Daniel T. Rodgers. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. 672 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-05131-7.
Reviewed by Seth Koven (Department of History, Villanova University)
Published on H-Urban (October, 1999)
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 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 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.
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.
Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact H-Net@h-net.msu.edu.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-urban.
Citation:
Seth Koven. Review of Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age.
H-Urban, H-Net Reviews.
October, 1999.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3500
Copyright © 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.