atlantic crossings note

8/7/2019 Atlantic Crossings Note

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"Social Politics Across the Great Pond: A Summary of Daniel T. Rodgers, _Atlantic Crossings_"

"Why is there no welfare state in America?" For decades, sociologists and historians interested in

the development of the post-World War II European welfare state have looked to the generative period from 1880 to 1940, when Germany, France, England and the Scandinavian countriesadopted a series of innovative, state-centered, social programs--unemployment insurance, socialsecurity, industrial accident and health insurance--adding programs for child care and motheringwork in the postwar era. While the explanations for these policies varied with scholarly fashionand the changing political fortunes of the welfare state itself, a uniform belief in the coherence(and inevitability) of the phenomena persisted, along with the conviction that there wassomething peculiar about the United States polity. How else to account for its noted delays inadopting some programs (social security, unemployment insurance) and failure to develop others(universal health insurance, maternity subsidies)?

Not the least of the merits of Dan Rodgers' pathbreaking book is that it calls into question thisreceived wisdom, which saw strong connections between the postwar welfare states and thesocial policies of the previous sixty years. For Rodgers, the postwar welfare states are somethingquite different from the "social politics" of the interwar and fin-de-siecle decades: "The 'welfarestate' was not the articulated goal of its framers, but [at best] a label trailing the fact (p. 28)."Even the label belongs to a later era: progressive reformers endorsed neither the statism of the'welfare state' nor its narrow reliance on social insurance mechanisms. Rather than seeing the

prewar era as the gestation period of the welfare state, it must, Rodgers argues, be read on itsown terms, as an period of trans-European, trans-Atlantic, social experimentation--experimentation with programs meant to soften and delimit the effects of intensiveindustrialization and urbanization.

Searching for a "middle course between the rocks of cutthroat economic individualism and theshoals of an all- coercive statism (p. 29)," the "progressive architects of social politics" traveledto learn by example. British reformers went to Germany to report on Bismarck's social insuranceschemes; German engineers came in the 1920s to study American factories, German architects tostudy American building designs; Irish, Austrian, German and Canadian agronomists trekked toDenmark to investigate the workings of rural cooperatives. Personal exchanges were augmentedvia textual means: reports, commissions and the proceedings of international congressesdocumented the operations of programs in housing, worker safety and insurance [1]. For morethan five hundred pages, Rodgers details the borrowing, imitating and modifying of social

programs among the members of this trans-Atlantic community, Europeans and Americans alike.

The greatest of these sociological tourists were the Americans, who turned again and again toEurope seeking lessons in social reform. Some of these visitors are well-known. Jane Adamsmade multiple pilgrimages to London's Toynbee Hall in the 1880s (while Graham Wallas, MaryMacArthur and KeirHardie, inter alia, returned the compliment by later sojourns at LillianWald's Henry Street Settlement). Richard T. Ely and W.E.B. DuBois studied the historicistmethods and social doctrines of the German Kathedersozialisten. In the early 1930s, LewisMumford and Catherine Bauer surveyed modernist architecture and housing reform in Frankfurt,



Berlin, and Vienna. A great many more travellers were forgotten until unearthed by Rodgers' prodigious trolling though the pages of Charities and the Commons, The Nation, The NewRepublic, and countless government and commission reports. Who but a few specialistsremembers Albert Shaw's translation of Glasgow's experiments in municipal ownership of railways? Do even specialists know about Frank Williams, who imported German zoning maps

and specifications to New York in 1913 (p. 185) or David Lubin, who modified Prussianagrarian mortgage banks (Landschaften) to help create the Farm Loan Act of 1916 (pp. 336-339)? The cumulative effect is unmistakable and irrefutable: political innovation in social policytook place in a trans-European, trans-Atlantic context. Isolationist in foreign policy the UnitedStates may have been, but in social policy they were internationalists.

The book consists of eleven chapters: an opening account of the Paris Exhibition of 1900, wherethe Musee Social put the wares of European and North American reformers on display; a chapter on the travels of settlement house workers, journalists and politicians to examine what Europeanshad made of the urban, industrial world America was coming to resemble; a chapter on the

pilgrimages U.S. students of economics made to Germany in the 1870s; a chapter on experiments

in "municipalization"--the political contests, from Birmingham (England) to Cleveland, over whether private entrepreneurs should be allowed to continue owning the water lines and thetrolleys; two chapters devoted largely to city planning and housing reform, one on the decades

preceding the Great War and one on the 1920s and 1930s; a chapter on social insurance(workman's compensation and health insurance) and workplace regulation; a chapter on theephemeral experiments with "war collectivism" in the Great War (housing reform, economic

planning and labor relations); a chapter on agrarian cooperatives and rural reconstruction; andtwo closing chapters on the legacies of social politics--the New Deal and the fate of WilliamBeveridge's plans for the postwar social reconstruction of Britain.

As the above inventory suggests, Rodgers' notion of social politics includes the conventionalsocial insurance schemes beloved of welfare state historians--workman's compensation laws,unemployment insurance, pensions and health insurance-- but it also incorporates city planning,municipal utilities (waterworks, gas works and street railways), farmers' cooperatives, sanitaryimprovements (public baths and milk stations) and housing reform (from slum clearance togarden cities). Though Rodgers is not the first to offer a more expansive version of pre-WWII"welfare statism"--both Douglas Ashford and ThedaSkocpol previously enlarged the canvas --Rodgers' is surely the most comprehensive, most systematic exploration of the topography of "social politics." [2] I would not dare attempt to tell you all Rodgers says about each of thesemovements, but will simply report that I learned something on virtually every page, even aboutthings I thought I knew rather well. But what does Rodgers wish us to understand about thenature of social politics, and its fate in the United States?

EXPLANATIONS. Rodgers' travellers are "idea" women and men who use their foreignexperiences to initiate and promote new social programs. "Amateurs" rather than specialists or career government officials, "they never wielded clear political power (p. 25)." Yet they"produced the ideas, alternatives and solutions that made social politics possible." Rodgersexplicitly commits himself to explaining policy agendas and programmatic ideas, not outcomes(see especially pp. 25- 28). What, then, of America's "backwardness," of the failures to transplantEuropean programs on American political soil, of political *outcomes*? Despite his reluctance



to take political results as the proper end of all politics, Rodgers has a good deal to say about theinstitutional fate of European ideas.

Essential to Rodgers' method is that we understood the nature of international exchange in the political realm. Even when the North Atlantic countries faced similar social problems, and even

when national reformers investigated and appropriated foreign models, the process of translationwas active not passive. Existing local (and political) circumstances shape the process of appropriation. In a common field of action, there are always local varietals. Take the example of social insurance in the late 19th century. Social insurance there was, but the financing andcontrol varied from place to place. In Germany, initially only the miners had a state mandatedinsurance fund while in France, the state banked the funds of government registered mutual

benefit societies; in Britain the same friendly societies shared their market with commercialinsurers. The weight of existing markets and interests (unions/mutual benefit societies; the so-called "private sector"), and the history of state-private relations gave defined shape to theresulting programs. Similarly complex stories are told about housing and agrarian reform, amongothers.

What of the United States?

Americans remain, in Rodgers' telling, Innocents Abroad. Just as the local ramifications of existentialism and deconstructionist critique escaped American academics in the 1950s and1980s, so the nuances of European social politics in the 1880s, 1910s or 1940s escapedAmerican social progressives. How else to explain the enthusiasm of American social reformers-- self-pronounced anti-socialists--for the socialist platform of British post-WWI socialreconstruction, Sidney Webb's and Ramsey MacDonald's _Labour and the New Social Order_?Or the studied blindness of American agronomists to the role played by government land banksin the much lauded Danish rural cooperatives? Translation is selectively tuned to some melodies

but not others.In several stories, timing plays a key role--both the sequencing of deep historical time (America's'backwardness' vis-a-vis Europe) and the adventitious character of ordinary historical time. Thus,

by the time the movement for municipal ownership reaches N. American shores (in the firstdecade of the 20th century), the gas utilities which were the target in Joseph Chamberlain'sBirmingham were already waning [3]. The lateblooming domestic "municipalization" movementdirected its attention instead to the nascent street railway industry. The movement to importhealth insurance plans, by contrast, simply has historical bad luck. The campaign for healthinsurance heated up in 1915, just as the "made in Germany" charges sparked by WWI becameavailable to critics.

The loyalties of American law and the American judiciary to property rights provided a moreconsistent check against progressive politics, especially in the cities [4]. Rodgers makes clear thecourts' role in breaking the rapid movement toward municipal ownership of railways. Yet evenhere it is the intellectual currents which intrigue him. For in the face of legal challenges to themunicipal control of railways, progressives resurrected a venerable but moribund politicalinnovation--the railway commission--giving the public voice in monitoring rates and service, but



not in owning railways and other utilities. Ideology and political precedent, not just the balanceof power, account for the political path taken.

Rodgers' affection for the architects of social politics cannot conceal the fact that their successeswere geographically limited and, in many cases, short-lived. Efforts to extend local programs to

the national level were often checked by a combination of powerful business opponents and tepidor ambivalent allies. If social progress in N. America remained local and piecem

eal, still Rodgers has rescued a range of regional innovations from partial obscurity: fromElwood Mead's California experiments with state-subsidized cooperative farm colonies (345-353) to Carl Mackley's German-inspired working class housing in Philadelphia (403-404).

Perhaps the greatest legacy of social politics, however, can be found in the New Deal. Here,Rodgers radically extends and revises a thesis of William Leuchtenberg's, that New Deal

programs and personnel had their roots in the agencies and ideals of the Great War [5]. Do not,Rodgers argues, direct your attention to the main stage of the New Deal--the National Industrial

Recovery Act or the Civilian Works Administration-- or to the main performers--few of Roosevelt's inner core came to Washington from the rank and file of social politics [6]. Look rather to the periphery--to the cooperative farming programs of the Rural ResettlementAdministration, which took up Elwood Mead's experiments with rural cooperatives--or to theinterstices--the public housing program inserted into the NIRA legislation by Senator Wagner,incorporating the advice of German-inspired New York housing reformer Mary Simkhovitch. Itis not, Rodgers argues, that Franklin Roosevelt and his advisors were social progressives: rather the New Deal drew on "an overstocked warehouse of reform proposals [from the past] stumblinginto the political center (446)." Even within the core programs of the New Deal, Rodgers notesthe weight of three decades of social politics. The provisions of Social Security, he argues, haveless to do with addressing "the economic insecurity of the Depression," and more to do with

European precedents in social insurance and child health nurtured by American progressives (pp.428-446) [7].

The New Deal is, for Rodgers, virtually the last gasp of social politics in the United States. Bythe time the British issue William Beveridge's manifesto for a postwar welfare state, Americanreformers have turned elsewhere, to the dictates of a home-brewed Keynesianism which reliedon economic growth to produce social justice. The U.S.'s extraordinary economic command over the international postwar economy gave reformers a ready reason to put their faith in thegenerosity of the expanding market, and to regard the European states as followers, not leaders,of other nations.

WHERE NOW?

My brief is to describe and not criticize Rodgers' work. Still, some talking points occur to me,which might be taken up in the discussion.

Nativism. Rodgers makes clear how much progressive discourse invoked European example. Yetapart from a few brief mentions, progressives' acknowledged debts to Europe are not treated as a

political liability [8]. How much of the failure of Progressivism, especially during the 1920s, can



be attributed to the strengths of nativism and the political mobilization of anti-communism? Andwhat about the complex nativism of middle class reformers itself, especially in the settlementhouse movement? If we are considering the impact of European political example, shouldn't we--extending the suggestion of Pierre-Yves Saunier (below)--recognize the contemporarydistinction between two Europes, the Nordic Europe of Germany, Britain and Scandinavia (good,

progressive) and the Europe of Italy and the Pale (bad, unmodern)? [9]

The State. Rodgers' focus is on outsiders, those who generated ideas from think tanks, and philanthropies, national and local. He makes a point of noting that few of these outsiders made acareer of holding government office. Yet I wonder if the trajectory of "social politics," especiallyin the 1920s and 1930s, can be explained without considering the careers of people such as theeconomist and statistician Edgar Sydenstricker, who went from a job as an analyst on the U.S.Commission on Industrial Relations to a full-time career in the U.S. Public Health Service. For two decades thereafter, Sydenstricker championed the cause of public health insurance, servingas a bridge between private philanthropies (the Milbank Fund), independent commissions (theCommittee on the Cost of Medical Care) and the government [10]. What about the democratic

planners in the U.S. Bureau of Agricultural Economics--Milburn Lincoln Wilson and LewisCecil Gray--both trained in John Commons' laboratory in progressive economics at theUniversity of Wisconsin [11]? Or the many officials who participated in international congresseson workplace conditions and industrial accidents [12]? Perhaps now that Prof. Rodgers has solovingly charted the place of social progressives outside government, we can also examine their allies in government.

Readers of Daniel Rodger's capacious new work might want to appreciate the symmetry betweenits author's eclectic method and intrepid research abroad and the assorted cultural interests andarduous trans-Atlantic voyages of the book's protagonists, U.S. progressive reformers. The resultof one and the other foray into foreign lands is an enlarged and enriched frame of citation, the

progressives using theirs to legislate reforms on behalf of social welfare, the historian using histo analyze the legacy of that action. To stretch this analogy further, we might also note thatwhereas the progressive reformers drew on their experience abroad to produce a novel, if distinctly American liberal reform tradition, the author has drawn on his to produce a novel, if decidedly "made in U.S.A." interpretation of its origins.

This explanation emphasizes the supply as opposed to the demand side of social reform. Itforegrounds the press of new ideas and experiments circulating through the North Atlantic worldas opposed to the pressures from below arising from social struggles, the collective awakening tonotions of social risks, or the implacable drive on the part of aggressive nation-states to engagein hygienizing bio-politics; all of the latter are arguments that European historians of similar

phenomena have advanced to explain the origins and character of early twentieth century socialreform. Vigorous if a bit ingenuous, serendipitous and piecemeal, the U.S. reform movement, asit is characterized here, ultimately seems very distant from the projects of capitalist reform inEurope. This is notwithstanding that it drew so insistently upon them as an inspiration.

Whether or not the supply of ideas is as crucial to reformist undertakings as Rodgers makes outhere, whether or not he adequately addresses the paradox of why American reform whichappeared to be converging with the European then diverged from it, he does convincingly show



how much contact there was among turn-of-the century critics of market society and howimportant this cross-Atlantic circuit was to the education of American reformers.

My own queries turn here on two issues related to this traffic in ideas and institutions: first, oncharacterizing the cross-national terrain over which they moved, and second, on interpreting their

consumption in milieu so very distant from their original place of conception. Both issues present themselves in a similar context, though from a different vantage point when, in the wakeof World War I, continental Europe began to face the challenge of American models of marketculture. Sweeping over the old problematic of capitalist reform, this U.S. wave of socialinvention carried with it the concept of the "standard of living" engineered by access to massconsumption, and would eventually become the hegemonic current, influencing Europeanreformism more and more from the second half of the century.

The study of institutional transfers inevitably raises what is perhaps the foremost problemcomparativists address, which is why innovations appear more or less simultaneously and withcommon features in what might seem like different contexts, and why, over the longer term, such

innovations might produce drastically different outcomes. In his famous 1928 essay on thecomparative method, Marc Bloch, basing his examples on the spread of the feudal system,suggests three possibilities: namely, that commonalities across different cultures are owed to acommon social-structural origin, a common source of dissemination, or a common functionality(assuming that there were only so many ways of acting in human society). For historians of thetwentieth century, in which change has been so rapid, promoters (and opponents) of innovationcatch on so quickly to new trends, and public debate delights in mixing up arguments about thecauses of bad (and good) trends, distinguishing among these different possibilities is tricky as isgiving them their appropriate weight. If you emphasize the first, you risk being denounced as adeterminist, to emphasize the third a "modernizationist," or functionalist, while to emphasize thesecond hypothesis seems to explain nothing unless there is some plausible account of why anysingle source should be hegemonic.

The key move for comparativists lies in establishing the broad historical context, which Rodgersdoes, though only very cursorily as the North Atlantic "field of force." This space, looselyunified by the intensification of market relations, prodigious urbanization, and rising workingclass resentments (p. 59) was a far stormier place that he suggests. Far from being placid waters,open to traffic hither and yon, in which backwardness and lags among states were imagined asmuch as real, it was the eye of the hurricane of a conflictual global capitalist world-system.Across the North Atlantic the leading western states competed over models of capitalistaccumulation, their rivalries passing through two catastrophic wars that shook Europe from itsglobal leadership and annihilated classical liberal visions of progressive reform.

If the North Atlantic is viewed as a site of rising and declining hegemonies, and we seehegemony as Robert Cox's reading of Gramsci underscores, as speaking to the role of leadingstates in exercising influence in the domain of social as well as technological invention, certainfeatures of Rodger's analysis stand in sharper relief [1].

The first is periodization. World War I should be underscored as a real turning point. Before that,Europe's attractiveness is indeed very great. Afterward, the U.S. and the USSR emerged as the



main poles of social invention. Before the War, Germany and Britain competed mightily for primacy in the field of reform as in other endeavors, and American reformers, as Rodgersdocuments, established a special relationship with German reformers at Halle, Leipzig, and other university centers and especially around the Verein fur Sozialpolitik at Berlin, the youngAmericans sharing with their German professors and contemporaries a common interest in neo-

mercantilist political economy suited to big (and closed) national markets and a common distastefor the tired Manchesterism and imperial highhandedness of the British. After the war, Germanstatism was indelibly associated with the Kaiser's warmongering, and German reformism tingedwith the menace of bolshevism. Before the war, nationalism and liberal reformism could coexist.After the war, nationalist ideologies were incorporated into right-wing authoritarian programsand Fascist corporatism presented itself as a new "third way" toward reform, and its positions ondemographic policy, maternity and child care, as well as leisure, enjoyed great influence withininternational reform circles, among their U.S. participants as well.

If we see the Atlantic as an arena of competing and uneven development, the relationship of national and internationalism acquires a different salience from the relatively open and

progressive world Rodgers portrays. Though ideas did indeed crisscross national frontiers andwere nurtured in international congresses by cosmopolitan minds, reform was essentially anationalizing, if not nationalistic phenomenon. The passage of social reform legislation was anelement of competition among national states, its implementation a factor of nationalredemption, its contribution to improving the human factor calculated more or less scientificallyin national accounts on wages, fertility, pensions, public health, and migration. Paradoxically, thevery implementation of reform on a national basis acted as an element of national cohesion,working not only against the internationalism of the labor movement but also against thecosmopolitanism of progressive ideas. Foreign examples might spur innovation. But their foreignnature, whether that was characterized as statist, authoritarian, socialistic, or other, could just aseasily obstruct it.

My second point regards the institutionalization of ideas generated in such a freighted broader context. Globalization has engendered a vast literature on the "contests of interpretation"unleashed by cross-national encounters. Rodgers speaks of a "fluid politics of borrowing" (p.249), and in his forceful conclusion of the "expanded world of social-political referents andsolutions (that) made politics out of mere economic fate."(p.508). What I miss in this vast canvasof the crossAtlantic politics of citation is a sense of the discursive power, the fraught processesof inclusion and exclusion that are suggested in notions of "identity formation," "creolization,""dialogical encounter," or "hybridization," just to mention a few terms commonly used in suchstudies [2]. Not much is necessarily gained from new-fangled borrowing from anthropology,linguistics, or social psychology the old-fashioned empiricist might say. But something surely isto be said for heightened awareness that a nuanced and systematic assessment of culturalinstitutional transfers is very problematic, all the more so when real issues of translationare involved.

One problem whose answer eluded me here is the degree to which experiments from Europe didactually set terms of debate and/or shape alternatives. We know from European responses to thechallenge of post-war U.S. models of production that experts were in effect forced to debatewhether high productivity necessarily went-hand in hand with out-of-control consumption and



rationalized kitchens would necessarily engender unmanageable American-style housewives. Weknow that sooner or later non-anglophone Europeans, the overwhelming majority, in the processof adopting new words like "service" and "marketing" had to assimilate whole new conceptualrelationships. To what degree, say, did German social reformist ideas, imbricated as they werewith statism, solidaristic ideas of market, sharp class hierarchies, or social radicalism, reshape

the meaning of "social"? The answer might well be that Americans relatively speedilysuppressed the original frame of reference, eliminating the foreign and alien far speedier thanEuropeans could expurgate the American influence. The near-total erasure of the Germanintellectual influence not just from the public, but also from the academic collective memory isin itself stunning testimony to this capacity.

The issue of appropriation takes us back to Rodgers' description of American experimentation aseclectic, local, even innocent or at least ingenuous. This is of a piece with his overall negativeview of the propensity in the U.S. to marry reform to commercial capitalism, unlike Europe,where reform was allegedly solidly wedded to social democracy (p. 408). The fact is that by theinterwar period, progressive reformism was everywhere in crisis, and mass consumer-oriented

capitalism presented itself as a strikingly rich vein of reform in the face of cutbacks of state provision, vast unemployment, and the pinched notions of workers' lives that prevailed inreformist circles. It is also true that in some measure all reform in the Atlantic area was

piecemeal until after World War II when the Atlantic markets reopened, stabilized, and grewstrongly under U.S. hegemony, and indigenous social-democratic and Catholic social-marketideas were wedded to American models of production and consumption.

Above all what I learned from Rodger's erudition is that Americans were quick learners. Thecosmopolitanism of turn-of-the century reformers was an important contribution to Americanascendancy. The eclecticism of their style of appropriation and the intensely local way in whichreform was practiced far from making the U.S. marginal to the mainstream, contributed to thesocial inventiveness that would lend so much dynamism to the U.S.'s informal empire over thenext three-quarters of the century.

If, to conclude, we recognize that the U.S. old strength came from making connections abroad,from going outside to acquire "a spark of philosophy," what does it say now for U.S. leadershipthat American elite culture is so scornful of social reform abroad? If it is not oblivious to it, theattitude today toward the giant mixing bowl of projects and measures of the European Union--around leisure, job training, gender parity, child care--is "been there, done that." Under the newworld order, the level playing field is the name of the game, and the only arbiter of public policyseems to be consumer choice and opinion polling, expressed in American, please.

Partly in response to the challenges of comparative historical sociologists, partly to promptingsfrom within their own discipline and field, historians of the U.S. have recently begun to adopt amore internationalist and comparative approach. With the publication of _Atlantic Crossings_,Daniel Rodgers sets a new standard for this sort of work. Capacious (to use Natalie ZemonDavis' well-chosen word) yet fine-grained, this study places the history of American social

policy in a new light, offering insights and provocations that others will be grappling with for years to come.



In comparing and contrasting turn-of-the-nineteenthcentury developments in Europe and theU.S., Rodgers, unlike many current practitioners of comparative history, refuses to construct aneat typology or rely on an existing one to do the work of explanation. His restraint is all themore admirable because the period and set of circumstances under study form an ideal socialscientific "case," that is, one in which there is a constant or set of constants (namely, the ideas

and concepts of social politics being trafficked between Europe and America, usually, during thisearly period, from east to west), and a range of dependent variables--the reception of those ideasand concepts on foreign (usually American) soil.

This is not to say that Rodgers eschews systematic analysis; far from it. But instead of adducingthe outcomes a typology would predict, he provides, in each instance (and sometimes multiply,when the imports land in different sites), nuanced explanations of why a particular idea "took"or, more often, failed to do so. Among the factors that matter are "interests andideology,...timing, inertia, precedent and preemption,...and the social configuration of capital" (p.200). Through deft use of telling details and mots justes, Rodgers' parses subtle differencesamong societies and cultures. Throughout, the freshness of his style, even when discussing the

most abstract matters, restores one's faith in the infinite resources of the English language.As Rodgers' early chapters document, the export trade in progressive European social politicswas robust, with most of the impetus coming not from Europeans eager to impose their ideas onthe U.S. but from Americans seeking new approaches to perceived problems at home.Comparing their polities to those of Europe, these progressives came to understand that althoughthe U.S. could boast a higher level of democracy in terms of suffrage and property rights, itoffered far less by way of material goods and services; they recognized, in other words, adiscrepancy between "the democracy of form and the democracy of act" (p. 158) (between

political and social citizenship, to use T.H. Marshall's terms), and this was what they sought tocorrect.

Despite apparent similarities between European and American social and economic conditionsand the enthusiasm of the travelers for European innovations, few of the transplants took root, atleast, not immediately. Rodgers, however, resists the conclusion that this long history of failedtransplants reveals a pattern of American exceptionalism. Exceptionalism rests in part onisolation, and for Rodgers, the very fact that the U.S. was for decades deeply enmeshed in manylayers of Atlantic crossings meant that it was by no means isolated. But was participation in anongoing intellectual exchange, energetic and proactive though it was, sufficient immunizationagainst exceptionalism? Or, rather, do America's responses to proposed transplantations,however complex, indicate that a particular pattern of social politics was emerging, a pattern thatwas not evolutionary (as a stark typology might imply), but was instead formed by the veryaccretions of those responses, admixed with domestic developments (what sociologists AnnOrloff, ThedaSkocpol, and Margaret Weir would call "policy feedback")?

A focus on the gendered and racialized dimensions of U.S. social politics would suggest thelatter. But neither race nor gender figure significantly in Rodgers' analytical scheme. Thoughonly a handful of middle-class white women (most prominently Jane Addams and FlorenceKelley) and minority men (W.E.B. Du Bois) make their appearances in the early chapters,Rodgers does not use race as a political factor until the New Deal, and he minimizes the



distinctiveness of maternalist politics. To be fair, he does refer to the ethnic heterogeneity thatmade it more difficult for Americans to accept universalistic principles honed in homogeneousEuropean societies, but mentions only in passing the deep racial cleavages of Jim Crow Americathat underlay ethnic conflict. As Joanne Goodwin, among others, has demonstrated, racism aswell as nativism skewed the administration of early social policies like mothers' pensions and left

them permanently stigmatized [1].

Rodgers scants the structural conditions that allowed primarily white male elites to becometravelers in the first place, and at the same time he overlooks those that facilitated women'sactivism at home. While pointing, quite rightly, to the importance of urban venues for earlysocial politics, he does not mention that cities also allowed women to enter the political fieldmore conveniently and gracefully. His interest in world-traveling women tends to marginalizethose who labored anonymously in the urban trenches. Though the influence of figures likeKelley and Addams cannot be denied, it remains the case that much of the momentum for earlysocial legislation came from the rank and file of organizations like the National Congress of Mothers and the General Federation of Women's Clubs--women whose maternalist vision, far

less cosmopolitan than that of the world travelers, imbued provisions like mothers' pensions witha tone of middle-class condescension and reinforced a male breadwinner ideal.

Indeed, though progressive reformer William Hard relied on the universalistic principlesenunciated by British New Liberal L.T. Hobhouse in advocating for pension laws, it was acombination of sentimental maternalist appeals to motherhood and hardheaded thrift thatultimately carried the day with state legislators. Such provisions established a paradigm for thesocial-political inscription of women that was reproduced in the Social Security Act and itsamendments and persisted at least until the welfare "reform" of 1996. This paradigm, I wouldargue, constituted a distinctive and continuous element of American social politics which, while

perhaps not unique or "exceptional," repeatedly served to deflect models from abroad for more progressive policies toward women such as child care and paid maternity leave.

Perhaps less germane to Rodgers' agenda but more disconcerting to historians of women andgender is his reversion to a definition of the welfare state that privileges policies targeted towardwage-earning men such as unemployment insurance and workmen's compensation as "socialinsurance," while treating provisions that primarily benefit women and children, such as mothers'

pensions, as secondary or subsidiary. Feminist analysts have repeatedly exposed this definitionas inherently male-biased and criticized it for reproducing precisely that which must bedeconstructed, namely the very formation of a "male-breadwinner state." Rodgers' predilectionhere is all the more unfortunate since he cites but does not adopt Barbara Nelson's notion of a"two-channel welfare state (p. 561, n. 63), a model that more accurately captures not only thegenealogy but also the dynamics and impact of the U.S. welfare system from the Progressive Eraonward.

Perhaps the reason Rodgers gives programs such as mothers' pensions and child welfare suchshort shrift is that they seem to lack the internationalist dimension that is, after all, his mainconcern. But these programs were in fact the subject of international discussions, and importedideas played a role (albeit often a limited one) in U.S. debates. Writing in 1913, the progressiveWilliam Hard, mentioned above, sought to transform the discourse surrounding mothers'



pensions by interjecting New Liberal principles, but he largely failed to convince his fellowAmericans that the measure should be considered "payment for a civic service" rather than a"dole." A few years later, New York City reformer Katharine Anthony, influenced by the radicalfeminist visions of Swedish writer Ellen Key and British reformer Eleanor Rathbone, called for an honorific "endowment of motherhood" rather than stigmatizing pensions. Rodgers compares

American formulations unfavorably with those in France, where pronatalism gave policiestoward mothers "a civic and political spin" (p. 241), and he mentions that American mothers' pensions provided British feminists with a precedent, but he misses the influences that flowed inthe opposite direction. Though such omissions are rare for Rodgers, in this instance, they leave atelling gap.

Indeed, the eventual bottoming of the U.S. mothers' pension debate on sentiment and "women'sweakness," as Rodgers puts it, is instructive, for it demonstrates how the radical gender implications of certain imports could become blunted within a political culture that lacked theuniversalizing potential of an indigenous socialism or liberalism (I say "potential" because I amwell aware that neither France nor Britain, where these political strains were markedly stronger,

produced model policies toward women during this period, though in both, social provisions for mothers, if not civil rights for all women, tended to be more generous than in the U.S.). If, asKathryn Kish Sklar (whose fine biography of Florence Kelley Rodgers curiously neglects)argues, "gender did the work of class" in forging U.S. social policy, then Rodgers would have

profited from engaging more deeply with women and gender politics in explaining the mixedoutcomes of attempted European transplantations [2].

Engagement with gender politics would also have provided Rodgers with another avenue into thecomparative impact of socialism on social politics, a theme he pursues, but (probably in anattempt to avoid rehearsing the old exceptionalist arguments) not as assiduously as he mighthave. He might, for instance, examined the extended worldwide debate over protectivelegislation for women, a debate that over the years gave rise to numerous internationalconferences and occupied speakers at many international socialist conferences as well. Likesocial politics in general, protective legislation provides another "ideal case" for comparativists,for common ideas form a constant whose application varied widely from one setting to another.Moreover, as the comprehensive collection edited by Ulla Wikander, Alice Kessler-Harris, andJane Lewis (cited by Rodgers only in the context of "social maternalism" in general)demonstrates, shifts in the positions of key socialist women leaders rippled across the debatefrom Europe and North America to the Antipodes, revealing much about women's prospectswithin the socialist movement--and socialism's prospects within different national settings [3].

For women activists in the U.S., where protective legislation made considerable headway,international debates and information on developments in all areas of social politics concerningwomen and children were extremely valuable, both as sources of ideas for alternative policyformulations and as ammunition in legislative campaigns. The U.S. Children's Bureau and later the Women's Bureau frequently compiled worldwide data on mothers' pensions, infant andmaternal mortality, maternity leaves, and similar issues, and then, deploying rather rudimentary"shame" tactics, used their reports as leverage in Congress. One wishes that Rodgers hadcompared some of these campaigns to those involving benefits and services for men, many of which he does examine in depth [4].



Does Rodgers' relative inattention to race and gender undermine his fundamental arguments, or am I simply carping, falling into the usual reviewer's stance of wishing that the author hadwritten a different book? I am glad--very glad, indeed--that Rodgers has written _AtlanticCrossings_, but I wish he had grappled with these issues more fully, not only for the pleasure of seeing his discerning mind at work on them, but because their absence inevitably shapes his

interpretation. While his claims about the continuities between the Progressive Era and the 1930sare convincing, his marginalization of the "women's welfare state" and delayed attention to raceleads him to overemphasize the European roots of certain New Deal ideas while neglecting theracialized, gendered paradigm that the indigenous politics of the earlier period also cast over thisremarkable body of legislation. His privileging of transatlantic over indigenous factors alsocauses him to overstate the discontinuities between the New Deal and postwar social politics.

Finally, while Rodgers is no doubt right that World War II and the Cold War sent thetransatlantic exchange into eclipse, I would argue that it did not disappear entirely. Though notterribly viable politically, it continues now in the fields of comparative historical sociology andcomparative policy history--fields to which _Atlantic Crossings_ is a major contribution. With

its wealth of documentation, methodological innovations, and historiographical challenges, thisfine book will not only add new rigor and richness to the field, but it bids fair to inaugurate anew chapter in the ongoing history of the transatlantic exchange.

Daniel Rodgers' _Atlantic Crossings_ is an important book that has many virtues. By stepping back to write a history of comparable developments in social politics, rather than a series of "comparative histories," Rodgers successfully calls attention to developments common to manyindustrial polities that have often been obscured in accounts that overemphasize difference. Byfocusing on a large group of politically active idea brokers rather than on "pure" intellectuals or

practical politicians, he successfully emphasizes the importance of work that defines and framesissues. For fifty years and more, Rodgers shows, prominent idea brokers and policy advocatesdrew close connections among government policies and other activities that have more recentlyseemed separate and distinct to many historians. These included public health, housing, urban

planning and design, parks and recreation, workplace safety, workers' compensation, pensions,and insurance of many kinds, as well as poor relief and health care. As Rodgers points out,several of these matters were of great interest to chambers of commerce as well as to labor organizations, to commercial insurance companies as well as to social reformers. And, as ageneral contribution to the history of the U.S., _Atlantic Crossings_ makes a very strong case for viewing the New Deal as part of a movement that dated to the 1880s, a movement in manyindustrializing nations to redefine the relation of the national government to economic and socialaffairs.

One of the notable virtues of _Atlantic Crossings_ is Rodgers' observation that the progressive"social politics" of the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first third of thetwentieth was not simply about the expansion of "the state." It had, as he puts it, more to do withefforts, social as well as political, to limit the market. Some innovations required onlyindependent, cooperative, voluntary social action. Some needed only permissive enablinglegislation. Other innovations called for state subsidies of "the voluntary institutions of society"in a pattern Rodgers calls "subsidarist." (p. 28.) Here Rodgers makes the very importantdistinction, usually ignored by historians of social politics, between services provided directly by



state employees, and services the state encourages or, through direct contracts or indirectvouchers, pays others to provide [1].

This is a theme others may well want to pursue. Rodgers does not connect subsidarist efforts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to recent activity, but the connections surely

exist. State subsidies to "nongovernment organizations" have increased significantly in Europeand elsewhere in recent decades. In the United States, the share of the Gross Domestic Productthat flows through the federal government and goes to pay for health care, research, education,

job training, and other human services has increased from less than 0.4% in 1960 to just under 3% in 1980, then to nearly 4.5% in 1997 [2]. Perhaps two-thirds of this money flows, in a kind of "subsidarist" fashion, to nonprofit organizations. Most commonly, federal money flows throughvouchers and related instruments, increasingly the chosen instruments of federal social policy inthe United States. Under recent "charitable choice" legislation, some of this money is now goingto pay for services provided by organizations that are affiliated with religious groups.

_Atlantic Crossings_ has other virtues as well, and I am sure they will receive full attention in

this H-State discussion. To start discussion here, I would raise some questions about Rodgers'definition of his topic and about his treatment of the policy environment faced by Americanswho sought to bring ideas about the positive uses of government into the United States.

To judge from his own index, Rodgers defines "social politics" in a way that emphasizes effortsto expand government involvement in the welfare of employed workers and farmers, and inurban development. Apart from Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George,and Theodore Roosevelt, the largest number of index citations go to urban planning and housingadvocates Catherine Bauer, Charles Booth, Frederick C. Howe, Lewis Mumford, and RaymondUnwin, and to social reformers William Beveridge, Richard T. Ely, Florence Kelley, BeatriceWebb, and Sidney Webb -- all of whom favored increased government activity, at least through

regulation and control. Close behind in index references are other social reformers concernedwith city living conditions -- Jane Addams, Paul U. Kellogg of _Survey_ magazine, AlbertShaw, Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, and Edith Elmer Wood. In many ways _Survey_ magazineand its sponsor, the Russell Sage Foundation, lay at the heart of "social politics" as Rodgersdefines the topic.

_Atlantic Crossings_ is an ambitious and carefully constructed book, and it is certainly true thatthe idea brokers on whom it focuses did concern themselves with the entire array of policyconcerns that Rodgers emphasizes [3]. It would be inappropriate to criticize so coherent andeffective a book for an omission of additional topics. But it is interesting that although Rodgersstates that he defines "social politics" to include nongovernmental efforts to limit the market anddoes writes extensively about cooperatives both in agriculture and among industrial workers, he

pays almost no attention to nonprofit organizations that were not set up as cooperatives, althoughsuch organizations (including a majority of U.S. hospitals and clinics, and very large shares of itscolleges, museums, and social service agencies) probably expanded from 1% to 3% of the U.S.gross domestic product in the years he writes about.

It would also be interesting to know whether Rodgers ever thought about includingdevelopments in two policy fields that he generally ignores: elementary and secondary



education, and health care. U.S. idea brokers and policy-makers in these fields paid as muchattention to European and British Commonwealth models and innovations as did those in thefields he does emphasize, especially before World War I. Many late-nineteenthcentury educationleaders, for example, extolled Prussian approaches. And in these areas as in urban planning,

public health, and social welfare, U.S. leaders usually found their own ways to accomplish

purposes they shared with other parts of the industrial world.

I would also raise two questions about the policy environment in which Rodgers' idea brokerssought to advance their favored reforms. Rodgers focuses on connections among the idea brokersrather than on the context in which they operated. But one of the excellent qualities of _AtlanticCrossings_ is his thoughtful attention to the constraints imposed on the idea brokers by the

political and policy contexts in which they operated

y constraints of which nearly all his protagonists were well aware.

The first question has to do with the relation between ideas and "problems" in shaping policy

debates. In making his case for close attention to idea brokers, Rodgers offers a strong argumentfor the significance of ideas in politics. "Americans in the Progressive Era," he writes, "did notswim in problems -- not more so, at any rate, than Americans who lived through thesimultaneous collapse of the economy and the post-Civil War racial settlement in the 1870s. Itwould be more accurate to say that they swam in a sudden abundance of solutions, a vast number of them brought over through the Atlantic connection." (p. 6.) Rodgers is surely right to insistthat problems do not create their own solutions, and to remind us indirectly that such "solutions"as the post-Civil War racial settlement often fail to solve the underlying problems they ostensiblyaddress. But the usual argument has not been simply that the American Progressives faced many

problems. It has been, rather, that they faced some very specific problems that grew out of therapid urbanization of the northeastern and upper midwestern U.S., and out of that region's

simultaneous industrial transformation. The idea brokers who fill Rodgers' book focused quiteexplicitly on these problems. Others may well want to do more than Rodgers does with therelation between pressing problems, such as, for example, the poverty of families whose

breadwinner had suffered injury at work, and ideas about work accidents and the law.

The second question has to do with participants in the U.S. policy-making process. One of thegreat strengths of _Atlantic Crossings_ is Rodgers' insistence on the variety of the forces andcircumstances that shaped policy decisions. His argument that economic interests andcommitment to private property rights were very important but by no means determined alloutcomes is very persuasive. But I wonder whether he gives adequate attention to the importanceof the family farm, the private house on its own lot, the small retail business, and even the smallmanufacturing firm in shaping the perceptions and preferences of American voters and electedofficials.

Perhaps more important, I wonder whether he gives sufficient attention to the impact of religiousdiversity on social policy debates in the United States. It is striking that _Atlantic Crossings_

pays more attention to Catholics in Europe than in the United States. Rodgers disagrees quitesharply with Lizabeth Cohen's argument, in _Making a New Deal_, that ethnic, often Catholic,mutual-benefit associations played important roles in the big cities of the upper midwest and



northeast before the Great Depression [4]. He certainly seems right to insist that ethnic mutual- benefit insurance companies were financially weak and often poorly run. But Catholiccommitment to community institutions, together with the powerful Protestant attachments of theleaders of many public institutions, explains much of the persistent American opposition to theexpansion of government social and health care as well as educational services before the Great

Society. Accounts of policy debates within the Democratic Party between Reconstruction and the1970s must pay as much attention to Catholic views as to the views of Southern segregationists.

American Catholics (and to a lesser extent Lutherans, members of the various Eastern Orthodoxcommunities, and Jews) defined (and continue to define) their communities to a great extentthrough their sponsorship of hospitals, orphanages, homes for the elderly, schools and colleges,as well as through mutual benefit organizations. They devoted great effort between the 1870sand the 1930s to the defense of their right to do so. One high point of that effort was thesuccessful mid-1920s defense before the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of PIERCE v.SOCIETY of the SISTERS, of the right of parents to send children to nonpublic schools, and of Catholic nuns and others to operate private schools [5]. It is notable that federal aid did not flow

to hospitals, clinics, social service organizations, or schools until the designers of the G.I. Bill,the Hill-Burton Act, and then Great Society legislation found ways to direct federal funds tosectarian institutions.

One last observation about religion in the policy debates that make up _Atlantic Crossings_.Rodgers makes some striking observations about the role of religion in some policy debates. TheSocial Gospel facilitated exchanges among American, British, and northern EuropeanProtestants, he notes (p. 63ff). In the 1920s, European visitors sometimes mocked the utopianCalvinism of U.S. prohibition. Yet although he acknowledges Thomas Haskell's work [6],Rodgers has little to say about the shift in the authority of policy advocates from Protestantministers to secular "experts" that took place at the end of the nineteenth century. Rodgers is

probably correct when he suggests that Haskell exaggerated the success of the academic experts'efforts to gain authority for their ideas. But Haskell persuasively argues that northeasternCongregationalists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians had lost much of their ability to define thesocial policy agenda by 1900. Thereafter, many of the leading social policy forums -- especiallyin the northeastern, upper midwestern, and north Pacific coast areas that Rodgers emphasizes --were nonsectarian, secular, and "scientific" in self-conception. ATLANTIC CROSSINGS tells

part of this story, but leaves more for others to develop.

When the English socialist and philanthropic aesthete C.R. Ashbee crossed the Atlantic with hiscomrade wife Janet to see America at the turn of the new century, they were determined to visitHull House and to meet its formidable leader, Jane Addams. Fourteen years earlier, Ashbee hadleft the rarified beauty of Cambridge to live in Toynbee Hall, the university settlement founded

by Samuel and Henrietta Barnett in the slums of East London. During Ashbee's tenure at thesettlement, Jane Addams had visited with the Barnetts at Toynbee Hall as part of her ownsociological grand tour of Europe, and had returned home to Chicago anxious to transplant theBarnetts' settlement scheme to the south side of Chicago. Few historians in the United Statesneed to be reminded that Addams' work at Hull House launched her remarkable career as one of the nation's most influential social reformers. Less well known perhaps is the fact that her work and the reputation of Hull House inspired almost reverential awe from many European visitors



anxious to see the effects of American life on an English idea. Addams was a revelation for Ashbee, the "embodiment of moral power," the "most convincing personality" he had ever encountered whose carefully chosen words he likened to a "falling star dropping into the pool itlights up."[1] Henrietta Barnett, a grande dame of English social reform who had followed up her achievement as co-founder of Toynbee Hall by creating the world renowned Hampstead Garden

Suburb, was no less admiring. Hull House had far "transcended anything Toynbee ever did."[2]Addams, the erstwhile American student of European social movements, was now the sage towhom Europeans flocked, seeking out her wisdom about how best to grapple with the dilemmasof the industrial capitalist metropolis. English progressives, writers, and reformers often came toAmerica in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on lecture tours intended to instructtheir audiences, publicize their writings, and, with luck, earn money beyond the costs of their

journey. Some of them returned home having learned as much as they taught. As Daniel Rodgersemphasizes in _Atlantic Crossings_, Americans in the late-nineteenth century believed that theylagged far behind their European counterparts in the development of their social politics, buttheir relationship with Europeans was never a "one way street."(70).

This sort of complex circuitry of influence, mutual exchange, rivalry, and self-criticalcomparisons between Europeans and Americans lies at the heart of Daniel Rodger's magisterialstudy, _Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age_. Such migrations of people,ideas, institutions and policies form the threads which Daniel Rodgers has woven together to

produce his compelling and compassionate tapestry of a vanished Atlantic world of practicalidealists, which stretched from Berlin to San Francisco. Rodgers not only makes it possible tounderstand how and why someone like Addams went to Europe and saw it the way that she did;he also makes an important and original contribution to modern European history by explainingwhen, why and how Europeans looked to the United States. Men and women on either side of the Atlantic saw one another through what Rodgers calls "screens of conviction and expectation"(142) shaped by broad political, economic, social and cultural forces which profoundlydetermined what they did and did not see. However, because the prey Rodgers ultimately stalksare all American -- American isolationism and exceptionalism, American backwardness, theorigins of the New Deal in the United States, etc. -- his book leaves it up to Europeanists tofigure out for ourselves the impact of these "Atlantic crossings" on European social politics.

Preferring the safety and specificity of archives, historians all too rarely grapple with "BigStructures, Large Processes and Huge Comparisons."[3] _Atlantic Crossings_ is a notableexception to this generalization and invites comparison between Rodgers' methodology and thoseused by leading historical sociologists such as GostaEsping-Andersen who have studiedcomparative welfare state development. Esping-Andersen, in his celebrated analysis of welfarecapitalism, deploys transnational categories such as "liberal," "corporatist" and "socialdemocratic" "welfare regimes" to discipline his data so that he can make meaningfulcomparisons across national cultures. Whilst Esping-Andersen acknowledges that no one of these regimes ever existed in its "pure type" as a point of historical fact, the categories, oncedefined and imposed on the data, take on a life of their own.[4] Rodgers, by contrast, never squeezes the countries he examines into invented categories. He takes great pains to use therhetoric specific to each of the national cultures he surveys and to attend to the constantlyshifting climate of political opportunity within each country. Like leading historical sociologists,he synthesizes what other scholars have to say about progressive reformers, social



welfare,laborand women's movements, and political parties. But he also has read -- in English,French and German language sources --what these men and women had to say for themselves inhundreds of articles, books, letters, and diaries. He has a well-trained ear for subtle differences inthe idioms and phrases used by New Liberals in Britain, Solidarists in France, and Katheder-sozialisten in Germany. While Rodgers offers a wide range of astute comparisons between

national polities, unlike most historical sociologists, he eschews identifying constants, causalregularities, or variables, which all too often produce over-determined narratives of policydevelopments. Timing, context, the layering of long term structural forces and immediatecircumstances, the impact of ideas and the efforts of individual men and women, theaccumulation of small differences -- all of these factors weigh heavily in Rodgers' explanation of key outcomes.(200, 222, 233, 316, 435). Perhaps his most memorable achievement lies in thehumane, wise but critical portraits he offers of scores of reformers, politicians, professors,

journalists, bureaucrats and businessmen. These biographical sketches do much more than addcolor and intimacy to his narrative. They insistently remind us that the initiatives of individualsas much as the configuration of broader structural forces shaped social politics. All of this is tosay that while Rodgers asks very large questions, his answers are often rooted in the messy

contingency and details of historical processes.Rodgers dismantles the myth of American isolationism by thrusting Americans into the heart of nineteenth century Europe as students in German universities, sociological tourists and policyinvestigators. At the same time, he breathes life into the case for a new kind of Americanexceptionalism. America's early immersion in democracy, what Rodgers calls the"democratization of office," paradoxically inhibited the "democratization of service" and hencethe growth of public provision. (158). Similarly, the American legal system, in particular courts,zealously guarded the rights of property owners, hence checking the impulses of a nation inwhich political citizenship was divorced from property rights. (207). As arresting as this thesis is,I wondered if it might need to be qualified in light of the widespread use of poll taxes,grandfather clauses (with property qualifications built into them), and sometimes, as in SouthCarolina and Louisiana, outright property qualifications to disenfranchise many AfricanAmerican and poor men during this era. [5] He reperiodizes American welfare history andreconceptualizes its sources by underscoring the essential continuities between the ideas and

programs of progressive reformers from the 1880s to 1920s and the work of the New Deal. Hedoes this by constructing a two-part argument. First, he shows that American progressives andtheir policies were deeply marked by their encounters with Europe; second, he argues that facedwith the crisis of the Depression, architects of the New Deal turned to the accumulated ideas and

policies of these American progressives in seeking policy solutions. As a consequence, Rodgersconcludes that were we to "seal the United States off from the world beyond its borders, the NewDeal is simply not comprehensible." (428)

No doubt, these are some of the provocative and intelligent arguments that American historianswill debate in the years ahead. But one of the many delights of reading this book was discoveringthat Rodgers, in pursuing his comparisons, had so much to teach me as a modern British andEuropean historian. Some of what I learned from Rodgers is based on his original research. For example, his superb analysis of how Americans read and interpreted the Beveridge Planhighlights just how much Beveridge's scheme was rooted in British assumptions about post-war economies of scarcity at odds with American expectations of abundance and rapid economic



growth. (494-502). At other times, Rodgers made me rethink subjects I thought I knew well bysynthesizing the work of other scholars. For example, he shows that the fate of schemes toimprove conditions in American cities often hinged on the configuration of preexisting private,capitalist, commercial interests within individual cities. "When cities assumed the tasks of supply[of goods and services such as gas, water, transportation]" Rodgers explains, "they cut into the

business of private suppliers."(116). This may seem like little more than common sense,especially in the context of American history, with its emphasis on anti-statist traditions andexuberant, unregulated capitalism. But it leads Rodgers to show just how important local

business and commercial interests were in the emergence of municipal socialism and municipaltrading in Birmingham, Glasgow, and London. (115-125). Social politics in Britain may haveentailed renegotiating the roles of private voluntary charity and public welfare programs; butRodgers's study has also encouraged me to think more deeply about the relationships between

private entrepreneurship and municipal bureaucracies in British urban social policy, between the"civic and commercial city." (172).

In a book so ambitious and so full of astute judgments about complex historical pathways, there

are inevitably some interpretations and omissions with which each reader will disagree. WhileRodgers carefully traces the way commercial links in the interdependent North Atlantic economylaid the foundations for creating a shared world of ideas, he only rarely gestures at the existenceof dense networks joining together imperial economies and social politics in a global context.For example, India was a crucial laboratory where Britons in the nineteenth century developedand tested ideas they later brought home. As MrinaliniSinha demonstrates, efforts to regulate andreform Indian political, social and sexual life were shaped by the ways in which the "manly"Englishman and the "effeminate" Bengali "babu" came to define one another as genderedconstructions.[6] Rodgers offers an exceptionally rich portrait of white intellectual life, but hefails to do justice to the international perspectives and borrowings that figured so prominentlyamong writers and ministers of African American churches and organizations, most notably theAfrican Methodist Episcopal Church.[7] Rodgers contends that systems of state welfare focusedmostly on the working class, not the poor. "Social insurance -- the working-men's insurance, as itwas called at its birth -- was as distinctly for the working class as the workhouse, the labor colony, and the bourgeois friendly visitors were for the nation of the poor." (216). But is it

possible, at least in the British context, to differentiate so starkly between these populations,given the insecurities of most working people's lives and their movements during the course of their lifetimes between the free labor market and the clutches of state poor relief? [8] AsRodgers' own treatment of old age pensions suggests, until the 20th century, huge numbers of working-class men and women faced the poor house as the inevitable, humiliating conclusion of their working lives. Furthermore, the personnel who shaped and enforced these policies alsooverlapped considerably. Bourgeois friendly visitors working on behalf of the CharityOrganization Society, settlements, and care committees worked side by side and sometimesmoved into municipal and state welfare bureaucracies, though the opportunity structures for menand women differed considerably. For all that social investigators were keenly aware of thecomplex and highly differentiated nature of poverty and of working class life, reformers and

journalists alike often offered the public sensational representations of the very poor in lobbyingfor social welfare programs and policies intended to benefit the working class. British elites weresimultaneously aware of distinctions between the working class and the poor and all too readyand willing to lump them together.



Substituting common sense eloquence for academic jargon, Rodgers is as attentive to thenuances of language and the politics of representation as the most ardent disciple of the"linguistic turn" and the not-so-New Cultural History. He also consistently attempts toincorporate the findings of historians of gender into his arguments, though he never engages verysuccessfully with the social welfare debates around protective labor legislation and maternal and

child welfare that preoccupied many European women reformers. By contrast, he divorcesentirely sexual politics from social politics. Thus we get a strong dose of the social gospel and itsimpact on social politics, but nothing about the sexual politics that galvanized W.T. Stead'scareer in Anglo-American journalism. [9] Similarly, Rodgers emphasizes that Britain led the wayin providing publicly designed, subsidized housing for its working class, but ignores the key role

played by widespread British fears and fantasies about incest and promiscuous sex in singleroom dwellings in fueling public interest in the topic.[10] The insistent eroticization of poverty

by British social reformers, many of whom like Beatrice Potter Webb found in the slums a"certain weird romance," left a deep imprint on the way agents of public and private welfaredefined social problems and sought solutions to them. [11] But do these disagreements of emphasis and interpretation call into question the value and validity of Rodgers's overall

arguments? Most assuredly not. Rather, they suggest the richness of this field of inquiry, themany different approaches it both invites and can accommodate.

Daniel Rodgers has produced that rare book, one that should satisfy specialists with sparklingnuggets unearthed from territory we imagined we had mined entirely ourselves and generalreaders, for whom he provides deft vignettes made intelligible by cogent summaries of theexisting scholarship. He has championed an intellectually ambitious kind of comparative socialwelfare history: one whose questions are driven by the history of a single nation state, but whoseanswers can be found only within the much broader framework of the interconnected NorthAtlantic world. _Atlantic Crossings_ is an elegant and intelligent performance Europeanistsshould not only applaud but emulate.

When I read about the publication of Daniel T. Rodgers' _Atlantic Crossings_ in the HarvardUniversity Press 1998 catalogue, my anxiety was double. First, I could not wait to read the book,as my own research deals with how people, schemes, ideas, words, books, designs traveledacross the oceans in the first half of our century, with a special attention to "urban issues". The

book was obviously a very much needed friendly companion for this research. Second, I wasanxious to discover if Daniel Rodgers had written the book I wanted to write. As a reviewer, Iam still sitting on this rusted fence: I want to give an "insider's" angle on the book, but I mustreview the book he wrote and not the book I would like to write. These anxieties probably shapeall that I can write in this electronic symposium. I hope they will not prevent me from bringingan interesting and fair perspective to a work that will stay on my working table for a long time.But I am also sure that this will give a kind of unruly aspect to this text, as the questions thatcame to my mind when reading the book were also questions regarding my research: this meansthat they are not "compliments" nor "reproaches" to _Atlantic Crossings_, but rather an opendialogue with the book.

The book jacket bears an Art Deco style picture of a transatlantic steamship. This reproduction of one of the famous posters by the French designer Cassandre on the cover of the book isappealing at first sight. The impressive steamer brings us back to the time of pendular travel [1],



to the life between two worlds that Fitzgerald or Hemingway had made dear to us during hotsummer afternoon teenage readings. Of course, Rodgers does not pay attention to these kinds of contact and exchanges, but it must be kept in mind that his Atlantic crossings (in social politics)got along with many other crossings of ideas, people, books, songs, paintings, values and

products. The North Atlantic economy [2] nourished all those cultural exchanges in an era when

social politics also boarded the liners departing or arriving under the vacant eyes of LadyLiberty. Indeed, the focal point of Rodgers' book is the United States of America.

His introduction makes it clear that the book is intended to counter an "all-american" view of american history. The whole book argues convincingly against the (seemingly) common opinionof the "exceptional" nature of the United States of America. But the path that Rodgers takes inorder to cope with the except ionalism thesis makes his book an intriguing read for many peopleother than historians of the USA. It is a fascinating and instructive reading for all those who careabout the international circulation of ideas. In our own researches, we mention too often theexistence of a "foreign model"--German, Spanish of Chinese according to circumstances--toexplain a new set of governmental measures, a new artistic trend, a new way of writing novels or

a new social movement in the country we study. Like a deus ex machina, the "foreign model"comes unmediated, miraculously unwrapped--as neat as when it left his point of departure. Butideas, values, skills, words or visions of the world are not manufactured products coming in andout of containers. Daniel Rodgers urges us to wrestle with a whole set of arguments to deal withthis international commerce.

He shows us how to consider the indigenous circumstances which shape each model's creationand its legitimation abroad as something worth importation. Here, his insistence on the subtletiesof the rhetoric of backwardness is especially valuable); he po ints to the necessity to pay attentionto the shipping crate in which ideas travelled, the circumstances of the journey, the points of arrival and departure; above all, he reminds us that no Atlantic crossing left the ideas unchanged,and that importation (of words, ideas, policies, laws) means translation and reappropriation. Hiscareful analysis of what happened to several social policies of "foreign" origin also underlineshow the context of the importing country matters in understanding what comes out of theimportation process. But Rodgers's book is also a rewarding read for many "non-international"historians, because of -at least- two other reasons.

First, his pleas against geocentrisms and the analytical iron cage of national histories. As hewrites, historical scholarship is partly right in treating the distinctiveness of each nation's

peculiar history. But, doing this, it lops off the connections and similarities among countries.What Rodgers proposes to get over this obstacle is not comparative history as usuallyunderstood. The aim is, as in comparative history, to put several nations on the scene. But insteadof pointing at differences, as comparative history usually does by going from one country toanother, Rodgers choses to point to similarities, taking the "world between" the nations, theconnections, as his field. The proposal is exciting, as it sounds like a promise to bust out thestraightjacket of "national" histories in a much more efficient way than comparative history does.With comparative history, nations are still the touchstones of historical analysis, and its frame."Starting with connections", as Rodgers choses to do, surely brings something to be gained. Itmay "shift the frames and boundaries of classic American history" (p.7), but it also doessomething to classic national histories elsewhere. In my mind, Daniel Rodgers has clearly drawn



an approach that is complementary to comparative history for all those who don't want to be "one place" historians. This move is familiar to medieval or early modern historians, who did not stopthe searchlight at the national boarders when they were studying religion or culture. But theimpressive growth of nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries has often prevented modernhistorians from acting similarly. Rodgers' Atlantic might inspire them as Braudel'sMediterrannee

once did for their fellows.

The second universal point of interest of Rodger's book lies in him tackling the history of social politics at large and from an international angle. This seems to be the right way to think aboutwhat "reform" or "being a progressive" meant in the "North Atlantic world" -whatever that is-

between 1870 and 1940, when those words permeated the whole world in a thicker and thicker web of exchanges embodied in travels, congresses, exhibitions, books, periodicals. Indeed, his

book, together with other works [3] suggests that reform is, above all, an international phenomena. Its values, its shared attitudes and references, its questions and suggestions took form and definition at the international scale. Like an echo of Enlightment cosmopolitanism, the

progressives, though they clearly had to deal with the nation-states they belonged to, built their

attempts to change the world on their connections beyond national borders.As Harry Marks has produced an overview of the book, I won't linger on description. Neither will I, as I had first expected, focus on the "urban" chapters of the book, "The self-owned city"and "Civic ambitions" (though chapter 9 "The machine age" is also of particular urbanrelevance). In fact, I don't think that the quality of Rodger's work lies in the specifics, thougheach thematic and/or chronological chapter brings his share of detailed knowledge to readerswho are not as familiar as Rodgers is with information coming from different countries (4).International specialists on workers' insurance or rural cooperative movements might not learn agreat deal from the chapters dealing with their favorite subjects, and might even have a clear ideaabout the missing parts in Rodgers' picture. They would argue on this point, suggest that point,mention some forgotten bibliographical references. But they must resist this temptation given bythe power of reviewing, as they would betray the book by doing so. The strength of the book

precisely lies in the fact that it can take those specialists out of their fields to reintroduce them tothe wide array of themes embraced by turn of the century reformers. Indeed, chapter 3 remindsus of something each of us tend to forget when we dive into our specifics: like their Germanmasters and many of their European counterparts, Simon Patten, Richard Ely or Edmund Jameswere committed to many aspects of reform, from social insurance to municipal government,from the development of social sciences to popular education, from the extension of democracyto the improvement of working conditions. "Being a reformer" or "being a progressive" meant

being involved in many "issues" at the same time, all those issues contributing to the same aim atan international level: peacefully mending the society that had been shaped by the rise of industry, capitalism, urbanism and democracy, in order to find a way between the market Diktatand Revolution. It is up to us to heed this call: scholars of "reform", wherever they are, have torespect this national and thematic ubiquity of reform and reformers. Of course, we must payattention to the shifts towards specialization and professionalization that developedconcomitantly at the national levels, but without being blinded by their light.

So, I will forget the "urban" sides, and some trivial comments that would not be a match for Daniel Rodgers' work. Neither will I stress the many questions that Rodgers open for the



scholars of comparative social policies, especially his considerations about t iming, context andthe conditions for success. Rather,I want to concentrate on two points that came again and againwhile I was reading the book as a "participating reader" who had to face some of the samequestions and choices that Rodgers faced. The first is about a choice he made to privilege printedmaterial and interindividual connections rather than the structures that framed these contacts. It is

a choice that has produced tremendously interesting results, but that also leaves us with manyopportunities. The second is about the geographical focus of Rodgers' study and carries questionsabout the difficulties in doing the kind of "world history" that he has attempted. Indeed, theworld is vast and we cannot embrace it all -unless we have this faith and energy to go for teamwork. So the question is which slice of it do we choose to study.

1. Working on connections: who has lost the user's guide?

There certainly is no genuine or unique way to work on connections. According to the placewhere you work and live, to the library facilities you have, to the languages you read and to your specialty, there are things that will prove possible and others not. We are not all polyglots or

successful grant-applicants. Nevertheless, considering the prominent resources of DanielRodgers, it seems to me that he has made two major choices in the vast possibilities that wereopened to him.

The first choice was to focus on the role of individuals in the Atlantic connection. This choice produced detailed and fascinating accounts of the energy , skill and faith of the progressives. Byfocussing on such rich persons as Richard Ely, Albert Shaw, Frederic Howe, Florence Kelley,Charles McCarthy, Elwood Mead, Edith Elmer-Wood or Catherine Bauer, Rodgers gives us athick description of how the US international idea brokers discovered Europe, interpreted it andtried to bring back the best of its social achievements. As the result is so rewarding, the point isnot to put Rodgers on trial for this choice. A question nonetheless remains about the existence of

more obscure importers than the ones who inhabit his book and who are familiar to most of reform scholars [5]. More importantly, Rodgers deliberately left aside a closer examination of allthe structures that organized the "world in between". Ideas and models often cross the pages of

_Atlantic crossings_, but we certainly need to know more about the specific rules, constraintsand thw work of congresses and exhibitions [7], of the structured connections laid by thesocialists, the catholics or the protestants, of the quests organized by federal structures (such asthe Bureau of Labor) or by reformers and business societies (such as the National CivicFederation or the Chambers of Commerce), of the action of organizations such as the Institute of Educational travel. As Rodgers points out, the "market of connections" became more and moreorganized in the 1930s, but even before it seems to me that the connection choices an individualcould make, and the things that he could carried home with him, were not free of allorganizational constraints/concerns. Among these constraints were 'Societies' that specialized inthe international trade of social policies, and managed the definition of what it was possible toimport. For example, the _Survey_, the NY periodical managed by Paul Kellog, led a consciouscampaign to give Americans their "marching orders from the older civilization to the new"(Kellog, quoted p.267). Such devotion over the years could not but have consequences on withwhat, who and where the connections were developed. There were many agencies with this kindof organized will to develop connections. The foundations were amongst them, a world of their own with their staff and programs. [8]. Rodgers mentions the Oeberlander Trust (that specialized



in Germany), the American-Scandinavian Fund, and also "golden donors" such as the Russell-Sage, the Carnegie and the Rockefeller. But they only appear when he tells the story of anindividual trying to get some funding from them, as with the Irish rural activist Horace Plunkett(p.333-335). Nowhere are they considered in light of their structures and the framing effect theymight have had on US connections with Europe. Lawrence Veiller's connections with Europe in

the housing field were largely funded by the Russell-Sage, as David Hammack probably remindsus in his participation to this symposium. Later, the "1313 center" organized in Chicago under the leadership of Louis Brownlow and Charles Merriam with Rockefeller monies was especiallyassiduous to work on the import-export of ideas in the public administration field, includingmunicipal government and housing [9]. For sure, the main concerns of the big foundations can

be said to have been child care, public health, the peace movement or the social sciences, but Isuspect that their size and power shaped the way the Atlantic connection worked even outside of these specialties. As far as the Rockefeller is concerned, this seems to be especially true for the

New Deal period, as the people connected with the 1313 center and the Rockefeller philanthropies were major figures of the brain trust and of the new federal agencies. It wasDaniel Rodgers' right to leave the philanthropies outside of his already-rich landscape. It will be

the duty of others to bring them back in the picture with the other structures that consciouslyorganized the Atlantic connection.

One reason why Rodgers left the structures out may have to do with his second major choice,e.g. working with printed sources rather than with archives. Private papers are almost the onlyarchival pieces he uses, and with great parsimony. I would have expected more use of journalssuch as John Ihlder's about the study tour he directed in 1914 for the National HousingAssociation, or a deeper analysis of the papers left by an Atlantic crosser such as John Nolen, inorder to have a clearer understanding of the mechanisms of US tours of Europe, or of themeaning and consequences of having personal contacts with european like-minded reformers.Daniel Rodgers chose to privilege the writings (articles, books, reports) thrown in the publicarena by US idea brokers, rather than the elements documenting the process of brokering, itslimits and components. That is very coherent with his aims, his priority being to describe whathas been brought from Europe, and how the importers tried to change matters on the other side of the Atlantic. Doing this, he also urges us to contribute to the puzzle he has begun to assemble.

Nevertheless, this preference for printed material might have other consequences, as a result of the emphasis Rodgers places on Germany and Great-Britain.

2. London-Berlin- New York : the golden triangle of the Atlantic connection?

Germany and the UK are the salient points of the geography of exchanges, flows andimportations drawn by the book. Though Denmark, Sweden, Italy, France, Ireland or Belgiumalso step on the scene here and there, the German and British elements dominate the book. For sure, this is not scandalous at all. Apart from the language question that eased the US quest in theUnited Kingdom, Germany and Great Britain are arguably at the forefront of the shocks created

by the age of capitalism, and offered natural breeding grounds for the invention of social politicsthat our US progressives were in search of. Above all, as the major purpose of the book is torecover the process of importation, it is fair to give priority to the countries that were privileged

by the US importers themselves. If these were Germany and the UK, why should we bother?Good. But if we, as the book deserves, consider Rodgers' work as something more than a piece



of US history, as an attempt and a call to study connections, to bring more light on how ideascirculated and were changed in this circulation process, then we may try to explore the questionfurther.

At first sight the German-British privilege can be exaggerated in two ways. As Rodgers carefully

points out, the American progressives in search of solutions tended to focus on achievementsinstead of considering the processes and contexts that made these achievements possible. Thus, by focussing on Germany and the UK, it is also possible that the modern historian misses theformer moves of a scheme or an idea, and also the contexts and processes that shaped thisscheme and idea in his first travels, and thus conditioned its forthcoming trajectory.

Let's consider, for example, Chapter Six, where Rodgers mentions that the US imported Britishsocial insurance legislation passed by Lloyd Georges was itself borrowed from Denmark andGermany. These prior translations might be important even when the importation towards theUSA is the main question, as previous importations might explain the fate of imported ideas oncethey land in America. As Rodgers writes (p.198), "Precedents were not only exchanged; they

were sifted, winnowed, extracted from context, blocked, transformed and exaggerated". Thus,catching an idea in its German or British "state of mind" means that the historian of connectionscan lose all this careful engineering, and mistake a point in a process as The point of origin. Theother cost of emphasizing the UK and Germany might be that it leaves aside the "smallcountries" that were important -and forgotten- places for international activities, or important -and forgotten- sources of social innovations. Sweden, Belgium, Italy of the Netherlands arementioned in _Atlantic Crossings_, but their examples are alluded to rather than developed. For example, Rodgers suggests that the municipal unemployment schemes of German towns wereinspired by the Belgium municipalities (p.225): indeed the system created by Varlez in the townof Gand was very important amongst reformers in this area and gave impetus to the reflection on

public involvement concerning unemployment [8]. Once again, perhaps the US idea brokerssimply were not paying that much attention to these small countries. Then Rodgers is right not tocare, as he never pretends to describe the "origins" of ideas or schemes when he describes their importation to the USA.

But chapter eight, "Rural reconstruction" offers the reader an opportunity to carry the questionfurther. Only in this chapter does Rodgers consider such a vast sample of countries, fromGermany to Italy, Denmark, France or Belgium. Once again, it might be that these countries paidthe heaviest interest to rural reform, and that the US importers focused on them. But this chapter is also the one where Rodgers has found very little available research in English, and hence wasforced to make the most with first hand material such as reports, diaries, etc. The cosmopolitismof this chapter is especially obvious in the part devoted to the cooperative movement, as a replicaof the cosmopolitism of the international cooperative movement itself. This movement does notseem to have been dominated by a single country or a culture as was the case in other spheres(city planning, for example, was widely "controlled" by the British). The cosmopolitanism of rural reform has been noted by Rodgers, and this raises the question about the other spheres of reform he examined. I just wonder whether he might have been influenced by the strongdomination or imperialism of the British and German in these spheres, overshadowing thecontribution of less 'aggressive' cultures. This brings me to two remarks. Both are not strictlyaddressed to Rodgers' work, but they wish to build on it...



The first is about the link between two visions-- the reformers' and the historians'. If we consider that Daniel Rodgers is right to follow the focus of US Atlantic crossers on Germany and UK, wemay still wonder whether he is right to record this focus as a given fact. Rodgers stresses howimportant the rhetoric of "backwardness" was in the discourse of the US progressive importers,as a crucial weapon to empower their claim for the building of social policies in their country.

Then, it must be considered whether this rhetoric would have been as efficient if reformers hadcompared the US with Belgium and Italy rather than with Germany and the UK. Would it havemattered to anyone if reformers claimed that the US was losing a race to such "junior nations",rather than to two of the world's leading powers. Hence the question: to maximize the success of the importation process, the international brokers may have cheated on the labels describing theorigins of the schemes they brought from Old Europe. Rodgers does mention the 1st WW and itstomorrow as a moment where the German origins of schemes and ideas were better off hidden.There were also times when German or British origins were better to be put on display. Then, if following the steps of US brokers is a necessity, their discourse strategy might nonethelessobscure the origins of what they loan, borrow and bring home.

The second point is about the tools Rodgers has used. I often wonder what is the best working process when you want to work on connections. The question is two-fold. The first point is howyou will build your bibliography. The second is how you will build your corpus of sources. Aswe all do, Rodgers has made choices in answering those two questions. I would like to brieflyconnect those choices to what has just been said. As said earlier, Rodgers has privileged printedsources over archives. Doing this, he has made the strategical discourse of the reformers hismaterial. Certainly, all source materials are discourses, and none is free of strategical aims.

Nevertheless, as Rodgers shows, the reports and books produced by the US progressives werethe public weapons of their fight to build social policies. Hence the possible bias that has beensuggested in the last paragraphs. On the other hand, it is clear that most of the book's

bibliography is based on US research on Europe and British or German scholarship. The point innot to blame Rodgers for not being a fluent reader in Finnish, Polish, Dutch, Lithuanian or Italian. None of us is, and the solution to this is certainly teamwork at the international scale. Butwe know that Rodgers does read French. Then, the absence of much scholarship in French, either on Belgium or France, or on the european connections of reform, might be a new hint of theexcessive privilege paid to Germany and the UK. I was just wondering whether US modernhistorical scholarship was not bending under the same forces as early century reform, privilegingthe study of Germany and the UK rather than the "small" countries of Europe. Of course, I wouldneed to know far more things about the US academic world to go further in interpretating thecase of _Atlantic crossings_, but I will nevertheless formulate my question more generally. Don'twe, all of us who work on connections, pay excessive attentions to specific connections with onecountry or another, the criteria of this privilege being connected to the contemporary size andimportance of these countries, that generally goes along with the symbolic and scientific rewardsit can bring us as an historical subject ? In other words, I gather from personal experimentationthat what leads us towards the choice of studying, let's say, the French German connection inmunicipal government, rather than the French-Belgium connection, is as much the "strategicalinterest" in being a specialist of Germany in the French academic word as the intrinsic quality of this connection (6). I may be wrong in thinking that our work on connections can be biased bysuch material considerations. If not, then we have to keep that in mind if we aim at following thetouchstones laid by Rodgers and to study the "worlds in between" nations. With a scout-master



of the quality of_Atlantic Crossings_, followers must work hard to improve the record. Certainly,Thomas Bender and other report-writers should avoid such ultimate sentences as "It is probablythe most important book written on the 20th century in a decade at last", "one of today's leadinghistorians" and "a book unlike any other I have ever read". As much rooted in americanacademic tradition as these gimmicks are, it would be my wish for the millennium that publishers

stop using them and that report-writers stop thinking they have to carve such commonplaces.But, from the other side of the Atlantic, I can say from my own experience that _Atlanticcrossings_ can affect the research and reflection of all those who pay interest to comparativehistory, to the world of reformers or to social policies ... I mean, if they read it.

Thirty years ago, historian Peter Filene proposed that his colleagues quietly bury the term"progressivism." All scholars agreed that the first two decades of the twentieth century hadwitnessed a burst of governmental and civic reform, but disputes over just who was a progressive(W.E.B. DuBois? Jane Addams? Theodore Roosevelt? Louis Brandeis? John Dewey?) and what

beliefs, if any, they shared had become embarrassingly fussy. Dissertations insistently claimingthis or that sect of Wisconsin politicians or Washington policymakers as the true progressives

had become the American equivalent of medieval treatises on the corporeality of angels.That Daniel Rodgers sidesteps this entire discussion is one among many advantages of hisimpressive new history of social politics during the period. Rodgers's title, Atlantic Crossings,suggests his purpose, which is to argue that reform efforts in the United States were part of a

broader and connected attempt in France, Germany, Denmark, and Britain to respond to theintertwined dilemmas of explosive urban growth, growing poverty, and mass migration.

This assertion might seem unremarkable, but Rodgers demonstrates more clearly than any previous historian how literally hundreds of American activists pounced upon the pilot projectsand settlement houses of the suddenly innovative Old World and attempted to transplant them to

native grounds. The depth of research, in three languages, conclusively establishes this sharedresponse to what contemporaries called the "social question." Part of Rodgers's purpose is tochide American historians whose narratives rarely venture outside the analytical cage of thenation-state. "For a moment," he argues "London's East End and New York City's Lower EastSide; the 'black country' of Pittsburgh, Essen, and Birmingham; and university debates andchancery discussions in Paris, Washington, London, and Berlin formed a world of commonreferents." Jane Addams modeled Chicago's Hull House on similar efforts in London's East End,economist Albert Shaw described for American audiences the virtues of Glasgow's municipallyowned streetcar lines, and Lewis Mumford urged Americans to visit modernist public housing

projects in Frankfurt.

All true, but Rodgers also claims that the international dimensions of the problem (poverty,urban housing, rural blight) and the transnational links between reformers prove that Americanand European social politics were part of a common arc. The evidence is ambiguous on this

point, even for those historians properly worried that arguments for American exceptionalismsubstitute patriotism for analysis. After all, the social welfare states that develop in France,Germany, and Britain - from mass worker housing to elaborate social insurance programs - arefar more impressive than comparable developments in the United States. World War I solidifiessocial welfare expansion in Western Europe, but in the United States it solidifies the presidential



ambitions of Warren Harding. Where Europeans exported carefully drafted pieces of reformlegislation in the 1920s, Americans exported Model Ts, dime stores, efficiency kitchens, andtractors.

Even the crisis of the Depression did not fundamentally alter this picture. Rodgers deftly

sketches how the economic crisis created an ideological opening for progressives to try their most cherished schemes - from voluntary guidelines for wages and prices to town planningefforts and publicly owned utilities. But Rodgers does not disagree with recent assessments thatthese efforts produced relatively few enduring programs. Instead, American liberals by the late1930s had begun focusing less on policy reform than on increasing economic growth andindividual consumption, and Rodgers demonstrates quite clearly that European models had littleeffect on American politics in the immediate postwar era. The triumph of a Republican party onthe warpath against "big government" in the 1946 elections is a stark contrast to the simultaneousascendancy of the British Labour party and its ambitious social welfare agenda.

Rodgers is a superb historian, and like all historians he is predisposed to emphasize the

contingency of the recent past, the constellation of forces that prevented a more social welfare-oriented American politics at one moment, the obtuseness of particular reformers or their opponents in the next. But another reading of the evidence would support the sort of broadgeneralization that makes Rodgers uneasy: that most Americans during the twentieth century

persistently emphasized the virtues of the competitive market, even when this sort of rhetoric hadalmost disappeared on the European continent; and that the emphasis in American culture onindividual autonomy gave advocates of a more social vision little maneuvering room. The

problems faced by reformers in Boston and Berlin were similar, but the cultural resources inMassachusetts and Prussia were quite different.

Support for this assertion might come from the trajectory of Catholic social thought, one

important international tradition of social reform neglected in Atlantic Crossings. Leo XIII, after all, and the Italian Jesuits who helped draft Rerumnovarum were among Europe's mostinfluential voices on the "social question," and Catholic intellectuals and workers formed the

backbone of what eventually came to be called Christian Democracy, a movement central to theformation of the modern European and South American welfare states. Catholic social thoughthad more influence on the American welfare state than Rodgers allows - John Ryan, the nunswho founded the world's largest network of Catholic hospitals, Al Smith, and even Father Coughlin might have figured in his story. But Rodgers is also correct, in a more important sense,not to emphasize Catholic social thought, since its formal idiom of corporatism, subsidiarity, andguilds always rang slightly off-key in a culture that invented credit cards, installment payments,and mobile homes.

Perhaps too scrupulously, Rodgers only hints at the contemporary implications of his project.But it is hard to read his homage to this earlier, cosmopolitan group of activists without a tinge of regret at the narrow way in which contemporary social policy debates on matters such as welfareand health policy are framed. Members of the Clinton administration, as Rodgers points out,never even bothered to make the public argument that Americans could learn how to organizehealth policy from foreign models.



Perhaps they decided not to waste their breath. The extraordinary changes in global capitalismover even the past ten years, however, may prompt both a reformulated "social question" and anappreciation for the importance of Rodgers's work. The Asian crisis suggests the vulnerability of any single nation in an era of international financial markets, even as international organizationsnow mount efforts to prevent a regional economic collapse. A renewed sense that the most

effective markets require both openness and vigorous constraints - a view persuasivelydeveloped by the early twentieth century reformers Rodgers so rightly admires - might usefullydirect discussion on these most important matters.

Atlantic Crossings is an account of lively intercontinental network that was created - so oftenhidden by ideas of American exceptionalism - and of its deep impact on the US from the 1870sthrough 1945. According to Rodgers, Europe was the experimental hothouse. This book istransnational history grounded on thorough research of social reforms in the industrialized NorthAtlantic world; it focuses primarily on how European experiences influenced the programs andaccomplishments of American social reformers. Daniel T. Rodgers argues that those influenceswere strongest in the 20th century before the United States entered World War II. By detailingthe adaptation and the ultimate rejection of European ideas by American reformers, Rodgersadds significantly to our understanding of the Progressive Era and the New Deal and of thenature of American exceptionalism. Atlantic Crossings, is a narrative horizon that sweeps acrossEurope and the United States, Daniel Rodgers retells the story of the classic era of efforts tomend the ravages of unrestrained capitalism. Rodgers 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 humble origins to rebuilding of new great citiesand rural life, and to the wide-ranging mechanics of social security for working people, Rodgersfinds the interconnections, alterations, interactions, and even contention in the Atlantic region's

social planning. Rodgers exposes the vast dispersion of talent, ideas, and action that were breathtaking in their assortment and impact. The scope of Atlantic Crossings is vast and peopledwith the reformers, university men and women, new experts, civil servants, politicians, giftedamateurs. This long durée of modern social policy the provides the contours of a fierce debate,new conceptions of the role of the state, an recognition of the significance of expertise in makinggovernment policy, and a recognition of a shared destiny in a newly created world. Americansocial reformers in 1900 were irked that their country had done little to ameliorate the harsheffects of the transition of the work force from country to city. They were also aware that theUnited States lagged behind Europe in its struggle with such issues. For American reformers,European nations were laboratories where responses to the social question were tested for

possible use in the United States. Borrowing their solutions made American progressives part of a "broader North Atlantic pattern" (Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings 56). Germany and Britain were asource of progressive inspiration, although France, Denmark, and Sweden were also influential.At German universities in the late nineteenth century, American postgraduate students ineconomics had their faith in laissez-faire undermined by a new awareness "of the social

possibilities of the state" and returned home to professorships as cosmopolitan" citizens of aEuro-American world of social-political endeavor," anxious to teach and to serve government as



expert policy advisers (Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings 111). Progressives turned their attention firstto the great cities. Their sudden growth and poverty created horrendous housing, sanitary, andtransportation problems that were compounded by "predatory commercial interests" (Rodgers,Atlantic Crossings 113) that profited from tenements, gas and water utilities, and trolley car lines. Progressives looked overseas and made up their minds that "the self-owned city" (Rodgers,Atlantic Crossings 143) could provide its own public services more satisfactorily and efficientlythan grasping private companies. British cities - where laissez faire was also under fire - wereespecially inspirational. After purchasing its gasworks, Birmingham used gas profits to buy outits water suppliers; Glasgow municipalized its gas supply and by 1894 had a city-owned trolleycar system. In Germany, Frankfurt built new streets and parks, a sewage plant and incinerator,

public baths and swimming pools, acquired streetcar lines, adopted zoning, and helped financelow-cost housing. Düsseldorf, according to the American progressive Frederic Howe, ownedmore things and did "more things for its people" than any other city (Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings123). Just before World War I, the American progressives' dream of municipalization did not

materialize. Despite transatlantic parallels, their fight for city-owned utilities had meager success. Although most major cities owned their waterworks and public markets, only a fewowned their gasworks, electric power plants, or transit systems. Private traction interests weretoo big and expensive for a city to buy out; courts - notoriously friendly to private propertyrights--tended to reject a hostile takeover by the public; and most important, the fear of mismanagement by corrupt urban party machines drove Americans to embrace halfwaymeasures such as regulation by commission. Progressives longed for a city that not only ownedits own infrastructure, but that also could design itself. Again inspired by Europe, their wishesranged from monumental civic designs to cheap, decent housing. Paris, with its boulevardsconverging on the Arc de Triumph forming arteries of civic unity, was the primary model for the

architects of Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza and Philadelphia's Fairmount Parkway. However,when acquiring property for diagonal boulevards proved frightfully expensive, American citiesrealized few of the Paris-inspired plans of the "city-beautiful" movement. Chicago's Grant Park,for example, is but a shred of a grandiose plan. For progressives concerned with social justice,city planning involved more than beauty. To solve overcrowding, German cities purchased landfor low-cost housing, taxed profits from land speculation, and zoned not only to protect thewealthy, but also to provide for low-density workers' housing. In Britain, philanthropistssponsored the construction of attractive villages that, in the eyes of progressives, became"blueprints for the resocialized city" (Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings 180). Although those tools andmodels inspired progressives, public-assisted housing in the United States remained in the

blueprint stage. By the 1920s, there were only a dozen such houses in Lowell, Massachusetts,and about a hundred in Milwaukee. Ironically, Americans adopted zoning but used it to protect

property rights rather than to develop low-density housing for workers. Efforts to reduce therisks faced by wage earners followed a similar pattern. Compulsory social insurance originatedin Germany in the 1880s, with the passage of sickness, accident, and old age and invalidinsurance laws and was imported by Britain from 1906 to 1911. Compulsory social insurance



gained American converts, perhaps most notably Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 Progressive Partythat adapted it "to American use." However, it was not adopted because it was German (adevastating drawback after 1914), labor opposed a social security tax on wages, and big

businesses were opposed. Only state laws compensating workers for on-the-job accidents passedduring the Progressive Era. Progressives discovered in Denmark, Ireland, and Australia ideasthat they believed would revitalize rural America. Convinced that the isolation and individualismof farmers caused their problems, they advocated agricultural cooperatives, farm villages, andfolk schools. Of these, cooperatives took root, after taking on the culture of the market and

becoming intermediaries. World War I initially dismayed progressives. But the capacity of theGerman, then British, and ultimately American governments to unite their peoples and organizetheir economies toward a common destructive goal soon filled reformers with hope that the war-collectivized state could also plan and construct a socially just post war world. Reformers' hopeswere not realized. Not interested in reconstituting American society, Woodrow Wilsondismantled wartime organizations as quickly as possible. The crisis of the Great Depression,

however, opened the door for the projects progressives had advocated. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal used and adapted plans progressives had been maturing for decades in the NationalIndustrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the Social Security Act of 1935. Grand civic designs wereconstructed, farm cooperatives, rural villages, and greenbelt towns were established, and publichousing was built for the urban poor. The New Deal, however, was the climax of thetransatlantic progressive connection. World War II fundamentally changed Americans from

political isolationists to political cosmopolitans who, paradoxically, no longer looked abroad for solutions to their social problems. On both sides of the Atlantic postwar welfare states emergedwith comprehensive efforts to remedy social ills, but Americans no longer depended onEuropean social laboratories. Emerging from the war victorious, unscathed, and prosperous,

Americans reverted to their earlier conviction that their land and way of life were exceptional."Having saved the world," Rodgers concludes, it was not "easy to imagine that there was stillmuch to learn from it" (Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings 508).

Daniel Rodgers' thesis in Atlantic Crossings is simple and direct: "the reconstruction of American social politics was of a part with movements of politics and ideas throughout the NorthAtlantic world that trade and capitalism had tied together." (3) He concludes that from the 1870sthrough World War II, America was not an internalist or an imperialist nation, but instead theseyears saw an "opening" for social reformers in the U.S. to import foreign models and ideals fromother North Atlantic countries. Furthermore, these imported policies and reforms (mostly from

Britain and Germany) were not adopted in America (if at all) unchanged upon reaching theAtlantic's western shores, but instead were adapted to the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of American society and political structure. Finally, Rodgers argues, the seeds of the New Deal can

be found in the activities and positions of the social reform activists of the last two decades of the19th century and the first thirty years of the 20th century. Rodgers convincingly supports histhesis by describing "a largely forgotten world of transnational borrowings and imitation,adaptation and transformation" (7) from the 1870s through the 1940s, a time during which



Americans had an abundance of solutions to the myriad social problems of their day. This"borrowing" was a process that changed significantly over time. Initially, Americans were

primarily recipients of reform ideas from abroad. Later, during the prosperity of the 1920s, amore even exchange of social solutions took place among North Atlantic countries, whicheventually led to "a great gathering...of proposals and ideas" in the New Deal. Finally, by the endof World War II, the differing experiences of the nations of the North Atlantic world and thevarying effects suffered by each from the conflict largely ended the former transnationalexchange, and saw the Cold War rise of American exceptionalism. Rodgers provides numerousconvincing examples of the cross-national exchange process of ideas and reforms to illustrate hisarguments. Workmen's compensation insurance in America, for example, was based upon a pre-World War I British model, a "ready made solution with a history of success behind it" (248) thatmade similar acts in the U.S. possible. Additionally, housing, health and streetcars were a major concern of American social reformers in large cities, who often borrowed ideas aboutmunicipally-guided urban and industrial projects from experiments and visions in Berlin and

London. As Rodgers notes regarding the new "self-owned" city, "municipalization was the firstimportant Atlantic-wide progressive project...[that] borrowed experience and transnationalexample." (159) European precedents gave American progressives "a set of working, practicalexamples." (144) "He describes, however, in chapters 5 and 6, the impossibility of wholesaleAmerican import of strong European municipality due to the unique and equally strong traditionsin the U.S. in favor of property rights, a tradition buttressed and maintained by legal tradition andthe courts. One need only look at excess condemnation, widely practiced in Paris and London, tosee an example of reforms disallowed by the courts, which held that public interests of taste and

beauty did not surmount the rights of property owners. Housing in America "was a privatematter," (196) unlike the European examples progressives saw. Although some reviewers have

taken exception with Rodgers' claim that within the progressive movement's ideology one cansee the footers of the New Deal, his argument is convincing. What New Dealers "did best," heasserts, "was to throw in to the breach, with verve and imagination, schemes set in motion yearsor decades before." (415) A large number of New Deal projects came out of the old Atlantic

progressive connection, and in "gathering in so much of the progressive agenda, the New Dealgathered in large chunks of European experience as well." (416) Perhaps the weakness inAtlantic Crossings is that which is left out, not in the arguments Rodgers articulately presents.First, it is surprising that Rodgers presents no detailed discussion regarding education reform,

particularly when this issue was so important to the Germans at the time. Second, one wouldnever know that there was an American South during this time period, a region where

progressives were active even despite a lack of urban areas there. Nevertheless, Rodgers hasdone a masterful job of comparative history by emphasizing trans-national borrowing andcooperation .

atlantic crossings note

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