“Do the Right Thing Always”Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Global Pandemics of 1918 and 2020 Amy S. Fatzinger (bio) As the global pandemic has forced Americans to retreat into their homes, physically distance themselves from their relatives and neighbors, and perhaps even bolster their food security with a freshly dug garden, many find themselves thinking once again of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her Little House novels. Like Wilder’s initial Depression-era readers, some find Wilder’s novels a comfortable retreat from today’s stressful world, while for others the Ingalls family’s struggles are newly relatable, inspiring, and instructive. Many of Wilder’s fans, however, are unaware that she, too, survived a global pandemic, the influenza, or “Spanish Flu” pandemic of 1918, during the time she wrote regularly for the Missouri Ruralist farm journal. Although the other major global event of the times—World War I—tends to overshadow the pandemic in Wilder’s nonfiction columns, she occasionally made observations about the pandemic and its impact on her community, and she contracted influenza herself early in 1919. Wilder’s columns in The Missouri Ruralist, especially when revisited within the context of the global pandemic of our own times, offer readers more than just the warm feelings of comfort and nostalgia many fans tend to associate with the Little House books; Wilder challenges readers to consider what it means to act as a good citizen during times of national and international crisis. In her Missouri Ruralist articles, particularly those written between the time the United States entered World War I in April 1917 and the end of the pandemic in summer 1919, again and again Wilder calls upon readers of all ages to “do the right thing always” and elevate their consciousness as members of their community and citizens of their country.1 Writing from the vantage point [End Page 367] of the global crises of her own time, Wilder offers common sense advice that is deceptive in its simplicity and often as challenging to live by in our time as it was during Wilder’s: do one’s part and be a good citizen and neighbor. Far more than just folksy wisdom from an Ozark farmer, Wilder’s guiding principles are deeply rooted in her understanding of patriotism and citizenship. Before the pandemic of 2020 began, Laura Ingalls Wilder and her Little House stories had already been in the news several times in recent years. In 2018, for example, Caroline Fraser’s biography on Wilder, Prairie Fire: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, won the Pulitzer Prize. The following year Wilder made headlines again when the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) changed the name of its “Laura Ingalls Wilder Award” to the “Children’s Literature Legacy Award” due to concerns about controversial representations of American Indians and other minority characters in Wilder’s children’s texts (Chokshi). The ALSC’s decision acknowledged objections regarding the portrayal of minority characters—especially American Indians—in the Little House narrative that had been raised periodically across several decades. While some scholars analyzed the complex cultural elements in Wilder’s novels in the context in which they were written, or proposed suggestions for helping children learn from problematic cultural representations in the texts,2 others took a firmer stance or called for the books to be banned. Francis Kaye, for example, maintained that the Little House books were an “apology for the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Great Plains” (123), and Angela Cavendar Wilson described Wilder’s novels as a “narrative that transformed the horror of white supremacist genocidal thinking and the stealing of Indigenous lands into something noble, virtuous, and absolutely beneficial to humanity” (67). Prior to 2019 such criticism had received only moderate attention, but the ASLC’s decision shined a spotlight into the darkest corners of Wilder’s narrative more brightly than ever before and reignited discussion about cultural and ethnic themes in the novels. Predictably, “many educators, activists, and readers applauded the [ALSC’s] move” while others disagreed, and still more “found themselves somewhere in the middle, or unsure what to think” [End Page 368] (Fatzinger, “Learning”), but it appeared the time had finally arrived for...
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Feb 17, 2023
Suzanne Graham 
Open Access
