Laura Ingalls Wilder's Name Removed From Book Award Over Racism Concerns

As Dr Russell Kirk says in Obdurate Adversaries of Modernity, citing M. Charles Baudouin's The Myth of Modernity, 'Modernists delight in the “clean sweep”—the obliteration of memorials of the past—...'

Whilst the Left has not yet perfected Orwell's 'memory hole' they are succeeding in obliterating the past in other ways. As I discussed in Erasing General Lee, they are attempting to remove the memory of 'politically inconvenient' people from history, just as did the fictional Oceania of Orwell's 1984 and the real world Stalinist USSR.

Now they are attacking literature. Laura Ingalls Wilder has delighted myriads of children for well over 80 years. I can still remember my teachers reading the Little House books to my class before many of us could read. I later read them myself, but I found them very 'girl-centric'. As a boy, my favourite was always Farmer Boy, her retelling of the boyhood of her husband, Almanzo Wilder. I so wanted a yoke of oxen with which to plough after I had read it!

'The ALSC said Wilder’s work continued to be published and read...', but for how long? Once the 'powers that be' start this sort of thing, how long will it be until school authorities and individual teachers decide that children should not be exposed to works of literature that contain words and ideas that are politically incorrect?

From The Guardian

American Library Association changes award name after examining ‘expressions of stereotypical attitudes’ in books

A division of the American Library Association has voted to remove the name of Laura Ingalls Wilder from a major children’s book award, over concerns about how the author portrayed African Americans and Native Americans. 

The board of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) made the unanimous decision to change the name on Saturday, at a meeting in New Orleans. The name of the prize was changed from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award. 

The association said Wilder “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values”.

The first award was given to Wilder in 1954. The ALSC said Wilder’s work continued to be published and read but her “legacy is complex” and “not universally embraced”.

Wilder was born in 1867 and died in 1957. She is best known for her eight Little House on the Prairie novels, about pioneer life in the American west, which were published between 1932 and 1943.

In 2010, the British broadcaster Samira Ahmed wrote for the Guardian: “Wilder has a special status in American culture despite posthumous allegations of racism. The Osage nation, according to biographer Pamela Smith Hill, still condemns her work, which was based on their eviction.

“The novels are full of phrases that are unacceptable today. Even in her own lifetime Wilder apologised for her thoughtlessness and amended a line in Little House on the Prairie that said Kansas had ‘no people, only Indians’. It now reads, ‘no settlers, only Indians’.”