Transcripts For CSPAN3 Laura Ingalls Wilder 20240711

Cake. Its a wonderful feeling to know that something so positive representing Jefferson County will be on national television. My job tonight [ applause ] is to introduce the two people on the podium who will be conducting this conversation. Jane henderson is the editor at the st. Louis post dispatch. She graduated from st. Louis and graduated from columbia with degrees in journalism and english literature. She cut short her work as a grad student to go to work as a copy editor in the mid 1980s and later, after three years in the newsroom of the hartford in connecticut, she returned to st. Louis and has been an editor and writer with the post dispatch features department for 30 years. As a book editor, she assigns and edits book reviews choosing from some 300 or so new books each week. Shes written stories about book trends and interviewed many authors from sam and rushdie to e. L. Doctorel. So tonight she adds to that and she will be having a conversation with caroline fraser. Caroline fraser is the editor of the library of america edition of Laura Ingalls wilder, the little house books and the author of three works of nonfiction. Her latest book is prairie fires the American Dreams of Laura Ingalls wilder. It was one of the New York Times ten best books of the year and won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for biography. The National Book critics circle award for biography and the biointernational 2018 plutarch award and was for the history prize given by the Columbia University journalism school. Caroline fraser has traveled the country for the past two years giving talks on Laura Ingalls wilder, her daughter, rose wilder lane and other related topics to groups large and small to wischools, Public Libraries d universities. On the staff of the new yorker, caroline has also appeared in the new york review of books and the atlantic, the Los Angeles Times book review and the london review of books among other publications. She is also the author of gods perfect child. Living and dying in the Christian Science church and rewilding the world, from the conservation revolution. She was born in seattle washington, in 1979 she graduated from Mercer Island high school and in 1987 she received her ph. D in english and American Literature from harvard university. She lives with her husband in santa fe, new mexico, and we would like you all to give her a very warm welcome tonight. [ applause ] i guess were on. Are you ready for us to go ahead. Are you going to talk . Thank you. Thank you very much for having me and talking to carolyn fraser. It is very exciting. I think most of us read little house on the prairie books when we were young and maybe many others and maybe watched it on tv which i did. I was getting to be a teenager, though at that time, and i sometimes was a little skeptical and thought it was a little corny, but well get back to that later. So how long have you researched and studied and why did you start studying, Laura Ingalls wilder . Well, i studied the books as a kid, too and read them and loved them and thought they were fantastic. I think part of the reason why i really loved them was because my grandmother and most of my grandparent his been farmers in the midwest and they were all immigrants from scandinavian places and came to minnesota and wisconsin and were farming in the late 1890s and in some of the same places, same areas that Laura Ingalls had lived. So i think it was really fascinating to me to discover these books that told stories that cast some light on what they must have gone through, and then as an adult i had an opportunity to review the first biography of rose wilder lane, Laura Ingalls wilders daughter who was at one time a pretty well known journalist and in the 90s a biography of her appeared and it was quite a scandal, actually, because it claimed that she was really the author. That was william holtz, and he was from the university of missouri, right . Yeah. He taught at the university of missouri. And it created quite a sensation. There were lots of headlines like said fraud on the prairie. Right. Right. Right. So i reviewed that book and thats when i started looking at wilders manuscript and kind of thinking about what an interesting story that was. About her life . Yeah. I think you mentioned in your book that a lot of his assertions about rose writing the book is in the appendix, right . Did he set out to debunk it or did he just somehow fall into that later . It was kind of an odd presentation in some ways because he seemed to have some real hostility towards laura as part of the story and was very critical of her and yet he didnt bring up this thing that was such a central part of the book. His book was called the ghost in the little house until really the appendix when he talks about it at the end. So it was a contentious kind of argument to make, and i ultimately came away from it feeling like there was a lot more to the story and that it was more complicated than that. But when you earned your ph. D, im not sure how many people at harvard were studying Laura Ingalls wilder, were they . Oh, ill tell you how many. Zero . There were zero. I didnt even think of it at that time, and i would never have proposed it because it was not considered academic, i would arc summe but you have made it academic with your book because you do incorporate so much history into the story, right . Yeah. Later i had the opportunity to edit a new version of the little house books, a new edition for the loibrary of america and tha entailed writing some notes on the text explaining what certain historical events there were for the reader and as i was doing that, i began to realize, well, this stuff is really interesting and it is really interesting to me, and so i began to hope that it would be potentially interesting to readers, as well. And so how long did you study or what papers did you dig up . Where did you find actual new information that hadnt been written about much before . Well, scholars were starting to do related work. There was a fascinating paper, for example, about the ingalls family in kansas that i found and there was another paper and a folklore journal about a discussion of the origins of this phrase that occurs repeatedly in little house on the prairie. This scurrilous phrase, the only good indian is a dead indian, and that was in use at the time because of an event that that is also mentioned in the book called the minnesota massacre, and so there was a whole history just about that one phrase that was so fascinating, you know, in terms of how that was used politically to justify the treatment of indians. And so it just it seemed like really rich history that really repaid attention. Did you find and some of the papers are in the Herbert Hoover library, too . Are those roses or roses only, her papers . Both. Laura Ingalls Wilders papers are in the Herbert Hoover library. The reason that that came about was because when rose began her writing career, and she raleally began as a yellow journalist, she was writing these kind of questionable biographies. Oh, right. Of people, and she wrote one of Herbert Hoover. So she was actually the first person to write a biography of hoover before he became president. And that was for adults . Yes. It wasnt for kidses. It was actually fictionalized. Right. Anyway, after her death her papers ended up at the hoover president ial library as well as some of her mothers. Isnt that interesting . What were some of the revelations that you found . The book is one and the Pulitzer Prize and people must have thought it was somewhat groundbreaking, the way you pulled it together and all of this information and how it related to history. I assume this is why it won . I think it was a combination of establishing the importance of wilder and her work. Both are literary history, but also our selfimage and you know, the way that we see ourselves as the, you know, descendants of people who crossed the great plains and were involved in the settlement of the country. I think people are interested in the kinds of fantasies that weve created about our own past and sort of looking at how true are those stories that we tell ourselves . Well, i mean, other people were telling that story, though, before wilder, though, were rn they . Oh, sure, but her story has become one of the central ways that children absorb, you know, white children about the ideas about manifest destiny which thats a concept thats been interrogated quite a bit and yet, even still today you hear politicians and other people kind of endorsing this idea that there was some grand plan from behind the whole idea of homesteading. Its been known that some of our president s and president ial candidates have been big fans of little house on the prairie. So was that a subtle message on their part or was that just that thats what they were interested in . Well, i think youre speaking about Ronald Reagan who, famously, was there this anecdote about how he used to watch little house on the prairie in the white house with nancy, because i think he knew Michael Landon, who, of course, was the star of the tv show. They were friends and landon was a big reagan supporter. I doubt very much whether reagan himself had read the books or kind of had that sort of knowledge of the background of them, but yeah, i think there is maybe a little bit of a message in that, you know that it was considered to be wholesome wholesome and hardworking and an also pulling yourself up from the bootstraps, right . Right. That whole notion of reagan famously said, you know, he obviously didnt support government. He said something famous about, you know, if somebody comes to you and says im here from the government and im here to help. And youre supposed to be suspicious and thats the worst thing that you can hear. So there is a colonel in the books of this slightly antigovernment well, and i wasnt going to actually bring that up until a little later, but since were talking about it, i remember reading an essay in the new york yorker not a few years ago, Judith Thurman and a person that i was talking about the Vice President ial candidate was sarah palin, and became associated with her, and Judith Thurman seemed to want to point out that this idea that people are doing this all themselves and that Laura Ingalls wilder did it all herself wasnt entirely true, that shed had help and that the government had given or loaned them money to buy land, et cetera. So how have you how did you react to that and what is your interpretation of how much help over not from the government did the you know, ingalls get . Its quite clear, actually, that laura herself had a really sort of contradictory reaction to the federal government because for a time in the 1920s she actually worked, in a sense, for the government. She was a loan officer. She was the secretary treasurer for the mansfield, missouri, federal farm loan program. So she helped farmers fill out paperwork and so forth to get these loans which were beneficial for farmers and she was very supportive of that program, but then when the new deal came along she was very opposed to that, and she was opposed to people taking assistance or aid from the government as many people were. Many farmers were. It wasnt an unusual attitude to have. I remember my mother who was born in the 20s and was born to a family of ten. When i asked her why dont you love fdr or something. She said he made us feel poor. During the depression with ten kids in the family, you were pretty poor. A lot of people didnt like to either feel that or to feel like they were being told that. I dont know. Yeah. Its a baffling thing. I think laura and certainly rose loved this idea of complete independence and autonomy and they felt that farmers and people should never take things from the government that was shameful, i think, to them and yet when you look at the history of the ingalls family, they accepted help from mary, lauras oldest sister who became blind as a teenager as a result of her illness and mary was ultimately sent to college to iowa which was a state program which paid for that. And so they were willing to accept aid, and in fact, i think shes really the only member of the family that was able, you know, to go to college. There was clearly flexibility in the original ingalls family and for some reason laura possibly because, you know, she was a little ashamed of some of her own reliance on her daughter financially developed a somewhat more rigid reaction. But that was when did she start writing or talking about that exactly . Was in the 20s or 30s. You dont hear laura talking about it before then. So, then tell us about Charles Ingalls. Did he get i mean, he took advantage of the homestead act, right . Uhhuh. So what did that mean . How did that affect the family . Of course, the homestead act was one of the biggest government giveaways in history and the family was fine with that, and so he began the homestead act is signed into law around 1862 by lincoln and he takes advantage of it first in minnesota, although they dont really develop a homestead there. It really becomes a factor in their lives when they move on to the dakota territory which the ingalls family did found. It was from the beginning a real struggle for them because it involved breaking land and cutting up the prairie with the breaking plow which in itself is fiendishly difficult work to cut the roots and tear off the grasses on the prairie, and i think he really, by this time hes an older how old was he about . Id have to look, but by that time he was in his late 30s, 40 and hed probably been working. Yes. Hed been working like a dog all his life. So he wasnt probably on. Yeah. So it really took it out of him, and they were able to have a few good krps and so forth, but he wasnt really supporting the family just with the homestead. He had to go into town and build houses and he actually worked mainly as a carpenter in his later years. It kind of shows you how tough it was and it was easier for big families who had a lot of sons who could help out. He didnt have any sons. Sadly on. Did they have a boy and did he die . They had lauras little brother freddy who was born right after the locusts wiped them out in minnesota, and he died less than a year old so there were no sons and mary had her disability so it was a pretty tough life. Well, did they also have were they expected to pay back the government or prove the land . I mean, make sure that it was producing or something before they could really keep it or what was that yeah, the process of what they called proving up on the land took about five years when you applied for a homestead, you filled out some paperwork and you paid a small fee. You know, a few bucks. I think it was 10 for a while and it gradually went up. And you did have it clear a certain number of acres and you had to build something. You had to build some kind of house or shanty or sod house or something. You had to at the end of five years you had to get friends or neighbors to help you fill out the paperwork and testify to this. You had to prove that you had done this and that had to be published in the local newspaper. Oh, really . Thats why a lot of local newspapers were founded was to publish the paperwork. Also to publish announcements perhaps even from the government and land sure. But to play devils advocate here, theyre not getting anything for free from the government because theyre also doing the government a favor, arent they by moving west and kind of helping clear out the indians and what you know, create a farm. Yeah, although the utility of some of those farms was questionable because especially on the great plains on the dakota, a lot of that land was not ideal for farming especially dry land farming which was going alone without irrigation, and just relying on whatever Mother Nature provided. So that land was marginal for farming and the government knew that in sending people out there or allowing the railroads to send people out there. Oh, really . Because the government scientists like john, Wesley Powell had told them, look, this is better for grazing than it is for farming and you actually need a lot more of it to be successful. You need a lot more than the traditional 160 acres to make a go of it, but they did not pay any heat to that. So what was their motive in that, do you think . I believe the motive was to help the Railroad Companies to pursue their profits. Oh, really . What about pa, though. We love pa because he loves laura. Laura loves him and, you know, we saw him on tv, and he sounds like he wasnt a very good provider. And laura knew that. She admitted as much in a letter that she wrote to rose. She said Something Like, pa was no farmer. He was no businessman. He was a you know, he was a poet and a musician, and i think she loved him for those qualities that were not that practical. She loved his charm and his he was a very affectionate and loving father and he was a very talented musician and his fiddle playing was something that made his life worth living which were pretty dark with the family and she came away from her relationship with him of valuing him as a father even though he in a lot of ways failed as a provider . Did he have a short Attention Span or something . It was restlessness, and he liked to be moving on. He had an itchy foot. He, clearly disliked it when an area became too settled and overpopulated and he always wanted to keep going and moving on to the next place which was wilder and he loved to wander by himself on these hunting forays. It was that he was not completely dedicated to the domestic farming scene. Well, what about his poor wife . I mean, was she doing the lion share of the work at home and poor carolyn. She sounds a little resigned. I think in some ways she was. That was the thing. That was the lot of many women at the time to hold down the fort and so i think she was a very patient and very accepting person in a lot of ways and it seems that she did put her foot down when they got to say this far and no farther. This this is it. I think she did that in part for the concern that she wanted them to receive some kind of education. How much education did laura get . You know, for the time, she got a pretty good she never actually graduated from what they called high school then because she left to become a teacher herself, and i think she always felt a little badly about that, but she was quite well read for a person of her age. How did they get books . Did they have a leibrary. They never had a library and she would later in life talk about how wonderful it was to have access to library, but they had a few books. You know, they really valued literature and Charles Ingalls for the son of farmers was a very literate man and he enjoyed reading and so did Caroline Ingalls and so i think reading on her own was something they did and at times reading aloud. He was a bit of a story teller, too, wasnt he . Oh, yes. And i think would hear stories down at the Hardware Store and sit around with those pals and get the news and loved to read newspapers and was a great story teller. She always said that once he heard a tune he would also remember it and could reproduce it so he must have had quite an ear and how long would her parents live . When did he pass away . Well, laura and her husband and daughter ended up leaving this mat in 1894 to come to the oedz arcs in missouri after a number of misfortunes that they suffered and that was actually the last time that laura would see her father until he was on his death bed in 1902. So about eight years . She was not able to see him or be with him until the very end and he died. I think he was 63 or Something Like that, and Caroline Ingalls lived on for some time in this 1920 and 1928. Thats before is that before laura made it big, right . Before laura published her first book . Because laura doesnt really start writing the books until the 30s. She writes first an autobiography until 1930. Pioneer girl. And its well annotate. They put a lot of Historical Information in that, too. Right. Her other sisters, carry ask gra and grace didnt up as well, and they had some struggles to the end or yeah. They were quite poor. Carrie was a kind of enterprising, Young Journalist fa while and she worked for some newspapers and ended up marrying a miner in the keystone area, and grace got married to a fellow in a town called man dhefter and they were very poor and grace had health problems. Did laura ever give them money, do you think . Its unclear. I dont think that she ever really helped support them. I do think in later years during the depression she may have given them some clothes and other things, but i dont think that she really financially helped support them. How was lauras marriage to alonso . Were they happy most of their life . He had his own sort of issues, it seems like. They had a terrible time. Right after they got married they were heavily in debt and lost all these crops and then they fell ill with diphtheria which was a very serious illness at the time and no treatment of and he suffered a stroke from the diphtheria. He was young after the stroke and after the stroke he had difficulty walking for the rest of his life. I mean, he could walk and he could work very hard, but i think it was a real struggle fizzecly and he couldnt do the hard labor that hed done. So they came to missouri, and i think there was something. Apples . The land of the big rpgs red frls apples and that thaezed with the oez arnd especially th wilders, and like the railroad come ones and it was a bit of a fantasy, but there were, in fact, a lot of orchards and so forth that were being established and that was actually one of the things that they did with their property outside of mansfield is to plant a lot of apple trees that were pretty successful for a while. I think a lot of that was wiped out during the years, but we dont think of the ozark, or at least i dont as great farmland either. Its pretty rocky. It is. You talk to people there now and almost all of them have stories about rock picking, somebody would pay them 50 cents to pick up rocks. Rocky ridge was the name of their farm and i dont think it was ever hugely i think they grew oats and stuff for their livestock and they did have quite a lot of livestock at one point. She was really proud of her chickens. Yes. She was very skilled with poultry, and developed all these ways to keep chickens productive and healthy and that was a huge boon to them and one of the things she began writing about for newspapers was poultry and how to be successful and she was very distressed that he was dismissive of her about the money she made and she sat down and added up all of the money she was making and proved to him that . That it was worthwhile. Yeah. So what paid the bills before shethat it was worthwhile. Yeah. So what paid the bills before she started before the book sold . What paid the bills mostly . They had all kinds of jobs and manzo was helping to deliver freight from the train depot and they worked for an oil company. She did the books for the company and they took in borders and she had quite a little business doing that for a while and then these various other things came along and she had the farm loan work and at that same time she was also starting to write for newspapers. She wrote for the missouri ruralist and very well known and well respected farm newspaper and thats where she served her apprenticeship as a writer and started writing about her family, her father, her sister, mary. Oh, she did . She wrote about them . People always like family stories in general, but how did she get that job . Do you know . Do we know how she started . Yeah. Well, she and rose kind of came up together. They had this famous trip. Laura took a trip in 1915 to visit her daughter rose who at that time was living in San Francisco. Right. Shed married this neerdowell guy in San Francisco and San Francisco was a hotbed of journalism at the time. So there were a lot of papers and they were publishing a lot. She started working on one of the womens pages of the San Francisco bulletin and wrote fiction and some nonfiction that actually was fiction. Yeah, and at the same time shes telling her mother, look, you can make much more money righting for a newspaper than you can with chickens so stop doing that. Oh, we know that thats still the case. Yes. And laura kind of apprenticed herself to her daughter for a while and then she was on her way and the ruralist gig was quite a lucky break for her and she was the woman columnist for some time. Do we know how much she was paid for those . I dont. Do you want to talk more about rose . Because rose is a character and she contributes quite a bit in the book and she sounds a little unsteady to me and a little moody at the very least. Yeah. Rose had a hard life in some ways from a young child she had a lot of trauma in her life because of what happened and her parents illness and her fathers disability. They lost another child and the house burned down and the house that manzo had built for his wife and a lot of that had left her with all sorts of confused feelings of responsibility and so as an adult, you can kind of see all of this trauma playing out in her life and she certainly did get severely depressed at various periods and suicidal sometimes. So she did seem to suffer a lot and her relationship with her mother was pretty rocky, too. They had a lot of back and forth. Yeah. They must have also supported each recall because didnt she also send her mothers first manuscript to a publisher and sort of coached her through, you know, what to do . Oh, yeah. I often say that yoefrpgs i don we would have the little house books if it werent for rose because she had a lot of experience as a writer and she had a lot of polish and professionalism and she knew a lot of editors in new york and she knew editors at magazines. She was the driving force pushing her mother to take advantage of these memories that shed been hearing about these stories about the pioneering days all her life, and she knew that there was some money to be made off of that, that there was a real market for that. And possibly, i dont know the fact that the koptry was becoming more modern made people nostalgic or interested in those older stories, i assume. Definitely, and you can see that kicking in during the depression and the stories in farmer boy which was about manzos childhood that was obviously really appealing to a public that doesnt know where their next meal is coming from and these stories about wonderful farms and these amazing meals that they used to prepare and sort of accounts of eating pie for breakfast and this was a wonderful nostalgia for a time of plenty during a time when people were desperate. Well, so how did obviously, these books took a little liberty with history, and we should not look to tv series for our history lesson, but a lot of people watched that show and so they probably got a pretty good idea of that this was sort of how it was. What were some of the things that it got wrong, do you think . The tv show . Uhhuh. More or less everything. Really . I think that the tv show was so made up, and if you look at it now it really was more about the 1970s than the 1870s and this was true of anything coming out of hollywood and the westerns and so forth and westerns and so forth were notoriously fantasies of what life was supposed to be like the way that Charles Ingalls was portrayed, for example, by likal landomichael i have a picture of Michael Landon with his shirt off and his chest shaved. That wasnt pa, huh . That wasnt happening a lot on the prairie, im thinking. So, i mean and they also i could give you a million examples. And you also wrote that they didnt wear shoes to walk around or go to town or go to school, but Michael Landon didnt want them to have Michael Landon did emphasize the success of the family. So his kids did wear shoes, right. And they had toys that the real ingalls girls coveted and would have loved to have had, but didnt have. Right. I dont remember the detail of the tv series. How did it show the indians and how did that compare to how the indians were portrayed in the books . I mean, laura, there is a mixed sort of messages there, it seems. Yeah. Im aware of a handful of instances especially one episode of the tv show that showed what was meant to be an indian boy and lauras interaction with him, and i think that these were, again, ideas of Michael Landon who also did a lot of bonanza episodes. Oh, did he . They were bonanza plots . I dont think they had anything to do with historical reality or even with wilders own memories, you know, that come through so strongly in little house on the prary which she called her Indian Country novel and which does portray a number offen counters that she and her family had with indians in kansas which are, you know, today when we read them theyre problematic and theres a certain amount of racist language and attitudes on display in that novel. Its not laura necessarily who shows those, is it . Her mother is quite afraid of indians. Her mother is certainly, and a member of times when she uses this inflammatory language its given to another character and its not something that laura is saying and her father disagrees with it vocally, but i think nonetheless, there are attitudes and expressions of how people see and interpret indians and indian behavior that are that would never be published today. No, and so its interesting to look at that novel as an expression of that time. I think it remains one of her most important novels, but i do think you have to understand it in its historical context. Its really a page turner, i think, that book is. Theres always stuff happening and there are wolves and indians and just a lot of stuff, but as you know, the American Library association a couple of years ago renamed what was the Laura Ingalls wilder award in part because of this part over concern of the portrait of the indians, right . Right. How do you feel about that . Do you think that was necessary . I think it was necessary for them because thats what they decided to do, and i understand why did it. They were the institution that developed the award. They owned it. They had the right to change the name of it. But they didnt withdraw it. They didnt withdraw it from wilder herself who was the first recipient of it and they made a very Public Statement says that they hoped that children and adults would continue to read the books. So it wasnt intended as an act of censorship. I think the general public somehow interpreted it, at least in some quarters, as that. Which i think is too bad. Because that wasnt the intent. But they still have a theodore guisele award, right . He was more explicitly antisemitic i think than laura was in her novels. Right. Yes, he in fact published during the period of the Second World War a number of racist images. So its complicated. They actually i have a different set of problems with that award based on how it was set up really . And their arrangement with the family. I dont know the full story behind that. But i think there is some complications involved with that. But as far as wilder is concerned, it had been something that they had been discussing for years. I know librarians had been concerned about it because there had been children in communities in south dakota and in other states in the plains and the west who had actually come home from school in tears because they had been reading little house on the prairie and had read these inflammatory things. I think it was a recognition that some of the books have become you know, that their portrayal of indians is complex and that and disturbing and that that has to be acknowledged. That there has to be context provided for these books, if theyre going to continue to be taught in schools. How does that compare to, say, other sort of classic childrens books, though . Are there wouldnt many of them would every one of them pass the sort of test of being not surely not. There have been many instances of this. My mother was a Kindergarten Teacher and taught first grade and i remember i remember her distressed when she had to stop reading little black sambo to kids. People reevaluate classics all the time and begin either withdrawing them from young children. I think that the issue is children. Its particularly notable and disturbing when its children who are the audience for these works. And i think for adults, its a totally different situation. People are still reading and discussing huckleberry finn, for example, in literature courses. But those are adults. And so its a different set of standards, i think, that we have hopefully they have more knowledge to put things in context, i would assume. Sure. Would you have them edit or change anything now in the little house books to make that go away . No. Im never a fan of and i dont think its necessary. I dont think it solves a problem. I think you just need to either reconsider who is readings the books and what age they are when they read the books and provide context or, you know im not an educator. Im not somebody who has those kinds of skills. But i just think its an issue with, you know, all of literature from previous periods. Which, by the way, i think when my children were young, there was a new picture book that came out that was about was like like black sambo and it had different illustrations that were more respectful and it was a darling little book. I read it to my daughter a lot. I cant remember what the name of it is now. But they they called him something slightly different. But i think it was based on that. Its just it had been reillustrated so that it told the story more kind of respectfully. Anyway, its probably about time for other people to think of some questions. There are microphones over here and youll have to get up to go to them because they dont roam around the room. Would anyone else like to ask Caroline Frazier a question . Hello. Do you have a favorite novel by Laura Ingalls wilder . If so, which one and why . Ive always really loved the long winter which is her novel about the familys survival of this winter of 1880 to 1881 and it describes how the ingalls family was basically kind of trapped in their house for months at a time as the food dwindled and dwindled. They were down to their last sack of potatoes, i think, when this young man named Almanzo Wilder with another fellow in town made a kind of desperate journey to get the seed weed from a farmer outside of town and they risked their lives to go find that wheat. And this of course happened. Its beautifully written. Its an extraordinary survival tail and its just very evoketive of the kind of terror and numbness that overtakes you, you know, when youre subjected to these kinds of conditions. And then of course it all comes right in the end through this act of heroism by the man she eventually marries. Its a wonderful novel. And did were they happy for the rest of their lives, do you think . Right, yes. I do think that they were. I think their marriage was difficult in the ways that many marriages are. That they had sometimes real sort of power struggles. I think laura was a really forceful person. She had a hot temper. She would often, you know, fly off the handle. I think she was quite quick to anger. She knew this about herself and sort of regretted it. But nonetheless and yet he was very patient with her and he would say, i think, later in life that he knew that about her when he married her. And i think that he admired her kind of fire, her fiery personality. And i do think they loved each other deeply. I dont think it was always easy, though, for them. Do you have a favorite little house site . Some people go on pilgrimages to different locations. Do you have a favorite . Yeah, theres Something Wonderful at all of them. But one of my favorites is the plum creek site. The town of walnut grove is quite interesting in itself. And theres a lot there. But theres this area where the family dugout was right next to plum creek and you can still see the depression in the earth where the dugout must have collapsed at one point. And its such a lovely place. The owners of it have really kind of preserved the character of it. So you can kind of see the views that they must have seen and taken a little bit of the character of the land. And its just a beautiful little spot. What do you think go ahead. Would you talk a little bit about lauras relationship with her sister mary. Oh, sure. Yeah, that was a critical, you know, part of her life i think because they obviously the two sisters, mary and laura, had a competition. They were very competitive with each other and mary tended to be, you know when they were younger, much more pious and proper and a little bit prim which was something that laura always resented. I think this was true. I think this was a difference between them. And then when mary fell ill and nearly died and then became blind, laura was then, you know, really kind of forced into this role that she had never contemplated for herself which was to become a teacher. That was what mary had been intending to do. And her parents had always hoped that mary would teach and be able to make a little money that way and so it was this huge i think shock for laura that then she had to step into those shoes and it showed her, she said, that she really could do something that she didnt want to do. She was never comfortable, you know, doing that so young. And yet she did do it. She forced herself to do it and it was really hard for her to step up in front of kids who were bigger than she was, you know. And she was a small person. Yes, she is wasnt she just under 5 feet or something. She was just around 5 feet. So i think that relationship stayed with her for the rest of her life, even though she and mary were separated for most of their adult lives. And i think that even the, you know some of those little childhood resentments stayed with her too. She would describe those with such feeling, you know, later in life that it was clear that that remained. I think it created her love of fairness and her intolerance of injustice. She was very quick to be angry about things that she felt to be an injustice. And in fact i think it came from her competition with mary. I really enjoyed your talk so far. I had a couple questions. Ill do the one. How did you get into researching like you did . I know most people you read books, you love the books and you dont go as far as you have where you have researched these people for years. What led you into doing what youve done . To me the historical background of the ingalls lives was fascinating and the more i got into that, the more i wanted to find out. It was almost like putting together a puzzle or something. There were all of these kinds of missing pieces that i wanted to find the answers to. And so i think that was a big part of it. I also, you know you had had mentioned earlier that nobody add harvard would have studied Something Like this. I did feel that there was an importance to these books that they really deserved attention and analysis in a way that they hadnt not that there arent lots of fans. There are lots of really dedicated fans and amateur historians and people who studied the books and they have contributed an enormous amount as well. So i want to give them credit as well. But i really felt like it it was a subject that the general public would respond to and that, you know, the attention would be repaid with new fans. I think its fine to not be a fan of the little house books as well. There are lots of people who dont like them. Which i completely understand. And i think thats totally legitimate. But i do think theyre important. I think theyve helped shape our ideas about homesteading and about our history with farming and settlement that we need to know more about those things. Did you have another question . How does it make you feel knowing your book is as big as it is . How does it make an author feel knowing this book is huge out there . Well, its enormously im curious what authors think like that. Its enormously gratifying to get a response to your work because, of course, most writers and certainly i have, you know, spent a lot of years sitting by myself in a room, you know, not talking to anybody, just working and so its wonderful to have readers and to meet readers and to hear their responses and their enthusiasm for the topic. Were you surprised when you won the pulitzer . I was shocked. Deeply, deeply shocked. Very surprised. Question . Yes. I read that Charles Ingalls lineage stopped with rose. Did they not have any children . No. Kerry had a couple of the man that she married had a couple of children before they married but she had no children of her own. Mary had no children. Grace had no children. Rose, likewise, did not have any surviving children. Rose did have a kind of habit later in her life of sort of causally adopting, adopted several young people in a kind of temporary way and one of those people eventually became the inheriter of the estate, a fellow named Roger Mcbride who she met when she was the 14yearold son of her editor at Readers Digest and he became her adopted grandson and inherited the estate when she died. Thank you. I have a comment and a question. My favorite was always the long winter and my view is colored now having read about that lazy couple that lived with them during the long winter. The other thing, whenever i read those books well, i still do, i always wondered, i knew that laura was born right after the civil war and it was never mentioned, you know, like charles never apparently fought in the war. And it seems to me from the book, it sort of was it when the draft came that she sort of disappeared for a year . Is that kind of yeah, thats a very interesting period and it remains, i think, an unanswered question why he did not serve. There was some history there. The ingalls married in 1860. She had a brother who died in the war and it may have been, you know, im just speculating here. But she might have discouraged his participation. But, yes, they do kind of drop off the map briefly around that time and then turn up in peppen, wisconsin, and that was an area where a lot of men were in wisconsin, were kind of drifting off into the lumber camps and so forth in the northern part of the state to potentially avoid the draft which was quite a contentious subject in wisconsin. Although i think the state of wisconsin ended up sending more men to fight in the war than almost any other state. Really . So its, you know, tantalizing and interesting to think about what that might have been like and why none of the ingalls boys, except the two youngest who ended up volunteering very late in the war, why none of them served. Thank you. Thats very interesting. In mansfield, this Roger Mcbride, she kind of took over the royalties or whatever of some of the little house books, didnt he, and wasnt the Mansfield Public Library supposed to get them later but they never did, they got a lump settlement, right . Lauras will did leave the Wright County library, i think it was, the proceeds the royalties. She left them all to rose for roses lifetime. But then once rose had died, it was supposed to go to the library. And he engaged in some legal proceedings. After he died there was a bit of a reckoning and a lawsuit was filed by the library and they did get a settlement for a fairly substantial sum. So, yeah, it was a little shady. Yeah. Im not american, but, you know, little house on the prairie the tv series kept a benchmark in our country. I was a big fan. I was a teenager so i cannot request something because i believe the majority of people in here are big fan of you. Can i take a can we take a photograph at the end of this event . Well, she was going to sign. But theres no books to sign. Youre going to sign the i would be happy to. Thank you. Thats really cute. Do we have any other questions . I could keep asking questions all night long. But if you i dont know pam, heres someone. You kind of mentioned this at the beginning about the possibility that this one author brought up that rose really was the author of the books and i read the bib leography, took me, forever, but i read it, and when you read that, you can see where she sent things to rose and rose kept sending them back saying, do this, do this, do this. So it was more like rose was her editor than the author. So to me, it would always be Laura Ingalls wilders books. They had a collaboration is what people often call it. I think it was, you know, kind of mother daughter writer editor collaboration. But rose contributed a lot and more clearly edited more heavily than a standard editor in new york might have done at that time. So it is worth studying and talking about and i dont think were done with that even today. And there are certain stages of the manuscripts that appear to be missing. So it really does show you a lot about their process when you look at what remains. I think that, though, that it is clear that laura did produce the raw material that became the books and rose brought a lot to it in the editing. Can you compare her writing and her farm columns to the writing in the novels and tell, is there any substantial difference in the tone or the language she uses or her style of writing . Yeah, there are some really interesting moments in the farm columns and also in the speech that she delivered about her work which was entirely hers. Rose didnt contribute to it at all. She gave this famous speech at the detroit book fair about why she had written the books and she was only halfway through at that point. But i think you can tell that she had her own voice. She had her own style which was very different than roses. She had a very plainspoken, not melodramatic, very factual and kind of affecting tone, whereas roses contributions are often much more kind of hyper dramatic and more polished sometimes. So it is possible to discern the different voices and i think that a lot of what makes the little house books unique is lauras voice and her perceptions, her memories of what she saw and experienced. I have two completely unrelated questions. The first is, the books are somewhat fictionalized. How much would you say is history and how much is fiction . I think whats in the books is often very factual and factually accurate. Laura really cared about getting things right and described things quite accurately. For example, the famous locust plague in the on the banks of plum creek, very accurate description. What she left out was what happened to the family after that event, the period of kind of financial collapse and homelessness and drifting around and so a lot of how shes changing her stories, leaving things out that she didnt want to write about that she thought were not appropriate for children. And the second question regarding her estate, is any part of her estate used to maintain the various sites like mansfield and plum creek . Not directly to my knowledge. I know that Roger Mcbride did give generously to some of the sites, including, you know, mansfield. I think he was instrumental in helping them set up a museum and i think he also contributed items from his from roses possessions to dismet. I know dismet has some of her furniture and other materials, things that he had. I dont know whether he set up any kind of permanent bequest, but i know he did give them money. I know many of them struggle for funding. Its too bad theres not a National Support for those sites because like a lot of literary sites, they need help. Didnt mansfield have plans to build another building or something recently . They did. It was was a couple of years ago. They have a new museum now. Any other questions . Well just wrap it up then. Thank you all so much for coming. Lets give a round of applause. [ applause ] looking at whats coming up tonight, beginning at 8 00 eastern, a couple of programs from our American History tvs reel america series. First, all the way home, a 1957 film looking at changing racial demographics in u. S. Neighborhoods. Then its the american look, this film examines the style of mass goods produced in the 1950s including classic american cars. At 9 00 p. M. Well show you this years cable tv pioneers induction ceremony honoring 22 men and women who have made lasting contributions to todays cable and broadband industry. And at 9 55 more from reel america with crisis in levittown. American history tv on cspan3. Exploring the people and events that tell the american story every weekend. Coming up this weekend, saturday at 10 00 p. M. Eastern on reel america, as Health Officials prepare to roll out a vaccine against the coronavirus, we take you back in time with five films about vaccines and the fight against disease. 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Gorbachev did most of the work to change the soviet union but reagan met him halfway, reagan encouraged him, reagan supported him. Freedom of the press, which well get to later i should just mention, madison originally called it freedom of the use of the press and it is indeed freedom to print things and publish things. Its not a freedom for what we now refer to institutionally as the press. Lectures in history on American History tv on cspan3. Every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Lectures in history is also available as a podcast. Find it where you listen to podcasts. Youre watching American History tv. Every weekend on cspan3, explore our nations past. Cspan3, created by americas Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by our television provider. Up next on American History tv, author Donald Miller interviews Jessica Shattuck about her novel the women in castle. She explains how her familys connection to nazi g