Bibliographic Details
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Harvard University Press, 1998.
Thesis Statement
Rodgers argues that American progressivism was not an isolated domestic phenomenon but was deeply embedded in a transatlantic conversation about social politics, reform, and the modern state. By tracing the circulation of ideas, policies, and reformers between the United States and Europe, he demonstrates that many of the key innovations of the Progressive Era—from social insurance to city planning to labor legislation—were adapted from German, British, and French models, challenging the narrative of American exceptionalism and revealing the porous boundaries of national reform movements during the period 1900-1945.
Summary
Atlantic Crossings fundamentally reorients our understanding of American reform between 1900 and 1945. Rodgers, a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, recovers the largely forgotten history of American progressives who looked to Europe for solutions to the social and economic crises of industrialization, urbanization, and war. Rather than seeing the United States as a uniquely progressive nation, he shows that American reformers were avid students of European social politics, particularly the German welfare state, British land taxation, and French labor organization.
The book begins in the late nineteenth century, when a generation of American intellectuals and social workers traveled to Europe to study the “social question.” Rodgers then traces how these transatlantic networks shaped the major reform campaigns of the Progressive Era—including housing codes, minimum wage laws, social insurance, and the regulation of monopolies. The First World War, rather than disrupting these connections, accelerated the transfer of European models of state planning and economic management to the United States. The war emergency, Rodgers argues, provided a crucial laboratory for implementing ideas that had been circulating for decades.
The narrative extends into the New Deal, which Rodgers interprets not as a uniquely American response to the Depression but as the culmination of a half-century of transatlantic borrowing and adaptation. Social Security, the Wagner Act, and the Tennessee Valley Authority all had European antecedents. Yet Rodgers also shows how American exceptionalism reasserted itself: race and racism, the power of business interests, and the structure of American federalism consistently limited and transformed these imported ideas. The book concludes with the Second World War, which definitively reoriented the United States from a borrower to a lender of social political ideas.
Rodgers’s account is learned, elegant, and revisionist without being polemical. He recovers a lost world of intellectual exchange—of German professors visiting Chicago settlement houses, British Fabians advising New Dealers, and French social economists shaping American labor law. In doing so, he offers a powerful alternative to parochial accounts of American reform, showing that the most creative moments in American social politics arose from engagement with the wider world.
Chapter-by-Chapter Breakdown
- Introduction: “A Paris of the Mind” – Establishes the book’s transnational framework and the concept of “social politics.” Critiques the myth of American isolation in reform thinking.
- Chapter 1: “The Atlantic Economy: Traffic of Ideas, 1870-1900” – Traces the emergence of a transatlantic reform network through World’s Fairs, study tours, and the translation of European social science. Focuses on the German Historical School of economics and its American admirers.
- Chapter 2: “The Social Question in the Cities: Housing, Sanitation, and the European Example” – Examines how American housing reformers and urban planners studied German, British, and Austrian models of tenement regulation, garden cities, and municipal socialism.
- Chapter 3: “The Insurable State: Social Insurance and the Labor Movement” – Analyzes the transatlantic origins of workmen’s compensation, old-age pensions, and unemployment insurance, focusing on the influence of German and British social insurance laws.
- Chapter 4: “The Unsettled State: Land, Taxation, and the Single Tax” – Explores Henry George’s influence in Britain and Ireland, and the international campaign for land value taxation as a response to rural and urban poverty.
- Chapter 5: “The State and the Economy: Corporation, Regulation, and the New Competition” – Investigates how American trust-busters and regulators engaged with European debates about cartels, industrial councils, and “organized capitalism.”
- Chapter 6: “The First World War: The Crucible of Social Politics” – Shows how the war emergency in Europe and the United States created unprecedented opportunities for state planning, price controls, and labor management, with European models directly informing American war agencies.
- Chapter 7: “The Reorientation of the 1920s” – Documents the persistence of transatlantic reform contacts despite the Red Scare and isolationist nationalism. Focuses on housing, labor law, and the rise of “welfare capitalism.”
- Chapter 8: “The New Deal: The Atlantic Connection” – The culmination: demonstrates how New Deal architects consciously drew on European precedents for Social Security, the Wagner Act, agricultural adjustment, and public works. Shows the limits of borrowing through racism and federalism.
- Chapter 9: “The Second World War and Beyond: From Borrower to Lender” – Concludes with the war’s transformation of American global power and the shift from importing to exporting social political models, including the Marshall Plan and the postwar welfare state.
Scholarly Reception
Atlantic Crossings won the 1999 Bancroft Prize and the 1999 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians. It has been hailed as a landmark work of transnational history that reshaped the study of American progressivism. Critics have praised its erudition and archival depth, though some have argued that Rodgers understates the distinctiveness of American race politics and the persistence of domestic resistance to state-building. The book remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the tangled history of American reform in global context.
Representative Quotes
“The most revealing history of American social politics in the Progressive era is not to be found in the landscape of American institutions alone. It is to be found in the transatlantic traffic in ideas, policies, and reformers that made the first decades of the twentieth century a great age of social experiments.” (p. 3)
“The New Deal was less an invention than a synthesis. It gathered up ideas and policies that had been in transatlantic circulation for two generations and gave them an American accent.” (p. 412)