Prairie Girl

 I am a charter member of the American Writers Museum (AWM).  My love for American literature was instilled in me by Robert Streeter at U of C and by my high school English and American History teachers that ran a joint program at my Chicago Public High School in which we read the literature of the historical period that was being taught in American history.  I was thrilled when I learned that AWM was opening in May of last year.  I signed up immediately and attended the museum’s inaugural day.  Since then I have attended many wonderful programs and have handed out guest passes to many people.  AWM, together with the Newberry Library and the Poetry Foundation cements Chicago as a literary and cultural center.

I am hoping that the Board of Directors and leadership of the AWM does not succumb to the insidious trend of purging writers that do not conform to the norms of political correctness or otherwise engage in censorship or de-legitimizing American authors.

The Association for Library Service to Children recently voted to change the name of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award to the bland and innocuous Children’s Literature Legacy Award.  The ALSC’s board made that decision because, “her body of work, includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness.”  It is widely thought that this “demotion” of Ms. Wilder is yet another instance of politically correct administrators and educators lowering the stature of a noted author because he or she does not conform to today’s social norms and viewpoints or what a select group of individuals believe that the correct social norms and viewpoints ought to be. 

The demotion of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the commensurate implied criticism of her work is all the more ironic since the American Writers Museum recently had a special exhibit dedicated to her life and work.  The exhibit nudged me to read Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser.   I also attended the presentation at AWM by Marta McDowell and purchased her work The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and have begun to read some of Wilder’s work.  In doing so, I learned a great deal about this remarkable woman.  She was not only a gifted writer but a true American.   Her work belongs on the same shelf with Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, Thoreau’s Walden and Cather’s My Antonia as a testament to the American pioneer grit.  She lived through economic downturns, including the Great Depression, lived in poverty most of her life, suffered numerous personal setbacks, began her writing career late in life and remained resilient and undeterred throughout.  Wilder moved from place to place, trying to make a go of it, suffering through fires, droughts, grasshopper plagues, and other disasters.   She exemplified the American spirit and found joy and happiness in many of the simpler things in life, and left a legacy for generations of children. 

Yet, the ALSC chose to demote her while the AWM chose to honor her.

Her demotion by the ALSC comes at a time of other similar occurrences.   Mark Twain was taken off the reading list at a Minnesota school district as was Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.  Penguin recently removed literary giant Lionel Shriver from her position as a judge of literary short story works largely because of her criticism of Penguin’s emphasis of “inclusiveness” over quality.   It’s one thing to relegate  a team mascot such as Chief Illiniwek or Chief Yahoo of the Cleveland Indians to the dustbin.  It is yet another to purge authors and writings from our literary heritage.

Wilder’s depictions of Native Americans were borne out of a time in which the brutal Indian Wars were still fresh in the memory of her family.   While some of her references to Native Americans were racist, there is also evidence that she also empathized with them, as biographer Caroline Fraser asserts.   And the narrative of the clashes between the settlers and Native Americans is still being re-examined as evidenced by the recent book The Earth is Weeping by Peter Cozzens.

Technology changes.  Social norms change.  Even Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton opposed marriage equality a decade ago.  If we purge our literary heritage of every writer that evidenced a whiff of racism or racist language, misogyny, religious bigotry, homophobia or other kind of bias from pre-WWII writing, there likely wouldn’t be much left to read.  Writers such as Ezra Pound and James T. Farrell would certainly be thrown overboard.

AWM is doing a fine job of bring back into our consciousness important writers from all periods of our rich literary tradition—from Thoreau to Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells and James Baldwin. That approach permits us to take pride in the glorious parts of our past, as well as face the inglorious parts.   I applaud AMW’s decision to honor Laura Ingalls Wilder and I am grateful that it did.  It exposed me to her remarkable work and life.   I implore AWM to continue in this vein, to continue to honor America’s literary giants that have withstood the test of time,  to highlight great writers that have added to America’s literary tradition, whether or not their writing conforms to today’s language and social norms.  We desperately need to hear their stories in the context in which they were written and not sanitized through the filter of political correctness.