Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age
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Overview
"The most belated of nations," Theodore Roosevelt called his country during the workmen's compensation fight in 1907. Earlier reformers, progressives of his day, and later New Dealers lamented the nation's resistance to models abroad for correctives to the backwardness of American social politics. Atlantic Crossings is the first major account of the vibrant international network that they constructed—so often obscured by notions of American exceptionalism—and of its profound impact on the United States from the 1870s through 1945.
On a narrative canvas that sweeps across Europe and the United States, Daniel Rodgers retells the story of the classic era of efforts to repair the damages of unbridled capitalism. He reveals the forgotten international roots of such innovations as city planning, rural cooperatives, modernist architecture for public housing, and social insurance, among other reforms. From small beginnings to reconstructions of the new great cities and rural life, and to the wide-ranging mechanics of social security for working people, Rodgers finds the interconnections, adaptations, exchanges, and even rivalries in the Atlantic region's social planning. He uncovers the immense diffusion of talent, ideas, and action that were breathtaking in their range and impact.
The scope of Atlantic Crossings is vast and peopled with the reformers, university men and women, new experts, bureaucrats, politicians, and gifted amateurs. This long durée of contemporary social policy encompassed fierce debate, new conceptions of the role of the state, an acceptance of the importance of expertise in making government policy, and a recognition of a shared destiny in a newly created world.
Synopsis
"The most belated of nations," Theodore Roosevelt called his country during the workmen's compensation fight in 1907. Earlier reformers, progressives of his day, and later New Dealers lamented the nation's resistance to models abroad for correctives to the backwardness of American social politics. Atlantic Crossings is the first major account of the vibrant international network that they constructed—so often obscured by notions of American exceptionalism—and of its profound impact on the United States from the 1870s through 1945.
On a narrative canvas that sweeps across Europe and the United States, Daniel Rodgers retells the story of the classic era of efforts to repair the damages of unbridled capitalism. He reveals the forgotten international roots of such innovations as city planning, rural cooperatives, modernist architecture for public housing, and social insurance, among other reforms. From small beginnings to reconstructions of the new great cities and rural life, and to the wide-ranging mechanics of social security for working people, Rodgers finds the interconnections, adaptations, exchanges, and even rivalries in the Atlantic region's social planning. He uncovers the immense diffusion of talent, ideas, and action that were breathtaking in their range and impact.
The scope of Atlantic Crossings is vast and peopled with the reformers, university men and women, new experts, bureaucrats, politicians, and gifted amateurs. This long durée of contemporary social policy encompassed fierce debate, new conceptions of the role of the state, an acceptance of the importance of expertise in making government policy, and a recognition of a shared destiny in a newly created world.
Nicolas Maffei - Journal of Design History
Atlantic Crossings makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the complex traffic of social policy and design solutions during the period [of the 1930s]. It counters the notion of American isolation, and shows that there was an active transatlantic exchange of ideas and models generated, borrowed, tested and modified.
Editorials
American Studies in Scandinavia
Americans are so imbued with the sense of living in a 'city upon a hill' which is a model to the world that a book depicting American leaders enmeshed in a North Atlantic web jars. Daniel Rodgers places such a network at the heart of Progressive social reform, informing and shaping policy agendas from the 1890s to the New Deal...this is an impressive and informative work that will sensitize any reader to the international influences in the Progressive tradition. In particular, Rodgers deftly depicts the misunderstandings and dangers inherent in adopting social policies outside of their cultural context.
— Bruce Leslie
Brandeis University James T. Kloppenberg
It will be one of the most widely discussed books among historians of American politics and culture, and it will reach many social scientists in other disciplines as well...Rodgers challenges directly the prevailing wisdom about American insularity and exceptionalism, which pervades discussions of American social science and American political development among both historians and social scientists. His analysis displays the multiple dimensions of social policy formation, from the first presentation of ideas through the implementation of policies...[It] is intricate, detailed, and long, but its richness is inseparable from those characteristics...[A] well crafted, richly informative study.Commonweal
Rodger'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 the intertwined dilemmas of explosive urban growth, growing poverty, and mass migration...Rodgers demonstrates more clearly than any previous historian how literally hundreds of American activists pounced upon the pilot projects and 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 the shared response to what contemporaries called the "social question."
— John T. McGreevy
Foreign Affairs
This book pulls into view another dimension of the Anglo-American relationship and broader Atlantic ties. Conversant in a formidable range of topics across two continents, Rodgers ably puts ideas, not impersonal forces, at the center of this century's great eras of reform. He describes Progressive and New Deal responses to the Industrial Revolution as really Atlantic in origin, not just American—full of borrowings from kindred social thinkers and urban planners watching their transatlantic counterparts.
Journal of Design History
Atlantic Crossings makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the complex traffic of social policy and design solutions during the period [of the 1930s]. It counters the notion of American isolation, and shows that there was an active transatlantic exchange of ideas and models generated, borrowed, tested and modified.
— Nicolas Maffei
Journal of Economic Literature
[Atlantic Crossings] reconstructs a distinctive era in American history during which American social politics were tied, through rivalry and intellectual exchange, to social political debates and endeavors in Europe.
n+1
Easily the best single-volume history of American progressivism and reform.
— Scott Spillman
Washington Times
Atlantic Crossings is an extremely readable book on a subject—American and European social policy during the past century—about which few other academics have written with Daniel Rodgers' skillful blend of scholarship and flair. It is a book to be read from beginning to end for its account of the efforts to humanize the productive, but often brutal, changes imposed by the industrial revolution on what had been a predominantly agricultural world. It is also a book worth keeping on the table next to one's favorite armchair, offering moments of acquaintance with philanthropists, technologists, labor leaders, politicians, idealists and journalists whose personalities and proposals for economic correctives have been explained by the author in the manner of an erudite, witty and affectionate gallery lecturer...Most relevant of all is Mr. Rodgers' ability to convey to the reader an immediacy that is generally thought to be the sole province of great journalists. This reviewer stands in awe of the writer's ability to explain the interconnectedness of the topics he covers.
— Roger Starr