A division of the American Library Association has voted to remove Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from a major children’s book award over concerns with how the early-to-mid 20th century author portrayed blacks and Native Americans. The Association for Library Service to Children’s board made the unanimous decision Saturday at a meeting in New Orleans. The name has been changed to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. The association says the work of Wilder — best known for her “Little House on the Prairie” novels — “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books were essentially ghost written by her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, at one time the highest paid woman author in America. This is a well documented fact no doubt well known to these leftist librarians. This Orwellian name change is, in essence, a backhanded campaign against not her mother, but against Lane and the values she stood for.

The Little House books champion individualism, self-reliance, loyalty to the nuclear family and community. These are forbidden values today’s progressives abhor. They believe, like the censuring Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, that the past must be totally cleansed and brutally disinfected of any vestiges of such treasonous ideas in opposition to the reactionary collectivist regime they wish to reimpose on us.

This was explicitly displayed in a sneering politically motivated, hatchet-job biography of Ingalls and her daughter which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2017.  It is not the first of such reprehensible attacks.

Earlier this year in a diatribe condemning Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books before the American Booksellers Association Winter Institute in Memphis another Pulitzer Prize-Winner Claims ‘Super-White’ Children’s Books Ruined His Youth.

The speech was directed against “white people, white supremacist racists,” and their enablers. It focused especially on authors and publishers Díaz considers to be responsible for the “erasure” of young minority readers by their “relentless, underlying whiteness.” In an embarrassing moment for publishing and bookselling, he received a standing ovation.

This rant by the controversial author Junot Diaz (who was recently accused of several instances of sexual misconduct) before an audience of publishing professionals, booksellers, and librarians perhaps provided the spark that ignited in the award’s name change inferno.

The racism smear is a spurious excuse for the name change. Along with Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson, Lane was one of the founders of the modern American libertarian movement in the 1940s. And like her colleague Rand, Rose Wilder Lane was a determined enemy of all collectivism, including the virulent variety of biological collectivism known as racism.

As the Wikipedia entry on Lane notes:

During World War II, Lane enjoyed a new phase in her writing career. From 1942 to 1945, she wrote a weekly column for The Pittsburgh Courier, at the time, the most widely read African-American newspaper. Lane combined advocacy of laissez faire capitalism and anti-racism. The views she expressed on race were similar to those of Zora Neale Hurston, a fellow individualist and writer who was black. Her columns emphasized the arbitrariness of racial categories and stressed the centrality of the individual. Instead of indulging in what she referred to as the “ridiculous, idiotic and tragic fallacy of race, [by] which a minority of the earth’s population has deluded itself during the past century”, Lane believed it was time for all Americans – black and white – to “renounce their race”. Judging by skin color was comparable to the Communists who assigned guilt or virtue on the basis of class. In Lane’s view, the fallacies of race and class hearkened to the “old English-feudal ‘class’ distinction.” She further believed that the collectivists, including those who embraced President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, were to blame for filling “young minds with fantasies of ‘races’ and ‘classes’ and ‘the masses,’ all controlled by pagan gods, named Economic Determinism or Society or Government.”

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