Customer Reviews

The Search for Order, 1877-1920

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

In "The Search for Order," Robert Wiebe provides perhaps the first unifying overview of the American Progressive period. Beginning with the Reconstruction era, Wiebe presents the United States as "a nation of loosely connected islands." The economic panic of 1873 began what Wiebe describes as as a "soul searching" period for these homogenous, stable, primarily Protestant "island communities." America was noticeably changing from simple, locally-oriented communities guided by small town ethics to complex, interdependent societies seemingly controlled by distant and impersonal forces. Wiebe explains the ways in which Americans sought to regain some sense of order as this rapidly changing nation rumbled through the first decades of the twentieth century.

A "revolution in values" took place during this "search for order." Wiebe traces a pattern of "bureaucratization" in such diverse areas as science, philosophy, business, education, journalism, law, medicine, and social work (although Wiebe neglects the influence of arts and technology). A new middle class emerged as certain occupations such as law, medicine, and teaching became professionalized. Journalism became more scientific. Social workers began to establish their distinct field. "Idealists" and "utopianists" advocated the idea of progress by stages. A "business unionism" developed establishing a set of values for organized labor and carrying "the obligation that union executives become experts in their particular industry" (125). Factories turned to scientific management. With the establishment of the American Farm Burea, even farmers allowed their former image as "the people" to fade in favor of an agricultural business image. Such bureaucratic solutions were also attempted on an international level with the League of Nations (curiously, foreign policy makers seemed quite confident of America's superior place in the world despite domestic confusion). In other words, when the new middle class joined the Progressive movement, reform had altered its meaning from results to procedures.

The success of this bureaucratic integration was made evident by the ability of the nation to mobilize for the First World War. However, as Wiebe maintains, the successes of the Progressive movement actually helped lead to its downfall. Achievements such as financial reform following the panic of 1907, workmen's compensation laws, and policies under Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom "dulled the reforming urge" (212). Former Progressives began to defend the status quo as the nation entered the 1920s. What is more, the Progressives had "constructed just an approach to reform, mistaking it for the finished product" (223). Although Wiebe does not fully explain the reasons Americans turned to bureaucratic trends in their "search for order" and is often guilty of over-generalizing, over-intellectualizing, and inundating his work with an excessive use of abstractions, he does make a strong case that there was a "revolution in values" during the Progressive era. These values of Progressivism are with us today, including an active executive begun during the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

This book set the agenda for research in Gilded Age/Progressive Era studies for the current generation of American historians. It is a groundbreaking study which is not overly long and is very well written. It is one of the most widely used overview texts for the period in graduate history courses. If you only want to read one book on this period, make it this one.

Mr. Wiebe has done an excellent job of getting beneath all the confusion and conflict of America's history from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of the 1920's. To understand how many of the elements of our modern society came into being, and how and why the United States became a world power, one must go back to this period (1877-1920) to trace their origins. The book, while revealing many triumphs of our nation at this time, also reminds us of the tragedies which inevitably shaped our country's present course (ie World War I). Overall, it is a book of great value, for it sheds some much needed light on a very complex portion of our nation's history.

When I read a history book, I'm normally after more than the kind of facts and figures you could find in an encyclopedia. I'm normally most curious about the zeitgeist; not just what happened, but how the people of the times felt about what happened. I want to understand the past on its own terms, not our modern ones. If you stick with this book to the end, it does deliver on that, so for me the book was a success. To get there, however, Wiebe has to lead you down a pretty rocky path, which is of course what real history is apt to be like, in traversing its peaks and valleys in detail, without oversimplification.

Looking at yesterday through the wrong end of history's telescope, we can easily forget that the world back then was just as big and complicated a place as it is now, and just as hard to understand or explain. Wiebe examines and explains the decades between Reconstruction and Prohibition pretty well, in about as much detail as is possible in a single volume. In doing so, however, he must constantly refer along the way to people and events unfamiliar to the general reader, which can make the rocky path even fainter and more bewildering at times. The book regularly shows itself to be the work of a specialist, particularly in the early going, meaning that the more you yourself know going in about the topic, the more you will get out of this finer-grained discussion. It is because Wiebe's prose so often reads like a specialist talking shop, whereas I had been hoping for a popularized treatment more on my own level, and for that reason alone, that I am being stingy with my stars here, only giving four to what is actually a pretty good book.

"The search for order" is one of those toe-tags by which it may be helpful to identify and characterize the zeitgeist of any given era, and by the time Wiebe is done you will be likely to consider it well-chosen for this particular cadaver, which is in fact not dead but only sleeping. So many of the deeds of those times, both remembered and generally forgotten, have resonances that ring on into today. Some of the people covered are still familiar faces, such as robber baron JP Morgan, not to mention "that cowboy in the White House," Theodore Roosevelt, who saw it as his job to rope and bulldog Morgan and his ilk into submission before their steal-everything runaway greed could completely wreck the country. My words, not Wiebe's, who actually invests less discussion in these familiar figures than in so many of the more obscure players, and mainly leaves the impression that, whatever the case, he doesn't think much more of Roosevelt than Morgan did. In fact, however (and again, my words, not Wiebe's,) it is striking to find so many parallels between those times and ours. President Obama (who actually seems to prefer to pattern himself on Lincoln) has to some degree been playing TR in his campaign search for "change" that actually amounts to a "search for order" to be imposed on the chaos created by eight years of an extremely rocky out of control previous administration.

Good luck with that! Books like this one are compelling cautionaries on the way the more things change, the more they stay the same, and the only thing we ever learn from history is that we never learn. The takeaway message on Vietnam: We won't be fooled again. The takeaway message on Iraq and Afghanistan: Don't bet on it. The take on "Search for Order?" Pretty good book, if you're willing to grind it out with Google and Wikipedia standing by.

Historian Robert Wiebe examines the USA as it emerged from mostly rural society to an industrial giant during the years 1876-1920. The author shows that the USA grew from a series of largely independent, mostly Protestant, small-town communities at the end of Reconstruction, to a more interlocked, diverse, and urbanized society by the end of the First World War. As the USA grew into the world's foremost power, diffuse forces arose to both lead and to give the changing society a sense of order. Those forces included industrialization, professionalism, scientific management, progressive reform, bureaucracy, and urbanization. In short, most elements of modern society. Not that this melding process was perfect - much division, racism, and inequality remained - but the melding process was a powerful and successful one.

We studied this book in a college history class and it was one of the best we read; not as stiffly written as some histories and very informative.

Published decades ago, this book continues to be a very influential interpretation of the Progressive era. While roughly chronologically organized, this book is a long interpretative essay, not a narrative overview of the Progressive period. To get the most out of this book, a reasonably thorough knowledge of American history in this period is needed. Wiebe's basic theme is captured well by the title. Following the Civil War, American society was inundated by major economic and social changes. Increasingly rapid industrialization, expanding participation in the global economy, large scale urbanization, and massive immigration greatly altered American life. An American society that had been dominated by what Gordon Wood refers to as a "middling" class living in relatively small communities was ill-equipped to deal with these transformations. Wiebe interprets much of American political and social history in this period as responses, some creative and effective, some repressive and destructive, to this basic problem. After setting out the basic problem, Wiebe discusses the emergence of political movements such as gentile reform and populism as efforts to contain the enormous uncertainties faced by the traditional middlling classes. This interpretation links political reform efforts to phenomena like temperance movements and strengthening of Jim Crow laws. Similarly, Wiebe discusses the efforts of powerful business interests, often backed by Federal authorities and the Supreme Court, to contain social unrest, as an allied phenomenon.

Against this background, Wiebe describes the emergence of a middle class with relatively new features. Professionally oriented, better educated, and oriented towards increasingly sophisticated bureacratic methods of government and public administration, the new middle class became the heart of the Progressive movement. Wiebe does a nice job of showing the often adversarial and equally often synergistic relationship between the middle class Progressives and big business, particularly the emerging modern corporations. Wiebe also has very useful discussions of the interaction of Progressive movement and politics, particularly for Presidential elections. The increasingly important role of the executive branch, not only at the Federal level, but also at the local level, is described well, as is the emerging power of the President.

The final chapters include a very nice set of chapters on American foreign policy and American involvement in WWI, stressing the importance of a relatively small cadre of individuals, like Teddy Roosevelt, interested in American international prestige. The demise of the Progressive movement in WWI, partly a result of its successes, and partly a negative response to additional perceived threats to order from the Left, is also described well.

Defects of this include a somewhat wordy writing style, the absence of footnotes, a failure to convey the diversity of the Progressives, who included both individuals as diverse as Jane Addams and Woodrow Wilson, and perhaps too much emphasis on administrative success during WWI. Nonetheless, an and largely convincing thesis.

This book provides an excellent, and now classic, synthesis of the cultural, intellectual, and political evolutions during this period of industrialization, urbanization, and economic change. Highly recommended to scholars and highly accessible to amateurs.

This is a tremendous accounting of the end of the 19th Century. It shows what a period of flux the United States was in during this time in an analytic, scholarly way.

In The Search for Order, Robert Wiebe examines the changing American society between the end of Reconstruction and the end of World War I, and the struggle of the emerging middle class to compartmentalize and understand the changes around them. America experienced a significant amount of change between 1877 and 1920. New states entered the union, the frontier closed (or so was accepted at the time), a rural to urban shift produced large and disorganized cities, and the country emerged from isolation to become a world power. Depending mainly on secondary sources, Wiebe successfully argues that progressive reformers were not simply seeking a cleaner government, nor were they merely a group of displaced elite seeking to regain power, but a middle class attempting to establish new values.

Robert Wiebe creates an interesting social and structural study of the United States during a dynamic period of growth and change. While the progressive period was not sustained into the 1920s, the lasting impact is in the programs and legislation that nurtured a sense of continuity and functionality, and provided an understandable structure that the middle class masses could understand and thrive in. The Search for Order is a very readable and in-depth study of an important time period, and although the structure and placement of the final two chapters are questionable, the book remains essential reading for one trying to understand this, and succeeding time periods.

This book is a prime example of poor scholarship. Wiebe's complete lack of objectivity allows him to wantonly discredit movements which he sees as too radical or dangerous, as ineffective and laughably incomptent without citing any evidence to support his claims. His regurgitation of conventional knowledge is uninteresting, and when a point is made that is blatantly opinionated, Wiebe feels no need to back it up with any evidence. In short, this book is a gigantic waste of time.