With Good Intentions?

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.

?In his impassioned explorations of six lost causes....Kauffman advances the losers' arguments cogently, even when, especially in the case of the anti-women 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.?-Booklist, ?In this handful of essays, Kauffman has tackled...the entire myth of progress in America. He has tackled this subject head on and with a flair that befits a superb essayist.?-Crisis, ?With Good Intentions? is valuable not only for its defense of worthy, defunct causes but for the demonstration it provides of just how early in the national game those causes really were lost.?-Chronicles, "In this handful of essays, Kauffman has tackled...the entire myth of progress in America. He has tackled this subject head on and with a flair that befits a superb essayist."-Crisis, "With Good Intentions? is valuable not only for its defense of worthy, defunct causes but for the demonstration it provides of just how early in the national game those causes really were lost."-Chronicles

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.