Glynnis MacNicol on WILDER
"There’s quite a lot of horror in these books."
Welcome back to SOURCE NOTES, and say hello to my old pal Glynnis MacNicol, whose new podcast, WILDER, was an Official Audio Storytelling Selection at the 2023 Tribeca Festival this month. Episode three is hot off the presses, and I’d recommend racing over to your podcast player of choice if you’re a fan of the Little House on the Prairie books, the classic television series of the same name, the old American West, the 1930s New York City publishing world, or any combination of these topics. Without further ado…
WILDER is a podcast about Laura Ingalls Wilder, but give me the more nuanced version.
I was a devoted Little House on the Prairie reader as a kid, and I also love the television show, which, I don't know if you remember this, but it was just on TV constantly.
Oh yeah. That and M*A*S*H.
Exactly! It's a real signifier of Gen X that, even if you weren't a fan of the show, everybody can recite scenes and episodes because it was on all the time. But I also loved the books, in which there is a not insignificant amount of racist depictions of Native Americans, in addition to a number of other problems. And so, as a lover of the books, I just was like, this seems like an opportune moment, based on a wide array of things that are happening in this country, reconsidering its history, to really reconsider Laura Ingalls Wilder, and try and understand who she was really, how these books came about, and why they occupy such an enormous place in our cultural history. The road into this was very personal. Who's this figure I loved so much, and should I love her? How do you love something that's problematic?
I’m pretty sure everyone else I've interviewed for this so far arrived at their subjects not really knowing anything about them. You on the other hand have been a Wilder obsessive since you were seven.
I started out saying I was obsessed. I've sort of downgraded myself to devoted. That said, because she has such an obsessed fan base, every expert we spoke to made me have a pre-call with them to make sure I knew what I was talking about to a degree that warranted their time. And without fail, every person said to me, wow, Glynnis, you really know what you're talking about! [😂] And I was like, oh, I guess I do!
Did you go back and re-read all the books?
I did. The interesting thing was, there was an edition released a couple years ago that had no illustrations. And actually, reading the books without the illustrations was fascinating, because there’s really, like, quite a lot of horror in these books that gets wrapped up in this coziness. Also, when I went back and re-read them this time, as a grown-up woman, I had a new appreciation for Ma. I was like, Oh my God, you're living in a dugout on the side of a hill, which, as a kid I thought sounded fantastic.
Part of your research involved a road trip to the various towns where Laura lived and where the books take place. How did that inform your storytelling?
All of the houses are basically in the Midwest, in these tiny towns that you have to drive three hours to get to from an airport. They hold these pageants for the first three weekends in July that reenact parts of the books that took place there, which is really moving. So we drove around to all these towns to attend the pageants and to interview the people who lived there, and the people who participate in the pageants. I think it's gotten to the point where there's no living memory of Laura or her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, but there are certainly people who had like, parents or grandparents that lived at the same time in the same place. And these places haven't changed. Like, obviously we live in the 21st Century, but the towns are the same size, the population is the same, the buildings look the same. It's very easy to find your way back in time. And people have really invested in these museums, and in recreating certain experiences.
What was the more archival component of the research like?
Her papers are at the Hoover Museum. We didn't go there. A number of the local museums, particularly Mansfield [Missouri] and De Smet [South Dakota], have a lot of artifacts. They really care for them. They have original Garth Williams illustrations. They have Pa’s fiddle. They have a lot of the items from the books. And so it gives you sort of an immersive experience. And there's a number of Laura Ingalls Wilder scholars that we talked to extensively. Like, really serious ones. Caroline Fraser, who won the Pulitzer. Pamela Smith Hill, who's written biographies and also annotated PIONEER GIRL, which was Laura's adult memoir. A woman named Nancy Tystad Koupal who ran the South Dakota Historical Society. They have all this information and knowledge that we were able to tap into, and they were really generous with their time.
As someone who went into this project impressing the scholars with her knowledge, what were some things you learned about Laura that you didn’t already know?
It was more how to think about her. Debbie Reese, who's a Native American scholar of children's literature, really frames the Little House books as propaganda. She said something to me about Indian mascots and sports teams. We had this conversation that led to thinking of Laura as a mascot for certain things, which really reframed my thinking of her significantly. In a larger sense, we talked to an environmental historian, because there's grasshopper plagues in the books, and we talked about why there were grasshopper plagues in terms of, you know, the Homestead Act and homesteading and how that led to farming of land in ways that it shouldn't have been farmed, which led to droughts that brought the grasshopper plagues, and the way we pulled up all of the grass that should have been there that resulted in environmental shifts. Also, the narrative of Manifest Destiny and how it's attached to the Little House books when, in fact, they didn't go west, they went north and south. Just this small reframing of these sweeping ways we understand American identity.
What about just, like, any juicy facts that you never knew?
They were more about Rose, her daughter. Rose was one of the most successful freelance writers in the twenties. The Saturday Evening Post serialized one of her stories for $30,000 in 1920s money, which is half a million dollars today. I think, too, understanding that Laura had a life of enormous poverty and deprivation, and sort of wove this magical tale from it, and Rose and her had this incredibly destructive, complicated relationship where, like, Rose—behind Laura's back—was taking Laura's story and writing her own novels with her own name on it. Like, this deceptive, very Mommie Dearest relationship that resulted in these amazing books, but was dysfunctional to the point where you think you're watching an episode of the Jerry Springer show. Also, Rose was in Paris literary circles in the twenties. She apparently went to an orgy. Like I just—I hope she participated. Someone needed to be having some fun! Rose was the real revelation of all of this actually.
Tell me about tracking down all the cast members from the show for interviews, and what you got out of those conversations.
They all participate in these sort of like, fan conventions still. Most of them do.
That’s very Twin Peaks-y.
They were all actually were happy to speak to us. Alison Arngrim, who played Nellie Oleson, she was the first one we got. She's incredible and has this amazing life story. Dean Butler, who played Almanzo, was really helpful. And then, I sort of got the impression that the word went out because the cast members speak to each other, and so we got everyone who's still alive, basically. The woman who played Miss Beadle [Charlotte Stewart], it turns out in real life she was like, a favorite of David Lynch's and once partied with Elvis on the Sunset Strip. Melissa Gilbert [who played Laura] took an entire afternoon to talk to us. We were really, really fortunate.
Did you go back and rewatch the show, too?
The show's still on TV! It’s fifty years old now, there's plenty of problems with it, but it's also compulsively watchable and comforting. And the interesting thing about it was, Michael Landon essentially took these books about a young girl and made it a show about him. There's a lot of Michael Landon half naked on the Prairie, but that's part of the reason it had the ratings it did.
So after doing all this research and reporting, and revisiting Laura and the books and the show, where did you end up in terms of how you think about her now?
I went into this thinking, I might hate her when I come out the other side. Like, that's a real risk you're taking. What actually happened was, I sort of found myself with great sympathy and admiration for her as an individual, with all of her faults, and really understanding the ways we have used her story to enforce certain narratives, and remove certain people from our history. But the person that really emerged from this podcast for us is Rose, who is so flawed, and uncomfortable, and—problematic is a word we use way too much, but she's deeply problematic. She's also so modern, so American that she is a little bit Gatsby-esque. The end result of the podcast is really understanding that Rose is the person in this scenario that you could pick up and put in any decade. She could walk into any of the cable news channels right now and get a job immediately. She's one of the founders of the Libertarian party. She was such a successful writer. She was deeply flawed and had a lot of mental health issues, but the amount of money she made—she later funded a school where the Koch brothers were educated, just in case you think we're all not living in Rose Wilder Lane's world. Rose had no children, so she adopted this grown man who she'd known since he was a kid as her heir, Roger Lea MacBride, who, when she dies, inherits the entirety of the Little House copyright and sells it to Michael Landon for the TV show, and uses that money to run for president on the Libertarian ticket. I don't think Rose has gotten her due.
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