Ingalls and Wilder on women voting

I don't have the book with me today, but near the beginning of Little Town on the Prairie there's a dialog at the Ingalls home on the scandal of alcohol and the negative influence of DeSmet's two saloons. Caroline remarks that if women just had the vote, they'd outlaw such things. Interestingly enough, by the time she penned these words, Laura had already seen women get the vote, and--in at least one case--vote to make their city even wetter than before. Even without women voting, though, Dakota Territory was able to outlaw the retail sale of alcohol--and it was one of the first laws passed in South Dakota, the new state of which DeSmet, with its two holders of $400 retail liquor licenses, formed a part.

In her Little-House takeoff Free Land, Rose Wilder Lane gives us the following conversation involving Eliza Wilder, Almanzo's bossy big sister, as they travel an inconveniently long distance to file their respective claims for free land:

"Well, I must say!" said Eliza. "It comes with a pretty grace from you men, finding fault with what you do yourselves." If women had the vote, she stated, things would be done differently.
"That shows how much you know," David retorted. Somebody in Washington decided where to put the land offices. [sic] "If you think voting has anything to do with it, you've got a bee in your bonnet."

Finally, another opinion along these lines was put in the mouth of Mrs. McKee in These Happy Golden Years:

"I don't know why the law makes us do this," she said. "What earthly good it does, to make a woman stay on a claim all summer."
"It's a bet, Pa says," Laura answered. "The government bets a man a quarter-section of land, that he can't stay on if for five years without starving to death.
"Nobody could," said Mrs. McKee. "Whoever makes these laws ought to know that a man that's got enough money to farm, has got enough to buy a farm. . . . All it means is, his wife and family have got to sit idle on it, seven months of the year. I could be earning something, dressmaking, to help buy tools and seeds, if somebody didn't have to sit on this claim. I declare to goodness, I don't know but sometimes I believe in women's rights. If women were voting and making laws, I believe they'd have better sense."

Alas, good sense is not the prerogative of either sex, and whatever sense people have tends to leave them once they get behind the reins of power. The problem here was one of the government giving away something that wasn't theirs to take, and yet the recipients of the government's largesse must grumble and complain about how much work it is to grab it before somebody else does, and then to hang on to it long enough to keep anyone else from being able to take it away.

The non-combatant American

An earlier post reflected on the European desire to kill or be killed for the motherland. Rose Wilder Lane very elegantly explained that this ideal never became part of the American psyche:

War has always been the primary function of Old World Government. Men living in the Old World use a large part of their energy in killing men and in destroying food, shelter, and all other necessities of human life. Americans in general do not understand this. Neither do most continental Europeans understand the American attitude toward war.

When I was living in Albania I had a friend who was one of the finest persons I ever knew. He was an Italian of English ancestry. His mother and his maternal ancestors for many generations had been English. He was fourteen and his brother was nine, when their parents were drowned at sea. The boys had no other near relatives and from that time they were inseparable. They stayed together in schools and universities; they got from the King himself a special permission to do their military service together. They went together to Argentine, and in 1915 returned to join their regiment. They were both wounded at Caporetto, and abandoned on the field. My friend reached his brother but was too weak to do anything for him. The brother died during the third night. My friend's wounds still required him to return to hospitals at intervals.

For weeks I tried to explain to him the American attitude toward war. He could not understand it. I was confused, myself, for like most Americans I had taken it for granted that no one wants war. My friend had the best European schooling, Italian, German, and English. He was widely and accurately informed; he was intelligent, open-minded, and eager to understand my puzzling country. The clue, he said, was in our attitude toward war. It baffled him.

"War has always been the primary function of Old World Government." He laughed at the superficial European belief that Americans are mere dollar-chasers. He knew several Americans intimately. He did not find them mercenary, nor cowardly, nor weak, nor — exactly — unpatriotic. American patriotism is peculiar, he said. Americans never say "my fatherland," "my motherland." What a peculiar attitude toward your country, to call it Uncle Sam. And notice, he said, the tone in which you say "Uncle Sam," or, "The States." It is affectionate; it has a sound of — what should he say? equality? tolerance? — as if a confident young man were speaking of a good old uncle. That is not the way in which a man speaks of his country, the fatherland, the motherland, the parent whose child he is. And then, the curious American talk about war. He did not believe that it was entirely hypocritical. But would I explain the facts?

The United States are made by unprovoked military aggression. They attack the Indians and take half a continent; they attack Mexico and take Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California; they attack Spain, and take Cuba; they attack the Filipinos and take the islands. Then why don't they hold and subdue Mexico, when American troops have taken Mexico City? Why don't they attack Canada while the mother country is embroiled in Europe? Why do the United States reverse all history, and fight for an older empire instead of helping to dismember it? Now (in 1928) the United States are the strongest world power; why do they no have compulsory military training? They have used military power to dictate to all Europe; then why has the army no influence in our foreign policy? Why do the sons of our upper classes go into business or professions, why not into the army and navy? Why do Americans not honor their great Generals above such men as Edison and Hoover? Why, when General Pershing is an American, do Americans make a small-town editor the President of the United States?

One morning his servant brought a note, asking if he might see me at once, for only a moment. He came in, excited, apologizing for calling at that hour, "but I could not wait to tell you! It came to me in a flash, suddenly, just now. It is materialism! As you have said, Signora: Americans hate war because it kills men and destroys property. Suddenly, it comes to me. What are lives and property? Material things. All men die, time destroys all property. Lives and property have no value. The immortal value is the soul of a nation, and war regenerates the nation's soul. Americans cannot see spiritual values. That is it, Signora; yes, yes, that is the truth. Deep down, at base, au fond, your countrymen are pure materialists. You see only the material world; you cannot see what war is, because it is spiritual."

He had seen his brother die at Caporetto, and he died in Ethiopia, a fine, brave, honorable man, who believed with his whole mind that an individual is a cell in the body of The State, that Authority controls all human beings, and that his own life had no value whatever but service to Immortal Italy.

That is the cause of war.

Men who have that pagan belief will always make war. They must make war, because of the nature of human energy. Not knowing that individuals control themselves, they do not recognize and accept that responsibility; they try to make their own energy work on a false basis. It will not work on a false basis, and one of the results of trying to make it do so, is war.

--Rose Wilder Lane, from The Discovery of Freedom

Rose Wilder Lane on the Right to Vote

The White Man is on a Laura Ingalls Wilder kick right now, so the next few posts will probably be on that general topic. I wrote earlier on Laura's views on voting as of 1919. I'll get back to her later, but for now, here's what her daughter Rose wrote in the early 1940's, in her epic work The Discovery of Freedom, p. 202ff (emphasis mine):

THE RIGHT TO VOTE
WHEN American politicians took the election of the President of the United States into their hands, they had no idea that this would be the result. No one then imagined that everyone should vote, or ever would vote. In all the States, voting was restricted.

Today, voting is an American superstition. Hardly anyone ever thinks about it. Americans take it for granted that every human being has a natural right to vote. Of course this is not true. No one has a natural right to vote. Everyone is born with inalienable liberty, but nobody is born with an inalienable ballot. . . .
Then what is the actual value of an American's legal right to vote? The Constitutions restrict this Government. Voting can restrict it further, but only when voters elect delegates to conventions to make their Constitutions stronger. Or, when voters have an opportunity to elect men who will repeal laws and reduce Government's area of activities.

Voting for Congressmen can not repeal laws. Voting can never control Government. Men in public office are individuals, and nothing outside an individual can control him. The Constitutions limit the time that a man may stay in office, but during that time he controls himself. At the end of that time, a majority of voters can put him out of office. So an American's legal right to vote can be used as a threat to office-holders who want to be re-elected. 

But a majority of voters can never use that threat. A majority can not even know what their Congressmen are doing. Human beings must use their energies in productive work, and they want to, and they do. The more freely they can act, the more energetically they improve their living conditions, and the less attention they give to anything else. The fact is that Americans pay no attention to Government so long as it does not interfere with them. Normally they never think of it except at election time. Americans are busy; not half of them even know the names of their Congressmen. Ask the next forty persons you meet, if you doubt it.

So the threat of the vote does not operate to restrict Government and protect human rights. The fact is that pressure groups use it to increase Government and restrict the use of natural human rights.
Every American politician is constantly assailed by small groups fiercely determined to make the men in this Government exceed the Constitutional limits of their use of force. Stupid men believe that force can improve other men's morals; they want force to stop men's drinking, or smoking, or gambling. Superstition clouds their minds; they imagine that force can produce economic results; they demand that police clubs control the growth of crops, and the making of goods, and wages and prices and trade. They dream that because a law can make any action a crime, it can stop that action. (Though they know nothing of the history of smuggling and graft, they should be able to remember the law that stopped drinking in these States.)




To these ardent reformers who want to do good (as they see good) by using force upon the greatest number of their inferiors, add the groups of those who want to rob others by force without risking going to jail. Since Government has the only legal use of force, all these groups try to persuade and compel the men in Government to use force as these reformers and these thieves want it used. Their weapon is a threat to use the vote, at the next election, to put out of office the politicians who resist them.


And whenever they succeed, and do increase the Government's use of force, they reduce the area of every American's free action. They decrease the productive use of energy in this country. And they weaken the only legal protection of every American's property and liberty and life. Groups have been trying to do this ever since the first Congress met. The Constitutions, and the morality and patriotism of a few politicians—who are almost never thanked—have all this time protected the natural human rights of Americans, from these pressure-groups who use the threat of the vote.

The majority of Americans can not use that threat. They haven't time, they are too busy, they are making their livings and supporting the Government; they can not spend their time in Washington or in their State capitals, watching Congressmen. Now and then, in a crisis, they can send up a roar from this whole country, and they do. But their voting can not undo anything that Congressmen have done.

If there is a candidate who promises to repeal laws and to reverse a course of action begun by men in Government, then voting can elect him. But electing him is no guarantee that he will keep his promise. He may not be able to keep it. He may be one of those politicians who make promises only to get votes. An average citizen has no means of knowing a candidate personally; no means of knowing how honorable he is.  In any case, while he is in office he controls himself; the voters have no control over him.

On the whole, of course, this is fortunate. For why does anyone suppose that a majority of citizens should control their Government? No one imagines that a majority of passengers should control a plane. No one assumes that, by majority vote, the patients, nurses, elevator boys and cooks and ambulance drivers and interns and telephone operators and students and scrubwomen in a hospital should control the hospital. Would you ever ride on a train if all passengers stepped into booths in the waiting-room and elected the train crews by majority vote,as intelligently as you elect the men whose names appear in lists before you in a voting booth?

Then why is it taken for granted that every person is endowed on his twenty-first birthday with a God-given right and ability to elect the men who decide questions of political philosophy and international diplomacy? This fantastic belief is no part of the American Revolution. Thomas Paine, Madison, Monroe, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, did not entertain it for a moment. When this belief first affected American Government, it broke John Quincy Adams' heart; to him it meant the end of freedom on earth; it made him doubt the goodness of his God.

Laura Ingalls Wilder on women voting

For having died fifty years ago, Laura Ingalls Wilder remains a best-selling author. In fact, her books continue to come out decades after she stopped writing. The latest compilation of her writings covers essays she wrote for the Missouri Ruralist, which are no longer under copyright. I will present excerpts here, interspersed with my comments (italics mine).

WOMEN'S DUTY AT THE POLLS April 20, 1919

"Now that women . . . have been given the right to vote . . . it will be interesting to observe how they will respond to the new duty laid upon them."

Note how a right, once conferred, immediately became a duty. Laura will explain why later on; for now she assumes it.

"That it is a duty for every self-respecting woman to discharge faithfully there can be no question; and as these women are not in the habit of failing in their duties, there is no danger that they will do so now that they understand the situation.

"We must get rid of the habit of classing all women together politically and thinking of "the woman's vote" as one and indivisible. . . . there are all kinds of women as well as of men, and . . . woman's vote will no more bring purity into politics . . . than . . . man's vote."

So Laura is setting forth the new situation: opening suffrage to women will not change the nature of the electorate, just the size. But something about that is of great concern to her:

"It is easy to forecast the effect of woman suffrage on politics if the home-loving, home-keeping women should refuse to use their voting privilege, for the rougher class of women will have no hesitancy in going to the polling places and casting their ballots. There must be votes enough from other women to offset these in order to keep the balance as it has been."

So, this is how a privilege becomes a duty. Because undesirable people will cast their votes (with no doubt an equally undesirable outcome), we of the nobler class must also vote to maintain the status quo.

But there is a fallacy or two behind this reasoning. One, which originally led to universal adult suffrage, is that it is a good thing to vote. Everyone who says this really believes deep down that it is not a good thing to vote undesirably. What the refined woman really wishes is that the rough woman would not exercise her right to vote, thus swinging things even more in the direction the refined woman wishes things would go. As an example of this, Laura earlier pointed out that female suffrage had not served to end the legal sale of whisky in Chicago, voting females of the rougher classes apparently having helped to decide the vote in favor of making their favorite drink more readily available.

What this mindset eventually leads to is clearly shown in elections where the entire electorate is encouraged to vote, but given no real choice as to the outcome of their vote. Saddam Hussein won his last election by 100%; it seems that the few who had voted against him in the previous election had been successfully encouraged to either change their minds or die in the interval. This, however, is the ideal election according to the mindset that every vote is good, but only if it leads to the desired outcome. The ideal election is 100% registration, 100% turnout, and 100% of the votes favoring the outcome already chosen by the ruling class. Or at the very least, to "keep things balanced" in favor of the same outcome.

Note how this mindset comes through as Laura struggles to make her point without ever stating the obvious:

"And so, as I said before, instead of being a privilege to be taken advantage of or neglected according to individual fancy, voting has now become, for the better class of women, a duty to be bravely and conscientiously done, even though it may be rather distasteful. It is up to them to see to it that the power of their ballot is behind their influence for good clean government; for an honest administration of public affairs; for justice for all and special privileges for none. In short, as they have stood behind their soldiers at home and abroad who were fighting for freedom and democracy, now [they should] stand shoulder to shoulder with them and keep up the fight."

Note what she didn't say: she never mentioned her desire or even the possibility that the lower class women would do their part by not voting. That they sneaked in under the new rules seems to bother her a bit, but as nothing can be done about that, she is determined to overrule the anticipated exercise of their electoral right as much as possible. Rougher women, she fears, will vote for a corrupt government; for crooked administration of public affairs; for special privileges for some and injustice for the rest. In fact, although Laura appears not to have foreseen it, for sending both themselves and their refined cousins to war along with the men they had previously only supported from home.

Well, Laura, guess what.

Whatever their station in life, these are the very outcomes the American electorate has chosen at the ballot box. Female Suffrage preceded the Social Security Administration, The New Deal, the Great Society, the Patriot Act, the Global War on Terror, and the re-election of convicted felon Marion Barry. To fund all these programs, the refined woman has now had to join her coarser cousin in the workplace, because the wages of her husband are barely sufficient to support his family--and all of her wages, along with a growing portion of his, must go to support the programs of the federal government.

Could Laura have foreseen all this? Should she have? Let us read on.

"I fear that we are not quite ready to use the ballot intelligently. Though there has been warning enough that the responsibility was coming to rest upon us, we have been careless about informing ourselves of the conditions which the people of the United States must handle and the questions they must answer.

"In this reconstruction period, the most serious time which our nation and the world has ever been called upon to face, we come into the responsibility of helping to decide the fate of the world for perhaps hundreds of years, without being prepared."

Having taken on such a solemn role, and even admitting that she is not up to it, Laura nonetheless charges into it, confident that she can do a better job of it from the get-go than the men who have attempted no more than the status quo for over a hundred years:

"Women can no longer hide behind their husbands . . . by saying, "I don't pay any attention to politics. That is the men's business," nor can they safely vote as the men folks do without any other reason for so doing. We women know in our hearts, though we would not admit it, that our men are not infallible. They do sometimes make mistakes and have the wrong ideas.

"Frankly now, is it not true? This being the case, now that the responsibility is ours, we shall be obliged to think things out for ourselves if we are honest and fair to them and ourselves."

This really is the idealism of the neophyte--the new guy who always thinks he can do it better than the old-timers. Men vote wrongly, therefore it is the women's responsibility to cancel out not only the votes of the rougher class of women, but even those of their ill-informed husbands. Really, she thinks to much of herself if she is to clean escape the tendency to wrong ideas in only six months preparation for the exercise of her franchise. Of course men get wrong ideas--but so do women, even women of the refined classes. Thus it was that women who did not then look forward to the prospect of having to support themselves in old age voted in a system by which they would, sixty years later, have to live at a much lower standard of poverty than their own mothers.

My grandmother serves as an excellent example, except that I do not know how she herself voted. But I do know that this mindset which Laura obviously picked up from elsewhere had also reached my grandmother, as both she and her mother went together to vote in the national elections of 1920, she having attained her majority at the same time her mother gained suffrage.

The mother lived out her days in the home of a first a husband, then a son, and eventually that very daughter, never having had to depend on her own devices for a livelihood from the time she got married at the age of twenty-three until she died, a widow of twenty-one years. The daughter, on the other hand, lived out the long decades of her widowhood dependent first upon her own income as a schoolteacher, and, once she was too old to continue working, a combination of three different government handouts to which she had become entitled. When she still had children at home, before her husband had even died, she suffered the additional humiliation of being put on public assistance. How little could she have foreseen these outcomes on that November day of 1920! Yet the one followed the other as night follows day, when women took upon themselves to decide the fate of the world for the next few hundred years, irrespective of their husbands' opinions--and incomes.

"In plain words, as the other women will vote, we must do so in order to keep things properly balanced, and though we may be unprepared at present, there is no reason why we should not be able to vote intelligently by the time we are called upon to exercise the privilege."

To carry this argument to its logical extreme, suffrage should be extended down to the youngest child in school, who, after nearly a semester of imbibing the political sentiments of the Weekly Reader, should be amply informed as to cast the right vote. Unless, I suppose, he belongs to one of the rougher classes, in which case it is all the more important for his more genteel classmates to "keep things properly balanced."

Moving the other way, the fewer segments of the population that can vote, the less need there is to mobilize the other segments to "keep things balanced." Eliminate schoolchildren from the electorate, and the right-thinking elementary scholar is relieved of the burden of outvoting his errant classmates. Eliminate college students, and the genteel coed is relieved of the burden of outvoting her uninformed fellow underclassmen. Eliminate women altogether, and the threat from the rougher class thereof is eliminated therewith. But why eliminate women just to exclude the rougher classes? Let only refined, educated people vote, and soon there will be no need to even put two choices on the ballot.

Right?

Mrs. A. J. Wilder on Women Voting

Laura wrote this in April 1916:

"I see by the papers that one of the suffrage leaders of the state will tour the Ozarks this spring in the interest of women suffrage, bringing light into the dark places, as it were.

"A great many seem to regard the securing of the ballot as the supreme attainment and think that with women allowed to vote, everything good will follow as a matter of course. To my mind the ballot is incidental, only a small thing in the work that is before the women of the nation. If politics are not what they should be, if there is graft in places of trust and if there are any unjust laws, the men who are responsible made them and their wives usually have finished the job. Perhaps that sounds as if I were claiming for the women a great deal of influence, but trace out a few instances for yourself, without being deceived by appearances, and see if you do not agree with me."

It appears that she was always ambivalent about women having the vote, but once they received it, she resolved to make the best of the situation and support the issues she cared about by faithful attendance at the polls.

The TNIV and The Leading Men of the City

I really do intend to get back to Laura at the end of this post--but for now, I need to say one more thing about the TNIV.

One of the main arguments the TNIV supporters give for translating 'men' as 'people' (where the YNIV had not already dropped the word entirely) is based on the use of andres in Acts 17:34, in which a named woman is included in a class that is labeled 'men':

Acts 17:34 Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.

The CBT translates andres in such cases as 'people'--never as 'men and women'. But the implication is clearly that women are meant to be included. In literature supporting the TNIV, scholars have defended the idea that Damaris was one of the leading citizens of Athens who heard Paul's address on Mars Hill. But 'people' is, in my opinion, a very poor translation. Other scholars have shown that andres can carry the idea of a 'citizen' of either sex, and I think this is clearly its meaning here. The idea is that this class of andres, of which Damaris is a member, are leading citizens of Athens. Andres in Acts 17:22&34 could be translated 'citizens'. [UPDATE 7/7/2010: Upon further reflection--this being a census year and all--I believe an even better translation of andres into modern American usage would be 'heads of households.']

But what happens when Luke makes mention of some leading citizens of a city, and doesn't use the word andres? Then it would be okay to call them 'people', wouldn't it? Oops, the TNIV calls them "men":

Acts 13:50 But the Jewish leaders incited the God-fearing women of high standing and the leading men of the city.

There is no word for 'people' in this verse, much less 'men'! A much more sensible--and sensitive--translation would be:

But the Jews incited the religious women of high standing and the leaders of the city.

By translating 'leaders' as 'leading men', the CBT has categorically denied to the women of Pisidian Antioch the very role they assert for the women of Athens four chapters later.

Would Laura Ingalls Wilder have approved?

Biographical Fiction and the Snakes of Vietnam

The Land I Lost by Quang Nhuong Huynh has been read by many an elementary teacher to her students. Probably all accept its stories as gospel truth, because the author really did grow up in the mountains of Vietnam.

Likewise, for many decades teachers have read the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder to their students, assured that what they related must be true because Laura really did grow up where she said she did. Now, however, we know that the Little House books were highly fictionalized, with changes in names, ages, and family relationships of the characters, as well as both lapses and inversions in the chronology. Time compression and composite characters are other typical features of dramatized biography.

We need to recognize The Land I Lost for what it is--novelized dramatized biography. How much of the account is actually based on truth, we can only guess. But we certainly shouldn't go adding the Horse Snake (which can kill by both constriction and venom, and is mesmerised by burning the fat of a certain fish) and the Two Step Snake (which can kill just by breathing on its victim) to our Vietnamese Bestiary, just because both animals play prominent roles in the book. In fact, it appears that almost nothing in the book is zoologically accurate. The book should be filed not under Biography, but Mythology--not that educators have learned anything from The Education of Little Tree.

And yet the ACLU has no problem whatsoever that teachers not only read it as literature during instructional time, but expect their students to actually believe it.