Daniel T. Rodgers: Atlantic Crossings
"Response"
von Daniel T. Rodgers, Department of History, Princeton University
These reviews of my ATLANTIC CROSSINGS are so wide-ranging, so rich in suggestions for the study of transnational historical processes, that it seems superfluous to add much commentary of my own. One of the key strengths of this symposium is that it taps so richly into the multi-faceted work of its participants: David Hammack's studies of the role of non-profit organizations in the field of social politics, Seth Koven's ongoing explorations of the sexualization of modern London, Sonya Michel's work in the gendering of modern American social welfare provisions, Pierre-Yves Saunier's investigations of the structures of cross-national urban information exchange, and Victoria de Grazia's ongoing work on the invasion of interwar Europe by mass-produced American consumer goods and culture. [1] This is the sign of a vigorous scholarly field, pressing everywhere at its boundaries. This is also the kind of exchange--engaged, provocative, and generous--that authors dream of instigating.
The point on which we all agree is how complex the systems of cross-national social-political exchange and influence were, even in an age saturated with nationalism. There were "many crossings," Pierre-Yves Saunier reminds us, many overlapping and competing systems at work, a lot of boats in motion. Some of these I tried to follow carefully. But there are others which fell outside ATLANTIC CROSSINGS's scope: rich and important fields of inquiry that a comprehensive account of the era's transnational traffic in social-political ideas must include.
The imperial connection, as Seth Koven suggests, formed one of these. From Delhi to London, Leopoldville to Brussels, the imperial world was crisscrossed with appropriations, rivalries, and imitations--sometimes independent of the debates over domestic social politics but often interlaced with these, as policy measures of hygiene or policing were exported from imperial core to colony or, conversely, given a trial run in the colonies before being brought home to the imperial core. Every transaction in this field was saturated with concepts of race. This was a system of exchange in which the Americans were deeply involved, not only in working out the administration of their overseas colonies in the Pacific and the Caribbean but in the social, economic, and racial administration of their "internal" empire in the American South--that fragment of a slave/plantation system that ended up, unlike the fragments of the other great eighteenth-century empires, within the political boundaries of an advanced capitalist nation-state. [2]
Another major system of transnational exchange had gender at its core. Writing in the midst of a veritable renaissance of comparative studies on maternalist social politics (in which two of this symposium's contributors were key figures), I chose to leave investigation of the era's international "social feminist" network in the hands of those who were already so far ahead of me in constructing a new, transnational women's history. [3] But as Sonya Michel so effectively argues here, a comprehensive account of the movement of policies, ideas, and aspirations across the boundaries of the early twentieth-century nation states has to include gender (like race and empire) at its core. When that comprehensive account is written it will not only have to find room for mothers' pensions, women's restrictive labor legislation, and provisions for maternity and child care--critically important as these provisions were, and pivotal to the politics of our own day. It will also need to find room for the issues of urban physical and economic environment that form many of the case studies in ATLANTIC CROSSINGS and that, as progressive women everywhere knew, pressed hard on the day-to-day lives of working-class women: housing conditions within the constraints of urban capitalist land markets, safe water, cheap baths and cheap cooking gas, cooperative retail purchasing, or penny-policy systems of burial insurance. For that matter, the very systems of working-class and bourgeois engenderment were international productions, sustained by systems of transnational transmission and emulation. Those gender systems worked out their social-political ramifications in the diverse, compromised, interrelated, and everywhere deeply conflicted ways that comparative historical work is now beginning to recover.
Still another major international system of exchange had poverty at its core. [4] Moving the focus of ATLANTIC CROSSINGS away from poverty was a deliberate choice. Social politics began as a means of rolling back some of the most destructive consequences of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. The poverty of labor, not poverty in itself, was at its center. (The citizenship-based social provisions we might now envy were barely on the table in this period, except for purposes of military enhancement: veterans' payments to arms-bearing men or fecundity bonuses for child-bearing women.) Everywhere in this labor-centered period social provisions favored wage-earning men over wage-less men: tenant farmers, for example, or tramping men, skidding from lockup to penal colony. Those same social provisions favored wage-earning men over most wage-earning women, and wage-earning men over all poor women without a money wage. The concept of the "two channel welfare state" arose as an analytical articulation of the last of these contrasts; it is more critically needed now, with the feminization of poverty in contemporary America, than ever before. Add race and region back in, however, and the pattern of historical inequalities seems to me to grow more complicated than the dual track metaphor acknowledges. Like gender, race also "did the work of class" in forging U.S. social policy. And so, even in America, did class itself.
Still, for all the gender biases with which its origins freighted social politics, for all the unstated class and racial restrictions that it incorporated, its labor roots kept social politics focused on the welfare of the mass rather than on a "dependent" few--on a potentially expandable political constituency rather than a stigmatized and politically vulnerable one. The point is a simple one, but in the context of contemporary pressure to cramp the idea of public welfare down until it means only poor relief, it seemed to me worth reiterating.
Beyond all these were still other systems of transatlantic exchange, centered (as David Hammack suggests) on education and health, on public administration, on temperance and hygiene, on labor and socialist organization, or on the new techniques of welfare capitalism. Some of these were mediated (as Harry Marks suggests) through state structures; some (as Pierre-Yves Saunier writes) by the new philanthropic foundations. ATLANTIC CROSSINGS would have been completed much more quickly had it only relied on print materials rather than the forty-odd archival collections where, long ago, the book began. But Pierre-Yves Saunier is right that much more needs to be known about the ways in which all these systems of exchange were structured and about the filtering and framing effects those structures entailed.
My ambitions in ATLANTIC CROSSINGS were not, in all these regards, comprehensive. I was drawn in framing it to those places where American social policy debate seemed to me particularly porous to contemporary debates elsewhere. I was interested in those sites not only for their own sake but for the general processes they might reveal. I wrote with an eye to reframing U.S. history, to demonstrate what we might learn by breaking open the nation-state boundaries and the "exceptionalist" assumptions that normally police them. For all the flaws in the American progressives whose "crossings" I was following, I was sympathetic to one central part of their endeavors: their effort to extract a few key social goods and social relations from the all-encompassing grasp of the market. Reconstructing the world these progressives inhabited, I let their points of interest map it. In the American progressives' minds, Berlin overshadowed Stockholm, just as London by the end of the 1890s dwarfed Paris--though Dublin, to confound any simple nordic paradigm, overshadowed Amsterdam, as did Fascist Rome. Within the nations of Europe, there were different flows of influence than these (as Pierre-Yves Saunier points out) and tangled networks of origin.
But crossings--no matter how much we enlarge its scope and the freight it carried--is a metaphor, and a partial one. So is "exchange." ATLANTIC CROSSINGS is not a record of the "movement" of ideas, like inert ship-borne ladings, but of social-intellectual politics. Perception, misperception, translation, transformation, co-optation, preemption, struggle, failure: these are the core processes at work. ("Dialogical encounter," "creolization," and "hybridization," too, though our attunement to the language of race might make us want to think twice before taking aboard terms that trail as much history in species-centered evolutionary biology as some of these.) Without consideration of these processes the book would have been half as long as it became.
In the interwar period as mapped out in Victoria de Grazia's comment, the field of struggle had become so intense as to virtually preclude any serious social-political translation into the American polity at all. And this was for two reasons. First, reform itself in the post-World War I context had become, she suggests, "essentially nationalizing." Second, what cultural and economic models now swept across the nation-state borders came overwhelmingly not to, but from, the new hegemonic center in United States. There is a point to both contentions, and not only from an Italian-centered perspective. But they are partial points. Even in central Europe in the 1920s, the struggle to limit the effects of the capitalist transformation was never solely the arena of the nationalizers, the social hygienists, and the keepers of nationalist social accounts. Secondly, it is true that the economic and political fragility of the European nations after 1919 made the influence of European social-political models less powerful in the United States than in the pre-war years. But this did not yet fundamentally break the pre-war pattern in American social politics, nor the powerful role of translated European elements in the New Deal, funneled into 1930s Washington from both pre-war and interwar sources. The concept of shifting hegemonic centers is important--and essential for the post-1945 period. But if it leads us to imagine that there is, at any historical moment, only one significant center for the flows of power--even in a globe in which power is as radically imbalanced as in the 1920s or, still more, our own contemporary one-I fear we will lose more than we gain from it.
The question of "exceptionalism" that threads its way through this symposium is too large to address here, except to say the obvious: that distinctiveness and connection are not antonyms. [5] Within the complicated, tension-filled, field of interdependence that the north Atlantic economy made and that the cosmopolitan progressives tried, in their own way, to bring to consciousness, the Americans drew much more deeply on aspects of European social politics than merely a "spark of philosophy" or a passing rhetorical advantage. Taking seriously those edges of the nation state that were most porous, where the struggles over transnational forces were most concentrated and most consequential, is not to abandon the old nation-state history. But it will, I hope, make us skeptical about some of the nation state's claims and some of its imagined history. As these thought-provoking essays suggest, there is a lot of important, imaginative testing of the nation-state's historical boundaries currently going on. There remains a lot more to be done.
NOTES
1. David C. Hammack, MAKING THE NONPROFIT SECTOR IN THE UNITED STATES (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Seth Koven, Dr. Barnardo's 'Artistic Fictions': Photography, Sexuality, and the Ragged Children in Victorian London," RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW 69 (1997): 6-45; Sonya Michel, CHILDREN'S INTERESTS/MOTHERS' RIGHTS: THE SHAPING OF AMERICA'S CHILD CARE POLICY (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Pierre-Yves Saunier, "Changing the City: Urban International Information and the Lyon Municipality, 1900-1940," PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 14 (1999): 19-48; Victoria de Grazia, "Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American Challenge to European Cinemas, 1920-1960," JOURNAL OF MODERN HISTORY 61 (1989): 53-87.
2. Two forthcoming contributions may stand as examples: Paul A. Kramer, "The Blood of Government: Race and Rule Between the U.S. and British Empires, 1880-1910; Robert Gregg, INSIDE OUT, OUTSIDE IN: ESSAYS IN COMPARATIVE HISTORY (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).
3. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, "Womanly Duties: Maternalist Policies and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880-1920," AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 95 (1990): 1076-1108; Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., MOTHERS OF A NEW WORLD: MATERNALIST POLITICS AND THE ORIGIN OF WELFARE STATES (New York: Routledge, 1993). See also Sonya Michel, "The Comparative Turn: Is Women's History Ready?" JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY 10 (1998): 189-97.
4. Michael B. Katz and Christoph Sachsse, eds., THE MIXED ECONOMY OF SOCIAL WELFARE: PUBLIC/PRIVATE RELATIONS IN ENGLAND, GERMANY, AND THE UNITED STATES FROM THE 1870'S TO THE 1930'S (Baden-Baden: Nomos 1996).
5. I have pursued this point farther in Daniel T. Rodgers, "Exceptionalism," in IMAGINED HISTORIES: AMERICAN HISTORIANS INTERPRET THE PAST, ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.