The Search for Order

Robert H. Wiebe. The Search For Order, 1877-1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.

According the Wiebe, "America during the nineteenth century was a society of island communities." (xiii) By 1877, the United States government had waged a four-year long total war, and the American economy was becoming rapidly industrialized as society was becoming increasingly urbanized. Yet the country had not developed the sort of centralized state apparatus to go with these developments. Most people still lived in communities which were, in institutional terms, isolated from each others. This book is a study of the process by which the nation slowly came to grips with the realization that it was hurdling into a new economic and social order while still operating under increasingly outdated assumptions and organizational modes of operation.

Wiebe's study is political in nature, although there are chapters on the emerging, self-conscious Middle Class, "values", and foreign policy. More specifically, it is the story of the arrival of the Progressive movement and its eventual incorporation into the two main political parties. The Democratic Party is the more "natural" and congenial home by 1920, but that shift is far from complete at the end of the time period.

Wiebe's interpretive framework is compelling, and it gives an intellectual unity to his account. He might err too much towards crediting the Progressives for giving the era the unity and purpose it was striving for, and he spends too little time discussing the ugly aspects of the war-inspired nationalism which led to the Red Scare and anti-immigration legislation. He doesn't ignore them, but his explanation that these repressions were merely the domestic corollary to the heightened passions of the war is inadequate--if he didn't want to discuss these issues with the attention they deserved, he should have ended his account in 1919 rather than 1920.

Still, this book still holds up well nearly half a century after publication. Wiebe's central understanding of the era as a "search for order" still merits respect and consideration from students and scholars alike.