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

by Bill Kauffman

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 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 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.

Genres: Politics

124 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

With Good Intentions is odd among Kauffman’s published works, appearing not as a monograph but as a collection of six essays of varying length linked by a theme, that of resistance to various ‘improvements’ of the 20th century, from women’s suffrage to the interstate system. Although progress tends to be a four-letter word in a Kauffman book, as he associates it with the destruction of cities to ‘save’ them and the ever-expanding growth of the beast on the Potomac, here not only does he include changes that he personally has no issue with, but he’s not the one arguing against them. Instead, Kauffman assays contemporary arguments and responses (for and against) and presents them to the reader with his own commentary — commentary which is more subdued than his usual style, and given that each piece ends with its own section of end-notes, the collection is more formal than one would expect from Batavia’s finest. To be sure, he’s still there: in quoting one person, he forewarns the reader that they use enough passive construction “to make Strunk turn White”. Kauffman is usually on the side of the opponents of change, especially of the interstate system and the standing military, but in the case of female suffrage he’s more fascinated by why some women opposed it: “Red Emma” Goldman, who no one would ever confuse with a traditionalist, despised it in part because she regarded the female sex as far more meddling and obnoxious, eager to interfere in the lives of others. (Readers who object should consider that pre-suffrage female activism was a huge part of the Temperance movement .) I was intrigued by Kauffman’s assertion in Ain’t my America that the standing military is enormously disruptive of the family, and thus anti-conservative, and here his commentary makes that case more forcefully. Presumably present readers would take most issue with the concept of child labor laws being opposed, but contemporaries make an excellent point that is not now sufficiently appreciated: this was when the State began asserting and assuming ownership of children, irrespective of the family’s interests or the parents desires — a road which has led to some places like the Inglorious People’s Republic of Californistan wanting to abduct children from parents who objected to their tweens wanting to chemically and surgically destroy their bodies under the influence of transmania. Good people often bad policy make, Kauffman remarks.

Fans of Kauffman will enjoy this on the off chance they can find it, but I wouldn’t use it to introduce Kauffman to anyone: he’s more restrained and formal here, and I only had to consult a dictionary once while reading

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A true conservative with a small "c," Kaufmann challenges such commonplaces of our life as school consolidation, the interstate highway system, mass military service, and even women's suffrage, both by looking at the arguments of their opponents back in the day, and at their ultimate effects--weakening or destroying small communities and increasing the anonymity and atomization of American life.

The book is a bit quirky, but the writing is sprightly and the source material is fascinating. There are arguments we never hear these days, but we should. A great deal has been lost, and as our power, our treasure, and our carbon fuels run out, what can we recover?