Original article can be found at The Weekly Standard
Originally published on July 3, 2018 By Alice B. Lloyd
ALA won’t honor Little House on the Prairie author anymore: All the more reason to read her recent biography.
You’ve probably read by now that the American Library Association removed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from an award last Monday. The Wilder Award was one they—the world’s oldest assembly of library professionals—created especially to honor her in 1954, just three years before she died, in large part because they’d come close but never awarded Wilder a Newbery Medal for Little House on the Prairie and its eight sequels. By then essential to our canonical grasp on frontier history and the making of America as we know it, her books were phenomenally popular. Honoring their author’s legacy was an obvious move for the nation’s librarians.
Caroline Fraser, author of Prairie Fires: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s American Dreams, was on the cusp of winning the Pulitzer for biography last year when the ALA first formed its renaming committee. Their principal question, Did someone whose characters sometimes traded in racist stereotypes still deserve such celebration? Their decree last week answered, no: “Her works reflect dated cultural attitudes toward Indigenous people and people of color that contradict modern acceptance, celebration, and understanding of diverse communities.”
Fraser wrote, in a Washington Post piece rightly anticipating the ultimate decision, “There’s nothing wrong with changing the name of an award.” And here, or so she suspected in the piece, Wilder herself would agree. “I’d like to think that what would matter to Wilder in this debate would be not the institutionalized glory of an award bearing her name but the needs of children.” (It’s now the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.)
This isn’t the first time Wilder has been criticized for racial insensitivity in her works. In the 1950s Wilder consented to have a line rewritten in subsequent editions. She’d originally written: “The land was level, and there were no trees . . . there were no people. Only Indians lived there.” When a reader complained, Wilder told her publisher, Harper Collins, that she’d blundered and never intended to diminish natives’ humanity. (“There were no settlers,” the description reads now.) More than a generation later, a child of the Wahpetunwan Dakota, the same tribe Ma and neighbors despise in the books, came home crying in 1998 when her third-grade teacher read aloud a wartime slur one ancillary character repeats: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” The child’s mother made a stink, but her teacher withstood the controversy and, with the ACLU on her side, went on teaching the books. It took 20 more years for the ALA to turn on Wilder.
Why now? A writer at Vox who loved the Little House books, but also praised the ALA’s decision, invoked intersectionality. Junot Diaz, until recently an irreproachable thought leader in literary circles, has prominently condemned Wilder too. But it’s possible these critiques weren’t all that did Wilder in: Renewed attention to her life and legacy could also be to blame.
Leading historian of the American West Patricia Limerick, whose book The Legacy of Conquest set off a robust reexamination of the complicated and all-important American story of westward expansion thirty years ago, wonders whether Fraser’s biography of Wilder elevated controversy and criticism. “There’s a way in which, when you call attention to somebody, you might actually do that departed the person a disservice by saying to everybody, Look over here, look at this interesting person, much more interesting than we realize,” said Limerick. It was the combined force of a hypercritical political climate and a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography remind us of her humanity.
In the week since the ALA’s decision, the director of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Home museum in Missouri—where the Ingallses lived before they took off for the frontier—came forward to condemn the award’s renaming. And the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association published the letter their president sent the ALA earlier this year, urging them not rename the award. “No human has a perfect legacy. No human is untarnished,” the president Dr. Barbara Mayes Bausted’s letter read. Curricular aids to contextualize racially insensitive passages would be a more “inclusive” response to the problem of teaching the Little House books in 2018, she argued.
In an interview with TWS last week, Bausted discussed the elements of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s legacy that the ALA may have overlooked. At their last Laurapalooza convention, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association held a panel on Wilder’s contributions to feminism. “Whether she saw herself as one or not, she exhibited the traits of a feminist. She is one of a number of strong and, one might say, stubborn female writers—at a time when female writers were not strongly heard,” Bausted said. She then looked up and read aloud a complex and possibly revealing proto-feminist passage from These Happy Golden Years, the eighth of nine books: Laura refuses to say the word “obey” in her wedding vows but assures her fiance she doesn’t care about suffrage. “It’s a mistake to conflate the book and TV character Laura Ingalls with the author. Laura the book character saw and reflected perspectives of people around her,” but deeper study of Wilder’s own life paints a more complicated picture. And, “From the letters we were able to read between Laura and her daughter, it doesn’t appear she held racist attitudes,” Bausted adds.
Wilder and her daughter, who helped found the Libertarian party, were on the losing side of political history in their day as well as ours. Mother and daughter often in ideological sync, they were iconoclastic free-thinkers and outspoken opponents of the New Deal. But Wilder’s greatest offense against modern sensibilities is less personal. The reality of the world the Little House books depicted in such clear and vivid prose was too cruel for the political tastes of today’s librarians.
Which is a shame, because it was an honest representation of Wilder’s world—the American frontier West—and Wilder’s world helped make ours. “Maybe it’s better, if we really admire writers, not to have things stirred up around their heritage,” Limerick allows. Because to know Wilder as readers of Fraser’s biography do, “We will have to deny ourselves simple-minded appreciation.”
The same goes for children reading Little House on the Prairie for the first time. “Where did we get this notion that children are these are delicate little flowers and they must be kept in protected containers? They’re not getting protected containers,” Limerick lamented.
Frontier children certainly didn’t get them, as young readers learn from Wilder. As Limerick notes, “Why don’t we just trust them to think?”