Crossings and Creations

Daniel T. Rodgers. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). Pp. 672. $36.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper)

Daniel T. Rodgers, who teaches history at Princeton, delivers much more than his titles promise. Just as Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (Basic Books, 1987) is about much more than political rhetoric, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, is about much more than the exchange of social policies between the United States and Northern Europe.

The title describes a central theme, which is that America is not exceptional, but rather was one member of an encompassing North Atlantic economy as twentieth-century social policies were taking shape. The United States was sometimes a sender, as with Mothers Aid and, on a grander scale, the industrial production described in Chapter 9, "The Machine Age," which contains a whole section on the American invasion of Europe. Still, in regard to social policy, the United States was a debtor rather than a creditor nation.

The book is necessarily very much about creations as well as crossings. In addition to pictures of the processes of exchange, there are also pages upon pages of very rich, highly informed, and informative portraits of the development of policies within nations--mainly Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, with occasional forays into Denmark and, in a considerable stretch of the North Atlantic, Australia. Canadians may feel some disappointment. In a book that seems to cover everything everywhere, not much is said of their country.

Some of the most suggestive comparisons for an Americanist are not those among nations, but among policy areas and political activities within them. The United States was backward in regard to the development of streets, but was advanced in schools and parks. Public city playgrounds were an American social invention. In speaking of crossings, Rodgers speaks also of filters: some innovations got through while others did not.

After scanning the table of contents and the first and last chapters, I was poised to criticize the lack of a summary chapter, but eventually decided that that would be unfair for three reasons. First, the contents are so rich and varied, so packed with fact, so nuanced and qualified, that they defy summary. Second, there are often, though not always, concluding sections of individual chapters that pull out themes. One that particularly caught my attention as arresting and original was the conclusion of the chapter "Wage Earners' Risks," in which Rodgers reflects on the importance of ideology versus interests, coming down on the side of interests. He argues that in Germany, Britain, and the United States, "the niches social insurance's proponents sought to occupy were nowhere empty." They were crowded with interests, from private clubs on up to commercial insurance companies in the United States. It is the kind of explanation one might expect to find for the failure of health-care reform in the administration of Bill Clinton at the end of the century, but more surprising for social insurance in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States.

A third reason why no concluding chapter is possible or necessary is that the penultimate chapter, on the New Deal, virtually functions as one. At seventy-six pages, it is the longest chapter in the book, and much the most political in content. It argues that all that had gone before was preparation for the outburst of activity in the Roosevelt administration.

As I approached the chapter on the New Deal, I wondered what Professor Rodgers might say that would be fresh. The New Deal is not new terrain to students of American social policy. Yet he caught my attention with the focus he put on the question: Why social insurance? He made this newly puzzling by pointing out that it was by no means at high tide or even doing very well in Europe at the time. The answer he gives is that it is what Europeans had...