Stacy Dorgan notes for 2/18/04 

 

Rodgers, Daniel T., Transatlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age 

 

Study Questions:

• Can the years between 1890 and World War II be lumped together as one distinct "era," during which Rodgers proposes that progressive Americans were more open to European social theory and practice? He describes a series of contradictory and overlapping trends through which American policy evolves, but still assigns an exact "beginning" and "end" to all of them. Could these dates be more malleable? 1) Some of the late-19^th century trends Rodgers uses as evidence could have begun earlier in the century. Dickens, for instance, was very popular in the states by the mid-1840s, and Americans had been going on their "grand tour" of Europe much earlier than Rodgers suggests. 2) The direction of influence may have changed during the 1940s (American influence going toward Europe); however, as Rodgers himself points out, the 1940s weren't free of social movements: the Civil Rights movement was born, ethnic and African American literature became mainstream, labor unions found a place at negotiating tables and America became involved in the United Nations. Can't we find international roots for these seemingly "homegrown" efforts?
• Why was the mindset of America different during the years Rodgers examines? Rodgers gives a lot of attention to social scientists who were educated in Germany, seeing their subsequent open-minded repurposing of German social and economic theory as opening the progressive era he analyses. However, the American trend of studying in Germany had begun 30 years before that time. Decisions to do post-graduate work in Germany were not rooted in economic considerations alone, as Rodgers describes, or even in an internationalist mindset and belief that there was something to be learned from the "old" world. Scholars went to Germany because there weren't well-established research universities or many post-graduate programs in American until late in the century. The American research universities that grew late in the century were steeped in Humboldtian traditions with faculty trained in Germany. Thus learning from German scholars had more to do with opportunity than with choice and intellectual influence would have begun earlier than 1880 or 1890.
• Couldn't we say that culture is always crossing back and forth across national borders and that social theory and the growth of the largely urban progressivist movement happened to grow during the period of increasing internationalization, necessity and opportunity, rather that just openness in social thought? Considering the unprecedented mass movement of people across the globe during the period that Rodgers discusses, it is not surprising that there were open and effective channels of communication across national borders. Given the increasingly urban nature of America (the census of 1920 was the first in which the majority of Americans lived in cities, a peak percentage of which were foreign born in the years prior to 1924), it is not surprising that people were concerned with urban social reform.

Prologue

• Ideas, as well as goods, moved across the borders of the countries within the North Atlantic economy.
• Colonial America had always been a part of this broader political, economic and ideological world; however, in the years between 1890 and 1945, America was more receptive to these ideologies, especially in social theory and policy.

Chapter 1: Paris: 1900

• Progressives of the era did not necessarily anticipate the Welfare State (i.e., that government would act directly and control social issues). The modern manifestation of social ideas that offers citizens "insurance" is only a fraction of progressive social political agendas.
• There were international institutions of thought that bound people, though social policy experts of the world were not unified in their thought. Social ideas were ultimately exchanged among the nations of the world; America imported ideas of other nations but adapted them to its own purpose.
• Progressives didn't necessarily mean to do away with or radically change the system, but they did wish to exclude aspects of society from the established market system (e.g., children).

Chapter 2: The Atlantic World

• Expansion of industrial capitalism and, despite strong nationalisms, a new understanding of common histories and vulnerabilities made the North Atlantic progressive connection possible.
• Late-19^th century American sensibilities had seen America and Europe as polar opposites; however, in the last decade, new juxtapositions were formed (Old World tyranny-->cultured).
• Europe began to evolve from 18^th century revolutionary institutions to turn-of-19^th century progressive movements. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic needed to use social issues. Social policy in America split along party lines.
• International links, mutual examination of policies and competition between states grew. Some of the links that influenced Americans were: education in German universities, evangelists, international journals and international conferences.
• The disconnectedness of America from European processes was the result of geographic distance. Early-20^th century progressives sought to observe these processes; they saw the European experience as useful.

Chapter 3: Twilight of Laissez-Faire

• Americans came into contact with Laissez-Faire, which in social issues moved responsibility from politics to markets. Rodgers' discussion shows how economic doctrines moved across national borders and were reinterpreted.
• Laissez-Faire had been highly contested throughout mid-century Europe, as the trend toward studying economics grew. The American educational experience in Germany loosened Americans from ethical rigidities.
• The American Economic Association was modeled off of Verein für Sozialpolitik and combined ideological aspects of German economic theorists (e.g., the possibilities of the state); but it sparked debate between the younger American economists and the Laisse-Faire economists. The younger, German-influenced scholars were viewed as subversive.

Chapter 4: The Self-Owned City

• Rodgers discusses the urban movement: cities were places of great social injustice but also of collectivity.
• Issues such as health, sanitation and transportation became major topics of negotiation, as citizens and politicians attempted to determine a city's responsibilities.
• There was mistrust for city ownership and monopolies on services resisted change, but the socialist municipal movement grew and was influenced by European movements and policies. These progressives tried to find a place for municipal control within democracy.
• Timing and scale made it difficult for American cities to move toward municipal control and implementation of European ideas. In transportation, for example, it was difficult for cities to buy out companies that controlled the networks (because of the amount of track, volume of passengers who used it, constitutional limitations on the debt cities could accrue, nature of Democracy and corruption, etc.).
• In the end, municipalization became a successful transatlantic progressive project.

Chapter 5: Civic Ambitions

• Rodgers discusses how law, politics and property were formative of cityscapes; he demonstrates how progressives were concerned with city space, shelter and design issues.
• He sees in New York's grid how the city could facilitate the use of space without controlling it. Meanwhile, he discusses how European influence, such as Haussmann's Parisian plan, influenced sensitivity for public space and civic unity.
• Zoning developed as a practice of European origin (British and German), as a solution to overcrowding in Lower Manhattan, where workers lived and worked. However, it was also reinterpreted later on for property's purpose, which contained working neighborhoods where they were.
• Americans followed European progressives again in housing, but with little success in the years prior to World War I. Rodgers argues against traditional notions of why certain concepts were accepted while others weren't, saying that decisions were based on a combination of factors relating to "timing, inertia, precedent, and preemption." Supporting organizations were not in place in America, the lower classes were fractured by ethnic differences, property was seen as private and not subject to public regulation, the Constitution was restrictive, etc.

Chapter 6: The Wage Earners' Risks

• Progressives had been interested in keeping the working poor from slipping into poverty, but the extreme poor were not actually considered in their policies. Poor relief had existed much longer (outside of progressive efforts) and those in poverty were conceptualized by progressives as not belonging to society.
• Mutual and commercial insurance had existed to safeguard against the loss of a family's wages through death or accident, but its quality was poor and not all-inclusive. Social insurance, which began in Germany, made the workers' well being a matter of industrial interest. It included: mandatory state-administered social insurance, minimum wage limits, suitable workplace conditions and pensions.
• These discussions over wages, risk and welfare in America were inspired by the early German, and later, British efforts. Real change did not come about until a multitude of interests were at stake. When it did, the European connection was essential, though American policy answered to a different set of interests (in regard to business, commercial insurance companies, etc.).

Chapter 7: War Collectivism

• Progressives feared the loss of their initiatives in the face of World War I and sought to discover the war's origin. Many tried to find an economic basis for the war. In the end, they believed that their cause could have prevented the war and that the war had a social lining.
• This ideology forced progressives to link the state, rather that social organizations, with the common good and to contribute toward war collectivism.
• Reconstruction efforts following the war, however, disappointed progressive expectations that sought to carry over aspects of the war economy (especially British-inspired reconstruction in labor politics).
• After the strikes of 1919, many progressives sought to emulate the British Labor Party.

Chapter 8: Rural Reconstruction

• Prior to the New Deal, agrarian communities were not the target of progressive reforms, though they were being left behind in the wake of the modernization of the agricultural market.
• Cooperatives were the solution upheld by international reform networks and were, because of the malleability when crossing national borders, the system that flourished in the 1920s (it was not anti-capitalist in the US). Rural Denmark was often the model.
• Attempts at rural reconstruction included not only cooperatives but also restructured farm colonies. Success balanced on overcoming individualism and on education. However the Danish model "folk" school didn't translate across American borders (where there was almost no unified "folk" culture to speak of and the model was in conflict with American individualism). Thus rural American adult education focused in most of the US on information and technical skills.

Chapter 9: The Machine Age

• Post-war American reconstruction efforts in France incorporated the work of American social workers, consumer goods and Fordism.
• Europeans began to study the American commercial productivity and standardization. The European progressives saw mass production as recognizing the masses as part of the economy (as consumers).
• European public and social-modernist housing was inspired by American, Fordist standardization, though such housing projects didn't exist in the US.
• Progressivists sought to implement social-modernist housing projects in America, but the labor movement was not strong enough.
• The market quickly absorbed modernism and it became disassociated with functionalism in America.

Chapter 10: New Deal

• The New Deal reversed the movement of ideas from Europe to America so that ideas began to flow more from America to Europe.
• Rodgers argues that crisis made room for such an innovative era (seemingly incoherent in the history of American progressivism) that pulled from a resource of ready made solutions. Many of these had been created by the earlier progressives and not been utilized before, so they were formulated and ready to go. This is how Rodgers proposes that European policy influenced the New Deal (Social Security being the most enduring). Many of these same programs that had been developed earlier in Europe were swept over in Europe during the Depression years.
• Even when creating new policy, social knowledge in 1930s America was constructed off of ideologies that had originated in Europe. The crisis was responsible for translating ideas across borders.
• Rural community planning initiatives were especially quick to take hold and incorporated many of the initiatives earlier progressives had modeled off of European policy.
• Rodgers implies that the New Deal made exceptional progress because the US needed to catch up in social policy with Europe. The US attempted to mask these European connections

Chapter 11: London, 1942

• Rodgers argues that World War II ended the American involvement in the north Atlantic social-political era, even though the seeming similarity of post-war welfare states and the internationalization of American politics would seem to imply otherwise. He proposes that Americans were no longer listening to the transatlantic dialogue but were, instead, looking toward the future.
• The difference in wartime experience between the Americans and Europeans ended the possibility that common social experiences would link the nations of the north Atlantic, as seen in the different receptions of Keynes and the Beveridge Report.
• Instead, the Marshall Plan brought American culture, social practice and consumer products glaringly to the attention of Europeans.
• American progressivism didn't end, but it no longer looked toward Europe for usable experience.

CARLA

Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age – Daniel Rodgers 

Notes:  

Atlantic functions not as a barrier but as a connective life-line for the movement of people goods Ideas and aspirations. 

Defines Progressivism as – the rise of interventionist state due to the shock of particularly rapid industrialization, the thin and distended nature of the mid-nineteenth century American state and society, the status anxieties of a declining middle class, the scientistic ambitions of a new elite of experts and professionals, the social maternalism of middle-class women, the demands from below of farmers and wage workers, and the demands of industrial capitalists at the top for a more rationalized social order than capitalist competition by itself could create. 

This reconstruction of American social politics was part of the movement of politics and ideas throughout the North Atlantic world that trade and capitalism had tied together.

Rodgers periodizes this phenomenon from the 1870s through World War II. During this time Rodgers argues the American politics was peculiarly open to foreign models and imported ideas. The North Atlantic economy formed a world mart of useful and interesting experiments. 

The making of this Atlantic connection hinged on a new set of institutional connections with the industrializing nations of Europe. It required new sorts of brokers to span the connection as well as an intellectual shift – a sense of complicity with historical forces larger than the US. 

Rodgers does acknowledge that some ideas did not successfully traverse the Atlantic and died mid-passage while other successfully made it, and others transformed into a particularly American form. 

Older historiography to which Rodgers is responding

1. For the earliest historians social politics key arena was where individual conscience came up against the cruelties, miseries, injustices, and inefficiencies of modern life. – narrative that reflected the reformers own stories
2. The social scientists who pioneered the study of comparative social politics in the decade after WWII had little use for these local, biographical contexts. Steeped in theories of global process, their framework was international. 1950s and 60s
3. As post-war welfare states came under heavy attack in Europe and North America in the difficult economic times of the 1970s politics was emphasized as the central analytical focus of social politics. This was in part because class was thrust as the center of social-political analysis. This produced several trends in the historiography from this decade.
   1. The central story in social politics was an infusion of power from the bottom up.
   2. Response to this type of theory is backlash that more often it is imposed as a set of rescue operations from above.
   3. third cluster entered the debate sympathetic to the left’s stress on structures but unconvinced of the captivity of the state to the economic interests arrayed around it. This “institution political process” approach to social politics is now characterized by close attention to the structures of politics along several dimensions: the administrative capacities of the state, the composition of parties and electorates, and the structurally embedded legacies of past policy decisions.
   4. From those that look at social policy from the recipients end another theme emerged: that those agents of social policy are not merely administer justice, but impose discipline as well. The very act of separating people into class groups serves to divide and survey the recipients of the state’s assistance.

 
Rodgers identifies a group of people that while not law makers or politicians they were middle class intellectuals for the most part. They did not administer social policy; nowhere did they control legislative outcomes. Their proposals were never advanced except to be battered and recast by those who possessed not policy notions but interests. Yet without the production if proposals, without their intellectual work in framing the terms of debate, social politics could not have transpired. Rodgers focuses on these people feeling that state-centered analyses of social politics in this period have not adequately fathomed how indistinct the line between state and society remained throughout most of Europe and the US, how thin the apparatus of state management was, and how reliant it was on temporary and borrowed expertise. Even for the principal architects of social politics government services typically figured as an episode rather than a career. 
 

According to Rodgers the market was the thread that wove social politics endeavors together. Whether it was a child labor crusade, the economist’s campaign to municipalize monopolies, the city planner’s attempt to mitigate the claims of price over the uses of urban land, the housing reformers’ conviction that the working poor would never be adequately sheltered through the unchecked play of the urban land and building markets, the agricultural reformer’s struggle to socialize the atomized conditions of rural exchange, or the social insurance expert’s effort to mitigate the risks of commodified labor.  

He breaks it down into 2 opposing camps: the promotionalists (those who promoted business’ interests) versus the social politicians. And says that the battle between the 2 factions was played out throughout the North Atlantic world. 

Rodgers identified three conditions that caused Americans to tailor the progressive programs they adopted to make them their own because 1) American progressives had to get past their veil of cultural distance and potential misperceptions and 2) they had to trim their borrowings to fit their sense of American conditions and distinctiveness and 3) transform each borrowing because of distinctive pressures of American political circumstances.

Two phenomena of 19^th century North Atlantic made the progressive connection possible:

1. The rapidly convergent economic industrial development of the key nations of the North Atlantic basin created similar economic, labor and social conditions. Industrialization, urbanization, rural depopulation and class rigidification (creation of middle and working classes as well as distinct “labor” identity) and differences all were outcomes of the industrial revolution on both sides of the Atlantic.
2. A new understanding of common histories and vulnerabilities. The new Atlantic wide economy encouraged new Atlantic-wide politics. In France England and the US political parties and politicians were coming up with plans to curb the influence (and in some cases dominance) of these industrial powers.

 Progressive politics in the North Atlantic economy had its own international dynamics and institutions. In Europe they were constituted by:

1. legislation passed form one nation to another sometimes despite acute distrust and rivalry
2. the international conference of like-minded reformists whether expert or amateur
3. public or private inspection visits to industries on neighboring countries
4. influential publicists with a keen interest in other nation’s social policies

 Americans had not automatic access to the networks and discussions taking shape in Europe. The distance that held them at arm’s length was both physical and cultural. These distances began to be breached however through various mechanisms:

1. An early channel through study abroad – a generation of American students studies economics and social science abroad, mainly in Germany.
2. Bureau of Labor who made key investigations into the question of comparative standards of living in European countries.
3. The social gospel movement – Fabian Society, German evangelical Social Congress, and other agents of Social Protestantism.
1. settlement house movement
2. Democratic Socialism – broad-based working-class socialist movement
4. International Conferences
5. Journals of Liberal and progressive opinion
6. Later on after the turn of the century specially commissioned investigations by groups such as the National Civic Federation, the American Federation of Labor, and the National Association of Manufacturers.

 Rodgers points out an asymmetry in the transfer of ideas: the flow was heavily weighted toward transmission of ideas from Europe to America. Some of the reasons were

1. Contracted interest in American progressivism
2. Europeans believed Americans backward

 Because of the physical difference American progressives

1. rarely saw anything in the working phase – they always saw finished institutions
2. because they were continually surprised by what their sense of behindhandedness was reinforced.

Socialism

Definition of socialism with regard to what the students of economics in Germany learned: not class centered but at heart ethical. “Socialism was the antonym of competitive individualism: an extension of the social idea that had struck them abroad. Socialism meant revolt against the “each one for himself” doctrine in economics…It meant a wider scope for the “forces which tend to weld society together and to render the idea of self subservient to that of the common weal.” (p. 100) 
 

Urbanization

The process of urbanization caused cities to be the sites of social-political mobilization, experiment and controversy. Water, streets, trolley cars, public baths, gasworks, and housing were areas of contestation. Questions of who should control these public works the trans-Atlantic revolt against laissez-faire and predatory commercial interest were enacted. 

In the United States government moderation of public works less extensive than that of European countries because 1) timing and extensive nature of private interest 2) lack of blanket prohibition that kept American cities from the development of municipally owned enterprises and 3) corruption in the government 
 

Civic Planning

Emphasis on the creation of aesthetically pleasing city lay-out – street design, public buildings, cityscapes all important on both sides of the Atlantic.

Haussmann in Paris

German style acquisition of public land on the city’s rim

Creation of European inspired architecture in Chicago World Fair in 1893, layout of Central Park in NYC 

Also concern of creating recreation space in urban settings as well as affordable subsidized housing.

Monumental street planning and zoning were adopted by Americans. The idea of subsidized housing however did not make it across the Atlantic for a myriad of reasons: 1) private property laws 2) no lobby for limited-profit housing – funds for philanthropic housing small. 
 

Labor Laws

Push for working regulations – health and death insurance, public relief, pensions, wages and workplace conditions. 
 

Factory legislation, minimum wage, and pensions for the blameless poor, contained by gender boundaries though they were, were all absorbed into American policy. The contested area was social insurance – where worker’s well-being became industry’s responsibility. Voluntary mutual insurance was o.k. 
 

World War I

American progressives experienced the outbreak to World War I with dismay. The collapse of the progressive social agenda seemed complete in Europe. American progressives were offered an example of the war-time collectivized state by Woodrow Wilson. Momentarily the anti-state attitude of progressives was set aside.

1. labor achieved leverage because of the government’s need for good relations between labor and industry for war-time production
2. government subsidized housing for war-industry workers

These war-time changes happened on both sides of the Atlantic and portions of them retained after the war had ended. Labor became radicalized as employers attempted to roll back the advances they had made during the war and strikes broke out in European nations and the US. In the United States labor was especially radicalized. The ensuing Red Scare and anti-communist targeting of Progressive approach made the conflict more virulent than in Britain. In America there was also a political union of intellectuals and labor occurred  

Americans take the lead in Progressivism after World War I, and it is at this time that the change in the flow of ideas takes place. This change happens alongside the export of American goods to Europe, a phenomenon facilitated by mass production of the assembly line. Another reason was the flood of American social workers to Europe in order to help rebuild the war-torn nations – “Fordism” Measured by access to consumer goods, the advantages of American over European wager earners was now a fact. The US had invented a mass-production economy without antagonistic class interests, without inherent political warfare, without hard political trade-offs. Fordism invaded Europe as a progressive idea: future oriented, flexible and melioristic. 

The New Deal solidified the role of America as the beacon of Progressive light in the world arena. The New Deal went farther than ever before in intervention of state policy in economic matters. The state sponsored relief programs were unmatched in European nations during the Depression. 

After WWII with Americans bestride the world and the fortunes of the European social democracies diminished, with the hazards of the Cold War politics, and a new exceptionalist literature growing in historical and political science circles, with the markets working miracles of abundance that seemed uniquely American, the transatlantic progressive connection’s ability to shape the agenda of politics no longer had as much force. 

 

Questions:

• Do you accept Rodgers' argument? 
  
  How does this book fit in with the previous historiography on progressivism? Why is it important? How does Rodgers define Progressivism? Is it mainly social or economic? 
  
  How do domestic concerns change progressive policy as it traverses the Atlantic? Does Rodgers provide a satisfactory explanation? 
  
  In this Atlantic approach, Latin America is obviously left out. Do you think this is a detriment? Do you think Latin America would fit into Rodger’s thesis? 
  
  How does ethnicity and race fit into Rodger’s analysis? Is it present at all? If it isn’t, how would its inclusion affect the telling of this particular story? 
  
  This book basically discusses the mutual flow of progressive ideas between Western Europe and the United States, but this flow is not mutual – in the beginning it is from Europe to the US and after WWI it is mostly from the US to Europe. Does this affect Rodger’s thesis at all? 
  
  This is mainly an intellectual history, what are the natural biases of intellectual histories such as this one?  
  
  Does the fact that it is mainly a self-selecting intellectual class that Rodger’s is examining a liability of his approach?  
  
  How does Rodgers Atlantic history approach affect the way historical events are discussed? How could it be used in other disciplines of history? What are the benefits and detriments in this type of evaluation