Rose Wilder Lane

Rose Wilder Lane

Rose Wilder Lane (December 5, 1886, De Smet, Dakota Territory – October 30, 1968, Danbury, Connecticut) was an American journalist, travel writer, novelist, and political theorist. Although her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, is now the better known writer, Lane's accomplishments remain remarkable. She is considered a seminal force behind the American Libertarian Party.

Early life and schooling

Rose Wilder Lane was the first (and only surviving) child of Laura Elizabeth Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder. As a child, she moved with her parents to Minnesota, Florida, back to South Dakota and eventually to Mansfield, Missouri, where her parents established a farm. By all accounts a brilliant student, she attended high schools in Mansfield and Crowley, Louisiana (where her father's sister Eliza Jane Wilder Thayer had settled), graduating in 1904. Her intellect and ambition were demonstrated by her ability to compress three years of Latin into one, and by graduating at the top of her high school class. Despite this academic success, her parents' financial situation placed college out of reach.

Early career, marriage, divorce

Despite inheriting the pioneering spirit of her forebears, Lane was quickly drawn away from a rural lifestyle, and eventually spent much of her life traveling the world. After her high school graduation, she returned to her parents' farm, assessed the limited options that a life in Mansfield could offer, and took matters into her own hands. She learned telegraphy at the Mansfield railroad station (the station master was the father of a school friend). Before she turned eighteen, she was working for Western Union in Kansas City as a telegrapher. She worked as a telegrapher in Missouri, Indiana and California for the next five years, until her marriage.

In 1909, she married salesman and occasional newspaperman Claire Gillette Lane. Around 1910, Lane bore a son who was either stillborn or died shortly after birth. Complications from subsequent surgery appear to have left Lane unable to bear more children. The details of the child's death remain vague; the topic is mentioned only briefly in a handful of existing letters, written years later to express sympathy and understanding to close friends who were also dealing with the loss of a child.

For the next few years, Lane and her husband led a somewhat vagabond existence, traveling around the US and working together various marketing and promotional schemes. Later autobiographical pieces written about this period in her life describe Lane as becoming depressed and disillusioned with her marriage, caught in the tensions arising from the recognition that her intelligence and interests did not mesh well with the life she was living with her husband. Her writing career began around 1910, with occasional free-lance newspaper jobs that earned needed cash. Beginning around 1912, Lane and her husband sold, over several years, millions of acres of farm land in what is now the San Jose/Silicon Valley area of northern California. Rose turned out to be the better land salesman of the two, which ultimately led to several periods of separation and an eventual divorce. Lane never remarried, although she informally "adopted" and educated several young people throughout her life.

The threat of America's entry into World War I seriously weakened the real estate market, so in early 1915 Lane accepted a stopgap position as an editorial assistant on the staff of the San Francisco Bulletin. The stopgap turned into a watershed. She immediately caught the attention of her editors not only through her talents as a writer in her own right, but also as an extremely skillful editor for other writers. Before long, Rose Wilder Lane's photo and byline were running in the Bulletin daily. She easily churned out formulaic fiction that would run for weeks at a time, and captivated readers with multi-part human interest articles and biographical studies of the rich and famous. Her studies of Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin,Jack London, and Herbert Hoover (who became a lifelong friend) were published in book form.

Launches free-lance writing career

By 1918, Lane's marriage was officially ended and she had quit her job with the Bulletin to launch a career as a free-lance writer. From this period through the early 1940s, Lane's work regularly appeared in leading publications such as Harper's, Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies' Home Journal. Several of her short stories were nominated for O. Henry Prizes and a few novels were top sellers. In the late 1920s, she was reputed to be one of the highest-paid female writers in America. Despite this financial success, Lane's compulsive generosity with her family and friends often found her strapped for cash and forced to work on material that paid well, but did not engage her growing interests in political theory and world history. She suffered from periodic bouts of self-doubt and depression in mid-life, self-diagnosing herself as manic-depressive (now more commonly known as bipolar disorder). During these times of depression, when she was unable to move ahead with her own writing, Lane would easily find work as a ghostwriter or "silent" editor for other well-known writers, who were well-aware of her talents in that area.

Lane's occasional work as a traveling war correspondent began with a stint with the American Red Cross Publicity Bureau in post-WWI Europe and continued though 1965, when at the age of 78, she was reporting from Vietnam for Woman's Day magazine, providing "a woman's point of view." During her Red Cross travels, Lane became enamored with Albania, and lived there for several long periods during the 1920s, spaced between sojourns to Paris and her parents' farm in Missouri. She informally adopted a young Albanian boy whom she claimed saved her life on a dangerous mountain trek, and later sponsored his education at Oxford University in England. After about 1928, Lane returned to the U.S., living on her parents' farm until about 1937, when she purchased a rural home outside of Danbury, Connecticut, where she spent the rest of her life.

A controversial collaboration

Controversy surrounds Lane's exact role in her mother's famous Little House series of books. A contributing factor was the stock market crash of 1929, which wiped out both Lane's and her parents' investments. The ensuing Great Depression further reduced the market for her writing, and she found herself isolated and depressed, struggling to maintain her commitments to support herself, her adopted children and her elderly parents. Her ghostwriting jobs increased at this time, because her depression always seemed to affect her ability to pursue her own writing projects. In late 1930, her mother approached her with a rough manuscript outlining her hardscrabble pioneer childhood. Lane, with her well-developed sense of what was marketable, took notice. She recognized that an American public weary of the Depression would respond warmly to the story of the loving, self-sufficient and determined Ingalls family overcoming obstacles while maintaining their sense of independence, as told through the eyes of the spunky Laura as she matures from ages five to eighteen.

Some argue that Wilder was an "untutored genius", relying on her daughter mainly for some early encouragement and for her established connections with publishers and literary agents. Others contend that Lane essentially took her mother's unpublishable manuscripts in hand and completely (and silently) transformed them into the series of books we know today. The truth most likely lies somewhere between these two positions — Wilder's writing career as a rural journalist and credible essayist began more than two decades before the Little House series, and Lane's formidable skills as an editor and sought-after ghostwriter are well-documented. The existing evidence (including ongoing correspondence between the women concerning the development of the multi-volume series, Lane's extensive personal diaries detailing the time she spent working on the manuscripts, and Wilder's own initial draft manuscripts) tends to reveal an ongoing collaboration that involved Lane more in crafting the earlier books, and to a much lesser extent by the time the series ended, as Wilder's confidence in her writing ability increased. Lane insisted to the end that she considered her role to be little more than that of an adviser to her mother, despite much documentation to the contrary.

It can be said that the mother's strengths as a compelling storyteller, and the daughter's considerable skills in dramatic pacing, literary structure, and characterization, resulted in a sometimes tense yet remarkable collaboration between two talented women. In fact, the collaboration may have benefited Lane as much as her mother - many of Lane's most popular short stories and her two most commercially successful novels were written at this time. Let the Hurricane Roar (later retitled Young Pioneers) essentially retold the stories of her grandparents in an adult format. Free Land, was also written for adults, (and loosely based on Laura and Almanzo's first four years of marriage) addressed the difficulties of homesteading, and how the "free land" in fact cost many homesteaders their life savings. The Saturday Evening Post serialized both books, and both were adapted for highly popular radio performances. Regardless of Lane's actual involvement in the success of her mother's writing, both writers' careers were reinvigorated by their collaboration, enabling them to recoup their financial losses from the Depression.

Later years

After about 1940, despite continuing requests from editors for material, Lane finally turned away from fiction writing and became known as one of the more influential American libertarians of the middle 20th century. She vehemently opposed the New Deal, creeping socialism, wartime rationing and all forms of taxation, claiming she ceased writing highly-paid commercial fiction in order to avoid paying income taxes. She cut her income and expenses to the bare minimum, and lived a modern-day version of her ancestors' pioneer life on her rural acreage near Danbury, Connecticut. A staunch opponent of communism after seeing it practiced in the Soviet Union, she wrote The Discovery of Freedom (1943), and tirelessly promoted and wrote about individual freedom, and its impact on humanity. As Lane grew older, her political opinions solidified on the far-right side of conservative, and her defense of what she considered to be basic American principles of liberty and freedom could become harsh and abrasive in the face of disagreement.

During the 1960s, she revived her commercial writing career by publishing several popular magazine series, including one about her tour of the Vietnam war zone. She wrote an immensely popular book about the history of American needlework and also published "On The Way Home", which served as a capstone to the Little House series. She also contributed book reviews to the influential William Volker Fund. She was the adoptive grandmother and mentor of Roger MacBride, the Libertarian Party's 1976 candidate for President of the United States. The last of the many protégés to be taken under Lane's wing was the sister of her Vietnamese interpreter; impressed by the young girl's intelligence, she brought her to the United States and enrolled her in college.

Lane died in her sleep at the age of 81 on October 30, 1968, just as she was about to depart on a three-year world tour.

Quotes

• "The longest lives are short; our work lasts longer."

• "Happiness is something that enters our lives through doors we don't remember leaving open."

• "Making the best of things is a damned poor way of dealing with them."

• "I am now a fundamentalist American; give me time and I will tell you why individualism, laissez faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit."

Bibliography

• The Story of Art Smith (1915) (biography)
• Henry Ford's Own Story (1917) (biography)
• Diverging Roads (1919) (fiction)
• White Shadows on the South Seas (with Frederick O'Brien) (1919) (non-fiction travel)
• The Making of Herbert Hoover (1920) (biography)
• The Peaks of Shala (1923) (non-fiction travel)
• He Was A Man (1925) (fiction)
• Hillbilly (1925) (fiction)
• Cindy (1928) (fiction)
• Let the Hurricane Roar (1932) (fiction) now better known as Young Pioneers.
• Old Home Town (1935) (fiction)
• Give Me Liberty AKA Credo (1936) (political history)
• Free Land (1938) (fiction)
• The Discovery of Freedom (1943) (political history)
• "What Is This: The Gestapo?" (1943) (pamphlet)
• On the Way Home (1962) (biography/autobiography)
• The Woman's Day Book of American Needlework (1963)

About Lane

• Holtz, William V., 1995. The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane. University of Missouri Press. More.
• ———, ed., 1991. Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Friendship Letters, 1921-1960. University of Missouri Press. More.

External links

• Cato Institute: Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968).