Robert Wiebe's The Search For Order

Robert Wiebe in The Search for Order portrayed the end of the nineteenth-century as a turning point for America through the restructuring of society. He described the failure of society in the United States, along the ability to continue to govern eroded by the 1870s leaving the illusion of the power of the “island communities” local governments to self-govern with a belief that it could manage and maintain the lives of its members. Wiebe covered with great detail the new dynamics of the change from local communities to urban-industrial landscapes with centralized institutions and authority while detailing the emergence of a new middle class and a new structure of government. As urban-industrial society grew, men identified more with their …show more content…
This emerging professional class understood the need for new values and new ways to own and create new opportunities in the modern world as they worked through this time of struggle. Wiebe discussed that small-town community life would be replaced by “assumptions of bureaucratic …show more content…
Even efforts at reform were reactionary attempt to reclaim the local communities of the past. The Populist movement culminated the reform groups into one political party in the early 1890s creating tension between reform and competing economic visions. This came to a head during the 1896 Presidential election in which McKinley’s victory marked a victory for the business elite and the dissolution of the reformers creating opportunities for fresh solutions facing America which established the rise of the new middle class and the