Chapt Fifteen- The Discovery of Her Freedom

Chapter 15

The Discovery of Her Freedom

Motherhood, Libertarian Style

“...the essence of human life is in the free-standing individual rather than in the social collective, that individual action is freely chosen, that choice implies individual responsibility, that the essence of government is coercion to impede individual action.”

                                                                                                                    Rose Wilder Lane

                                                                                                      The Discovery of Freedom

Little Broken House in California

Rose was footloose and twenty-two in 1908 when she abruptly abandoned her job in Kansas City as a telegraph operator. It had been her first job, on her own, away from home, and it lasted four years. She had met a charming fellow who made his living as a traveling salesman, and was headed out to San Francisco. His name was Claire Lane, and he was determined to be a writer. Maybe she would follow him to California and get a job, and who knows, even marry him. One day, without even telling her parents, she turned in her door key to her landlady and took a taxi to the train station.

The train depot was a noisy crossroads of steel and steam and distracted people scurrying in every direction. It was a perfect symbol of the city and the confusion of modern life, and she felt relief as she boarded the polished passenger car, her magic carpet to paradise. She thought about her parents, who were back in Missouri, totally oblivious to her decision, her mom probably happily hoeing in her garden, her father proudly breaking his new Morgan colt. They had never met Claire, and she feared they probably would not like him. She picked out a window seat, and took a deep breath.

Rose did not remember much about that trip across America, over the Missouri River, zooming through sleeping prairies and forests until she too fell asleep, cutting through snow-patched farms and ranches, plunging through mountains while winding streams followed along side in an endless race. It was beautiful, magnificent, and yet it was nothing compared to California, she was sure. The past couple of years had been so mundane, so average. Rose desperately wanted to leave the futility and mediocrity of Kansas City behind. Every mile on the tracks made her more confident of her destination.

The West Coast was a kind of mecca for hopeful, ambitious youth, and artistic types, and Claire had already landed a job as a reporter for the newspaper. He now went by “Gillette.” Some day she would explain it all to her parents, when the risks were behind her.

Rose with a cousin, before the plunge.

When she got her first tour of San Francisco, arm in arm with the man who brought her there, she knew that everything was going to be different from now on. She already had a friend named Bessie and a little job working as the telegrapher at the hotel where she was staying. The blue skies of California promised happiness and good times. Perhaps for the first time in her life, she felt excited and happy and optimistic. This was what life was about!

These were all new sensations for her. Rose was still nursing considerable self-pity, and often thought of her childhood as a nightmare. She would often characterize her youth as a “...mal-nutrition child in an Ozark log cabin...” Now it would be no more cheap shoes or oxtail soup. No more poor kid from nowhere, with no future. She and Claire, or Gillette, as he now called himself by his middle name, would make it big here and “live the American dream.”

They were married as if it was their irresistible destiny. And Rose went out and looked for a better job. She knew she was a hard worker and would do well if only given a chance. Then, in a shocking jolt, she realized that there were many applicants for every job she applied for. And housing in “San Fran” was very expensive. Gillette searched far and wide but could not find a decent place for them to live. And she could not land a job which would pay enough. More ominously, Gillette wasn't sure anymore that his job would last. His talent as a cocky, presumptuous salesman had not translated well into journalism. And then she became pregnant. In a very short time, Rose wondered if she had made a terrible mistake, one that would cause her misery the rest of her life.

Within months they were back in Kansas City, with Gillette trying to make some fast money, using his charm and salesmanship to hustle unsuspecting prospects with dubious products. It was the era of “Let the buyer beware.” People without educations had to depend on “street smarts.” Rose's dream of sunny prosperity had morphed into a Kansas City con game, and the streets were crawling with “sharpies” like Gillette out to “do unto others before they did unto you...” By now she had told her parents about her marriage and stiffened by pride, there was no direction for her but forward. And yet it was all backward.

Then, stressed and truly malnourished, she lost her baby. It was a terrible time, and little did she know, this nameless baby boy would be the only child she would ever have. She later explained that this tragedy was where she learned that we never really forget these hurts, but “...unhappiness and loss are part of living.”

The birth had required a medical procedure which made pregnancy impossible from then on, and medications taken for some time afterwards left her in a fog that lasted for years. Thankfully Rose had been near enough to her parents for them to take care of her.

Rose went back to work in Kansas City, trying to forget her multiple heartbreaks. But Kansas City was cold and unforgiving with fledgling writers, and the Lanes could not pay the rent. Typically, Rose was very hard-headed and would not give up. Finally she got a job as a reporter for the Kansas City Post, and Gillette also began to negotiate for a better gig. Surely they could do better. They just needed a decent break. Then the opportunity of a lifetime, for Gillette in New York, scooped them up and swept them away to the other end of the country.

Supposedly, Gillette would be selling advertising space for a periodical. Which publication, or if it was ever published, sill remains a question. But this could be real good money, as he would be paid a commission on every column inch he sold. The harder he worked; the more he sold, the more he would bring home. But New York proved to be as inhospitable as any place they had experienced. They traveled down to Boston, and up to Maine, with Gillette's gift for "panhandling" seeming to dominate his strategies. Rose thought a lot then about her childhood, riding in the wagon on the plains, and realized that they had never felt so helpless or hopeless as she felt as they wandered around the East Coast. And on the Plains they always maintained their integrity... and self-respect.

Poverty was not about money, it was about your attitude.

Then Gillette found a faster, more expedient ramp to the fast lane. In Maine he claimed an injury from one of their train excursions, and was able to shame the railway “responsible” into paying him a tidy settlement out of court. It was a considerable sum, even though he claimed the Railroad in California would have been more generous. He seemed to know  his way around small-time scams and the legal system. Maybe too well.

Soon they were back in San Francisco, with plenty of cash, and Rose dreaded even telling her parents about their travels and the job changes. But this time they had the money they needed to survive while they climbed the slippery ladder of California success. Gillette landed a decent job, and Rose began to market her skills as a freelance writer. This was a way of shaping her image, as “freelance” was a better way to couch her unemployment, to avoid being called a parasite, as some young people in California called housewives. But her positive attitude worked, and through her friend Bessie she eventually landed a paying position at the San Francisco Bulletin.

Rose Wilder Lane was now an “editorial assistant” on the women's section of the newspaper! She also landed a position with the Pacific Hardware and Steel Company. The Wilder wagon train in her mind had finally come to an end. But the Promised Land was still beyond the horizon, and seemed to always be over the next hill.

Rose and Gillette decided that no matter how fulfilling, news reporting was not going to pay off any time soon, so impatiently, they abandoned ship, something young people often do. They entered into a totally different industry... selling Real Estate. Long before it had occurred to her, the more she watched her husband operate in different arenas, a “Jack of all trades yet master of none," she began to realize how little she knew him when they married. Rose began to wonder if “Gillette” would ever amount to anything.

He was no longer the glib, confident street kid, ready to take on the world, but a little man with a big mouth in a mean world. His humor was no longer entertaining. His excuses were no longer convincing. And Rose felt the bitter frustration she knew too well as a child, of never being able to “makes ends meet”; Never being able to have the things she wanted. She was humiliated but deeply grateful when her hillbilly mother sent her money just so they could eat. Every time money arrived, Rose told herself several things: She promised herself she would pay her mother back someday. She told herself that she would do the same for somebody else. And she swore she would get rid of Claire Lane if he did not shape up.

Rose still carried the pride of a Dakota pioneer, asking for no special favors and giving none. She had little sympathy or understanding for a healthy man who did not support himself, much less his wife. As she and Gillette would separate each day to go out to sell lots, she began to take note of which direction he went, and how his sales tickets added up at the end of the week. She consistently outsold him. It began to be painfully clear that Claire Gillette Lane was either incompetent or lazy, and either way was not going to carry his weight. Ever. Rose had a decision to make.

Years later she would argue that it was “really much better to be killed quickly than little by little.” And Rose chose not to be killed at all. She would do it herself. In less than a decade she would write a very autobiographical book named Diverging Roads, a therapeutic fiction based on the dilemma, and she used her ex-husband as the inspiration for her antagonist in the book. But in the short term she opted to commit suicide. This whim was unsuccessful of course, but she had been dead serious, and she later admitted that faking her love and marital happiness one more day, and moreover for the rest of her life, was too much to bear. 

At that moment, her unhappiness seemed far from resolvable. And Rose always admitted that “making the best of things,” the way her mother always had, “was a damn poor way of dealing with them.”

Her marriage and her man had not been the “usual” kind, nothing like her parents, and she was unprepared to live with the situation “till death do us part.” Thankfully Rose would survive her attempt to end her life, and the literary world, especially her mother, and many others who benefited from her life, were better off for that. So many lives would have gone differently, and probably worse, significant books would have gone unwritten, the very fabric of our American political scene would have been cheated, had this desperate young woman been successful in ending her own life.

Much like most of his wares, Claire was not what he had sold himself to be. In fact Rose became convinced that Claire Lane was something worse than mentally incompetent. She could no longer trust in him. Where she came from, every human relationship was built on that one foundation, or it was not built. Pride forbid divorce, so she had tried the most efficient, economical way out. But her failure at suicide only created the awkward coexistence of convalescing in the same house with a man who knew that she would rather die than stay married to him.

The attempt at her death made Claire try harder to be a better husband, to earn more, and as if a material thing could solve a spiritual problem, they purchased a gorgeous red car, and ran in glamorous circles. But with Gillette constantly living on pins and needles, and Rose using her discontent to manage him, they both would eventually realize that it was hopeless. Rose was never good at veiling her contempt. Neither would ever be happy. But Rose had been raised to loathe divorce. And she could not decide if her failure at suicide was her stupidity, or a sign from God.

But Rose had discovered a simple truth about marriage, that sometimes two people can be too much alike, with too many things in common. Claire and Rose were both creative, artistic types, communicators, but also confident, take-charge individuals, and a struggling family can handle only one such person, or there will be blood! A car just needs one accelerator, and somebody must act as the brakes. Otherwise the car will go right over the cliff.

Then the Real Estate boom on the West Coast went bust. Of course this depressing environment only pushed Claire further away. His joblessness became a permanent condition of their union, with him always promising a great job which he had "in the works." Rose would write her mother admitting that she had no idea what Claire was up to, that she believed that he was working… and then one evening he showed up with expensive red roses for her birthday, when they could not even afford to eat. She peddled the flowers to neighbors and bought food, and it was then she knew what she had to do.

Rose no longer wanted to die. She had begun to see marriage as “the sugar in the tea” and resolved to start drinking her tea straight. Claire had been an illusion. “Gillette” was a delusion. Love was a fantasy. But somehow she had found her rhythm in her career and rediscovered her core values. She just wanted to work...and to live without lies and disappointments. And without Claire Lane.

Finally in 1915, Bessie Beatty offered her a really good job, in fact a stepping stone, once again at the Bulletin, in San Francisco. Rose left her lackluster jobs and initiated a divorce from Claire and started anew. Diverging Roads made a mediocre book, the first of many, but it was all she had to show for seven years of her life.

Now Rose's life was suddenly filled with the high-pressure demands of a daily newspaper, sometimes working twelve-hour days, and always governed by the tyranny of the urgent, for just $12.50 per week. With Rose's help Bessie was pioneering a modern woman's daily news feature, called On the Margin of Life. The byline for the women's page was fairly bold...

“Truth is seldom on the written page. We must search the margins and read between the lines.”

This clever perspective perfectly fit Rose and the writer she was to become. She became an expert at "reading between the lines" of the superficial and the pretense in people's lives. Soon the Bulletin's editor, Fremont Older, challenged Rose to write more lengthy articles on her own; biographies, features which bordered on high journalism- and expose'. It was a comfortable fit for the small town girl who had gifts of perception and prose, and who just wanted to work. And that she did. 

She took to her assignments with a vengeance. Rose became somewhat of a local celebrity, writing engaging portraits of local characters, and majestic profiles of American icons like actor Charlie Chaplin and automobile magnate Henry Ford, who was promoting his Peace Ship in a noble yet vain attempt to intervene in WWI, and hopefully keep America out of it. She offered dramatic revelations about San Francisco police and the dark yet thrilling prison confessions of a professional burglar.

Young and ambitious, Rose accepted some freelance jobs she would later regret. The market was ripe for juicy autobiographies, but most interesting people are not good writers. Rose agreed to “ghostwrite” some of these, and they may have been some of her most popular and successful works. As they were emerging in book stores and newsstands, she was operating fast and loose, releasing her more popular newspaper series in book form. Then, as is often the case in a creative avalanche, greed and jealousy raised its inevitable head, and lawyers began to register their protests and claims- and injunctions.

Rose had been very naive, and perhaps guilty of willful literary strategies, which streamlined legalities and ignored concerns of libel or publishing royalties. And in all of her professional career, Rose struggled with veracity... as she tried to weave good stories, focusing on larger “truths,” at the expense of inconvenient facts. Thus she quickly found herself spending much of her time in litigation. Jack London's estate raked her over the coals and threatened to sue her. Chaplin did sue her. Henry Ford publicly criticized her for his bio, sorry he ever granted an interview. Even her future mentor Herbert Hoover regretted her glowing treatments.

These challenges barely phased her, because by now Rose was running with a fast crowd, popular artists and entertainers and members of the bohemian society of San Fran, and it was a matter of prestige to be jousting with the most famous and powerful people in America. Rose was becoming a local hero. It was possible, in some cases she was too truthful. Of course the rich and powerful resented exposure which was less than flattering. She learned that no matter what the newspapers said about you, any kind of publicity was beneficial. Rose ultimately found her alliance with her publisher Century Company prestigious, and only wished to reconcile her novel about Jack London to cement her relationship with them. She did try to reach out to London's indignant relatives who were, as it turned out, irreconcilable. They found her book to be so wrong, so inaccurate, that they finally broke off negotiations. It was erroneous, unfixable. The squabble went from weeks to months to years.

The problem might well have been that after the truth was out, the cat out of the bag, about an unrepentant libertine, and no writer could fix the impressions made by Rose, not even Rose. London's widow had hoped for a whitewash, as the article had originally been pitched as a loose, semi-biographical interpretation. The following result was taken as an expose', and her plans for a novel was out of the question. But Century was so upset with her (not!) they immediately published her first full length novel, Diverging Roads.

Many of Rose's associates were communists, or anarchists, and she wore her trials proudly among them. The brain trust in her circle was all about rocking the world, embracing Marx and Freud as prophets of the future. “Drunk on Darwin, Huxley, Spencer,” she later admitted, “my generation nonchalantly abolished God.” They were patriotically rethinking the flawed, fallen American culture as they perceived it, and reconstructing it in their own image. The modern crowd saw Socialism as the inevitable solution to every social question. It would muzzle the captains of industry, feed the masses, and make life fair. It would spread around the wealth, stabilize the banks, and end economic injustice, making all of the country one big happy family. This sounded good, even in 1917.

By now Rose knew she was a damn good writer, even if other people were getting the credit. Even if her versions of things were often found objectionable. Her day would come, and she could serve the Socialist cause well.

Rose had all the necessary traits of a fledgling revolutionary; insolence, talent, determination, and nothing to lose. Rather than be discouraged, she learned her lessons and kept her work ethic, and continued her pioneer-styled persistence. Questions over publishing ethics were for sissies... she left it to editors and lawyers to settle. She was just happy to be working, a modern woman, free to do what she loved. It was this love of her newfound freedom which would eventually collide with her friend's infatuations with the Socialism.

Next Rose took an assignment which was probably intended to be another thinly disguised expose'. But instead she wrote a respectful biography of a self-made man who inspired her. And it may have been this man's example which began to turn her philosophy upside down. His name was Herbert Hoover, and he was a son of pioneers who had become a rising star in the Republican Party. Brought in to President Warren Harding's Administration as Secretary of Commerce, his imposing figure cast a distinct shadow into the country's future, and Rose became committed to nudge his story further into the limelight. But, he was a capitalist. She was gradually sucked into his whirlpool because he had a huge heart for service to mankind. In fact, he did more than all the cheap talk in California. This would be the beginning of a political transformation for her, which led her to become one of the nation's most influential “Libertarians.”

For many years, Rose experienced a slow mental metamorphosis, sorting out all of the various influences in her life. It meant that for a considerable time, she did not have a group, as she stood in the middle, between political extremes, and often found herself doubted or even despised by both.

Rose's life today reads like an adventure novel. She traveled all over Europe during WWI as a war correspondent for the Red Cross. Her travels took her as far as Albania, a magical, place untouched by modern advances. She wrote The Peaks of Shala, which was well received. Then she and her best friend trekked all over Europe by car after the war, and she returned to Albania, and gained a great deal of understanding about Islam. She and Helen Dore Boylston, another fledgling writer, drove a Model T across France and Italy to live in pure, un-Westernized, Albania... in a bizarre excursion which inspired and instructed her in many ways. Single young women did not do such things in those days. After publishing some articles about her saga, and nearly adopting an Albanian boy, she liquidated everything and came back to the States, all the wiser.

Rose and Helen: Pals in Adventure. Helen would 

later write and publish the Sue Barton nurse's tales.

Rose came home, quite conciliatory, and ushered her mother into her own writing career, which became one of the outstanding literary legacies in America, the “Little House” series, later made into a very successful television series starring Michael Landon. Rose wrote many articles for major magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Post and Woman's Day, and a number of books; novels, some adult versions of her mother's stories, a book about American needlework, and a couple of political manifestos.

Besides the three states she lived in as a child, she lived in California, New York, France, Albania, Connecticut, and even Texas, witnessed the taming of the West, two world wars, the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, and evolved from near communist sympathies in her youth to fierce libertarian philosophy, before there was a Libertarian Party. She wrote a book which today is considered essential to the Libertarian cause: The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority. Rose was done with most traditional social structures which might limit human freedom. It would be no surprise that she never married again. And that was some man's loss. Claire Lane was not shy in letting his later wives know, that Rose had been the great love of his life.

In Diverging Roads, Rose revealed more than her contempt for Lane, she unveiled the prototype of her vision of the Twentieth Century woman; self-sufficient, ambitious, intolerant of sorry men. A group of her female characters, gainfully employed and triumphantly independent, agree that they still want to have kids, but they have no use anymore for men... in fact what these modern, professional women needed were... wives. Of course, the suggestion was revolutionary and high heresy to tender American ears.

In fact her views on marriage might well have shaped her ultimate views about politics. Rose had learned to distrust authority, at every level. It probably began when she witnessed vigilante justice on the frontier, where lawlessness brought out the worst in everyone. She saw many self-serving, corrupt regimes in small countries in Europe and the near East, where life was cheap, and the people in charge were ruthless and motivated by greed. She came home to an America already losing its vision of itself. After she saw the imposition of Socialist policies and programs during the Roosevelt Administration, she became very suspicious of them and the trend in America towards a centralized government, the kind she saw oppressing people all over the world.

In The Discovery of Freedom she often reiterated that all men were free, but they did not know it, after thousands of years of domination by various failed governmental systems. America she believed, was the first culture since Mohamed to set men free of Kings and Dictators. But even the Islamic version freedom evolved into slavery and intolerance. It was America which combined the most compassionate world religion with Liberty. It was this inborn freedom, individual independence given by God, which created the greatest, most prosperous and most generous country in human history, and which Rose wished to inspire in the next generation. America, the pilot project for maximum human potential, was far more preferable to dependence on a Socialist or Communist regime, which would never repeat the progress, or the heights of individual happiness witnessed in the United States during the Industrial Revolution.

Her book has become a primer of sorts for the Libertarian party. Rose effectively helped to invent a major political movement. She saw problems with both of the major parties, and suggested that the nomenclature be changed to reflect their true philosophies; Democrats she redefined as “Collectivists.” Republicans were “Individualists.” Both had sacrificed too much of our liberty, imposed an income tax which would have outraged our Founders, and compromised too many American principles to be trusted. Our very liberty was being stolen, one Right at a time. She was a Libertarian, someone who placed individual liberty, individual human rights, above the authority of government, which inevitably would be steered wrong by the fickle masses, and step on Liberty. It was possible to have too many laws, too much government, and especially too many expectations of it. Real freedom was not compatible with a centralized power.

Rose was one of the first Americans to stay off of the grid... to never acquire a Social Security number, or carry a Social Security card, and never filed for Social Security benefits in old age. She quit a good-paying job when she found that her earnings would require her to pay taxes. She refused the Socialistic practices begun by the Roosevelt Administration, and believed that someday America would regret the concessions he made to Marxist philosophy.

It took a while, but a great deal of her concerns have been validated. Even in the 1960's she wrote: “the United States federal government is eating up the states, which is fatal. We're in debt beyond all possibility of paying up; our money is being debauched and we are going to have a crash in comparison with which the one in the 1930's will seem like a Sunday School picnic.”

Still, America with all of its flaws was better than whatever country might take second place. Rose chose to stay and fight for what she believed. 

“We stay; we survive. Because freedom is right, and right is everlasting.”

Rose translated her disillusionment in marriage into a life of passionate searching for the truth about major issues of consequence, and promoting her conclusions about them. Few men could have ever kept up, or put up with her, especially her tendency to bring home wayward boys like lost kittens. Typically, she followed her maternal instincts in unorthodox ways, and found young people who for various reasons needed a “guardian” to guide them through adolescence. She was a mother by choice. Rose took on hard cases and mothered them with a rare kind of commitment, even compared to mothers for their natural-born children.

In many ways, Rose was ahead of her time, pioneering the Twenty-First Century family, demonstrating that devoted mothers need not necessarily give birth to their children; that motherhood is needed in every corner of the earth, especially wherever you find the motherless; and adoption between humans is a primal instinct and not necessarily a legal transaction overseen by an adoption agency. Rose saw a war-torn world crawling with hordes of vulnerable, unloved children, and responded as one human to another. She was a “good Samaritan.” Local, spontaneous missions without names or struggling 501c-3's are ripe for involvement in everyone's neighborhood. It will always be mothers, and not committees or programs or institutions which supply the most effective treatment of those children, or as Jesus called them, “the least of these.”