Terrific liberal response RE: Laura Ingalls Wilder

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

I can't find who this is in response to, but it's great.

I agree. We all ought to be self sufficient like Laura and her family.

There they were, living out there on their homestead. Err, homestead. Yeah, that's where the government gave land away to people to settle the prairies because the government thought we ought to have people in far away places like Nebraska.

And they got there, of course, on the railroad, which by that point was heavily subsidized by the government because the Lincoln administration (which also invented the homestead) somehow thought our country would be better with a railroad running through it. Okay.

And when Laura's sister whose name escapes me went blind, they sent her to a state supported school for the blind because, well, the government thought it might be nice if blind people got an education, too. And later the government paid her to teach other blind kids, cause, well, they were just meddlesome that way.

And, though it's been years and years since I read these books, I do remember a relief train coming through (on that government supported railroad, through all those government giveaway homesteads) during that bad winter and giving them coal and food, I guess, cause the big bad government didn't want them to starve to death or freeze solid in a lump when their braids of hay were all gone.

Oh, and years later, when were Laura Ingalls Wilder's books published? During the depression, where virtually all of their sales were to government supported libraries and schools, cause most of the country was broke, until my hero FDR bailed us all out with things like the WPA and an actual honest to god minimum wage law that, adjusted for inflation, was more than the minimum wage today, and kept thousands of people from suffering more.

My own introduction to the "Little House" books was through a school librarian at the public school in the middle of Appalachia that I attended (bad ole government again) who suggested that I check them out of our school library, which had copies of them cause they were bought with "Title I" money from one of LBJ(my other hero)'s education bill. Bad ole government, go away and leave us alone.

So, yeah, like you, I think we should all be as self sufficient as the Ingalls family.

https://beta.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=33536046&postID=115771772430364285

[proud patriot]

1. Laura's sister's name was Mary

:hi:

[wildeyed]

3. And there was baby Carrie, too. n/t

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

5. I don't recall Mary ever teaching either.

So he got a couple of things wrong, but man the response is just beautiful.

:hi:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. Yes, the writer has the TV series confused with the books

Mary indeed went blind and was sent to a state school for the blind, but I believe the books are silent on what happened to her after that. The books end with Laura and Almanzo getting married when Laura is sixteen. In real life, they had one child, a daughter, Rose, who is believed to have had a hand in writing the books.

Baby Carrie was in both the books and the TV series, but there was also an even younger daughter named Grace in the books.

Most of what was in the TV show was not in the books.

Still, he's right in stating that the "rugged individualists" out West owe nearly everything to government programs that gave away free land, subsidized the railroads, and sent the U.S. cavalry out to kill off or drive away the Indians. Later, they benefited from water programs, crop subsidies, and price supports.

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

10. The books don't say, but I've read more about the family.

There's also a web site (of course). http://webpages.marshall.edu/~irby1/laura/frames.html

Mary came back & lived with her parents. Ingalls died in his early 60s. She & her mother lived together until her mother's death. Then she went to live with Grace until her own death from a stroke.

I was actually spending a lazy Saturday afternoon googling to see if I could find out what caused Mary's blindness: a stroke following an illness was there no illness? just a freak stroke in a 14 year old. That's when I came across this response & just felt it was a good fit for DU.

[Scout]

22. i thought Mary went blind after scarlet fever? n/t

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

23. According to the book, but Wilder has admitted

that the books weren't truly autobiographical. I read on one of the many web pages that Wilder had written in her unpublished memoir that Mary had a stroke. If you check out the link above you'll find lots of discrepancies between the books & what really happened. For example she never mentions her little brother, Charles Frederick, who died at 9 months. She also wrote that Carrie was born in a different state.

[Sweet Freedom]

15. Grace was on the TV show as well

but you had to watch for years to witness her arrival...:hi:

[niyad]

2. a wonderful response indeed.

[JDPriestly]

4. Thank you.

Back then, people knew what community meant, and isn't that what democratic government is in the end -- commmunity?

[Mist]

6. Overall, interesting, but the "relief train" was, I believe, simply a

regular train with preserved foods and dry goods that hadn't been able to get to the town for 5 months. In other words, goods that would have been sold through a store anyway. Laura and Almanzo Wilder produced Rose Wilder Lane, one of the biggest cheerleaders for Ayn Rand. The Homestead Act seems to have gone past Rose, too.

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

7. I didn't know that about Rose.

Interesting.

Didn't Charles Ingalls get a job as a timekeeper/bookkeeper for the railroad? Isn't that how they got out of Plum Creek after the grasshopper invasion? And wouldn't working for the railroad be basically working for the government?

[SheilaT]

11. The "relief train"

was one that was intended for somewhere else. She called it an "emigrant" train. It did have food and goods that the town desperately needed, and had been stuck in the snow for some months. It was two days later that the train intended for DeSmet (the actual little town on the prairie) arrived with goods the stores had ordered back in the fall.

Laura's parents had to pay out of their own pocket for Mary's education. It was not free. They spent years saving for it. Laura contributed most of the cash she earned the three terms she taught as a teacher (one term more than Ma) to help keep Mary in school. When Mary finished the college for the blind in Vinton, Iowa, she returned to DeSmet and spent the rest of her life there. She never married.

Grace and Carrie both married, but neither had any children. Laura's daughter Rose married briefly. Apparently her husband was abusive. She divorced him, never remarried, never had any children.

The real Pa Ingalls was basically a loser who failed at most everything he did for years and years. He'd pack up Ma and the girls (there was a son who died in infancy that Laura never wrote about) and move on, until Ma finally put her foot down and refused to continue moving.

The TV series is truly a travesty. It's basically late 20th century people dressed up in 19th century clothing. Every once in a while I'll pause and watch about two minutes of it when cruising the channels, and I'm always appalled at how far it strays from the books. What a shame. Too bad a series of movies weren't made more directly from the books, but then you'd be stuck with such non PC things as Ma saying, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian". However, I suppose a little sanitizing could have been okay and kept far more to the spirit of the books than the series ever did.

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

13. Much of what you say is true, but Mary's education

was funded by the State. At least according to several web sites. Her parents needed money to pay for her clothes, etc.

http://www.laurasprairiehouse.com/family/maryingalls.html

I have no idea how true any of this is. Wilder herself said that she wasn't writing nonfiction. I think she called it something like 'living history'. :shrug:

[SheilaT]

16. My recollection from the books

which I have read many, many times over the years, was that they needed the money for tuition, not just her expenses. But I am also well aware that Laura took some liberties with events. However, if all Mary needed was money for clothes and incidental expenses, those would have been relatively trivial. And it is clear in several of the books, ever since Ma and Pa learned about the School for the Blind, that it was a major, multi-year undertaking to save the money needed for Mary to go to school. I suppose if any of us really cared, we could research and find out what, if any, tuition was needed at the school Mary went to.

I know from my own experience that dollar amounts needed to attend school at some time in the past sound trivial today. I first attended college at the University of Arizona in the fall of 1965. I had two scholarships: one paid $125 per semester, which covered my tuition and fees; the other was half that, $67.50 per semester, and paid for books. Which sounds completely unbelievable today. But without those scholarships I would have been unable to go to college. So whatever it was the Ingallses had to pay for Mary to attend the School for the Blind would sound like nothing today, but it was a major financial undertaking for them then.

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

17. I'm not sure either, I'm only citing what I've read & giving links.

Whether the Ingalls were paying for tuition or just incidentals, Mary went to a state school that was funded by the state. Even when I was in college & my tuition was small, the State was underwriting most of the cost. In a public school, students pick up a fraction of the cost. Ergo, government is a good thing. The poster in the above piece is obviously responding to someone who thinks that everyone should be self-sufficient, like the Ingalls. Obviously they weren't.

[Mist]

19. It seems a bit harsh to call Charles Ingalls a loser, but he did seem to

have a lot of problems. I think he didn't want to work for anyone if he could help it, and farming in South Dakota, before irrigation, was incredibly difficult.

The TV series was so far from the books, I couldn't watch it.

Another totally non-PC bit: Pa and 4 other men putting on a minstrel show in blackface (In "The Little Town on the Prarie.")

I still think the trains were private enterprises--AFAIK, the first train to be partially funded by gov't was Amtrak, and of course you had to pay for your ticket!

Another nitpicky point: Mr. Edwards, the friend of the family, visited them in De Smet soon after they moved there, and put $25 under Mary's napkin, which the family didn't find until he was leaving on the train. That went to Mary's college fund, too!

A more accurate picture of the Ingalls' lives is given in Donald Zochart's biography "Laura."

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

20. I thought that the train track west was funded by the

government. In fact, I thought that's where many of the robber barons of the 19th century got their money; screwing the government on the cost of the railroad tracks.

I wouldn't call Ingalls a loser, but I do think he had an absolute knack for leading his family into disaster. He moves them to Missouri, then has to leave when it's decided not to open it up to homesteading, goes back to Pepin, then moves them to Minnesota, has one good crop then the grasshopper invasion, moves them to South Dakota a year before the worst winter there had ever been (blizzards from October through May).

[LisaM]

24. Actually, it was $20, not $25

Because he just left one bill.

[Mist]

25. Ooops! My bad! ;) nt

[LisaM]

26. I'm loving this thread. I've hated that show forever

I couldn't believe how bad it was; when they had a Minnesota high school football team that wouldn't play against black people? Before football was even invented?

[Mist]

27. I don't remember that, but I only watched if kids I was babysitting wanted

to watch. I thought they should have had an actor with the sprawling beard Pa had. The show was too pretty. The Ingalls lived
-very- simple lives, and they didn't show that.

[InvisibleTouch]

9. I remember them travelling west in a covered wagon...

...but I'm being nitpicky now. :) It's surprising how much I remember from those books. My fourth-grade teacher read us a couple of chapters every day after lunch, and it was the anticipated high point of the day. Just as an irrelevant aside, my great-grandmother was born in a covered wagon....

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

12. My 1st, 3rd & 5th grade teachers read them to us too.

Right after lunch. Like you, I thought it was the highlight of the day. I also learned to read on my own in the 1st grade because my older sister got one of the House books as a present. I picked it up & realized it was what our teacher was reading to us. I also figured out that I didn't have to wait for her, I could do this myself. It probably instilled a lifetime love of reading.

As an aside, we were at a living history museum & there were covered wagons on display. I know I've seen them before, but really didn't pay much attention. I was absolutely shocked at how narrow & small they were. I can't imagine living in one for months.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

21. They didn't actually live in the covered wagons or ride them

(I was living in Oregon during the 150th anniversary of the Oregon Trail, so we got our covered wagon lore on public TV!)

The covered wagons were more like moving vans than RVs, most were pulled by oxen rather than horses, and most people walked or rode horses alongside their wagons. People did circle their wagons at night, but they mostly camped outside them instead of sleeping in them.

The Oregon Trail was practically like a freeway during the height of westward migration. There were no gas stations or rest stops, of course, so people simply relieved themselves by the side of the trail. There were no trees or bushes for privacy, so the women would stand in a circle facing outward, spread their skirts to create a barrier, and take turns going into the middle of the circle. With all the people on the trail, it evidently got very stinky in the summer.

[Branjor]

14. Great response....

but according to the books, the Ingalls family got to their homestead via covered wagon, not railroad. But yes, the railroad brought relief supplies at the end of the terrible winter - the train could not get through the snow.

***Too bad a series of movies weren't made more directly from the books, but then you'd be stuck with such non PC things as Ma saying, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian".***

Such a series of movies *was* made recently, but they are by (get set to gag) Disney. Oh, and it *was* a bit sanitized - the one saying "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" was a neighbor woman, not Ma.

[iamjoy]

18. I Wouldn't Even Bother With That

any time some one points out stuff like that, just tell them if that's what they think, they are welcome to it. And tell them to go live out in a rural area with no electricity and grow their own food. I say no electricity because of the rural electrification project, were things truly left to the free market, only urbanized areas would have electricity. Remind them that they could not take any aid from the goverment in terms of price supports for crops and if a disaster hits, they can't take any aid from FEMA or any other government organization.

Or send them the parable about "Joe Republican."