With Good Intentions?: Reflections on the Myth of Progress in America (Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series; 32) - Hardcover

Kauffman, Bill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0275962709 ISBN 13: 9780275962708

Publisher: Praeger, 1998

Synopsis

Kauffman's perspective on progress in America―from the point of view of those who lost―revives forgotten figures and reinvigorates dormant causes as he examines the characters and arguments from six critical battles that forever altered the American landscape: the debates over child labor, school consolidation, women's suffrage, the back-to-the-land movement, good roads and the Interstate Highway System, and a standing army. The integration of these subjects and the presentation of the anti-Progress case as a coherent political tendency encompassing several issues and many years is unprecedented. With wit, passion, and an arsenal of long-neglected sources, Kauffman measures the cost of progress in 20th-Century America and exposes the elaborate plans behind seemingly inevitable reforms.

Kauffman brings to life such people and places as Ida Tarbell, the muckraker who thought that suffrage would ruin women; Onward, Indiana, the town that took up arms to defend its high school from death by consolidation; and the motley band of agrarian poets and ghetto dwellers who tried to stop the bulldozers that paved over America. He maintains that these forlorn causes―usually regarded as quaint, archaic, and hopeless―rested, in large part, upon quintessential American ideals: limited government, human-scale community, and family autonomy. The victory of progress has uprooted our citizens, swollen the central state at the expense of liberty, and sucked much of the life from what was once a nation of small communities.

About this title

About the Author

BILL KAUFFMAN is a contributing editor to Chronicles and Liberty. His work has appeared in The Nation, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of three books: America First! Its History, Culture, and Politics (1995), Country Tours of New York (1994), and Every Man a King (1989). He lives in upstate New York.

Reviews

America First! (1995), Kauffman's spirited resurrection of home-and-hearth patriotism in U.S. history, receives its natural complement in his impassioned explorations of six lost causes: the fights against child labor laws, school consolidation, woman suffrage, the interstate highway system, the standing army, and the fight for planned homesteading to alleviate Great Depression poverty. Kauffman advances the losers' arguments cogently, even when, especially in the case of the anti^-woman suffragists, he disagrees. When he agrees, he is riveting, amusingly vituperative (he dubs New Deal bureaucrat Rexford Guy Tugwell, who scuttled homesteading, "Tyrantosaurus Rex"), even piquantly ribald (of the bad influence of uniformed encampments on host communities, he says, "Seasoned wankers still know that the best peep shows are found adjacent to military bases"). Kauffman would be trivia-mongering if the ideals animating the losers of these old conflicts--parental authority, family stability, community integrity, self-determination, and anti-imperialism--did not still concern us. They do, and their defeated defenders' views deserve the loud-and-clear airing that Kauffman gives them. Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Praeger
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0275962709
• ISBN 13: 9780275962708
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 124