Little House celebrates land theft

“Little House on the Prairie”: Tea Party manifesto

The far right has adopted the beloved children's books as an instrument for teaching the virtues of "lived liberty"

By Caroline FraserThe Little House books, eight novels published between 1932 and 1943, are Laura Ingalls Wilder’s tribute to the great plains and her homesteading family. “I realized that I had seen and lived it all,” she wrote later, “all the successive phases of the frontier […] a whole period of American history.” Written during the depression, when the author was in her sixties and seventies, these autobiographical narratives of enduring wildfire, drought, locusts, tornadoes, and blizzards have sold tens of millions of copies.

Beloved though they may be, however, the books are in danger of being politicized, having already acquired a certain conservative aura. Much of it emanated from the 1970s-era television caricature, “Little House on the Prairie,” which leached the books of their rich specificity while displaying an often shirtless Michael Landon, chest shaved, addressing concerns never mentioned in the originals, including drug addiction, rape, and menopause. Ronald Reagan reportedly called it his favorite television show (Landon campaigned for him), watching it in the White House while he and his wife dined off TV trays. In a 2008 profile of the Republican vice-presidential nominee, the New York Times cited one of Sarah Palin’s sisters remembering that her sibling read “a lot” as a child. The only specific title she could recall was Little House on the Prairie.

The impression has lately been reinforced by the books’ adoption into Tea Party circles as ideal teachers of “lived liberty.” That’s a phrase that occurs in “Lessons in Liberty from Laura Ingalls Wilder,” an essay in the summer issue of National Affairs, the reboot of Irving Kristol’s quarterly The Public Interest. Dedicated to helping Americans “rise a little more ably to the challenge of self-government,” National Affairs features the work of Charles Murray, George Will, and David Brooks, who hailed it as “the bloody crossroads where social science and public policy meet matters of morality, culture and virtue.”

Wilder is now detained at those crossroads by Meghan Clyne, managing editor of National Affairs, former speechwriter for Laura and George W. Bush and contributor to the New York Post (where she worried that an Obama nominee might introduce sharia law). Clyne calls for building an “historical-appreciation movement” around Wilder, who is to model self-reliance for millions of less worthy Americans currently receiving Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and “food stamps or other nutrition benefits.” Citing Jefferson, Clyne warns against “degeneracy” in the dependent, commending Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 paper for its depiction of “the conquest of this last unsettled frontier,” without remarking on the removal of natives that made it possible, paid for by the federal government and intended as the type of benefit she condemns. She takes no notice of the fact that Indians occupy a great deal of real estate in Little House on the Prairie, with its references to the 1862 “Minnesota massacre,” when Sioux warriors angered by treaty violations killed hundreds of soldiers and settlers and were then captured, tried, and hung in the largest mass execution in our history. Or that the little house in question was built illegally on an Osage reserve, which may explain why the Ingallses relinquished it.

Condemning “welfare-state redistribution,” Clyne embraces the 1862 Homestead Act, central to the later Little House books. Yet it was one of the biggest federal handouts in American history. Clyne praises it as policy that “encouraged habits of self-reliance rather than undermining them,” but it sought to give away a trillion acres of “free land,” as it was called, in 160-acre parcels to those over twenty-one if they could live on it and improve it over five years. Homesteading was no picnic, as Wilder makes clear, but everyone at the time knew it was a giveaway. Wilder remembers her father singing, “Uncle Sam is rich enough / To give us all a farm!” a popular ditty that hardly comports with Clyne’s contempt for “the crutch of government support.” The Homestead Act was not a particularly successful incubator of self-reliance, as only a fifth of the land went to small farmers, and less than half of all homesteaders managed to make the necessary improvements to keep it. The Act was also undermined by fraud and land speculation: Much of the property was acquired by railroads and large ranching interests.Comment:  Cline's views are classic American myth-making. Celebrate land theft under the rubric of "pioneering." Ignore the Indians and our immoral acts against them. Relabel government handouts as "self-reliance."

In short, refashion America as a great white bastion of Euro-Christian triumphalism. Shout "USA is no. 1!" for people with fragile egos who can't handle the complex truth. Hold the hands of weak-kneed Americans so they won't bawl like babies.

For more on this conservative rewriting of history, see GOP America = Strivers vs. Parasites and America's "Bootstrap Theocracy." For more on Little House on the Prairie, see Wilder the Typical Conservative and Little House on the Reservation.

150th anniversary of Homestead Act

U.S. marks 150th anniversary of Homestead Act offering free landThe United States on Sunday marks the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln signing the Homestead Act, the law that gave away 270 million acres of land and transformed the vast American interior.

Representatives from 30 states will take part in a ceremony at the National Monument of America in the Nebraska town of Beatrice, representing the states where nearly 2 million people each received 160 acres of free land under the program.And:Not everyone benefited from the Homestead Act. Engler said the law accelerated the removal of Native Americans from some states, especially across the Plains. With few exceptions, they were not allowed to homestead until 1924, when Native Americans were able to become U.S. citizens.

The act was in effect for 123 years. Homesteading ended in the continental United States in 1976. It ended in Alaska in 1986. In addition to the American West, homesteading took place in the South because land confiscated from plantation owners after the Civil War was deemed public land. Texas had no homesteading because it did not have federal public land.

Engler said the Homestead Act contributed to the expansion of the U.S. economy, spurred immigration and advanced transportation and communications networks.Nothing to celebrate

The "not everyone benefited" paragraph is the only negative thing in the article about the Homestead Act. Here's a less benign view:

The Subsidy of History

History can't be done a priori.A considerable number of libertarian commentators have remarked on the sheer scale of subsidies and protections to big business, on their structural importance to the existing form of corporate capitalism, and on the close intermeshing of corporate and state interests in the present state capitalist economy. We pay less attention, however, to the role of past state coercion, in previous centuries, in laying the structural foundations of the present system. The extent to which present-day concentrations of wealth and corporate power are the legacy of past injustice, I call the subsidy of history.

The first and probably the most important subsidy of history is land theft, by which peasant majorities were deprived of their just property rights and turned into tenants forced to pay rent based on the artificial “property” titles of state-privileged elites.

Of course, all such artificial titles not founded on appropriation by individual labor are completely illegitimate.

As Ludwig von Mises pointed out in Socialism, the normal functioning of the market never results in a state of affairs in which most of the land of a country is “owned” by a tiny class of absentee landlords and the peasant majority pay rent for the land they work. Wherever it is found, it is the result of past coercion and robbery.In particular:The Homestead Act of 1862, an apparent exception to this general trend, was really just another illustration of it. The majority of land, rather than being claimed under the terms of the Homestead Act, was auctioned to the highest bidder. Even for land covered by the Act, according to Howard Zinn, the $200 fee was beyond the reach of many. As a result, much of the land was not homesteaded on Lockean principles at all, but initially went to speculators before being partitioned and resold to homesteaders. And compared to the 50 million acres covered by homestead legislation, 100 million acres were given away as railroad land grants during the Civil War—free of charge! In other words, the privileged classes got the gravy, and ordinary homesteaders got the bone.Comment:  In this case, of course, the "peasant majorities" were Indians.

Much of today's concentrated wealth began with government subsidies to railroads, ranchers, miners, and drillers. So our "free market" economy has always been a crock. The country was "built" by elitists using government power to enrich themselves at the expense of Indians and other Americans.

For more on the subject, see:

Ayn Rand, racist
Land theft in My Little Pony
Jefferson's Indian removal policy
Capitalism killed the Indians
Great Plains in Years of Dust

Little House on the reservation

A commentator on Selective Omissions, or, What Laura Ingalls Wilder left out of LITTLE HOUSE adds an interesting note on the "Little House's" location:Yes, the Ingalls family was definitely illegally squatting on the Osage Diminished Reserve--Laura pretty much comes right out and says so in Little House on the Prairie. Pa says, "If some blasted politicians in Washington hadn’t sent out word it would be all right to settle here, I’d never have been three miles over the line into Indian Territory."

Charles Ingalls never filed on a homestead claim in Kansas because the land wasn't yet open to settlers; it was still Osage land. However, Charles and the other settlers mentioned in the book had heard that the land would soon be open, and they knew it would go fast. The best way to be sure of getting a good piece of land was to get there before it was open for settling, and that way as soon as it was available, they could file their claim--first come, first served, so to speak.(Excerpted from Debbie Reese's American Indians in Children's Literature, 7/3/08.)

Comment:  And people wonder why the Indians fought back against white settlers? Even "innocent families" like the Wilders were illegally trespassing on Indian land.

White folks have rarely hesitated to evict squatters and trespassers. Why shouldn't Indians have had the same freedom to protect their property?

For more on the subject, see Little House on the Osage Prairie and Little House on the Prairie.