Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age

by Daniel T. Rodgers

"The most belated of nations," Theodore Roosevelt called his country during the workmen's compensation fight in 1907. Earlier reformers, progressives of his day, and later New Dealers lamented the nation's resistance to models abroad for correctives to the backwardness of American social politics. Atlantic Crossings is the first major account of the vibrant international network that they constructed--so often obscured by notions of American exceptionalism--and of its profound impact on the United States from the 1870s through 1945.

On a narrative canvas that sweeps across Europe and the United States, Daniel Rodgers retells the story of the classic era of efforts to repair the damages of unbridled capitalism. He reveals the forgotten international roots of such innovations as city planning, rural cooperatives, modernist architecture for public housing, and social insurance, among other reforms. From small beginnings to reconstructions of the new great cities and rural life, and to the wide-ranging mechanics of social security for working people, Rodgers finds the interconnections, adaptations, exchanges, and even rivalries in the Atlantic region's social planning. He uncovers the immense diffusion of talent, ideas, and action that were breathtaking in their range and impact.

The scope of Atlantic Crossings is vast and peopled with the reformers, university men and women, new experts, bureaucrats, politicians, and gifted amateurs. This long durée of contemporary social policy encompassed fierce debate, new conceptions of the role of the state, an acceptance of the importance of expertise in making government policy, and a recognition of a shared destiny in a newly created world.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, 20th Century, American, Politics, 19th Century

648 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 1998

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 3 out of 5]

Over a decade after its highly lauded publication I still have not entirely made up my mind as to how I feel about this book. On the one hand, it is intelligent, interesting, and for the most part well-researched. On the other hand, there are some pretty significant errors and omissions.

To begin with the most glaring: Rodgers' underlying chronological supposition concerning transatlantic communication is mistaken. He asks how and why a transatlantic intellectual discourse grew up towards the end of the 19th century, and answers this question with the growth of progressivism, relating the “new” discourse to the social and political changes of the 1890s.

In fact, transatlantic intellectual discourse had been solidly in place well before the period of Rodgers study. Anyone who has studied 19th-century intellectual life could have pointed this out to Rodgers, whose area of specialization is the 1920s. Presumably neither he nor the publisher sought feedback in this area, which is a great pity.

However, if your area of interest is progressive movement after the First World War, its ideas and influences, and the root causes are less important to you, Rodgers' analysis of these elements is useful and intelligent. It is also perhaps timely, as Rodgers' sees American progressives as looking to Europe for ideas and models in a period of “rapid intensification of market relations... and the rising working-class resentments” (59).

Interestingly, one of Rodgers contentions is that a difficulty faced by American progressives was not in finding models in the first place, but in finding many and having to choose between them. They wanted, to put it very generally, to find a path of moderation between the “rocks of cutthroat economic individualism and the shoals of the all-coercive statism” in time to prevent the rise of working class socialism. The debate in these circles included labor regulation (minimum wage, maximum hours, et al), urban planning, and social insurance.

After WWI, in contrast, the exchange of ideas between Europe and the US became more even, especially after the New Deal, which many progressives viewed as the gathering up and culmination of ideas from both sides of the Atlantic. Rodgers argues convincingly that this period and its ideas and political actions were of lasting influence in the US and many European nations.

Even for those interested in the late 19th century there is material of value here, although it less original in its research. Rodgers discusses sociological tourism (largely but not uniquely American), using the most famous example of Jane Addams multiple visits to Toynbee Hall and W.E.B. Dubois' study of German Kathedersozialisten. He returns to this theme in the 1930s with the Lewis Mumford and Catherine Bauer's investigation of housing reform and modern architecture in Germany and Austria. There are also excellent, if not precisely stimulating, examinations of experimental reform attempts in the area of mapping, railway ownership, agrarian reform, mortgages, and, probably best known of these, the Farm Loan Act of 1916.

Other chapter topics: the Paris Exhibition of 1900 and its Musee Social, American students in Germany, municipalization (i.e. the contests over civic versus private ownership of utilities), “war collectivism,” agrarian cooperatives, rural reconstruction, and William Beveridge's plans for postwar reconstruction in Britain. That's just an overview; we also get sanitary improvements, slum clearance, public baths, urban gardening, pensions, health insurance, the role of unofficial* policy advisers, mutual benefit societies – all of which, of course, varied greatly from one place to another.

*Oddly, Rodgers doesn't make much mention of official ones, i.e. those who actually employed by the government or universities to study these questions. It is all philanthropists and philosophers for him. People like Edgar Sydenstricker, Milbourn Lincoln Wilson, and Lewis Cecil Gray don't figure into his chart, although they were essential providers of communication and sponsorship.

Another odd omission is the issue of American nativism. Many historians, such as Harry Marks, would argue that this was a major factor in the failure of Progressivism in the 1920s. I expect legal historians would also debate his minimalist reading of the role of the courts in this process.


There are far more books on this subject than I can list here, but a few suggestions for further reading:

The Emergence of the Welfare States
The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences
Social Scientists And Farm Politics In The Age Of Roosevelt
States, Social Knowledge, And The Origins Of Modern Social Policies
Carroll Wright and Labor Reform: The Origin of Labor Statistics
Transnational History
British Social Reform and German Precedents: The Case of Social Insurance 1880-1914
Municipal Services and Employees in the Modern City: New Historic Approaches

[Kelli Peters · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age by Daniel T. Rodgers is an immense work about the progressive age in the United States and Europe. Rodgers follows the progress of the progressive age from approximately 1870 to the Second World War. The focus of this work is on the development and rise of social politics during this time, particularly in labor and housing reforms. Progressive ideas began to manifest themselves in European communities facing harsh working and living conditions. These ideas were then carried back to the United States by individuals that Rodgers calls “brokers”. These brokers were often students and journalists that traveled to Europe to learn and observe. Most of the first ideas that were brought back from the United States were visual ones, changes that people could observe and then apply in the United States. Following these observations, people were able to delve deeper into the thoughts and politics that propelled these changes and introduce those in their journey back to the United States. Rodgers focuses on labor and housing throughout this work to demonstrate the movement of ideas. Changes in labor and housing were very visible and had clear connections across the continents. Rodgers follows the changes in labor, outlining the development of labor unions, rise of insurance agencies, decrease in laissez-faire government, increase in government regulation, and more. He also details changes in urban development, particularly government-sponsored transportation, manufacturing, and housing.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rodgers's tome is at times unwieldy, given its enormous thematic range and lack of defining characters throughout, but the book brilliantly synthesizes seventy-five years of progressive politics, 1870 to 1945. All of the people in this book wanted to solve the "social question" — the nature of society in a modern capitalist age. More than any person or group of people, an intellectual exchange is the star of this book. Rodgers believes that Progressivism would not have existed in its modern form without an exchange of ideas, books, students, travelers, and politicians across the Atlantic. This concept ties together distinct chapters on urban planning, insurance, and municipalization. The New Deal years tie together many of the developing themes, showing how the Roosevelt administration enacted sweeping reforms that were still limited, ineptly administered, or prejudicial at times. America became a global nation by the end of WWII, but the transatlantic web of progressives declined, as Americans became more interested in dictating their ideas to the world instead of listening and discussing. This book is a clear-eyed analysis of Atlantic social politics, with the triumphs and failures of the Progressive Era.

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, but def a slog. Writing a longggg book was part of his historiographic intervention, so he can't be blamed. Academics, read his "In Search of Progressivism" article.

[Dan Allosso · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought Rodgers made an important point about the transatlantic spread of ideas that ultimately became known as Progressive. The period he chose, from the Exposition Universelle at the turn of the 20th century to the New Deal, was interesting. My only criticism was that he focused almost exclusively on elite urban intellectuals. Don't get me wrong, Horace Plunkett was a fascinating figure. But when Rodgers wrote about the Municipal Ownership League, he mentioned three of the leagues vice presidents, including Jane Addams. He did NOT mention Albert May Todd, the founder and president of the league. Todd was a rural businessman from Kalamazoo Michigan. He ran the largest peppermint oil business in the world, where he mixed business with agricultural reform, labor activism, and (in his political career) support for the Populist platform and opposition to railroads and other monopolies. AND he was at the Exposition Universelle Rodgers begins his story with. My point is, failing to see people like Todd because they were rural rather than urban or businessmen rather than academics, distorts the story Rodgers is telling.

[Andrea R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Understanding where we are

Atlantic Crossings, in its detailed and lively description of the flow of progressive ideas about modernizing societies through Northern Europe, the US and the antipodes from 1880 till 1950, does much to highlight and describe the commonalities and the distinctions in each country. Our present world stands in the shoulders of these exchanges. As we look to a an increasingly globalized world, even as it staggers, perhaps especially as it staggers, there are innumerable lessons to learn from the well told story Professor Rodgers has give us.

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a lot of good material here about transatlantic intellectual history during the gilded age and progressive era but Rodgers is mostly unable to explain why this phenomenon stopped which is pretty critical to his argument about the period between the Civil War and WWII being an exceptional period. Also the absence of race in a book about transatlantic ideas in the late 1800s\early 1900s is pretty glaring. Still very useful though and foundational for a lot of later work

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I get why this one is so important but god is it dense

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good intervention into the American exceptionalism debate. Short answer: it's not exceptional but is different at the same time.

[Zachary · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book concerns the period from about 1880 up through the Post-War. Readers expecting a strict definition of "Progressive" as being those policies enacted between McKinley's death and Harding's inauguration will find that Rodgers includes New Deal Liberalism in the broad swath of Progressive policies adopted from across the Atlantic. Rodgers' thesis is two-fold. First, that the reforms Americans enacted in response to industrialization originated in Europe. Second, that the New Deal was a belated burst of pent-up Progressive reforms. Having finished the book, it is clear to me that the second part of the thesis governs the first. Rodgers, in seeking to explain the manifold contradictions within the New Deal, looked to earlier American reform attempts and their European influences. The Great Depression provided frustrated reformers with an opportunity to revive efforts to import European reforms. Rodgers' discussion of Social Security exemplifies my interpretation of his argument. If the New Deal was merely a reaction to an economic crisis, then it does not follow that a government would impose a new tax upon citizens in a struggling economy. Rodgers argues convincingly that the Social Security Act had origins in the Old Age Pension and Unemployment Insurance schemes of Lloyd George's Britain. Because Rodgers has built his argument from the end of the 19th century forward, his argument stands on solid footing. However, I have difficulty accepting that the first generation of American reformers would have seen Roosevelt's New Dealers as their successors. The book focuses much on policy, as it happened at the highest levels. There's little discussion of the public, and their buy-in to progressive manipulation. Did they really benefit from these schemes? I suppose that's outside of Rodgers' project, since he concerns himself only with the ideas, their origins, and their implementation. I liked the conclusion, and its sly condemnation of American Exceptionalism. My midlevel rating of the book has more to do with its tedium than with the quality of its arguments. The arguments are sound, but they are hidden.

[Kristi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rodgers focuses his study on the trans-Atlantic connections between industrializing nations during the Progressive era. He is primarily interested in the confluence of processes and cultural transformations that impacted distinct political choices, arguing that transnational similarities render particular domestic choices more meaningful. While Rodgers discusses the shared economic development between Western nations, as well as changed attitude in America toward Europe that involved an acknowledgement of a common history and past culture, he also states that the cultural exchange was largely intellectual, and that Americans’ travel abroad not only emphasized America’s lag behind Europe, but also contributed to selective cultural experience and remembering that would influence American politics until after the New Deal. Trans-Atlantic relationship were, therefore, largely oppositional. While lazier-faire economics was linked to morality by the freedom of choice, this conflicted with tensions of urban collectivization. According to Rodgers, American progressives concentrated their reform efforts on realizing the potentials of urban spaces through municipal and social planning, while American simultaneously pursued cultural imperialism of the physical and cultural European landscape through city planning, consumer goods, and motion pictures. Personally, I found it dry at times, simply because the topic was not of particular interest to me, but it is an important read on this subject and is well done.

[Vincent DiGirolamo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, impressive study. Such a big canvas. So many social ills to rectify and social goods to de-commodify -- in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Scandinavia, New Zealand, etc. Everyone zipping around the globe, reading each other's dry-as-dust studies and proposals with eagerness. Still, the bad'uns who cling to some mythic American Way and reject all foreign-born ideas. Who else could sort this out with such clarity and lively writing? Useful, informative, and inspiring for those daring to begin or finish work on one's own big study. Thank you, Daniel Rodgers.

[Gregory W. Swedberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

He fails to discuss a monumental example of the true universality -- and not just cross-Atlanticity -- of the Progressive Movement by connecting imperialism with Progressivism, which, for a brief period, were difficult to distinguish. Still, a refreshing break from American exceptionalism while leaving the door open to other avenues of trans-national research on Progressivism.

[Ben Brandenburg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Transnational history at its best.

[Lance · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contributes to the growing literature of the unified Atlantic world

[Melissa Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was long but informative. I wished he would have included women and that movement involved.

[Jeffrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Its about 300 pages longer than it needs to be. Good information, but repetitive.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

good book. i wish the fact that americans spoke with europeans didn't constitute an argument. so i hold that against him. the research is interesting especially the bit about municipal socialism

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good examination of the origins of coping with urban growth and modernity in America.

[AskHistorians]

Amazing history of "progressive" thought and politics as a trans-atlantic phenomenon.

[Andee Nero · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book didn't need to be this long to make the point it was making.

[Malini Sridharan · Rating 2 out of 5]

sections

[Caitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

On pg. 134, Rodgers refers to Jesse Macy and Albert Shaw, both Grinnell grads. Badass!