When invited to write this retrospective review, I turned to my library shelves to pick up once more The Search for Order, 1877–1920. Footnote ¹ 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.

My copy has been well-thumbed and underlined at key points (in pencil!), but is in good condition, unlike some other old books on my shelves, such as Democracy in America or the works of Richard Hofstadter and Charles Beard, which are falling apart at the seams. The explanation is simple. The Search for Order was not a key part of my intellectual development after graduate school. In my teaching and research, I did not initially find much use for this book, as American history was split at my university into two periods, with 1877 as the dividing line. In the Australian universities of the 1970s, heads of schools still assigned courses as if issuing papal decrees. I was consigned to the earlier period, due to my original specialization in antebellum America, no doubt, and for some years rarely had the opportunity or need to reflect further on this book. Unsurprisingly I did not find it particularly useful for understanding the coming of the American Civil War. Though I did manage to trespass surreptitiously on the modern America course with a concluding lecture on 1877–1890, Wiebe's work was not helpful to me because it looks forward, and I was chiefly interested in the retrospective legacy of those antebellum and Civil War changes. When, in the midst of my research on Frances Willard and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the time came to return to the territory that Wiebe covered, the influences upon me had come from vastly different sources.

But here it is necessary to back-track. I marveled at this work as a young graduate student, having first encountered it in 1971. It was an era of such books as Wiebe's, which was set along with Samuel Hays, The Response to Industrialism, as a pair to read.Footnote ² Hays's work was more lucid and solid; Wiebe's was more sweeping and novel in its interpretation of modern America's emergence. I largely accepted its thesis. Indeed, it may have been an unconscious influence on my first book, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America (1979), in which I argued that the temperance reformers of that period were a mixture of innovative evangelicals and a modernizing middle class.

Wiebe's book and its influence must be considered in the first instance as part of the practice of professional history in the 1950s and 1960s. It gained significance because of its genre and the mode of its publication and its place in contemporary historiography. It came out as part of a prestigious Hill and Wang series on The Making of America, edited by the esteemed historian, David Donald. Dividing the nation's history into fairly large but manageable chunks gave the writer the opportunity to think big about the period at hand, and to provide a synthesis that never became bogged down in intractable or inconvenient little facts. Empirical evidence was deployed to illustrate a bold theme and took the form of meditations upon the evidence, which was often put in striking light through contextualization and comparison. Though different from the work of Louis Hartz in many ways, the arresting technique of situating a political personage or event in an entirely new angle by process of juxtaposition had echoes of Hartz's work.Footnote ³ I wondered whether Hartz had been an influence upon Wiebe. Certainly Richard Hofstadter was, and will be discussed below, but Charles Beard, a key figure in the progressive tradition, had a subtle impact upon this book if we consider history as a form of rhetorical exposition. The confident, sweeping judgments; the sense of forward motion in history; and the forging of a distinctively national story in a world of nations was characteristic of Charles and Mary Beard's The Rise of American Civilization, and the plot of The Search for Order recalls that same sense of movement and the scope of big-picture history.Footnote ⁴ As rhetoric of history, Wiebe's book was superbly successful—a tour de force in its composition and compression.

As a whole, the book should be assessed as an extended interpretive essay in which Wiebe sought to grasp the essence of change in the United States in those momentous years of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The theme was the emergence of the United States as a nation, shifting from a set of local communities to the organized society of modern America. Despite the conventional periodization imposed by the series, Wiebe's approach was part of the move away from the old “presidential synthesis” condemned by Thomas Cochran in 1948.Footnote ⁵ Wiebe was careful to situate political action in a wider sphere. He grasped the importance of voluntary associations pooling pressure and resources for the encounters with industrialization, the concentration of business, urbanization, immigration, and world power. Organized groups networked and interlocked, and took up an empirical approach that abandoned ideological agendas or holistic options. Professionalism gradually subsumed amateurism in a range of fields; the experts contributed to new social and economic policy, aided by the emerging and impressive American universities exercising a newly found and “unquestioned desire to legitimize” these new forces (p. 121). Pragmatic, incremental reform occurred but added up to a transformation of American approaches to social organization and political economy. Though the book covers nominally the period from the end of Reconstruction to 1920, the focus was on a rather abrupt transition to progressive reform during the two decades bookmarking the twentieth century's turning. This makes it extremely relevant to the historiography of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

The book appeared to a mixture of enthusiastic and respectful reviews. It continues to be footnoted in other major synthesis as an influence, or a pioneering work worth of respect.Footnote ⁶ Moreover, Wiebe's book became probably the most important foundation of an “organizational synthesis” of modern American history. It sat alongside the books of Alfred Chandler in the field of business history,Footnote ⁷ and Hays's Response to Industrialism.Footnote ⁸ True, some scholars nitpicked about this point or that. Some could, quite correctly, not see the motor forces of modernization explained, even as they were described and situated in novel ways within the stream of American history. Others tackled head-on the supposed transition Wiebe found from “island communities” to an urban, industrial and nationally oriented America, and critiqued the origins of Wiebe's conceptualization in the Weberian theory of a rationalizing bureaucracy's emergence.Footnote ⁹

While he did display the influence of the Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft dichotomy of the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, Wiebe knew that nations were not fashioned in a single period. Within the frame of 1877 to 1920, Wiebe himself treats the process as an unfinished one. Moreover, as his subsequent book, Self-Rule (1995)Footnote ¹⁰ makes clear, Wiebe did not like how an elitist and professionally ordered America had turned out, and spent the rest of his career studying the history of democracy. Still, the argument for a decisive shift at the turn of the century stands as the central interpretive feature of The Search for Order. Footnote ¹¹ The structure of the book does lend itself to oversimplification, especially since Wiebe argued for movement in one direction toward modernity.

While historians of the mid-1970s attacked modernization,Footnote ¹² in the 1990s scholars became aware, under the influence of more reflective and radical social science theories, of the social production of localism, as developed, for example, by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai.Footnote ¹³ One could argue that the fabled “island communities” of Wiebe's intellectual architecture were, for immigrants at least, reconstituted in America, or even “made” as ethnic networks and identities in new environments. Though, in Wiebe's estimate, the archetypal “small community” had “crumbled” under the forces of modernization (p. 113), the real story is as likely to have been one of a successive reproduction of traditions and the invention of new ones as society changed.

If Wiebe wanted to push his thesis on modernization even further than he did, he needed to place greater emphasis upon the changes in communications and transport, especially railroads, as the front cover of the paperback edition evocatively insinuates, but also steamships and telegraphic cables that girded the globe. These were matters that received only passing mention without analysis linking them to a communications system. The features of a communications revolution are implicit in Wiebe's examination of distant forces that “distended” island communities (p. 42), but the implications are not exactly what Wiebe argues. The integration of railroads with other elements of the communications and technology revolutions that bound society together also tied the United States to world history, as well as promoted concern over the cultural fragmentation of society rather than its integration.Footnote ¹⁴ If viewed as an instrument of purely national integration, the communications revolution is also a phenomenon that has been shown at work for the antebellum years, as in Daniel Walker Howe's magisterial volume, What Hath God Wrought. Footnote ¹⁵ The development of this national system did not start in 1877; it could be argued to equal effect that local adjustment to national communications and technological change was a driving force in the 1830s and 1840s as well.Footnote ¹⁶

A more novel feature of the postbellum years was the linking of the national networks with global trade and communications, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which almost exactly coincided with the extension of the telegraph cable to East Asia via Suez; the completion of the first American transcontinental railroad; and the beginning of globally connected commercial steamship services.Footnote ¹⁷ The phenomenon of high-ranking American officials and prominent persons undertaking globetrotting tours emerged in the 1870s, with the circumnavigations by Ulysses Grant and William Henry Seward, the trips to Europe, the “Holy Land” and Egypt of William T. Sherman and Mark Twain, and other foreign exploits that captured the imagination of people at home. Without changes in the infrastructure of Europe's empires, this phenomenon of international travel would have been impossible,Footnote ¹⁸ yet its impact on national integration remains for the most part unstudied, not only by Wiebe, but also in subsequent scholarship.

The modernization thesis was more than a story of technology and communications, however. Wiebe supplied an explanation for the rise of modernity, through the middle class, but here Wiebe's American history runs the risk of duplicating a staple in British as well as American historiography, since a rising middle class has been frequently invoked to explain democratization and social reform. Wiebe portrays the shift from tradition to modernity through the integration of formerly fragmented communities as both marking and, to some indeterminate extent, even causing the rise of a new middle class, though the explanation is not entirely clear. His concept of a confident middle class could be seen as a historiographical reaction against the status anxiety interpretation of Richard Hofstadter, to whom Wiebe is otherwise indebted for his conceptual frame of progressive “reform.”Footnote ¹⁹

Although I found the middle-class thesis attractive at first reading, when the time came to reread this book in great detail, it seemed as if American history had passed The Search for Order by. It is easy enough, perhaps too easy, to tax Wiebe for what he did not include, because some of the scholarship I am about to relate was then just a glint on the historian's horizon, or far into the future. Most obviously, my assessment registers changes in American historiography to make social history more central, and the rise of specialist but vital fields such as race and gender studies. Certainly African Americans, women's rights, and suffrage are included in Wiebe's work, but as instances of the process of networking and organizational synthesis. The labor historiography of the 1950s and 1960s was similarly deployed as evidence in a larger and more impersonal story. His account of the “Age of Organizations” was applicable to some institutional labor history, though not so easily to the bottom-up approach and the interest in noninstitutional forms of resistance to industrial capitalism—trends developing in labor history almost concurrently with Wiebe's work. Rare it was that the two types of labor history could be combined.Footnote ²⁰

Wiebe's failure to see beyond the articulate elite and the middle class to the key social problem of an industrial working class and its emergence was most strongly registered by Nell Irvin Painter, in an alternative synthesis that also deserves reflection.Footnote ²¹ For Wiebe, class formation was a complex matter, unable to be either ignored or reduced to the changing mode of production, and the middle class was the driving force in his story, not Marx's polarized class conflict. Diverse though this middle class was, to Wiebe a “remarkable degree of interaction” occurred among constituent groups with similar aims and experiences (p. 113). Yet it remains true that progressivism was the tip of a larger iceberg of social change in which the protean forces of labor and class inequality were critical, either as a perceptual stimulus to change or as agents of change. This “Social Question” of inequality and class conflict was a common progressive formulation, but not Wiebe's.Footnote ²² Though Wiebe's book was published in the midst of the social turmoil of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, the intellectual influences behind The Search for Order went back to the consensus historians of the 1950s and their reconsideration of and reaction against progressive historiography, not the charting of a class activism adapted to American conditions that came from Herbert Gutman and others influenced by E. P. Thompson, starting in the mid-1960s.Footnote ²³ But the issue at hand is even broader than class activism. If the Social Question—as significant numbers of progressives framed it—does not need to be at the center of every synthesis of the period, it ought to be kept in mind as a substantial presence, as a way of conceptualizing the distribution of social, economic, and other material resources within a nation, and internationally.Footnote ²⁴

As a work that preceded the rise of the “new social history” and the emergence of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is not surprising that Wiebe's treatment of women included them as cogs in the organizational synthesis and no more. Frances Willard of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (incorrectly given as “Women's” in the book as in some other writing on the Gilded Age) epitomized one version of the nineteenth-century search for ways to control distant forces shaping women's lives. Wiebe interpreted Willard as a figure seeking grand solutions, like her friend Terence Powderly. Willard's Do-Everything policy captured the overreach, while her dalliance with spiritualism in her final years indicted her in Wiebe's eyes as a dreamer. Such people Wiebe regarded as defensive, even utopian thinkers destined to give way to more focused, optimistic reformers who used their expertise to advance reform, while the populists and their allies looked back. In so far as the women's movement succeeded, its achievement was based on professionalization of so-called natural tasks that women had undertaken, such as child care and moral advocacy. In this synthesis, women contributed to the creation of a new bureaucratic order, without shattering gender stereotypes or the entrenched inequality of gender relations. In this analysis, as elsewhere in the book, one can, in retrospect, find plenty of implicit criticism of the new social order evolving in the United States, but not an overt and radical critique.

In contrast to the sidelining of cultural and social history, many of the hallmark economic and industrial changes are indeed front and center in Wiebe's synthesis. These are topics relevant to the rediscovery of business history or the history of capitalism today.Footnote ²⁵ The importance given to economics as part of “organizational” change is not surprising given Beard's legacy for the historians of the 1950s concerning the integration of economic history into historical narratives, but also Wiebe's major monographic work on progressivism as an “age of organizational reform,” in Businessmen and Reform (1962, pp. 16–41).Footnote ²⁶ Nevertheless, in The Search for Order business is just one of the participants in the organization of society rather than a singular force to be combated, as progressive historians would have it. The peculiar political economy of the United States in which the state was considered weak and private enterprise strong is congenial to this view of a fragmented society, but this view of the American state underrates the latter's importance as coordinating and doling out the tasks of infrastructural development through land grants, tariffs, and other measures. Fortunately, new work accumulating over the last two decades on the history of the American state is available to show how pervasive and profound its economic influence was.Footnote ²⁷

Ideas that impinged upon the running of the economy and society, especially the concept of efficiency, are recognized in The Search for Order, as is conservation of natural resources. Wiebe asserts that conservation was the “most complicated political story of its time” (p. 185), but the worldview of conservationists is not explored in the book.Footnote ²⁸ Conservation was a theme that surged in interest after 1900 in a way that made it not simply another “issue” (p. 185) but central to progressivism's purpose by 1912.Footnote ²⁹

Given Wiebe's emphasis upon modernization, a bureaucratic ethos, and organizational reform, it is perhaps understandable that the intellectual content of progressivism runs second to the process of progressivism in the exposition. Forward looking or backward looking, the dichotomy fails to grasp the internal tensions in—and dynamics of—progressivism. These tensions were not just evidence of battles between different interest or status groups but revelatory of progressivism's contradictory core. The case of prohibition is apt. Wiebe does not give this movement significant recognition as an aspect of progressivism and tends to slot alcohol prohibition, like populism, into the category of “panacea” (p. 98) associated by him with retrograde and doomed campaigns to preserve small communities. This interpretation is similar to Hofstadter's characteristically cosmopolitan condemnation of the same phenomenon. Wiebe puts the problem of prohibition, in my mind a central Progressive Era “reform,” to the margins. There are few references to the movement, and it is seen as triumphing only through a narrowing and dissipation of the progressive agenda in response to the fear of alien subversion during the Great War, 1917–1919 (pp. 291–92). To the extent that Wiebe interprets it at all, prohibition was “a narrow zeal” (p. 110), with its earlier manifestation a “passing fad” (p. 105), and its later surge an afterthought of the “new reforming middle class” (p. 292). Not acknowledged is the extent to which prohibition was a persistent claim within Progressive Era reform, as an issue tied to many other progressive causes. The arguments for prohibition's moral and social efficiency during the war represented more an apotheosis of progressivism than a retreat from its reformist ethos and agenda.

Associated with this marginalization of prohibition is the dismissive approach to religion. The Social Gospel is consigned to the vaporous dreaming of a Washington Gladden with his “grand solvents of love and brotherhood” (p. 138), while religion's role in progressivism becomes an elaborate justification, but no more, to give the cause “that distinctive aura of righteousness” evident at its “floodtime” of 1912 (p. 208). This treatment of religion as both backward looking and declining on the one hand, and an epiphenomenal gloss of a progressive momentum on the other, is symptomatic of the approach to secularization as part of modernity, in which a more rational society is advocated by progressives. Against this advance of rationality, the flare-up of cultural politics in the Great War and after looms as an unexpected speed bump, rather than an extension of the wild ride that political progressivism already was.

On this matter, I suspect that fewer historians would now neglect or omit the significant if not vital role of religion in the shaping of America in the late nineteenth century and during the Progressive Era. New studies are returning to the old and well-researched topic of the Social Gospel with fresh eyes for its applications, to focus on the flexible capacity of its doctrines to inform central parts of progressive politics and practice at home and abroad.Footnote ³⁰ Granted, this reanalysis of religious influence is only just beginning to reach new audiences; thus Wiebe is closer to the current consensus than perhaps many recognize, as most of this work is being done in the specialized history of religion and the history of missions, or in religious studies.Footnote ³¹

If Wiebe's uneven attention to progressive policy and practice opens his work to obvious revisionism, his periodization of the era initially received little criticism from historians. The quite conventional architecture of the book explains this outcome.Footnote ³² Alongside the demands of modernization theory favoring long-range change and impersonal forces rather than political action, Wiebe strongly asserts the idea of a sharp turning point in the late 1890s. He argues for a “remarkably abrupt, clean removal of old causes and old champions” (p. 105) as populism imploded, paving the way for a new type of reform grounded in the urban middle class.Footnote ³³ Despite surveying the deep roots of progressivism in the nineteenth century, Wiebe's insistence on this short but sharp break between old and new does not fit much of the more recent research emphasizing continuities between populism and progressivism, and between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era in general. This remains true whether historians think of a “long” Progressive Era or a “long” Gilded Age that lasted into the 1920s. To cite just one obvious example, the contribution of pre-1900 experience in the agrarian sector to progressivism was more important than Wiebe realized.Footnote ³⁴

While newer work has the better of the argument over long-term roots and significant continuities across the entire period, it is less satisfactory than Wiebe's for highlighting distinctive and novel features in progressivism after the 1890s. These features are the movement of reform attention more to the national arena; the greater prominence of conservation within progressive thought and national policy; the assumption of a more activist foreign policy; and the acquisition of colonies, protectorates, and other signs of an imperial agenda or mindset. In the recent discussions among GAPE scholars over continuity versus change, little attention has been paid to these new pressures as critical to periodization or new syntheses.Footnote ³⁵ Reconceptualizations look for domestic continuities or breaks, assuming international aspects to be secondary, and almost entirely exclude or minimize the issue of the nation's changing world role. Perhaps this is because they assume that role. Two issues are present here. One is non-state international engagement by individuals, groups, and organizations. Material on these matters is steadily accumulating in the work of historians. Thus the “emerging global information age” of the late nineteenth century, as Rebecca Edwards puts it, allowed foreign missionary work to “reach new heights of ambition.”Footnote ³⁶ Related currents of “an increasingly modern, technologically sophisticated, and globally connected society” made populists aware of global market competition and various international nostrums for reform.Footnote ³⁷

The other issue, imperialism and the American state, is distinct. By no means were all of those Americans making global connections pro-imperialist. Of course it is not that historians are unaware of the rise of a formal empire,Footnote ³⁸ but that its importance for conceptualizing the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era is underrated or omitted. Only Edwards mentions imperialism in the two JGAPE forums (2006 and 2009) on periodization, and she implies that progressivism and imperialism may be incompatible, at least in regard to a definition of progressivism as “a story of turn-of-the-century citizens who suddenly took up the causes of democracy, poverty eradication, and social justice.”Footnote ³⁹ This stance could be taken as identifying with the era’s most “progressive” elements in retrospect, rather than examining the full range of policies championed by those who took up the label of “Progressive.” Little has been done to build upon the ideas first developed by William Leuchtenburg and other 1950s historians that imperialism and progressivism were far from mutually exclusive before World War I. While newer research has its valid point on periodization, it mostly fails to explore the connections between the rise of progressivism and the assumption of world power.Footnote ⁴⁰

In contrast, Wiebe is helpful on this transformed agenda because he considers the changing geopolitical focus of progressivism in relation to the domestic reorganization of society. He also provides an important clue to that quickening influence of national progressivism, provided we connect the content of progressive attitudes and policies to the spatial shift in American consciousness that he identifies from 1896 to 1899. Located in the fateful years from the election of McKinley and the defeat of the populist insurgence to the confirmation of a formal empire, Wiebe detects a cathartic “climax.” That was the “real fruition of the years of turmoil” of the previous two decades. Describing those years as a “culmination in unity and world destiny” (p. 106), Wiebe thereby acknowledges an American apprehension of future global power.

But if this interpretation takes us some way to explaining the shift from the Gilded Age to a Progressive Era, the realization of geopolitics is treated in The Search for Order not so much as an encounter with the world as a projection of American social trends upon it. The relationship remains one-way, and that way was outward. Seeing the Progressive Era's external manifestations in foreign policy and empire as a climactic moment rooted in the resolution of internal social strains and the discovery of a “destiny” for a rising nation reveals Wiebe to be too easily embroiled within a counter-progressive and cold war teleology of history, especially as found in Hofstadter's “Cuba, the Philippines and Manifest Destiny,” an idea first put forward in 1952.Footnote ⁴¹

In his emphasis upon a decisive shift around 1896–1901 in the American orientation toward national networks and national solutions, Wiebe treats American relations with the world as an add-on. But the chapters on foreign policy, including World War I, call into question the entire pattern of the “organizational synthesis.” The international encounter is seen as a manifestation of “an unmistakeable immaturity” (p. 254); the nation came to world power unready for it, with no experience of such power, and little knowledge. According to Wiebe, the nation lacked the networks of information gathering that might underpin a sound and consistent foreign policy. Without specialist expertise in areas of interest, the government fell back upon informal contacts, especially business interests. These circumstances of American expansion bequeathed an ad hoc and “amateurish approach” that “accentuated the elements of chance where consistency was essential.” The result was “explosive action” (p. 254) and “intuitive management” (p. 255) rather than careful and considered policies using professional experts and bureaucratic procedures. Yet the process of information gathering, systematizing of policies, and so on is described as basically the “same broad pattern” as for domestic policy—that is, a move from an initial attempt to impose a “crude order” to a more rational policy based on executive action (p. 229).

Confounding the idea that foreign policy came as an afterthought, Wiebe conceded that this “basic qualitative shift” occurred in both foreign and domestic politics in the same period, “those few critical years around 1900” (p. 229). That time frame marked in his view the arrival of progressivism. Even leaving aside Wiebe's aphoristic pronouncements and the contradictory nature of his exposition, more recent research does not substantiate the lack of foreign exposure before 1900 required by his thesis. The trend of scholarship since the 1990s emphasizes the growth of power and the antecedents of formal empire in the nation's nineteenth-century's expansion, suggesting a broader and more deeply rooted engagement with the wider world that began informally, but which became formal and ideologically harnessed to domestic policy after 1898.Footnote ⁴² A growing body of transnationally oriented U.S. scholarship treats the reciprocal actions of individuals and groups across national boundaries in the nineteenth century. Especially after about 1870, and particularly through the work of missionaries, travelers, scientists, military officers, and businesspeople did these contacts accrue, but after the century's turn they became the foundation of an intensified program for exerting American global influence and power.Footnote ⁴³

It is the Achilles heel of Wiebe's interpretation that he failed to grasp this international and transnational interaction with domestic progressivism. He states that prior to World War I the middle class (that he places at the center of his story) was “otherwise occupied” than thinking about international engagement or exporting American values overseas (p. 237). Of all the sweeping statements in his book, this is the one that least stands the test of time and later historical research. Of course we now know so much more about these things from the work of Daniel Rodgers and many others. Middle-class reform was not limited by national boundaries. Inspiration and techniques often came from abroad and these were reexported abroad in complex patterns of circulation and adaptation.Footnote ⁴⁴

A repositioning of the course of American history giving attention to this reciprocal interaction with the wider world in the late nineteenth century would help to overcome the teleology toward national integration and world power at the heart of Wiebe's work. Oddly, Wiebe's work provides us with a clue, and a way to square the emphasis on unilinear national development still dominant in U.S. scholarship with our growing knowledge of transnational connections. The networks that began to bind the nation and disrupt localism also destabilized it because they brought more and more transnational influences to bear upon the United States well before the acquisition of a formal empire in 1898, and simultaneously provided many opportunities abroad. Borders were not fixed, as Wiebe conceded, and they were emotionally imagined: “The foreign” could mean “any distant, threatening power” (p. 54), thus hinting at the plasticity of boundary definitions in nineteenth-century America. Wiebe almost gives the game away when he argues that two important elements in the new foreign policy developed after 1898 were a messianic progressivism designed to make the world into the United States, evidenced by 1917 in Wilsonian diplomacy; and an “exaggerated” type of “ambivalence” toward global dangers and opportunities that had its roots in the old island communities (p. 237). In announcing the latter idea, Wiebe does not take seriously enough the extension of his point—that the foreign and alien blurred into the question of distant and unknown not only for the feared effects upon the United States but also for the prospects it offered abroad, and the hope for a newer and more positive engagement with the wider world.

This tension was not new in 1900, nor 1917. Thus the railroad expansion of the 1880s and 1890s did not stop at U.S. borders but connected with Canada, and drove deeply into Northern Mexico where American-owned railroads facilitated U.S. investment, mining, and the movement of migrant workers.Footnote ⁴⁵ Even more so, the telegraph made the United States globally connected by the 1880s via the Atlantic and Indian Oceans (and the Pacific in 1903), and made Americans through their newspapers conceptually aware of a growing and apparent simultaneity of global change.Footnote ⁴⁶ Manifest as they were in the 1870s to 1890s, these features point to foundations for the later engagement of the United States abroad, and to the impact of external pressures upon the United States, from competition for trade to immigration and repatriation, cultural and social movements, and the imitative example of reform. It would require a much greater attention to the actual processes of business expansion and foreign investment as well as migration and cultural interchange to realize that a national social and economic order was not being created in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era so much as repeatedly disrupted and reshaped.

This failure to consider the international context over the entire period of his study explains why the section on foreign policy is the least satisfactory part of the book, yet at the same time the most heuristically promising. Even some supporters of the organizational synthesis were unconvinced by this section when the book first appeared. The evidence did not conform easily to Wiebe's networks of modernity as shaping a nation.Footnote ⁴⁷ Given Wiebe's focus on civil society's role in the promotion of order rather than the federal government's, a great weakness was the failure to consider how uneven the national frame of reference was, and how permeable the national borders remained. Despite the growing calls for immigration restriction and the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, 1882–1902, the pattern of American cross-border interactions was intensifying in velocity, and the borders “leaked,” one might say, persistently. Not until 1924, with the National Immigration Act was anything like a comprehensive immigration reform that might stem the transnational flows attained. Even then, it failed to enact border policies as rigid as those adopted in Australia. Many aspects of this question could be given further consideration. The repatriation of increasing numbers of “immigrants” in the late nineteenth century through to 1914 was creating a floating quasi-proletariat that did not integrate well into American society, and spurred cultural anxiety over “Americanization.” The wartime xenophobia only makes full sense if the impact of this demographic turbulence before the war is understood. State repression from 1917 to 1922 was a response to this social disruption, but its impact, as the war and postwar industrial turmoil shows, was not to set in place a new social order, at least until the 1920s and the demographic stabilization that temporarily occurred with the sharp reduction of foreign immigration from 1924 to the late 1940s. If modern America could ever be declared as created or made, it was in the challenges of this demographical consolidation by the mid-twentieth century—the rise of the American Century—and the aftermath of the greatest depression that the world had ever known.

While Wiebe conveys the fluidity of social change, a more reflexive interpretation of that change is required; it should be one in which movement is not one-way, but in many directions; this is probably why I did not re-bond with the book in the 1980s. By then I was already beginning the study of the international experiences and transnational diffusion of the WCTU and other religiously affiliated reform organizations in the 1880s.Footnote ⁴⁸ Wiebe's work was of little use in this research. While monographic work for the integration of domestic history and international history is beginning to mount, in most subsequent syntheses covering the same period as Wiebe's the frame remains mostly national.Footnote ⁴⁹

As Wiebe's work and its scholarly reception indicate, the pressures to explain the national integration of the Great Republic are substantial and valid, and the difficulties inherent in challenging this frame remain formidable. As the bulk of historical scholarship is synthesized in this commonsense way, it is all very well for people like me to highlight empirical case studies showing the existence of alternative contexts and connections that Wiebe has not studied, but quite another to show how transnational approaches could combine with the internal nationalizing story that he emphasized, and which most others since have continued to stress. This combination could not possibly be achieved simply by weighing up the national versus the transnational. Richard White is quite correct in his argument that “the nation took shape in response to these larger [transnational] changes, rather than as a reflection of them.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Just as obviously, 1898–1901 constituted an important shift in those international and transnational circumstances, and it is that “qualitative shift … in those few critical years” that Wiebe did grasp as important for foreign policy (p. 229). Changes in both strategy and procedure can clearly be seen in the early twentieth century. Wiebe himself noted the growth of an “inner circle” applying “bureaucratic management” (p. 235), a cadre that he describes as the “apostles of power” (p. 236). But Wiebe does not explain why, or if, this context was important for domestic policy, even as he demonstrates that the scope of dangers conjured up by citizens and the agendas of politicians and businesspeople did not stop at national boundaries.

If the insights in Wiebe's sections on foreign policy are to be something more plausible than an add-on to the national story, some new method would have to be worked out to allow us to assess, in terms of the networks of power, the significance of international and transnational exchanges. It is necessary to determine both the links between the inside and the outside of American history, and the continuities or otherwise of these interactions across some dividing line, whether around 1900 or not. A statistical enumeration of the flow of people and goods and other communications, showing the thickening of routes for steamships and cable connections, might elucidate the transnational context, but would not capture the dynamic and interactive qualities of those connections, or their emotional impacts on the lives of ordinary Americans.Footnote ⁵¹ What remain to be considered are the interactions between technologies, their synergies, and the emotional and perceptual history of technological impacts. Wiebe was on the right track in considering the “search for order” as a study in the emotional reaction to distant forces. In a way, we can come back to him for aid in this endeavor, at least through his methods, especially his emphasis on networks, associations, economic institutions, and the indeterminacy of borders.

To this perspective must be added, however, the individual actors so often missing in Wiebe's study; reintroducing them and their ideas, ideals, and stories would allow us not only to follow trails of transnational influence, but also the history of the 1870s to 1920s as a narrative of contingency.Footnote ⁵² Though Wiebe treats late nineteenth-century movements as a series of alternative aspirations for America, he then consigns that kind of aspiration to history's dustbin. In Wiebe's account, industrial and progressive America seems indeed to be on Saul Lambert's railroad track, going in one direction only. But did modern America turn out to be as foreclosed as Wiebe's study inexorably suggests? I think not. The inception of the Progressive Era was not the end of aspirations for a better path, but only the beginning.

It was exactly a decade after being introduced to the book that I met the man, just once. The venue was the cafeteria of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The time was late September 1981. It was an audience of sorts that I had solicited, but the request was only partly spurred by my acquaintance with his book. My curiosity arose because I fortuitously spent a summer minding his house in Evanston while researching the records of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union held at WCTU National Headquarters in that salubrious little city. It was a pleasant and productive summer that I spent compiling work that added to the case for the international and, indeed, more broadly transnational contacts of Americans in the Gilded Age. Though I was far from conscious of contradicting Wiebe, my work spanned the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and argued, in effect, that American middle-class women were not so “otherwise occupied” as to be unable to formulate ambitions and emotional investments of time, money, imagination, and personnel to projects across national boundaries. Nor did that international interest cease when Frances Willard died in 1898. Neither did her death bring about a return to single-issue politics, despite the widespread historical assumption of such a fate, and the WCTU did not fade in numbers but actually grew to its greatest extent in the 1920s, albeit in different circumstances. The jury is still out on the later influence of the WCTU and its more conservative cast, as its post-Willard history remains neglected; but the cliché of its irrelevance after 1898 would certainly have perplexed Herbert Hoover as he posed for a photograph with its leaders, while soliciting women's votes in the 1928 presidential election. The shape of historiography has moved on, making studies of women's movements of far more importance than conceded in Wiebe's work.

Little did I know, when I sat in that cafeteria with Wiebe as he munched his sandwich and downed his soft drink, that I might be pronouncing on his book thirty-six years later. Put that way, the enterprise seems impertinent. But now, as then, I could reply that Robert Wiebe was a historian whom I admired, despite my reservations about The Search for Order. The book was a remarkable achievement that could only be explained as a product of thorough knowledge of the existing historiography, an ambitious framework, and a capacity for creative application of interdisciplinary concepts. It is a book that still speaks to our times, even as our answers may be different.