WAS LAURA INGALLS WILDER A RACIST?

After seeing a PBS documentary recently, I went to the bookcase and took out my personal copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, which was given to me in 1945. At the time I was interested in reading other things, such as Wonder Woman comic books, and so I never got around to reading the remaining Little House on the Prairie books. Now I have read this one, and can fully appreciate Wilder’s writing. She showed readers her own remembrances of nineteenth century life for a poor family far from city life. Though The Long Winter is considered a young-adult book, Wilder never talked down to readers, and even adults can read it with pleasure.

By 1945, some critics had already begun pointing out the prejudiced attitudes in Wilder’s books, and some of the early editions were revised accordingly. In The Long Winter, Ma (Wilder’s own mother) “didn’t like to see women working in the fields. Only foreigners did that. Ma and her girls were Americans above doing men’s work.” When Pa went into town and was warned about the storms to come, the warning came from “only an Indian.” He came home and described the warning, and “Ma looked as if she were smelling the smell of an Indian . . . Ma despised Indians.” Somewhat to his credit, Pa answered “there’s some good Indians.” in another of Ingalls’s books, someone says the awful “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Yes, remarks like these make us cringe today. It’s understandable that Native Americans and other groups have protested the books’ use in schools and libraries, even when they are used as examples of prejudice. However, it’s good to consider the context. Early in American history, both Indians and white settlers engaged in terrible acts. If the Ingalls family only heard stories of settlers being tortured, they might well have been frightened enough to believe the worst.

In my own childhood, we hadn’t advanced very far. In the forties and fifties, I heard patronizing or prejudiced attitudes toward Blacks. Living near a resort area, I saw many Jews who came out from Chicago. As in all tourist groups, a few of them were obnoxious. I often heard the words “kike,” “sheenie,” and so on. It would be many years before I fortunately met enough people of other races and religions to lose my prejudices, and to marry a Jew. If I had written a book about my own childhood, I might have included remarks as bad as those in The Long Winter and other Little House books, simply to show accurately how my own community behaved.

I have been lucky in this respect. Spending many years in various schools and working for or with a variety of people, I have overcome those attitudes. There are still many who have not had my privileges. Though yahoos and hypocrites stir my anger, I can understand them also. Yes, we need to be sensitive to concerns of minority groups, and to speak and write carefully. On the other hand, we should avoid a revisionist approach to history. I hope the Ingalls books stay on bookshelves along with enlightened comments about them.

Copyright © January 12, 2021 by Carol Leth Stone (a.k.a. RovinCrone)

ATTICUS FINCH, REVISED EDITION

Harper Lee’s just-released novel Go Set a Watchman continues the story of Jean Louise (“Scout”) Finch and her father, Atticus. In Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), set in Alabama in the 1930s, Atticus was a heroic lawyer who stood up to the local rednecks by representing a young black man who was falsely accused of rape. (The book’s popularity was soon ensured by the movie, starring beloved actor Gregory Peck as Atticus.) In the new book Jean Louise and the readers see an older, flawed Atticus who joins a local citizens’ council that opposes the NAACP in the fifties, toward the beginning of the civil rights era.

Many readers who have loved To Kill a Mockingbird for half a century, and revered Atticus, have been horrified. (Reviews of the new book have been mixed, but the quality of the writing is another issue.) Online and in print, comments like “Atticus was a racist” have appeared. In the novel, the adult Jean Louise herself reacted violently when she came home from living in New York and realized what her father was doing. Her love and respect for Atticus were severely threatened. It seems likely that Lee’s relationship with her own father, on whom Atticus was presumably based, was endangered also.

Though I never confronted my own father as sharply as Jean Louise did, during the sixties and seventies we had some prickly disagreements about civil rights. Like Atticus, he was an intelligent, fair-minded man who treated all people equally, but his background and education simply doomed him to an intolerant outlook. Born in 1908 and growing up in a conservative, mainly white, area of the Midwest, he never was exposed to other races and religions as a child. Though college-educated, he never accepted the sameness of blacks and whites, or of Jews and Gentiles. I feel sure that if he had not died in the seventies, he would have become much more liberal. (My mother, who was also born in 1908 and died only a few years ago, had become nearly as liberal as I am by the time she died.) This is not just wishful thinking on my part: my father was anti-Semitic also, but when I married a Jew, his attitude changed quickly. Simple exposure can work wonders.

It is easy to judge people who lived in the past by current standards. History textbooks today are more judgmental about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, for example, than they once were. However, individuals and groups of people are continually changing. In the fifties, many well-intentioned people had attitudes about race, homosexuality, marriage, and other issues that would seem quaint, if not actually evil, today. We need to try to understand them as products of their environment.

There is a genetic aspect, also: Though in some circles it is politically incorrect to state it, it is obvious from sociobiology that we have some inborn prejudices. Cleaving to the group that resembles us must have had adaptive advantages early in human evolution; so, try as we may, it is hard for those of every race not to distrust or even fear other groups. Understanding prejudices must not lead to agreeing with them, of course. It is important to recognize our prejudices and to strive to overcome them rather than denying they exist. As different groups intermingle and intermarry, tolerance seems to be increasing, but complete acceptance will still take a long time. In the meantime, we need to use education and legislation to lessen ignorance and to protect minorities.