Daniel T. Rodgers
Auteur van Age of Fracture
Over de Auteur
Daniel T. Rodgers is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. His many books include Age of Fracture, winner of the Bancroft Prize.
Fotografie: Princeton University
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Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (1982) — Medewerker — 19 exemplaren
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- Rodgers, Daniel Tracy
- Geboortedatum
- 1942-09-29
- Geslacht
- male
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- Darby, Pennsylvania, USA
- Opleiding
- Brown University (AB|ScB|1965)
Yale University (PhD|1973) - Beroepen
- professor emeritus (History)
historian - Organisaties
- American Historical Association
Princeton University
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Of the origin of Progressivism as a political stance, Rodgers writes, “It was English before it was American, born in the heated municipal politics of 1890s London before crossing to the United States in the first decade of the new century. By 1910, in the Progressive People’s Party (Fortschrittliche Volkspartei) of Friedrich Naumann, Lujo Brentano, and other younger reform intellectuals, the term ‘progressive’ had acquired social-political overtones in Germany as well. It was central to the self-identity of the proponents of social politics to think of themselves as committed less to an abstract principle than to a distinctive place at history’s leading edge, where the effects of the revolutions in production and exchange cut most sharply” (pg. 52). Zoning and cities serve as a case study for Rodgers. He writes, “Brought into the city through far-flung markets in goods and labor, sorted into neighborhoods by markets in land and shelter, sustained by armies of shopkeepers, peddlers, teamsters, and middlemen, city dwellers lived in a web of mutual dependency that was at once extraordinarily powerful and barely visible. Nowhere outside the great cities did the necessities of shelter and sustenance hinge as fully on invisible suppliers” (pg. 114). Cities owning their own infrastructure offered the opportunity for the blurring of class lines. Rodgers writes, “Investing boldly in public works, urban business-class progressives had engineered a major shift in the line between city and private enterprise. They had established for turn-of-the-century cities a new set of collective tasks, which, spinning out from concerns with public health, defied determinate limits” (pg. 130).
Turning to the working class, Rodgers writes, “The distinctive concern of the North Atlantic economy’s progressives was not to patch and mend the lives of the poor: it was the struggle to find effective means to keep those who were not abjectly poor, who still possessed work and wages, from being precipitated into poverty’s abyss” (pg. 211). He continues, “One must imagine, then, the North Atlantic economy as crisscrossed with benefits pools and insurance institutions: regulated and unregulated, commercial and fraternal, actuarially primitive or highly systematized. The resulting system was both a fixture of everyday life and inadequate to it, far-flung and full of holes. No other organizations set down deeper roots in the working class” (pg. 218-219). Further, “In the United States as in Europe, the campaign for protective labor legislation was a curious amalgam of efforts, on the one hand, to eliminate certain of the most dangerous risks of the workplace and, on the other, leaving the dangers in place, to make sure that only adult men were exposed to them” (pg. 239).
Prior to World War I, Rodgers writes, “From the American university students’ delight at European ‘sociability’ through each piecemeal effort to decommodify a streetcar line here or a laborers’ risk there, the goals of most of those in the Atlantic progressive network were elements of a stronger collective life: ‘solidarity,’ a ‘civic sense,’ ‘society’” (pg. 269). He continues, “Across the Atlantic world, the wartime transformation in political economy was, indeed, far-reaching. Everywhere old rules were set at odds, warring social parties brought into state-sponsored harness, the market drastically narrowed, and the realm of things public dramatically swollen” (pg. 280). Turning to the American South, Rodgers writes, “With the poverty and backwardness of southern agriculture on their minds, and, still more, the massive drag of that backwardness on the South’s general welfare, they strained to read the social-political lessons in the European countryside. In that endeavor the Americans joined others: Irish progressives trying to track down the exportable lessons of the Danish rural revival, English investigators of Belgian agricultural organization, Indian and Italian rural reformers in Germany. All were in pursuit of the secret of rural revival – of workable means to rebalance the market in agricultural goods in ways less disadvantageous to the country’s small producers” (pg. 323-324).
Of the 1930s, Rodgers writes, “In bits and pieces, the late-Weimar fusion of labor housing politics, machine production techniques, and radical aesthetics found its way into 1930s America. But the elements would not stay put. The Atlantic crossing scrambled and dissolved relations in the very process of extraction and appropriation” (pg. 407). Writing on the New Deal in American memory, Rodgers argues that contemporaries “let their memories shift in the same direction, pushing the internationalism of 1930s social politics into smaller and smaller recesses, redrawing 1930s politics as a distinctly American movement. As memory it was wrong, but as prognosis it was not entirely off the mark. Battered by events abroad and opponents at home, the transatlantic progressive connection was under palpable strain. The New Deal was the climax of that connection. It hinted at a quite different future” (pg. 484).
Rodgers concludes, “The historical importance of the transatlantic phase of American progressive politics lies not in the exaggerated polarities of its rhetoric but in its experienced connections. It marked a moment when, across the countervailing pull of nationhood, the world of capital seemed to many a world akin. For all the ‘un-American,’ ‘made in Prussia’ furor that met their work, the Atlantic progressive travelers made other nations’ social policy headline news. They sustained not only highly visible structures of international exchange but also a public debate that bound choices in American social politics with choices elsewhere” (pg. 508).… (meer)