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Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 21:13:34 -0800 From: "Robert W. Cherny" <cherny@sfsu.edu> Subject: Marks on Rodgers, _Atlantic Crossings_ (1 of 6)
NOTE: H-STATE (Peter Dobkin Hall), H-URBAN (Clay McShane) and H-SCI-MED-TECH (Harry M. Marks) have organized a review symposium of Daniel T. Rodgers' _Atlantic Crossings_. Rodgers' book offers a substantial reinterpretation of Euro-American social reform in the decades 1880-1940; it discusses topics of interest to a great many kinds of historians, including urban history, public health, labor and political history among others.
The symposium leads with a summary of the book (below) by Harry M. Marks (The Johns Hopkins University), to be followed by comments (in separate messages) from Prof. Victoria de Grazia (Columbia University), David Hammack (Case Western Reserve University), Seth Koven (Villanova University), Sonya Michel (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne), and Pierre-Yves Saunier (CNRS, Lyon). The author's own comments can be found linked to each individual review.
Anyone who is interested in accessing the colloquium, in whole or in part, can do so in the Book Review Logs under the headings of H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-State, and H-Urban. All of the individual posts will be placed under each list's header.
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-SCI-MED-TECH@h-net.msu.edu (October, 1999)
Daniel T. Rodgers. _Atlantic Crossings. Social Politics in a Progressive Age_. Harvard University Press, 1998. Bibliography, Index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-05131-9.
Reviewed for H-SCI-MED-TECH by Harry M. Marks <hmarks@jhmi.edu>, The Johns Hopkins University
"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 countries adopted a series of innovative, state-centered, social programs--unemployment insurance, social security, industrial accident and health insurance--adding programs for child care and mothering work in the postwar era. While the explanations for these policies varied with scholarly fashion and 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 was something peculiar about the United States polity. How else to account for its noted delays in adopting 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 this received wisdom, which saw strong connections between the postwar welfare states and the social policies of the previous sixty years. For Rodgers, the postwar welfare states are something quite different from the "social politics" of the interwar and fin-de-siecle decades: "The 'welfare state' 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 its own terms, as an period of trans-European, trans-Atlantic, social experimentation--experimentation with programs meant to soften and delimit the effects of intensive industrialization and urbanization.
Searching for a "middle course between the rocks of cutthroat economic individualism and the shoals of an all- coercive statism (p. 29)," the "progressive architects of social politics" traveled to learn by example. British reformers went to Germany to report on Bismarck's social insurance schemes; German engineers came in the 1920s to study American factories, German architects to study American building designs; Irish, Austrian, German and Canadian agronomists trekked to Denmark to investigate the workings of rural cooperatives. Personal exchanges were augmented via textual means: reports, commissions and the proceedings of international congresses documented the operations of programs in housing, worker safety and insurance [1]. For more than 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 to Europe seeking lessons in social reform. Some of these visitors are well-known. Jane Adams made multiple pilgrimages to London's Toynbee Hall in the 1880s (while Graham Wallas, Mary MacArthur and Keir Hardie, inter alia, returned the compliment by later sojourns at Lillian Wald's Henry Street Settlement). Richard T. Ely and W.E.B. DuBois studied the historicist methods and social doctrines of the German Kathedersozialisten. In the early 1930s, Lewis Mumford 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 New Republic, and countless government and commission reports. Who but a few specialists remembers 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 Prussian agrarian 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 policy took place in a trans-European, trans-Atlantic context. Isolationist in foreign policy the United States 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, where the 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 Europeans had 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 the trolleys; 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 the ephemeral experiments with "war collectivism" in the Great War (housing reform, economic planning and labor relations); a chapter on agrarian cooperatives and rural reconstruction; and two closing chapters on the legacies of social politics--the New Deal and the fate of William Beveridge's plans for the postwar social reconstruction of Britain.
As the above inventory suggests, Rodgers' notion of social politics includes the conventional social 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, sanitary improvements (public baths and milk stations) and housing reform (from slum clearance to garden cities). Though Rodgers is not the first to offer a more expansive version of pre-WWII "welfare statism"--both Douglas Ashford and Theda Skocpol 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 these movements, but will simply report that I learned something on virtually every page, even about things I thought I knew rather well. But what does Rodgers wish us to understand about the nature of social politics, and its fate in the United States?
EXPLANATIONS. Rodgers' travellers are "idea" women and men who use their foreign experiences 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." Rodgers explicitly 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 transplant European 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 the institutional 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 translation was 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 and control varied from place to place. In Germany, initially only the miners had a state mandated insurance 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 commercial insurers. 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 the resulting programs. Similarly complex stories are told about housing and agrarian reform, among others.
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 and 1980s, so the nuances of European social politics in the 1880s, 1910s or 1940s escaped American social progressives. How else to explain the enthusiasm of American social reformers-- self-pronounced anti-socialists--for the socialist platform of British post-WWI social reconstruction, 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 banks in 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 first decade of the 20th century), the gas utilities which were the target in Joseph Chamberlain's Birmingham were already waning [3]. The lateblooming domestic "municipalization" movement directed its attention instead to the nascent street railway industry. The movement to import health insurance plans, by contrast, simply has historical bad luck. The campaign for health insurance heated up in 1915, just as the "made in Germany" charges sparked by WWI became available to critics.
The loyalties of American law and the American judiciary to property rights provided a more consistent check against progressive politics, especially in the cities [4]. Rodgers makes clear the courts' role in breaking the rapid movement toward municipal ownership of railways. Yet even here it is the intellectual currents which intrigue him. For in the face of legal challenges to the municipal control of railways, progressives resurrected a venerable but moribund political innovation--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 balance of power, account for the political path taken.
Rodgers' affection for the architects of social politics cannot conceal the fact that their successes were 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 tepid or ambivalent allies. If social progress in N. America remained local and piecemeal, still Rodgers has rescued a range of regional innovations from partial obscurity: from Elwood 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 Resettlement Administration, which took up Elwood Mead's experiments with rural cooperatives--or to the interstices--the public housing program inserted into the NIRA legislation by Senator Wagner, incorporating the advice of German-inspired New York housing reformer Mary Simkhovitch. It is 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] stumbling into the political center (446)." Even within the core programs of the New Deal, Rodgers notes the weight of three decades of social politics. The provisions of Social Security, he argues, have less 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. By the time the British issue William Beveridge's manifesto for a postwar welfare state, American reformers have turned elsewhere, to the dictates of a home-brewed Keynesianism which relied on 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 the generosity 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. Yet apart 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? And what about the complex nativism of middle class reformers itself, especially in the settlement house movement? If we are considering the impact of European political example, shouldn't we--extending the suggestion of Pierre-Yves Saunier (below)--recognize the contemporary distinction 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 a career of holding government office. Yet I wonder if the trajectory of "social politics," especially in the 1920s and 1930s, can be explained without considering the careers of people such as the economist 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, serving as a bridge between private philanthropies (the Milbank Fund), independent commissions (the Committee 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 Lewis Cecil Gray--both trained in John Commons' laboratory in progressive economics at the University of Wisconsin [11]? Or the many officials who participated in international congresses on workplace conditions and industrial accidents [12]? Perhaps now that Prof. Rodgers has so lovingly charted the place of social progressives outside government, we can also examine their allies in government.
NOTES
[1]. Rodgers is hardly the first to examine the international traffic in political ideas. See E.P. Hennock's study of the British debt to German social insurance schemes, _British Social Reform and German Precedents: The Case of Social Insurance, 1880- 1914_ (Oxford University Press, 1987). Yet Rodgers' account is without precedent in its breadth.
[2]. Ashford emphasizes the significance of public education; Skocpol, the Civil War veterans' pensions. Douglas E. Ashford, _The Emergence of the Welfare States_ (Blackwell, 1987); Theda Skocpol, _Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States_ (Harvard University Press, 1992).
[3]. This example raises some issues. Can we talk, not simply of American 'backwardness' but of an imbalance in the United States, between technological progressiveness (gas industry--early) and political backwardness (municipalization-- late). Timing as an explanation of political outcomes seems to me problematic for the municipalization case--after all, the British water industry is virtually entirely privately controlled for the first two-thirds of the century, yet moves to public control thereafter. [See J.A. Hassan, "The Growth and Impact of the British Water Industry in the Nineteenth Century," _Economic History Review_ 38 (1985), 531-547]. What needs explaining here is how and why the business classes, led by Joseph Chamberlain, exercised their political power differently than similar groups in the United States.
[4]. Rodgers light-handed reading of the courts' role is more in keeping with the first volume of Morton Horwitz's history of U.S. law than with the second: Morton J. Horwitz _The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860_ (Harvard University Press, 1977).
[5]. William E. Leuchtenberg, "The New Deal and the Analogue of War, in John Braemen, Robert H. Bremner and Everett Walters, _Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America_ (Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 81-143.
[6]. Frances Perkins is one exception noted; Henry Wallace could well be another.
[7]. Rodgers is careful to note the ways in which domestic political circumstances modified European precedent, as in the insistence, modeled on commercial insurance, that the federal government track individual contributions to Social Security accounts (pp. 445-446).
[8]. Rodgers' most extended attention to the "made in America issue" comes in his discussion of the New Deal (pp. 481- 484).
[9]. While the nativism point is mine, the two Europes idea was inspired by reading Pierre-Yves Saunier's contribution to the discussion below.
[10]. On the CIR, see Mary O. Furner, "Knowing Capitalism: Public Investigation and the Labor Question in the Long Progressive Era," in Mary O. Furner and Barry Supple, eds. _The State and Economic Knowledge. The British and American Experiences_ (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 274-286.
[11]. On the BAE, Richard S. Kirkendall, _Social Scientists and Farm Politics in the Age of Roosevelt_ (Iowa State University Press, 1966, 1982).
[12]. On industrial accidents and labor statistics, see Anson Rabinbach, "Social Knowledge, Social Risk, and the Politics of Industrial Accidents in Germany and France," in Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, eds. _States, Social Knowledge, and the Origins of Modern Social Politics," (Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 48-89; James Leiby, _Carroll Wright and Labor Reform: The Origin of Labor Statistics_ (Harvard University Press, 1960).
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Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 21:14:21 -0800 From: "Robert W. Cherny" <cherny@sfsu.edu> Subject: de Grazia on Rodgers, _Atlantic Crossings_ (2 of 6)
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-State@h-net.msu.edu (October, 1999)
Daniel T. Rodgers. _Atlantic Crossings. Social Politics in a Progressive Age_. Harvard University Press, 1998. Bibliography, Index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-05131-9.
Reviewed for H-State by Victoria de Grazia <vd19@columbia.edu> Professor of History, Columbia University
Commentary: "_Atlantic Crossings_: Close Encounters, Of What Kind?"
Readers of Daniel Rodger's capacious new work might want to appreciate the symmetry between its author's eclectic method and intrepid research abroad and the assorted cultural interests and arduous trans-Atlantic voyages of the book's protagonists, U.S. progressive reformers. The result of 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 his to analyze the legacy of that action. To stretch this analogy further, we might also note that whereas 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. It foregrounds the press of new ideas and experiments circulating through the North Atlantic world as opposed to the pressures from below arising from social struggles, the collective awakening to notions of social risks, or the implacable drive on the part of aggressive nation-states to engage in 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 social reform. Vigorous if a bit ingenuous, serendipitous and piecemeal, the U.S. reform movement, as it is characterized here, ultimately seems very distant from the projects of capitalist reform in Europe. 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 out here, whether or not he adequately addresses the paradox of why American reform which appeared 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 how important 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, on characterizing 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 wake of World War I, continental Europe began to face the challenge of American models of market culture. Sweeping over the old problematic of capitalist reform, this U.S. wave of social invention carried with it the concept of the "standard of living" engineered by access to mass consumption, and would eventually become the hegemonic current, influencing European reformism more and more from the second half of the century.
The study of institutional transfers inevitably raises what is perhaps the foremost problem comparativists address, which is why innovations appear more or less simultaneously and with common 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 the comparative 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 a common 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 the twentieth century, in which change has been so rapid, promoters (and opponents) of innovation catch on so quickly to new trends, and public debate delights in mixing up arguments about the causes of bad (and good) trends, distinguishing among these different possibilities is tricky as is giving them their appropriate weight. If you emphasize the first, you risk being denounced as a determinist, to emphasize the third a "modernizationist," or functionalist, while to emphasize the second hypothesis seems to explain nothing unless there is some plausible account of why any single source should be hegemonic.
The key move for comparativists lies in establishing the broad historical context, which Rodgers does, though only very cursorily as the North Atlantic "field of force." This space, loosely unified by the intensification of market relations, prodigious urbanization, and rising working class 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 as much 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 capitalist accumulation, their rivalries passing through two catastrophic wars that shook Europe from its global 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 see hegemony as Robert Cox's reading of Gramsci underscores, as speaking to the role of leading states in exercising influence in the domain of social as well as technological invention, certain features 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 Rodgers documents, established a special relationship with German reformers at Halle, Leipzig, and other university centers and especially around the Verein fur Sozialpolitik at Berlin, the young Americans 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 distaste for the tired Manchesterism and imperial highhandedness of the British. After the war, German statism was indelibly associated with the Kaiser's warmongering, and German reformism tinged with the menace of bolshevism. Before the war, nationalism and liberal reformism could coexist. After the war, nationalist ideologies were incorporated into right-wing authoritarian programs and Fascist corporatism presented itself as a new "third way" toward reform, and its positions on demographic policy, maternity and child care, as well as leisure, enjoyed great influence within international 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 and were nurtured in international congresses by cosmopolitan minds, reform was essentially a nationalizing, if not nationalistic phenomenon. The passage of social reform legislation was an element of competition among national states, its implementation a factor of national redemption, its contribution to improving the human factor calculated more or less scientifically in national accounts on wages, fertility, pensions, public health, and migration. Paradoxically, the very 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 the cosmopolitanism of progressive ideas. Foreign examples might spur innovation. But their foreign nature, whether that was characterized as statist, authoritarian, socialistic, or other, could just as easily 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 and solutions (that) made politics out of mere economic fate."(p.508). What I miss in this vast canvas of the crossAtlantic politics of citation is a sense of the discursive power, the fraught processes of 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 such studies [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 is to 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 translation are involved.
One problem whose answer eluded me here is the degree to which experiments from Europe did actually set terms of debate and/or shape alternatives. We know from European responses to the challenge of post-war U.S. models of production that experts were in effect forced to debate whether high productivity necessarily went-hand in hand with out-of-control consumption and rationalized kitchens would necessarily engender unmanageable American-style housewives. We know that sooner or later non-anglophone Europeans, the overwhelming majority, in the process of adopting new words like "service" and "marketing" had to assimilate whole new conceptual relationships. To what degree, say, did German social reformist ideas, imbricated as they were with statism, solidaristic ideas of market, sharp class hierarchies, or social radicalism, reshape the meaning of "social"? The answer might well be that Americans relatively speedily suppressed the original frame of reference, eliminating the foreign and alien far speedier than Europeans could expurgate the American influence. The near-total erasure of the German intellectual influence not just from the public, but also from the academic collective memory is in itself stunning testimony to this capacity.
The issue of appropriation takes us back to Rodgers' description of American experimentation as eclectic, local, even innocent or at least ingenuous. This is of a piece with his overall negative view 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 the interwar 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 in reformist 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 grew strongly under U.S. hegemony, and indigenous social-democratic and Catholic social-market ideas were wedded to American models of production and consumption.
Above all what I learned from Rodger's erudition is that Americans were quick learners. The cosmopolitanism of turn-of-the century reformers was an important contribution to American ascendancy. The eclecticism of their style of appropriation and the intensely local way in which reform was practiced far from making the U.S. marginal to the mainstream, contributed to the social inventiveness that would lend so much dynamism to the U.S.'s informal empire over the next 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. leadership that American elite culture is so scornful of social reform abroad? If it is not oblivious to it, the attitude 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 new world order, the level playing field is the name of the game, and the only arbiter of public policy seems to be consumer choice and opinion polling, expressed in American, please.
NOTES
[1]. Robert W. Cox, "Gramsci, Hegemony, and International Relations: an Essay in Method, Stephen Gill, ed., Gramsci, Historical Materialism, and International relations, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 49-66; see also Giovanni Arrighi, "The Three Hegemonies of Historical Capitalism," Review, XIII,3 (Summer, 1990) 365-408.
[2]. The fruitfulness of such concepts and approaches to analyzing the meaning of cross-cultural contact in another context is exemplified in Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. Legrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds, _Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations_ (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998). One might usefully ask here why methodologies appropriate for the study of the contacts between "white" and "dark" areas (British Empire-Indian subcontinent, U.S.-Latin America, Europe-Africa, Europe-the Caribbean) have not been regarded as appropriate to the contacts within the "White" Atlantic?
Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
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Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 21:15:07 -0800 From: "Robert W. Cherny" <cherny@sfsu.edu> Subject: Michel on Rodgers, _Atlantic Crossings_ (3 of 6)
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-State@h-net.msu.edu (October, 1999)
Daniel T. Rodgers. _Atlantic Crossings. Social Politics in a Progressive Age_. Harvard University Press, 1998. Bibliography, Index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-05131-9.
"Gender, Race, and the Comparative Project in Daniel Rodgers' _Atlantic Crossings_"
Reviewed for H-State by Sonya Michel <s-michel@uiuc.edu>, History and Women's Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Partly in response to the challenges of comparative historical sociologists, partly to promptings from within their own discipline and field, historians of the U.S. have recently begun to adopt a more 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 Zemon Davis' 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-nineteenth- century developments in Europe and the U.S., Rodgers, unlike many current practitioners of comparative history, refuses to construct a neat typology or rely on an existing one to do the work of explanation. His restraint is all the more admirable because the period and set of circumstances under study form an ideal social scientific "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 this early period, from east to west), and a range of dependent variables--the reception of those ideas and concepts on foreign (usually American) soil.
This is not to say that Rodgers eschews systematic analysis; far from it. But instead of adducing the 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 and ideology,...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 differences among 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 politics was robust, with most of the impetus coming not from Europeans eager to impose their ideas on the 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 although the U.S. could boast a higher level of democracy in terms of suffrage and property rights, it offered far less by way of material goods and services; they recognized, in other words, a discrepancy 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 to correct.
Despite apparent similarities between European and American social and economic conditions and the enthusiasm of the travelers for European innovations, few of the transplants took root, at least, not immediately. Rodgers, however, resists the conclusion that this long history of failed transplants reveals a pattern of American exceptionalism. Exceptionalism rests in part on isolation, and for Rodgers, the very fact that the U.S. was for decades deeply enmeshed in many layers of Atlantic crossings meant that it was by no means isolated. But was participation in an ongoing intellectual exchange, energetic and proactive though it was, sufficient immunization against exceptionalism? Or, rather, do America's responses to proposed transplantations, however complex, indicate that a particular pattern of social politics was emerging, a pattern that was not evolutionary (as a stark typology might imply), but was instead formed by the very accretions of those responses, admixed with domestic developments (what sociologists Ann Orloff, Theda Skocpol, and Margaret Weir would call "policy feedback")?
A focus on the gendered and racialized dimensions of U.S. social politics would suggest the latter. But neither race nor gender figure significantly in Rodgers' analytical scheme. Though only a handful of middle-class white women (most prominently Jane Addams and Florence Kelley) 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 that made it more difficult for Americans to accept universalistic principles honed in homogeneous European societies, but mentions only in passing the deep racial cleavages of Jim Crow America that underlay ethnic conflict. As Joanne Goodwin, among others, has demonstrated, racism as well 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 become travelers in the first place, and at the same time he overlooks those that facilitated women's activism at home. While pointing, quite rightly, to the importance of urban venues for early social politics, he does not mention that cities also allowed women to enter the political field more conveniently and gracefully. His interest in world-traveling women tends to marginalize those who labored anonymously in the urban trenches. Though the influence of figures like Kelley and Addams cannot be denied, it remains the case that much of the momentum for early social 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 with a tone of middle-class condescension and reinforced a male breadwinner ideal.
Indeed, though progressive reformer William Hard relied on the universalistic principles enunciated by British New Liberal L.T. Hobhouse in advocating for pension laws, it was a combination of sentimental maternalist appeals to motherhood and hardheaded thrift that ultimately carried the day with state legislators. Such provisions established a paradigm for the social-political inscription of women that was reproduced in the Social Security Act and its amendments and persisted at least until the welfare "reform" of 1996. This paradigm, I would argue, 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 and gender is his reversion to a definition of the welfare state that privileges policies targeted toward wage-earning men such as unemployment insurance and workmen's compensation as "social insurance," while treating provisions that primarily benefit women and children, such as mothers' pensions, as secondary or subsidiary. Feminist analysts have repeatedly exposed this definition as inherently male-biased and criticized it for reproducing precisely that which must be deconstructed, namely the very formation of a "male-breadwinner state." Rodgers' predilection here 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 the genealogy but also the dynamics and impact of the U.S. welfare system from the Progressive Era onward.
Perhaps the reason Rodgers gives programs such as mothers' pensions and child welfare such short shrift is that they seem to lack the internationalist dimension that is, after all, his main concern. But these programs were in fact the subject of international discussions, and imported ideas played a role (albeit often a limited one) in U.S. debates. Writing in 1913, the progressive William Hard, mentioned above, sought to transform the discourse surrounding mothers' pensions by interjecting New Liberal principles, but he largely failed to convince his fellow Americans 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 radical feminist 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 policies toward 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 in the opposite direction. Though such omissions are rare for Rodgers, in this instance, they leave a telling gap.
Indeed, the eventual bottoming of the U.S. mothers' pension debate on sentiment and "women's weakness," 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 the universalizing potential of an indigenous socialism or liberalism (I say "potential" because I am well 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, as Kathryn 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 mixed outcomes of attempted European transplantations [2].
Engagement with gender politics would also have provided Rodgers with another avenue into the comparative impact of socialism on social politics, a theme he pursues, but (probably in an attempt to avoid rehearsing the old exceptionalist arguments) not as assiduously as he might have. He might, for instance, examined the extended worldwide debate over protective legislation for women, a debate that over the years gave rise to numerous international conferences and occupied speakers at many international socialist conferences as well. Like social 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, and Jane 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 debate from Europe and North America to the Antipodes, revealing much about women's prospects within 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 concerning women and children were extremely valuable, both as sources of ideas for alternative policy formulations 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 and maternal mortality, maternity leaves, and similar issues, and then, deploying rather rudimentary "shame" tactics, used their reports as leverage in Congress. One wishes that Rodgers had compared 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 had written a different book? I am glad--very glad, indeed--that Rodgers has written _Atlantic Crossings_, 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 1930s are convincing, his marginalization of the "women's welfare state" and delayed attention to race leads him to overemphasize the European roots of certain New Deal ideas while neglecting the racialized, gendered paradigm that the indigenous politics of the earlier period also cast over this remarkable body of legislation. His privileging of transatlantic over indigenous factors also causes 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 the transatlantic exchange into eclipse, I would argue that it did not disappear entirely. Though not terribly viable politically, it continues now in the fields of comparative historical sociology and comparative policy history--fields to which _Atlantic Crossings_ is a major contribution. With its wealth of documentation, methodological innovations, and historiographical challenges, this fine book will not only add new rigor and richness to the field, but it bids fair to inaugurate a new chapter in the ongoing history of the transatlantic exchange.
Notes
[1]. Joanne L. Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers' Pensions in Chicago, 1911-1929 (University of Chicago Press, 1997).
[2]. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work (Yale University Press, 1995).
[3]. Alice Kessler-Harris, Jane Lewis and Ulla Wikander, Protecting Women. Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
[4]. See Kriste Lindenmeyer, A Right to Childhood. The U.S. Children's Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
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Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 21:15:49 -0800 From: "Robert W. Cherny" <cherny@sfsu.edu> Subject: Hammack on Rodgers, _Atlantic Crossings_ (4 of 6)
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-State@h-net.msu.edu (October, 1999)
Daniel T. Rodgers. _Atlantic Crossings. Social Politics in a Progressive Age_. Harvard University Press, 1998. Bibliography, Index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-05131-9.
Reviewed for H-State by David C. Hammack <dch3@po.cwru.edu>, Department of History, Case Western Reserve University
Comment: "Defining and Explaining North Atlantic 'Social Politics'"
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 many industrial polities that have often been obscured in accounts that overemphasize difference. By focusing 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 frames issues. For fifty years and more, Rodgers shows, prominent idea brokers and policy advocates drew close connections among government policies and other activities that have more recently seemed 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 a general 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 many industrializing nations to redefine the relation of the national government to economic and social affairs.
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 the twentieth was not simply about the expansion of "the state." It had, as he puts it, more to do with efforts, social as well as political, to limit the market. Some innovations required only independent, cooperative, voluntary social action. Some needed only permissive enabling legislation. 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 important distinction, usually ignored by historians of social politics, between services provided directly by state employees, and services the state encourages or, through direct contracts or indirect vouchers, 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 Europe and elsewhere in recent decades. In the United States, the share of the Gross Domestic Product that 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 through vouchers and related instruments, increasingly the chosen instruments of federal social policy in the United States. Under recent "charitable choice" legislation, some of this money is now going to 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 Americans who 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 efforts to expand government involvement in the welfare of employed workers and farmers, and in urban 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 housing advocates Catherine Bauer, Charles Booth, Frederick C. Howe, Lewis Mumford, and Raymond Unwin, and to social reformers William Beveridge, Richard T. Ely, Florence Kelley, Beatrice Webb, 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 concerned with city living conditions -- Jane Addams, Paul U. Kellogg of _Survey_ magazine, Albert Shaw, Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, and Edith Elmer Wood. In many ways _Survey_ magazine and its sponsor, the Russell Sage Foundation, lay at the heart of "social politics" as Rodgers defines the topic.
_Atlantic Crossings_ is an ambitious and carefully constructed book, and it is certainly true that the idea brokers on whom it focuses did concern themselves with the entire array of policy concerns that Rodgers emphasizes [3]. It would be inappropriate to criticize so coherent and effective a book for an omission of additional topics. But it is interesting that although Rodgers states that he defines "social politics" to include nongovernmental efforts to limit the market and does 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, although such organizations (including a majority of U.S. hospitals and clinics, and very large shares of its colleges, 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 including developments 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 much attention to European and British Commonwealth models and innovations as did those in the fields he does emphasize, especially before World War I. Many late-nineteenthcentury education leaders, 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 brokers sought to advance their favored reforms. Rodgers focuses on connections among the idea brokers rather than on the context in which they operated. But one of the excellent qualities of _Atlantic Crossings_ is his thoughtful attention to the constraints imposed on the idea brokers by the political and policy contexts in which they operated
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 argument for the significance of ideas in politics. "Americans in the Progressive Era," he writes, "did not swim in problems -- not more so, at any rate, than Americans who lived through the simultaneous collapse of the economy and the post-Civil War racial settlement in the 1870s. It would 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 insist that 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 ostensibly address. 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 the rapid 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 quite explicitly on these problems. Others may well want to do more than Rodgers does with the relation 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 the great strengths of _Atlantic Crossings_ is Rodgers' insistence on the variety of the forces and circumstances that shaped policy decisions. His argument that economic interests and commitment to private property rights were very important but by no means determined all outcomes is very persuasive. But I wonder whether he gives adequate attention to the importance of the family farm, the private house on its own lot, the small retail business, and even the small manufacturing firm in shaping the perceptions and preferences of American voters and elected officials.
Perhaps more important, I wonder whether he gives sufficient attention to the impact of religious diversity 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 quite sharply 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 Catholic commitment to community institutions, together with the powerful Protestant attachments of the leaders of many public institutions, explains much of the persistent American opposition to the expansion 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 the 1970s 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 Orthodox communities, and Jews) defined (and continue to define) their communities to a great extent through 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 1870s and the 1930s to the defense of their right to do so. One high point of that effort was the successful 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 to sectarian 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. The Social Gospel facilitated exchanges among American, British, and northern European Protestants, he notes (p. 63ff). In the 1920s, European visitors sometimes mocked the utopian Calvinism 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 Protestant ministers 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 northeastern Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians had lost much of their ability to define the social policy agenda by 1900. Thereafter, many of the leading social policy forums -- especially in 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.
NOTES
[1]. For a good discussion of the various ways in which governments can provide or evoke services, see Elinor Ostrom and Gina Davis, "Nonprofit Organizations as Alternatives and Complements in a Mixed Economy," in David C. Hammack and Dennis R. Young, editors, _Nonprofit Organizations in a Market Economy_ (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993), pp. 23-56; for the best general discussion of alternative forms of owning and controlling service-producing agencies, see Henry Hansmann, _The Ownership of Enterprise_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
[2]. Calculated from "Historical Tables" in the Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 1999, pp. 50-64, Budget of the U.S., FY 1999 Online via GPO Access [http://wais.access.gpo.gov].
[3]. I have discussed the Russell Sage Foundation's involvement in social welfare, industrial safety, public health, city planning, and related issues in _Social Science in the Making: Essays on the Russell Sage Foundation, 1902-1972_, with Stanton Wheeler (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994).
[4], Lizabeth Cohen, _Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939_ (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
[5]. For the case of PIERCE v. SOCIETY OF THE SISTERS, see David C. Hammack, _Makeing the Nonprofit Sector in the United States: A Reader_, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 404-421. A good account of Catholic responses to Protestant influence in public schools is Lloyd P. Jorgenson, _The State and the Nonpublic School, 1825-1925_ (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987).
[6]. Thomas L. Haskell, _The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth Century Crisis of Authority_ (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1977).
Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
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Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 21:16:25 -0800 From: "Robert W. Cherny" <cherny@sfsu.edu> Subject: Koven on Rodgers, _Atlantic Crossings_ (5 of 6)
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Sci-Med-Tech@h-net.msu.edu (October, 1999)
Daniel T. Rodgers. _Atlantic Crossings. Social Politics in a Progressive Age_. Harvard University Press, 1998. Bibliography, Index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-05131-9.
Reviewed for H-Sci-Med-Tech by Seth Koven <skoven@email.vill.edu>, Department of History, Villanova University
"Transatlantic Exchanges: the Lessons of Atlantic Crossings for Europeanists"
When the English socialist and philanthropic aesthete C.R. Ashbee crossed the Atlantic with his comrade wife Janet to see America at the turn of the new century, they were determined to visit Hull House and to meet its formidable leader, Jane Addams. Fourteen years earlier, Ashbee had left 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 the settlement, Jane Addams had visited with the Barnetts at Toynbee Hall as part of her own sociological grand tour of Europe, and had returned home to Chicago anxious to transplant the Barnetts' settlement scheme to the south side of Chicago. Few historians in the United States need 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 it lights 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 to whom Europeans flocked, seeking out her wisdom about how best to grapple with the dilemmas of the industrial capitalist metropolis. English progressives, writers, and reformers often came to America in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on lecture tours intended to instruct their 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 Rodgers emphasizes in _Atlantic Crossings_, Americans in the late-nineteenth century believed that they lagged far behind their European counterparts in the development of their social politics, but their relationship with Europeans was never a "one way street."(70).
This sort of complex circuitry of influence, mutual exchange, rivalry, and self-critical comparisons between Europeans and Americans lies at the heart of Daniel Rodger's magisterial study, _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 practical idealists, which stretched from Berlin to San Francisco. Rodgers not only makes it possible to understand 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 explaining when, 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 profoundly determined what they did and did not see. However, because the prey Rodgers ultimately stalks are all American -- American isolationism and exceptionalism, American backwardness, the origins of the New Deal in the United States, etc. -- his book leaves it up to Europeanists to figure 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 "Big Structures, Large Processes and Huge Comparisons."[3] _Atlantic Crossings_ is a notable exception to this generalization and invites comparison between Rodgers' methodology and those used by leading historical sociologists such as Gosta Esping-Andersen who have studied comparative welfare state development. Esping-Andersen, in his celebrated analysis of welfare capitalism, deploys transnational categories such as "liberal," "corporatist" and "social democratic" "welfare regimes" to discipline his data so that he can make meaningful comparisons 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, once defined 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 the rhetoric specific to each of the national cultures he surveys and to attend to the constantly shifting climate of political opportunity within each country. Like leading historical sociologists, he synthesizes what other scholars have to say about progressive reformers, social welfare,labor and 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 in hundreds of articles, books, letters, and diaries. He has a well-trained ear for subtle differences in the 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, causal regularities, or variables, which all too often produce over-determined narratives of policy developments. Timing, context, the layering of long term structural forces and immediate circumstances, the impact of ideas and the efforts of individual men and women, the accumulation 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 the humane, wise but critical portraits he offers of scores of reformers, politicians, professors, journalists, bureaucrats and businessmen. These biographical sketches do much more than add color and intimacy to his narrative. They insistently remind us that the initiatives of individuals as much as the configuration of broader structural forces shaped social politics. All of this is to say 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 policy investigators. At the same time, he breathes life into the case for a new kind of American exceptionalism. America's early immersion in democracy, what Rodgers calls the "democratization of office," paradoxically inhibited the "democratization of service" and hence the 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 in which 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 South Carolina and Louisiana, outright property qualifications to disenfranchise many African American and poor men during this era. [5] He reperiodizes American welfare history and reconceptualizes 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. He does this by constructing a two-part argument. First, he shows that American progressives and their policies were deeply marked by their encounters with Europe; second, he argues that faced with 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, Rodgers concludes that were we to "seal the United States off from the world beyond its borders, the New Deal is simply not comprehensible." (428)
No doubt, these are some of the provocative and intelligent arguments that American historians will debate in the years ahead. But one of the many delights of reading this book was discovering that Rodgers, in pursuing his comparisons, had so much to teach me as a modern British and European 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 Plan highlights 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 by synthesizing the work of other scholars. For example, he shows that the fate of schemes to improve 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 and exuberant, unregulated capitalism. But it leads Rodgers to show just how important local business and commercial interests were in the emergence of municipal socialism and municipal trading in Birmingham, Glasgow, and London. (115-125). Social politics in Britain may have entailed renegotiating the roles of private voluntary charity and public welfare programs; but Rodgers'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. While Rodgers carefully traces the way commercial links in the interdependent North Atlantic economy laid the foundations for creating a shared world of ideas, he only rarely gestures at the existence of 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 developed and tested ideas they later brought home. As Mrinalini Sinha demonstrates, efforts to regulate and reform 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 gendered constructions.[6] Rodgers offers an exceptionally rich portrait of white intellectual life, but he fails to do justice to the international perspectives and borrowings that figured so prominently among writers and ministers of African American churches and organizations, most notably the African Methodist Episcopal Church.[7] Rodgers contends that systems of state welfare focused mostly on the working class, not the poor. "Social insurance -- the working-men's insurance, as it was 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] As Rodgers' 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 also overlapped considerably. Bourgeois friendly visitors working on behalf of the Charity Organization Society, settlements, and care committees worked side by side and sometimes moved into municipal and state welfare bureaucracies, though the opportunity structures for men and women differed considerably. For all that social investigators were keenly aware of the complex 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 lobbying for social welfare programs and policies intended to benefit the working class. British elites were simultaneously aware of distinctions between the working class and the poor and all too ready and willing to lump them together.
Substituting common sense eloquence for academic jargon, Rodgers is as attentive to the nuances 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 to incorporate the findings of historians of gender into his arguments, though he never engages very successfully with the social welfare debates around protective labor legislation and maternal and child welfare that preoccupied many European women reformers. By contrast, he divorces entirely sexual politics from social politics. Thus we get a strong dose of the social gospel and its impact on social politics, but nothing about the sexual politics that galvanized W.T. Stead's career in Anglo-American journalism. [9] Similarly, Rodgers emphasizes that Britain led the way in 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 single room 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 welfare defined 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, the many different approaches it both invites and can accommodate.
Daniel Rodgers has produced that rare book, one that should satisfy specialists with sparkling nuggets unearthed from territory we imagined we had mined entirely ourselves and general readers, for whom he provides deft vignettes made intelligible by cogent summaries of the existing scholarship. He has championed an intellectually ambitious kind of comparative social welfare history: one whose questions are driven by the history of a single nation state, but whose answers can be found only within the much broader framework of the interconnected North Atlantic world. _Atlantic Crossings_ is an elegant and intelligent performance Europeanists should not only applaud but emulate.
Notes
[1]. Ashbee Memoirs, November, 1900. C.R.Ashbee Papers, Kings College, Cambridge.
[2]. Henrietta Barnett to Jane Addams, 25 July, 1913, Jane Addams Papers, Swarthmore College.
[3]. The phrase comes from Charles Tilly's 1984 book of that title.
[4]. Gosta Esping-Andersen, _The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) 26-29.
[5]. See John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr., _From Slavery to Freedom, A History of African Americans_, Vol.2. (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 260.
[6]. See Mrinalini Sinha, _Colonial Masculinity: The 'Manly Englishman' and the 'Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth Century_ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
[7]. See Lawrence Little, "Ideology, Culture, and the Realities of Racisms in the A.M.E. Foreign Agenda Toward Events and Issues in Britain and France, 1885-1905," _Western Journal of Black Studies_, 22 (Summer 1998) 128-140. Obviously this article was published too late for Rodgers to take its findings into account,but my larger point is that African Americans, not just DuBois, were actively participating in the intellectual debates fostered by the internationalization of social politics examined by Rodgers.
[8]. On the many instrumental and highly differentiated uses of poor relief by administrators and the poor themselves, see Lynn Lees, _The Solidarities of Strangers, The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700-1948_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) chapters 7-9.
[9]. See Judith Walkowitz, _City of Dreadful Delight, Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
[10]. See Anthony Wohl, "Sex and the Single Room: Incest Among the Victorian Working Classes," in Anthony Wohl, ed., _The Victorian Family, Structure and Stresses_ (NY: St. Martin's Press, 1978).
[11]. See Potter (Webb's) diary entry for 8 March 1885 in Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, _The Diary of Beatrice Webb_, Volume One, 1873-1892 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 132.
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Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 21:17:00 -0800 From: "Robert W. Cherny" <cherny@sfsu.edu> Subject: Saunier on Rodgers, _Atlantic Crossings_ (6 of 6)
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Urban@h-net.msu.edu (October, 1999)
Daniel T. Rodgers. _Atlantic Crossings. Social Politics in a Progressive Age_. Harvard University Press, 1998. Bibliography, Index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-05131-9.
Reviewed for H-Urban by Pierre-Yves Saunier <pierre-yves.saunier@wanadoo.fr>, CNRS (Lyon).
Comment: "A Tale of Pendular Times: On Board the Spirit of St. Louis with Daniel T. Rodgers,"
When I read about the publication of Daniel T. Rodgers' _Atlantic Crossings_ in the Harvard University 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 traveled across 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 was anxious to discover if Daniel Rodgers had written the book I wanted to write. As a reviewer, I am still sitting on this rusted fence: I want to give an "insider's" angle on the book, but I must review the book he wrote and not the book I would like to write. These anxieties probably shape all that I can write in this electronic symposium. I hope they will not prevent me from bringing an 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 that came to my mind when reading the book were also questions regarding my research: this means that they are not "compliments" nor "reproaches" to _Atlantic Crossings_, but rather an open dialogue 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 is appealing 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 hot summer 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 Lady Liberty. 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 opinion of the "exceptional" nature of the United States of America. But the path that Rodgers takes in order to cope with the exceptionalism thesis makes his book an intriguing read for many people other than historians of the USA. It is a fascinating and instructive reading for all those who care about the international circulation of ideas. In our own researches, we mention too often the existence of a "foreign model"--German, Spanish of Chinese according to circumstances--to explain 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. But ideas, values, skills, words or visions of the world are not manufactured products coming in and out of containers. Daniel Rodgers urges us to wrestle with a whole set of arguments to deal with this international commerce.
He shows us how to consider the indigenous circumstances which shape each model's creation and its legitimation abroad as something worth importation. Here, his insistence on the subtleties of the rhetoric of backwardness is especially valuable); he points to the necessity to pay attention to 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. His careful analysis of what happened to several social policies of "foreign" origin also underlines how the context of the importing country matters in understanding what comes out of the importation 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 he writes, 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 usually understood. The aim is, as in comparative history, to put several nations on the scene. But instead of pointing at differences, as comparative history usually does by going from one country to another, Rodgers choses to point to similarities, taking the "world between" the nations, the connections, as his field. The proposal is exciting, as it sounds like a promise to bust out the straightjacket 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. It may "shift the frames and boundaries of classic American history" (p.7), but it also does something 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 stop the searchlight at the national boarders when they were studying religion or culture. But the impressive growth of nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries has often prevented modern historians from acting similarly. Rodgers' Atlantic might inspire them as Braudel's Mediterrannee 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 about what "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 urban relevance). In fact, I don't think that the quality of Rodger's work lies in the specifics, though each thematic and/or chronological chapter brings his share of detailed knowledge to readers who 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 a great deal from the chapters dealing with their favorite subjects, and might even have a clear idea about 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 by the 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 to the wide array of themes embraced by turn of the century reformers. Indeed, chapter 3 reminds us of something each of us tend to forget when we dive into our specifics: like their German masters and many of their European counterparts, Simon Patten, Richard Ely or Edmund James were 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 democracy to 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 at an 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 Diktat and Revolution. It is up to us to heed this call: scholars of "reform", wherever they are, have to respect this national and thematic ubiquity of reform and reformers. Of course, we must pay attention to the shifts towards specialization and professionalization that developed concomitantly 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 timing, context and the conditions for success. Rather,I want to concentrate on two points that came again and again while I was reading the book as a "participating reader" who had to face some of the same questions and choices that Rodgers faced. The first is about a choice he made to privilege printed material 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 many opportunities. The second is about the geographical focus of Rodgers' study and carries questions about the difficulties in doing the kind of "world history" that he has attempted. Indeed, the world 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.
There certainly is no genuine or unique way to work on connections. According to the place where 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 Daniel Rodgers, it seems to me that he has made two major choices in the vast possibilities that were opened 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. By focussing 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 a thick description of how the US international idea brokers discovered Europe, interpreted it and tried to bring back the best of its social achievements. As the result is so rewarding, the point is not 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 all the 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, constraints and thw work of congresses and exhibitions [7], of the structured connections laid by the socialists, the catholics or the protestants, of the quests organized by federal structures (such as the Bureau of Labor) or by reformers and business societies (such as the National Civic Federation 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 more organized in the 1930s, but even before it seems to me that the connection choices an individual could make, and the things that he could carried home with him, were not free of all organizational constraints/concerns. Among these constraints were 'Societies' that specialized in the international trade of social policies, and managed the definition of what it was possible to import. For example, the _Survey_, the NY periodical managed by Paul Kellog, led a conscious campaign 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 with what, who and where the connections were developed. There were many agencies with this kind of 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 an individual 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 they might 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 reminds us 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 especially assiduous to work on the import-export of ideas in the public administration field, including municipal 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 I suspect 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 was Daniel 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 consciously organized 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 only archival pieces he uses, and with great parsimony. I would have expected more use of journals such as John Ihlder's about the study tour he directed in 1914 for the National Housing Association, or a deeper analysis of the papers left by an Atlantic crosser such as John Nolen, in order to have a clearer understanding of the mechanisms of US tours of Europe, or of the meaning and consequences of having personal contacts with european like-minded reformers. Daniel Rodgers chose to privilege the writings (articles, books, reports) thrown in the public arena by US idea brokers, rather than the elements documenting the process of brokering, its limits and components. That is very coherent with his aims, his priority being to describe what has 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 and importations drawn by the book. Though Denmark, Sweden, Italy, France, Ireland or Belgium also 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 the United 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 politics that our US progressives were in search of. Above all, as the major purpose of the book is to recover 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 ideas circulated and were changed in this circulation process, then we may try to explore the question further.
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 achievements instead 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 the former moves of a scheme or an idea, and also the contexts and processes that shaped this scheme 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 British social insurance legislation passed by Lloyd Georges was itself borrowed from Denmark and Germany. These prior translations might be important even when the importation towards the USA is the main question, as previous importations might explain the fate of imported ideas once they 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 connections can lose all this careful engineering, and mistake a point in a process as The point of origin. The other cost of emphasizing the UK and Germany might be that it leaves aside the "small countries" that were important -and forgotten- places for international activities, or important -and forgotten- sources of social innovations. Sweden, Belgium, Italy of the Netherlands are mentioned in _Atlantic Crossings_, but their examples are alluded to rather than developed. For example, Rodgers suggests that the municipal unemployment schemes of German towns were inspired by the Belgium municipalities (p.225): indeed the system created by Varlez in the town of 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 brokers simply were not paying that much attention to these small countries. Then Rodgers is right not to care, 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 question further. Only in this chapter does Rodgers consider such a vast sample of countries, from Germany to Italy, Denmark, France or Belgium. Once again, it might be that these countries paid the 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 was forced to make the most with first hand material such as reports, diaries, etc. The cosmopolitism of this chapter is especially obvious in the part devoted to the cooperative movement, as a replica of the cosmopolitism of the international cooperative movement itself. This movement does not seem 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 strong domination or imperialism of the British and German in these spheres, overshadowing the contribution of less 'aggressive' cultures. This brings me to two remarks. Both are not strictly addressed 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, we may still wonder whether he is right to record this focus as a given fact. Rodgers stresses how important 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 had compared the US with Belgium and Italy rather than with Germany and the UK. Would it have mattered 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 the origins of the schemes they brought from Old Europe. Rodgers does mention the 1st WW and its tomorrow 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 nonetheless obscure 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 how you will build your bibliography. The second is how you will build your corpus of sources. As we all do, Rodgers has made choices in answering those two questions. I would like to briefly connect those choices to what has just been said. As said earlier, Rodgers has privileged printed sources over archives. Doing this, he has made the strategical discourse of the reformers his material. 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 were the public weapons of their fight to build social policies. Hence the possible bias that has been suggested 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 in not 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. But we 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 the excessive privilege paid to Germany and the UK. I was just wondering whether US modern historical scholarship was not bending under the same forces as early century reform, privileging the study of Germany and the UK rather than the "small" countries of Europe. Of course, I would need to know far more things about the US academic world to go further in interpretating the case of _Atlantic crossings_, but I will nevertheless formulate my question more generally. Don't we, all of us who work on connections, pay excessive attentions to specific connections with one country or another, the criteria of this privilege being connected to the contemporary size and importance of these countries, that generally goes along with the symbolic and scientific rewards it can bring us as an historical subject ? In other words, I gather from personal experimentation that what leads us towards the choice of studying, let's say, the French German connection in municipal government, rather than the French-Belgium connection, is as much the "strategical interest" 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 by such material considerations. If not, then we have to keep that in mind if we aim at following the touchstones 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 probably the most important book written on the 20th century in a decade at last", "one of today's leading historians" and "a book unlike any other I have ever read". As much rooted in american academic 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 _Atlantic crossings_ can affect the research and reflection of all those who pay interest to comparative history, to the world of reformers or to social policies ... I mean, if they read it.
Notes
[1]. Henry James called Edith Wharton, another American writer who settled up in Paris in 1907, the "pendular woman".
[2]. Daniel Rodgers makes a wide use of this term, though I had difficulties in figuring out the extent of the North Atlantic: from Berlin to Bogota, from Berlin to San Francisco, eastern wards towards Moscow or down under till New Zealand and Australia, his geography is quite vague. Clearly, since Braudel and Wallenstein, we know more or less what he means, but he uses the term "North Atlantic" enough to deserve a stronger definition or explanation.
[3]. To be added to the titles quoted by Rodgers himself, one can mention here Christian Topalov , _Naissance du chomeur 1880-1910", Paris: Albin Michel 1994 or Patrizia Dogliani, _Un laboratorio del socialismo municipale in Europe. La Francia 1870-1920_, Milano: Franco Angeli, 1992
[4]. It must be underlined how each chapter is usually made of two parts. The first that seizes the theme as developed in Germany or the UK or the other countries considered, thanks to the use of a huge international bibliography; the second that explores the american connections with the other countries. Thanks to this method, Rodgers has produced a book we too rarely know the kind in France, both a textbook and a monograph.
[5]. Though one can share Rodgers' insistence on NYC as a core-city for the reform movement, recent works such as Amy Bridges _Morning Glories: Municipal Reform in the Southwest_(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) tend to demonstrate that the spirit of reform was not confined to New England. Were there also connections between Southwest reformers, or others, and Europe? Certainly, places like Wisconsin or California are also present in Rodgers pages, but the lead singer remains the East Coast reform establishment.
[6]. Many other things participate to the "making" of the privilege, such as the existence of specific grants, etc. For example, it has proved easier for me to work on the US-Europe connections in the field of "urban issues" than inside Europe, and this can lead me to neglect the connections amongst european, especially the ones involving countries such as the Netherlands, Switzerland or Belgium.
[7]. On this, see the forthcoming book by Anne Rasmussen, _L'internationale Scientifique 1890-1914_, to be published at the Editions de la Decouverte.
[8]. For recent views about writing the history of the foundations, see the collection of essays edited by Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, _Philanthropic Foundations. New Scholarship, New Possibilities_ (Indiana University Press, 1999).
[9]. The activity of the National Association of Housing Officials, with Coleman Woodburry as its executive secretary, takes place in the setting of this 1313 center. When Rodgers uses the work of NAHO in the 1930's (p.465-466), he may lose one part of the picture by not seeing as an element in the largest Rockefeller philanthropic program.
[10]. Eric Lecerf, "Les conferences internationales pour la lutte contre le chomage au debut du sicle", _Mil Neuf cent_, 7 (1989); and Christian Topalov, "Les reformateurs du chomage et le reseau du Musee Social 1908-1910", in Colette Chambelland (ed); _Le Musee Social en son temps_, Paris: Presses de l'Ecole Normale Suprieure, 1998.
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