My first encounter with the work of Bill Kauffman took place in a small public library in suburban New Jersey. While poring over a back catalogue of “current events” titles that were neither current nor eventful, I stumbled upon a book entitled America First! Drawn to the volume by its defiantly Buchananite title and the promise of an interesting forward (Gore Vidal rarely disappoints), by book’s end I had been transformed from a fire-breathing leftist into a decentralist “Americanist.” I had my taste of the forbidden fruit, and I was hooked.
For a political junkie, the collected works of Bill Kauffman are the gateway drug to all things off limits. Emphasizing the “character “ in “character sketch, “ the typical offering from Kauffman is filled with witticisms and quirks of history ignored or discarded by “consensus historians.” Kauffman’s books focus on a variety of causes lost to time, historical memory, or executive privilege. From the anti-internationalism of J. Bracken Lee to the eco-anarchism of Edward Abbey and every point in-between, nary an obscurity or eccentricity of our political (or cultural) landscape has been overlooked by the self-professed “placeist” Kauffman, patriot son of Batavia, New York.
In his latest work, Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet, Kauffman stays true to form while tackling his biggest beast yet. Though this is ostensibly a biography of the firebrand, alcohol-fueled Anti-Federalist extraordinaire Luther Martin, the “forgotten” of the title has as much to do with the causes of states’ rights and individual liberty as with the virtually unknown man whose portrait adorns the cover.
Kauffman, by way of Martin, argues the unthinkable: our Constitution is not a perfect document, drawn up by selfless representatives of the people’s will. Quite the contrary, according to Kauffman: its writing and ratification were a “coup” promoted by centralizing nationalists dedicated to the principle that what’s bigger is inherently better. Or to sum it up rather neatly, the slow death march of the republic began almost a hundred years before Mr. Lincoln’s War and over two hundred years before the age of Bush.
