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ROBERT WIEBE'S THE SEARCH FOR ORDER, FIFTY YEARS ON

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2018

Ian Tyrrell
Ian Tyrrell*
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales
*
email: [email protected]
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Extract

When invited to write this retrospective review, I turned to my library shelves to pick up once more The Search for Order, 1877–1920. My faded paperback copy has a striking image of a railroad track, peeling off into the distance, past a mine site, and then disappearing over the horizon. The colors are shades of red, a black tinged in the glow of red, and a pale pink sky. The scene conveys both an unsettling alarm at the turmoil of society in the coloration, and a binding process through the railroad. I have just discovered that Saul Lambert (a noted illustrator) drew this evocative scene for Hill and Wang, and the job was exceedingly well done.

Type
Classic Book Reflection
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , April 2018 , pp. 397 - 411
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2018 

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References

NOTES

1 Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)Google Scholar.

2 Hays, Samuel P., The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914, 2nd ed. (1957; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

3 Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1955)Google Scholar.

4 Beard, Charles and Beard, Mary, The Rise of American Civilization, 1 vol. ed. (1927: New York: Macmillan, 1930)Google Scholar. For Wiebe's appreciation of the Beards' work, see The Search for Order, 303.

5 Cochran, Thomas C., “The ‘Presidential Synthesis' in American History,” American Historical Review 53 (July 1948): 748–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, methodologically, Zelizer, Julian “Beyond the Presidential Synthesis: Reordering Political Time” in Zelizer, Governing America: The Revival of Political History, ed. Zelizer, Julian E. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 11–40Google Scholar.

6 See esp. the recent work in Nichols, Christopher M. and Unger, Nancy C., eds., A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2017)Google Scholar.

7 Chandler, Alfred D., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

8 Galambos, Louis, “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business History Review 57 (Winter 1983): 471–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Henretta, James, “Modernization: Toward a False Synthesis,” Reviews in American History, 5:3 (1997): 445–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tipps, Dean C., “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of National Societies: A Critical Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 15:2 (1973): 199–226CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rodgers, Daniel T., “Tradition, Modernity and the American Industrial Worker: Reflections and Critique,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7 (Spring 1977): 655–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cmiel, Kenneth, “Destiny and Amnesia: The Vision of Modernity in Robert Wiebe's The Search for Order,” Reviews in American History 21 (June 1993): 352–68, at 353–54, 358, 360CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grew, Raymond, “Modernization and Its Discontents,” American Behavioral Scientist 21:2 (1977): 289–312CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Wiebe, Robert H., Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

11 The Hill and Wang series' allocation of periods itself is an accomplice to this methodological choice with its determining synthesis of forward movement, and it is hard to see what Wiebe could have done to overcome the defect.

12 James Henretta, “Modernization: Toward a False Synthesis,” 445–52; Tipps, “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of National Societies,” 199–226; Rodgers, “Tradition, Modernity and the American Industrial Worker,” 655–81.

13 Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

14 Evans, Richard J., The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815–1914 (New York: Penguin, 2017)Google Scholar, demonstrates how interconnected technologies were similarly affecting European nations.

15 Howe, Daniel Walker, What Hath God Wrought?: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

16 For the national spread of the telegraph, see John, Richard, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

17 Ian Tyrrell, “Connections, Networks, and the Beginnings of a Global America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era” in Nichols and Unger, A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 38–98.

18 This is a theme in Chaplin, Joyce, Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 214–15Google Scholar.

19 Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Random House, 1955)Google Scholar. It might be worth noting, too, that his interpretation broke with the parallel interpretation of David Donald, who saw antebellum reformers as exhibit number one for the status anxiety thesis. Donald, David H., “Toward a Reconsideration of Abolitionists” in Donald, ed., Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (New York: Knopf, 1956), 19–36Google Scholar.

20 However, the theme of organization and its contradictory impacts for the representation of workers were employed to good effect in Greene, Julie, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, e.g., 14, 72.

21 Painter, Nell Irvin, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), xii–xiiiGoogle Scholar.

22 See, e.g., Sklar, Kathryn and Palmer, Beverly Wilson, eds., The Selected Letters of Florence Kelley, 1869–1931 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), xxiiGoogle Scholar.

23 Gutman, Herbert G., “Protestantism and the American Labor Movement: The Christian Spirit in the Gilded Age,” American Historical Review 72 (Oct. 1966): 74–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 78; cf. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 112.

24 I have personally attempted to take this into account in Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), chap. 5Google Scholar.

25 Beard and Beard, The Rise of American Civilization. This contrast also shows how far historians had travelled intellectually from the 1960s to just before the Great Recession of 2007–08—away from the world of Charles Beard and his influence on the integration of economic history into historical narratives.

26 Wiebe, Robert H., Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

27 A point nicely emphasized by White, Richard, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 59Google Scholar.

28 For this, one must consult Johnson, Benjamin Heber, Escaping the Dark City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

29 This phenomenon was not the projection of a newly empowered middle class and its sensibilities, but, to an extent not yet fully appreciated, a product of a new historical conjuncture, a theme anticipated by Wiebe himself. For the standard coverage, see Hays, Samuel P., Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959)Google Scholar.

30 There are hints of this in Johnson, Escaping the Dark City, 28, 59–60, 81–82.

31 But see Matthew Bowman, “Religion in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era” in Nichols and Unger, A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 165–79, esp. 185; David C. Hammack, “Nonprofit Organizations, Philanthropy, and Civil Society” in ibid., 217–21; Flanagan, “Decades of Upheaval and Reform,” ibid., 217; McGerr, Michael, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), 66, 68, 81Google Scholar; Luker, Ralph E., The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Dorrien, Gary, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Carter, Heath W., Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Dorrien sees Social Christianity and the Social Gospel as interchangeable terms. Dorrien, Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal of Social Christianity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003)Google Scholar. On the historiography, see Fishburn, Janet, “Historiography of the Social Gospel and the Missionary Movement” in Shen, Wilbert R., ed., North American Foreign Missions, 1810–1914: Theology, Theory, and Policy (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 218, 222Google Scholar. See also Fink, Leon, The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 137–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 This was similar to the approach of Hays, Response to Industrialism, 93.

33 Wiebe, The Search for Order, 111. The chronology of this shift was quite conventional: For Wiebe, the 1896 election represented “a final act of organizational self-destruction” for the impractical Populists (p. 102).

34 Fink, The Long Gilded Age; Edwards, Rebecca, “Politics, Social Movements, and the Periodization of American History,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8 (Oct. 2009): 463–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sanders, Elizabeth, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Nugent, Walter, “Preface to the Second Edition,” The Tolerant Populists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Postel, Charles, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Flanagan, Maureen A., America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

35 See, e.g., Perry, Elisabeth, “Men Are from the Gilded Age, Women Are from the Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1 (Jan. 2002): 25–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schneirov, Richard, “Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873–1898,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 (July 2006): 189–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Edwards, Rebecca, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 156–60 at 156Google Scholar.

37 Postel, The Populist Vision, 55, 154, 164, 289 (quote); Edwards, New Spirits, 156–60.

38 Flanagan, America Reformed, 199–212.

39 Edwards, “Politics, Social Movements, and the Periodization of American History,” 465 (quote); Edwards, “Response 2,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 (July 2006): 232, 234Google Scholar; Perry, “Men Are from the Gilded Age, Women Are from the Progressive Era,” 25–48. See, more generally, the Forum on “Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 (July 2006): 189–240Google Scholar; and the October 2009 Forum, “Should We Abolish the Gilded Age?,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8 (Oct. 2009): 459–80Google Scholar.

40 Leuchtenburg, William E., “Progress and Imperialism: The Progressive Movement and American Foreign Relations,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49 (Dec. 1952): 483–504CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, “Manifest Destiny and the Philippines” in Aaron, Daniel, ed., America in Crisis: Fourteen Crucial Episodes in American History (New York: Knopf, 1952), 173–200Google Scholar. For the links between domestic and foreign, and between progressivism and imperialism, see McCoy, Alfred W. and Scarano, Francisco A., eds., The Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Hilfrich, Fabian, Debating American Exceptionalism: Empire and Democracy in the Wake of the Spanish-American War (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), esp. 167–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Montgomery, David, “Workers' Movements in the United States Confront Imperialism: The Progressive Era Experience,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7 (Jan. 2008): 7–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Flanagan, America Reformed, 205, 207.

41 Hofstadter, Richard, “Cuba, the Philippines and Manifest Destiny” in Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1967), 145–87Google Scholar; Hofstadter, “Manifest Destiny and the Philippines,” 173–200. As David S. Brown points out, Hofstadter was in turn indebted to Julius Pratt for this interpretation. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 245Google Scholar; Pratt, Julius W., Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936)Google Scholar.

42 See, e.g., Pletcher, David M., The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 395Google Scholar; Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Involvement: American Economic Expansion across the Pacific, 1784–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 303Google Scholar. The documentation of the nineteenth-century involvement abroad shown by Pletcher is convincing; less so the assumption that 1898–1901 did not represent a substantial change.

43 I have discussed much of this in Tyrrell, Ian, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. An illuminating study of labor and empire is Montgomery, “Workers' Movements in the United States Confront Imperialism,” 7–42.

44 Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Tyrrell, Reforming the World; Tyrrell, Crisis of the Wasteful Nation, esp. chap. 1.

45 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 609–10, regarding Mexico and mining; Pletcher, David M., Rails, Mines, and Progress: Seven American Promoters in Mexico, 1867–1911 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958)Google Scholar.

46 Tyrrell, “Connections, Networks, and the Beginnings of a Global America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.”

47 A (qualified) admirer, Louis Galambos noted that Wiebe's sections on foreign policy lacked the backing of monographic research to extend the theme of organization into foreign relations. Galambos, “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization,” 285.

48 Tyrrell, Ian, “International Aspects of the Woman's Temperance Movement in Australia: The Influence of the American WCTU, 1882–1914,” Journal of Religious History 12 (June 1983): 284–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tyrrell, Ian, Woman's World/Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

49 Lears, Jackson, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper Collins, 2009)Google Scholar; Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent; Klein, Maury, The Genesis of Industrial America, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This is partly true even of the impressive and newest synthesis of the Gilded Age, Richard White's, The Republic for Which It Stands. Though much less comprehensive, Painter’s Standing at Armageddon is rare in attending to the simultaneous influences of the domestic and international scene. Her insights flow largely from the recognition she gives to race and imperialism as issues.

50 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 6.

51 Examples are found in Postel, The Populist Vision, passim.

52 This is something that White, The Republic for Which It Stand does so well, throughout. Fink, The Long Gilded Age, 5–6, stresses the need both for broadening the period as the “long gilded age” and for integrating transnational analysis.