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

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Bill Kauffman

Book Code: C6270

ISBN: 0-275-96270-9

ISBN-13: 978-0-275-96270-8

DOI:

144 pages

Praeger Publishers

Publication: 10/30/1998

List Price: $72.95 (UK Sterling Price: £41.95)

Availability: Out of stock

Media Type: Hardcover

Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4

Subjects:

Reviews:

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
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

Description: 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.

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

LC Card Number: 98-11125

LCC Class: HN57

Dewey Class: 303


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