Book Review

In retrospect, one recognizes the mental cables of Daniel T. Rodgers's magisterial new book, Atlantic Crossings, being laid long ago. "This study is narrow . . . in drawing its bounds at the Atlantic Ocean," Rodgers apologized in The Work Ethic in Industrial America (1978) —a book not known for its parochialism. Progressivism's "language of social bonds was an international language, not fully explainable by experiences endemic to the United States," Rodgers observed in "In Search of Progressivism" (1982). Spread the word: Rodgers has at long last found "that great, overarching thing called 'progressivism,'" as he put it somewhat derisively. But the progressivism he heralds in Atlantic Crossings little resembles his predecessors' quarry. It is more significant, more encompassing, and thoroughly transnational.	1
Convention depicts progressivism as American liberalism's attempt to treat self-inflicted social and economic wounds via limited government intervention. It "seems to have originated in the late nineteenth-century crises of a single social group, the Victorian middle class," writes Michael McGerr in A Companion to American Thought, edited by Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (1995). "By the 1880s and 1890s, professionals, white-collar workers, and petty proprietors found themselves trapped in a hostile world made by their own values." Maybe so, Rodgers responds, but that Victorian middle class was more than merely anxious; it was irrepressibly peripatetic. Its hostile world incorporated much of Western Europe, as well as the United States, and its constituents' Atlantic crossings could be as politically purposeful as they were aesthetically pleasing. Indeed, acute American observers encountered a Europe confronting conflict like that at home but enacting social political initiatives far outpacing those of the United States. Only stubbornness could prevent Americans from recognizing that the Old World had much to teach the New. Alas, stubbornness has ever been the nation's stock in trade.	2
Enter Rodgers's progressives: cosmopolitan cousins of the structural reformers, social gospelers, and corporate liberals of traditional monographs, here for the first time joined in common endeavor. Spurred by evidence of the nation's social and political "lag," these mavericks beat well-worn paths among common circles seeking foreign solutions to vexing modern problems. They scoured European expositions, settlement houses, universities, and conferences; they consulted labor leaders, farmers, finance ministers, heads of state. The reward of their scavenging was no coherent, ready-to-use social political platform, Rodgers cautions. Their sources were necessarily ad hoc. American conditions were inevitably distinctive. Nor did this cohort itself ever wield the political power necessary to effect a platform whole hog. Nevertheless, Rodgers maintains, "without their production of proposals, without their intellectual work in framing the terms of debate, [American] social politics could not have transpired."	3
And transpire American progressivism surely did, though not, as convention has it, primarily during the early years of the Wilson administration. Rather, Rodgers argues with wondrous audacity, progressivism peaked in the New Deal programs mistakenly believed to have sprung from depression America, but which actually derived from a transatlantic marketplace of progressive ideas by then fully two generations old. New Deal maybe, but long in coming. Rodgers's argument here is elaborate but reduces to this. Crises "alter the conditions of the politically possible," spawning innovation but rarely novelty. They trigger "the social policy experts moment"—a "frantic rummaging" through a ready stock of ideas fully elaborated but hitherto unused. Scholars will search in vain for horizontal arguments capable of making sense of New Deal initiatives, Rodgers maintains. "The New Deal was a great, explosive release of the pent-up agenda of the progressive past; its clearest logic was the vertical logic of history." The New Deal figures prominently in Rodgers's revision for another reason. During the 1930s, American "lag" became leadership. As Europe descended into fascism and obfuscation, the social political initiative passed to the United States, reversing the current of the transatlantic progressive connection. The new dynamic would not last, however, as American success in World War II bred a hubris incompatible with genuine exchange. Progressivism's days were numbered.	. . .