washington, d.c., and around the country so you can make up your own mind. created by cable in 1979, c-span is brought to you by your local cable or satellite provider. c-span, you're unfiltered view of government. >> pull lit certify prize winner carolyn frasier discusses laura ingals wilder. the jefferson county, missouri, library hosted this event. >> good program in this series. we've kept ms. frazier very busy for the last two days and we've had wonderful crowds turn out each time. we sold out of the books. it's been really very satisfying

and to have c-span here taping this to show on television is just icing on the cake. my job tonight is to introduce the two people on the podium who will be conducting this conversation. jane henderson is the book editor at the st. louis post dispatch. she grew up in st. louis and graduated from the university of missouri columbia with degrees in journalism and english literature. she cut short her grad titstude work to go to work as a copy editor. after three years in the newsroom in connecticut, she returned to st. louis and has been an editor and writer with the post dispatch features

department for 30 years. she assigns and edits book reviews choosing from 300 or so new books each week. tonight she will be having a conversation with caroline frazier. caroline frazier is the editor of the library america edition of laura ingalls wilder, the little house books. her latest book is "prairie fires, the american dreams of laura ingalls wilder." it was one of the "new york times" ten best books of the year and won the 2018 pulitzer prize for biography. the national book critics circle award for biography and the bio

internationals 2018 plutarch award. carolyn frazier has traveled the country for the past two years giving talks on laura ingalls wilder, her daughter rose wilder lane and other topics to groups large and small at schools, mick libraries, conferences and universities. formally on the staff of the new yorker, carolyn frazier's articles have appears in the new york review of books, the atlantic, the los angeles times book review and the london review of books among other publications. she is also the author of "god's perfect child, living and dying in the christian science church" and dispatches from the conservation revolution. she was born in seattle, washington. in 1979, she graduated from mercer island high school. in 1987 she received her phd in

english and american literature from harvard. she lives with her husband in santa fe, new mexico. we would like you all to give her a very warm welcome tonight. [ applause ] >> i guess we're on. are you ready for us to go ahead? are you going to talk? >> thank you very much for having me and asking me to talk to carolyn frazier. it's really exciting. i think that probably most of us read "little house on the prairie" books when we were young and watched it on tv. i was getting to be a teenager at the time and sometimes was a

little skeptical and thought it was a little corny. we'll get back to that later. how long have you researched and studied and why did you start studying laura ingalls wilder? >> well, i discovered the books as a kid too and read them and loved them and thought they were fantastic. i think part of the reason i really loved them was because my grandmother and most of my grand parents had been farmers in the midwest. they were all immigrants mainly from scandinavian places and came to minnesota and wisconsin and were farming in the late 1890s in some of the same places, same areas that laura ingalls had lived. so i think it was really fascinating to me to discover these books that told stories that cast some light on what

they must have gone through. and then as an adult, i had an opportunity to review the first biography of rose wilder lane, laura ingalls wilder's daughter, who was at one time a pretty well known journalist. and in the '90s, a biography of her appeared and it was quite a scandal, actually, because it claimed that she was really the author. >> that was william holts. he was from the university of missouri, right? >> yeah. he taught at the university of missouri. it created quite a sensation. there were lots of headlines like little fraud on the prairie. >> right, right, right. >> so i reviewed that book. that's when i started looking at wilder's manuscripts and kind of

thinking about what an interesting story that was. >> her life? >> yes. >> i think you mention in your book that a lot of his assertions about rose writing the books actually is in the appendix, right? did he set out, do you think, to debunk it, or did he just somehow fall into that later? >> yeah. it was kind of an odd presentation in some ways because he seemed to have some real hostility towards laura as part of the story. i was very critical of her. yet he didn't bring up this thing that was a central part of the book. his book was called "the ghost in the little house" until really the appendix when he talks about it a little bit at the end. so it was a contentious kind of

argument to make. i ultimately came away from it feeling like there was a lot more to the story and that it was more complicated really. >> than that. >> than that. >> but when you earned your phd, i'm not sure how many people at harvard were studying laura ingalls wilder, were they? >> i'll tell you exactly how many. there were zero. and i didn't even think of it at that time. but i would never have proposed it because it was just not considered -- >> it wasn't considered academic, i would assume. >> yeah. >> but you kind of have made it academic in a way with your book, because you do incorporate so much history into the story, right? >> yeah. i mean, i later had the opportunity to edit a new version of the little house books, a new edition for the library of america.

that entailed writing some notes on the text explaining what certain historical events were for the reader. as i was doing that, i began to realize, you know, this stuff is really interesting. it's really interesting to me. so i began to hope that it would be potentially interesting to readers as well. >> and so how long did you study or what papers did you dig up? where did you find actual new information that hadn't been written about much before? >> well, scholars were starting to do, you know, related work. i mean, there's a fascinating paper, for example, about the ingalls family in kansas that i found. and there was another paper in a folklore journal about a

discussion of the origins of this phrase that occurs repeatedly in "little house on the prairie," the scurrilous phrase, the only good indian is a dead indian. that was in use -- >> at the time. >> -- because of an event that is also mentioned in the book called the minnesota massacre. so there was a whole history just about that one phrase that was so fascinating in terms of how that was used politically to justify the treatment of indians. so it seemed like a really rich history that really paid attention. >> some of the papers are in the herbert hoover library too?

are those rose's only, her papers? >> both. >> laura ingalls wilder's papers are in the herbert hoover library? >> yes. it's unusual, but the reason that came about was because when rose began her writing career -- and she really began as a yellow journalist -- she was writing these kind of questionable biographies of people. and she wrote one of herbert hoover. she was actually the first person to write a biography of hoover before he became president. >> and that was for adults? >> yes. >> it wasn't for kids? >> yes. but it was actually fictionalized. >> right. >> anyway, after her death, her papers ended up at the hoover presidential library as well as some of her mother's. >> isn't that interesting.

so what were some of the revelations that you found? i mean, obviously this book has won the pulitzer prize. people must have thought it was somewhat groundbreaking the way you pulled it together, all this information and how it related to history, i assume is why it won. >> i think it was a combination of establishing the importance of wilder and her work to both our literary history, but also our self image, the way that we see ourselves as the descendents of people who crossed the great plains and were involved in the settlement of the country. i think people are interested in

the kind of fantasies that we've created about our own past and sort of looking at how true are those stories that we tell ourselves. >> well, oh peop rk, other peop telling that story, though, before wilder, weren't they? >> oh sure, but i think that her story has become one of the central ways that children absorb, especially white children, the ideas about manifest destiny, which that's a concept that has been interrogated quite a bit and yet even still today you hear politicians and other people kind of endorsing this idea that

there was some grand plan for behind the whole idea of homesteading and so forth. >> it's been known that some of our presidents and presidential candidates have been big fans of "little house on the prairie." so was that a subtle message on their part, or was that just that that's what they were interested in? >> well, i think you're speaking about ronald reagan, who famously there was this anecdote about how he used to watch "little house on the prairie" in the white house with nancy, because i think he knew michael landon, who of course was the star and producer and director of the tv show. they were friends and landon was a big reagan supporter. i doubt very much whether reagan himself had read the books or

kind of had that sort of knowledge of the background of them. but yeah, i think there is maybe a little bit of a message in that, you know, that it was considered to be wholesome. >> wholesome and hard working. i guess an also kind of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, right? >> right. that whole notion of -- i mean, reagan famously said that, i mean, he obviously didn't support government. he said something famous about, you know, if somebody comes to you and says i'm here from the government and i'm here to help, you know -- >> you're supposed to be suspicious. >> yes, that that's like the worst thing you can hear. so there is a kind of kernel in the books of this sort of slightly anti-government.

>> well, i wasn't going to actually bring that up until a little later, but since we're talking about it, i remember reading an essay in the new yorker a few years ago, judith thurman, who -- the person i was talking about the presidential candidate, vice presidential candidate was sarah palin. it became associated with her. and judith thurman seemed to want to point out this idea that people are doing this all themselves and that laura ingalls wilder did it all herself wasn't entirely true, that she had had help, that the government had given or loaned them money to buy land, et cetera. i assume you've read that essay. >> mm-hm. >> how did you react to that and what is your interpretation of how much help or not from the

government did the ingalls get? >> yes. it's quite clear, actually, that laura herself had a really sort of contradictory reaction to the federal government because for a time in the 1920s she actually worked in a sense for the government. she was the secretary treasurer for the mansfield, missouri, federal farm loan program. so she helped farmers fill out paperwork and so forth to get these loans, which were beneficial for farmers. and she was very supportive of that program.

but then when the new deal came along, she was very opposed to that. she was opposed to people taking assistance or aid from the government, as many people were, many farmers were. >> it wasn't an unusual attitude to have, was it? >> no. >> i remember my own mother, who was born in the '20s and was one of a family of ten. i said why don't you like fdr or something? she said, because he made us feel poor. well, you were poor. during the depression with ten kids in the family, you were pretty poor. apparently a lot of people didn't like either to feel that or to feel like they were being told that. i don't know. >> yeah. it's kind of a baffling thing, because i think laura and certainly rose loved this idea

of complete independence and autonomy and they felt that, you know, farmers and people should never take things from the government. that was shameful, i think, to them. and yet, you know, when you look at the history of the ingalls family, they did accept help. they accepted help, for example, for mary, laura's older sister, who became blind as a teenager as a result of an illness. and mary was ultimately sent to college in iowa, which was a state program that paid for that. so they were willing to accept aid. in fact, i think she's really the only member of the family that was able, you know, to go

to college. so there was clearly flexibility in the original ingalls family. and for some reason i think that laura possibility because she was a little ashamed of some of her own reliance on her daughter financially developed a somewhat more rigid reaction. >> but when did she start writing or talking about that exactly? was it more like in the '20s and '30s? >> it was really with the advent of fdr. you don't see laura talking about it before then. >> tell us about charles ingalls. he took advantage of the homestead act, right? >> mm-hm. >> so what did that mean? i mean, how did that affect the family? >> well, and of course the homestead act was one of the biggest government give-aways in

history and the family was fine with that. he began -- you know, i mean, the homestead act is signed into law around 1862 by lincoln. and he takes advantage of it first in minnesota, although they don't really develop a homestead there. it really becomes a factor in their lives when they move onto the dakota territory, the town which the ingalls family did help found. i think it was from the beginning a real struggle for them, because it involved breaking land, you know, which cutting up the prayirie with a

breaking plough, which i think is fiendishly difficult work to cut through all the roots and tear off the grasses on the prairie. i think he really -- by this time, he's an older -- >> how old was he about? >> i'd have to look, but i think he was probably by that time in his, you know, late 30s, 40. >> and he'd probably been working -- >> yes. and he'd be working like a dog all his life. >> right. >> yeah. i think it really took it out of him. they were able to, you know, have a few good crops and so forth, but he wasn't really supporting the family just with the homestead. he had to go into town and build houses. he actually worked mainly as a carpenter in his later years. so it kind of shows you how

tough that was. i think it was easier for big families who had a lot of sons who could help out. >> and he didn't have any sons, right? >> sadly -- >> they had a boy. did he die? >> yes. laura's little brother freddie, who was born right after the locusts wiped them out in minnesota, and he died less than a year old. so there were no sons. mary had her disability. so it was a really pretty tough life. >> were they expected to pay back the government or prove the land, make sure that it was producing or something before they could really keep it? >> yeah. the process of what they called proving up on the land took about five years.

when you applied for a homestead, you filled out some paperwork and you paid a small f fee, you know, a few bucks. i think it was $10 for a while and then it gradually went up. and you did have to clear a certain number of acres and you had to build something. you had to build some kind of house or shanty or sod house or something. you had to prove that that was on the land. and you had to at the end of this process, at the end of five years, you had to get some friends or neighbors to help you fill out the paperwork and testify to this. you know, you had to prove that you had done this. and that had to be published in the local newspaper. that's why a lot of local newspapers were founded, was to

publish that paperwork. >> also probably to publish announcements perhaps even from the government and haland sales >> sure. >> but to play devil's advocate here, they're not getting anything really for free from the government because they're also doing the government a favor, aren't they, by moving west and kind of helping clear out the indians and create a farm? >> yeah. although the utility of some of those farms is and was questionable because especially on the great plains, in the dakotas, a lot of that land was not ideal for farming, especially what they called dry land farming, which was just going alone without irrigation, just relying on whatever mother nature provided.

so that land was marginal for farming. the government actually knew that when it participated in sending people out there or allowing the railroads to send people out there. because the government scientists like john wesley powell had basically told them, look, this is better for grazing than it is for farming and you actually need a lot more of it to be successful. you need a lot more than the traditional 160 acres that the homestead act provided to make a go of it. but they did not pay any heed to that. >> so what was their motive in that, do you think? >> i believe the motive was to help the railroad companies pursue their profits. >> oh really?

okay. so what about pa, though? i mean, we love pa, right? >> we do. >> because he loves laura. laura loves him. you know, we saw him on tv. but he sounds like he wasn't a very good, you know, provider. >> and laura knew that. you know, she admitted as much in a letter that she wrote to rose. she said something like, you know, pa was no farmer, he was no businessman, he was a poet and a musician. and i think she loved him for those qualities that were not that practical. she loved his charm and his -- he was very affectionate and loving father and he was, i think, a kind of very talented

musici musician. i think his fiddle playing was something that made their lives worth living, you know, even during the darkest hours which were pretty dark of the family. and so, you know, she came away from her relationship with him, i think, valuing him as a father even though he had in a lot of ways failed as a provider. >> right. was that unusual or did he have like a very short attention span or something? >> i think it was just kind of restlessness in one way. he loved to kind of be moving on. he had an itchy foot, you know. he clearly disliked it when an area became too settled and

overpopulated. he always wanted to keep going and moving onto the next place that was wilder. he loved to kind of wander by himself on these hunting forays. so i think it was just that he was not supremely dedicated to the domestic farming scene. >> well, what about his poor wife? i mean, was she doing the lion's share of the work at home? poor carolyn. she sounds a little resigned. >> well, i think in some ways she was, although that was the thing. >> common, yeah. >> that was the lot of many women at the time to hold down the fort. so i think that she was a very patient, very accepting person

in a lot of ways. it seems though that she did finally put her foot down when they got to decembismat and sai further. i think she did that in part for the children that she wanted them to receive some kind of education. >> how much education did laura get? >> for the time, she got pretty good. i mean, she never actually graduated from what they called high school then, because she left to become a teacher herself. and i think she always felt a little badly about that. but she was quite well read for a person of her age. >> how did she get books? did they have a library there? >> they never had a library while she was there. she would write later in life to school children and talk about

how wonderful it was now that kids had access to libraries. but they had a few books. you know, they really valued literature. i think charles ingalls for the son of farmers was a very literate man and he enjoyed reading and so did caroline ingalls. so i think reading at home was something they did all the time, reading aloud. >> he was a bit of a story teller too, wasn't he? >> oh yes. and i think he would hear stories down at the hardware store. he'd sit around with his pals and get the news and love to read newspapers and was a great story teller. she always said that once he had heard a tune played on the fiddle, that he would always remember it and could reproduce it. so he must have had quite an ear.

>> and how long would her parents live? when did he pass away? >> well, laura and her husband and daughter ended up leaving dismat in 1894 to come to the ozarks in missouri after a number of misfortunes that they suffered. and that was actually the last time that laura would see her father until he was on his death bed in 1902. >> so about eight years? >> yeah. so she did not -- she was not able to see him or be with him until the very end. he died, you know, in his -- i think he was 63 or something like that. caroline ingalls lived on for some time in dismat. she and mary lived together and

caroline ingalls died in 1924, i think and mary in 1928. >> that's before laura made it big, right, before laura published her first book? >> right, because laura doesn't really start writing the books until the '30s. she writes first an autobiography that was not published during her life around 1930. >> "pioneer girl" is that it? >> yes. it's recently been published by the south dakota historical society. >> right. and it's well annotated, as i remember. >> yes. it's beautifully produced and annotated. >> they put a lot of historical information in that too, i think. >> yes. >> but her other sisters, carrie and grace, they didn't end up as well as the wilder family, right? they still had some struggles to

the end or -- >> yeah. you know, they were quite poor. carrie was a kind of enterprising young journalist for a while. she worked for some newspapers and ended up marrying a miner in the keystone area. and grace got married to a fellow not far away from dismat in a little town called manchester. but they were very poor. and grace had some health problems all her life. >> did laura ever give them money, do you think? >> it ie's unclear. i don't think she ever really helped support them. i do think in later years during the depression, she may have given them some clothes and other things. but i don't think that she really financially helped

support them. >> how was laura's marriage to almonzo? >> yes. they had a terrible time right after they got married, they were heavily in debt and lost all these crops. and then they fell ill with diphtheria which is a very serious illness at the time, no treatment for it. and he suffered a stroke while he was recovering from the diphtheria, which would last -- you know, the effects -- >> he was young when he had the stroke or relatively young. >> yes. he was a young vital man and after the stroke he had difficulty walking really for the rest of his life. i mean, he could walk and he could work. he worked very hard, i think. but i think it was a real

struggle physically for him and he couldn't do the kind of hard labor that he'd done. >> so they came to missouri. i think that was something about apples. >> the land of the big red apples. that was how the railroad advertised the ozarks and especially the area where the wilders ended up moving around mansfield. like all railroad come-ons it was to some extent a bit of a fantasy. but there were orchards and so forth that were being established. that was actually one of the things they did with their property outside of mansfield, is to plant a lot of apple trees that were pretty successful for a while. i think a lot of that was wiped out during the dust bowl years,

sadly. >> i mean, we don't think of the ozarks or at least i don't as great farmland either. i mean, it's pretty rocky. >> it is. you talk to people there now and almost all of them have stories about rock picking that somebody would pay them 50 cents to go pick up rocks in their fields. so rocky ridge was the name of their farm. i don't think it was ever, you know, hugely -- i think they grew oats, they grew stuff for their livestock. they did have quite a lot of livestock at one point. >> she was really proud of her chickens. >> yes. she was very skilled with poultry and developed all these ways to keep chickens productive and healthy. that was a huge boon to them. and one of the things that she began writing about for

newspapers was poultry and how to be successful. she was very distressed that alm almonzo was kind of dismissive of the money she made off of poultry. so she sat down and added up all the money she was making and proved to him -- >> that it was worthwhile. >> yeah. >> what paid the bills before she the book sold? what paid the bills mostly? >> oh, they had all kinds of jobs. when they first went there, almanzo was helping deliver freight from the train depo. she worked for an oil company doing the books. and they took in borders. she had quite a little business doing that for a while. then these various other things

came along. she had the farm loan work. and at that same time she was also starting to write for newspapers. she wrote for the missouri ruralist, a very well known and well respected farm newspaper. that's really where she kind of serves her apprenticeship as a writer and started writing about her family, her father, her sister mary. >> oh she did, she wrote about them. >> mm-hm. >> and people always liked family stories in general, but how did she get that job, do you know? >> yeah. well, she and rose kind of came up together. you know, they had this famous trip -- laura took a trip in 1915 to visit her daughter rose who at that time was living in san francisco. she'd married this kind of never do well guy in san francisco.

san francisco, of course, was a kind of hot bed of yellow journalism at the time. she started working on one of the women's pages of the san francisco bulletin, wrote fiction and some nonfiction that actually was fiction. at the same time she's telling her mother, look, you can make so much more money writing for a newspaper than you can with chickens, you know. so stop doing that. >> oh yeah, we know that's still the case. >> so that was how they got into it. laura kind of apprenticed herself to her daughter for a while. then she was on her way. and the ruralist gig was quite a

lucky break for her, because they really valued her. you know, she was sort of their woman columnist for a long time. >> do we know how much she was paid for those? >> i don't think we do. >> do you want to talk more about rose? because rose is a character and, you know, she contributes quite a bit in the book, but she also sounds a little unsteady to me, a little moody at the very least. >> yeah. yeah, rose had a hard life in some ways. you know, from a young child she had a lot of trauma in her life because of all those things that happened, her parents' illness and her father's disability. they lost another child that she didn't even remember for a long

time. and the house burned down, the home that he had built for his wife. so i think a lot of that left her with, you know, all this sort of confused feelings of responsibility. so as an adult, you can kind of see all this trauma playing out in her life and she certainly did get severely depressed at various periods and suicidal sometimes. so she did seem to suffer a lot. and her relationship with her mother was pretty rocky too. >> they had a lot of back and forth. >> yeah. >> but they must have also sort of supported each other, because she sent -- didn't she help send her mother's first manuscript to a publisher and sort of coached her through what to do? >> oh yeah. i often say that i don't think

we would have the little house books if it weren't for rose, because rose had a lot of experience as a writer. she had a lot of polish and professionalism. she knew publishing people. she knew a lot of editors in new york. she knew editors at magazines. so she was really kind of the driving force pushing her mother to take advantage of these memories that she'd been hearing about these stories about the pioneering days all her life. and she knew that there was some money to be made off of that, you know, that there was a real market for that. >> and possibly, i don't know, the fact that the country was becoming more modern made people nostalgic or interested in those older stories, i assume. >> definitely. you can really see that kicking

in during the depression, that the stories in farmer boy were obviously really appealing to a public that doesn't know where their next meal is coming from. you know, these stories about wonderful farms and these amazing meals that they used to prepare, farmer boy is full of accounts of eating pie for breakfast. you know, it was just the kind of wonderful nostalgia for a time of plenty during a time when people were desperate. >> i mean, obviously these books took a little hib liberty with history, right? but so did the tv series, probably even more. and maybe not that we should look to tv series for our

history lessons, but a lot of people watched that show. so they probably got a pretty good idea that this was sort of how it was. what were some of the things that it got wrong, do you think? >> the tv show? >> mm-hm. >> more or less everything. >> really? >> i think that the testiv show so made up out of whole cloth, if you look at it now, it really was more about the 1970s than it was about the 1870s. and this was true of almost everything coming out of hollywood. it's not like that was unusual. >> right. >> westerns and so forth are notoriously fan lly fantasies o life was supposed to be like. but yeah, i mean, the way that charles ingalls was portrayed

for example by michael landon, i have a picture in my slide show of michael landon with his shirt off, you know, and his chest shaved. >> that wasn't pa, huh? >> that probably was not happening a lot on the prairie, i'm thinking. i could give you a million examples. >> i think you also wrote that they didn't wear shoes to walk around or go to town or go to school, right? >> right. >> but michael landon didn't want them to have -- >> michael landon really did emphasize the success of the family. so his kids did wear shoes and they had toys that the real ingalls girls, i think, coveted and would have loved to have had but didn't have. >> right. i don't remember every detail of

the tv series, but laura ingalls -- how did it show the indians and how did that compare to how the indians were portrayed in the books? there's some mixed sort of messages there, it seems. >> yeah. i mean, i'm aware of just a handful of instances, especially one episode of the tv show that showed what was meant to be an indian boy and laura's interaction with him. and i think these were, again, just ideas of michael landon, who apparently also repurposed a lot of bonanza episodes. >> did he? >> yes. i don't really think it had anything to do with historical reality or even with wilder's own memories, you know, that

come through so strongly in "little house on the prairie" which she called her indian country novel and which does portray a number of encounters that she and her family had with indians in kansas, which are, you know, today when we read them, they're problematic. there's a certain amount of racist language and attitudes on display in that novel. >> it's not laura necessarily who shows those, is it? i mean, her mother is quite afraid of indians. >> her mother is certainly. and a number of times when she uses this inflammatory language, it's given to another character. it's not something laura is saying or her father is saying. in fact, her father disagrees

with it vocally. but i think nonetheless there are attitudes and expressions of how people see and interpret indians and indian behavior that would never be published today. >> no. >> and so it's interest iing to look at that novel as an expression of that time. i think it remains one of her most important novels, but do i think you have to understand it in its historical context. >> it's really a page turner, i think, that book is. i mean, there's always stuff happening. there's wolves, there's endians. there there's a lot of stuff. as you know, the american library association a couple years ago renamed what was the laura ingalls wilder award in

part because of this concern over a portrait of the indians, right? how do you feel about that? do you think that was necessary? >> i think it was necessary for them, because that's what they decided to do. i understand why they did it. they were the institution that developed the award. they owned it, they had the right to change the name of it. but they didn't withdraw it. they didn't withdraw it from wilder h eer herself, who was t first recipient of it. they made a very public statement saying they hope that children and adults would continue to read the books. so it wasn't intended as an act of censorship, although i think the general public somehow interpreted it, at least in some

quarters, as that, which i think is too bad, because that wasn't the intent. >> but they still have a theodore guisele award, right? >> they do. >> he was more explicitly anti-semitic than laura was in her novels. >> yes. he, in fact, published during the period of the second world war a number of racist images. so it's complicated. they actually have, i think, a different set of problems with that award based on how it was set up and their arrangement with the family. i don't know the full story behind that, but i think there is some complications involved with that. but as far as wilder is

concerned, it had been something that they had been discussing for years. i know librarians had been concerned about it because there had been children in communities in south dakota and in other states in the plains and the west who had actually, you know, come home from school in tears, you know, because they had been reading "little house on the prairie" and had read these kind of inflammatory things. so i think it was a recognition that some of the books have become, you know that their portrayal of indians is complex and disturbing and that that has to be acknowledged, that there has to be context provided for these books if they're going to continue to be taught in schools. >> how does that compare to,

say, other sort of classic children's books, though? i mean, would every one of them pass the sort of test of being -- >> oh surely not. there have been many instances of this. you know, my mother was a kindergarten teacher and taught first grade. i remember her distress when she had to stop reading "little black sambo" to kids. this is something that has been happening and people reevaluate classics all the time and begin either withdrawing them from young children. i mean, i think that the issue is children. it's particularly notable and disturbing when it's children who are the audience for these

works. and i think for adults, it's a totally different situation, you know. i mean, people are still reading and discussing huckleberry finn in literature courses. but those are adults so it's a different set of standards. >> hopefully they have more knowledge to put things in context, i would assume. >> sure. >> would you have them maybe edit or change anything now in the little house books to make that go away? >> no. i'm never a fan of -- and i don't think it's necessary. i don't think it solves a problem. i think you just need to either reconsider who's reading the

books and what age they are when they read the books and provide context. i mean, i'm not an educator. i'm not somebody who has those kinds of skills, but i just think it's an issue with, you know, all of literature from previous periods. >> which by the way i think when my children were young, there was a new picture book that came out that was like little black sambo. it was the story. it wasn't called that, of course. and it had different illustrations that were more respectful and it was a darling little book. i read it to my daughter a lot. i can't remember what the name of it is now. they called him something slightly different but i think it was based on that. it's just that it had been reillustrated so that it told

the story more kind of respectfully. anyway, so it's probably about time for other people to think of some questions. there are microphones over here and you'll have to get up to go to them because they don't roam around the room. so would anyone else like to ask caroline frazier a question? >> hello. this is an easy one. do you have a favorite novel by laura ingalls wilder? if so, which one and why? >> okay. yes. i've always really loved "the long winter" which is her novel about the family's survival of this hellacious from 1880 to

1881. it describes how the ingalls family was kind of trapped in their house in dismat for months at a time as the food dwindled and dwindled. you know, they were down to their last sack of potatoes, i think, when this young man named almanzo wilder with another man in town made a desperate journey to get the seed from a farmer outside of town. they risked their lives to go find that weed. this all happened. it's beautifully written. it's an extraordinary survival tale and it's just very evocative of the kind of terror and numbness that overtakes you,

you know, when you're subjected to these kind of conditions. and then, of course, it all comes right in the end through this act of heroism by the man she eventually marries. so it's a wonderful novel. >> were they happy for the rest of their lives, do you think? >> right, yes. i do think that they were. i think their marriage was difficult in the ways that many marriages are, you know, that they had sometimes real sort of power struggles. i think laura was a really forceful person. she had a hot temper. she would often fly off the handle. i think she was quite quick to anger. i think she knew this about herself and sort of regretted it. and yet he was very patient with her and he would say, i think, later in life that, you know, he

knew that about her when he married her. and i think that he admired her kind of fire, her fiery personality. i do think that they loved each other deeply. i don't think it was always easy, though, for them. >> do you have a favorite little house site? some people go on sort of pilgrimages to different locations. do you have a favorite? >> there's something wonderful at all of them, but one of my favorites is the plum creek site. the town of walnut grove is quite interesting in itself and there's a lot there. but there's this area where the family dugout was right next to plum creek. you can still see the depression in the earth where the dugout must have collapsed at one point.

and it's such a lovely place. the owners of it have really kind of preserved the character of it. so you can kind of see the views that they must have seen and take in a little bit of the character of the land. and the two sisters had a competitive culture, and what they were younger, mary was pias and proper and a little bit prim which was something that laura always resented.

i think it was true and a difference between them. then when mary fell ill and nearly died and then became blind, laura was then forced into the role that she had never contemplated for herself which was to become a teacher. that is what mary had been intending to do, and her parents had always hoped that mary would teach and be able to make a little money that way. and so it was a huge, i think, shock for laura to then step into the shoes. it showed her, she said that, you know, she really could do something that she didn't want to do. she was never comfortable, you know, doing that so young, and yet she did it do it. she forced herself to do it.

it was really hard. for her to step up in front of kids who were bigger than she was. >> and she was a small person. >> yes, she was. >> and wasn't she just under 5'0" or something? >> yes, under feet five. so i think that relationship stayed with her really for the rest of her life even though she and mary were separated for most of their adult lives. i think that some of the childhood resentments stayed with her, too. she would describe them with such feeling later in life that it was clear that she remained the kind of of created her love of fairness and her intolerance of injustice, you know.

she was quick to be angry about things that she felt to be an injustice, and that came from her competition with mary. >> hi. i really enjoyed the talk so far, and i had a couple of questions, but i will do the one. i know that you said that you loved the books. how did you get into researching like you did, because i know that most people, you read the books and you love the books and you don't go as far as where you have to research the people for years. so what led you to doing what you have done? >> to me, the historical background of the ingalls' family was fascinating and to me it was like the more i wanted to know more like putting together a puzzle and there were missing pieceses that i wanted to find the answers to.

and so i think that was a big part of it. also you said that you didn't feel that anybody at harvard would study this, but there is an importance to the books they really deserved attention and explanation and analysis in a way they hadn't, not that there are not lots of fans, because there are really dedicated fans and amateur historians and people who have studied the books, and they have contributed an enormous amount as well. so, i wanted to give them credit as well, but i really felt like it was a subject that the general public would respond to.

and the attention would be paid with new fan, because it is okay not to be a fan of the "little house" books, which i completely understand and it is totally legitimate. !h] i think they that are important to shape our history of homesteading and farming and we need to know more about those things. >> did you have another question? >> yes, i will, because nobody else is coming up, but how does it make you feel knowing that your book is as big as it is, and how does an author feel knowing that the book is huge out there? >> well, it is enormously --

>> i am curious what authors think like that. >> and it is enormously gratifying to get a response because most writers like myself have spent many hours sitting alone in a room, and so it is wonderful to meet readers and know reader and hear their responses a their enthusiasm for the topic. >> were you surprised when you won the pulitzer? >> i was shocked. deeply, deeply shocked, yes. very surprised. >> next question? >> yes, i read that charles' lineage stopped with rose, and

did he not have another sister? >> no, carrie, the man she married had a couple of children before they married. but she had no children of her own, and mary had no children, and grace had no children. rose likewise did not have any surviving children. rose did have a habit of casualty adopting several young people in a kind of temporary way. and one of those people eventually became the inheritor of the estate a fellow named roger mcbride she met when she was the 14-year-old son of her editor at readers digest, and he became her adopted grandson. and inherited the estate when

she died. >> i have a question and comment, and i loved the long winter and my view is skewed with that lazy couple. but whenever i read those books, and well, still do, but i always wondered and i knew that laura was born after the civil war, and it was never mentioned like charles never apparently fought in the war, and it seems to me from the book that it sort of was it when the draft came that he just sort of disappeared for a year? is that kind of? >> well, that is an interesting period.

it remains a question of why he did not serve. charles and caroline married in 1860, and she had a brother who die died. i am just speculating, but it is possible that she discouraged his participation, but yes, they do drop off of the map briefly at this time and turn up in peppen, wisconsin, and that is an area where a lot of men were in wisconsin were kind of drifting off into the lumber

mills and drifting off in a state although the state of wisconsin sent more men to fight in the war than almost any other state. >> really. >> so it is, you know, it is tantalizing and interesting to think about what that might have been like and why none the i ingalls boys except for two youngest ended up volunteering late in the war why none of them served. >> in mansfield, didn't this roger take over the royalties of the book, and never did, but

they got a lump sum? >> yes, laura's will did leave the wright county library, i think it was, the proceeds for the royalties. she left them all to rose for rose's lifetime, but then once rose had died, it was supposed to go to the library, and he engaged in some legal machinations to prevent it from happening, but after he died, there was a reckoning when the library did get a settlement for a fairly substantial sum. so, yeah, it was a little, a little shady. >> yeah. i think that there is a question. >> i am sorry, because i am not

american, but, you know, "little house on the prairie" and that tv series kept a benchmark in our country. i was a big fan of it, and so can i request something, because i believe that, you know, a majority of the people here, and i can take a, and can you take a photograph at the end of this event? >> he wants a photograph. and she was going to sign, but there is no books to sign. so you are going sign the -- >> no, no, i would be happy to. >> >>er, that is terrific. really cute. do we have other question, because i could ask questions all night long, but if you -- i don't know, pam? here is someone.

>> so you mentioned this in the beginning about the possibility that the one author brought up that rose really was the author of the books, and i read the annotated bibliography, and it took me forever, but i read it. when you read that, you can see where she sent things to rose and rose kept sending them back, and saying no, do this, this, this, and so it was, it was more like rose was the editor than the author, and so i think that to me, it is always going to be laura ingalls wilder's books. >> yes, they definitely had a collaboration is what people often call it. i think it was mother/daughter/writer, collaborator, but rose contributed more than a standard editor in new york might have

done at this time. so, it is worth studying and talking about, and i don't think that we are done with that even today. and there are certain stages of the manuscripts that appear to be missing. so, it really does show you a lot about their process when you are looking at what remains. i think that though that it is clear that laura did produce the raw material that became the books, and rose brought a lot to it. in the editing. >> can you compare her writing in the novels to the farm writing and tell if there is a substantial difference of the tone or the language that she uses or her style of writing? >> yeah. there are some really interesting moments in the farm columns, and also in the speech

that she delivered about her work which was entirely hers. rose didn't contribute to it at all, and she gave the famous speech at the detroit book fair about why she had written the books, and she was only halfway through at that point, but i think that you can tell that she had her own voice, and she had her own style which is very different than rose's. you know, she had a very plain-spoke plain-spoken and not dramatic, where as rose's are more melodramatic and more polished at times, and so it is possible to discern the different voices.

a lot of what makes the "little house" books is laura's voice and perceptions and memories of what she saw and experienced. >> i have two completely unrelated questions. the first is the books are somewhat fictionalized, and how much would you say is history and how much is fiction? >> i think that what is in the books is factual and laura really cared about getting it right and describing things quite accurately for example, you know, the famous locust plague on the banks of plum creek, and very accurate description. what she left out was what happened to the family after

that event. you know, the period of kind of financial collapse and homelessness and drifting around, and so, a lot of how she is changing her story is leaving things out. that she did not want to write about that she thought were not appropriate for children. >> and the second question regarding her estate. is any part of the estate used to maintain any of the sites of the various places like mansfield or the plum creek? >> i know that roger mcbride did give generously to some of the sites, including, you know, mansfield and he was instrumental in helping them to set up a museum, and i think

that he also contributed items from his, from rose's possessions, to dismet and i know that dismet has some her furniture and other materials, and things that he had. i don't think that. i don't know whether he set up any kind of permanent bequest, but i know that he did give them money. i think that many of them struggle for funding and it is too bad that there is not a kind of national support for those sites, because like a lot of literary sites, they do need help. >> doesn't -- didn't mansfield have plans to build another building or something recently? >> yes, they did.

>> did they open it now? >> a couple of years ago now, yes. they have a new museum now. >> any other questions? okay. we will wrap it up then. we want to thank you for coming, and let's give a round of applause applause. all week we are featuring american history tv programs as preview of what is available every weekend on c-span3. lectures in history, american artifacts, real america, the civil war, oral histories, the presidency, and special event coverage about our nation's history. enjoy american history tv now and every weekend on c-span3. next, historian david

pietrusza describes the 1919 world series fix which became known as the "black sox" scandal. he will talk about how it shaped what happened. he is the author of the criminal genius who fixed the 1919 world series and the judge and jury about baseball's first commissioner. >> okay. i'd like to welcome you all to the village library in cooperstown. i'm with the director here dave kent, and we are fortunate here tonight to have esteemed historian and award winning writer who is not only a historian, but he is very into baseball, and so it a good combination, because right now, it is the 100th anniversary of one of the mostnf