American Exceptionalism and Little House on the Prairie

I could get really political with this article on American Exceptionalism, and talk about
this article from the leftwing site AlterNet, titled "We're #1 --
Ten Depressing Ways America Is Exceptional", which talks at some length about all
the advantages this country had when it started out, and how over time we've squandered
most of them, to the extent that we are now a poorer, less healthy, and less fair place,
than most of the European countries most Americans feel so superior to. But I won't.
Instead, I want to talk about the idea of exceptionalism, where it came from, and how it
has shaped American perceptions.



The idea of American Exceptionalism put briefly, is that America enjoys certain
advantages, because God or a beneficent nature, gave them to us, and that because of
that, we also have certain responsibilities. It comes out of the Puritan tradition, from the
original settlers, who moved to New England to escape religious discrimination at home,
and found a fertile land in which to make their home. John Winthrop gave voice to the
idea first, in a sermon he
preached in 1630.

Over time, the original
Puritan idea has gotten itself coupled with the so-called "Frontier Theory" of American History. This is historian
Frederick Jackson Turner's theory that Americans, because for most of our history we
lived in a land with plenty of undeveloped land, where all a person (a white person,
at least) had to do to lift themselves out of poverty, was to move westward, to a place
that hadn't been settled yet, and make a home there. He said that this former freedom
had nurtured a unique American character, distinctive for its individualism, self-
reliance, and distrust of established authority, that the American tendency to want to "do
for ourselves", and keep Big Government's hands off our lives, was something we'd
developed mainly because whenever someone couldn't make it at home, they could just
light out for the territory and do better.

I think he has a good
point. And just recently I found his point exemplified, in a book titled Let The Hurricane Roar,
first published in 1933, by Rose Wilder Lane.



Rose Wilder Lane is mostly known today, for being the daughter
of Laura
Ingalls Wilder, author of the popular Little House book series. In truth though,
she was a lot more. An author in her own right (and thought by many to have done a lot of
the writing on the Little House books), she was famous enough in her time, to have
been chosen by Henry Ford to do his biography. She was also noted for her political
activism, which came from a libertarian perspective.

Libertarianism is a political movement, mostly American, which holds up individual self-
reliance as the highest good, and staunchly opposes most government programs (or laws
for that matter). Libertarians take seriously, Thomas Paine's famous statement, "that
government is best, which governs least". The most famous libertarian of the present
day is probably Texas Representative Ron Paul. Ron
Paul opposes military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is usually thought
of as a leftwing issue, and for government spending on social programs such as Medicare
and Social Security, generally considered more of a rightwing concern. If he looks like
he's all over the place politically, it is only to people who don't understand the libertarian
orientation behind all of Representative Paul's views, which all come out of his desire to
keep government as small as possible.

Likewise, Rose Wilder Lane wanted to keep government in America very small. She
was offended by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's introduction of Social Security, and cut her
own lifestyle back to a bare-bones minimum, in later years, to make sure of not having to
pay Social Security or income taxes. (For more details, click here) Americans
should should stand or fall on their individual initiative, she thought, as they had done in
pioneer times.



As anyone familiar with
the Little House books knows, Lane was thinking of how her mother grew up, raised by

two authentic American pioneers, Charles and Caroline Ingalls. Her book Let the
Hurricane Roar tells about how Charles and Caroline made a homestead together
near Walnut Grove, Minnesota. It is a sort of an adult version of her mother's book,
On the Banks of Plum Creek, although there are differences to how Lane and her
mother treat the story.

What stood out most to me when I read the book recently though, was not how it
compared to the Wilder book, but rather, what a good example the book was, of
Turner's "Frontier Theory", and how the pioneer life it showed might have shaped Lane's
own libertarian beliefs.



The book begins with Charles and Caroline Ingalls, settling in for their first summer at
their homestead on the Minnesota prairie. They are living in a dugout-house Charles has
made with his own hands, dug into a hillside, and roofed with prairie sod. Their diet is
game Charles catches out on the prairie, cooked over a fire stoked by tight-twisted marsh
hay. Their income comes from the hides of the animals he catches, which he takes into
town and sells.

Charles and Caroline pride themselves on their self-sufficiency, not just in good times,
but in bad as well. When locusts eat their entire young wheat crop, Charles hops a
freight train and goes back East to find work, while his wife stays on the homestead, to
make sure some squatter doesn't take it over. It must have taken incredible strength and
courage, yes, to live as they did. But what's missing from the story, is that it also took a
lot of material advantages, that were there for the asking during pioneer times.

There was the
advantage of plentiful game, for instance. As anyone who has ever played the
educational game Oregon Trail knows, game supplies are limited. If too many
animals are hunted at any one time, there will be fewer available for later hunting.
Indeed after the locusts come through, Charles and Caroline bewail the fact that there
aren't any jackrabbits left to provide food for them, never realizing (at least as far as the
book lets on) how fortunate they were to have plenty of them available before.



There was the advantage of free land, which was available to them because of the Homestead Act of
1862, which said that anyone could have 160 acres of undeveloped frontier land,

provided they stayed there and farmed it for five years. This too, Charles and Caroline
take as their natural due -- And so does Lane who, for a libertarian, is surprisingly
pleased with this bit of federal intervention.

Charles and Caroline have plenty of free fuel, thanks to the free-growing grass in the
marshes. They have money, thanks to the wild game, free just for the cost of bullets, that
Charles hunts. They get more money, from Charles working on the Transcontinental
Railroad, built thanks to a collaboration of private companies and the Federal
Government, a fact which also seems not to have bothered the libertarian Lane. (See here:
Pacific Railroad Acts)

When the situation is at its most desperate, Charles goes back east, not by buying a
railroad ticket, but by walking until he reaches the nearest freight train line, and then
hopping a free ride. In other words, this self-reliant man takes advantage of the work of
others, for his own benefit. Being a young, strong white man (another advantage), he
finds it easy to get a job, and sends back money to his wife and young child.

What bothers me about Let the Hurricane Roar, and about Rose Wilder Lane's
pioneer-influenced libertarianism in general, is how much good fortune it fails to notice.
Charles and Caroline work hard, yes, they are strong, and they are brave, and in the end,
their accomplishment is a significant one. But they do not do it all on their own. They
are helped by the wonderful situation of the time, when land, wildlife and wild plants
are available freely, and all a (white) couple has to do, is go out past the urbanized area,
and take charge of a farm of their own. They are helped by the Federal government too,
however much libertarian admirers of our pioneer past might like to admit it. In truth,
for a bunch of self-reliant individualists, pioneers such as Charles and Caroline Ingalls
are really much more like George W. Bush, born on third base, but they think they hit a
triple.