Book Review

Canada and the United States

Daniel T. Rodgers has reconstructed American social politics from the Gilded Age through the New Deal along an axis that stretches across the North Atlantic. "Tap into the debates that swirled through the United States and industrialized Europe over the problems and miseries of 'great city' life, the insecurities of wage work, the social backwardness of the countryside, or the instabilities of the market itself," he writes, "and one finds oneself pulled into an intense, transnational traffic in reform ideas, policies, and legislative devices" (p. 3). Historians, he claims, neglect this distinctive transatlantic moment in America's past.	1
Rodgers tracks Americans as they went to Europe to observe, interview, and gather data that found their way into doctoral dissertations, magazine and newspaper articles, books, public documents, reform, and legislation. With a focus more on connections than national differences, American social politics, he argues, originated not in "nation-state containers" but "in the world between them." The traffic flowed more often from East to West, and until the New Deal the pace of change in social policy lagged behind Europe's. During the New Deal, Europeans finally began to arrive in America to observe a transformation of social policy more thorough than any undertaken on their side of the Atlantic—but, then, Americans had a long way to go just to catch up.	2
Rodgers stresses the importance of ideas and individuals. Ideas set the agendas for politics; individuals carried ideas back and forth across the Atlantic and urged their implementation. Rodgers weaves his tapestry of interconnections through multiple biographical narratives of idea and policy brokers: the human links that composed the transatlantic social politics cable. Moving in and out of government, between positions in the world of social reform, publishing, and academic life, they were "self-taught experts working on the intellectual margins of imperfectly professionalized fields" (p. 26).	3
One thread stitched together their efforts across a multitude of different projects: "not everything belonged in the market" (p. 29). As they tried to navigate a passage between individualism and statism, reformers criticized laissez-faire economic theory and resisted the threatened commodification of social policy. Although Rodgers does not draw it, the contrast with today's transatlantic neo-liberal approach to the core issues of the welfare state is unmistakable. Today, entranced by declining American welfare rolls, European policy brokers participate in a transatlantic marketization of social policy and weakening of entitlements. In the new transatlantic moment, Europeans look to Wisconsin the way Americans once turned to Berlin.	4
In a roughly chronological sequence, Rodgers reports on a multitude of issues that historians for the most part discuss separately: for instance, subsidized housing, municipal transportation, city planning, rural reconstruction, wage and workplace regulation, workers' insurance, modernist architecture, the single tax, and the New Deal. His account of each draws on massive reading in transnational sources. The extraordinary footnotes that document the arguments in this long, and never dull, book alone are worth its price. Indeed, Rodgers has written a book that can be studied profitably for its craft as well as its substance. He has shown historians how to join narrative and analysis in a powerful and persuasive argument. Beautifully written, masterfully organized, always with an eye for the telling detail, this work rides lightly on great learning.	. . .