What do you think?
Rate this book
Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front Porch Anarchists
In Look Homeward, America, Bill Kauffman introduces us to the reactionary radicals, front-porch anarchists, and traditionalist rebels who give American culture and politics its pith, vim, and life. Blending history, memoir, digressive literariness, and polemic, Kauffman provides fresh portaiture of such American originals as Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, regionalist painter Grant Wood, farmer-writer Wendell Berry, publisher Henry Regnery, maverick U.S. senators Eugene McCarthy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and other Americans who can’t—or shouldn’t—be filed away in the usual boxes labeled �liberal” and �conservative.” Ranging from Millard Fillmore to Easy Rider, from Robert Frost to Mother Jones, Kauffman limns an alternative America that draws its breath from local cultures, traditional liberties, small-scale institutions, and neighborliness. There is an America left that is worth saving: these are its paragons, its poets, its pantheon.
250 pages, Hardcover
First published May 15, 2006
3 people are currently reading
160 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
October 27, 2008
Kauffman writes like no other political-social-cultural observer. An excellent stylist who knows how to make a point with great wit and insight. Looking beyond the two parties, this book reveals who the true radicals really are -- and why they're right.
June 25, 2014
A tremendous book - is changing my life and inspiring me to move homeward after school. Kauffman defies Left and Right in favor of a loyalty to Place. A former Washington insider, he rejected that life to move back to his hometown of Batavia, NY and has spent the past years honoring the legacies of "reactionary radicals" and "front porch anarchists": the pacifists, localists, mini insurrectionists, and the like who have more loyalty to their hometowns than any abstraction that someone from afar is telling them to twist and turn and kill for. In this work, he honors Eugene McCarthy, the poet-Senator who took down a president, Dorothy Day, the saint who started her own revolution through opening Houses of Hospitality at the neighborhood level, Wendell Berry, who insisted on loyalty to home over town, town over state (Kentucky!), state over country, and yet not country over world, and Carolyn Chute, who is now my favorite militia head. Kauffman calls on us to notice where the lack of roots are rotting us, such as in this great quote pulling from Wendell Berry: "the architects of Empire fit the description of "upwardly mobile transients" who wage war on places: 'they must have no local allegiances; they must not have a local point of view. In order to be able to desecrate, endanger, or destroy a place, after all, one must be able to leave it and forget it. One must never think of any place as ones home; one must never think of any place as someone else's home. One must believe that no place is valuable as what it might be changed into or as what might be taken out of it. Unlike a life at home, which makes ever more particular and precious the places and creatures of the world, the careerist's life generalizes the world, reducing it's abundant and comely diversity to 'raw material.'" I never thought I'd like a book by someone who has worked for Reason Magazine and called himself a paleo-conservative, but Bill Kauffman delighted me. Onward to the Front Porch!
Read
August 2, 2013'This is a big old sloppy mess of a book, strange and charming and rhapsodic and even inspirational. It will make its receptive conservative readers reconsider what it means to be a true conservative and even what it means to be a true American. But it is also the kind of book that will leave quite a few conservatives scratching their heads and wondering if Kauffman is more a rocking-chair Romantic than red-state right-winger. Then again, in these sour and shipwrecked late days of Republican Party rule, it is both useful and pleasurable to read conservative writing this fresh and iconoclastic.'
Read the full review, "All-American Anarchists," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...
Read the full review, "All-American Anarchists," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...
July 28, 2020
Bill Kauffman at his eloquent (and peppered with fancy words) yet delightfully crotchety best. Similar to "Ain't My America" but with a broader focus than antiwar activism, "Look Homeward America" honors various historical figures (known and unknown) who stood against excessive bigness. Included are people like the artist Grant Wood, Senator Eugene McCarthy, President Millard Fillmore, labor activist Mother Jones, author Carolyn Chute, and many more. Bound together by Kauffman's anarchic localist leanings, as his writings tend to do, this telling gives you a different angle on history. I appreciate his wonderful contrarian views, even when I disagree. Worth a read for anybody interested in American history, decentralism, or antiwar movements.
April 30, 2020
Bill Kauffman is, as he is quite to tell you right up front, very much a conservative. However, it is important to know that he is not the kind of Right-wing ideologues who today call themselves "conservative" -- for they are not, they are extremists. Kauffman is, rather, the genuine article, the kind of person I knew and served with in the Iowa Legislature so many years ago.
This kind of conservative is principled, rational, respectful of facts, is not a bigot, and while distrustful of "big government" -- very much including, by the way, the imperial armed forces of which we boast so much today -- is also committed to government that truly serves the people, ideally being that level of government closest to the people.
This is the kind of conservative with whom I share many values, even though I am politically on the left. I, too, believe in local and state governments, and wish they were far more vigorous and truly representative than they usually are. I share Kauffman's belief that they can -- and should be -- the true "laboratories of democracy."
Kauffman is also a witty, non-bashful writer. He likes to get in his digs into people and causes that many others lionize, but -- again unlike the trash-mouthed trolls so common today on social media -- he is not hurtful when he does this. Rather, he is critical of all those who helped move the focus of our citizenry from their own back yards -- that is, the part of "the world" and "the nation" that they can most usefully impact -- towards causes and issues that are both more distant and, perhaps, not really much of our business at all.
I don't always agree with him, in part because I think there are larger national and world issues that individual citizens of the US MUST be concerned with, the greatest of which is global warming.
In any event, this book is a collection of interesting essays about several personages whom Kauffman -- and in most cases, I -- truly count as important Americans, including Dorothy Day, Wendell Berry, and Grant Wood. In these essays you will likely learn some interesting -- even surprising -- things about the persons under discussion, but you will also enjoy -- sometimes by laughing out loud -- Kauffman's voice which is always witty, insightful, and intentionally occasionally disturbing (in the best sense).
He is particularly strong in his criticism of how America's citizenry -- for so long tied to and caring about nurturing their land and their communities -- have been sucked into international affairs to the degree that we long ago became a modern empire, effectively the "policeman of the world."
He does us all the service of raising questions many of us have not often thought of or, if we have, they are things we would prefer not to dwell upon. If we are to restore a democratic republic in this country -- something that is hardly a "given" -- we are going to need spirited persons like Kauffman, because of the important questions they raise and the perspective they offer, but also because of their commitment to vital communities of and on the land.
This kind of conservative is principled, rational, respectful of facts, is not a bigot, and while distrustful of "big government" -- very much including, by the way, the imperial armed forces of which we boast so much today -- is also committed to government that truly serves the people, ideally being that level of government closest to the people.
This is the kind of conservative with whom I share many values, even though I am politically on the left. I, too, believe in local and state governments, and wish they were far more vigorous and truly representative than they usually are. I share Kauffman's belief that they can -- and should be -- the true "laboratories of democracy."
Kauffman is also a witty, non-bashful writer. He likes to get in his digs into people and causes that many others lionize, but -- again unlike the trash-mouthed trolls so common today on social media -- he is not hurtful when he does this. Rather, he is critical of all those who helped move the focus of our citizenry from their own back yards -- that is, the part of "the world" and "the nation" that they can most usefully impact -- towards causes and issues that are both more distant and, perhaps, not really much of our business at all.
I don't always agree with him, in part because I think there are larger national and world issues that individual citizens of the US MUST be concerned with, the greatest of which is global warming.
In any event, this book is a collection of interesting essays about several personages whom Kauffman -- and in most cases, I -- truly count as important Americans, including Dorothy Day, Wendell Berry, and Grant Wood. In these essays you will likely learn some interesting -- even surprising -- things about the persons under discussion, but you will also enjoy -- sometimes by laughing out loud -- Kauffman's voice which is always witty, insightful, and intentionally occasionally disturbing (in the best sense).
He is particularly strong in his criticism of how America's citizenry -- for so long tied to and caring about nurturing their land and their communities -- have been sucked into international affairs to the degree that we long ago became a modern empire, effectively the "policeman of the world."
He does us all the service of raising questions many of us have not often thought of or, if we have, they are things we would prefer not to dwell upon. If we are to restore a democratic republic in this country -- something that is hardly a "given" -- we are going to need spirited persons like Kauffman, because of the important questions they raise and the perspective they offer, but also because of their commitment to vital communities of and on the land.
December 6, 2015
Bill Kaufmann holds the following beliefs very strongly: (1) that people do best if left alone to work things out amongst themselves in small communities, (2) that the family is the smallest unit of social organization and therefore the most important to preserve intact, (3) that a nation state going to war is the worst thing that can happen to families and small communities and should be avoided and resisted at all costs.
In this book, Kaufmann explores historical and contemporary Americans who, despite thier failings, at least in part stood for the principles of small government, individual liberty, responsibility to the community, and tradional values of connection to the land and family relationships.
Part of the book functions as an attempt to reclaim several individuals for conservatism who have been co-opted by a political left whose contemporary platform (Federal control of the states, homogeny through regulation, abortion on demand, upheaval of tradtional family and gender roles) would have been anathema to what these people believed and stood for. These include Doris Day of the Catholic Workers and Mother Jones. States Kauffman: "Today we know Mother Jones primarily as the name of a magazine for consumerist liberals whose idea of a radical act is selling thier R.J. Reynolds stock and buying Starbucks."
Kaufmann's definition of "conservatism" diverts radically from the current understanding and would likely exclude the majority of Republican politicians and all of the 2016 candidates with the possible exception of Rand Paul. He despises neo-cons, especially the Bushes, and while he rarely comes after Reagan, it is clear he is no fan of the cold warrior. He states that his book is for "those Americans who reject Empire; who cherish the better America, the real America; who cannot be broken by the Department of Homeland Security, who will not submit to the PATRIOT Act, and who will make the land acrid and bright with the stench and flame of burnt national ID cards when we - should we - cross that Orwellian pass."
Kaufmann is against daycare, public schools, gun control, tv, and consumerism. He is for regionalism, baseball, home schooling, farming, and staying in your hometown. He expresses a sincere love for America for its parts, its excentricities, its orneriness. He despises the concept of American Empire and derides as false patriotism any pride for country which extends much beyond the indiviual state where ones family is from.
Kauffman obviously likes to view himself as a reactionary radical, and his narrative voice would be likely off-putting to conservatives whose political identity includes a distrust of counter-cultural movements. Kauffman is a guy who started out on the left and comes to his positioning as a traditionalist anarchist type from this direction, and it shows. His message would be easier to receive for a person coming from the same perspective. Its harder for someone from the anti-communist wing of the right to accept that self-proclaimed socialists like Eugene Debs have any place in the conservative pantheon. But he makes a good argument.
In conclusion, the book is a fun read and teaches a lot about parts of American history not covered in school. As a reactionary radical, some of what he says is fairly controversial, including his support of anti-war abolutionists and his harsh criticism of Abraham Lincoln. His vociferous support of pacifism and non-intervention is delivered fairly compellingly and has forced me to reexamine my own views of the American foreign policy of peace through strength advocated by Republicans and the Clinton wing of the Democrat party.
In this book, Kaufmann explores historical and contemporary Americans who, despite thier failings, at least in part stood for the principles of small government, individual liberty, responsibility to the community, and tradional values of connection to the land and family relationships.
Part of the book functions as an attempt to reclaim several individuals for conservatism who have been co-opted by a political left whose contemporary platform (Federal control of the states, homogeny through regulation, abortion on demand, upheaval of tradtional family and gender roles) would have been anathema to what these people believed and stood for. These include Doris Day of the Catholic Workers and Mother Jones. States Kauffman: "Today we know Mother Jones primarily as the name of a magazine for consumerist liberals whose idea of a radical act is selling thier R.J. Reynolds stock and buying Starbucks."
Kaufmann's definition of "conservatism" diverts radically from the current understanding and would likely exclude the majority of Republican politicians and all of the 2016 candidates with the possible exception of Rand Paul. He despises neo-cons, especially the Bushes, and while he rarely comes after Reagan, it is clear he is no fan of the cold warrior. He states that his book is for "those Americans who reject Empire; who cherish the better America, the real America; who cannot be broken by the Department of Homeland Security, who will not submit to the PATRIOT Act, and who will make the land acrid and bright with the stench and flame of burnt national ID cards when we - should we - cross that Orwellian pass."
Kaufmann is against daycare, public schools, gun control, tv, and consumerism. He is for regionalism, baseball, home schooling, farming, and staying in your hometown. He expresses a sincere love for America for its parts, its excentricities, its orneriness. He despises the concept of American Empire and derides as false patriotism any pride for country which extends much beyond the indiviual state where ones family is from.
Kauffman obviously likes to view himself as a reactionary radical, and his narrative voice would be likely off-putting to conservatives whose political identity includes a distrust of counter-cultural movements. Kauffman is a guy who started out on the left and comes to his positioning as a traditionalist anarchist type from this direction, and it shows. His message would be easier to receive for a person coming from the same perspective. Its harder for someone from the anti-communist wing of the right to accept that self-proclaimed socialists like Eugene Debs have any place in the conservative pantheon. But he makes a good argument.
In conclusion, the book is a fun read and teaches a lot about parts of American history not covered in school. As a reactionary radical, some of what he says is fairly controversial, including his support of anti-war abolutionists and his harsh criticism of Abraham Lincoln. His vociferous support of pacifism and non-intervention is delivered fairly compellingly and has forced me to reexamine my own views of the American foreign policy of peace through strength advocated by Republicans and the Clinton wing of the Democrat party.
March 7, 2014
"The Little Way. That is what we seek. That -- contrary to the ethic of personal parking spaces, of the dollar-sign god -- is the American way. Dorothy Day kept to that little way, and that is why we honor her. She understood that if small is not beautiful, at least it is always human." p. 39
Look Homeward, America collects the stories of eccentric individuals who, in a century marked by the advance of corporate and state power, rebelled against the machine. Planting their flag above small towns and in the countryside, they held on what they regarded as valuable and defied or attempted to resist the march of a more inhumane world. Bill Kauffman is a sympathetic soul, a die-hard "placeist". He calls himself the anarchist love-child of Henry David Thoreau and Dorothy Day, and Look Homeward is his tribute to peaceable troublemakers like his 'parents'. They are farmers and social workers, politicians and miners, men and women whose faith is the family and the local community. They champion self-reliance, local interest, and peace; they scorn war, industrial agriculture, big business, and government bureaucracy. The expression thereof varies; some are hands-on activists, like Day and Mother Jones, others very frustrated political candidates, still others authors who sing the song of their places and peoples in novel and verse.No political labels apply here; although most are out to protect traditional expressions of civil society, or are vigorously insisting that the powerful leave them be, these conservatives and libertarians are joined by men like Eugene Debs. A book that can honor the six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist party in the same breath as Wendell Berry (a Kentucky farmer, novelist, and proponent of agrarianism) is wonderfully eclectic. A strong sense of the meaningful life pervades and is carried forth by both religious personalities (Catholic Dorothy Day, featured prominently) and the irreligious, like Robert Ingersoll. (The great agnostic only receives a mention, which is too bad; his view of the American republic was quite Jeffersonian.) The expression of this common spirit differs from In essence, Look Homeward is a lively championing of localism, a tribute paid to people whose lives were a great raspberry in the face of war and modern alienation. It's a ball to read, not only because Kaufman is so personable, but because of his colorful-but-not-obscene vocabulary.
Related:
The Plain Reader, assorted authors (including Berry)
Crunchy Cons; The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rob Dreher. Like Kauffman, a writer at Front Porch Republic
Any of Wendell Berry’s works
"....this institution of the home is the one anarchist institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside the State. By its nature it is refreshed or corrupted by indefinable forces of custom or kinship." - G. K. Chesteron, What's Wrong with the World?
Look Homeward, America collects the stories of eccentric individuals who, in a century marked by the advance of corporate and state power, rebelled against the machine. Planting their flag above small towns and in the countryside, they held on what they regarded as valuable and defied or attempted to resist the march of a more inhumane world. Bill Kauffman is a sympathetic soul, a die-hard "placeist". He calls himself the anarchist love-child of Henry David Thoreau and Dorothy Day, and Look Homeward is his tribute to peaceable troublemakers like his 'parents'. They are farmers and social workers, politicians and miners, men and women whose faith is the family and the local community. They champion self-reliance, local interest, and peace; they scorn war, industrial agriculture, big business, and government bureaucracy. The expression thereof varies; some are hands-on activists, like Day and Mother Jones, others very frustrated political candidates, still others authors who sing the song of their places and peoples in novel and verse.No political labels apply here; although most are out to protect traditional expressions of civil society, or are vigorously insisting that the powerful leave them be, these conservatives and libertarians are joined by men like Eugene Debs. A book that can honor the six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist party in the same breath as Wendell Berry (a Kentucky farmer, novelist, and proponent of agrarianism) is wonderfully eclectic. A strong sense of the meaningful life pervades and is carried forth by both religious personalities (Catholic Dorothy Day, featured prominently) and the irreligious, like Robert Ingersoll. (The great agnostic only receives a mention, which is too bad; his view of the American republic was quite Jeffersonian.) The expression of this common spirit differs from In essence, Look Homeward is a lively championing of localism, a tribute paid to people whose lives were a great raspberry in the face of war and modern alienation. It's a ball to read, not only because Kaufman is so personable, but because of his colorful-but-not-obscene vocabulary.
Related:
The Plain Reader, assorted authors (including Berry)
Crunchy Cons; The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rob Dreher. Like Kauffman, a writer at Front Porch Republic
Any of Wendell Berry’s works
"....this institution of the home is the one anarchist institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside the State. By its nature it is refreshed or corrupted by indefinable forces of custom or kinship." - G. K. Chesteron, What's Wrong with the World?
May 25, 2009
This book was notable both in terms of content and style. It was the first book I've read in a long time that sent me scurrying to my dictionary. I expanded my vocabulary as I read! While negotiating the rough waters of unfamiliar words, I was also navigating ideas and positions, trying to read between the lines to see just what he was actually saying. For instance, "The automobile, and especially that grand Republican experiment in state socialism known as the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, did so much to deface and distort the American mien." So when I parse this sentence, I come away with the fact that the author is decrying automobiles and the highway system, as well as comparing the highway system to a socialist work project. So it was an exercise in reading between the lines. I didn't know much about many of the political figures he mentioned, so I was trying to learn about them while filtering through his bias.
What I really enjoyed were the chapters on Dorothy Day and Wendell Berry. It was interesting to read about Berry from Kauffman's perspective, and in covering Dorothy Day, he explained more about 'distributivism', an economic philosophy that I'd encountered in reading about GK Chesterton but don't fully understand. So I recommend this book to anyone interested in hearing a defense of pacifism and localism.
What I really enjoyed were the chapters on Dorothy Day and Wendell Berry. It was interesting to read about Berry from Kauffman's perspective, and in covering Dorothy Day, he explained more about 'distributivism', an economic philosophy that I'd encountered in reading about GK Chesterton but don't fully understand. So I recommend this book to anyone interested in hearing a defense of pacifism and localism.
June 12, 2007
In Look Homeward, America, Kauffman means to show us “the better America, the real America” that has existed and still exists under the surface of “the televised America.”
This “real” America is full of “holy fools and backyard radicals,” “third parties, quixotic crusades, border bandits, charlatans, and raggedy-ass preachers on the political fringe,” “Jewish Confederates, Latin Mass Catholics, Ed Abbeyesque tree-hugging beer-can throwers, radical businessmen who admired Jerry Brown, and gay Quakers who campaigned for Pat Buchanan.”
The “real” America is “provincial, parochial, isolationist” (and he means all that in a good way), agrarian, regional, cooperative, and rooted — “Jeffersonian”. It has been fighting a losing battle with the rootless pioneer, the cosmopolitan urbanite, the space-age corporate technophile, and the centralizing imperialist nanny-stater.
This “real” America is full of “holy fools and backyard radicals,” “third parties, quixotic crusades, border bandits, charlatans, and raggedy-ass preachers on the political fringe,” “Jewish Confederates, Latin Mass Catholics, Ed Abbeyesque tree-hugging beer-can throwers, radical businessmen who admired Jerry Brown, and gay Quakers who campaigned for Pat Buchanan.”
The “real” America is “provincial, parochial, isolationist” (and he means all that in a good way), agrarian, regional, cooperative, and rooted — “Jeffersonian”. It has been fighting a losing battle with the rootless pioneer, the cosmopolitan urbanite, the space-age corporate technophile, and the centralizing imperialist nanny-stater.
January 26, 2016
I really like this book, because I agree with a lot and disagree with about as much. But mainly I like it because all the people he writes about are people and not agendas, all are a mixed bag of yeas and nays and sometimes and perhaps. Also, Mother Jones and Dorothy Day in the same book, with a smidgen of Emma Goldman- gotta love it. Two quotes-In response to the impersonal and deadly demands of the military-industrial complex- "Don't feed the war machine. You are not expendable, in your family's eyes or in God's." And "It is only anarchists who are really conservative." Now if those don't kick a few of your synapses in the butt, I don't know what will. Except maybe one more name. Bless you, Eugene Debs.
December 4, 2007
from the introduction- 'Robert Frost put his faith in the 'insubordinate Americans,' throaty dissenters and ornery traditionalists, and this book is for and about them- those Americans who reject Empire; who cherish a better America, the real America; who cannot be broken by the Department of Homeland Security, who will not submit to the Patriot Act, and who will make the land acrid and bright with the stench and flame of burnt national ID cards when we-should we- cross that Orwellian pass. This is still our country you know. Don't let Big Brother and the imperialists take it from us." brilliant. it's good and funny to be pissed about the right things.
January 11, 2012
A difficult book to comment on. The first word in it's bibliographic description is "anarchism." That's unnerving or offputting, whichever it is!, but it is worth pushing on. I did not agree with everything in this book but I was both convicted and challenged by some of Kauffman's charges. I especially enjoyed the sections on Wendell Berry and Grant Wood. Regionalism is certainly a worthy topic.
September 5, 2013
Another fun read from Bill Kauffman.
This book is another defense, in the vein of Wendell Berry, of localism and the importance of "place". Kauffman also does a good job of showing how the warfare state destroys rural America.
This book is another defense, in the vein of Wendell Berry, of localism and the importance of "place". Kauffman also does a good job of showing how the warfare state destroys rural America.
August 10, 2016
More dispatches from mind-yr-own-business, don’t-tread-on-me, regionalist, communitarian, rural America.
December 31, 2013
sehr gut
May 18, 2013
One of the best books I've ever read. This book resonated with me to such an extent that I felt as if the author were reading my mind. Great book!
September 9, 2015
Wonderful book, but would not recommend reading right after leaving America for an extended period of time. So many feels.
January 14, 2008
Relevant and Refreshing. Funny and Educational.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews