October 30, 2006
Conservatism’s Intellectual Godmother Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:15 AM EST Yesterday evening, as I was flipping television channels, I stumbled across the old television show Little House on the Prairie not once, not twice, but three times. Which got me to thinking about William F. Buckley.
Last year, Buckley, conservatism’s aging happy warrior, remembered the American right of his childhood as an intellectually barren place. Forty years of progressive reform, New Deal state-building, and wartime collectivism had taken the bite out of the country’s once-dominant libertarian strain in politics and letters.
Then, according to Buckley, in 1943, everything changed. Three American women—Ayn Rand, Isabel Paterson and Rose Lane Wilder—published important theoretical tracts denouncing the state’s incursions against individual autonomy and freedom. In effect, Buckley claimed, the modern conservative movement, often dated to 1955, with the inaugural appearance of his own publication, National Review, was born.
Most Americans with a passing interest in literature are familiar with Ayn Rand. Fewer know of Isabel Paterson, though she was recently the subject of a scholarly biography. But virtually every American woman born before the 1980s, and not a few men of the same age cohort, know Rose Lane Wilder. Author of several obscure tomes on libertarianism and an early critic of Social Security, Wilder is best remembered as the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the creator of Little House on the Prairie and a string of other children’s classics.
Rose, a successful magazine journalist by her own right, served as her mother’s trusted editor, coauthor and, according to some critics, ghostwriter. Today, more than ever, Rose Lane Wilder is relevant, not because ABC televised a new Little House miniseries last year, though certainly that fact alone speaks to the lasting popularity of the Ingalls family saga.
More to the point, whatever the extent of her literary collaboration with Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose, a fiercely doctrinaire conservative who denounced the New Deal as pure socialism and refused to her dying day to collect Social Security, left a strong libertarian imprint on her mother’s work.
The Little House books—and the popular 1970s television series, and its latest ABC incarnation—boldly celebrate the pioneer spirit and rugged individuality of the American West. Generations of schoolchildren have been raised on Rose Lane Wilder’s frontier saga, in which hard work and internal discipline form the bedrock of American success. There is no nanny state—no unemployment insurance, no withholding tax, no welfare system, no Social Security, no minimum wage or maximum hours law, no Wagner Act—on Rose Wilder’s prairie. Only God and man.
Critically, this historical drama, so central to the current conservative assault on the New Deal state, is all myth. Just as latter-day conservatives ignore the long legacy of state intervention on behalf of private industry, 30 years of scholarship by “New West” historians have revealed the federal government’s strong hand in subsidizing the private exploitation and development of America’s frontier.
From massive giveaways of federal land and mineral holdings to the publicly financed construction of the nation’s railroad and telegraph systems, to the state’s artificial deflation of labor costs through its enforcement of slavery, tenancy, and strikebreaking, the federal state was everywhere.
So vast was its shadow, that it’s a wonder Rose Wilder, an authentic child of the American West, was able to neatly write it out of her frontier myth. But, then, she had to. To write truthfully about American history would have been tantamount to rejecting the logic of her stringent libertarian faith.
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