Book Review: Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1998).
In Atlantic Crossings, Daniel Rodgers discusses American social politics from the Gilded Age through the New Deal. In the process, he uncovers the international roots of social reforms such as city planning, workplace regulation, rural cooperatives, municipal transportation, and public housing. For Rodgers, ideas shaped progressive social politics while individuals carried those ideas back in forth across the Atlantic. Rodgers examines an array of sources, including doctoral dissertations, magazine and newspaper articles, books, and public documents, to describe the tapestry that was trans-Atlantic world of social politics in the Progressive Era.[1] Ultimately, Rodgers seeks to unearth a distinct trans-Atlantic period in America’s past.[2]
Rodgers contends that U.S. social policy from the 1870s to World War II was the product of a cosmopolitan Atlantic internationalism. [3] For Rodgers, American social politics originated not in “nation-state containers” but “in the world between them.”[4] Moving between positions in the world of politics, publishing, and academic life, cosmopolitan thinkers created progressive social reform.[5] “Trans-Atlantic brokers,” Rodgers explains, encouraged the “debates that swirled through the United States and industrialized Europe over the problems and miseries of ‘great city’ life, the insecurities of wage work, the social backwardness of the countryside, or the instabilities of the market itself…”[6] In Rodgers’s analysis, two philosophical strands connected the trans-Atlantic brokers: a belief that the market should not dominate social policy and a confidence in the historical progress of humankind.[7] Overall, the trans-Atlantic brokers criticized laissez-faire economic theory and opposed the commodification of social policy.
For Rodgers, the industrial revolution had, by the late nineteenth century, created an Atlantic economy in which various individuals designed reforms through an international marketplace of ideas. Rodgers explains that economic forces eroded local differences and imposed a commonality on the societies of the Atlantic region.[8] While market forces were contributing factors, Rodgers also points to the labor violence of the 1880s and 1890s as the immediate cause for the Atlantic internationalism. Rodgers argues that international labor violence shattered the illusion of America’s unique destiny. Ultimately, economic and social forces helped to destroy previous notions of American autonomy and distinctiveness and, thus, set the stage for a new anti-exceptionalist worldview.
Several links made up the trans-Atlantic connection. For instance, journals of political opinion, such as the New Republic and the Nation, ran accounts of social reforms in America and Europe. International conferences, official commissions of inquiry, and publicized injustices also energized Atlantic connections. Yet, for Rodgers, the emergence in the 1880s of American academic social scientists represents one of the most important factors in the creation of Atlantic social politics. Traveling to Germany to further their education, aspiring young American scholars discovered ideas that challenged the perceived naturalness of laissez-faire policies. In Germany, the young scholars began to challenge the myth of American exceptionalism, embrace cosmopolitan views, and resist the tendency to commodify social policy.[9]
Unlike traditional interpretations, in which the early years of the twentieth century are depicted as the height of progressivism, Rodgers argues that American progressivism did not peak until the New Deal programs. For Rodgers, New Deal programs did not just stem from depression-era America, but actually derived from a transatlantic network. “The New Deal,” Rodgers explains, “was a great, explosive release of the pent-up agenda of the progressive past.”[10] As Europe descended into fascism, the social political initiative passed to the United States, reversing the flow of transatlantic progressive ideas. During the New Deal, Europeans finally began to arrive in America to observe their social policies.
Why did this trans-Atlantic era end? Rodgers points to the aftermath of the Second World War. “In the United States,” Rodgers explains, “the Second World War marked a triumph of cosmopolitan political consciousness. No one expected that it would also mark the closing of the Americans’ Atlantic social-political era.”[11] According to Rodgers, with Europe in ruins, postwar America emerged as a lone juggernaut of economic activity. Consequently, Americans became too proud to follow other nation’s policies. Additionally, Americans developed a sharp aversion to foreign influences. Thus, America’s success in World War II created the conditions that would eventually lead to the demise of trans-Atlantic social politics.
Like other historians, such as James Kloppenberg, Rodgers places American progressivism in the middle of a transatlantic context.[12] Still, his work is unique as he relegates Americans, for the most part, to secondary roles. For Rodgers, the traffic of ideas flowed mostly from East to West and, until the New Deal, American’s pace of change in social policy lagged behind Europe’s reforms. Most of all, Rodgers contends, American reformers developed their ideas after studying European precedents. Accordingly, Rodgers transcends the analytical constraints of the nation state and he challenges scholarly assumptions of American exceptionalism. In his view, American history is not necessarily a unique entity that is separate from the historical trends of other regions.
Rodgers also refashions the history of the American welfare state in two aspects. First, he underscores the anachronism of applying the label “welfare state” to the goals of social reformers during the Progressive Era.For instance, Rodgers notes that none of the progressive “players held the ‘welfare state’ as an end goal…the term ‘welfare state’ did not come into currency until the end of the 1940s, as a new term in the Republican Party’s attack on the remnants of the New Deal…”[13] Second, Rodgers challenges monocausal theories to explain the development of social insurance. In the process, Rodgers turns away from the state-centered institutionalism pioneered by Theda Skocpol and the social discipline views identified with Michel Foucault.[14] Rodgers, for example, insists on historical contingencies. He contends that ideas and policies were not simply exchanged; they were transferred, revised, and transformed. Social politics, Rodgers explains, was a “chain of crises, impasses, borrowings, and improvisations.”[15] Rodgers concludes that scholars should resist theoretical constraints, and embrace causal variety.
While Rodgers’s work presents several scholarly insights, it is not without problems. For instance, Rodgers ignores the importance of group identities. Even though he admits that he is more concerned with historical processes, rather than conceptions of identity, he overlooks the ways in which race, ethnicity, and gender could be factors that contributed to the development of social reform efforts.[16] His historical actors do include some African Americans and women, such as W.E. Du Bois, Florence Kelley and Jane Addams. Still, these individuals only appear in his narrative when they share similarities with a group dominated by white males.
Rodgers’s periodization also raises problems. Since Rodgers seeks to uncover a distinct Atlantic period in American history, he tends to dismiss other instances of Atlantic internationalism. For instance, his analysis seems to ignore the ways in which antebellum social efforts, such as those involving education, crime, juvenile delinquency, mental health, and poor relief, might also represent an era of reform entrenched in a trans-Atlantic internationalism. Additionally, Rodgers’s argument overlooks the works of scholars, such as Bernard Bailyn, Ira Berlin, and T.H. Breen, who describe an early modern Atlantic world.[17]
Reservations aside, Rodgers’s work provides several important contributions to the history of progressivism. For instance, Rodgers situates modern American history within a rich and elaborate international context—the Atlantic World. Rodgers also illuminates an intricate web of individuals, institutions, and relationships that facilitated the movement of ideas across national borders. Most of all, by expanding the geographic and temporal boundaries of the Progressive Era, Rodgers underscores the transnational character of historical trends. In the end, Rodgers’s analysis demonstrates the merits of exploring transnational connections and recognizing the analytical constraints of the nation state.
-Rebecca DeWolf, Ph.D.
[1]In an earlier article, Rodgers questioned whether progressivism was even a coherent ideology. In this work, however, Rodgers suggests that it is possible to discuss progressivism in terms of various international clusters of social reform policies. See, Daniel Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (December 1982): 113-132; Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1998), 28-29.
[2] Alan Dawley also highlights the international character of progressivism. See, Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressivism in War and Revolution, 1914-1925 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003).
[3] Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 3.
[4] Ibid., 1-2.
[5] Ibid., 26.
[6] Ibid., 3.
[7] Ibid., 29, 368.
[8] Ibid., 44. Rodgers writes: “By the late nineteenth century, what struck those who traversed the industrial regions of the Old and New Worlds was not their difference but their extraordinary sameness.”
[9] Ibid., 77-78, 111.
[10] Ibid., 415.
[11] Ibid. 485.
[12] See James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and America Social Thought, 1870-1920 (Oxford University Press, 1986).
[13] Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings 28.
[14] Ibid., 25. Theda Skocpol argues for the importance of state structures in shaping the timing and outcomes of political movements. See, Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1992). Michel Foucault argues that the rise of state institutions revolved around notions of “biopolitics” and “biopower.” In his view, state led reforms were developed to exercise more control over individuals, specifically disciplining their bodies and minds. See, Michel Foucault, Disciplined & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Random House, 1977).
[15] Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 250.
[16] Ibid., 5.
[17] See Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005); Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 2 (1996); T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford University Press, 2004).