In modern America they also seem like escapism—a welcome relief from the welter and conflict of today’s politics. Actually they’re anything but. The Little House books, conceived during the Great Depression as a family project to honor the nation’s tough old pioneers, blossomed during the writing into something else. Woven into the story of Laura’s life were then-new ideas about the value of individual freedom, unfettered markets, and limited government. During the writing of each new book, as the series expanded in answer to the fans’ clamors for more, the Little House books became anti-New Deal political parables. They helped lay the groundwork for the modern libertarian strain of modern conservatism—and to an extent few people realize, they helped fund its rise. [...]
Amidst the images of stoic optimism displayed by the Ingalls and Wilder families as they ride through storms and survive locust plagues, the authors deliver little lessons in vignettes and dialogue, extolling free-market economics (“You work hard, but you work as you please. ... You’ll be free and independent, son, on a farm”) and raising skepticism about government overreach (“Why do they make a law that he’s got to stay on a claim, when he can’t?”). For a country in the throes of the Depression, the Little House books delivered a clear and consistent message about the virtues of rugged individualism and not taking handouts from Washington. [...]
In her mythologizing of America, her institution-building, and her long and constant argument for the value of individual liberty over regulation, Lane was helping to reboot conservatism itself at a pivotal moment in its history. Republicans from the 1930s through the early 1960s were confronting the fact that their image was that of plutocrats trying to keep their own pockets lined, and to broaden their appeal they had to define themselves in a new way. “The party in fact did continue to represent the interests of elites,” says Phillips-Fein of the time, “but it tried to find a new and more politically and philosophically palatable way of doing this.”
No comments:
Post a Comment