Paradise lost: a populist's nostalgic ode to an America gone by.

AuthorMcClaughry, John
PositionLook Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists - Book review

Look Homeward, America, by Bill Kauffman, Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 185 pages, $25

AT THE TURN of the 20th century, one of the most popular writers in America dwelled in a small village in upstate New York. After two decades of wandering about Europe and America, Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) had settled in East Aurora, 18 miles southeast of Buffalo. Along the way he had built and sold a soap company, making a tidy profit he used to finance his literary ventures.

Hubbard wanted to be a well-known writer. The editors at the leading publishing houses of the day did not encourage that ambition. So Hubbard followed the advice of an ancient local rustic, Uncle Billy Bushnell: "Stay at home and do your work well enough, and the world will come to you."

Hubbard launched a printing plant, manned by youngsters from the village, to turn out his magazine The Philistine, devoted to expressing his political, philosophical, and religious views. He went on to print, bind, and sell his essays. Many of them, written to introduce readers to notables such as Washington, Voltaire, Marcus Aurelius, and Jane Austen, appeared in a 14-volume set titled Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great. His most celebrated essay--still read today, though not often enough--was "A Message to Garcia," the inspiring tale of a resourceful and courageous U.S.Army courier who made his way to the camp of a Cuban rebel leader just before the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Hubbard became known far and wide as "The Sage of Aurora."

In many respects--not including the creation of a 300-employee publishing house--Bill Kauffman of tiny Elba, New York, has become today's Elbert Hubbard. But unlike Hubbard, whose essays glorified the lives and works of famous people, Kauffman's literary journey seeks out "the America of holy fools and backyard radicals, the America whose eccentric voice is seldom heard anymore ... the [voice of] third parties, of Greenbackers and Libertarians and village atheists and the 'conservative Christian anarchist' party whose founder and only member was Henry Adams."

Kauffman's earlier books mined interesting veins of localism and hostility to modernity. America First! celebrated America's forgotten isolationist activists, from Hamlin Garland to Alice Roosevelt, plus other assorted individualists, including Edward Abbey, Gore Vidal, Sinclair Lewis, and this writer, included because he considered me, not altogether inaccurately, the last lonely true-believing Jeffersonian. His Dispatches From the Muckdog Gazette celebrated the lives of the common people of Kauffman's Genesee County, home of the minor league Batavia Muckdogs baseball team.

His newest book, Look Homeward, America, will interest anyone who suspects there might be more to America than is found in the average installment of the network news. It's a series of...

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