Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age by Daniel T. Rodgers

From the Publisher

"The most belated of nations," Theodore Roosevelt called his country during the workmen's compensation fight in 1907. Earlier reformers, progressives of his day, and later New Dealers lamented the nation's resistance to models abroad for correctives to the backwardness of American social politics. Atlantic Crossings is the first major account of the vibrant international network that they constructed--so often obscured by notions of American exceptionalism--and of its profound impact on the United States from the 1870s through 1945.

On a narrative canvas that sweeps across Europe and the United States, Daniel Rodgers retells the story of the classic era of efforts to repair the damages of unbridled capitalism. He reveals the forgotten international roots of such innovations as city planning, rural cooperatives, modernist architecture for public housing, and social insurance, among other reforms. From small beginnings to reconstructions of the new great cities and rural life, and to the wide-ranging mechanics of social security for working people, Rodgers finds the interconnections, adaptations, exchanges, and even rivalries in the Atlantic region's social planning. He uncovers the immense diffusion of talent, ideas, and action that were breathtaking in their range and impact.

The scope of Atlantic Crossings is vast and peopled with the reformers, university men and women, new experts, bureaucrats, politicians, and gifted amateurs. This long durée of contemporary social policy encompassed fierce debate, new conceptions of the role of the state, an acceptance of the importance of expertise in making government policy, and a recognition of a shared destiny in a newlycreated world.

Library Journal

It's an ambitious book that attempts to reinterpret even one historical era, let alone two--and to do so across borders at that. "Nations lie enmeshed in each other's history," writes Princeton's Rodgers, prefacing his argument that our progressive era and the New Deal were chapters in an age of social politics when the United States was open to overseas influence as never before or since. Between 1870 and World War II, a new intensity in market relations, urbanization, and working-class grievance struck both Europe and America, leading progressives to import ideas on zoning and city planning, housing and social insurance, agriculture and rural community. The resulting "logjam" of proposals was broken only in the New Deal era, the last historical moment prior to a renewed sense of American exceptionalism. If Rodgers, a graceful writer and eclectic researcher, sometimes strains his thesis, the sheer mass of his examples will compel other scholars to assess their own interpretations within his framework. For all academic and larger public libraries.--Robert F. Nardini, North Chichester, NH

Jackson Lears

[A] truly remarkable synthesis of intellectual history and political history. Historians will depend on it for decades to come, and policy intellectuals will ignore it at their peril. -- The New Republic

What People Are Saying

Alan Brinkley
A compelling narrative and a historical argument of great and lasting importance. It will be an enduring masterpiece.

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Table of Contents