Social Darwinism, as almost everyone knows, is a Bad Thing. On a national American history examination, a high school senior asked “how could a democratic society … profess to be the land of opportunity [in the 1880s] when poverty, disease, and social Darwinism were rampant?” Also speaking of the Gilded Age, another student added, “Social Darwinism made us very snobbish about what we read or watched or constructed.” In a newspaperYouth Forumat the height of the Vietnam war, a college student warned readers “not to adhere to a fascist worship of war and to one-sided Darwinism.” “Survival of...

“I have received in a Manchester newspaper, rather a good squib,” Charles Darwin wrote to the geologist Charles Lyell, shortly after the appearance of theOrigin of Species, “showing that I have proved ‘might is right’ and therefore that Napoleon is right, and every cheating tradesman is also right.” Although Darwin ridiculed the charge, it would not go away. “It is splendid that Darwin again discovers among plants and animals his English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’,” wrote Karl Marx to his associate Engels in 1862: “This...

Soon after the appearance ofThe Descent of Man, Herbert Spencer began to discover that public identification with Darwinism had some distinct disadvantages. In 1875 the economist John Elliott Cairnes charged that Spencer “transferred laws of physiology (including the ‘survival of the fittest’) to the domain of social science.” James Martineau, a prominent Unitarian clergyman, alleged that the Spencerians failed to see that “fittest” in the absence of certain preconditions, equated “best” with “strongest.” Thus they invested their “favorite lord and master, competition, with an imperial crown and universal sway.” A decade later the Belgian sociologist, Emile de Laveleye, added...

In August 1882, Herbert Spencer sailed for New York. During his three-months’ stay in America, he toured Niagara Falls and as far west as Pittsburgh, where he visited Andrew Carnegie. The highlight of the trip was a public banquet at Delmonico’s restaurant in New York in November, arranged hastily but successfully by Edward L. Youmans, Spencer’s American literary agent and chief supporter. On the dock, awaiting his return to England, Spencer grasped the hands of Carnegie and Youmans. “Here,” he proclaimed, “are my two best American friends.”¹

The visit triggered a flood of rumor. Denied an interview with the elusive...

During the final decades of the century, a dwindling band of American Spencerians kept the faith against considerable odds. Although the economic upswing and relative calm in the early 1880s gave temporary relief from the troubles of the previous decade, the promise proved illusory. The rise of the trusts, renewed labor militancy, and persistant poverty defied the formulas of individualism and laissez faire. Meanwhile, a remarkable flowering of books laid the basis for a New Liberalism, among them Oliver Wendell Holmes’sCommon Law(1881); Lester Frank Ward’sDynamic Sociology(1883); and Richard Ely’sPast and Present of Political Economy(1885)....

William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) made enemies easily. An Episcopalian minister in the late 1860s, he accepted the chair of Political Economy at Yale in 1872 and was soon embroiled in hassles over curriculum reform. In 1880 his battle with Yale President Noah Porter over the use of Herbert Spencer’sStudy of Sociology, one of the earliest academic freedom cases in the modern American university, made national headlines. During the eighties, in dozens of articles in popular magazines, he championed laissez faire and free trade, the former anathema to a growing body of younger economists, the latter unacceptable to many industrialists....

American reformers of the late nineteenth century were understandably less interested in their opponents’ intellectual difficulties than in capitalizing on apparent gaps in logic. New Liberals and socialists asserted in almost a single voice that opponents of state activity wedded Darwinism to classical economics and thus traded illicitly on the prestige of the new biology. InProgress and Poverty(1879), Henry George charged that Malthusianism was now “buttressed” by the new science, and bemoaned “a sort of hopeful fatalism, of which current literature is full.” “The final plea for any form of brutality in these days,” wrote the Nationalist Edward...

During the 1890s labor violence, agrarian protest, and disturbing new evidence of urban poverty convinced many Americans that “the wolfish struggle for existence,” as one contributor to the Arena called it, was growing worse. At Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead steel mill near Pittsburgh seven men died in a single clash in 1892. Two years later strikers and police again battled during a bloody strike at the Pullman Palace Car Company in Chicago. As farmers joined laborers in their fight against the trusts, a Chicago poet turned instinctively to the rhetoric of Darwinism to describe the new barbarism:

Ne’er before has time...

In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross publishedSocial Control, a study of the foundations of order in modern society. Although he never defined the term precisely, Ross traced formal and informal means of social control through history and predicted the gradual substitution of the force of enlightened public opinion for the mystical and authoritarian agencies of the past. Although he made only brief reference to evolution, at the heart of the theory was a perception of neo-Darwinian chaos that had haunted Ross for more than a decade. The question, as he saw it, was frighteningly simple: given the fact...

Although ideas of racial inferiority antedated theOrigin of Species, modern racism like eugenics appeared on the surface to be a direct legacy of Darwin’s work. Darwin, after all, subtitled his masterpiece “The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” InThe Descent of Manhe predicted, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.”¹ His coevolutionists Huxley, Wallace, and Spencer repeatedly contrasted the “lower” and “higher” races to the advantage of the latter. By the 1890s images...

While most Americans in the 1890s sought escape from the chilling logic of neo-Darwinism, a scattered few seemed deliberately to dramatize their contemporaries’ worst nightmares. A decadent and sterile America required “the kind of courage that aids by active cooperation the survival of the fittest,” wrote the author ofMight is Right, a paperback shocker that appeared in Chicago in 1896. “Death to the weaklings, wealth to the strong.” A decade later Henry Louis Mencken trumpeted an equally brash Darwinism. The “will to live,” he wrote in Men vs. the Man (1910) inevitably entailed a fight to gain domination over...

During the 1890s American novelists also pondered the lessons of biology. InCaesar’s Column(1892) Ignatius Donnelly treated readers to an unabashedly Darwinian “Sermon of the Twentieth Century.” “If Nature, with her interminable fecundity, pours forth millions of human beings for whom there is no place on earth, and no means of subsistence, what affair is that our ours, my brethren?” a newstyle clergyman asks his well-to-do congregation. “We did not make them; we did not ask Nature to make them. And it is Nature’s business to feed them, not yours or mine.” “Nature’s attitude toward all life is profoundly...

“The rule of the survival of the fittest applies to nations as well as to the animal kingdom,” wrote a prominent Asia watcher in the wake of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Urging annexation of the territories acquired in the conflict, another expansionist argued that “the law of self preservation as well as that of survival of the fittest” demanded a larger American role in the world.¹ Nor apparently were such sentiments entirely new. As early as 1880, John Fiske discussed America’s “Manifest Destiny” in evolutionary terms. In Our Country (1886) the publicist Josiah Strong invoked Darwin on behalf of...

Unlike many slogans of World War I, social Darwinism continued to flourish in the interwar years. At the Scopes trial in Tennessee no less than in the work of leading sociologists and even literary critics, the suspicion lingered that someone, somewhere was twisting Darwinism for evil purposes. During the 1930s, renewed debate between individualists and collectivists revived charges of brutal Darwinism. The resumption of hostilities with Germany likewise resurrected images of DarwinismMachtpolitik. By 1941 the many definitions of Social Darwinism sparked a vigorous exchange in the pages ofScience and Society. Within a few years the concept was an...