Bill Kauffman – författare

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.

The America First Committee, founded in September 1940 to keep the United States out of what became the Second World War, was the largest antiwar organization in American history. Its 800,000 members spanned the political spectrum from conservative Republican to Socialist; its spokesmen were prairie populists, Eastern patricians, and, most controversially, the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh. Written in 1942, but unpublished until now, this study of the America First Committee by its chief researcher and Senate lobbyist, Ruth Sarles, sheds new light on this frequently misunderstood and misrepresented group. An introduction by Bill Kauffman assesses the place of Ruth Sarles and America First in American history.Ruth Sarles was at the center of the storm. An Ohio-born peace activist with the pacifist National Council for Prevention of War, Sarles knew all of the principals and had a ringside seat for the great debates that pitted isolationists against interventionists. In 1942 she wrote a firsthand history of the America First Committee. But a war was on, and dissent was scarce: her manuscript remained unpublished—until now. Ruth Sarles tells of America First's unlikely birth at the Yale Law School, its extraordinary growth as Middle Americans rallied to the antiwar banner, and the fierce controversies in which it became enmeshed. In this edition, Kauffman uncovers some fascinating sidelights to the era, including a pro-Lindbergh editorial by a student journalist named Kurt Vonnegut.

Barber B. Conable, Jr.-perhaps the most respected member of Congress of his era-kept a frank, insightful, revealing journal available now for the first time thanks to the efforts of editor Bill Kauffman in The Congressional Journal of Barber B. Conable, Jr., 1968-1984.The journal is an honest, searching, sometimes humorous, occasionally cutting, and always fascinating look inside Congress. Conable, a Republican member of the House from upstate New York, wrote perceptively about Presidents Nixon, Ford, H. W. Bush, and the leading congressional figures of the day. For seventeen years he wrote about the big events as well as daily political life in an era that included Vietnam, Watergate, political realignment, and major changes in entitlements and taxes, where he played a key role.Displaying his gift for clear expression and astute insight, Conable narrates the machinations of major tax measures, trade bills, and such special interests of his as public financing of congressional campaigns. While he is never shy about expressing personal judgments, he revels in the give and take of legislative politics. Conable had an acute sense of the human dynamics of legislating: In addition to the tax bills he shaped and struggled with as the leading Republican on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, his work with the 1982-1983 Social Security Commission, led by Alan Greenspan, is a classic exercise. Conable thought a deal was critical for the solvency of the Social Security Trust Fund but politically almost impossible given the differing priorities of the chief protagonists, President Reagan and House Speaker Tip O'Neill. In the journal Conable pronounces the effort doomed on January 13, 1983. Two days later he marvels at the political and personal dexterity and skill that ended up producing a deal.The journal illuminates Conable's intellect, his commitment to his constituents, and his appreciation of principled pragmatism; his writings are in real time, not rendered retrospectively to make himself look better, a rarity among political legacies.

A native son on the history, literature, culture, and characters of the Upstate New York he loves.Over the last three-plus decades, Bill Kauffman has written about and interviewed upstate New York novelists, politicians, and civic activists who have given the region much of its pith, vitality, and distinctiveness. Upstaters collects the best of these, including profiles of upstate novelists Walter D. Edmonds, John Gardner, and Henry W. Clune; a portrait of congressional legend and World Bank president Barber Conable; appreciations of underknown writers Josephine Young Case, Martha Treichler, and Warren Hunting Smith; and a cast of characters that includes dying men and enterprising women, enfants terribles and eminences grises, doomed folksingers, and the cheapest man in America. These men and women do not exist in isolation; they give life to and draw life from their little places, and so their communities also slip into profile, from the literary capital of New York State (Utica) to the flame-tender of an all-but-extinct Olympic sport (Angelica). Kauffman, former vice president of the minor-league Batavia Muckdogs of the New York-Penn League (extinguished by Major League Baseball), writes also of the fight to maintain baseball in a Rust Belt town in a bottom-line age. His tone throughout is by turns amused, hortatory, wistful, angry, and earnest, but most of all animated by love for the part of New York that has nurtured, annoyed, and entertained him for a lifetime.