The Search for Order, 1877-1920

At the end of Reconstruction, the lives of most Americans were still controlled by the values of the village, the conventional 19th-century beliefs in individualism, laissez-faire, progress, and a divinely ordained social system. But in the last decades of the century, the spread of science and technology, industrialism, urbanization, immigration, and economic depressions eroded this world-view. In The Search for Order, Robert Wiebe depicts the Progressive Era of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as a search for organizing principles around which a new viable social order could be constructed in the new, modern, largely impersonal world. This subtle and sophisticated study combines the virtues of historical narrative, sociological analysis, and social criticism.