Chapt Fourteen- The Seeker

Chapter 14

The Seeker

Rose Wilder Lane

                                                                      “ // ”

“People meet me all of the time and refuse to believe me, my name evokes all kinds of reactions; the gypsy sounding woman named after her mother’s favorite prairie flower… like an Indian or something; An alley covered in wildflowers... an exotic dancer! Sorry, It's just lil' old me. By the time I got married, I had come to realize how much my given name was self-fulfilling... if not a little flashy... and so, being an ambitious young writer, I did not drop my maiden name. Like many things my mother coined, I had become a living part of her literary vision, albeit unrealized.

“Long before either of us were writers, she was thinking like a poet, embracing nature, forming her world and her family as quintessential emissaries of the American West. Her kind of world view... a creative, poetic paradigm, propelled me... although I never realized that until much later. When you are growing up, you do not know what to make of your parents, your upbringing... until you leave and find out how fortunate you were.

Rose Wilder

“I must have had great parents, since I never got any college education, and grew up much like “the Grapes of Wrath,” and yet I was able to enter into the journalism industry and work my way up to my own byline. I am blessed with articulate speech, and higher than average noodles, and whenever I mention my childhood, they laugh with hilarity, and say something like, “Now Rose, that’s absurd, you have to be exaggerating!”

“Well, I am not exaggerating.”

“I grew up as a pioneer, riding around the Great Plains in a covered wagon, my pet was a donkey named Spookendyke, and I hardly ever wore shoes until my mother sent me down to Louisiana to go to High School. It’s nothing to be proud of… I’m not ashamed of it either. It made me who I am. Rose Wilder Lane, but I got away from all of that as soon as I could. It never seemed interesting or picturesque to me. It was hard. And dirty. And dangerous. And I didn’t love it.

“People ask me how it is I broke out... you know, got away from that life, from my hillbilly roots, and I suppose it started when I was quite young. By parents were once stricken, both of them at the same time, with a deadly case of Diphtheria. We were farmers and lived out in the boon docks of South Dakota, and we pretty much doctored ourselves. Or else we died!

Caroline Lake Quiner Ingalls- "Grandma"

“While Mama Bess and Manly fought for their lives in our little cabin on the plains, I was sent to live with my grandparents. Of course they spoiled me rotten. My Aunt Grace Pearl made sure of that. They sat around and adored and entertained me, read to me, and reassured me about my parents, who could have died, but little did I know. Months went by, and when I finally saw my parents again, they were both emaciated and weak, and looked almost scary... My father was never the same after that.

Aunt Grace

“And I really did not want to leave my grandparents. I knew now there was something else, and I did not want to return to the farm! You're laughing, but that was the truth!

“Years later I would understand that Daddy had been crippled for life by a light stroke, on top of the effects of “difftheeria.” He really never could work much after that episode. And many things died with that stroke; Any hope of prosperity. Maybe hope in general. My mom's ambitions, her eternal optimism was put to the test. I was too young to understand, but I blamed the farm, where Manly spent his last good days as a whole man.

“Sweet man.”

“And I had learned very young that your parents may act strong and self-sufficient, but they are not, and you are best served if you look after yourself.

“Life with my grandparents had been so... idyllic. You know them as Carolyn and Charles Ingalls. There was a television show made all about them, and it captured their spirit I suppose, but it was mostly just “Hollywood” as they say. In real life they were very capable, gracious people, sweet people. But they knew all about hard times, Grandma Ingalls was as tough as any mountain trapper. She was fearless, I guess that's where I got my brass. She once endured a blizzard on the plains with a brand new baby, all by herself. Shot a stray cow for food and captured another for a milker. In the blizzard!

“I could go on... And she and grandpa made me understand the poetry in Nature which I took for granted, which just naturally flowed out of my mother like honey. They probably turned the light on, as far as reading... and literature... So I grew up knowing there was something better. And that you had to understand the way the world works... to protect yourself from life's pitfalls. Books became my school... and my escape.

“I knew that life could be very satisfying, even beautiful. If you survived. I was not mad at my parents who raised me otherwise, after all, “every man has to make his own way.” They had that so-called “pioneer spirit,” and they never knew or wanted any other way. Just give my mama a sunrise and a layin' hen and she was as happy as an unbroken colt.

“But they could never understand my desires, to get away, to become something. I dearly loved them, but the day I left, it was like I had been living with a burlap bag over my head and suddenly it had been lifted off…

“Sunshine! Fresh air! I can see!”

“Clarity!”

“Hope!”

“I can imagine what you are thinking... DAMN that woman is independent and ungrateful! You don't know the half of it! I just wrote J. Edgar Hoover the other day, I was mad as hell, I don't mind saying it. I did, I wrote the FBI, and told them about a concern of mine... tremendous changes in this country- I have been watching over the years. I grew up in the West, where lawmen were often just recycled outlaws, and anyway I've got my craw full of nosy policemen, overbearing government... It's getting to where it all reminds me of some Communist countries I have been to.

“I guess I ought to explain. Let's go stand in the shade, this might take awhile.

“I was minding my own business, diggin' dandelions in my yard... it was overgrown with weeds. All sweaty and dirty... and this cop drives up, gets out of his patrol car... I was expecting him to ask directions or something. Nice lookin' young man. Uniform nicely pressed. I'm always glad to see a policemen... But he kind of has a funny look on his face.

“Like a little boy, you know, who has to go the bathroom, but can't.

“I noticed he had on a revolver. I didn't think much about it. Until he looked at me real professionally, and condescendingly rested his hand on the butt of his pistol... changed right there from a little boy to... well seemed like the Gestapo to me. I'm sure I overreacted. He asked me if anybody from my address had sent a post card to Sam Grafton. Well, Sam has a radio show that I listen to, and yes, I had sent him a post card.

“Then the cop pulled out a piece of paper from his clipboard, and he had myyyy message to Sam on his clipboard! The exact words.

“I was flabbergasted.”

“Then I made my own transformation! I swelled up like a toad... who gave him the right to be reading my mail?

“I admitted to having penned those exact words, then I bored right in to him, “WHAT have the State Police to do with ANY opinion that an American citizen wants to express?”

“I knew I had him... if he was an American.”

“Can you believe it, he said he did not like my attitude! So we were even, I did not like his either. NOT ONE DAMN BIT. I told him, “You work for me, and I pay you, and you have the insolence to question my attitude?” I was out of my mind by this time. I told him that this whole situation felt like the Nazi Gestapo. Like I said, I was out of my mind.

“Then I saw another transformation... now he was a Boy Scout. He fell all over himself. He apologized, assured me that he was not trying to frighten me. I guess he handled me pretty well... But I gently scolded him anyway... had to keep the upper hand. Reminded him that his uniform and his tone could be intimidating to some people, but not me of course.

“Told him that his questions were outrageous in a free country... and the last time I checked, it was still a free country! Then Boy Scout got kind of fresh, tried to humor me. He was pretty foxy. Tried to get me to give him credit for speaking to me face to face, instead of sneaking around the neighborhood and asking my neighbors about my SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITY. He had no idea, Ha Ha! That I didn't give a rat's behind about what the neighbors think! BUT THAT REALLY TICKED ME OFF!

“Sub versive Activ ity? 'You think that post card was subversive activity?' What country are we living in? And he said that it WAS!

“God help us all.”

“I was beyond myself at this point. I think I had one of those out of body experiences! That's all that kept me from strangling him!

“I told him, now back in my body, ' Then I'm as subversive as HELL!' You see my message to Sam was a pretty defiant rant against Social Security, the bane of our existence. It is nothing but a government Ponzi scheme! And I told him I was just getting started. That ' I would say it, I would write it, I would broadcast it, and I would keep on doing it until they PUT ME IN JAIL!' ”

It did not help that he was smirking at this point... trying not to laugh in my face. I told him to write THAT down! Report that to his superiors!

“And he did. I swear!”

“Well Boy Scout could not have known that I had some pretty powerful connections... I wrote a little anecdote, like it happened to one of my neighbors... hate to toot my own horn, and sent it to some associates, who had it printed all over the country in a matter of weeks... And I wrote Mr. Hoover, J. Edgar, although by now I suspected that he was behind the whole thing. I warned him that just because our country needs some kind of secret police, they still had to operate within our rights as Americans.

“I know he probably laughed it off, but this is dead serious to me. The very idea!

“The local Postmaster must have seen my SUBVERSIVE post card and alerted the authorities. That was when I realized that there was a local Gestapo... right here in lil' old Danbury, who continued, I might add, to turn me in for other “seditious activities”!

“That was OK, the papers got ahold of it, and pretty soon I was the guest speaker at some local women's clubs... they were very glad to be informed. They too sensed this creeping snake of Socialism, government overreach, and they understood my objections. We all must buck up, and resist these “New Deal Secret Police.” This was EXACTLY how the Nazis took over Germany. It all seemed innocent enough, for the so-called “common good.”

“The Nazis rooted out all the dissenters, the thinkers and the political or intellectual opposition. The rest was like taking candy from a baby.”

“Anyway my accountant says that I have to watch it, as now I have come under their scrutiny. That's how the government destroys people now, through the IRS. The FBI has become nothing more than an eye into all our private lives. And the IRS is their lever. President Roosevelt used it on several of his perceived enemies. People have no idea. It's like the Pinkertons, turned on the American people.

“I'm sure that Americans will not put up with it.”

“So yes, I am independent! And I have always been that way. It became a problem with my parents and it came to a stalemate when I was around thirteen. I was an angry, indignant, suppressed kid... and my mother and I both had done or said things we already regretted.

“Mama Bess, that's what Daddy called my mother, sent me to live with my Aunt E.J., one of my Daddy's older sisters, down in Louisiana, to attend High School. E.J., her name was actually Eliza Jane, would have been called “hip” today. Actually I looked just like her. Mama always said I favored her, even acted like her. That was not always meant as a complement. She came to visit once and spent some time with me, kind of like a counselor, and we seemed to really understand one another... and Mama and her had a long talk. 'If push comes to shove...' she would take me off of Mama's hands.

Eliza Jane Wilder Gordon-

 A woman of the world.

“And anyway E.J. was married to a wealthy older man who had a plantation down there in Louisiana. It was right out a William Faulkner novel.”

“Mama Bess explained to me that I was going down there because of the school, but when I got there it was not much better than in Mansfield. The fact was Mama hoped E.J. would understand me better and might be able to coax me into treating school more seriously. But I hated it, found it boring, did not get along with my teachers as usual... There are so many under-qualified teachers in education... And I've never had much use for morons. And especially ones that are setting themselves up as the experts... And with those Southern accents... it was too much!

“But I guess I never met an expert in my life that impressed me very much. It's almost always just a pretense.”

“I learned much later that famous or influential people put their pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us. I suppose that if I could do it all over again I would be a little more charitable. Anyway, eventually I started dating a fella down there and don'tcha know it, it was not long until Aunt E.J. shipped me back to Mansfield. But I was graduated from High School and “a woman full growed!” as they say in the Ozarks, and I told Mama I was never coming back to the farm... and although that was a big lie, she gave me bus fare and a grubstake to go look for a job in Kansas City.

“I think back on that, and although I took it for granted at the time, since I saw myself as all grown up, I realize now that she must have either been so frustrated with me, and scared to death, or else she actually believed in me, so that she took the chance. And I like to the think it was the latter.

“Actually, Mama Bess was a very forward thinker, in many ways. I suppose Daddy's injuries prompted her, just to survive. She was a good mother, but an even better entrepreneur. She was always learning a new skill, trying to make extra money... messing with laying hens, selling eggs, sewing, canning, writing her little columns for the local paper. It's crazy, she had no education to speak of, but she was treated like an expert about everything! So there you are, I could not stand her, but I became my mother!

“Most people have never heard of me. But most people have been exposed in one way or another to things I have either written, or ghost-written, or edited. I was a gifted writer fairly early, and got some wonderful assignments, like biographies of Charlie Chaplin and Henry Ford and Herbert Hoover, but my inexperience and cavalier attitude got me into a lot of trouble as fast as I got published. Permissions, royalties... Once again, more “morons”... But I was the big one... ghostwriting at least seventeen books!

“It was a big adjustment coming from the ends of the earth, having nothing, not even an opinion, totally unknown, to the California fast track, writing words about the rich and powerful- to be printed and argued over by lawyers. I was such a babe in the woods. But I’m a country girl, and it did not take me long, and eventually I was running with the wolves! Leading the pack!

“I was probably more aware of myself than most kids; little Rose, an only child, in captivity in the woods, no children around to play with... hauling water... firewood... lonely and absorbed in some tattered book I was re-reading... I had a brother that died, and I was sure I was missing out on having an ally. So I escaped into books, found my friends there. I spent my childhood stewing and brooding, in my mother's shadow.

“I admired her greatly. But to be honest, she made me jealous. Mama Bess was so imperial... She always knew how things ought to be, and she was an expert at improvisation, or as she called it “Making the best of things...”

“Whereas I was given to depression, she seemed immune to it. She got out her feelings, put them on somebody else's shoulders. Mostly papa's... and he bore them bravely. I tried to, but it would make me angry.

“You were supposed to smile, keep a positive attitude, no matter what, and pretend everything was alright... and if you didn't she made you feel guilty... like a family traitor or something... So sometimes I hated her greatly, as well. When I was growing up, children had no rights, no voice, only total submission to adults- parents, teachers… aunts and uncles… the needs of the farm, the animals, the garden, and I was an only child… when I wasn’t doing chores I was feeling sorry for myself. I know it’s hard to imagine, me walking barefoot through chicken poop to collect eggs in my homemade shift made from a sugar sack- My hair cut short like a boy to make it easy to wash, to avoid lice. It wasn’t quaint. It was suffocating. At least it was for me.

“When I look back on it now, it probably hurts more, because now I understand it. And I would never have understood it if I had not left. I was such a bright child, inquisitive, and a little insolent I guess, so boredom was unavoidable… My mother was a dreamer, living inside of her own script, my father a pleaser. She was always the main character in her own narrative- and this of course was partly how her stories, basically auto-biographies, which she wrote many years later, became best-selling books. I had a lot to do with that as well... My father Manly was her “Man Friday.” He was so different from her... or me... good-natured, with a servant's heart. He was like a devoted slave to her.

I had friends who insisted that I was too. I don't see it, but there was no question that Mama Bess was the queen of the plantation. This meant constantly “bootstrapping” to try to please her and meet her expectations. Manly did not mind... he kind of enjoyed making her smile, they were so devoted to one another. The way you hear about storybook “happily married couples.” I was jealous of that too.

“Even then, I knew there was only one Manly... and I would never one for myself.

“It sounds petty but sometimes I hated them, as this insurmountable, united force. I could handle them one at a time... but together they could be downright disheartening. Manly gave in to her too much, and the effect was that I was always outnumbered... But my father was a saint. So much so that no man ever compared well to my father and no relationship was ever that promising to me.

“He had so many great qualities, perhaps the best man I ever knew. Such a hard worker… and hard teaser… and hard drinker… I guess most men were like that. Mama usually sat on him pretty hard. She made me mad sometimes, like fun was infectious and deadly. But they both could not be the head, the creative energy of the family. And she was way ahead of him in that category.

“Anyway I escaped! I chuckle now because it was so absurd. I escaped alright, only to pine for that crude little cabin and its warmth and simplicity for the rest of my life. It was only after I was a fairly successful writer and had been all around the world, seen two World Wars, and had known presidents and princes that I really appreciated being a country girl. And their little home, built with their own hands. And being born in the greatest country on earth.

“I came home in the 1930’s with my girlfriend and tried to live there again. As much as I loved them, my dear parents drove me crazy. I wanted so much to give them things they had never had. I built them a new house, with all the modern conveniences... but they still preferred the old one! For me houses store up all kinds of feelings and impressions. Good and bad. I guess I wanted to erase all of those memories of mine... of discontent. I guess I thought a new house would be so exciting, a fresh place for better times.

“Mama Bess and Manly just watched and smiled. Manley was button-lipped, bless his heart... They had never had a 'storebought house.' It took me a long time to realize- I was the one trying to impose my discontent on them. The new house was more for me. They had been happy!

“But during that ordeal I did get Mama Bess to put together some of her pioneer stories, and that was the beginning of the “Little House” series of books which ultimately made her famous. It was almost absurd, how successful her books were! It was hard for me, because I had written a number of books and could not get a winner. She writes some homespun children’s books and sets the world on fire! That was just like her.

“Go figure. I remember telling her quite confidently that there was no money in those children's books...”

“True, I helped her a bit with editing and finding her an agent, but they were her stories. I did no more than any editor might do for a budding author. Well, maybe a little bit more... She was my mother! Of course I did. Her success actually made me realize how special and important my upbringing was, and I began to realize that I had been a bit of a snob.

“So I wrote my own pioneer stories! You know, for the adult market. They still were not as successful as hers. Later I moved into more political interests. Fiction was just too ambiguous. So inconsequential. The world was going to hell, and frivolous nostalgia and romance stories just would not cut it. I had researched and written for the Red Cross in the middle of a war, been all over Europe after World War I, and I had seen the American people struggle through the Great Depression. I had documented their magnificent spirit, and then watched as the Roosevelts injected Socialism into our system… only to trade our free society for permanent dependency, just to avoid the down-side of free market capitalism. I could not restrain myself!

“ And I could no longer stay silent. But Americans needed to be reminded- and often, why we are special, and why we must never compromise and always defend our hard-won Freedom. We can never forget that Freedom comes with a price… and a responsibility.

“Freedom is the perfection of human existence, but it is also ironically the celebration of imperfection, as opposed to governmental attempts at social perfection, imperfectly enforced by imperfect humans.”

“In other words, nothing is perfect, and it is folly to trade freedom, which may have some glitches- for institutionalized fairness, which will always fail.”

“We Americans are very hard on ourselves, rooting out evils in our tiny cracks, while the world's poor and ignorant are truly perishing in ancient, Old World canyons. These canyons are the very same canyons of inhumanity and injustice which our forefathers turned their backs on and crossed the sea to escape. I once explained to my mother, 'America is a young nation... We are so young, with all the crudities and illusions and bombastic self-assertions, over hidden self-distrusts that go with youth. Europe is old and cultured and wise and cynical- and golly, how she envies America!'

“Yes! They are insanely jealous, all of them. Pride prevents them from ever seeing things as they are. So Marx created a godless social machine that these canyon dwellers can conceive, rather than the glory of prosperity and the pursuit of happiness that we enjoy. Godlessness always inspires hopelessness. But cynical people never want to be wrong- that would be humiliating.

“They were the same cynical people who kissed off the Pilgrims and the Puritans. They settled for the bird in the hand. So they embrace Communism or some form of it. They settle. It's what the hopeless masses do rather than suffer. We in America agreed a long time ago to reach for the two birds in the bush. We gambled and won.

“My Socialist friends are about half right, they see injustice, they reach for solutions... I was once one of them, but they begin to think that we “across the isle” don't see it or reach as well, that we don't feel just as committed to fixing things as they are. They become self-righteous prigs. They are impatient and they should be, but they have strained at a gnat and then swallowed a camel.

“Their fallacy is, and this is kind of funny, that as H. G. Wells indicated, they are wrapped up in a very provincial paradigm. They sit in contained circles of influence and observe, condemn, battle from a very egocentric, myopic perspective. They imagine themselves as brave zealots... but they are paper tigers in a paper cause. They seek and find, sometimes contrive the ugliness they need to justify their anger and zeal, right here in the most prosperous place, the the most generous bread basket of the world!

Our most poor and “downtrodden” would be considered fortunate in many places around the world. American Socialists have not begun to see things with a worldwide vision, and Wells was trying to tell them, as nicely as he could, that they did not know what human suffering, or fascism or historic injustice looked like. They do not know what the words mean.

“Wells was a Socialist, because he was convinced that Europe was too far gone, but admitted that comparatively, here in the U. S. there are not the class persecutions, or privileges, or pervasive injustices in America which are terrorizing the world. America has its wrongs, but no other country has admitted them so freely, or strived so heroically to right theirs, as we have- and drastically so, in our relatively short history.

“American Socialists are terminally discontented, and toil in the assumption that they must first recreate America, in spite of the fact that it is relatively immune to the world's chronic issues. And they harbor assumptions that no matter the situation, things could be better, and should be. This was once the assumption in Russia, in China... in subsequently fallen, dysfunctional countries all over the world. Nobody bothers to study the promises made by Castro in Cuba, or Tito in Yugoslavia. Or by hundreds of Socialist candidates in hundreds of countries, especially in Latin America. Nobody counts the bodies of the so-called dissidents, perished in work camps in Stalin's or Mao's communist revolutions. And somehow that which has never worked anywhere is going to somehow work here? And they fantasize that the atrocities which have often happened in Communist and Socialist countries somehow will not happen here. Assumptions that 'We will be different.'

“People are people everywhere.”

“And they are are pretty much the same everywhere. It is their ideologies which decide their potential. Once the power of the masses is entrusted to people whom they have no control over... Naive proponents of Socialism ignore the fact that Socialism usually evolves into a totalitarian, intolerant regime, with no Human Rights. So the East Germans, the Poles, the Cubans, once inviting the Socialist leaders to take control, now risk their lives to get out of those places! Hellholes.

“And where do they all want come? To the United States of America! You cannot find a more zealous anti-Communist than someone who has escaped one of those countries!

“They tell of rationing, executions, work camps, a total breakdown of trust between communities and families. No one is safe from the State which protects its interests at all costs. IT is god and every knee must bow... Our children need to know that our country is unique in the world, unique in all of Human history.

“Most great regimes in world history have been ruthless and intolerant. No freedoms of speech, or religion, or the press. No freedom of thought! Yet I fear unthinking people will someday embrace Socialism and invite the devil into this pristine Nation!

“Every revolution has had its scapegoats… for the Germans it was the Jews, for the French it was the rich and educated class, in Mexico it was the landed gentry, or the church... The Nazis were Socialists, but who rubbed out anyone who disagreed with them, and since then other Socialistic countries have been somewhat more discriminating. But the power of the people is lost. The Muslims, led by clerics punish “infidels,” which means all Jews and Christians, the Communists in China and Russia vanquish capitalists, and the Irish Catholics plan the destruction of the Irish Protestants. But only Americans have waged revolution or war against injustice, and yet made true peace with their former enemies, often giving humanitarian and economic aid by repairing the destruction of that war.

“We have come to take for granted simple but glaring differences between us and the Communists… We rebuilt Japan, our former deadly enemy, into one of the strongest, and FREEest countries in the world. As Russia kept its neighbors in its clutches after the war, broken, and in bondage. They had to build a wall to keep their people from trying to escape!

“All the brutal, murderous powers of the Axis could not whip us, and the world would be lost without us. Certainly human freedom would have been. And yet in the final analysis, and despite some accusations, we Americans spawn free countries, and prosperity, still giving as generously as those magnificent pioneers I knew as a child.

“That is the kind of world I came out of, and that is the kind of world I wish to leave behind.”