Those who embraced Social Darwinism applied a convincing biological hypothesis to the workings of society. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in England in 1859 and in the United States a year later, presented evidence that animals and plants evolve into new species through a process of natural selection that enabled those that best adjusted to the environment (the fittest) to survive. Americans were preoccupied with slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction in the 1860s, but by the 1870s their main intellectual preoccupation had become EVOLUTION or, as it was frequently called, Darwinism. It quickly converted the scientific community, and secular-minded intellectuals—influenced especially by JOHN FiSKE (for whom evolution confirmed his optimistic belief in progress)— soon followed suit. Christian churches, however, regarded Darwinism as an assault on RELIGION, since it denied that God created the world and all in it—including humans in his own image—in six days; substituted for the fall of man from innocence to sin the ascent of man; and suggested that all was accomplished not by God’s orderly plan but by haphazard, accidental mutations. Yet, the Darwinian hypothesis was so compelling that theologians of mainstream Protestant denominations and subsequently ministers of fashionable urban churches like Henry Ward Beecher accepted evolution as God’s plan and Darwinism as compatible with theism.
Darwin’s ideas triumphed not merely because of his evidence but also because his notions of competition and progress resonated strongly with the outlook of Gilded Age business owners, politicians, and intellectuals. The term Social Darwinism gave their ideas the sanction of science. Herbert Spencer, the most outstanding Social Darwinist, was enormously popular in the United States. Beecher said he expected to meet Spencer in heaven as proof of the survival of the fittest, and Andrew Carnegie understandably enough was his most prominent American disciple. Spencer argued that competition led to progress; that the fit (the rich and powerful) should be free to eliminate the unfit; and that government attempts to protect the unfit (the weak and poor) from the strong impeded progress, violated scientific law, and would in the long run fail. Spencer’s laissez-faire ideas aimed to discourage any intervention on the part of government in the economy and also to paralyze the humanitarian reform spirit that would aid the weak.
William Graham Sumner was Spencer’s most consistent American disciple. A Yale sociologist, Sumner combined elements of the Protestant ethic—industry, frugality, temperance—with laissez-faire and Darwin’s natural selection through competition. He regarded himself not as an apologist for wealthy businessmen but as a spokesman for the forgotten in the middle class who had to get by on their own wits. Sumner insisted that while laissez-faire should not protect the weak, it also meant no special governmental favors like the protective TARIEE for manufacturers. Sumner was a determinist who believed that the mores of a society evolved over time, uncontrolled by people and uninfluenced by government action, and he is renowned for his observation that you cannot legislate morality.
Social Darwinists not only saw a figurative jungle in the unbridled competition between and crass exploitation of individuals prevailing in Gilded Age America but also applied the concept of natural selection to nations and peoples. Although Americans had been convinced by historian George Bancroft that God had watched over the United States, John Fiske argued that America and Americans were the fittest nation and the most superior people in the world. In the hands of Fiske and other historians as well as clergymen like JosiAH STRONG, Darwinism provided a scientific rationale for racist ideas and imperialism, while English and German scholars stressing Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon superiority did the same.
Darwinism (evolution), however, is a neutral concept and above all is not static. Competitive ideas arise that challenge and overthrow prevailing ideas, including those of the social Darwinists. Lester Frank Ward in Dynamic Sociology (1882) challenged the Social Darwinism of Spencer and Sumner with reform Darwinism. Ward’s basic argument is that while the environment transforms animals, people transform the environment, and people can therefore control the evolutionary process. The Social Darwinists failed to appreciate the power of the human mind. Cutthroat competition and government inaction resulted from people’s decisions, and if those practices harmed society, then people could through government regulate competition. Ward’s ideas were not popular during the Gilded Age, but they were followed by reformers in the ensuing Progressive Era. Notions of racial and national superiority lost all intellectual underpinning in the 20th century with the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the post-World War II decline of imperialism.
Further reading: Robert C. Banister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979); Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).
World History
