Rightwing makes effort to co-opt Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" books

Not even children's books are safe from their Ayn Rand-ian cult.

Long, but great read on Salon:

Wilder is now detained at those crossroads by Meghan Clyne, managing editor of National Affairs, former speechwriter for Laura and George W. Bush and contributor to the New York Post (where she worried that an Obama nominee might introduce sharia law). Clyne calls for building an “historical-appreciation movement” around Wilder, who is to model self-reliance for millions of less worthy Americans currently receiving Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and “food stamps or other nutrition benefits.” Citing Jefferson, Clyne warns against “degeneracy” in the dependent, commending Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 paper for its depiction of “the conquest of this last unsettled frontier,” without remarking on the removal of natives that made it possible, paid for by the federal government and intended as the type of benefit she condemns. She takes no notice of the fact that Indians occupy a great deal of real estate in Little House on the Prairie, with its references to the 1862 “Minnesota massacre,” when Sioux warriors angered by treaty violations killed hundreds of soldiers and settlers and were then captured, tried, and hung in the largest mass execution in our history. Or that the little house in question was built illegally on an Osage reserve, which may explain why the Ingallses relinquished it.

(...)

Clyne recently wrote an appreciative review in the Wall Street Journal of the Library of America edition of the Little House books (which I edited), welcoming the opportunity to consider Wilder’s work “as serious literature for adults.” But she could not resist interpreting them as a critique of the New Deal and the nation’s “unhealthy dependency on government.” Nor is this the first such reductive view. Wilder’s life and work have long been appropriated by the improving and pious, eager to seize on her faith or patriotism to promote their own agendas. In the post-war years, she was taken up by General Douglas MacArthur, who distributed a translation of The Long Winter, her autobiographical novel of surviving blizzards on the Dakota prairies, in Japan, to buck up a populace struggling without adequate food, shelter, or electricity. Thomas Nelson, the Christian publisher, doubtless hoping to capitalize on the popularity of the TV show, came out in the 1990s with a bizarrely spurious eight-volume series inspired by Wilder’s life, in which Laura battles the Ku Klux Klan in comic-book style heroics. Others cast her as a model of wifely subordination: In an introduction to Laura Ingalls Wilder: Farm Journalist, a 2007 collection of Wilder’s early newspaper columns published by the University of Missouri Press, editor Stephen W. Hines goes so far as to suggest that she urged readers “not to forget that homemaking is a woman’s sacred task, her primary task.” Wilder was a Christian, keeping next to her rocking chair a list of Bible passages appropriate for various trials (“Sick or in pain read 91 Psalm”), but her columns are largely free of cant.

(...)

But Ryan and other conservatives might grasp with alarm what these critics have missed. There is much to offend right-wing thinkers in Wilder’s work, perhaps as much as there is to comfort them. For instance, Wilder repeatedly declared her adoration of the wild and her dismay at its ruin; she was what the Fox News Channel would label a radical environmentalist. Her love of wilderness and her taste for solitude border on the misanthropic. Wolves appear in every book that she wrote about her life, a symbol of what Thoreau called “absolute freedom and wildness.” Her response to a species loathed as much today as it was then is notably empathetic and evolving: She feared them, admired them, envied them, and yearned to emulate them.

(...)

Lost in the discussion of whether she was a libertarian or a mere purveyor of liberty is the Wilder who rejoiced in wilderness. “She loved the beautiful world,” she says of herself in The Long Winter. Like those praised by the Sage of Concord, her books “smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.” They do not celebrate the exploitation of nature, as conservative pundits do, but mourn it. They do not promote anything like the shooting wolves from helicopters, a right cherished by those Emerson called “parlour soldiers” and supported by Sarah Palin. Last year, the governor of Idaho, C. L. “Butch” Otter, declared wolves a “Disaster Emergency,” expressing his desire to “bid for the first ticket to shoot a wolf myself.” By this spring, Idahoans had killed some 500, around half the state’s population. Wyoming is poised to do the same. With taxpayer funds, a host of state and federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture’s “Wildlife Services” — created in 1915 to exterminate wolves — still seeks to “control” the species and eliminate animals the federal government has spent millions to reintroduce, by poisoning, trapping, and aerial gunning. (For more on this federal program, see the three-part series, “The Killing Agency: Wildlife Services’ Brutal Methods Leave a Trail of Animal Death,” Sacramento Bee, April 29, April 30, and May 6, 2012.)