The Little House on the Prairie and the White House
Philippe de Lannoy, born to a Protestant family fleeing Spanish religious persecution, arrived in the Plymouth Colony in 1621. His descendants carrying the Delano family name include three presidents; Grant, Coolidge, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And Laura Ingalls Wilder. FDR and the writer of the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ books may be by far the best known of all the many prominent Delano descendants. The story of the pioneering family persevering through blizzards, droughts and plagues of locusts from Minnesota through Wisconsin to the Dakotas to carve a living from the soil while always remaining hopeful was not just a world away from the ‘Boston Brahmins’ and the Northeastern elites who dominated the country: it was also a deliberate philosophical contrast between independence and socialism. “We have a dictator,” Rose Wilder Lane wrote after FDR’s inauguration. The term was not nearly as outrageous then as it seems now through the distorting lens of time. Prominent liberals (...