Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods.
Reactionary Intent/Progressive Effect.
Context is Subtext/Subtext controls Content.
Burton Weltman
Politics in the Big Woods: Innocent Escapism or Calculated Indoctrination?
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder is a semi-autobiographical novel for young readers. It recounts a year in the life of a four-year-old girl named Laura who is growing up on a frontier family farm in northern Wisconsin in 1871.[1] Written at about a fourth grade reading level, the book was the first of Wilder’s Little House books that portray the maturation of Laura from early childhood to married adult, along with her siblings and her Pa and Ma.
Little House in the Big Woods (hereafter Big Woods) is told from Laura’s perspective as she observes and participates with her Ma and Pa in performing the various tasks necessary for the family’s survival, and she comes to better understand her parents. Pa is a self-styled rugged individualist who wants to get away from other people so that he can live however he wants, and he repeatedly moves the family from one frontier area to another toward this end.
People, however, keep catching up with Pa as frontier areas become increasingly settled, and it generally turns out that he needs these people to help him anyway. Ma is from “the East” and is more sociable and collaborative than Pa. Both are warm and devoted parents who make their children feel loved and safe. Starting with Big Woods, the Little House books describe in detail the ways and means of the family’s survival as the peripatetic Pa moved his family around from place to place during the late 1800’s.
First published in 1932, Big Woods was such a big success that Wilder followed it up with eight additional Little House books during the 1930’s and early 1940’s. The books have been continuously in-print since then, with some sixty million copies sold. Going on ninety years since the initial publication of Big Woods, the Little House books have remained “immensely popular with generations of readers” to the present day.[2] The books were also the basis of a popular weekly television program that was produced during the 1970’s and early 1980’s, and that continues in on-air syndication to the present day.[3]
Although the Little House books have been almost unanimously popular, there has been considerable controversy about the message they convey to readers. While most commentators regard the books as merely warm-hearted family drama with an almost cotton candy sweetness, others contend that the candy coating of the books covers seductively conservative political messaging. These critics claim that while the stories are not overtly political, they covertly convey right-wing ideology through the thoughts and actions of the characters. The books, they complain, imbue naïve young readers with the conservative political views of Wilder and her daughter Rose Lane, who ghost co-authored the later books.
Wilder and Lane were, in fact, archconservatives. They were both adherents of libertarianism, a political ideology that opposes government, labor unions, and liberal social reforms generally, and that promotes laissez-faire individualism and the idea of the self-made person. Lane was a colleague of the libertarian icon Ayn Rand, and is considered one of the founders of libertarianism in America. Critics of the Little House books claim that Wilder and Lane inserted libertarian messaging into the books as a form of insidious indoctrination of young readers.[4]
In the debate about the messaging of the Little House books, interpretations tend to cluster around the two extremes of either celebrating the stories as innocently idealized portraits of a bygone way of life or condemning the books as insidious inculcation of right-wing ideology.
Wendy McClure, who has written extensively about the Little House books, is an exemplar of the former view. She claims that “The Little House world is at once as familiar as the breakfast table and as remote as the planets in Star Wars.” Young readers can identify with Laura and her family, she contends, but still understand that the events in the books take place long ago and far away, and that the characters’ thoughts and actions are not directly applicable to today’s world.
McClure exclaims that when she was a child, “I wanted to be in Laura World” and do all of the things Laura did in the books. After reading about Laura doing chores, she claims that she even “wanted to do chores because of the books.” For McClure, the books were a way to escape the banality of her everyday life, portraying a romantic past that was long gone but nice to imagine. That is, as long she didn’t actually have to face a bear or undertake the really hard tasks that Laura did in the books. And, McClure concludes, this innocent escapism is the main point and the enduring attraction of the books.[5]
Christine Woodside, who has also written extensively about Wilder and Lane, exemplifies the critical view of the books. “How ‘Little House on the Prairie’ built Modern Conservatism” is the title of a recent article by Woodside, and that title pretty much summarizes her conclusions about the Little House books. Woodside claims that the books were conceived as “anti-New Deal parables,” “extolling free-market economics,” and conveying “a clear and consistent message about the virtues of rugged individualism.” She contends that the ethos of egoistic libertarianism permeates the books, and that generations of American children have had their political views molded and warped by the books, much to the detriment of them and the country.[6]
So, are the Little House books innocent escapism, calculated indoctrination, or maybe something else? I think that they are something else, and that is the main theme of this essay. I think the Little House books, and Big Woods in particular, convey a political message, but it is not the conservative message that Wilder may have intended or that Woodside and other critics detect. I do not think that young readers will identify with the rugged individualism in the book.
To the contrary, I think that readers are more likely to identify with the cooperation and communitarianism in the book, and take away a progressive pro-social message. It is an ironic outcome. In making this argument, I will contrast the political messaging of Big Woods with that of Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs, a contemporaneously published story that clearly and quite effectively promotes right-wing libertarian ideas to young readers.
Libertarian Politics in the Little House: Context is Subtext.
In deciphering the message of Big Woods, the question is not what Wilder wanted to convey but how the book is likely to strike young readers. The answer, I think, is that whatever conservative intentions Wilder might have had, the book conveys a socially progressive message. And I think, in this regard, that the setup and the context of the book control its message.
It is a commonplace that a story’s effect is often different than an author’s intent, and that “What may be more important than what the story is about is the way in which it is shaped.”[7] The narrative structure and the context of a story can determine the moral of the story, irrespective of its subject matter and its author’s political orientation.[8] In this view, context is subtext and subtext can control content, as I think it does with Big Woods.[9]
In order for a novel to serve as a vehicle for indoctrinating readers, the readers should be able to identify with the characters whose thoughts and actions are supposed to convey the message readers are intended to adopt. In Big Woods, the character who most represents the rugged individualism that libertarians promote is Pa. Although little Laura adores and idolizes her Pa, it is Laura, and not Pa, with whom young readers almost invariably identify. And Laura is in no way a rugged individualist.
In turn, for a novel to serve as a vehicle of indoctrination, readers should be able to identify with the situation in the story – the context and the setting – as comparable to their own. It is that which makes plausible the application of the thoughts and actions of the book’s characters to the readers’ own situation. In Big Woods, the story’s setting on a frontier farm could plausibly be identified as a libertarian setting. A frontier farm is not, however, a setting that most readers will identify with their own situations. The situation in the book with which most readers will identify is that of a child growing up in a loving family living in difficult circumstances. This is not a situation that conveys a libertarian message. In fact, it is my contention that the setting conveys a pro-social message.
The opening sentence and the first two pages of the book essentially confirm this point. They tell readers that the story is about a time and place with which readers cannot identify, but it is about a little girl with whom they can. The first sentence goes: “Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.”[10]
“Once upon a time” is a classic fairy tale opening that serves to set the unreality of the story apart from the reality of its readers. That the story takes place a long time ago and far away from its intended readers further emphasizes the difference between the time and place of the story and its readers’ lives. The story tells readers right off that they will not be readily able to identify with life on the frontier family farm where the book takes place.
At the same time, the opening sentence and the next two pages tell readers that the story is a about a child who lives in a precarious place. The word “little” is used twice in the opening sentence and repeatedly throughout the book to highlight the insecurity that the girl feels, living in the midst of woods whose overwhelming size and stature the girl emphasizes by denominating them in capital letters as the “Big Woods.” Around her, she says, there were “no houses,’ “no people,” and no living things except for “wolves…and bears and huge wild cats.”[11]
The woods are a scary place to a little child. There is the threat of wolves and bears but, more important, there is the threat of starvation in the woods if the family does not produce and preserve enough food to last through the winter. Like hapless characters in old time fairy tales, Laura and her family could get lost in the woods and never come out alive. It is Laura’s feelings of insecurity and how she deals with them that young readers can identify with themselves. That is something to which almost all kids can relate. And that fear is not a libertarian message either.
In portraying a frontier farm family, Wilder may have thought she was describing a situation that illustrated libertarian ideals in a way that would be attractive to young readers. What is arguably libertarian about the situation is that there is very little government of any sort in the book, and that Laura’s family seemed to get along just fine without it. In turn, Pa was a rugged individualist who went into the woods and carved out a farm and a life for his family.
Wilder may have hoped that her young readers would see that things went well for Laura’s family in the 1870’s without government interference, and conclude that rugged individuals could make a better world for themselves and their families if only they were allowed to do what they wanted. But this is a message that readers would get only if they could identify with the circumstances of Laura’s family and with her Pa’s individualism. If that was Wilder’s intention, I think she failed.
There is a sharp contrast between the historical context in which the book is set and the historical context in which the book has been read. This contrast is one of the keys to deciphering the message that the book delivers to readers. The historical context of the events in Big Woods is the American frontier of the early 1870’s. The historical context in which the book was written and first read was modern urban America in the 1930’s.
Most Americans in the 1870’s lived in rural areas, with some living on what could be described as a frontier. Government in the 1870’s played a relatively small role in the daily lives of most rural people, especially on the frontier. Government did, however, play a big role in the formation and overall functioning of rural society. It was government, for example, that pushed Native Americans off their land so that there was an expanding frontier on which people like Pa could settle. And it was government that coordinated and subsidized transportation networks so that farmers like Pa could get their products to urban markets and get necessities from them.
Since these government activities did not affect daily life, they don’t appear in Big Woods, which is a book about daily life. But that doesn’t mean government wasn’t important to frontier farmers, and doesn’t necessarily give the book an antigovernment emphasis. In any case, even if in the context of frontier America in 1871, the libertarian ideal of rugged individualism may have had some superficial plausibility, albeit it never was a reality and never could have been, even that superficial plausibility was gone by the 1930’s.
By the 1930’s, when Big Woods was published, most Americans lived in urban areas and there was no frontier. Most young readers of the book from that time until now have had no connection with farming, let alone frontier farming. And by the 1930’s, most people, rural as well as urban, relied on government services of all sorts in their daily lives. From schools to roads to garbage collection to almost every aspect of their lives, readers of Big Woods have invariably been enmeshed in government services and regulations. The book is, therefore, about a situation that is alien to its readers, and very few readers could realistically see themselves as living in the circumstances described in the book or identify those circumstances with their own.
At the same time, the rugged individualism that is ostensibly exemplified by some of the book’s characters could not a serve as a plausible role model for the book’s readers. Pa is a sympathetic and even to some extent a heroic character, but he is not a plausible role model. It is Laura, the child who wants to understand what is going on around her and to join in the family’s work, who is the role model for young readers. And that does not convey a libertarian message.
Pro-Social Politics in the Little House: Subtext controls Content.
Based on analyzing the context of the book and its setting, my conclusion is that Big Woods does not effectively convey to young readers a conservative libertarian message. I contend that the book has, instead, the contrary effect of promoting a progressive cooperative message. The key to this contention is the contrast between the individualistic ideology promoted by libertarians and the pro-social thoughts and actions of Laura and her family in Big Woods.
Although Pa seems to see himself as some kind of rugged macho individualist, the book portrays him as a full and willing participant in the intensely cooperative way of life both within Laura’s family and within the local community. Everyone in the book is primarily engaged in helping everyone else and being helped by them, including Pa. For example, the whole community of farmers comes together to help each other harvest their wheat in the autumn, which an individual farmer would be hard-pressed to do alone. Pa is all-in on that cooperation.[12]
It is also significant, I think, that collaborative Ma plays a role in the book at least equal to that of ruggedly individualistic Pa. In an era and area of the country that was without ice boxes, let alone refrigerators, Ma’s job of properly preserving food for the winter, most of which she had herself grown, was critical to the family’s survival. It is the most important task in the family. The fact that Ma plays such a prominent role, and that the protagonist of the story is a girl who understands, explains to us readers, and participates in the intricate tasks of family survival, makes the book what could be called a proto-feminist story.
The predominant ethos in the book is, therefore, cooperative, and not individualistic. Although a frontier setting could theoretically provide a context in which the idea of individualism might seem plausible, the story highlights cooperation instead. Laura’s family operated as a cooperative unit, had cooperative relations with neighboring farmers that were crucial to getting important tasks done, maintained connections with a nearby town that were critical to getting many of the family’s necessities and selling the family’s produce, and cultivated social relations with neighbors. Laura recounts joyfully the visits from extended family members and friends, the family’s weekly attendance at a local church, and the family’s going to town.[13]
In highlighting cooperation on the frontier, Big Woods mirrors historical reality, the truth of the frontier, regardless of Wilder’s ideological inclinations. Frontier settlements were built by settlers, with the emphasis on the plural. There were very few hermitic mountain men, and almost none of them had families. While the idea of living in a wilderness without government is something about which people, both young and old, might like to fantasize, it was never a reality and is not something that even most fourth graders would think is a realistic option.
The image of the frontier as a place of rugged individualism was largely a literary fantasy created by writers who had never been there. It was a fantasy that had been pretty much exploded by the time Wilder wrote her books. It survives today only among right-wing anti-government fanatics who live in so-called Red States that are, in fact, dependent for survival on largess from the federal government that is paid for by taxpayers in the urbanized Blue States.
Small family farms are, of course, not a fantasy. They existed when Big Woods was written in the 1930’s and still exist today, but they have always been closely tied to urban markets and urban culture. Starting in the 1890’s, for example, farmers were able to order almost anything they wanted from the Sears Catalog and have it delivered to wherever they lived. Being connected to the wider world is what historically has made rural life possible and tolerable. Although there have periodically been back-to-the-land movements in favor of living on small farms, those movements have not exemplified libertarian ideology or rugged individualism.
During the Great Depression of the 1930’s, for example, the federal government encouraged unemployed urban workers to settle on small farms as a means of family subsistence. But these farms were not like the one Wilder portrays in her book. They were not ruggedly individualistic enterprises. They were, instead, organized and financially supported by the government, and the farmers were organized into cooperatives for mutual support. Conservatives at the time derided these efforts as unAmerican socialism.
During the 1960’s, countercultural radicals encouraged young people to get back to the land as a form of environmental authenticity. But these, too, were cooperative efforts at what was considered an anarchistic form of socialism. And they were explicitly opposed to the free-market capitalism championed by libertarians. These, too, were derided by conservatives.
Finally, since the 1990’s, environmental activists have encouraged people to get back to the land to promote organic and environmentally friendly farming methods. But, again, these have mostly been cooperative enterprises and explicitly pro-social endeavors that are opposed to egoistic individualism and free-market capitalism. And they have been derided by conservatives.
In sum, insofar as Big Woods makes family farming look attractive, it is ironically more likely to encourage readers toward pro-social liberalism rather than right-wing libertarianism.
A Strangely Popular Book.
The irony of Big Woods extends beyond its message because the book also seems a peculiar candidate for popularity among young readers. It is not thrilling. There is little action, no real conflict, and not much suspense. There are no young heroes, no children in distress, and no battles. It is not the stuff of which most popular fourth-graders’ reading is generally made.
Big Woods is a tame book that portrays the mundane challenges of everyday farm life during the 1870’s. There is little plot in the book. It merely recounts the tasks the family must undertake during the various seasons of the year, from autumn to autumn. The story consists of a series of episodes in which the family faces and solves domestic problems. There is no overarching problem and no plot resolution at the end of the book, merely the beginning of another year.
A distinguishing feature of the book is that it not only tells a story about people living on a farm but also describes with exacting specificity how they lived there. Big Woods is effectively a how-to-do-it handbook for living on a frontier farm. Better than a Boy Scout Manual, it describes in detail how a person could build a cabin, slaughter a pig, preserve foods, and do a score of other things necessary for survival. I believe that one could go into the woods and successfully make one’s way with a few tools and this book.
So, what makes for the continuing popularity of the book? Some reviewers credit the popularity of the Little House books to “their art, their precision of language and depth of characterization.”[14] That is, they are well-written and that is something which fourth graders would be able to appreciate. Others contend the books’ popularity is based on the warm-hearted domesticity of Laura’s family that gives comfort to young readers. Young readers caught up in the emotional, physical, and intellectual turmoil of their preteen years can appreciate the comforting quality of the family life in the books.[15]
Still others claim that the rugged individualism in the books has a subliminal appeal to rebellious pre-teens seeking some independence from their parents, teachers, and social controls generally, and for whom an escape to the woods would seem attractive. This is essentially the theme of critics such as Christine Woodside who claim that the rebellious instincts of preteens are then channeled by the books in a right-wing political direction.[16]
In the view of these critics, the appeal of Big Woods to preteens would be of essentially the same sort that makes Ayn Rand’s books popular among teenagers. Teenagers, even more than preteens, almost invariably struggle to assert themselves against institutional conformity and to develop their own individual identities. It is a stage of social and psychological development when Rand’s libertarian ideas look good to many high school seniors and college freshmen. Fortunately, it is a stage that quickly passes with most of them.
In any case, there is a big difference between the contexts of Wilder’s and Rand’s books, and I think that makes a big difference in their effect on readers. Rand’s books are set within modern-day urban industrial society, and deal with individuals battling against big corporate and big governmental institutions. Although Rand’s characters and plots are incredible, they at least touch on a present-day reality with which readers can identify. This realistic context helps make them effective as vehicles of indoctrination, at least for the short run with most readers.
Wilder’s books, however, are set in a time and place that have no connection with present-day reality, and the meanings and messages of her books are mediated by the historical context in which her audience reads them. The books are set in a long-gone time and place with which few readers can identify. As such, I don’t think they can work as an outlet for preteen rebelliousness, and so that can’t be a significant reason for their popularity.
In sum, I don’t think the popularity of Big Woods can be satisfactorily explained by either the high quality of the writing of the book, the comforting domesticity of the book’s setting, or the rebellious individualism of some of the book’s characters. I think there are at least two other reasons for the popularity of Big Woods. The first is the handbook quality of the book, which enables readers to gain a vicarious competency in the skills described therein, and the second is the way in which the book fits in with the conventional elementary school social studies curriculum. These are not very exciting reasons, but I think they explain a lot.
Coping through Cooperation: Vicarious Competency.
Wilder’s childhood as a frontier farmgirl is the stuff of which Big Woods is made, and the book portrays her childhood in an alien old world to young readers in the modern new world. The book has a feeling of authenticity because Wilder had lived in both worlds and could convincingly convey life in the old to kids in the new. It is like a story of life on Mars told by a Martian. She could make it feel like the real deal.
Life in the big woods is precarious, and it is how Laura deals with it that I think is a main reason for the book’s popularity. In showing how Laura and her family subsist in the woods, Wilder helps young readers develop what could be called a vicarious competency. The book is about learning to cope in a precarious environment that as a child you know little about, in a setting in which you are small and seemingly insignificant, but in which you can learn to survive if you work with others. That is for most readers, I think, the moral and message of the book and the main reason for its popularity.
The story opens in the autumn and moves through the seasons, ending with the coming of the next autumn. There are thirteen chapters. In about half of the book’s chapters Pa’s skills are highlighted, in the other half Ma’s are emphasized. The first chapter of the book sets the tone and the agenda for the rest. Having established the precariousness of the little girl’s existence, something that is repeatedly emphasized throughout the book, Wilder moves into the main subject of the first chapter, which is getting the family ready for winter.
Pa hunts, fishes, and preserves his catch. He nails together a makeshift outdoor oven to cure meat. Ma gathers in their fruits and vegetables, and preserves them. Significantly, Ma takes the lead in most of food preparation and preservation. Also, significantly, they use salt and nails that they bought in a nearby town where Pa also sold animal pelts to get money to buy the things, thereby pointing out the family’s dependence on the wider world for their survival.
The efficiency and efficacy of the family’s coping methods are demonstrated by the way the family uses everything for a purpose. They waste not in order, hopefully, to want not. They slaughter a pig, for example, and use the whole of the animal. They cure the meat, make lard out of the fat, use the skin for clothing, and make a ball by blowing up the pig’s bladder. This how-to-do-it specificity highlights the differences between the old and new worlds. Few of Wilder’s readers would be able to identify with making a ball out of a pig’s bladder. But they would find it interesting and fun to find out how to do it, and to see that it is something they could do if they lived in Laura’s world. Young readers gain a form of vicarious competency by seeing how to do things in Laura’s world, and get some reassurance that they might be similarly able to cope in their own world.
It is also fun to imagine yourself making the things and performing the tasks that Wilder describes so clearly in what could almost be a set of farming-for-dummies instructions. It gives you a sense of confidence that you could do things that you would never have thought you could do. Not that you would ever want to slaughter a pig or skin a deer. But with this book in hand, you could. And I think that is a big part of the book’s popularity.
The underlying message conveyed to young readers is that the world is not such a bewildering place that it can’t be coped with, and that coping is conceivable in even the most difficult situations. That the protagonist is a girl is one of the reasons for the book’s popularity among girls. But it is also popular among boys. It emphasizes that kids can understand and do things. Laura can understand them, and the reader can, too. Laura can do things, and so can the reader.
Moreover, you don’t have to try to cope with the world by yourself. Coping is a cooperative effort. All members of a family, even kids, can make a contribution, and families can work with neighbors to make things work. The message is just the opposite of the libertarian go-it-alone-and-by-yourself credo. Libertarian individualism is, in fact, a scary proposition for most kids who can feel overwhelmed by the size and complexity of things. Competency and cooperation are the messages of the book and that, I think, is a key reason for the book’s popularity.
Expanding Horizons: It takes a Family, a Village, a State, a Country, a World.
A second key reason for the book’s popularity is that it fits in well with the focus of the social studies curricula adopted by most elementary schools. The book reinforces the emphasis on cooperation that has been a main theme of the elementary school curriculum, especially in social studies, for over one hundred years.
During the early twentieth century, self-styled progressive educators developed new methods of creative and cooperative teaching and learning that they hoped would replace the rote and competitive learning methods that had predominated in public schools since their initial development in the 1840’s. The idea of free universal public education had been a revolutionary idea in the mid-nineteenth century. It was a response to the rapid urbanization of the country, and the influx into the cities of people from rural areas of the United States and foreign countries.
The goal was to teach the children of these people the literacy skills and the orderly habits that it was thought necessary for people to productively live and work in a city. It was a massive task getting enough teachers and schools to teach such large numbers of students, and a major challenge developing workable methods and materials to teach these new students.
The solution to these problems was in the methods of the modern factory. The mid-nineteenth century was when the industrial revolution began in America, and when assembly-line factories that produced large quantities of standardized goods began to replace the workshops in which craftsmen produced individual hand-made goods. Given the success of the factory model in the mass production of goods, the factory model was adopted for the mass production of educated young people. Toward this end, educators quickly developed standardized methods of rote teaching and learning, standardized textbooks of facts and moral maxims to be recited, and standardized tests of remembered facts. The method was called common schooling because it was both democratic for the common people and because everyone learned the same things.
Grade levels were invented, and learning requirements were broken up into standardized packages of information and skills to be learned at each grade level. Students had to pass the tests for each grade level in order to move up to the next grade. Schools became assembly lines in which students were processed from grade to grade as they were manufactured into educated and well-behaved children. Competition was encouraged among students as to who could best remember the required facts and moral maxims, and who could be best behaved. It was an education intended to produce orderly, well-behaved assembly-line factory workers.
The growth of the public schools during the nineteenth century was remarkable. Mass production methods proved excellent for quickly getting a school system up and running, and for making Americans the most literate population in the world at that time. But beyond basic literacy and numeracy, the quality of the education in the public schools was poor. And the psychological toll on students being processed in this way was significant. It was not a system geared toward creative and critical thinking and, as such, did not prepare young people for the innovative post-industrial society that was developing at the turn of the twentieth century.
Educational reformers at the turn of the twentieth century came up with several different ideas of how better to teach students.[17] Progressivism was the name of a method developed by John Dewey and other similarly-minded educators. Progressives advocated an interdisciplinary school curriculum, and a teaching methodology that promoted critical thinking. Instead of the rote learning of separate subjects, they emphasized solving real-life problems using every subject as it was relevant to the problem. They claimed that this is the way knowledge is used in the real world, so it is the best way to learn. And instead of competition, progressives emphasized cooperation as a teaching method, an ethical practice, and a practical skill for the real world.
Progressives sought to break away from the conformity and competition of common schooling, but in the direction of individuality not individualism. Instead of the individualism promoted by conservatives in which everyone was for themselves and against everyone else, progressives promoted individuality in which everyone was with and for others in their own individual way. Progressives moved away from the moralistic maxims of common schooling – mainly “thou shalt nots” – to a cooperative ethos based around the Golden Rule of treating each other with respect. In the context of our largely collectivist modern society, they deemed an ethics of cooperation to be not only more humane, but also more practical than the self-centered moralism of common schooling.
Progressivism was also the name of a liberal political movement in the early twentieth century to which most of these educators belonged.[18] They believed that progressive educational methods would lead children to become progressive adults who would work toward a more progressive society. Progressives promoted liberalism in its original definition as being open-minded and open-handed, tolerant and generous, doing things with and for others, as opposed to the emphasis in libertarianism on doing everything by and for oneself. Cooperation was the key.
Not surprisingly, conservatives have perennially been opposed to the progressives’ political and educational ideas. And although progressive methods have been widely taught in teacher preparation programs over the last one hundred years, conservatives have been largely successful in keeping secondary school curricula and methods in line with common schooling. Progressive methods have, however, been largely adopted in the lower grades of the public schools.
Preschools, kindergartens, and the first four grades of elementary school have almost universally emphasized creativity and cooperation as major behavioral and intellectual themes in their curricula. Given the dire circumstances of many public schools – overcrowded classrooms, inadequately trained and poorly paid teachers, among other things – these themes are often more honored in the breach. The goal, however, has been to teach students to express themselves while sharing and cooperating with each other. Individuality through collegiality.
Students are also taught about current and past examples of people cooperating with each other. Science education generally includes learning about the scientific method in which progress has historically been made through scientists contributing to and critiquing each other’s work, and in which a scientist’s result is not accepted as valid unless and until it has been publicly disclosed so that others can replicate the methods and the results of the scientist. Collegiality is the key.
Elementary school social studies has been largely based on an “Expanding Horizons” curriculum that starts by focusing on the family, and then moves outward to the neighborhood, the city, the state, the country, and the world. Cooperation among people, social groups, and governmental entities make up the core of the curriculum. Big Woods, with its focus on cooperation within the family and the local community, fits right in with this progressive curriculum. I think the popularity of the book stems in large part from teachers feeling comfortable in assigning it to their students, and from the comfort and familiarity children feel with the book’s message.
Three Little Pigs in the Big Woods: A Libertarian’s Ideal.
Whatever Wilder’s intentions might have been, Big Woods does not promote libertarianism. For a brilliant attempt to indoctrinate young people in right-wing individualist ideology, Walt Disney’s The Three Little Pigs provides a prime example. In the spring of 1933, a few months after the publication of Big Woods, Walt Disney released an animated cartoon called The Three Little Pigs that was soon published as a children’s book of the same name. The cartoon and the book were instant classics that have been in syndication and in print ever since.[19]
The Three Little Pigs was a traditional European folk tale that was adapted by Disney for American audiences in the 1930’s. In Disney’s hands, the story became a vehicle for indoctrinating children with right-wing political ideas, and it offers a significant contrast with the story in Big Woods. A summary of Disney’s story is:
Once upon a time, there were three little pigs. The pigs, having apparently reached adolescence, were forced by their mother to leave home and make their own way in the world. So, each of them went off by himself to build a house in the woods. Two of the pigs were foolish and lazy, and they built houses of straw and sticks respectively. The third pig was wise and hardworking, so he built a house of bricks. A big, bad wolf came along and easily destroyed the houses of the two foolish pigs. They barely escaped with their lives before he could eat them. The wolf could not destroy the brick house, however, so he tried to trick the third pig into coming outside. But the wise pig was not fooled. Instead, he tricked the wolf into coming down the chimney of the house, at which point the wolf fell into a pot of boiling water and ran away with a scorched rear end.
Disney was one of the greatest storytellers of all time. He was also not shy about the fact that he wanted to use his stories to teach children what he considered to be proper moral values. So, like all Disney stories, The Three Little Pigs is full of lessons that we can glean from the setup of the story, the nature of the story’s characters, and the thoughts and actions of the characters.
The first lesson is that in this world it’s every pig for himself. The fatherless pigs (no telling where or what happened to him) are abandoned by their mother when they were still little (hence the name of the story). Significantly, the pig brothers did not work together to build a house but went off individually. The moral is that you are on your own in this world. You’ve got to take care of yourself first and foremost. You cannot rely on anyone, not even your mother. And this message of extreme self-reliance is, not coincidentally, the libertarian credo.
A second lesson of the story is that difference is dangerous, and you cannot trust anyone who is not like you. The sympathetic characters are all pinkish pigs. The evil character is a black wolf. In the context of the story, the pigs are right to be afraid of an animal that is not like them. If a story puts together carnivorous animals and their natural prey, then the moral of the story cannot be interspecies harmony. Or interracial harmony when the carnivorous animal represents black people and the prey represents white people. Setting up the story in this way once again promotes an individualist, everyone-for-himself moral, and with a racist twist.
The racial implications of Disney’s story are seemingly no accident, especially when you consider that most adolescent pigs are not pinkish and most wolves are not black. Disney went out of his way to set things up like this. In any case, the racism reflects the dramatic imagery of America in the 1930’s. During the 1930’s, if you wanted to make something scary for mainstream, pinkish American audiences, you made it big and black. Once again, the moral is that you cannot trust anyone, especially those who are different.
In conveying his messages, Disney takes advantage of the natural fears of little children who are facing a big world full of big people, and who are not able to understand much of what goes on or how they might make their way and defend themselves. Disney expects little kids to identify with the anthropomorphic little pigs, and understand that they must look out for number-one first and foremost. The contrast between Disney’s and Wilder’s stories in this regard is enormous.
In Big Woods, little Laura has loving parents to take care of her, siblings with whom she can work and play, and a neighborly community from which she and her family can get help. Everyone is helping each other. By contrast, the three little pigs have seemingly been abandoned first by their father and now by their mother. They won’t cooperate with each other. And they have been thrown into a community of vicious neighbors. Each is perilously on his own. While Disney’s is a story of every pig for himself, Wilder’s is a story of one-for-all-and-all-for-one. And Wilder’s story conveys a progressive sentiment even if in supposedly libertarian clothing.
Bigotry in the Big Woods.
Big Woods says virtually nothing about the Native Americans in the 1870’s who until very recently had occupied the land in Wisconsin that Pa and other white people now occupied. That silence seems to indicate that Wilder viewed the rights of Native Americans and the wrongs done to them as not worth discussing. It is seemingly evidence of callousness on Wilder’s part. But it also might indicate that given mainstream attitudes toward Native Americans during the 1930’s, Wilder did not want to write the derogatory things about them that her audience might have expected of her.
Disney’s Three Little Pigs exemplifies the mainstream racial attitudes of white Americans during the 1930’s. Most were in favor of segregating supposedly dangerous and dissolute minorities, which included blacks, Jews, Asians, and Indians. Wilder’s portrayal of black people and Native Americans in the Little House books is a mixed bag. Some of her characters say and do racist things, others don’t. On the whole, it is not a good picture.[20] But her attitudes do not come close to Disney’s racism, and her characters’ attitudes do not reflect the vicious racism that was common during the 1870’s when her book takes place. Genocide against Indians and almost daily lynching of blacks were the generally accepted theory and practice of that time.
The point is that Big Woods and the other Little House novels may not be as bad on racial matters as they could have been and would have been if they reflected the mainstream opinions of white people in the 1870’s or 1930’s, but they are still not good. As such, parents, teachers, and readers need to approach the books with a critical mindset as they should any book, but even more so with novels from the past like Big Woods that reflect past prejudices.
Coda: In Search of Lost Time.
When Wilder wrote Big Woods, she was some sixty-years old writing through the eyes of her four-year-old self. The book has the feel of someone trying to recover her past and make it live again. Little Laura’s closing words are particularly poignant in this regard as “She thought to herself ‘This is now,’” and concludes with what seems almost a prayer from the author put into the mouth of the little girl that “now is now. It can never be a long time ago.” [21] Writing this essay as a seventy-five-year-old who tries to remember and relive his past, I can identify with her sentiment.
BW 1/2020
[1] Laura Ingalls Wilder. Little House in the Big Woods. New York: Scholastic Inc, 1960.
[2] Amy Fatzinger. “Learning from Laura Ingalls Wilder.” The Atlantic. 9/9/18.
[3] Maria Russo. “Finding America, Both Read and Blue, in the ‘Little House’ books.” The New York Times. 2/17/17.
[4] Some critics have, in turn, claimed that the Little House TV show reflected the conservative views of Michael Landon, the star and sometimes writer, director and producer of the show. Landon was a staunch right-wing Republican, and a friend and fervent supporter of Ronald Reagan when Reagan ran for President during the time Landon was working on the Little House show. Critics claim that he carried Wilder’s libertarian conservatism forward into the show.
[5] Wendy McClure. “Why I still love the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Books.” The Atlantic. 4/8/11. See also, Amy Fatzinger. “Learning from Laura Ingalls Wilder.” The Atlantic. 9/9/18. Maria Russo. “Finding America, Both Read and Blue, in the ‘Little House’ books.” The New York Times. 2/17/17.
[6] Christine Woodside. “How ‘Little House on the Prairie’ built Modern Conservatism.” See also, Shannon Henry Kleiber. “Little Lie in the Big Woods.” To the Best of Our Knowledge. 7/10/19.
[7] Peter Hunt. Criticism, Theory and Children’s Literature. Cambridge, MA, 1991. P.73.
[8] Carol Witherell et al. 1995. “Narrative Landscapes and the Moral Imagination.” in Narrative in Teaching, Learning and Research. Edited by McEwan & K. Egan. New York: Teachers College Press,1995. P.40.
[9] For a discussion of the messaging in children’s books, I have an essay on this blog titled “What to do about the Big Bad Wolf: Narrative Choices and the Moral of a Story.”
[10] Wilder, P.1.
[11] Wilder. Pp.2-3.
[12] Wilder, P.199.
[13] Wilder. Pp.64, 88, 163, 177.
[14] Elaine Showalter. “At 150, Laura Ingalls Wilder still speaks to readers old and new.” Washington Post. 2/16/17.
[15] Wendy McClure. “Why I still love the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Books.” The Atlantic. 4/8/11.
[16] Christine Woodside. “How ‘Little House on the Prairie’ built Modern Conservatism.”
[17] For a discussion of educational reform movements, I have an essay on this blog titled “Struggling to Raise the Norm: Essentialism, Progressivism and the Persistence of Common/Normal Schooling in America.”
[18] See John Dewey. Liberalism and Social Action. New York: P.G. Putnam’s Sons, 1935.
[19] Walt Disney. “The Three Little Pigs” Pp. 69-84. in Walt Disney’s Classic Storybook. New York: Disney Press., 2001. Pp.69-84.
[20] Maria Russo. “Finding America, Both Read and Blue, in the ‘Little House’ books.” The New York Times. 2/17/17.
[21] Wilder. P.238.
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