In Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, Daniel T. Rodgers seeks to answer the focus questions, “How an era of transatlantic social politics came into being; how it was sustained; what difference the web of transnational connections made; how much it shaped political choices; and how like and different it shows, in retrospect, the United States to have been from its closest economic counterparts” (pg. 7). Rodgers argues, “Attending to events and processes throughout the north Atlantic economy, to both near and distant contexts, to politics as well as ideas, these pages comprise an experiment in shifting the frames and boundaries of a classic American story” (pg. 7). He continues, “The transatlantic moment in social politics was in many ways an age of amateurs. Persons of this sort did not administer social policy; nowhere did they control legislative outcomes. Their proposals were never advanced except to be battered and recast by those who possessed not policy notions but interests. Yet without their production of proposals, without their intellectual work in framing the terms of debate, social politics could not have transpired” (pg. 26). Rodgers’ history is mostly economic as he follows economic ideas across national boundaries.
Of the origin of Progressivism as a political stance, Rodgers writes, “It was English before it was American, born in the heated municipal politics of 1890s London before crossing to the United States in the first decade of the new century. By 1910, in the Progressive People’s Party (Fortschrittliche Volkspartei) of Friedrich Naumann, Lujo Brentano, and other younger reform intellectuals, the term ‘progressive’ had acquired social-political overtones in Germany as well. It was central to the self-identity of the proponents of social politics to think of themselves as committed less to an abstract principle than to a distinctive place at history’s leading edge, where the effects of the revolutions in production and exchange cut most sharply” (pg. 52). Zoning and cities serve as a case study for Rodgers. He writes, “Brought into the city through far-flung markets in goods and labor, sorted into neighborhoods by markets in land and shelter, sustained by armies of shopkeepers, peddlers, teamsters, and middlemen, city dwellers lived in a web of mutual dependency that was at once extraordinarily powerful and barely visible. Nowhere outside the great cities did the necessities of shelter and sustenance hinge as fully on invisible suppliers” (pg. 114). Cities owning their own infrastructure offered the opportunity for the blurring of class lines. Rodgers writes, “Investing boldly in public works, urban business-class progressives had engineered a major shift in the line between city and private enterprise. They had established for turn-of-the-century cities a new set of collective tasks, which, spinning out from concerns with public health, defied determinate limits” (pg. 130).
Turning to the working class, Rodgers writes, “The distinctive concern of the North Atlantic economy’s progressives was not to patch and mend the lives of the poor: it was the struggle to find effective means to keep those who were not abjectly poor, who still possessed work and wages, from being precipitated into poverty’s abyss” (pg. 211). He continues, “One must imagine, then, the North Atlantic economy as crisscrossed with benefits pools and insurance institutions: regulated and unregulated, commercial and fraternal, actuarially primitive or highly systematized. The resulting system was both a fixture of everyday life and inadequate to it, far-flung and full of holes. No other organizations set down deeper roots in the working class” (pg. 218-219). Further, “In the United States as in Europe, the campaign for protective labor legislation was a curious amalgam of efforts, on the one hand, to eliminate certain of the most dangerous risks of the workplace and, on the other, leaving the dangers in place, to make sure that only adult men were exposed to them” (pg. 239).
Prior to World War I, Rodgers writes, “From the American university students’ delight at European ‘sociability’ through each piecemeal effort to decommodify a streetcar line here or a laborers’ risk there, the goals of most of those in the Atlantic progressive network were elements of a stronger collective life: ‘solidarity,’ a ‘civic sense,’ ‘society’” (pg. 269). He continues, “Across the Atlantic world, the wartime transformation in political economy was, indeed, far-reaching. Everywhere old rules were set at odds, warring social parties brought into state-sponsored harness, the market drastically narrowed, and the realm of things public dramatically swollen” (pg. 280). Turning to the American South, Rodgers writes, “With the poverty and backwardness of southern agriculture on their minds, and, still more, the massive drag of that backwardness on the South’s general welfare, they strained to read the social-political lessons in the European countryside. In that endeavor the Americans joined others: Irish progressives trying to track down the exportable lessons of the Danish rural revival, English investigators of Belgian agricultural organization, Indian and Italian rural reformers in Germany. All were in pursuit of the secret of rural revival – of workable means to rebalance the market in agricultural goods in ways less disadvantageous to the country’s small producers” (pg. 323-324).
Of the 1930s, Rodgers writes, “In bits and pieces, the late-Weimar fusion of labor housing politics, machine production techniques, and radical aesthetics found its way into 1930s America. But the elements would not stay put. The Atlantic crossing scrambled and dissolved relations in the very process of extraction and appropriation” (pg. 407). Writing on the New Deal in American memory, Rodgers argues that contemporaries “let their memories shift in the same direction, pushing the internationalism of 1930s social politics into smaller and smaller recesses, redrawing 1930s politics as a distinctly American movement. As memory it was wrong, but as prognosis it was not entirely off the mark. Battered by events abroad and opponents at home, the transatlantic progressive connection was under palpable strain. The New Deal was the climax of that connection. It hinted at a quite different future” (pg. 484).
Rodgers concludes, “The historical importance of the transatlantic phase of American progressive politics lies not in the exaggerated polarities of its rhetoric but in its experienced connections. It marked a moment when, across the countervailing pull of nationhood, the world of capital seemed to many a world akin. For all the ‘un-American,’ ‘made in Prussia’ furor that met their work, the Atlantic progressive travelers made other nations’ social policy headline news. They sustained not only highly visible structures of international exchange but also a public debate that bound choices in American social politics with choices elsewhere” (pg. 508). ( )

This book explains, in a readable and entertaining fashion, the strong influence that European social politics had on American social legislature in the early part of the 20th century.

This book is strongly recommended for anybody interested in American or European history. ( )

The next definitive work on the Progressive Era.: This is the policy-side answer to Kloppenberg's UNCERTAIN VICTORY. While that book focussed on intellectual links between European (esp. German or French) thought and early American pragmatism, Rodgers seeks more practical applications, well into the 20th century. He is so well versed in the literature that scant references are made to secondary sources. It is rich in the literature of the time, particularly journals, magazines, and newspapers from several different countries. Interestingly, unlike Kloppenberg this book examines England and Scotland which provide springboards for American reforms. Rodgers' thesis is that the Europeans tried numerous policies which Americans learned about and then implemented, almost always later than their counterparts across the Atlantic--and sometimes with very limited success. The book is also noteworthy for some of the most practical applications of MODERNISM yet seen in contemporary scholarship. This is a hot topic, largely seen in discussions of art or literature. Here Rodgers takes all that knowledge, absorbs it, and then demonstrates it in action across the POLITICAL spectrum. Despite the enormous research behind it, Rodgers has written an enjoyable, readable work that is of considerable importance. After all, this is the author of the famous article, "An Obituary for the Progressive Movement," (1970) which claimed that there NEVER WAS such a movement. Here Rodgers answers his own claim, saying that the American reform impulse built upon a European foundation and produced policies which survive to the present. My only complaint is that this book is slanted TOWARDS Europe, with maybe 60% of the discussion dwelling across the Atlantic ... the format gets a little tedious, with most chapters beginning in Europe, then the Americans pick up on the policy (welfare, municipal gas/water etc) and then they try it themselves. This is nitpicking, though, for such a substantive, well-researched, lucid work that defines this generation's scholarship on the Progressive Era.