BOOK REVIEWS gggff

The Search for Order : 1877-1920, by Robert H. Wiebe New York: Hill & Wang, 1967   Review by Larry DeWitt December 2003 The state of the American nation during the period 1877 to 1920 can only be seen-in the backward-looking telescope of Robert Wiebe's, The Search for Order-as a society in tumult. Indeed, Wiebe describes a nation in a uniquely high pitch of turmoil and discontent-a kind of hyped-up Social Darwinian orgy in which every group and interest is at war with every other. According to Wiebe, something unprecedented in American history (beware historians who claim to have discovered the unprecedented!) was happening in these years. The tectonic plates of American culture were moving discernibly and all segments of society were their conceptual footing. The shift, in a phrase, was from local control of one's affairs in a personal community to control by some remote power. For Wiebe, the story of America during this period is the story of a titanic clash of interests. The image we get is of a collection of large metallic "Battle-Bots" of every imaginable sort-farmers, town elites, laborers, immigrants, monied financiers, silver bugs, gold bugs, Populists, Republicans, evangelicals-roaming the American landscape and bumping into each other, bouncing off one into the next, jostling for position in a world governed only by the laws of chaos. Out of this free-for-all somehow emerges a sense of order (when all the "Bots" are exhausted?) as a new urban middle class sticks its head up out of ruins and the occupations such as law, medicine, education, and the new one of social work, become organized and professionalized. Out of this order through exhaustion somehow emerges another spasm of hope for a new Progressive Era. Two discordant thoughts immediately push themselves forward through all the clang and clash described by Wiebe: Were Americans of this period really as confused as the historian's reconstruction would have them? Or did they, like most people in most epochs, adapt themselves to their world sufficiently so that, as lived experience, their world was not any more confusing to them than ours to us. The second question is: Even if they were overwhelmed by the pace of fundamental change in their time, was this really much different than the challenges faced by earlier generations of Americans? Was the period of the Revolutionary War, for example, any less conducive of upheaval than the years after the end of Reconstruction? How about the Civil War itself; did Americans have a stable sense of order then? Or to go back even farther in time, how about the early Virginia Colonists, was their voyage to a new and foreign land such a cruise of comfort and contentment? Or on the matter of reform: Was the felt-need for a bewildering variety of reforms any less keenly felt or less bewildering in variety among the movements of antebellum America? In the antebellum reform frenzy the emphasis was on moral corruption and its amelioration; while in the post-Reconstruction period it was apparently more on varieties of perceived economic injustice. [1] But it seems dubious to believe that the one period was any less fevered than the other. Perhaps the period between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Modern Era can be summed up as a time of upheaval and a search for order. But even if so, Wiebe's constant suggestion that this is somehow a new development-breaking with a community-centered sense of order present from the earliest days of the American colonies-is surely overblown. The story Wiebe tells is by stages dour and pessimistic-as the old order breaks down-and tartly optimistic as a new bureaucratic order, based on impersonal expertise and a concern with mid-level efficiencies, replaces the old order of personal, community-centered power. But the essential transitional phase between the old and the new is the inevitable destruction of Populism, with its archaic and hopelessly impractical notions of reform. True reform comes-in the Progressive Era-when reformers shift from a concern over highly generalized moral principles and get down to the brass tacks of running the national enterprise, with a combination of professionalism and pragmatism. After destroying the old society of rural individuals in personal communities, after dashing the dreams of the populist reformers, and giving birth to a new middle class whose values are more cosmopolitan and pragmatic than idealistic, we finally get to Wiebe's core claim (page 166) where in a sentence he summaries his thesis: "The heart of progressivism was the ambition of the new middle class to fulfill its destiny through bureaucratic means." The dawning of a modern foreign policy does not cling well to the mold of Wiebe's bureaucratic model, cleaving, as he describes it, to the older tradition of personalized power and individual patrons, and characterized more by a naive hubris than by expertise. And the emerging foreign policy-articulated most vividly by Theodore Roosevelt-was obsessed with high, if misguided, principles. The "natural superiority" of the American race and the corollary inferiority of so many colonial peoples, combined with a ruddy love of power as the prime expression of national will, combined to make America morally obtuse proto-imperialists. But these developments in foreign policy certainly do not fit Wiebe's model of domestic policy. No problem, Wiebe can make it all fit by the simple device of using foreign policy as an arena to slap those persons with power he detests (Theodore Roosevelt mainly) while using it to heap praise on those he admires (primarily Woodrow Wilson). So it fits a different kind of model. It's all Teddy Roosevelt's fault apparently. [2] America's entry into World War I is then easily seen as a kind of inevitable consequence of America's disorderly, naive, personality-centered, power-worshiping, foreign policy. Long-standing ties to Britain, and an inability to see the world in larger terms, set us careening down an inevitable path. We entered the War, it seems, because we could not figure out how not to; because our benighted approach to foreign policy-seasoned with a healthy dose of blind avarice-greased the chute in ways that doomed us to the descent. In the aftermath of the War, the progressives' hope of applying progressivism to foreign policy-the League of Nations- was killed by the icy opposition of the men, weaned by TR, who viewed foreign policy as being about power, and who therefore refused any notion of reform which diminished that power. It was all Teddy Roosevelt's fault again. Wiebe's prose, invariably graceful, is sometimes hyperbolic and-before he shifts gears a third-way through the book after arriving at the pivot-point of 1896-it is also sometimes bleak. This is how he describes the aftermath of the Presidential election of 1896: "However cathartic the climax of 1896 had been, traces of uneasiness remained in the victors as well as the vanquished. If from below the business magnate could never serve as quite same pure model of success, from above the masses could never seem quite so sheeplike. They would bear a close watch . . . . Throughout America a residual fear had shrunk the outer limits of optimism." [3] One sometimes gets the impression that Wiebe hears the hoofbeats of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse echoing in the distance down the cobblestones streets of late 19th century America, as if disaster is just the turn of a corner away. We begin to wonder how-if American society was as fractured with conflicts as Wiebe describes-it could possibly keep from flying apart in an orgy of self-destruction. But even a society modernizing at a dizzying pace, as America certainly was in this period, has more stability, more simple day-to-day living of life, and indeed, more optimism about the future, than we would gather from reading Wiebe. [4 ]Not only is Wiebe's account unbalanced by an over-dramatization of the conflicts of Gilded Age/Progressive Era America, it is also unbalanced by leaving out entirely any discussion of major trends of a less conflicted nature. For example, this is the same era which witnessed the rise of mass leisure as a prominent feature of American life. Organized team sports, especially baseball, became national obsessions. Coney Island, Luna Park and Dreamland competed for the most ostentatious displays (Dreamland, with its 1 million incandescent lights, had a main searchlight visible 50 miles out to sea) and drew millions of urban residents to their arcade pleasures. Much of the "conflict" and "search for order" during this period involved questions no more profound than whether the Steeplechase ride at Coney Island was more fun than the recreation of the Boar War at Dreamland. The period also saw an impressive prosperity which subsequent historians have described as the rise of Consumerism. While Wiebe tells the story of the breakdown of rural farming economies, he barely mentions the offsetting gains in real wealth experienced by rural residents and their vastly greater access to the goods of the industrial society through the appearance of such key innovations as the rise of mail-order catalogs, which spread consumer opportunity to previously isolated rural areas. In much of rural America, the Bible and the Sears catalog were the only two books in the home. The Sears catalog, colloquially called "the Wish Book,"opened a door of opportunity to rural residents which had never existed in the old rural economy. There are other serious problems with Wiebe. His grotesque portrait of Theodore Roosevelt (cf. esp. pgs. 189-192) is little short of historical slander. His 1960s-era contempt for TR has quite gone out of fashion now. A more reliable and balanced account can be found in such recent works as Stacy Cordery's Theodore Roosevelt: In the Vanguard of the Modern, (Wadsworth, 2003). The greatest weakness of this generally impressive book is that Wiebe spends the first third of the work detailing how America was falling apart, then suddenly in the second two-thirds he is detailing how it was put back together in a new way-not always to Wiebe's liking, which he makes abundantly clear through the device of tart literary condescension. How and why this shift occurred is unexplained-as if the sun set one evening in 1896 on a scene of gray depressing despair and rose the next morning in a new world of middle-class, scientific, pragmatic, real reform. What happened during that magical night is a mystery left unexamined by Wiebe. EndNotes: 1. For a discussion of the scope and tenor of antebellum-era reform movements see my previous review of Steven Mintz's Moralists and Modernizers. 2. Of course Wiebe does not say this; it is just that he would not take it amiss if the reader happened to somehow come away with this impression. 3. Wiebe, op. cit., pg. 110. 4. In her remarks before the SHGAPE, Elisabeth Perry-in trying to carve out a bigger role for women in the history of reform-argues that the era of reform had so much momentum and such a mass of dedicated advocates that we can see clear evidence of its existence as early as 1870 and equally convincing evidence of its persistence at least until the start of the Cold War in 1950! How, we must wonder, could a society as Dickensian as the one depicted by Wiebe have generated so much energy for forward progress?