The Little House on the Prairie and the White House

Philippe de Lannoy, born to a Protestant family fleeing Spanish religious persecution, arrived in the Plymouth Colony in 1621. His descendants carrying the Delano family name include three presidents; Grant, Coolidge, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

And Laura Ingalls Wilder.

FDR and the writer of the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ books may be by far the best known of all the many prominent Delano descendants. The story of the pioneering family persevering through blizzards, droughts and plagues of locusts from Minnesota through Wisconsin to the Dakotas to carve a living from the soil while always remaining hopeful was not just a world away from the ‘Boston Brahmins’ and the Northeastern elites who dominated the country: it was also a deliberate philosophical contrast between independence and socialism.

“We have a dictator,” Rose Wilder Lane wrote after FDR’s inauguration. The term was not nearly as outrageous then as it seems now through the distorting lens of time. Prominent liberals (and at least one movie, ‘Gabriel Over the White House’) had called for FDR to assume dictatorial powers and modern conservatives may bemoan Democrats today, but that was nothing compared to the economic powers wielded by the government under the New Deal.

Like many young intellectuals of her era, Rose Wilder Lane had flirted with Socialism and Communism. But she had also been raised by her parents, Laura and Almanzo, and grown up as the sole inheritess of her family’s pioneering history, working her way from small town South Dakota to become a nationally renowned writer and world traveler. Lane, a talented reporter, had also been in the Soviet Union during the Communist regime’s manufactured famine.

Arrested by the Soviet secret police, Lane dropped her Communism and became deeply cynical about both the system and many of her friends in the media who sympathized with it, remarking about her photographs of devastated landscapes under Soviet rule, “no picture of a Bolshevik country that looks like this would be joyously received by any American editor.” It was a long way for the woman who had once called herself a Communist and had been friends with John Reed who had given his life to push Soviet propaganda on behalf of the murderous regime.

After documenting the brutality of Armenian genocide perpetrated by Turkish Muslims, followed by extended trips around the Middle East, which she described to the ‘Ma’ of the Little House books, she returned home to her family just in time for the stock market crash and the Great Depression, and helped her mother edit together her memories into what became known as the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ series along with her own popular, but forgotten, pioneer novels.

The books were a means of earning a living for a family of women in the midst of an economic depression, but they also asserted what America was and what it was not. A widow and a divorced woman might have been expected to be the first to turn to socialism. Instead, Lane became one of the three ‘founding mothers’ of what became the libertarian movement.

The contrast between the ‘little house’, the struggles of Ma, Pa and the siblings, and the White House’s solution of socialism was not accidental. Much like Harold Gray, another farmboy who became successful through his determination and hard work, with Little Orphan Annie, the cultural message of the books was that individual perseverance built character while the government was more likely to destroy what everyone had built than to hold it up. (The ‘Annie’ musical was maliciously transformed into a celebration of FDR and a rejection of Gray’s work.)

“In 1933 a group of sincere and ardent collectivists seized control of the Democratic Party, used it as a means of grasping Federal power, and…began to make America over. The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism,” Lane wrote. The national part would not endure long past the fifties and the sixties. By the seventies, the Democrats had become just another international socialist party, keen not on industrializing, but deindustrializing America, captive to the fashionable trends of liberal elites whose appetite for identity politics and the Soviet Union’s ‘third worldism’ continue to define their politics now.

Unlike Harold Gray’s Annie, doomed to be buried by the musical with its cheerful paeans to the New Deal (in sharp contrast to the comic strip which excoriated the totalitarian economic regime of the National Recovery Act, mandatory unionization and total economic control), the Little House on the Prairie books largely survived intact because they were less overtly political.

But as the twenty-first century continued its descent into wokeness, the censors came for the ‘Little House’. Just ahead of the BLM purges, the American Library Association, which had long ago come under the control of the sorts of leftists who thought the Bolsheviks were misunderstood, and then come under the control of those who thought Malcolm X was the greatest figure in America history, purged Laura Ingalls Wilder and her popular series.

The American Library Association (ALA) had awarded its first literary award to Wilder for “substantial and lasting contributions to children’s literature” and named it the Laura Ingalls Award. Later honorees included Dr. Seuss, who would eventually also be purged, and Maurice Sendak, who apparently has not yet been purged. But it’s probably only a matter of time.

In 2018, the ALA awarded what had been the Laura Ingalls Award to Jacqueline Woodson, a black lesbian, who writes about what it’s like to be a black lesbian, and, of course, about “white privilege”. The ALA also voted unanimously to change the name because Laura Ingalls Wilder, unlike hating white people, was now politically incorrect. The most recent honoree, Carole Boston Weatherford, became famous for complaining that anime is racist.

Rose Lane Wilder could have seen it all coming, even if her mother who had traveled by covered wagon might not have. “The Soviet hope of economic equality rests now on the death of all men and women who are individuals. A new generation, they tell me, has already been so schooled and shaped that a human mass is actually being created; millions of young men and women do, in veritable fact, have the psychology of the bee swarm, the ant hill,” she wrote.

“I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a Communist, because I believed in personal freedom. Like all Americans, I took for granted the individual liberty to which I had been born. It seemed as necessary as the air I breathed; it seemed the natural element in which human beings lived. The thought that I might lose it had never remotely occurred to me. And I could not conceive that multitudes of human beings would ever willingly live without it.”

That ‘new generation’ with the psychology of an ant hill and no sense of freedom, to whom collectivism is the only morality and the repression of individuals their highest ambition, is all around us. It’s what the former Laura Ingalls Wilder award now celebrates.

By the sixties, Lane, now in her seventies, was reporting from Vietnam on the latest fight against Communism. That war was lost, but the question she was concerned with was whether the war would be lost in America. Would the ‘Little House’ triumph or would the White House rule us all.

In the age of social media collectives, the questions of individualism are more urgent than ever. America cannot be saved by virtuous mobs, only by the hard work of virtuous individuals.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Read my book 'Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers' Fight Against the Left' to discover the true origins of the American Left.