Rose Wilder Lane

Rose Wilder Lane was born in 1886, the first child of Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder; the latter was the author of the Little House on the Prairie series. Her parents would later become famous thanks to the book series, originally written by her mother and vastly reworked and edited by Lane herself. ... As a reporter, columnist, and author, Lane became interested in the issues of free trade and individual rights, especially as viewed against the backdrop of world events. She was one of several highly visible libertarian women writing in the first half of the 20th century.

I am now a fundementalist American; give me time and I will tell you why individualism, laissez faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit. Also I will tell you why the relative freedom of human spirit is better — and more productive, even in material ways — than the communist, Fascist, or any other rigidity organized for material ends.

Journalist Lane (1886-1966) was one of the most inspiring libertarian authors of the 20th century. She is best known for Give Me Liberty (1939) and The Discovery of Freedom (1943). Albert Jay Nock admired her work, and she inspired Robert LeFevre, who established the fabled Freedom School in Colorado. Lane refused to authorize reprints of The Discovery of Freedom until she got around to revising it, which she never did, but after her death her literary executor and heir, Roger MacBride, helped bring the beloved classic back in print.

Rose's mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, wrote story outlines about how she grew up on the American frontier, and as scholar William Holtz explained in his biography The Ghost in the Little House (1993), Rose transformed the outlines into eight magnificent Little House books which many readers consider the finest series of children's books ever written. These books are all about personal responsibility, self reliance, courage and love, and they captivate children as well as adults.

The documentary legacy of Rose Wilder Lane and her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, encompassed in the holdings of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa. A journalist and philosopher, Lane also was the first biographer of Herbert Hoover. In fact, her work on 'The Making of Herbert Hoover' (1919) led to a friendship with the Great Humanitarian that lasted more than forty years.

Rose Wilder Lane was one of the highest paid writers in the United States during her days as a journalist, war correspondent, and novelist. The daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, she was widely considered a silent collaborator on the Little House series. She lived from 1886 until 1968.

The daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lane extensively edited and shaped that great alternative history of American settlement, the Little House books, which place the family, community, and commerce—rather than male adventure, escape, and violence—at the heart of our national experience. She was a prolific author in her own right and, along with Isabel Paterson and Ayn Rand, one of the three godmothers of modern libertarianism. Lane's The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority remains a powerful statement about the evolution and necessity of individual rights.

As a young man, Roger MacBride was "adopted" by Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls who, along with Isabel Paterson and Ayn Rand, was one of the three founding mothers of the modern libertarian movement ... Ms. Lane's strain emphasized the Eastern (or "Hebrew") concepts of emotion and community. Rose Wilder Lane, although herself something of an agnostic and a thoroughly cosmopolitan person, unabashedly presented the freedom philosophy as part of—indeed, as the essential part of—our Semitic religious tradition, and the defining feature of the American experience.

[Ruth] Dazey ... brought me another [book]. It was "Discovery of Freedom," by Rose Wilder Lane ... nearly everyone is familiar with the television program, "Little House on the Prairie." ... the Ingalls family of the series included a daughter name Laura. In real life, Laura Ingalls married a man named Wilder and Rose Wilder was their daughter. Later Rose married a man named Lane, hence, the name Rose Wilder Lane ... Rose's mother, is the author of a series of children's books ... Rose clearly inherited her mother's talent for expression. "Discovery" was a book that was so enthralling I read it through at one sitting.

Lane, like Rand, had the benefit of picking Paterson's brain, and Cox writes, 'It is possible that Lane derived many of her key concepts from her all-night conversations with Paterson.' However, Discovery and God of the Machine are very different books, as Cox points out: 'Libertarian readers have generally turned to Lane for emotional satisfaction and to Paterson for intellectual challenge.'

[Islam] has a history of peace and respect for individual rights. One famous exponent of freedom who knew that was Rose Wilder Lane. Her original book, The Discovery of Freedom, contains an abundance of information on the golden era of Islamic civilization, particularly the role that free markets played in that remarkably progressive and virtually stateless society ... One point of disagreement between Lane and Ahmad is over the existence of Islamic law. Lane writes that "the weakness that eventually ended the Saracens' civilization" was that "there was no civil law."

Laura's only child was Rose Wilder Lane. Lane was born in DeSmet, South Dakota, and grew up on her parents' Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri. ... Lane wrote two novels of her own about her family's homestead ... But her interests turned more to politics, and she became a vociferous adversary of President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, which she saw as "creeping socialism." In the dark year of 1943 ... Lane published a passionate historical book called The Discovery of Freedom. ... Also in 1943 Lane met Roger MacBride, the 14‐​year‐​old son of her editor at Reader's Digest.

So how in blazes does the author open this often inspiring story? By describing the Cato Institute's intellectually dubious and positively pallid campaign to partially privatize Social Security ... Rose Wilder Lane – the feisty author of the Little House on the Prairie books, and prolific libertarian polemicist of the 1940s and 50s, who refused to even sign up for Social Security, and quit her job when informed she had to – must be rolling in her grave. (Doherty’s portrait of her, by the way, is sympathetic, as well as extensive.)

Rose Wilder Lane ... was the daughter of Almanzo Wilder and Laura Ingalls ... The young Rose Wilder was a star student in the small-town schools she attended in Missouri and in the cajun country of southwestern Louisiana, but there was no money for her to attend college ... she wrote ... "Americans (of both parties) who stand for American political principles ... have no means of peaceful political action." What was needed, Rose believed, was a political movement, which would unite writers, activists, teachers, propagandists, and politicians in favor of individual liberty. A "libertarian movement" — that was her phrase.

According to Lane, because of the doctrine of monotheism, people came to believe in one creator God who judges men's actions, instead of a pantheist pantheon of capricious gods. Additionally, the laws of morality are woven into the fibre of creation and provide the guide for human behavior. It is from these doctrines, Lane argued, that the Christian conceptions of individual responsibility and self-control are derived; essential qualities for the preservation of a free society.

Born on the frontier, in America's Dakota Territory, Rose Wilder's family left the Territory for Florida after surviving diphtheria, crop failure, and even the loss of their house to fire. They soon returned, staying in a rented house for two years, during which time Rose learned to read in a matter of months at a small town schoolhouse, before leaving for Mansfield, Missouri by covered wagon ... The adult Rose's life, while less well known, is at least as exciting as the adventures related in any of her mother's books. In an autobiographical piece for the Federal Writers Project, Lane described her varied experiences ...

Rose Wilder Lane came out to the Freedom School in Colorado on various occasions and on one such instance undoubtedly saved the school from foreclosure. ... When Rose finally died, mourned and respected by all of us at the Freedom School, Roger MacBride, who was Rose Wilder Lane's protege, graciously granted me permission to make copies of the book. Of course I did.

Like her compatriots, Rose Wilder Lane surprised people ... she soared with great eloquence as she helped revive the radical principles of the American Revolution, and she inspired millions of adults and children alike as the editor of the beloved "Little House" books about individual responsibility, hard work, stubborn persistence, strong families, and human liberty ... She quit school after the ninth grade and determined that somehow she would see the world beyond rural Missouri ... She spent most of her spare time reading, perhaps three hours a day. By 1908, she relocated to San Francisco for another Western Union job ...

In 1919 I was a communist. My Bolshevik friends of those days are scattered now; some are bourgeois, some are dead, some are in China and Russia, and I did not know the last American chiefs of the Third International, who now officially embrace Democracy. They would repudiate me even as a renegade comrade, for I was never a member of The Party ... Individual Americans are ... answering the question I should have known better than to ask, ten years ago. They are answering it now in Europe and Asia, and tomorrow they will answer it at home. The answer is: Yes, individualism has the strength to resist all attacks.

[Introduction by author's daughter] The book ... continues the childhood story of Rose Wilder Lane, and her mother and father, Laura Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder. Rose treated my father much as she would have treated a grandson and told him many stories about what it was like growing up in Missouri almost a hundred years ago. Dad took those stories and spun them into a series of books based on the facts of Rose's life. Bachelor Girl is the eighth and last of those books. ... Abigail MacBride Allen