Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age.

Thirty years ago, historian Peter Filene proposed that his colleagues quietly bury the term "progressivism." All scholars agreed that the first two decades of the twentieth century had witnessed a burst of governmental and civic reform, but disputes over just who was a progressive (W.E.B. DuBois? Jane Addams? Theodore Roosevelt? Louis Brandeis? John Dewey?) and what beliefs, if any, they shared had become embarrassingly fussy. Dissertations insistently claiming this or that sect of Wisconsin politicians or Washington policymakers as the true progressives had become the American equivalent of medieval treatises on the corporeality of angels.

That Daniel Rodgers sidesteps this entire discussion is one among many advantages of his impressive new history of social politics during the period. Rodgers's title, Atlantic Crossings, suggests his purpose, which is to argue that reform efforts in the United States were part of a broader and connected attempt in France, Germany, Denmark, and Britain to respond to the intertwined dilemmas of explosive urban growth, growing poverty, and mass migration.

This assertion might seem unremarkable, but Rodgers demonstrates more clearly than any previous historian how literally hundreds of American activists pounced upon the pilot projects and settlement houses of the suddenly innovative Old World and attempted to transplant them to native grounds. The depth of research, in three languages, conclusively establishes this shared response to what contemporaries called the "social question." Part of Rodgers's purpose is to chide American historians whose narratives rarely venture outside the analytical cage of the nation-state. "For a moment," he argues "London's East End and New York City's Lower East Side; the 'black country' of Pittsburgh, Essen, and Birmingham; and university debates and chancery discussions in Paris, Washington, London, and Berlin formed a world of common referents." Jane Addams modeled Chicago's Hull House on similar efforts in London's East End, economist Albert Shaw described for American audiences the virtues of Glasgow's municipally owned streetcar lines, and Lewis Mumford urged Americans to visit modernist public housing projects in Frankfurt.

All true, but Rodgers also claims that the international dimensions of the problem (poverty, urban housing, rural blight) and the transnational links between reformers prove that American and European social politics were part of a common arc. The evidence is ambiguous on this point, even for those historians properly worried that arguments for American exceptionalism substitute patriotism for analysis. After all, the social welfare states that develop in France, Germany, and Britain - from mass worker housing to elaborate social insurance programs - are far more impressive than comparable developments in the United States. World War I solidifies social welfare expansion in Western Europe, but in the United States it solidifies the presidential ambitions of Warren Harding. Where Europeans exported carefully drafted pieces of reform legislation in the 1920s, Americans exported Model Ts, dime stores, efficiency kitchens, and tractors.

Even the crisis of the Depression did not fundamentally alter this picture. Rodgers deftly sketches how the economic crisis created an ideological opening for progressives to try their most cherished schemes - from voluntary guidelines for wages and prices to town planning efforts and publicly owned utilities. But Rodgers does not disagree with recent assessments that these efforts produced relatively few enduring programs. Instead, American liberals by the late 1930s had begun focusing less on policy reform than on increasing economic growth and individual consumption, and Rodgers demonstrates quite clearly that European models had little effect on American politics in the immediate postwar era. The triumph of a Republican party on the warpath against "big government" in the 1946 elections is a stark contrast to the simultaneous ascendancy of the British Labour party and its ambitious social welfare agenda.

Rodgers is a superb historian, and like all historians he is predisposed to emphasize the contingency of the recent past, the constellation of forces that prevented a more social welfare-oriented American politics at one moment, the obtuseness of particular reformers or their opponents in the next. But another reading of the evidence would support the sort of broad generalization that makes Rodgers uneasy: that most Americans during the twentieth century persistently emphasized the virtues of the competitive market, even when this sort of rhetoric had almost disappeared on the European continent; and that the emphasis in American culture on individual autonomy gave advocates of a more social vision little maneuvering room. The problems faced by reformers in Boston and Berlin were similar, but the cultural resources in Massachusetts and Prussia were quite different.

Support for this assertion might come from the trajectory of Catholic social thought, one important international tradition of social reform neglected in Atlantic Crossings. Leo XIII, after all, and the Italian Jesuits who helped draft Rerum novarum were among Europe's most influential voices on the "social question," and Catholic intellectuals and workers formed the backbone of what eventually came to be called Christian Democracy, a movement central to the formation of the modern European and South American welfare states. Catholic social thought had more influence on the American welfare state than Rodgers allows - John Ryan, the nuns who founded the world's largest network of Catholic hospitals, Al Smith, and even Father Coughlin might have figured in his story. But Rodgers is also correct, in a more important sense, not to emphasize Catholic social thought, since its formal idiom of corporatism, subsidiarity, and guilds always rang slightly off-key in a culture that invented credit cards, installment payments, and mobile homes.

Perhaps too scrupulously, Rodgers only hints at the contemporary implications of his project. But it is hard to read his homage to this earlier, cosmopolitan group of activists without a tinge of regret at the narrow way in which contemporary social policy debates on matters such as welfare and health policy are framed. Members of the Clinton administration, as Rodgers points out, never even bothered to make the public argument that Americans could learn how to organize health policy from foreign models.

Perhaps they decided not to waste their breath. The extraordinary changes in global capitalism over even the past ten years, however, may prompt both a reformulated "social question" and an appreciation for the importance of Rodgers's work. The Asian crisis suggests the vulnerability of any single nation in an era of international financial markets, even as international organizations now mount efforts to prevent a regional economic collapse. A renewed sense that the most effective markets require both openness and vigorous constraints - a view persuasively developed by the early twentieth century reformers Rodgers so rightly admires - might usefully direct discussion on these most important matters.

John T. McGreevy teaches history at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Parish Boundaries (University of Chicago Press).