How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America

by Heather Cox Richardson

In 1932, the first of another set of books also became a bestseller. That series, too, remains hugely popular, although it often flies under the radar because it is classified as a children’s series. The first in the series was Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, who had traveled west from Wisconsin in a covered wagon, grown up on the frontier, lived in South Dakota, and settled in Missouri in the Ozarks. Wilder loathed the New Deal, and her portrait of her upbringing was the western individualist mythology personified. In her stories, Pa was the rock of the family, protecting them from Indians and providing for his wife and four girls with the deer he shot, the muskrat he trapped, and the fields he planted. Men had to look out for themselves, he told Laura, because they were “free and independent.”35 In fact, Pa had never been able to support his family; he had relied on income from the work of Laura, her sisters, and her mother.