America First!: Its History, Culture, and Politics

by Bill Kauffman, Gore Vidal (Foreword by)

Overview

America First! is a rarity among political books: first published in 1995, it remains more timely, relevant, and even urgent than ever. Lively and iconoclastic, it explores the rich heritage, the turbulent present, and the possible future of the political and cultural tendency known as "America First." Bill Kauffman, a columnist for the American Conservative, examines the nineteenth-century underpinnings and twentieth-century eruptions of American isolationism and nationalism, which are the fault lines along which the politics of the twenty-first century are cleaving. In a new preface and epilogue written especially for this reissue, he traces the evolution of America First sentiment over the past twenty years: from its near-eclipse in the war hysteria of the George W. Bush administration to its revival in 2016 with the populist campaigns of Donald Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781633883093
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	09/06/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Bill Kauffman is the author of eleven books, including Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, which won the 2003 national “Sense of Place” award from Writers & Books, and Look Homeward, America, which the American Library Association named one of the best books of 2006. He also wrote the screenplay for the feature film Copperhead (2013). Kauffman is a columnist for The American Conservative. He and his family live in his native Genesee County, New York.

Table of Contents

Preface 1

Foreword Gore Vidal 9

Introduction 13

Part 1 The Evolution of Populist Antiwar Sentiment

1 Ham 'n' Amos: The Populist and Patrician Roots of America First 27

2 There Are Left the Mountains: American Writers and the Perishing Republic 69

3 The Merchants of Death of Sunset Boulevard 85

Part 2 Let Us Now Praise Famous America Firsters

4 Alice of Malice: The Other Side of Rooseveltism 103

5 Sinclair Lewis: It's a Grand Republic 117

6 Patriotic Gore Vidal 129

7 Fulbright: The First Arkansas Bill 143

8 Edward Abbey: Parched in the American Desert 155

9 Jack Kerouac: The Beat Goes Right 165

10 Autumn in New England: The Last Jeffersonian 175

Part 3 America First Renewed

11 The New Party of the Old Republic 187

12 The Devil Thumbs a Ride: Buchanan, Perot, and the Middle American Revolt 209

13 The Coiled Rattlesnake: An America First Foreign Policy for the 1990s 235

Epilogue: The Road to Trump vii

Bibliography 257

Index 283

Editorial Reviews

"PRAISE FOR THE ORIGINAL EDITION OF AMERICA FIRST!“Enjoyable and fascinating…dazzling…If you read only one political history book this year, here it is.” —Booklist “Novel and important…often perceptive and nearly always provocative.” —World Policy Journal“Kauffman and I are the original patriots… Kauffman is a romantic reactionary, a writer with an odd, energetic optimism.” —Gore Vidal “Kauffman is an engaging and often amusing writer.” —Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Washington Monthly“

From the Publisher