Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchist [Hardcover]

Bill Kauffman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* "I am an American patriot," Kauffman begins, and after less than a paragraph of his customary fine, funny, dead-on-the-money phrasing about what that entails, does his first finger-pointing at role models: "I am the love child of Henry Thoreau and Dorothy Day." Dorothy who? (Please don't ask, "Henry who?") In chapter 2, Kauffman shiningly profiles that extraordinary pacifist activist, cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement and the closest thing to St. Francis America has ever seen. He has already sketched two ex-senators he admires, Eugene McCarthy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and revealed why McCarthy was better: Moynihan was a truth teller like McCarthy but also, finally, a political coward. Kauffman's marvelous trick of praising to the skies and then noting shortcomings and even vices increases the fascination of his remarks on such defenders of "family, community, [and] local self-rule" as Wendell Berry, Grant Wood, Carolyn Chute, Millard Fillmore ("ranks with the Quaker Herbert Hoover as the most pacific president"), as well as more obscure figures. More marvelous is that Kauffman, who freely injects himself into his prose, treats himself the same way; he vaunts his stance on something and then acknowledges his contradictions on the same matter. If figures he considers overrated don't get the same treatment, well, that helps keep things snappy. His writing persona couldn't be more appealing. Ray Olson
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Review

"Kauffman’s marvelous trick of praising to the skies and then noting shortcomings and even vices increases the fascination of his remarks on such defenders of "family, community, [and] local self-rule" as Wendell Berry, Grant Wood, Carolyn Chute, Millard Fillmore...More marvelous is that Kauffman, who freely injects himself into his prose, treats himself the same way; he vaunts his stance on something and then acknowledges his contradictions on the same matter. If figures he considers overrated don’t get the same treatment, well, that helps keep things snappy. His writing persona couldn’t be more appealing."-Ray Olson, Booklist

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 250 pages
• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute; 1st edition (May 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932236872
• ISBN-13: 978-1932236873
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #216,993 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Empire Has No Clothes, June 3, 2006

By 

J. LaLonde (Lakeland, Florida, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchist (Hardcover)

Bill Kauffman's "Look Homeward, America" is as refreshingly quirky as the heroes of place, community, and freedom one meets in its pages. It is a brilliant book, but also one that frequently causes the reader to wince--at times because Kauffman's keen observations are expressed so succinctly as to overwhelm with their heart-rending truth and honesty, at other times because his free flowing invective is so spot on it seems almost brutally cruel.

Part rhapsodic panegyric, part unmitigated venting of spleen, "Look Homeward, America" explores everything Kauffman loves and loathes about America: the modern America of chain restaurants, shopping malls, big box stores, fake boobs, and smart bombs and the not-yet-dead alternative America rooted in the love of place and communitarian values. Kauffman shows us that this alternative America has a worthy history exemplified by an unlikely cast of heroes including U.S. Senators Eugene McCarthy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, founders of the Catholic Worker Movement Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, mid-western visual artists John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood, Maine novelist and founder of a "love militia" Carolyn Chute, and the great Kentucky farmer and agrarian author and essayist Wendell Berry, just to name a few.

His invective is reserved mainly for politicians: JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Kissinger, Bush, Cheney, the Clintons. And it can be quite nasty: he calls Kennedy a "priapic skirt-chasing male bimbo" and mocks his "fabled forty-five second love marathons." He takes a nice swipe at the National Organization of Women, "who stroked Senator Clinton's randy husband as though they were silky hookers." And another swipe at "diversity," "...back in those prelapsarian days before mandatory 'diversity' drove off the entire nineteenth century and left our daughters with the belief that the Revolutionary and Civil Wars were fought primarily by runaway slaves and girls dress as boys."

But "Look Homeward" is not an endless tirade; there's plenty of love it in as well. One of the most interesting chapters in the book is about pariah novelist Carolyn Chute, a woman now universally ignored and disdained by the mainstream media and chattering literary class. Nevertheless, Carolyn Chute is a woman whose ideas deserve a hearing and thankfully Bill Kauffman had the gumption to interview her and share her insights with the public rather than turn away in horror from someone so un-p.c. as to advocate armed militias.

Although published by ISI, "Look Homeward" is not unlikely to make conservative Republican readers feel ill at ease. (For example, Kauffman at one point viciously flays Lamar Alexander while extolling the goodness of Mother Jones. And he's no more a fan of Reagan than Clinton or LBJ.) However, in a time of mindless red state/blue state myopia Kauffman's fearlessness in searching out the virtuous traits of politicos from both the left and the right of the political spectrum--what Kauffman calls "our hopelessly inadequate and painfully constrictive political corral"--is both stimulating and challenging.

"Look Homeward, America" is a fine book. At once discursive, discerning, gentle, bitter, nostalgic, and hopeful, it aptly describes the moral and spiritual emptiness of a far-flung empire of the deracinated, and the joys to be found instead in family and community life firmly rooted in place and history. It is also a nice antidote to Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons, which is a fine book and expresses some of the same sentiments but is a bit too prissy and pulls too many punches. Bill Kauffman doesn't pull any punches.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Counter-intuitive, counter-revolutionary, intriguing and inspiring, November 17, 2008

By 

Andrew S. Rogers (Stamford, Connecticut) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchist (Hardcover)

I read Bill Kauffman's remarkable Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism not long ago, and while I think "Look Homeward, America" is every bit as educational and inspirational, I probably should have read it first. Personally, I found "Ain't..." a more satisfying mix of polemic and personality, in that it was heavier on the former while "Look Homeward..." is stronger on the latter. But taken together, the two books are a solid defense of the almost-forgotten, certainly suppressed, patriotism of localism, liberty, and peace.

The author's argument in "Look Homeward, America" takes the adventurous reader into a world of ideas and ideals a long way from public elementary school civics classes, and equally far from the conventional taxonomy of "liberal" and "conservative." At times, Kauffman's attempt to describe Gene McCarthy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan as "conservatives" -- even of this eclectic sort -- reminded me of a book I read a long time ago (Say the Right Thing: Talk Radio's Favorite Conservative Quotes, Notes and Gloats by GOP activist Floyd Brown and Seattle talk radio host Kirby Wilbur) which included so-called "conservative" quotations from people like Chairman Mao and William O. Douglas. Saying a few "conservative" things does not make one a "conservative," however you choose to define it. So I admit to some skepticism here. However, I am certainly willing to be convinced, because I have gained a great deal of respect for Bill Kauffman's view of the world, as well as his remarkable skill as an entertaining and engrossing writer.

I learned quite a bit from "Look Homeward, America" though, as I said, I personally found "Ain't My America" a stronger book. I am now reading Kauffman's brand-new Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin (Lives of the Founders), which is itself proving to be a remarkable book. For best results, I would view "Look Homeward..." as the first part of a trilogy that includes those other titles as well. If the picture Kauffman paints in this book intrigues your intellect, tugs at your heartstrings, or both, you'll only benefit from following the author into those next books as well.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best introduction to a unique "counterculture", November 13, 2008

By 

mianfei - See all my reviews

This review is from: Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchist (Hardcover)

In "Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals", Bill Kauffmann provides a series of essays on some of the most fascinating figures of American political culture over the centuries, ranging from the fairly familiar like Dorothy Day to the highly obscure, like Maine novelist Carolyn Chute.

Although the figures he discusses are varied, all of them share a deep distrust not only of big government, but also in contrast to Austrians like Human Events and Thomas Woods, big business. Instead, most envisioned a society in which workers would be able to control their own lives. Though I was upon reading the book very familiar with the ideal of workers' self-control via radical Trotskyists at Melbourne University, the ideal here is manifested as an ideal of peaceful local self-reliance in which people are able to produce what they need and trade locally. In Kauffmann's view, attachment should be to one's local place and not to the vast nation-state and its military-industrial complex: a view I have come to sympathise with from readings on both sides of politics. Yet - and this is something my own personal experience tells me well to be necessary - Kauffmann understands how responsibility is much more than making choices every few years but must be seen in one's actions at all times. Despite Kauffmann's strong Catholicism, there are numerous moments of praise in "Look Homeward America" for what most would regard as quite ordinary popular culture; thus the book never comes off as preachy or harsh. Rather, Kauffmann comes off as lighthearted and humorous and as a very easy read even for those with little knowledge of politics.

In the process of describing some of the more little-known figures like Grant Wood, Kauffmann not only shows what they stood for but provides a number of real-life stories that is exceptional for any person writing about serious politics: for instance, how Wood's ideals evolved in the Iowa plains takes up a good proportion of the book, as does his account of obscure 1850s President Millard Fillmore and his efforts to prevent war between the North and South, together with Carolyn Chute's history in the remote interior of Maine as a potato-picker who worked for extraordinarily low wages but still coped well.

All in all, if you want an introduction to an overlooked but genuine "Third Way", "Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals" is truly the book to buy.