Pick the Dust Bowl chapter, the meteorologist said. I’ll relate to it, she said.
Well, I’ll get to talk about the Dust Bowl, but it looks like I’m going to have to talk politics, too. Let’s take a deep breath and get to it!
We do begin with a more thorough recap of the Dust Bowl and its effects in the Great Plains, especially. Fraser references The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, and I cannot recommend that book strongly enough for a deep understanding of the cultural and societal factors, not to mention the meteorological ones, around the Dust Bowl. From a weather and climate perspective, the Dust Bowl years were something of an accident, a happenstance. The years were a warm and dry blip in the climatology that in some locations remains unmatched to this day, even as the climate warms.
The state of the land, however, was no accident. For years, driven by economic pressures, farmers had plowed and planted the land virtually unchecked and beyond what was sustainable, priming the entire Great Plains for severe environmental damage. The meteorological accident of persistent warm and dry weather was more than enough to tip the fragile environment into catastrophe. Without protective vegetation, the loose and dried-out topsoil literally lofted away on a series of windstorms. In her letters to Rose, Laura even mentioned dust settling on her farm that came from the Great Plains dusters. The dust choked the life out of the Great Plains – literally, as humans and livestock succumbed to dust-related illnesses and plants of any kind struggled to grow.
Federal researchers arrived to stabilize the soil and save the region. They brought soil conservation techniques that are still used to this day, though the techniques are becoming neglected as generational memory of the Dust Bowl years is lost. Farmers were encouraged to plant shelterbelts, the strips of sometimes shrubby and stubby trees that you still see today every couple of miles across the prairies. It’s hard to even envision the treelessness of the Plains before those shelterbelts were planted – that’s how successful the program was. Farmers also were encouraged to do the unthinkable: let land lie fallow and not grow anything, rotating crops among other fields, to let the soil rest and let cover plants hold down the soil. Or worse, they were asked to destroy crops and livestock that were in oversupply, in order to stabilize the market.
Despite the clear indications that past practices were not working and the clear demonstrations that the soil conservation and economic stabilization measures led by the federal government did work, farmers in the region did not always take kindly to the laws or pressures of how to manage their lands. Even if the numbers worked out to be the right thing, it just felt wrong. The New Deal was not the kind of deal they wanted, and it sowed the seeds of a permanent break from the Democratic Party and the “reddening” of the Great Plains states.
Among those with anti-government views amplified by the New Deal were Rose and Laura. In letters between them, they grumbled about policies and politicians, much like a mother and daughter with shared views might do today on Facebook. While both were firm in their convictions that any government intervention was bad (conveniently looking aside from the policies that had benefitted them throughout their lives), Rose was by far the more vocal and more extreme of the two. Her viewpoints carried her across her blurred lines between fiction and reality, and her rhetoric was borderline dangerous as she wrote about how pleased she would be to assassinate Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She dove into support of fascism, including the Mussolini regime explicitly, and she published her support in an article, “Credo,” in the Saturday Evening Post. (By the way, having looked at the nostalgic artwork of the Saturday Evening Postthrough my life, I was a little shocked and a lot saddened to learn of its very racist publications in the 1920s.)
The viewpoints manifest in the Little House books, in their strong themes of independence and self-reliance. Laura wrote On the Banks of Plum Creek at the height of the Dust Bowl years, including the peak hot and dry year of 1936, and the effects of the grasshopper plague of her youth echoed into the present heat and dust. Fraser notes that Laura and Rose neglect to include a broader historical context of issues during the locust plagues of the 1870s. Laura’s Pa, like thousands of others, had accepted government aid to prevent starvation, just as he accepted aid later in life, while in Dakota Territory. During the Dust Bowl, Laura’s sister Grace participated in conservation and accepted relief, while Carrie asked Rose and Laura for clothes.
With Laura’s growing success and the publication of On the Banks of Plum Creek, Laura accepted one of her only large public speaking engagements as an author, making a well-documented speech at the Detroit Public Library in late 1937. Though the line between fact and fiction has been blurring through the writing of her first few books, it is here that she asserts publicly that every story in the book was true (spoiler: it wasn’t). She added just one caveat: that the stories were not the whole truth, that she had left out some stories that were not responsible to tell children. Additionally, she privately acknowledged to friends that she fictionalized the stories, even while maintaining the public line to children that they were true and real. While it doesn’t buy her a pass for asserting her fictionalized elements were fact, it does give insight that she realized she was fictionalizing the story and lied about it intentionally to preserve the mystique of her family – to make her life more like the Little House than her actual experiences. It’s a gentle reminder to us readers that Laura was a complex human, and humans are prone to make mistakes, especially when they feel their self-preservation is threatened.
Underlying the Dust Bowl, Rose’s radicalized politics, and writing another book in the Little House series, a more personal canyon developed: Rose moved away from Rocky Ridge, never to return. In fact, after leaving in 1937, she never saw Almanzo again, despite his urging to visit. The Wilders returned to their true home, the farmhouse, leaving Rose’s gifted Rock House behind.