social darwinism definition us history

social darwinism definition us history

Exploring the Concept of Social Darwinism in U.S. History

1. Introduction to Social Darwinism

Although Horatio Alger was a prolific 19th and 20th-century writer, who wrote more than 100 novels and countless articles, poetry, and video, this paper, however, is not about Horatio Alger. Rather, this research paper is a review of papers, newspaper articles, books, and other academic materials about Social Darwinism in the United States, particularly during the period from the 1880s to the first three decades of the 20th century. It delves into the concept of Social Darwinism, how the concept got started, and how it shaped and enabled the moderate and radical use of the laissez-faire policy during the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the Roaring 20s, and the subsequent Great Depression in the United States. Also to be compared is Kim Il Sung’s and Kim Jong Il’s Social Darwinism, financed by communism, with that of laissez-faire in the United States, and the recent denuclearization of North Korea. It was then that the Social Darwinism Theory made its American debut.

Acting as a sort of social Darwinistic base, laissez-faire U.S. government policy facilitated abuse and exploitation in the workplace and allowed big businesses, including the coffers of the U.S. government, to become fatter and fatter. Critics such as Judge G. Ulysses Fellows, T.C. Eccles, L.C. Grielan, Clarence Darrow, Samuel Wheelwright, and William Morris Stewart attacked its principles, but it was the arguments by critics such as Father John A. Ryan, John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan, David Augustus Park, and Rosalind Moore, who offered various explanations to soften Horatio Alger’s theory of success that eventually made it passé. In more recent times, the concept of “survival of the fittest” and self-evident qualities of those who are successful have been incorporated in opposing economic models such as Keynesian economics and the Welfare State.

2. Origins and Development of Social Darwinism in the United States

The political origins of social Darwinism can be traced back to the writings of Plato and Aristotle, but not in the developed and systematic form that would be found from the 19th century onwards. Such a vision would originate from the belief that all offspring are different from each other and because of this, these parents will unwittingly prefer those with the physical qualities that are seen as most beneficial at an individual or family level. Aristotle did not go so far, and his goal was to propose that the implementation of laws should encourage family relationships, such as parental marriages, exclusively between aristocrats while avoiding unions between members of lower social groups. Over time, the concept would go through an important historical journey, adapting and always adapting to the requirements of the powers that be. In the most general terms, it is an assimilation of the concept of natural selection, which is at the basis of organic evolution, on the social level. It is, therefore, a metaphorical concept, the foundations of which would allow for the inferiorization and elimination of the weak.

Social Darwinism is not just a pejorative concept nor a rhetorical device. Its roots can be found in several political, economic, social, and philosophical doctrines. The nature of this intellectual current, its claims, and its theses in the context of the social sciences and with a language that is specific to these disciplines need to be investigated so that we can better understand what is often described as “rapid social change” and the consequences that spring from it in a globalized world. Over time, these utopias would go on to combine religion, social myths, and biological and mechanical analogies, although they would often lack causal or contingency explanations, which social Darwinism would provide based on the discovery of the association between evolution as a biological process in the field of natural sciences and economics as a social science concerned with the distribution of rarer substitutable goods.

3. Impact and Influence of Social Darwinism on American Society

Several authors attempted to develop a scientific basis for feelings of social Darwinism. Critics of social Darwinism as well as several clergymen and women also sought a scientific basis for their negative reactions toward the implications of social Darwinism. These individuals developed a related ideology known as social science. Mitig, Lester Frank Ward, and Perry who were prominent among these individuals, argued that intelligence (not competition) inherited by its children proved to be the path of evolution that mankind should follow in its endeavor to survive in the very tough business climate of the day. Ward justified his findings on grounds of the human biology that men and women inherited a human potential from their parents – a potential that could only be nurtured not by natural laws but by the intervention in social, economic, and natural laws established by the state – laws with human interest at their center. Instead of being guided by evolutionary guidance of chance and competition, Ward encouraged selection by law and reason – guiding individuals to build a just, dignified, ultimately socialist republic. He felt that only then would the noblest objectives of a recombinational civilization inevitably triumph.

Although social Darwinism has no scientific basis in the fields of either philosophy or sociology, it became a popular theory among several groups in America during the latter portion of the nineteenth century. Industrial leaders and big business believed in the theory because the growth of their empires and the wealth they accumulated reflected their own individual abilities and skills. “The men who had been the most efficient in the industrial stage of production survived and inherited their ‘fitness’ to their sons.” They claimed that those who failed or who had little were inferior to them. After all, “Statistics instead of haphazard impressions proved that the hopeless classes were filled with the incompetent and the worthless; who, breaking the laws of success, had been pushed to the wall by faithful, persevering, frugal men, who had worked long hours, denied themselves privation, and lived in the fear of God.” Social reformers such as Henry George opposed big business leaders. They believed that if business leaders could recover from the competition that seemed to be “sapping the roots of social justice and destroying the self-respecting manhood of the nation… all would be well with society.” Eventually, activists labeled as progressives would inject the idea into society that big business was not the protector of social Darwinism but instead was the oppressor.

4. Critiques and Rebuttals of Social Darwinism

Opponents of social Darwinism raised a fundamental objection. They denied that the rules of competition had always been fair or that the superior wealth of the few was a suitable measure of their relative worth. Moreover, they continued, accepting social Darwinism was perilous—it made a virtue of poverty and condemned the model workers and other decent citizens to lives of hopeless misery. Worried social philosophers and theologians of the late 19th century went farther than that. They attacked the social Darwinists for presuming to have discovered biological support for their own dogma, characterizing a serious moral problem as a natural law and confusing a social ideal with the results of natural selection.

Industrialists and business reformers had a different analysis of the crunch. Social Darwinism began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection was popularly applied to human society. In 1859, Darwin anticipated Herbert Spencer’s theory of social Darwinism, the belief that in the struggle for existence, the fittest individuals and entire societies profited. It had long been taken for granted that some individuals were successful because they were better equipped to cope with the social and economic world around them. But not until the late 1800s did many accept the implications of the so-called survival of the fittest. In the United States, the analysis of social Darwinism was conducted in legislative halls, courtrooms, classrooms, books, and journal articles.

5. Legacy and Contemporary Relevance of Social Darwinism in U.S. History

All of the relentless drumbeat of economic explanations and anti-laissez-faire tracts by priests and Protestant reformers could hardly compete with the solid timbre of a robust new interpretation of nature’s laws that was based on the respected new science of biology. The result was a system of ideas that has been employed over and over during the past one and three-quarter centuries to explain away the inequalities that many viewed as unfair and, in some measure, unearned by the wealthy. Even today, the term “Natural Law” has taken on an outmoded ring, and this form of Social Darwinist posturing is generally reserved for weekly newspaper columns, which are taken less seriously than those that are cousins, found in respected-authored opinion journals. Yet, it is a way of interpreting inequality that gives comfort to many, especially in a belief system based on the precept that anyone can succeed through self-discipline and self-initiative, a belief that is less obviously forsworn than its corollary, that if you aren’t clearly already succeeding at a relatively early age, the odds are that you are congenitally and biologically less fit than others.

The theory and practice of Social Darwinism came of age in the era of U.S. continental expansion, and its most prominent practitioners were upper-class businessmen and reformers of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Most importantly, the idea that competition governed human society was used to justify the wealth of those at the top and the poverty of those at the bottom. Social Darwinists argued that because material wealth was a sign of biological fitness, it should be allowed to concentrate in the hands of the fittest members of society. Efforts to redistribute wealth through progressive taxation or government social programs simply undermined the process of natural selection by saving the weak and the inferior and perpetuating their kind.