MacBride Milks Memories

MacBride's version of Little House

I am constantly surprised by how much I don’t know.  

Just as I was getting over my surprise that Herbert Hoover was a humanitarian I discovered that Rose Wilder Lane’s agent, Roger Lea MacBride, had been a Presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party.  I knew that MacBride was the author of ‘additional’ Little House books but I was imagining a nerdy, Little House fan pining away for life on the prairie.  

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

MacBride was a Princeton and Harvard Law School graduate, an active member of the Republican party, a Presidential candidate for the Libertarian party, the co-producer of the Little House T.V. series and the heir to the Wilder fortune.  Roger MacBride was the son of Burt MacBride, Rose Wilder Lane’s editor at Reader’s Digest.    

Rose met Roger when he was still a teenager, he was taken by her stories and political theories and despite their age difference they became close friends.    Much later in her life, Rose actually admitted that she was grooming him to become a future Libertarian!  When Roger grew up and  was established, he became Rose’s attorney and business manager and remained close to Rose for the rest of her life.  

So here’s the part of the story that make me squeamish.  When Rose died in 1968, MacBride was her sole heir and gained the rights to the Little House books.  In three years he had Laura’s manuscript, The First Four Years, published and in another three years he edited her letters to Almanzo and published West From Home.  He used the royalties from the books to finance his campaign for President.  Then he decided to continue the Little House series with Rose as the main character and published EIGHT more books.  Talk about beating a dead horse...but he wasn’t done exploiting Laura yet.  

Studios had been trying to get the movie rights to the Little House story since the 1940s.  They knew a good thing when they saw it.  Laura repeatedly said no to Hollywood; she was afraid they would stray too far from the “true story”. Imagine. 

When the rights passed to Rose, she, too, refused the offers, respecting her mother’s wishes.  Roger, on the other hand, headed to Hollywood with the Little House rights in hand and made himself a millionaire.  In fact he agreed to everything and anything Little House related that came his way including a mini-series called The Young Pioneers and a spinoff entitled The Rose Years.

MacBride became a multi-millionaire and the antithesis of everything that Laura wrote about.  She must have been rolling over in her grave when Walnut Grove exploded in the last episode.  And Rose?  I bet she was pretty fired up and couldn’t wait to get her hands on MacBride in 1995 when he crossed over and joined them both in the great beyond.

The Hoover Wilder Connection

Since I was riding along with Wendy McClure’s on her quest to find ‘Laura World’ (see yesterday’s entry), I decided to find out where Laura Ingalls Wilder’s archives really were.  There’s usually a pretty interesting story behind why an author picks a library as their archive site and Laura’s was no exception.  After a quick search, I found myself at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in Burr Oak, Iowa.  Hhmmm.  What was the connection between Laura Ingalls and Herbert Hoover?  
Was it an Iowa connection?
nope.
Hoover left Iowa as an orphan when he was 10 years old and pretty much never looked back.  And Laura only lived in Iowa for a few years as kid.

Was Hoover a fan of the Little House books?
not that he admitted.
Hoover was working on world peace, saving war orphans from starvation, and trying to figure out what the heck happened to the U.S. economy - I can’t really see him tucking into “On The Banks of Plum Creek”.

Was Laura a Hoover fan?
not that she admitted
When Hoover was elected President in 1929 Laura Ingalls Wilder was churning out chapters about her childhood to be published as “Little House in the Big Woods” in 1932.  No doubt she was recovering from the death of her sister, Mary the year before.  And then there was bread to make, a garden to plant and cows to milk.  Any downtime was probably spent sleeping, not discussing politics..

Even though their life spans almost overlapped, 1870ish to 1960ish, the Hoover-Wilder connection wasn’t a Laura connection at all - it was a link to her daughter, Rose.

Rose Wilder was her mother’s opposite.   The Hoover Library describes her as “an author, journalist, world traveler, and Libertarian spokeswoman.”  But her life story is just as much a study in breaking boundaries,  risk taking and being true to yourself.  Rose began her career as a telegrapher for Western Union.  She moved from Kansas City to Missouri and then on to California where she eventually became a newspaper reporter.  She was married briefly and unhappily to Claire Gillette Lane, during which time she had a miscarriage.

Rose worked as a publicist for the American Red Cross during WWI, traveled across Europe and even lived in Albania for a while.  You certainly can’t get much farther away from log cabins and prairie dresses than Albania.

Rose found her greatest success as a journalist and an author of magazine articles and books.  In 1920 she wrote a series of articles with Charles K. Field, the editor of Sunset magazine, about the life of Herbert Hoover.  The articles were pulled together and published as the book, The Making of Herbert Hoover.    In retrospect, it seems like they were a little premature in their analysis but Hoover was already an well-known humanitarian by 1920 (see previous post).

Herbert Hoover and Rose did not work together on the biography, in fact, Rose heard that Hoover tried to “suppress” the book because of the dialogue she included. There are letters to Rose from Hoover’s relatives from that time period but Rose never spoke with Hoover.

When Laura Ingalls Wilder died in 1957 her papers went to Rose.  When Rose died in 1968 both of their   files went to Roger MacBride, Rose’s attorney, business manager and friend.  It was Roger who donated them to the Hoover Library in 1980, 12 years after Rose’s death.  The files include 30 feet of correspondence, diaries, book drafts, and other writings “rich in personal perspective and introspection”.

In the late 1930's Rose and Hoover did become friends and enjoyed a friendship that continued for three decades.  

So, in the end, neither Rose nor Laura picked Hoover’s library as the resting place for the papers that defined their lives, that choice was made by the mysterious Roger Lea MacBride and that story is for tomorrow.

Don't Go There

The Little House cover I remember

Great books create worlds that seem so real you could step right into them.  But you can’t really, they are made of words and imagination not bricks and mortar.  Even if they are real locations, zip codes you can punch into the GPS, they are not the same place as the book world.  While I would love to rock on the front porch with Atticus in Maycomb, Alabama, sit by the roaring fire with Hermione in the Gryffindor common room or drink coffee with Blomkvist on Hedeby Island,  I know I can only go there by passing through the pages of a book.

While some settings are actual locations, they don’t have book magic, the secret ingredient that the author adds to create the book world.  Wendy McClure discovered this bittersweet reality in her book The Wilder Life.  For a woman of ‘a certain age’, the Little House books, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, bring back vivid memories of visiting a secret book world, discovering a beloved series and escaping into the idealized universe of a story.  

Wendy McClure becomes obsessed with trying to find “Laura World”, and her book retells her quest to discover Laura’s life by experimenting with pioneer living and visiting the settings of the Little House books.  
In an interview with Gretchen Rubin (author of the Happiness Project) Wendy says that her fixation on the books came in part because Laura’s “point of view is at once so subtle and vivid that it feels like I’m in Laura Ingalls’s head, looking with her eyes. I learned so much about how to see from these books, which in turn helped me learn to observe and think like a writer.”

As a book, The Wilder Life is great fun to read - a lot like Julie and Julia by Julie Powell, an obsession based memoir that lets you ride along on someone else’s wacky pilgrimage as they try to make meaning in their otherwise ordinary life.  But learning the differences between the real Laura Ingalls and the fictionalized stories is a little depressing.  And visiting Little House tourist attractions and gift shops chips away at the book magic, like a bad movie adaptation.

A beloved book world is a place that must be protected, at all costs, in your imagination.  The only way to go there is to open the book and read your way there.  Trying to physically go there risks destroying the magic - and besides, opening the book is a lot easier on the wallet than driving across the country, or flying to Hogwarts in a convertible.