Rose Wilder Lane - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Here are the Americans who know the value of equality and freedom."

Rose Wilder Lane - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Rose Wilder Lane (December 5, 1886 – October 30, 1968) was an American journalist, travel writer, novelist, and political theorist. She is noted – with Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson – as one of the founding mothers of the American libertarian movement.[1]



Her intellect and ambition were demonstrated by her ability to compress three years of Latin into one, and by graduating at the top of her high school class in Crowley. Despite her academic success, she was unable to attend college due to her parents' financial situation.



In the late 1920s, Lane was reputed to be one of the highest-paid female writers in America, and counted among her friends figures such as Herbert Hoover, Sinclair Lewis, Isabel Paterson, Dorothy Thompson, and Lowell Thomas. Despite this success, her compulsive generosity with her family and friends often found her strapped for cash and forced to work on material that paid well, but did not engage her growing interests in political theory and world history. She suffered from periodic bouts of self-doubt and depression in mid-life, diagnosing herself as manic-depressive (now more commonly known as bipolar disorder). During these times of depression, when she was unable to move ahead with her own writing, she would easily find work as a ghostwriter or "silent" editor for other well-known writers.



Lane's exact role in Wilder's famous Little House book series(the basis for the television show, Little House On the Prairie) has remained unclear. A contributing factor was the stock market crash of 1929, which wiped out both her and her parents' investments. The ensuing Great Depression further reduced the market for her writing, and she found herself isolated and depressed at Rocky Ridge Farm, struggling to maintain her commitments to support herself, her adopted children (she had taken in two local orphaned brothers at this time, committing to pay for their educations) and her elderly parents, who had retired from active farming with her encouragement and financial support. Her ghostwriting jobs increased at this time, because her depression tended to affect her ability to generate ideas for her own writing projects.



The existing written evidence (including ongoing correspondence between the women concerning the development of the multi-volume series, Lane's extensive personal diaries detailing the time she spent working on the manuscripts, and Wilder's own initial draft manuscripts) tends to reveal an ongoing mutual collaboration that involved Lane more extensively in the earlier books, and to a much lesser extent by the time the series ended, as Wilder's confidence in her own writing ability increased, and Lane was no longer living at Rocky Ridge Farm. She insisted to the end that she considered her role to be little more than that of an adviser to Wilder despite much documentation to the contrary.



Whatever the extent of Lane's help to Wilder in writing the books, it certainly played the some role. Wilder did not keep copies of her correspondence with Lane, but Lane kept carbon copies of virtually everything she ever wrote – including the correspondence with Wilder concerning the Little House books. The correspondence shows that she sometimes adamantly refused to accept some of Lane's suggestions, and at other times gratefully accepted them. Lane's diaries show reactions to her time spent on the project ranging from anger and frustration over the time lost for her own paying work, to elation at the success of the books and the prestige and income they brought to Wilder.

At any rate, Lane's editing skills brought the dramatic pacing, literary structure, and characterization critically needed to make the stories publishable in book form.



During World War II, Lane had one of the most remarkable, but little studied, phases of her career. From 1942 to 1945, she wrote a weekly column for The Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely read American black newspaper.



Rather than hiding or trimming her laissez faire views, Lane seized the chance to sell them to the readership. She sought out topics of special interests of her audience. Her first entry glowingly characterized the Double V Campaign as part of the more general fight for individual liberty in American history. "Here, at last, is a place where I belong," she wrote of her new job. "Here are the Americans who know the value of equality and freedom." Her columns highlighted black success stories to illustrate broader themes about entrepreneurship, freedom, and creativity. In one, she compared the accomplishments of Robert Vann and Henry Ford. Vann's rags to riches story illustrated the benefits in a "capitalist society in which a penniless orphan, one of a despised minority can create The Pittsburgh Courier and publicly, vigorously, safely, attack a majority opinion" while Ford's showed how a poor mechanic can create "hundreds of jobs ... putting even beggars into cars."^[6]



Lane combined advocacy of laissez faire and antiracism. The views she expressed on race were strikingly similar to those of Zora Neale Hurston, a fellow individualist and writer who was black. Her columns emphasized the arbitrariness of racial categories and stressed the centrality of the individual. Instead of indulging in the "ridiculous, idiotic and tragic fallacy of race, [by] which a minority of the earth's population has deluded itself during the past century", it was time for all Americans (black and white) to "renounce their race". Judging by skin color was comparable to the Communists who assigned guilt or virtue on the basis of class. In her view, the fallacies of race and class hearkened to the "old English-feudal 'class' distinction." The collectivists, including the New Dealers, were to blame for filling "young minds with fantasies of 'races' and 'classes' and 'the masses,' all controlled by pagan gods, named Economic Determinism or Society or Government."^[7]



In the early 1940s, despite continuing requests from editors for both fiction and non-fiction material, other than helping Wilder produce the final volumes of the Little House series, Lane turned away from commercial fiction writing and became known as one of the most influential American libertarians of the middle 20th century.

During the 1940s and through the 1950s, Lane played a hands-on role in launching the "libertarian movement", a term she apparently coined, and began an extensive correspondence with figures such as DuPont executive Jasper Crane and writers Frank Meyer and Ayn Rand.^[13] She wrote book reviews for the National Economic Council and later for the Volker Fund, out of which grew the Institute for Humane Studies.