Rose's Last Days

August 20, 2008

I read more of Ghost in the Little House during lunch yesterday. Rose is getting up in years and living in Danbury, CT. Most if not all of her old friendships are gone; she has lost contact with Rexh Meta and has given up on John Turner. He went through a stage where he couldn’t keep a job and was always sponging off Rose. That didn’t surprise me one bit. She took him in as a young teen during the early years of the depression, provided for him amply, and sent him off to school and to travel the world. She had high hopes for him, but in the end he failed to appreciate her provisions and learned that he didn’t have to do anything for himself as long as she was around.

She was so very against the government having their hands in our lives. She didn’t believe in Social Security because “she was appalled that her government should presume to choose for its citizens how they should prepare for their old age.” In 1943, “she was convinced that government controls of prices, production, and distribution would suppress the natural productivity of the American people and needlessly distort the economy.”

She refused to get a ration card, choosing rather to grow her own fruits and vegetables and raise cattle, pigs, and chickens. She would make homemade butter and cheese and home-can her own food. The same year, she had what the author calls a “revolutionary insight,” one that I strongly agree with: “Man controls his own energy and is responsible for his own actions.”

To me, that says that we are free; free to make our own choices, but also free to accept the triumphs or defeats we achieve.

Rose would never have been happy in modern-day society.

I read ahead last night, to Laura’s and eventually Rose’s deaths. Rose fought the issue of income taxes and Social Security to the end; she never even got a Social Security Number. We must remember that Social Security and income taxes are relatively recent inventions in the government attempt to regulate the economy – which Rose was against from the beginning.

It has already become apparent to me that she didn’t seem to have any concern as to retirement income or subsistence in her old age. But then, that concept was foreign to her generation. Heck, the concept of a 401K is foreign even to my parents. It’s an invention of the late 1970s and 1980s. According to Wikipedia,

“In 1978, Congress amended the Internal Revenue Code, later called section 401(k),
whereby employees are not taxed on income they choose to receive as deferred compensation rather than direct compensation. The law went into effect on January 1, 1980, and by 1983 almost half of large firms were either offering a 401(k) plan or considering doing so. By 1984 there were 17,303 companies offering 401(k) plans.”

And regarding income taxes: “The first Federal income tax was imposed (under Article I, section 8, clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution) during the Civil War, then again in the 1890s, and again after the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913.”

Yes, many words describe Rose Lane. Trailblazer. Independent. Impatient. Driven. Intelligent. Pathfinder. Pioneer. Entrepreneurial. Go-getter. Achiever. She was a living history book. Born in Dakota Territory in 1886, her first seven years were lived as a homesteader, the daughter of a pioneering family in the Old West. Settling in Missouri, she was raised as a farm girl. Intelligent and enterprising far beyond her years (and the culture of her day), she grew to be a successful business woman and writer. She experienced the beginnings of feminism and witnessed the ratification of the 19th amendment. She traveled the world. She saw two world wars; she saw our economy crash and lived through the ensuing depression. She witnessed the New Deal, President Roosevelt’s plan to restructure our country economically. She actively promoted her political beliefs. With all her life experience, she was called on even in her last days, to travel to Asia and report on the Vietnam War.

She accomplished a lot and contributed a lot, in her 80-plus years; she spent every day of her life making the most of her time on earth. And she would still be doing the same, without any apologies, were she alive today. The world lost a great person when it lost Rose Wilder Lane.