Andrew S.

Terrell
Spring 2010

Précis 9 February 2010: Rodgers, Daniel T.. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a
Progressive Age. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998

Comparative histories in Atlantic studies are becoming more common. Daniel Rodgers

attempts to relate progressive movements of the late 19th century through the 1930s across the

major nation states of the North Atlantic. Such a cosmopolitan approach posits that each

movement was connected to the other and that these connections were possible because of

tangible evidence pinpointing the rapidity of economic and industrial modernization experienced

by the larger nation states of Great Britain, France, the German Empire, the United States, and to

a lesser degree Austria-Hungary. Rodgers also asserts that for social policies to be borrowable,

separate states must have had a foundation of common economic and social experiences. In

linking the progressive movements internationally, Rodgers explains how the transatlantic era

came into being and how it furthered individual nation states’ progressive movements.

Scholarship on the interplay of the Atlantic system usually pits the “Old world” against the

“New world,” but Rodgers details how such traditional thinking delayed the creation and

subsequent expansion of progressive social politics; once habitual ideologies and animosity

between the continents faded in the latter 19th century a lucrative system of tenet exchange took

place.

Rodger’s attempt to relate progressive era movements across the Atlantic is very

convincing. His work also plays into the historiography of how largely domestic politics can

influence foreign exchange and affairs. Rodgers covers plenty of vantages in defending his

contention that the Atlantic connection as an entity interlinked progressive movements.

However, asserting that exceptionalism went into an extended remission in the progressive era is

a little troublesome. One can argue that exceptionalism led to staunch nationalist trends that
Andrew S. Terrell
Spring 2010

allowed the Great War to engulf the continent so quickly. Furthermore, even during the

Progressive period, Rodgers notes how European and American tourists still looked down upon

the others’ cities and social politics while also seeking ways to replicate each other;

exceptionalism did not disappear to conveniently allow the Progressive era and New Deal

liberalism to be born, if anything it simply was not given as much credence as before and after

the period. Rodgers calls the failure to rally around Britain’s Beveridge strategy in 1942 the

turning point in the Atlantic connection whereby from then forward, the United States was

exemplified above all other states. However, one must wonder why Europeans accepted the

thought that the US system was more superior that early. Rodgers cites the effects of war torn

Europe as the main reason, but this requires the reader to believe that the best economic methods

and minds of the war years were in the United States. This perpetuates the idea that the United

States accidentally came into supremacy when there is plenty of evidence to contrary by the year

this monograph was published. A lurking question one has of Rodgers’ account of the

progressive era, is whether or not nationalist trends and military build up was selectively

overlooked by the rapid spread and success of progressive politics?