newspapers, in magazines as diverse as Harper’s, theSaturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Cosmopolitan, and the Ladies’ Home Journal. Her books would be in all the bookstores and sometimes on the bestseller lists. Several of her short stories were nominated for O. Henry Prizes and a few novels became top sellers.
In the late 1920s, Lane was reputed to be one of the highest-paid female writers in America, and counted among her friends figures such as Herbert Hoover, Sinclair Lewis,Isabel Paterson, Dorothy Thompson, and Lowell Thomas. Despite this success, her compulsive generosity with her family and friends often found her strapped for cash and forced to work on material that paid well, but did not engage her growing interests in political theory and world history. She suffered from periodic bouts of self-doubt and depression in mid-life, diagnosing herself as manic-depressive (now more commonly known as bipolar disorder). During these times of depression, when she was unable to move ahead with her own writing, she would easily find work as a ghostwriter or “silent” editor for other well-known writers.
But all that was in the future — the fairly near future, but still the future. For now, it was 1918. She was 31 years old, a local success with a local reputation. She believed she had it in her to do more, to make it bigger. But she wasn’t sure. How could she be sure? She hadn’t tried yet.
In 1926, she, Helen Dore Boylston and their French maid traveled from France to Albania in a car they had named “Zenobia”. An account of the journey, Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford was published in 1983. She became enamored with Albania, and lived there for several long periods during the 1920s, spaced between sojourns to Paris and her parents’ Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri. She informally adopted a young Albanian boy named Rexh Meta, who she claimed saved her life on a dangerous mountain trek; she later sponsored his education at Oxford University in England.
In 1928, Lane returned to the United States to live on her parents’ farm. Confident in her sales of her books and short stories, as well as her growing stock market investments, she spent freely, building a new home for her parents on the property and modernizing the farmhouse.
Lane’s exact role in Wilder’s famous Little House book series (the basis for the television show, Little House On the Prairie) has remained unclear. A contributing factor was the stock market crash of 1929, which wiped out both her and her parents’ investments. The ensuing Great Depression further reduced the market for her writing, and she found herself isolated and depressed at Rocky Ridge Farm, struggling to maintain her commitments to support herself, her adopted children (she had taken in two local orphaned brothers at this time, committing to pay for their educations) and her elderly parents, who had retired from active farming with her encouragement and financial support. Her ghostwriting jobs increased at this time, because her depression tended to affect her ability to generate ideas for her own writing projects.
In late 1930, Wilder approached her with a rough, first-person narrative manuscript outlining her hardscrabble pioneer childhood, Pioneer Girl. Lane, using her well-developed sense of what was marketable, took notice. She recognized that an American public weary of the Depression would respond warmly to the story of the loving, self-sufficient and determined Ingalls family overcoming obstacles while maintaining their sense of independence, as told through the eyes of the spunky Wilder as she matured from ages five to eighteen. Despite Lane’s efforts to market Pioneer Girl through her publishing connections, the manuscript was resoundingly rejected, although one editor recommended crafting a novel for children out of the beginning. Laura and Lane worked on this project, thus producing Little House in the Big Woods, which was accepted by Harper and Row in late 1931. Its success resulted in the decision to continue the series, following young Laura into young adulthood. The series has sold around 40 million copies in the United States in the last half century, and another 20 million or so in around 32 other languages worldwide.
It remains unclear whether Wilder was a naturally skilled novelist who never discovered her talents until her sixties, with Lane’s only contribution to Wilder’s success her encouragement and her established connections in the publishing world, or if Lane essentially took Wilder’s unpublishable raw manuscripts in hand and completely (and silently) ghostwrote the series of books we know today. The truth appears to lie somewhere between these two positions – Wilder’s writing career as a rural journalist and a credible essayist began more than two decades before the Little House series, and Lane’s formidable editing and ghostwriting skills are well-documented. The existing written evidence (including ongoing correspondence between the women concerning the development of the multi-volume series, Lane’s extensive personal diaries detailing the time she spent working on the manuscripts, and Wilder’s own initial draft manuscripts) tends to reveal an ongoing mutual collaboration that involved Lane more extensively in the earlier books, and to a much lesser extent by the time the series ended, as Wilder’s confidence in her own writing ability increased, and Lane was no longer living at Rocky Ridge Farm. She insisted to the end that she considered her role to be little more than that of an adviser to Wilder despite much documentation to the contrary.
Whatever the extent of Lane’s help to Wilder in writing the books, it certainly played some role. Wilder did not keep copies of her correspondence with Lane, but Lane kept carbon copies of virtually everything she ever wrote – including the correspondence with Wilder concerning the Little House books. The correspondence shows that she sometimes adamantly refused to accept some of Lane’s suggestions, and at other times gratefully accepted them. Lane’s diaries show reactions to her time spent on the project ranging from anger and frustration over the time lost for her own paying work, to elation at the success of the books and the prestige and income they brought to Wilder.
Regardless, Lane’s editing skills brought the dramatic pacing, literary structure, and characterization critically needed to make the stories publishable in book form.
In fact, this collaboration benefited Lane’s career as much as her mother’s – many of her most popular short stories and her two most commercially successful novels were written at this time and were fueled by material which was taken directly from Wilder’s recollections of Ingalls-Wilder family folklore – Let the Hurricane Roar (later retitled Young Pioneers) and Free Land, both addressed the difficulties of homesteading in the Dakotas in the late 19th century, and how the “free land” in fact cost many homesteaders their life savings. The Saturday Evening Post paid her large fees to serialize both novels, and both were also adapted for highly popular radio performances. These represented her creative and literary peak. Her name received top billing on the magazine covers where her fiction and articles appeared. The Saturday Evening Post paid her $30,000 in 1938 (worth $502,624 today) to serialize her best-selling novel Free Land, while Let the Hurricane Roar saw an increasing and steady sale, augmented by a radio dramatization starring Helen Hayes. Let the Hurricane Roar remains in print today as Young Pioneers.
In 1938, with the proceeds of Free Land, Lane was on a firmer financial footing, and the accumulating royalties from the Little House books was providing her parents with an assured and sufficient income, relieving her need to be the family’s sole source of support. She relocated to Danbury, Connecticut, purchasing a home surrounded by three wooded acres, where she remained for the rest of her life.
During World War II, Lane had one of the most remarkable, but little studied, phases of her career. From 1942 to 1945, she wrote a weekly column for The Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely read American black newspaper.
Rather than hiding or trimming her laissez faire views, Lane seized the chance to sell them to the readership. She sought out topics of special interests of her audience. Her first entry glowingly characterized the Double V Campaign as part of the more general fight for individual liberty in American history. “Here, at last, is a place where I belong,” she wrote of her new job. “Here are the Americans who know the value of equality and freedom.” Her columns highlighted black success stories to illustrate broader themes about entrepreneurship, freedom, and creativity. In one, she compared the accomplishments of Robert Vann and Henry Ford. Vann’s rags to riches story illustrated the benefits in a “capitalist society in which a penniless orphan, one of a despised minority can create The Pittsburgh Courier and publicly, vigorously, safely, attack a majority opinion” while Ford’s showed how a poor mechanic can create “hundreds of jobs … putting even beggars into cars.”
Lane combined advocacy of laissez faire and antiracism. The views she expressed on race were strikingly similar to those of Zora Neale Hurston, a fellow individualist and writer who was black. Her columns emphasized the arbitrariness of racial categories and stressed the centrality of the individual. Instead of indulging in the “ridiculous, idiotic and tragic fallacy of race, [by] which a minority of the earth’s population has deluded itself during the past century”, it was time for all Americans (black and white) to “renounce their race”. Judging by skin color was comparable to the Communists who assigned guilt or virtue on the basis of class. In her view, the fallacies of race and class hearkened to the “old English-feudal ‘class’ distinction.” The collectivists, including the New Dealers, were to blame for filling “young minds with fantasies of ‘races’ and ‘classes’ and ‘the masses,’ all controlled by pagan gods, named Economic Determinism or Society or Government.”
In the early 1940s, despite continuing requests from editors for both fiction and non-fiction material, other than helping Wilder produce the final volumes of the Little House series, Lane turned away from commercial fiction writing and became known as one of the most influential American libertarians of the middle 20th century. She vehemently opposed the New Deal, perceived “creeping socialism,” Social Security, wartime rationing and all forms of taxation, claiming she ceased writing highly paid commercial fiction to protest payingincome taxes. Living on her small salary from her newspaper column, and no longer needing to support her parents or adopted sons, she cut expenses to the bare minimum, and lived a modern-day version of her ancestors’ pioneer life on her rural land near Danbury. She gained some media attention for her refusal to accept a ration card, instead working cooperatively with her rural neighbors to grow and preserve fruits and vegetables, and to raise chickens and pigs for meat. Literary critic and political writer Isabel Paterson had urged the move to Connecticut, where she would be only “up country a few miles” from Paterson, who had been a friend for many years.
During the ’30s Rose Wilder Lane also became a leading opponent of the New Deal. The “real political question” of the ’30s, Lane wrote, was “the choice between American individualism and European national socialism.”
Unfortunately, as Lane saw it, there was no American political party committed to individualism. “In 1933,” she wrote, “a group of sincere and ardent collectivists seized control of the Democratic Party, used it as a means of grasping Federal power, and enthusiastically, from motives which many of them regard as the highest idealism, began to make America over. The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism.” Another way of saying this was to say that, again in Rose’s words, “[a] vote for the New Deal approves national socialism.” Unfortunately, however, the Republican Party was “a political mechanism with no political principle. It does not stand for American individualism.” Therefore, lamentably, “Americans (of both parties) who stand for American political principles … have no means of peaceful political action.” What was needed, Rose believed, was a political movement, which would unite writers, activists, teachers, propagandists, and politicians in favor of individual liberty. A “libertarian movement” — that was her phrase. Brian Doherty reports in his book Radicals for Capitalism that he found Rose using this phrase — “libertarian movement” — as early as 1947. He calls it “the first example I’ve found of the phrase in its modern sense.”
A staunch opponent of communism after experiencing it first hand in the Soviet Union during her Red Cross travels, Lane’s initial writings on individualism and conservative government began while she was still writing popular fiction in the 1930s, and culminated with the seminal The Discovery of Freedom (1943). After this point, she tirelessly promoted and wrote about individual freedom, and its impact on humanity. The same year also saw the publication of Paterson’s The God of the Machine and Ayn Rand‘s novel The Fountainhead, and the three women have been referred to as the founding mothers of the American libertarian movement with the publication of these works.
Writer Albert Jay Nock wrote that Lane’s and Paterson’s nonfiction works were “the only intelligible books on the philosophy of individualism that have been written in America this century.” The two women had “shown the male world of this period how to think fundamentally…they don’t fumble and fiddle around – every shot goes straight to the centre.” Journalist John Chamberlain credits Rand, Paterson, and Lane with his final “conversion” from socialism to what he called “an older American philosophy” of libertarian and conservative ideas.
In 1943, Lane was thrust into the national spotlight through her response to a radio poll on Social Security. She mailed in a post-card with a response likening the Social Security system to a Ponzi scheme that would ultimately destroy the US. The subsequent events remain unclear, but wartime monitoring of the mails eventually resulted in a Connecticut State Trooper being dispatched to her farmhouse (supposedly at the request of the FBI) to question her motives. Her vehement response to this infringement on her right of free speech resulted in a flurry of newspaper articles and the publishing of a pamphlet, “What is this, the Gestapo?,” that was meant to remind Americans to be watchful of their rights, despite the wartime exigencies.
There was a FBI file compiled on Lane during this time, which is now available under the Freedom of Information Act.
As Lane grew older, her political opinions solidified as a fundamentalist libertarian, and her defense of what she considered to be basic American principles of liberty and freedom could become harsh and abrasive in the face of disagreement. She broke with her old friend and political ally, Isabel Paterson, in 1946, and, in the 1950s, had an acrimonious correspondence with writer Max Eastman.
During the 1940s and through the 1950s, Lane played a hands-on role in launching the libertarian movement, a term she apparently coined, and began an extensive correspondence with figures such as DuPont executive Jasper Crane and writers Frank Meyer and Ayn Rand. She wrote book reviews for the National Economic Council and later for the Volker Fund, out of which grew the Institute for Humane Studies. Later, she lectured at, and gave generous financial support to, the Freedom School headed by libertarian Robert LeFevre.
With Wilder’s death in 1957, ownership of the Rocky Ridge Farm house reverted to the farmer who had earlier bought the property on a life lease, allowing her to remain in residence until her death. The local townfolk put together a non-profit corporation to purchase the house and its grounds, for use as a museum. After some wariness at the notion of seeing the house rather than the books themselves be a shrine to Wilder, Lane came to believe that making a museum of it would draw long-lasting attention to the books, and sustain the theme of Individualism she and Wilder wove through the series. She donated the money needed to purchase the house and make it a museum, agreed to make significant contributions each year for its upkeep and also gave many of the family’s belongings to help establish what became a popular museum which still draws thousands of visitors each year to Mansfield. Her lifetime inheritance of Wilder’s growing Little House royalties put an end to her self-enforced modest lifestyle; she began to travel extensively again, and thoroughly renovated and remodeled her Connecticut home. Also during the 1960s, she revived her own commercial writing career by publishing several popular magazine series, including one about her remarkable tour of the Vietnam war zone in late 1965, at the age of 78, for Woman’s Day magazine, providing “a woman’s point of view.” She traveled extensively in Europe and Asia as part of the Red Cross.
Lane wrote an immensely popular book detailing the history of American needlework (with a strong libertarian undercurrent) for Woman’s Day and edited and published On The Way Home, providing an autobiographical setting around her mother’s original 1894 diary of their six week journey from South Dakota to Missouri. It was intended to serve as the capstone to the Little House series, for those many fans who since Wilder’s death were now writing to Lane asking, “what happened next?”. She contributed book reviews to the influential William Volker Fund, and continued to work on extensive revisions to The Discovery of Freedom, which she never completed. Writer and writing teacher Christine Woodside is among those who argue that Rose Wilder Lane may have written the Little House books:
“Although Wilder and Lane hid their partnership, preferring to keep Wilder in the spotlight as the homegrown author and heroine, scholars of children’s literature have long known that two women, not one, produced the Little House books. But less well understood has been how exactly they reshaped Wilder’s original story, and why. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, as the Little House fans clamored for more, Wilder and Lane transformed the unpredictable hardships of the American frontier experience into a testament to the virtues of independence and courage. In Wilder’s original drafts, the family withstood the frontier with their jaws set. After Lane revised them, the Ingallses managed the land and made it theirs, without leaning on anybody.
Today, as Libertarian values move back into the mainstream of American politics, few citizens think to link them to a series of beloved childhood books. But the Little House books have done more than connect generations of Americans to the nation’s pioneer history: They have promoted a particular version of that history. The enduring appeal of the books tells us something about how deep the romance with self-reliance runs through American history, and the gaps between the Little House narrative and Wilder’s real life say a lot about the government help and interdependence that we sometimes find more convenient to leave out of that tale.
When Black Tuesday did come, the Wilder-Lane households began a painful two-year downslide, as Lane’s savings deflated from $20,000 to almost nothing. Magazine work dried up. Wilder, too, lost some money but, characteristically, scraped together savings and paid off the farm. Lane fretted about money, missed rent payments to her parents, borrowed thousands from friends, and continued to call herself the head of the household. She also began to consider other possible writing projects.
For a decade already Lane had milked various snippets from her parents’ lives for short stories. Now she saw an opportunity for her mother. Pioneer struggles could eerily mirror the struggles of the Great Depression, and Lane thought Americans were ready to hear about covered-wagon childhoods. After magazines rejected Wilder’s real-life account, Lane began reworking some of the memoir into what would become the first children’s book, “Little House in the Big Woods.”
Published in 1932 by Harper & Brothers, the book was praised by book critics for its honesty and caught the interest of readers nationwide. The Junior Literary Guild, a national book club, paid them an additional fee to print its own run. The income crisis at the Wilders’ ended. In the shadow of the crash, tales of overcoming great adversity resonated, and the editors wanted more.
Wilder and Lane responded with their now-famous sequels. From the start, there was tension between their approaches. Wilder argued for strict accuracy, while Lane, the seasoned commercial writer, injected made-up dialogue, took out stories about criminals and murder, and—most significantly—recast the stoic, sometimes confused pioneers as optimistic, capable people who achieved success without any government help.
Laura Ingalls Wilder never got used to Lane’s heavy rewrites, but the evidence suggests that on the main approach, playing up toughness in adversity, she agreed with her daughter. Both women believed fervently that the nation in the depths of the Depression had become too soft. In 1937, Wilder wrote Lane that people’s complaints about having no jobs made her sick. (“People drive me wild,” she wrote. “They as a whole are getting just what they deserve.”)
The early books celebrated Laura’s early childhood in a cozy log cabin in Wisconsin. They celebrated Pa Ingalls’s storytelling abilities and described in gripping detail how backwoods and prairie farmers took care of themselves—hunted, butchered, cooked, built, and made things like soap and bullets—in the 1860s and 1870s. The third book, “Farmer Boy,” was about Wilder’s husband Almanzo’s life on a New York State farm. In the fourth book, “On the Banks of Plum Creek,” the Ingalls family relocated to Minnesota (the locale of the TV show), where they built a house and became wheat farmers despite a grasshopper plague.
In shaping the memoirs into novels, Lane consistently left out the kinds of setbacks and behavior that cast doubt on the pioneer enterprise; the family’s story became a testament to the possibilities of self-sufficiency rather than its limitations. The last four books—which tell the story of the Ingalls family’s attempt to homestead in the future state of South Dakota—are particularly fired by Libertarian themes.
Comparing Wilder’s original memoirs to the contents of the published books, it’s possible to see a pattern of strategic omissions and additions. In the fifth book, for example, “By the Shores of Silver Lake,” Laura promises to become a teacher to pay for her older sister Mary to attend a college for the blind. Wilder’s own account of her life reveals that although Wilder’s sister did attend a college for the blind, in reality it was the government of Dakota Territory—and not the family’s hard work—that covered the bills.
AS LANE REDRAFTED the last four of the original Little House books between 1937 and 1943, her extensive correspondence reveals, she was growing increasingly anti-government in her personal views. She cut back her income specifically to avoid paying taxes; during World War II, Lane refused a ration card and retreated full time to her newly acquired 3-acre farm in Danbury, Conn., where she canned her own beans, beets, squash, and green-applesauce.
Throughout the early years of the Little House series, she had also continued to write fiction of her own. But Lane’s last novel, “Free Land,” about homesteading, published to great fanfare in 1938, had exhausted her. Her next effort, in 1939, the short story “Forgotten Man,” headed into what was becoming unpopular territory: It was an anti-New Deal story about a coal mine put out of business by government fees. The editors of the Saturday Evening Post rejected it for publication, calling it propaganda.
Once, in 1943, Lane was so outraged by a radio broadcast about Social Security that she penned an angry postcard comparing such programs to Nazi policies. (Someone sent it to the FBI, which dispatched a state trooper to her farm.) In 1944, the year after the last Little House book came out, newspaper reporter Helen L. Worden interviewed Lane, writing that Lane had “taken to the storm cellar until the Roosevelt administration blows over.” Lane had stopped writing her own novels, she said, “because I don’t want to contribute to the New Deal.”
She began to attend meetings against communism. She exchanged letters at the time with other conservative thinkers, including Isabel Paterson, H.L. Mencken, George Schuyler, and Clare Booth Luce. According to a 1990 biography of Lane by William Holtz, Lane socialized with Ayn Rand at her Danbury home and admired her writing
Just after World War II, an editor Lane had worked with introduced her to his 14-year-old son, Roger Lea MacBride. That began a friendship that lasted the rest of their lives. As a teenager, MacBride learned antitax principles at Lane’s knee in Danbury. Later, she enlisted him to help her revise a book that she intended as an explicit argument against big government, “The Discovery of Freedom.” It was published in 1943, and although it languished in obscurity for decades, Libertarian thinkers consider it a treatise that helped the party rise out of the strong anti-Communist movement of the time.
MacBride became Lane’s lawyer, agent, and her sole heir. Wilder, now a widow, remained on her Missouri farm, answering thousands of fans’ letters each year but rarely venturing out. In 1949 she instructed their agent to assign 10 percent of the Little House royalties to Lane. Lane made regular winter visits to Wilder until the pioneer author’s death at 90 in 1957. Lane, by then a rich woman doing little writing, started living most of the year in Texas. She died unexpectedly in her sleep in Danbury on October 30, 1968, at age 81, the night before she had intended to leave on a world tour.”
“The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism.” — Rose Wilder Lane
During World War II, when she was in her late 50s, Rose began working with Burt MacBride, an editor at Reader’s Digest who was planning to condense one of her books for the magazine. Through Burt MacBride, Rose met his 14-year-old son Roger MacBride, and Rose and Roger quickly became devoted friends. Within a couple of years, he was calling her “Gramma” and coming to spend weekends with her, weeding her garden, running errands for her, and talking with her about history, economics, politics, and philosophy. Lane’s biographer, William Holtz, writes that young “MacBride found himself receiving another education, an alternative to his classroom learning that was compelling by the range, focus, and energy his other grandmother brought to the political and economic arguments she had spent two decades in refining.” Lane became the adoptive “grandmother” and mentor to MacBride, best known as the Libertarian Party‘s 1976 candidate for President of the United States. She later admitted that she was grooming him to be a future Libertarian thought leader; he also became her attorney and business manager and ultimately the heir to the Little House series and the multi-million dollar franchise that he built around it after her death.
Rose gave a guest lecture in Roger’s government class at Philips Exeter Academy, his tony New England prep school, and lent moral support to his efforts to establish libertarian student groups at Princeton, where he earned his undergraduate degree, and at Harvard, where he went to law school. As Roger’s education progressed, he continued to make himself useful to his adoptive granny — first as her agent and business manager, then as her attorney. In the end, he and his wife moved Rose and her 6,000 books into their home and took her with them when they moved that home from Vermont to Virginia.
The last of the many protégés to be taken under Lane’s wing was the sister of her Vietnamese interpreter; impressed by the young girl’s intelligence, she helped to bring her to the United States and sponsored her enrollment in college.
After inheriting the rights to the literary works of both Lane and Wilder, MacBride agreed to the commercialization of the books via the “Little House on the Prairie” television series, and approved the miniseriesThe Young Pioneers, which was based on a compilation of Lane’s two best-selling novels.
MacBride also was the author of the spinoff The Rose YearsLittle House Series, a multi-part semi-fictional re-telling of Lane’s life from the age of seven to nineteen.
MacBride eventually went on to help form the Libertarian Party, and he ran on its presidential ticket in 1976. Lane’s thinking on limited government had from the beginning influenced a relatively small group of people; most writers of the era called Ayn Rand the “mother of the Libertarian Party.” But MacBride believed that Lane was more important. In 1984 he wrote in an introduction that Lane’s political opus, The Discovery of Freedom, was “the seminal force creating the current wide trend toward individualistic views in America.”
MACBRIDE succeeded at managing Lane’s estate. Lane had been divorced since 1918; her only child had died at birth. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s will had specified that when her daughter died, the valuable book rights should go to the tiny public library in Mansfield, Mo. Lane, however, instead left the Little House rights to MacBride, whose daughter still owns them today.
MacBride began systematically renewing copyrights to the Little House books in the 1960s, and sold the rights to television—turning it into the series that aired in the 1970s. Although the TV show departed in a saccharine way from the Little House books, it entranced another generation of fans.
Clearly, the Little House ethic of self-sufficiency appeals to a much wider American audience than just one with Libertarian politics. Pioneers could be cold, dirty, or hungry without whining. They faced down adversity. They made do with little. They respected the power of storms and the patterns of wild animals. The books inspired whole generations of women, and Americans of all political persuasions admire the tenaciousness of settlers like Ma and Pa Ingalls and their four daughters.
http://www.spreecast.com/events/the-discovery-of-freedom-tucker–2/embed-large Spreecast is the social video platform that connects people. Check out The Discovery of Freedom – Tucker on Spreecast. Lane must have known, as she redrafted her mother’s handwritten memoirs, that this notion of pioneer bravery—and the very real fortitude of the family—would prove an irresistible American theme. The result was a series of books that helped instill a deep national code of frontier values, including the notion that isolated Americans can thrive because the government leaves them to draw only on their personal energies and ethics. It’s an appealing idea, and it has become woven into our image of the pioneers. But it’s not the full story of what happened out there on the prairie. (This biographical post purloins heavily from the works of Christine Woodside. who is writing a book on Rose Wilder Lane and her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the work of Jeff Riggenbach.)
Tonie Nathan was the first woman and the first Jewish American to receive an Electoral College vote, decades before Geraldine Ferraro or Joseph Leiberman, when she was the (first) Vice Presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in 1972. (I met her in 2012 at the Libertarian Party nominating convention, less than two years before she passed away in March last year.)
Known for: First woman to receive an electoral vote (in a United States presidential election) — Libertarian Party candidate for vice president in 1972, with John Hospers
Occupation: political candidate, public relations consultant, freelance writer, insurance agent, music publisher, business manager, radio and television talk show host
Tonie Nathan was born in New York, lived for a time in California, and moved to Oregon.
She ran several businesses and was a talk show host on KVAL-TV and several radio programs.
In 1972, Tonie Nathan was nominated by the Libertarian Party, which she had helped found, as candidate for vice president, with John Hospers nominated for president. The Libertarian Party was on the ballot in two states and received about 3,000 votes total. Roger L. MacBride, a Republican elector, cast his electoral vote for Hospers and Nathan rather than for the Nixon and Agnew ticket.
In 1976, Tonie Nathan ran for Congress as an independent and in 1980 she ran for the Senate as a Libertarian.
In 1977, Bella Abzug appointed Tonie Nathan as a delegate-at-large to the National Conference of Women.
Tonie Nathan remained politically active and worked as a public relations consultant and writer, including promoting her husband’s musicals. Later she and her family owned a company that sold custom blinds and shutters
Most Libertarians don’t realize that the LP’s first two presidential candidates were both gay (in addition to its first vice presidential candidate being a Jewish woman). John Hospers, the 1972 candidate, a philosophy professor in southern California, was actually kind of out by early 70s standards, as academia somewhat allowed. (Among gays in the libertarian movement who knew him, the late Hospers was snarkily called behind his back (in the 80s), “Hot-spurs.” I don’t actually know why.)
Roger McBride, the 1976 LP candidate, was not out. But among his many historical firsts and other accomplishments he is the first gay member of the Electoral College to vote for an openly gay presidential candidate.
MacBride worked for the Wall Street-based law firmWhite & Case for several years before opening a small practice in Vermont.[3] By the mid-1970s, MacBride had relocated toVirginia and was no longer practicing law full-time.[2]
MacBride inherited Lane’s estate including rights to the substantial Ingalls-Wilder literary estate, including the “Little House on the Prairie” franchise.[3] He is the author of record of three additional “Little House” books, and began the “Rocky Ridge Years” series of children’s novels, describing Lane’s Ozark childhood.[3][4] He published two books onconstitutional law – The American Electoral College and Treaties versus the Constitution,[7] as well as a Libertarian Party manifesto – A New Dawn for America: The Libertarian Challenge.[3]
In the 1970s, MacBride co-created the television series Little House on the Prairie and served as a co-producer for the show.[2][4]
MacBride was the treasurer of the Republican Party of Virginia in 1972 and one of the party’s electors when Richard Nixon won the popular vote for his second term as President of the United States.[11] MacBride, however, as a “faithless elector“, voted for the nominees of the Libertarian Party – presidential candidate John Hospers and vice-presidential candidate Tonie Nathan. In so doing, MacBride made Nathan the first woman in U.S. history to receive an electoral vote.[7][11] Political pundit David Boaz later commented inLiberty magazine that MacBride was “faithless to Nixon and Agnew, anyway, but faithful to the constitutional principles Rose Wilder Lane had instilled in him.”[12]
After casting his historical electoral vote in 1972,[7] MacBride instantly gained favor within the fledgling Libertarian Party, which had only begun the previous year.[13] As the Libertarian presidential nominee in 1976,[2] he achieved ballot access in 32 states;[3] he and his running mate, David Bergland,[14] received 172,553 (0.21%) popular votes by official count, and no electoral votes. His best performance was in Alaska, where he received 6,785 votes, or nearly 5.5%.[7][15]
MacBride rejoined the Republican Party in the 1980s and helped establish the Republican Liberty Caucus, a group promoting libertarian principles within the Republican Party.[4][16] He chaired this group from 1992 until his death in 1995.[17]
MacBride died of heart failure on March 5, 1995.[3] A controversy ensued upon his death when the local library in Mansfield, Missouri, contended that Wilder’s original will gave her daughter ownership of the literary estate for her lifetime only, and that all rights were to revert to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Library after her death.[18] The ensuing court case was settled in an undisclosed manner, but MacBride’s heirs retained the rights.[19]
The Insomniac Libertarian 