Laura Ingalls Wilder

[Anonymous]

There have been a couple recent and we'll publicized biographies of Laura Ingalls Wilder depicting her as an awful person as well as a politically active racist, and showing that almost nothing in the Little House series was true. I suspect that had some influence on the decision, even if they aren't saying it. "Author depicts lived experience in a way we now dislike" is different from "Manipulative, racist crank wrote fiction that is racist." The current view is the latter.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:People! All they did was change the name of the award. Nobody is banning the books. Yeesh!

It's the first step on a slippery slope.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There have been a couple recent and we'll publicized biographies of Laura Ingalls Wilder depicting her as an awful person as well as a politically active racist, and showing that almost nothing in the Little House series was true. I suspect that had some influence on the decision, even if they aren't saying it. "Author depicts lived experience in a way we now dislike" is different from "Manipulative, racist crank wrote fiction that is racist." The current view is the latter.

If you want to find the flaws in any political figure from nearly a century or even 20, 30 years ago and craft it so that they are offensive by today's standards, it is quite easy to do. Even MLK. Even Mother Theresa.

It would not take intellect or academic prowness to accomplish this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There have been a couple recent and we'll publicized biographies of Laura Ingalls Wilder depicting her as an awful person as well as a politically active racist, and showing that almost nothing in the Little House series was true. I suspect that had some influence on the decision, even if they aren't saying it. "Author depicts lived experience in a way we now dislike" is different from "Manipulative, racist crank wrote fiction that is racist." The current view is the latter.

If you want to find the flaws in any political figure from nearly a century or even 20, 30 years ago and craft it so that they are offensive by today's standards, it is quite easy to do. Even MLK. Even Mother Theresa.

It would not take intellect or academic prowness to accomplish this.

Of any historical figure. Not just political.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I wonder what words we are using today that history will deem offensive..and thus us offensive too.

Just read the news.

[Anonymous]

Good Lord. Have your kids read her books if you are so worried about it. You remind me of an elderly relative of mine who, when she found out we weren't having Halloween IN SCHOOL anymore she said, "liberals are destroying everything we believe in!" Oh we "believ ein" Halloween now? LOL. The kids who wanted to still trick or treated that year and every year since.

Businesses have consciences and morals now. If the organization that gave her the award no longer feels it's morally correct to keep her on their list, they have the right to do that. The books aren't banned FFS. Show me a book burning bonfire sponsored by a mainstream lib organization and I'll share your paranoia.

[Anonymous]

I believe the books are classified as fiction despite any insistence otherwise by the author.

I do wonder if any of this was prompted by Prairie Fires, the newest Ingalls family biography. It's excellent and I recommend it to anyone who loved the series. What I try to remember when reading the books is that they are the (heavily edited) recollection of a childhood and not nuanced historical reporting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There have been a couple recent and we'll publicized biographies of Laura Ingalls Wilder depicting her as an awful person as well as a politically active racist, and showing that almost nothing in the Little House series was true. I suspect that had some influence on the decision, even if they aren't saying it. "Author depicts lived experience in a way we now dislike" is different from "Manipulative, racist crank wrote fiction that is racist." The current view is the latter.

Sorry, writing to correct myself because the two biographies blurred in my head. Laura Wilder's daughter, Rose, was the politically active one. She's believed (by many not all) to have ghostwritten the books for Laura.

I think if it were a true story written by Laura I might feel differently about the racism in it, but the fact it is a fabrication heavily influenced by Rose really affects the context. The series' vision of westward expansion is so popular (I loved it too) and colors how we think about personal independence and can-do spirit, and then you read the family were constantly running from creditors and stealing from native peoples... Ick.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There have been a couple recent and we'll publicized biographies of Laura Ingalls Wilder depicting her as an awful person as well as a politically active racist, and showing that almost nothing in the Little House series was true. I suspect that had some influence on the decision, even if they aren't saying it. "Author depicts lived experience in a way we now dislike" is different from "Manipulative, racist crank wrote fiction that is racist." The current view is the latter.

I follow the publicity on this pretty closely, and I'm not sure I've seen anything that says that -- can you provide cites?

Here's what I've read -- Her daughter Rose was a conservative Libertarian, and also kind of a mess, and struggled with some mental illness. Rose is the one that made a lot of the edits in the book that took it further away from the truth. Laura opposed FDR and the New Deal, but that was pretty common for Republicans of that era -- we forget now, but FDR was super-controversial before the War (when people rallied together and got over most of the FDR-hate in order to support the troops/country). My great-grandfather thought that FDR was going to run American business into the group with socialism -- and he was an immigrant from a poor family.

Laura had, all told, a pretty crappy life -- the stuff in the books is bad enough (locust infestation, losing home after home, father being gone for long periods in search of work, almost dying multiple times), but her life after the book was marked by a lot of awful things -- her husband was paralyzed, at least one child died in infancy, she was constantly broke, etc. (I sort of wonder actually if their family had some sort of genetic disorder that particularly affected male children, as her mother miscarried or had early infant deaths of at least one male child, as did Laura and Rose.) I am sure that I would greatly disagree with the politics of both Wilder women, but I'm not sure how that affects how I feel about the books. Tolstoy was a great novelist, but one heck of a wackadoodle when it came to political and social issues.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Good Lord. Have your kids read her books if you are so worried about it. You remind me of an elderly relative of mine who, when she found out we weren't having Halloween IN SCHOOL anymore she said, "liberals are destroying everything we believe in!" Oh we "believ ein" Halloween now? LOL. The kids who wanted to still trick or treated that year and every year since.

Businesses have consciences and morals now. If the organization that gave her the award no longer feels it's morally correct to keep her on their list, they have the right to do that. The books aren't banned FFS. Show me a book burning bonfire sponsored by a mainstream lib organization and I'll share your paranoia.

I dunno. Changing the name of the award, retroactively, is a bit more than taking Halloween out of schools (and along with it, a lot of fun in schools). It's literally rewriting the award's history.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I believe the books are classified as fiction despite any insistence otherwise by the author.

I do wonder if any of this was prompted by Prairie Fires, the newest Ingalls family biography. It's excellent and I recommend it to anyone who loved the series. What I try to remember when reading the books is that they are the (heavily edited) recollection of a childhood and not nuanced historical reporting.

I'm not sure I understand this criticism. Recollection is flawed but it's what we've got.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There have been a couple recent and we'll publicized biographies of Laura Ingalls Wilder depicting her as an awful person as well as a politically active racist, and showing that almost nothing in the Little House series was true. I suspect that had some influence on the decision, even if they aren't saying it. "Author depicts lived experience in a way we now dislike" is different from "Manipulative, racist crank wrote fiction that is racist." The current view is the latter.

Sorry, writing to correct myself because the two biographies blurred in my head. Laura Wilder's daughter, Rose, was the politically active one. She's believed (by many not all) to have ghostwritten the books for Laura.

I think if it were a true story written by Laura I might feel differently about the racism in it, but the fact it is a fabrication heavily influenced by Rose really affects the context. The series' vision of westward expansion is so popular (I loved it too) and colors how we think about personal independence and can-do spirit, and then you read the family were constantly running from creditors and stealing from native peoples... Ick.

It's funny, because I do think that was at least Rose's goal with the books, but I don't think the books really achieve that. (The TV show was much more successful in making it seem like they had this wonderful, self-made life.) When I read the books as a kid, I mostly focused on the fact that they got to run around a lot in the grass and milk cows, which seemed cool to a suburban kid--I don't think I took any great life lessons from it, other than that it would be cool to know how to build your own house and make your own dolls. But reading them as an adult, I'm really struck by how shitty it all was, and how it appears that her father had a terrible case of ADHD (or maybe bipolar?). The part where he's gone for months looking for work but doesn't send any money and no one knows where he is or if he'll come back? Or the part about where they borrow money to put glass windows into their house, and then the locusts eat all the crops so they lost the entire house to the bank and have to move again? Yikes, yikes, yikes.

When I read the online biographies on LIW , I was surprised that she had almost no contact with her parents in the later years of their lives. I think when they died, she had not seen them in many years, maybe decades. I know people were poor and travel was tough, but that still struck me -- this was a family with some issues. I mostly feel bad for her, and happy that there were at least some nice moments in her childhood that she could look back on and appreciate, despite all the horrible things. As I'm writing this, maybe that's sort of a life lesson.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:People! All they did was change the name of the award. Nobody is banning the books. Yeesh!

No. They are disparaging her name and portraying anything affiliated with her as wrong. If this act was just meant to broaden the name there would be no commentary on her being racist or not being inclusive of minorities.

I’ve enjoyed the Little House Series but the way Laura protrays Indians (indigenous peoples) in her books is terrible and generally historically inaccurate. Multiple characters say “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” I can see why they renamed the book award (which I had never heard of before this controversy.) I read the Little House series to my kids but make sure to point out the racist bits to them as unfortunate attitudes of time past.

That is not historically inaccurate.

Such things and worse were common sentiments of the time.

Saying the "only good Indian is a dead Indian" is the same as advocating ethnic cleansing. I don't know that it was common sentiment of that time, but it's certainly a vile point of view that Laura's family made. She also writes "there were no people there, only Indians" referring to the prairie. As a person of color, those statements make me nauseous. I'm sorry that you don't see that a child of color would feel similarly.

As for historically inaccurate, you need to read some reviews of the Little House series. What I was referring to was the portrayal of the Osage Indians in Little House on the Prairie. In the book, we see the Indians "stealing" from Ma and Pa and Pa being unfairly kicked off his land at the end of the book. But historians have noted that Pa had deliberately entered Indian Territory and was basically squatting on their land. Whether Laura knew it or not, historians have noted that the Indians were taking food and items as what they saw as "rent" from a squatter.

[Anonymous]

Something to consider when you talk about how the books portray different events, is that if you look at the Little House books as a complete series, each book is written at a level (writing style, complexity, perspective and length) that corresponds with the age that Laura is in each book.

So Little House in the Big Woods reads with the perspective and at the level of a 4 to 5 year old.

Little House on the Prairie (one of the more controversial books) reads at the level and depth of a kindergartner through maybe 7 or 8 year old.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There have been a couple recent and we'll publicized biographies of Laura Ingalls Wilder depicting her as an awful person as well as a politically active racist, and showing that almost nothing in the Little House series was true. I suspect that had some influence on the decision, even if they aren't saying it. "Author depicts lived experience in a way we now dislike" is different from "Manipulative, racist crank wrote fiction that is racist." The current view is the latter.

Sorry, writing to correct myself because the two biographies blurred in my head. Laura Wilder's daughter, Rose, was the politically active one. She's believed (by many not all) to have ghostwritten the books for Laura.

I think if it were a true story written by Laura I might feel differently about the racism in it, but the fact it is a fabrication heavily influenced by Rose really affects the context. The series' vision of westward expansion is so popular (I loved it too) and colors how we think about personal independence and can-do spirit, and then you read the family were constantly running from creditors and stealing from native peoples... Ick.

It's funny, because I do think that was at least Rose's goal with the books, but I don't think the books really achieve that. (The TV show was much more successful in making it seem like they had this wonderful, self-made life.) When I read the books as a kid, I mostly focused on the fact that they got to run around a lot in the grass and milk cows, which seemed cool to a suburban kid--I don't think I took any great life lessons from it, other than that it would be cool to know how to build your own house and make your own dolls. But reading them as an adult, I'm really struck by how shitty it all was, and how it appears that her father had a terrible case of ADHD (or maybe bipolar?). The part where he's gone for months looking for work but doesn't send any money and no one knows where he is or if he'll come back? Or the part about where they borrow money to put glass windows into their house, and then the locusts eat all the crops so they lost the entire house to the bank and have to move again? Yikes, yikes, yikes.

When I read the online biographies on LIW , I was surprised that she had almost no contact with her parents in the later years of their lives. I think when they died, she had not seen them in many years, maybe decades. I know people were poor and travel was tough, but that still struck me -- this was a family with some issues. I mostly feel bad for her, and happy that there were at least some nice moments in her childhood that she could look back on and appreciate, despite all the horrible things. As I'm writing this, maybe that's sort of a life lesson.

Are you truly this ignorant about history?