Bill Kauffman was born on November 15 (also the birthday of Bobby Dandridge) in the otherwise forgettable year of 1959. He was an all-star Little League shortstop for the Lions Club Cubs but soon thereafter his talents eroded. After an idyllic childhood in his ancestral home of Batavia, New York, birthplace of Anti-Masonry, he was graduated from Batavia High School in 1977. He earned, more or less, a B.A. from the University of Rochester in 1981 and went therefrom to the staff of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the only dairy farmer in the U.S. Senate. Two and a half years later he left Moynihan’s staff a bohemian Main Street anarchist who loved the Beats, the New England transcendentalists, early 20th century local colorists (Sarah Orne Jewett his Maine gal), cowpunk music, and the crazy old America. Neil Diamond and Karen Carpenter, too, but don’t tell anyone. He bummed around out west for a while, sleeping in bus stations and writing derivative poetry in Salt Lake City flophouses (nah, he’s not a Mormon, just a BYU fan) before an ill-starred year in graduate school at the UR. He took a seminar with Christopher Lasch and thought on it. In the spring of 1985 he flew west to become an assistant editor with
Reason magazine. He had great fun in Santa Barbara with that crew of congenial editors drinking far into the night at Eddie Van Cleeve’s Sportsman’s Lounge, but in ’86 he flew east to become the magazine’s Washington editor. Always homesick, Kauffman persuaded his lovely and talented wife Lucine, a Los Angelena, to move back to Batavia in 1988 in what he called a “one-year experiment”—the year to be measured, apparently, in Old Testament terms. They’re still there—or, more accurately, five miles north in Elba (apt name for an exile!), where Lucine is Town Supervisor. She may well be the highest-ranking Armenian-American elected official in the country, at least until the voters of California send Cher to the U.S. Senate. Take that, Turks!
Lucine and Bill have a daughter, Gretel, 17, who writes and acts and plays piano and French horn. Their lab mutt, Victoria, whose tail graces the accompanying photo, is now departed, to their sorrow, but a cat, Duffy, darts in and out of the house when the mood strikes.
Bill is the author of nine books:
Every Man a King (Soho Press/1989), a novel, which was recently rescued from the remainder bin by a
New York Sun article proclaiming it the best political satire of the last century (the
Sun thereupon set);
Country Towns of New York (McGraw-Hill/1994), a travel book about God’s country;
America First! Its History, Culture and Politics (Prometheus/1995), a cultural history of isolationism which Benjamin Schwarz in the
Atlantic called the best introduction to the American anti-imperialist tradition;
With Good Intentions? Reflections on the Myth of Progress in America (Praeger/1998), his worst-seller, a sympathetic account of critics of highways, school consolidation, a standing army, and the Siren Progress;
Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive (Henry Holt/2003; Picador ppb. 2004), a memoirish book about his hometown which won the 2003 national “Sense of Place” award from Writers & Books;
Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists (ISI/2006), which the American Library Association named one of the best books of 2006 and which won the Andrew Eiseman Writers Award;
Ain’t My America: The Long Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle American Anti-Imperialism (Henry Holt/ Metropolitan/2008), which Barnes & Noble named one of the best books of 2008;
Forgotten Founder: Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin (ISI/2008), a biography of a brilliant dipsomaniacal Anti-Federalist who warned us this was gonna happen; and
Bye Bye, Miss American Empire (Chelsea Green/2010), a cheerful account of dissolution.
Bill is a regular contributor to the
Wall Street Journal and
a columnist for
The American Conservative. He has written for numerous publications, including
The American Scholar, the
Los Angeles Times Book Review,
The Nation,
Chronicles, the
Independent and
The Spectator of London,
Counterpunch,
Orion,
University Bookman, and
Utne Reader.
He is vice president of the Genesee County Baseball Club, which owns the Batavia Muckdogs of the New York-Penn Baseball League. Come summertime, he can be found in the 3rd base bleachers at Dwyer Stadium. He is also active in the officerless (of course) John Gardner Society.
Bill is more handsome than the photo on this site would suggest.
See
books written by Bill Kauffman.
you know sometimes being old and local, not old as in I’m old now, but old as in how it was done back in the day old – whew, take a breather – being old and local does not imply being conservative, and conservative not in the sense of right wing, but in the sense of cognizant of and attempting to harmonize with what already is.
I don’t know if it is true everywhere, but in some places around my place those who were were quite content to extract the last ounce of value they could find and then leave. Exploitation is the culture that was.
I think at some point you all ran some pieces on how to live locally in a large urban center or something like that; it’s also true that there are plenty of mid to small to tiny towns where how to live locally has yet to be discovered.
Last time I was there, seemed the population in parts of Ohio was changing. Lots of people leaving, some moving in. One of those slow moving big changes sort of things, hard to see as it’s slow. Comes off as static at first glance. It’s not. Nothing is, I guess.
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