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Book Review
With Good Intentions?
Reflections on the Myth of Progress in America
by Bill Kauffman
144 pages, index and chapter notes,
hard cover, Praeger, Westport, CT, October, 1998
$35.00 from 1-800-225-5800 or www.greenwood.com
In his new book, Bill Kauffman devotes separate chapters to child labor
laws, school consolidation, women's suffrage, good-roads programs, New
Deal homesteading projects, and war-economy rootlessness. All but the
last two are generally acclaimed as the unassailable accomplishments of
the Progressive Era. But note that question mark in the title.
Was protecting children from greedy fathers and exploitive employers
the only object of the people who sought to prohibit child labor by law
or was there a political intention to extend government control to the
family level? Was school consolidation conceived only as a means for improving
education, or as a way to distance children from parental contact, to
more easily train them to become compliant citizens? Could resistance
to the new "progressive" ideas be overcome by allowing women to vote?
Were good roads desirable for the convenience of rural and small town
people or were they necessary in the "progressive" scheme to transport
children to the consolidated training centers and to make travel to factory
jobs away from home inviting for parents. Bill Kauffman writes of the
arguments by the men and women who cautioned against politically dictated
"progress."
Many of the predictions by the critics of social legislation have come
true. Now, 60 or more years after the enactment of the "progressive" agenda
the good intentions have not been fulfilled and we do have pervasive government.
The results of barring children from opportunities to work, and the failure
of centralized schooling are evident in the numbers of unemployed and
often violent urban youth, and in the falling reading and basic skills
of children attending public schools. And women, who equally deserved
to vote, have not been able to lessen political evils.
Kauffman tells, too, of government homesteading projects to place families
on small, pleasant home plots. Even these well-intentioned efforts didn't
succeed, largely because of bureaucratic control, and had to be abandoned.
In the last two chapters he cites observers who deplore the relocations
of military families, and the roving that weakens the attachment to home
places and withers the neighborly feelings of so many lured to wandering
by interstate highways.
But Bill Kauffman and readers of his book needn't feel discouraged,
there are many energetic couples establishing rural homesteads and achieving
a good life for their families inspite of land-use restrictions, arbitrary
building codes, and high taxes. Along any country road you drive, count
the expansive lawns, vegetable gardens, barns and small shops that go
with family country living where children learn how to grow vegetables,
care for animals, and use tools alongside their parents. Already some
of these husbands and wives are prospering by working at home, and some
of these children are acquiring a life-enhancing education through home-schooling.
Bill Kauffman lives with his family in Elba, a beautiful Upstate New
York village, and writes editorials, essays and books. His 1994 book Country
Towns of New York is soon to reappear in a new edition.
In his 1995 book, America First; Its History, Culture and Politics,
Kauffman wrote of authors: Hamlin Garland, Sinclair Lewis, William Saroyan,
Jack Kerouac, Gore Vidal, Edward Abbey, and John McClaughry; and of national
figures: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Amos Pinchot, and William Fulbright,
all of whom championed American ideals.
Essays by Bill Kauffman have appeared in The Crooked Lake Review:
"Back to Batavia" in #38 and #39, reprinted from The American Scholar;
"NY vs. NY" in #43 and "Henry and Louise in the Lair de Clune" in #47,
both reprinted from Chronicles; then "Warren Hunting Smith The Quintessential
Genevan" in #59; "Walter Edmonds, Our Stalwart" in #61 from New York History;
and "Ed Harris, Thanks for the Memories," in issue #100.
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