History Alive

August 15, 2008

Back to Ghost in the Little House. It's 1929. The stock market has crashed, and Rose and her parents have lost most of the value of their stocks already. The harder hit folks were the ones who bought on margin -- borrowed from the bank to invest, with the confident hope that they could pay back the bank and still enjoy a good return.

Rose is finding it harder and harder to sell her work, and she is frustrated not only with the inability to meet her obligations to her parents and Rexh Mehta (an Albanian young man whose education at Cambridge she is financing), but also with the halting of her plans to travel. She is restless and adventurous, much like myself.

She is currently staying at Rocky Ridge out of necessity, but not enjoying it. She mentions her frustration at not having any intelligent people to really talk to; she refers to the residents of the small rural town of Mansfield as "one-syllable people." She's disgusted and impatient at their small-town country lifestyle. She's forced to seek out new friends and business acquaintances within that small town, with whom she can converse intellectually and exchange views on politics, history, travel, government.

A new decade rolls around. It's the early 1930s, and the country is coping with an economic depression. Rose is frustrated that she is falling short on her promises to her parents to support them financially -- Laura is nearing 60 and Almanzo 70. Neither is any longer physically able to keep up the farm.

What a big contrast to modern day! In this decade, it's not unusual to see folks in their 50s-60s-70s staying busy and working. But making a living was much different 100 years ago.

Rose begins helping her mother with the Little House books, which are selling quite well in spite of the depressed economy, and are bringing in a steady income for the Wilder family. Rose sees writing "juveniles" as beneath her professional dignity. Out of a feeling of obligation, though, she continues to offer her mother counsel.

Rose is strongly opposed to the New Deal -- FDR's plan to stimulate the economy. She feels people will begin to depend on the government for their livelihood rather than their own hard work. Her newfound appreciation of her parents' and grandparents' struggles as pioneers serves to form this opinion. I don't exactly disagree, and her prediction was right -- people DO depend on the government too much. She believes people ought to earn their living by the sweat of their brow, and WORK for what they have rather than allow the government to support them. And I agree.

Books like Ghost bring history alive. It's one thing to learn history in school, from books... it's quite another to read about it from the perspective of someone who actually lived it. History is so much more fulfilling than fiction.