Category: Biographies

Midwestern Dreams or Nightmares?

Greetings and Happy New Year! The new semester is underway at Trinity Christian College. I hope that everyone reading this had a blessed Christmas and a good start to 2020.

It was just over four years ago, on January 4, 2016, that I posted my first entry on this blog. Since then, I have posted over sixty more. Thanks to everyone who has commented or sent me observations about my research.

You may have heard that John Miller has published an extended review of Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2017). The title is “Midwestern Dreams or Nightmares?: An Appreciation and Critique of Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.” It’s the first article in the Fall 2019-Spring 2020 issue of Middle West Review, an academic journal published by the University of Nebraska Press. Miller has written three books about Wilder: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town (1994), about De Smet during the late 1800s, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend (1998), a full biography that concentrates on Wilder’s adult life, and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time, and Culture (2008), a collection of essays. He is eminently qualified to provide what he calls “a more balanced account of Prairie Fires than has generally been accorded it.” (2) (Full disclosure: Miller discussed this article with me while he was writing it, and he shared an early draft with me for my comments.)

Miller praises many aspects of Fraser’s book. He notes that it is well-written and that it provides an incredible number of details about Wilder’s life and her historical context. Its over 500 pages of text and 85 pages of notes make it by far the largest biography of Wilder yet published. He is in agreement with the amount of space Fraser devotes to understanding the life and work of Laura’s daughter Rose Wilder Lane, and he is in general agreement with Fraser’s interpretation of Lane’s life and character. He argues that the historical contexts Fraser provides in the book are often insightful, and the speculations that Fraser makes when facts are not available are often good, helpful, or plausible.

However, Miller disagrees with what he sees as two of the most important assertions made in the book:

  1. Fraser describes Wilder’s early life as unremittingly difficult and argues that Wilder deliberately shaped the Little House books to recast her childhood in a positive light.
  2. Fraser argues that agriculture in eastern South Dakota was “economically unsound” and “ecologically disastrous.” (24)

In his description of these lines of argument, Miller uses examples from several speeches that Fraser delivered in Sioux Falls and Brookings, South Dakota, as well as a number of quotes and accounts from the book. In both cases, he finds these assertions unsupported, concluding that “Fraser has, in her major lines of argument, stepped beyond the bounds of reliable history.” (29)

In the first case, Miller argues that it is impossible to determine exactly how the Ingalls family experienced their years moving from Wisconsin, to Kansas, to Wisconsin, to Minnesota, to Iowa, to Minnesota, and to South Dakota. When he died, Laura’s father Charles Ingalls did not have much real estate or money in the bank. However, Miller notes that he had occupied many positions of public trust in De Smet, and that his wife Caroline and his daughter Mary enjoyed a comfortable home, the friendship of neighbors, and the respect of fellow church members, lodge members, and other townspeople. Furthermore, Laura’s recollections of her childhood in the Missouri Ruralist were not negative but happy. He argues that two key documents used by Fraser to substantiate the idea that Wilder remembered her childhood negatively are selectively quoted and misunderstood. He ends by asserting that the best way to understand rural women´s lives during the late 1800s is to recognize that they experienced both hardships and joys, and that while some resented their isolation, others embraced its beauty and relative opportunity. Miller clearly sees Wilder as belonging to the second group.

Miller also takes issue with Fraser´s characterization of agriculture in southeastern Dakota Territory. The article first disputes the reasons Prairie Fires gives for why the Great Dakota Boom began in 1878. However, Miller is more concerned about Fraser’s assertion that the region around De Smet was part of the Great Plains that should never have been settled the way it was during the late nineteenth century. He notes that Prairie Fires uses the terms “prairie” and “plains” interchangeably, and while it leans on John Wesley Powell’s 1877 warning about agriculture west of 100 degrees of longitude, De Smet is actually 120 miles east of that line. He asserts that the region was farmed successfully by some during the late 1800s, that it recovered after the dry years of the early 1900s, and that it remains productive for some farmers today.

Miller’s experience with Wilder’s Missouri Ruralist columns and his knowledge of South Dakota agriculture stands him in good stead in both of these critiques. Both appear persuasive to me today.

I’ve gone back to my blog entry on Fraser’s book, and it is much more positive than Miller’s review. I also wrote a review of the book for the Annals of Iowa in 2018, and it is similarly positive. In both pieces, I praised the painstaking research that went into writing the book and the details about Wilder and Lane’s lives that it provides. My main critique in the Annals piece is of Fraser’s tone when describing people who lived in small towns and rural areas in the past, especially those who opposed government support for those in financial need. At the time, I didn’t identify Fraser’s characterization of Wilder’s childhood as completely negative. I may have been focusing on the many details that I was eagerly noting for my own research on Wilder. I also didn’t have the background in South Dakota agriculture to argue against her characterization of the South Dakota boom as an agricultural disaster.

I also wonder if part of the reason that I didn’t see all that Miller saw in the book is that he had the benefit of Fraser’s speeches in shaping how he engaged the book. About five pages of the review are devoted to descriptions and quotations from those talks. Book talks are often more forceful in making an argument than a book itself. A book is much longer, can be more nuanced, and an argument can be obscured by the details. I’m thinking that hearing Fraser speak multiple times may have crystalized things for him.

One thing that Miller and I agree on is that Prairie Fires could have engaged Wilder’s Christianity more. My blog entry included the following: “there is not a lot of attention to Laura and Rose’s faith in the body of the book… Laura and Rose’s religious outlook is not really primary to Fraser’s understanding of the two women.” Miller’s article puts it this way: “a greater emphasis upon the central importance of her religious beliefs and attitudes would help better to explain the woman’s generally sunny disposition and proclivity for interpreting setbacks and negative happenings in a positive light.” (10)

Miller does value much of what Fraser has done in Prairie Fires. I appreciate the good things about the book as well. But Miller worries that Fraser’s incorrect assertions will be what readers remember, especially those who don’t know much about Wilder. I’d recommend his article as a counterpoint to Fraser’s interpretation of Wilder’s life and times.

Thanks much for reading.

Page number citations are from: John E. Miller, “Midwestern Dreams or Nightmares: An Appreciation and Critique of Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder” Middle West Review 6(1-2)(Fall 2019-Spring 2020), 1-36.

How might you be able to read Miller’s article? Several possibilities:

  • If you are a college student or live near a college or university, see if the library has access to it, either in hardcopy or online – you can check the catalog or go to/call the reference desk.
  • A public library may be able to get a copy of the article through interlibrary loan channels.
  • Buy a copy of the issue of the issue of the journal for $46 at this site.

Links:

Publisher’s site and picture credit: Middle West Review.

Trinity Christian College

Publisher’s Site for Prairie Fires

Publisher’s page for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town

My blog entry on Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder

Publisher’s page for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time, and Culture

My blog entry on Prairie Fires

My review of Prairie Fires in The Annals of Iowa

 

The Good Neighbor

During the last several weeks, my wife and I have been reading The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, by Maxwell King. We read out loud to each other when we’re in the car or doing chores at home. I found out about the book in the alumni magazine from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, where I received my M. A. in History. At Duquesne’s commencement this year, King and Rogers’s widow Joanne Rogers both received honorary doctorates. The book came out last year, and it’s the first full biography of Rogers.

I remember watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood when I was growing up in Western Pennsylvania in the early 1970s. At some point, I decided that I was too old, that the show was too slow, and that I liked Sesame Street and The Electric Company better. I did not realize that Rogers and his program were key to the development of WQED in Pittsburgh and Public Broadcasting nationally. This book sets Rogers’s life in context of the national development of educational television for kids. It also provides evidence that for many children – often those going through difficult life situations – watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a transformative experience.

Rogers grew up in the small town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, east of Pittsburgh. He was the only child of a wealthy family, and he struggled with asthma and social awkwardness at school. So he often would go to his attic and play with puppets, writing elaborate scripts for puppet shows and performing them for his family. He also played the concert grand piano (!) that his grandmother bought for him. He got his B. A. in music, became a concert-level musician, and wrote an opera at Rollins College in Florida. After he graduated, he decided he wanted to work in broadcast television.

He began his career with NBC in New York City, then went to work for WQED, a public station in Pittsburgh. There he wrote and operated the puppets for The Children’s Corner for seven years. At the same time, he attended Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and became an ordained minister in the mainline Presbyterian Church with the call to serve the community through television. In 1963 he moved to Toronto and created Misterogers for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. He returned to Pittsburgh three years later and recreated the show for WQED. By the early 1970s, the show was broadcast nationally.

King’s book does an excellent job describing the influences on Rogers’ development, including his mother’s love, his father’s money, his grandparents’ encouragement, the outlet of music and puppetry, and the educational theory of Benjamin Spock, Erik Erikson, and especially Margaret McFarland. King is also at pains to explain that Fred Rogers was in real life who he was on the television screen: a kind, encouraging man who cared about everyone he met. He especially cared about children. Born into a wealthy family, he never wanted for anything, but he was not pretentious. He was highly creative and had a perfectionist streak, which at times led him to become angry with coworkers and with his own two sons. Finally, he was intensely dedicated to friends, and he put off getting treatment for the ailment that eventually killed him—stomach cancer—because he did not want to back out on commitments he had previously made to others.

The author, Maxwell King, was a journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer for almost 30 years, eventually serving as Editor. He was then President of the Heinz Endowments, directed the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, and most recently was President and CEO of the Pittsburgh Foundation. Because he was writing the biography of a late twentieth century television celebrity, there are thousands of hours of shows and interviews, and reams of material to sift through. King’s training in journalism is evident, as he often allows his sources to tell the story: Fred himself, his wife Joanne, his coworkers, relatives, acquaintances, and fans of his work. However, this often means long sections of direct quotes, some of which repeat points made previously. While early chapters are chronological, later chapters are thematic, which also makes for quite a bit of repetition. Perhaps my wife and I noted this more because we were reading it out loud, but at the end of the book’s 360-plus pages of text, we thought that it might have been perhaps a 80-100 pages shorter.

There are some interesting comparisons between Fred Rogers and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Both created artistic works for children that had widespread influence almost immediately. Both used materials from their upbringing – Laura’s life story and Fred’s memory of his family’s neighborhood in small-town Latrobe. Both shared an upbringing and lifelong affiliation with the church, although Fred became a pastor and Laura never officially joined a congregation. The most striking difference between the two was the Rogers’s family’s wealth in comparison to the Ingalls’s family’s relative poverty.

I’ve been writing the chapter about Laura and Almanzo’s early years in Mansfield, Missouri, and that has brought me face to face with their daughter Rose Wilder Lane’s childhood. In fact, there might be more interesting comparisons between Fred Rogers and Rose Wilder Lane. Both were only children brought up in families with strong mother figures. Both were very artistic and creative individuals who followed their own paths. Ultimately, however, Fred was much more comfortable with who he was and a much more successful person. He never had to work for a living the way that Rose had to, and he didn’t face the difficulties or financial reverses that she faced. But I also think that his settled Christian faith provided ballast for the difficulties in life that he did face, and that kind of faith was one thing that Rose did not have for most of her adult life.

I certainly have a lot fewer sources for Laura’s life than King had for Fred’s, and I’m planning for my book to be much shorter than his. Caroline Fraser (Prairie Fires) has written the long and exhaustive book on Laura and Rose. I’m just hoping to tell their story in light of Laura’s faith commitments.

Thanks again for reading.

Picture credit: KHUT (CC0) at the Wikimedia Commons

Links:

Publisher’s site for The Good Neighbor

Duquesne’s May 2019 Commencement

Dr. Margaret McFarland

The Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at Saint Vincent College

Maxwell King

My blog entry on Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires

Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America

(Photo credit: Pete Unseth, Wikimedia Commons)

I know that I have not posted much this fall. My time has been taken up with Academic Dean duties here at Trinity Christian College. I had hoped to get some writing done on chapter four of my book, but that hasn’t happened. In other research project news, however, I did propose a paper for LauraPalooza 2019. John Miller, Bill Anderson, and I are also looking at doing a session proposal for the Midwestern History Conference. And last week, a group of professors at Trinity read the first chapter of my book and give me comments on it. I got some great critiques and words of encouragement.

Over Thanksgiving break I read a biography in the series from Eerdmans publishers that I’m writing for: Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America by Barry Hankins. It’s a very good book. I met Hankins at a meeting of the Conference on Faith and History (CFH) a while ago. He is the Chair of the History Department at Baylor University in Texas. The book came out in 2008. Since then, he has written books on the 1920s, American Baptists, and Woodrow Wilson.

Francis Schaeffer was a Presbyterian pastor during the twentieth century. He became a missionary to Europe and ran a Christian study center called L’Abri in Switzerland from the 1950s to the 1970s. It became a place where young Europeans who were questioning the meaning of life could come and hear Christian answers to their questions. Francis talked with them, Edith made them meals, and they could stay as long as they wanted. The theme of his teaching was that only Christianity provided philosophically supportable answers to the most important questions of life. He spoke cogently about art, culture, philosophy, politics, and many other topics. Eventually, L’Abri employed a large staff and thousands of young people from the United States and Europe visited. InterVarsity Press turned some of his talks into books, and during the 1960s he spoke at many Christian colleges in the United States. A number of the students who heard him became Christian scholars and college professors as a result of his inspiration. In the 1970s his son Frank Schaeffer and he made two movie series: How Should We Then Live and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? The first gave a history of western thought and culture, described where it had gone wrong, and gave instructions for how Christians should respond. The second was about the dangers of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia.

Hankins’s biography was a trip down memory lane for me. I grew up in a home and a church where people read Schaeffer’s books and talked about them. My Mom read books by Edith. I remember reading Schaeffer’s books—I can only remember Escape from Reason and A Christian Manifesto specifically, but I know that I read more—when I was in high school and college. Both movie series were shown at my church. I think that I would give Schaeffer some of the credit for why my best friend in high school and I both became academics (he’s now a Professor of Political Science). For us, Schaeffer made the idea of studying culture and history from a Christian perspective cool.

Once I became a historian, I went back and re-read several of Schaeffer’s books. I found that they have a number of historical arguments and assertions that I just don’t think are correct. Schaeffer wasn’t a trained historian. He was a pastor, and he tended to use stories about the past to make the points he wanted to make about the world, God, and Christian answers to life’s questions. Other Christian historians have also found his historical narratives wanting, even those who were launched on their path to becoming academic historians by hearing Schaeffer speak or reading his works. Hankins notes this. It’s a fascinating story.

As I read Hankins’s biography, I also thought a bit about its structure in relation to what I am planning for my book on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life. In many ways, Hankins’s biography is very different than what I think mine will be. Only one small section of one chapter is about Schaeffer’s childhood, mainly because there are few sources about it. I am projecting that three of the eleven chapters in my book will be on Laura’s childhood. Also, three of the main chapters of Hankins’s work are thematic: they’re about Schaeffer’s works on 1) philosophy, 2) culture, and 3) the Bible. The chapters are not chronological; the time periods covered overlap. I think that my book will mainly be chronological, and the chapters will be pretty self-contained.

This is likely the last post that I’m doing during 2018. I hope that everyone has a blessed Christmas and a good start to 2019.

Links:

Trinity Christian College

LauraPalooza 2019 Call for Papers

Midwest History Conference Call for papers

Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America

Pulitzer Prize

Faculty members are on summer break here at Trinity, so my job has slowed down a bit. I’m not actually on break yet, because I’m a Dean and have an extended contract. But I have been able to carve out some time to write. I’m also planning for a trip to, Lord-willing, four Laura Ingalls Wilder sites this summer (Burr Oak, Pepin, Walnut Grove, and De Smet).

Yesterday, I told a colleague who stopped by my office that Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder had been awarded the Pulitzer prize for Biography. He asked me when and I said about a month ago. He then asked whether I had put this information on my blog. I said no, and that the information was available from dozens of sites. He told me that I still should put it on my blog, because perhaps someone would learn about it from me the way he did. So here I am, putting it on my blog.

Congratulations are due to Caroline. She put years of work into the book, and she has rightly been basking in the attention of the media for the last several weeks.

More later this summer. Thanks for reading.

Links:

My post on Prairie Fires

The announcement at pulizer.org

 

60 Years

Laura Ingalls Wilder died on February 10, 1957, three days after her 90th birthday, sixty years ago today.

She had lived during the administrations of 17 different presidents, had survived two world wars, and had seen the emergence of the United States as a world power. She rode in a covered wagon in the 1870s and flew in an airplane in the 1950s. She is buried in Mansfield, Missouri.

[Wow, I had the wrong year when I first posted this. Thanks to Connie for setting me straight.]

Happy 150th Birthday

Laura Ingalls Wilder was born one hundred and fifty years ago today, on February 7, 1867, in a cabin outside of Pepin, Wisconsin.

The Washington Post ran a nice article yesterday about Wilder, the Little House books, and her ongoing popularity:  At 150, Laura Ingalls Wilder Still Speaks to Readers Old and New

We will celebrate by having cake at the Honors Seminar.

 

Her Heart Can See

I mentioned in my last blog post that I’ve been in contact with two publishers about the possibility of writing a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder with particular attention to her Christianity. So I went to Trinity’s library and checked out several religious biographies to see what they’re like. I was able to read one of them last week: Edith Blumhofer’s Her Heart Can See: The Life and Hymns of Fanny J. Crosby. Blumhofer is a history professor and director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College.

Some readers may know that Fanny Crosby was an almost superhumanly prolific Christian hymnwriter during the late 1800s and early 1900s. She wrote for multiple publishers who printed her songs under her own name and dozens of pseudonyms. As a result, an exact number cannot be given, but it is probable that she wrote as many as nine thousand hymns and gospel songs. Apparently she was able to think of rhymes on the fly, and she composed multiple poems and songs every day. She was blind and dictated the songs to others who wrote them down. Crosby was also a popular speaker at churches, Sunday schools, YMCAs, and rescue missions in the greater New York City area. While most of her hymns have fallen into obscurity, some are still sung today, especially “Blessed Assurance,” “Rescue the Perishing,” and “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.”

Since I’ve never written a book-length biography, I’m especially interested in how historians organize biographies, what questions they’re asking, and how they address a broader audience. Blumhofer’s book gave me answers to all three questions:

Organization: The first three chapters, which describe Crosby’s family history, childhood, and early adulthood, are chronological. Crosby was born in 1820 in a small town about 60 miles away from New York City. She lost her sight in infancy, and at age 15 she went to the New York Institution for the Blind in Manhattan. After she finished their course of study, she became a teacher there. At age 38, she married Alexander van Alstine and moved to Long Island.

The next eight chapters are thematic and address Crosby’s main period of activity, from 1858 to around 1900. One chapter recreates the world of New York City evangelical Protestantism that Crosby operated in. Others present the background of nineteenth century Christian music, especially “gospel songs.” Others give the biographies of Crosby’s collaborators: her music teacher, her publishers, her composers, and her friends. Still others describe Sunday schools during the nineteenth century and her talks in different venues. Finally, one chapter analyzes some of her most famous songs to draw a picture of how she experienced her faith and how she depicted it in her poetry.

The last chapter of the book covers the final fifteen years of her life, and the afterword considers her legacy. The book also has “A Note on the Sources,” which describes the sources used to write the book, an appendix giving Crosby’s family tree, and an appendix listing 150 of her pseudonyms.

Questions: Early in the Introduction, Blumhofer notes that there have been a variety of previous biographies of Crosby. Apparently most of them are inspirational, telling her story in order to feed Christian faith and devotion. Blumhofer also notes that, unfortunately, many of them are inaccurate. Her aim is to tell a more truthful story of how Crosby experienced life in nineteenth century New York as a blind, Christian, female hymnwriter. How did she come to be who she became? What networks supported her? How was she shaped by and how did she shape nineteenth century evangelicalism? How should one understand Crosby’s relationship to her historial context?

To answer these questions, Blumhofer spends a lot of time describing the historical developments, institutions, and individuals that made it possible for a Christian woman to do what Crosby did during the nineteenth century. First, music was increasingly seen as an important way to educate children and to Americanize immigrants. Second, Protestant evangelicalism came to define elite New York society. Third, Sunday schools became ubiquitous in Protestant churches. Fourth, new printing technologies revolutionized the publishing business. Finally, Crosby cultivated associations with important Christian figures like Phoebe Palmer, Dwight L. Moody, Ira Sankey, and William H. Doane. In all of these ways, Blumhofer presents Crosby’s life as being interwoven with nineteenth century evangelical Protestantism.

Broader Audience: I think that the major way that this book reaches out to a broader audience is by not having footnotes or endnotes and not engaging many other historians’ works directly. Her “Note on the Sources” is great, and I have some ideas of what that would look like for Wilder if I do a book for Eerdmans. However, as one might infer from my description of Blumhofer’s questions and ways of answering them, many of them are the types of questions that academic historians ask. I’m not sure how successful this story of Crosby’s might be in attracting the attention of Christians who are more interested in an inspirational story about the blind woman who wrote so many hymns.

At any rate, these are all things that I’ll have to continue to consider if I’m going to write a book on the Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Thanks for reading.