With Good Intentions?: Reflections on the Myth of Progress in America

by Bill Kauffman

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780275962708
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/30/1998
Series:	Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series; 32
Pages:	142
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.38(d)
Lexile:	1370L (what's this?)

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 Jourbanal. 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.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Catholics and Mugwumps and Farmers: The Debate Over Child Labor
Weatherbeaten Shacks, Ignorant Parents: What's Behind School Consolidation
Who in Her Right Mind Opposed Women's Suffrage?
I Shall Make America Over: The New Deal, Subsistence Homesteads, and the American Dream
Doesn't Anybody Stay in One Place Anymore? Good Roads, Interstate Highways, and the Asphalt Bungle
Doesn't Anybody Stay in One Country Anymore? Uncle Sam Wants You To Move
Bibiliographical Essay
Index

Editorial Reviews

Offers a unique perspective on progress from the point of view of those who lost six critical battles that forever altered the American landscape. Revives forgotten figures in debates over child labor, school consolidation, women's suffrage, the back-to-the-land movement, the Interstate Highway System, and the army. Integrates these subjects and presents anti-Progress cases as a coherent political tendency, arguing that these forgotten causes rested upon quintessential American ideals of limited government, community, and family autonomy. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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