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

Foreword by David Herbert Donald.

Robert H. Wiebe, in The Search for Order 1877-1920 (hereafter referred to as Search), argues that, during this forty-three year period, America and Americans underwent profound changes that forever transformed the politics, economy, society/culture, and ideology of the country. The events of these years “splintered” and swept away the existing order, replacing it with a new one founded on entirely different principles. Faced with the challenges of “nationalization, industrialization, mechanization, and urbanization,” late nineteenth-century Americans discovered that the values of an agrarian, community-centered society crumbled in the wake of these challenges, leaving them vulnerable, “a society without a core.” (12) These years, Wiebe contends, can be characterized by a continuing search for a new core around which society could form, a new center that would provide stability and continuity. The search culminated in the bureaucracy of the twentieth century exemplified by Progressivism and a new foreign policy. He states: “By contrast to the informal, personal ways of the community, the new scheme was derived from the regulative, hierarchical needs of urban-industrial life. Through rules with impersonal sanctions, it sought continuity and predictability in a world of endless change. . . .The new system, moreover, had applications as important in foreign as in domestic affairs.”(xiv)

Increasing centralization of power within the federal government, the dramatic alteration of the balance of power between the President and Congress, and the alteration of the American citizen’s perception of the role of the federal government marked the most dramatic changes in politics during this period. By 1920, the partisan, parochial political systems centered about local communities had given way to a centralized federal bureaucracy. Wiebe attributes this change to the loss of community isolation brought about by the growing technology of the late nineteenth century and to a growing sense of national identity. As the world increasingly invaded the small, community-centered towns and American cities burgeoned in size, Americans became increasingly aware of the massive inadequacies of the existing political system to meet the new challenges posed by economic change and the resultant social, cultural, and ideological dislocations that it produced.

Search offers the example of the antimonopoly campaign as exemplifying this response. Local and state governments discovered themselves powerless to regulate interstate business, particularly railroads. Only the federal government could effectively undertake this endeavor. The survival of local and state governments, and the local communities, challenged by the capricious rates charged by the railroads at this time, depended upon surrendering and concentrating power in a federal agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission. Self-preservation and continued self-determination depended upon this action. From this beginning, Wiebe contends, increasing amounts of power began to be entrusted to the federal government, culminating in the formation of the war administrative agencies during World War I. Moreover, as technology ended the isolation of the self-contained communities, Americans discovered that they shared common anxieties and problems. Sectionalism and localism yielded to a greater sense of national identity, strengthened by the commonality of experiences.

The concurrent reemergence of a strong President and the dramatic change in the perception of the average American citizen of the federal government also marked this “search for order.” In the 1880’s, the American President represented principally a moral figurehead, an example of to the nation of industriousness and Protestant values; Congress dictated the distribution of power. Little organization existed in politics at the national level. “Low esteem” might be a vastly understated term for how most Americans regarded the federal government. Wiebe argues that during this period, as Americans increasingly turned to the national government to control the economic and social upheavals created by unparalleled corporate and the floods of immigration, the emphasis on hierarchical organization to control these problems created the need for a strong Chief Executive to coordinate this hierarchy, much as the captains of industry directed the flow of power in the corporate structure. McKinley, Roosevelt, and Wilson grasped the importance of co-opting this successful technique, creating power structures that to a large extent redirected the control of the federal government away from Congress into the Oval Office. This redistribution of power would not change until the election of Warren Harding.

The development of finance capitalism and the rise of big business marked the economic transformation of American life. The most crucial factor in establishing economic order in these years, Wiebe posits, was the growth of the former. This type of capitalism moved the source of investment capital from foreign investments to domestic capital. American financiers such as J.P. Morgan developed large resources that allowed American industry to develop relatively free of foreign dependencies. Industrial leaders displayed a willingness to accept the guidance of these outside sources. Thus, American corporations (steel, oil, and manufacturing) could become competitive on world markets. Yet, this growth was not without problems. Search describes American industrial life at the beginning of this period as fragmented, localized in the hands of small businessmen in small towns, and not highly organized. By the end of World War I, tightly structured national (and increasingly international) corporations supplanted this. Again, the 1880’s marked the critical period of change. The much-vaunted American entrepreneur gave way to the faceless corporate monopoly. Workers, in turn, lost their sense of identity. This loss lead to dissatisfaction expressed by labor unrest, currency disputes over the free coinage of silver, and the organization of unions to attempt to win back some measure of control.

Rapid economic change leads directly to social/cultural and ideological changes. Small-town community values, the Protestant work ethic, and the clearly delineated social hierarchy disappeared with the advent of urbanization and industrialization, resulting in an impersonal, disorderly society. The quest for large-scale social control through Prohibition and public education marked the efforts to impose order and resolidify the country around a recognizable center. Class also becomes an important issue during this time, which marks the rise of the middle class in America. This nascent class divided into two parts. Agriculture, business, and labor specialists composed one half of this group; they took immense pride in their new scientific skills and specializations that were revolutionizing these fields. The growing specialized professions—medicine, teaching, law, and social work—constituted the remaining part of this group. A new sense of unity by specialization replaced the old community values. Distinguished by ambition and the ability to seek out others with similar purpose, the professionals of this class increasingly turned to universities to provide them with the skills and training for their areas.

“Scientific method” also transformed the ideology of Americans during this time. The developing middle class believed, that through the application of this method, “that man in the higher stages of evolution could control his own progress.” (144) The classical theories and the idealistic theories of the earlier part of the century yielded to a new approach that Wiebe terms the “bureaucratic approach.” In this methodology, the historian argues, “institutions ceased to live apart from the human beings who compromised them. . . .Now change was interaction and adjustment, forming elaborate and shifting multilinear patterns.” (145-146) Through these interactions and adjustments, order could be formed from disorder.

Wiebe views the Progressive movement as the culmination of the transformation of all four factors. He states: “The heart of progressivism was the ambition of the new middle class to fulfill its destiny through bureaucratic means.” (166) Members of this movement co-opted and adapted the techniques of “urban-industrial America” to effect change and establish stability. Beginning in the agrarian states of the Midwest and select areas of the South, Progressivism advocated the reorganization of government into a unified whole to rectify the problems of society by scientific method. Through “scientific government”, social, political, and economic problems could be identified and managed. Progressivism revolutionized the role of the federal government, bringing it into the new century pondering and acting upon previously neglected issues: natural resources, stabilization of the currency, reform of the banking system, federal regulation of the railroads, and the reform of legislative proceedings in Congress. Its principal weakness, Wiebe believes, was that this scientific approach separated the reformers from those they were trying to reform.

The same desire to bring order from disorder characterized the radical transformation of American foreign policy by the end of the nineteenth century. Wiebe posits that “[t]he same broad pattern prevailed here as well: the initial effort to impose a crude order, the desire for regularity and predictability, the need for government of continuous involvement, and the emphasis upon executive administration.” (229) By the last two decades, two groups, composed of relatively few men, controlled foreign policy. One group sought to gain profit by opening foreign markets; the other bluntly craved to make America a global power. However, their foreign policy often possessed little foundation in reality, and a great deal of origination in their vivid imaginations (“Four hundred million Chinese without shoes!!”). (231) With no wider framework of experience, foreign policy leaders interpreted the larger world with a very narrow lens of domesticity. Middle-class idealism also exerted considerable influence on America’s relationships abroad. After all, as men developed and progressed to higher levels, would this not result in more peaceful relationships between countries? America, then, had a responsibility to bring this development and progression to those who lacked it, and who, incidentally, were ripe targets for expansionism: Latin America and East Asia. Wiebe offers a rather pessimistic assessment of this foreign policy. Supposedly organized and orderly, it was more often “immature” and based more in imagination than reality, with little machinery to employ to fulfill its lofty goals. Furthermore, American presidents, especially Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson exercised considerable latitude and autonomy in power with an impunity that they would never have attempted in their domestic policy.

Walter LaFeber, in The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion 1860-1898, and Edward Crapol and Howard Schonberger in “The Shift To Global Expansion 1865-1900”, concur with Wiebe’s evaluation of this period. For these three historians, the transformation of American life in response to rapid change also characterizes this time, although for different reasons. LaFeber, like Wiebe, regards industrialization as a critical factor in transforming this nation. He argues that the quest for empire abroad arose from the industrial revolution of the late 19^th century. America’s “new empire” was a historical continuity, not a discontinuity that the nation’s leaders had been purposefully building toward since Reconstruction. The resultant transformation of American foreign policy did not happen by accident, nor was it something into which the nation “fell” accidentally or by force. Rather, America actively sought presence abroad as a means of continuing economic survival. In LaFeber’s account, foreign policy is made almost exclusively by and for urban industrial interests. Social disorder and dislocation receive less emphasis than in Wiebe’s work, though he does acknowledge their role in creating the drive for foreign markets to placate labor unrest.

Crapol and Schonberger’s essay contributes an interesting twist to the discussion of the transformation of America’s role on the world stage. For these historians, the quest for foreign markets through the Open-Door policy unified the two traditionally antagonistic factions of agriculture and urban industry with an “economic nationalism” by 1898, much like Wiebe’s national identity. The essay also attributes agency to agriculture as a key and crucial force for changes in American foreign policy. Furthermore, Crapol and Schonberger propose that the Open-Door policy acknowledged the reality of the geopolitical tensions of Europe during this time that threatened to erupt into world war. Through the policy, American leaders attempted to accomplish global commercial competitiveness without using traditional colonial or military means—literally a new order through diplomacy. This new order abroad would ensure domestic tranquillity.

Search presents a well-written, well-organized account of the tumultuous years that altered both a nation and its people. Wiebe’s strongest arguments focus on the presentation of Progressivism as the culmination of the search for political, economic, social/cultural, and ideological order and upon the development of foreign policy as the natural outgrowth of that social movement. He also includes a massive bibliographical essay at the conclusion of the work, possibly the most exhaustive, comprehensive one for this period in American history. Search, in its time (late 1960s), broke new ground in the study of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era by examining the multiplicity of causes that lead Americans by several different paths to the same conclusion: the existence of a “core” of order offered the only chance for the nation and its people to survive these tremendous upheavals.

Unfortunately, Search manifests several weaknesses that detract from its usefulness. Wiebe uses no footnotes in the work, which might be appropriate if the work were presented only as a historical synthesis. However, he purports that he presents new ideas and interpretations in the book. A reader unfamiliar with the historiography of the period might find this lack of reference to primary and secondary literature confusing; a reader familiar with the historiography and literature would find this dearth of sources downright annoying, as this reader did. Wiebe’s work needed far more specific evidence to support his assertions. At times, the historian would present a point with only vague examples to reinforce his point, or worse yet, no examples at all.

Furthermore, the Americans in Search tended to be nameless and faceless unless they were nationally famous (or infamous) politicians, industrialists, Congressmen, or clergymen. This reader found a remarkable resemblance between Search and Georges LeFebvre The Coming of the French Revolution, which presented the three estates in eighteenth –century France only by the terms “the aristocracy”, the “clergy”, and the “bourgeoisie”. It seems questionable that absolutely no or few records existed for “ordinary” people of the time, particularly since Crapol and Schonberger’s work attributes strong agency to the Grangers and the Populist Party. Most critically, this “facelessness” leads Wiebe to generalize in the extreme, positing events and attitudes of this period as monolithic by nature. It seems highly doubtful, particularly in light of new scholarship of the period, that these events and attitudes were as monolithic as he presents. However, the reader must be mindful that Wiebe wrote the work over thirty years ago, during a time when the historical profession began to reexamine its traditional approaches to this nation’s history and question “the great men” approach to history that would not reach fruition for another decade.

With these caveats in mind, Search proffers an ambitious and valuable work to explain a period of almost unbelievably rapid change in American life, and the means by which Americans sought to impose order and stability in the ensuing chaos. Search presents today’s historians with a new challenge: to build upon Wiebe’s work by finding those “nameless, faceless” Americans that also played crucial roles in this “search for order”, and adding their rich contributions to the ever-changing tapestry of American history.