Daniel T. Rodgers: Atlantic Crossings
Reviewed for H-Business and EH.NET by Milton Goldin, <MiltonG525@AOL.COM>, National Coalition of Independent Scholars (NCIS)
A Work of Original Scholarship
When Richard Hofstadter's _The Age of Reform_ appeared in 1955, the New York Times_ said, "It is not often that a work of original scholarship is also a work of great topical interest. Richard Hofstadter's new book is both." The observations could be justified; nonetheless, the reviewer missed critical points. For Hofstadter, reform was about America in the period between 1880 and the end of the New Deal, not about reform at home _and_ reform in Western Europe. Nor was reform about differences and similarities between reformers in America and in Europe. Not least, Hofstadter (a paperback edition of his book is still in print!) did not emphasize, as does Daniel Rodgers, the degree to which 19th century Americans and Europeans eagerly crossed the Atlantic to see for themselves strides in the others' habitats.
Among critical happenings that particularly attracted American progressives to Europe early in the period, Rodgers suggests, were Otto von Bismarck's social insurance program and the Christian Socialism that characterized London's Toynbee Hall. With respect to the first, historians now agree that the aristocratic Iron Chancellor was far less concerned with the well-being of workers than with diverting lower orders from thoughts of socialism and communism. Another Bismarckian objective was to reinforce loyalty to the monarchy and thus to the status quo. Rodgers not only makes clear the extent to which Bismarck succeeded, but the extent to which right things done for wrong reasons (or quasi-wrong reasons) can still inspire intellectuals to do and say right things for right reasons. Which, in turn, fits within Rodgers's overall purposes, as the jacket copy says, to retell "the story of the classic era of efforts to repair the damage of unbridled capitalism."
Repairing is where Toynbee Hall, a preeminent experiment with a settlement house, entered the picture for the British. The facility was located at the edge of London's East End, an area in which abject poverty and degradation easily matched New York's Lower East Side and Chicago's stockyard district. Albeit impressed by the idealism that Toynbee Hall symbolized, Americans were not impressed by what Rodgers describes as "[its] Oxford cultural pretensions (with its fine arts exhibits and reading rooms wreathed in pipe smoke...[and] its residents' easy, Oxbridge-greased access to government policy making)...." (p. 65) True, Americans never ignored the usefulness of ties between settlement houses and institutions of higher learning (consider Hull House's Jane Addams and the University of Chicago), but they far preferred dealing with issues of family, immigrants, and neighborhoods, to theoretical discussions.
_Atlantic Crossings_ makes for fascinating reading as Rodgers reconstructs "a distinctive era in the American past, in which American social politics were tied to social political debates and endeavors in Europe through a web of rivalry and exchange," (p. 5). But thus far, his book has not been of "great topical interest" in the media. A possible explanation for this, in a moment. But first, why has the book so excited the attention of academics on both sides of the Atlantic?
Part of the answer can be found in Rodgers's witty, clear analyses of eleven discussions of "social politics," in as many chapters. These include city planning, rural cooperatives, and public housing, as well as the New Deal and the Beveridge Report. He does not specify the capitalist damages in America to which intellectuals and other perennial complainers about capitalists reacted. This would have been helpful to readers unfamiliar with the economic history of the period and thus a summary account may be useful for the purposes of this review.
American labor's crusade for an eight-hour day, which started immediately after the Civil War, had slowed to a crawl by 1886, when, for the first time, dynamite was exploded at a rally on Chicago's Haymaker Street. For a moment, it seemed that a war between classes might closely follow the war between the states. Yet, an overwhelming majority of workers was not attracted to radical doctrines, a non-development that puzzled observers then and later. Another puzzler was that although America led the world in practically all the comforts and necessities of life, its workers and immigrants (who comprised a large percentage of its workers) lived miserably and were exploited unmercifully by men who donated large amounts to philanthropic causes and claimed to be dedicated to improving the commonweal.
In Europe, the critical political and economic event during the last third of the 19th century was the creation of the Second Reich, Bismarck's greatest production. The _Grunderzeit_ (founding period of Germany's awesome industrial base) quickly followed. The inflow of reparations from the French (after the Franco-Prussian War) overheated the economy to such an extent that German capitalism nearly demolished itself in a rush for riches based on stock market speculations. The country verged on financial chaos, but the German Left had no appetite to repeat liberal revolutions of 1848. Karl Marx's stirring statements may have inspired workers, but not to rush to barricades.
Rodgers begins _Atlantic Crossings_ with the Paris exposition of 1889 and the remark that Eiffel's tower, erected the same year, "was designed as a giant billboard for a great, temporary market of the wares of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism." Moving through exhibits at the exposition, Rodgers arrives in the "social economy exhibit hall," in which he finds that participants agreed that Germany was the overall victor in the impressive display department. One reason for this was that "...in deference to French sensibilities...." Germans left at home examples of weapons in their army's inventory, including prototype Krupp cannon which would be used with devastating effect in Northern France a quarter-century later.
Another reason was a large, gilded obelisk "representing the benefits the imperial social insurance funds had distributed to German workers...." (p. 13) Rodgers then poses the question, "What better alternative was there to the insecurities and predations of the market but the massive, countervailing paternal power of the state?" that Bismarck had pioneered. (p. 13)
The American social economy display featured descriptions of efforts by enlightened corporations to make workers comfortable. Examples included the Heinz Company's "spotless factory workrooms," Cleveland Hardware's employee restaurant, and an elaborate employee morale program developed by National Cash Register. The message was that "the most promising counter force to the injuries of industrial capitalism was the enlightened conscience of capitalism itself." (p. 17)
Discouragingly for American capitalists, American progressives, and especially muckrakers such as Lincoln Steffens, could never quite get the hang of this. For one thing, progressives felt that many robber barons did not have "enlightened conscience[s]." For another, progressives had ample evidence that when challenged by workers, capitalists would call on the full forces of the state to assist them to subdue workers. On the bright side, however, and thanks to Atlantic crossings, progressives had far greater understanding how social policies might work than did Washington bureaucrats. (Rodgers reminds us that as late as 1935, drafters of the Social Security Act came from academe, not from Washington agencies.)
On their part, progressives looked to charity organizations as magic carpets to enable them to foment social change. These included not only such activist organizations as Jane Addams's Hull House, but such capitalist-created agencies as the Russell Sage Foundation, "with its funds and fingers in pies ranging from public health and tuberculosis prevention to child labor and the promotion of city playgrounds, urban social surveys, low-interest pawnshops, [and] the condition of women's wage labor...," (p. 27). Not least, there were Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, creators of the modern corporation, who donated huge sums and seemed determined not only to talk the talk of philanthropy but to walk the walk of actually changing society for the better.
For Rodgers (as for Hofstadter) the high point of American reform was Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which appeared disjointed and illogical to many respected academics. "Aimless experiment, sporadic patchwork, a total indifference to guiding principles or definite goals," sniffed Lewis Mumford. (p. 409) "If there is leadership, it is the leadership of mounting one's horse and dashing off in every direction at once," (p. 409) lamented the American Political Science Association's outgoing president, Walter Shepard.
Yet, as Rodgers makes certain we understand in his superb summary of New Deal virtues and flaws, "it was a triumph for labor; it was capitalism's ambulance wagon. It was a moment of extraordinary public compassion for the poor and the unemployed, [albeit being] shaped by the class and racial prejudices of the white southerners who still dominated the Democratic Party." (p. 410) It also provided the experience base on which Washington thought through the later Marshall Plan and thus heavily influenced the philosophies and financing of post-World War II Western European welfare states.
This brings us back to the question, Why hasn't _Atlantic Crossings_, a work of exemplary scholarship, attracted the same degree of attention that _Reform in America_ attracted? The answer that springs to mind is that in 1955, liberalism was still the dominant frame of political reference for most Americans. Republicans could not ignore it: President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the dangers of a military-industrial complex, and Vice President Richard M. Nixon, a true believer in the existence of diabolical liberal and communist plots, would make certain that Great Society programs continued when he became president.
Another answer may be that the retreat from liberalism that began with Ronald W. Reagan and ended with a Democratic president, William J. Clinton, dismantling welfare programs, presaged something new on the American scene, a cynicism hitherto uncharacteristic of Americans, whether or not they were intellectuals. Rodgers writes, "Tax-payer revolts and privatization crusades may erupt, with a Thatcher or a Reagan to articulate and effect them. Still, as sharply contested as the politics of welfare states may be, and fight as their constituents do over who should receive their benefits and protections and who should pay for them, the continuous presence of the state in steering and taming the market economy is, at a deeper level, broadly accepted," (p. 286).
Yes, but primarily on whose behalf does the American welfare state function, at the dawn of the 21st century? It may be politically delusional not to grasp that the Reagan era is over. But is it delusional to wonder how it came to be, as the _Wall Street Journal_ reports, that while half the country now invests in stocks, 90 percent of shares are held by the wealthiest 10 percent of households, and Republican majorities in Congress never seem able to stop trying to reduce the taxes of that 10 percent?
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