"Prairie Fires" is the book for our times
I have two half-finished newsletters in my drafts folder -- one on anticipated turbulence in the job market as automation cuts off the opportunity to jump on to career-track-type jobs, another on what the physical infrastructure behind e-commerce means for the communities of tomorrow -- and it feels like the time to shelve one or both of them. It's too soon to see how current events will either amplify, accelerate or redirect these developing stories; we're overtaken by events.
Instead, I want to talk about how children's literature has led me to reread a book that I think may be the perfect primer for our times.
I've been casting about for a way to frame this San Francisco Bay Area experience of sheltering-in-place for my daughter, who asks daily, "Yes, but did you ever experience anything like this?" And daily, I repeat that the closest I ever got to quarantine was in tenth grade, when a kid our trigonometry teacher later dubbed "Measles John" Porter came down with the measles; the school nurse pulled the health records of every kid who sat next to Measles John in every class; my mom and I discovered in short order that the vagaries of alphabetic seating and the MMR vaccines of the 1970s had made me vulnerable to measles. I was required to stay inside my house for two weeks, alone save for my family and the giant, mimeographed stack of schoolwork I was to complete during this time.
Although my daughter always shivers appreciatively at "And we had no internet access and no streaming media," she's fixed on the fact that my isolation ended in two weeks. Hers has no end date, and so our experiences diverge. She wants and needs a story with which she can identify, so she can begin to understand her own life.
So I ransacked our books for one where a hero or heroine would experience something similar. We've already read the scarlet fever quarantine chapter in All of a Kind Family and the polio epidemic chapters in More All of a Kind Family (both by Sydney Taylor), but those books don't really touch a core component of my daughter's experience: waking up every day with no idea when her sheltering-in-place will be over.
Enter Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter, the installment in her Little House series that fictionalizes her family's experience surviving the winter of 1880-1881 in the Dakota territory. Being trapped without supplies, forced to improvise, offered scant government support, and enduring with no known end date? All of that resonates right now, so we've been reading a chapter a day.
I told my daughter, "Did you know that this book was one of the first U.S. books to be sold in Japan following World War II?" and to confirm my assertion, I revisited Caroline Fraser's Prairie Fires, which does recount how the book came to be so popular in post-war Japan: American librarians and educators had been asked to pick titles they thought reflected positively on the American character, the Little House books made the list, and a Japanese teacher and translator Aya Ishida (who had studied at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts), got permission from General Douglas MacArthur's General Headquarters (GHQ) to translate The Long Winter into Japanese. And then, as Fraser notes:
According to Noriko Suzuki, who has studied the book’s reception in Japan, The Long Winter tapped into the country’s anxieties and preoccupations in ways that Douglas MacArthur and authorities at GHQ could never have anticipated. There were obvious parallels between the extended suffering of the Japanese and the Ingalls family in the town of De Smet, Suzuki noted, but also subtler connections that readers in Japan would have recognized, including the value placed on self-sacrifice and the subjugation of individual needs. Citing chapter titles such as “Not Really Hungry” and “It Can’t Beat Us,” Suzuki pointed to correlations between those sentiments and postwar slogans promoted by Emperor Hirohito, who urged his subjects to “endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable.”
After finding the passage, I got sucked back into the rest of the book and re-read it over this past weekend*. It's a superb, well-researched book, and recounts several key moments in American history in the 1800s and early 1900s where vulnerable people suffered because of a wildly unregulated global economy, entirely preventable human-driven climate change as a result of rapacious corporate profit-seeking, and a federal government unwilling to offer any help to them. I am finding that it's also a primer for anyone who's looking to understand how it is we went from being all irritated about Little Women getting snubbed at the Oscars to live-tweeting Anthony Fauci's facial expressions because we're all experts on the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases now**.
I have no advice or analysis beyond this: Find the things that allow you to create the framework of meaning you'll use to understand what we're living through. Find the things that help the people you love to create their own way of understanding what's going on. Applying what we already understand to what we do not is a foundational step toward knowledge, and knowledge is power. We are more powerful than we think we are.
* I had talked about Prairie Fires in SWWC vol 3, issue 67, "How Thanksgiving Led to a Meditation on Death and Cleaning ." Excerpt below:
I'm up for reading Caroline Fraser's Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. What makes this look especially promising are two reviews I've read which elucidates on the conservative underpinnings of the series and what one can conclude about the U.S. today based on the story of the self-sufficient frontier family Wilder spun in her books. Patricia Nelson Limerick's review for the New York Times has a wonderful historic framing around it, while Vivian Gornick's piece for the New Republic brings up the terrible lie at the heart of homesteading -- less than 3% of the land on the Dakotas was suitable for farming, scientist John W. Powell warned, yet he was ignored by the industry titans and their amenable legislators of the day -- and its direct line to today's scrabbling American citizens.
Also, it's funny to re-read that newsletter and think, "Oh, that's right, we moved the bench to my daughter's room." Oh, the persistence of Ikea in this house!
** Saying "I've kept an eye on Anthony Fauci since reading about him in Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On" is the epidemiological equivalent of saying, "I knew about this band before it was cool."
On the advice of some very wise friends who listened to me moan about my writers' block, then gently asked, "Do you want us to listen or do you want advice?" ... I'm just writing my way out of a block and toward whatever big writing goal will emerge after I've just kept writing for a while. As always, any feedback, questions or suggestions welcome either via email (reply to this) or via Twitter (@lschmeiser).