MYTH 17

THAT SOCIAL DARWINISM HAS HAD A PROFOUND INFLUENCE ON SOCIAL THOUGHT AND POLICY, ESPECIALLY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Ronald L. Numbers

Social Darwinism was an influential social philosophy in some circles through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was used as a rationalization for racism, colonialism, and social stratification.

—John P. Rafferty, ed., New Thinking about Evolution (2011)

Based on the work of Charles Darwin in explaining evolution, Social Darwinism is the application of “survival of the fittest” to society and business. It held that weaker (or unfit) companies would die off at the hands of stronger, better and superior corporations. It was seen as justification of laissez-faire capitalism, as government should not interfere in the natural economic evolution by which smaller, weaker companies are eliminated. This concept was also applied to individual success, by which the most successful in society were thought to be the smartest, hardest working and as such most fit.

—Preparatory Information for the New York State Regents Examination (1999–2011)

Despite all the talk about social Darwinism in the twentieth century, nineteenth-century Americans paid relatively little attention to the social implications of Darwinism. This was true of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) himself, who devoted an entire book to The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) but only occasionally prescribed human behavior based on his theory of natural selection. In a section of The Descent of Man headed “Natural Selection as Affecting Civilized Nations,” he contrasted savage and civilized societies:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind.1

In spite of the negative biological effects of many humanitarian efforts, Darwin generally defended them in the name of human nobility.²

Most American scientists either remained silent on the topic or denounced attempts to apply Darwinian principles to human society. The California naturalist Joseph LeConte (1823–1901), perhaps the most influential scientific popularizer of evolution in the United States, insisted that “natural selection will never be applied by man to himself as it is by Nature to organisms. His spiritual nature forbids.” Even the geologist-anthropologist John Wesley Powell (1834–1902), who rejected traditional religion, nevertheless condemned efforts to apply “the methods of biotic evolution” to humans: “Should the philosophy of [Herbert] Spencer, which confounds man with the brute and denies the efficacy of human endeavor, become the philosophy of the twentieth century,” he warned, “it would cover civilization with a pall and culture would again stagnate.”³

The American disciples of the British philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)—not the Darwinians—led the effort to apply evolution to human societies. Claiming “the right to ignore the state,” Spencer opposed government intervention in regulating commerce, supporting religion, educating the young, and even caring for the sick and poor—all in the name of science and ethics. “Unpitifying as it looks,” he insisted, “it is best to let the foolish man suffer the appointed penalty of his foolishness.”4 Because his books sold impressively in the United States, it is easy to overestimate his influence.⁵ The biologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935), marveling at the philosopher’s popularity, noted that Spencer stated “the very A, B, C of science in language which is so obscure to a college professor that it must inspire awe among some thousands of his readers.” It surely did not help Spencer’s reputation in a predominately Christian country that he notoriously reduced divinity to the “Unknowable,” a concept that few but skeptics and Unitarians could love.⁶ Although the British philosopher came to be seen as an apologist for capitalism and unrestrained struggle for survival, his most recent biographer has convincingly argued that he has been misunderstood: “Spencer did not accept that modern individuals and societies would continue to make progress through struggle for survival.”⁷

Despite the damnation of the orthodox, Spencer recruited several well-placed American apostles, including William Graham Sumner (1840–1910), Yale’s celebrated professor of political and social science. Sumner, often portrayed as the country’s foremost social Darwinist, did for a time teach his students that “if we do not like the survival of the fittest, we have only one possible alternative, and that is the survival of the unfittest.”⁸ But biological evolution remained marginal to his study of human societies, and by 1884 he had quit talking about the fit and unfit. He roundly condemned imperialism, especially around the time of the Spanish-American War.⁹

Another of Spencer’s American disciples was Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), the Scottish-born steel magnate and philanthropist who at times justified the concentration of wealth in terms of Spencerian evolution. Overall, however, neither Darwin nor Spencer had much influence on American businessmen. As the historian Irvin G. Wyllie showed in an elegant study decades ago, “Gilded Age businessmen were not sufficiently bookish, or sufficiently well educated, to keep up with the changing world of ideas.”10 For ethical guidance they turned to the Bible, not Darwin’s Descent of Man or Spencer’s Social Statics. In one of the few references to biological evolution coming from the business community, the Ivy League–educated philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874–1960)—not his father, as is sometimes alleged—described the growth of a large business as “merely a survival of the fittest.… The American beauty rose can be produced … only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it.”¹¹

As we have seen, Darwin himself noted the dysgenic role of modern medicine. Surprisingly, few commentators took note. Like other educated Americans, physicians discussed the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinism but rarely its implications for public health. One of the few medical men to address the apparent conflict between evolutionary science and medicine was Charles V. Chapin (1856–1941), a national leader in the field of public health. In contrast to most of his colleagues, who simply ignored the alleged complaints of some biologists and sociologists that physicians were hindering “the beneficent workings of natural law by preserving those who are least fitted to survive, and permitting them to increase their kind,” Chapin squarely faced the charge.¹² He admitted that preventive measures to control against infectious diseases interfered “with the action of natural selection by the artificial preservation of the unfit,” but concluded, nevertheless, that physicians were not “warranted in abandoning our fight against these diseases and permitting natural selection to have again a free field.”¹³ Besides, preventing epidemics protected the strong as well as the weak.

Inattention to Darwin’s provocative passage about how modern medicine thwarted the effects of natural selection in civilized societies gave way to heated discussion in the early 1920s, when the fundamentalist leader William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) featured Darwin’s statement as confirmation of his own negative view of evolution. In a widely circulated attack on “The Menace of Darwinism,” Bryan dissected Darwin’s “confession.” The British naturalist, he alleged, “condemns ‘civilized men’ for prolonging the life of the weak.… Medicine is one of the greatest of the sciences and its chief object is to save life and strengthen the weak. That, Darwin complains, interferes with ‘the survival of the fittest.’ ”14

Darwinism could have provided scientific justification for racism, but it rarely served that function. As John S. Haller Jr. has shown in his survey of evolution and racism in the late nineteenth century, Darwin scarcely affected racial discourse: “The views of the older pre-Darwinian concepts of racial inferiority remained essentially the same in the post-Darwinian period.” In other words, the biblical account of God cursing Noah’s son and grandson continued to provide ample sanction for believing in the inferiority of blacks. The historian Jeffrey P. Moran has recently concluded that “although leading evolutionists were often deeply involved in eugenics and scientific racism, African American anti-evolutionists never cited Darwinism’s use by racists as an argument against the theory.”¹⁵

Similarly, Darwinism, with its emphasis on sexual selection and its implication of female inferiority, might have been employed to justify gender discrimination, but it seldom was. As with business practices and racial attitudes, Christianity continued to provide more than ample justification for discrimination, beginning with Eve’s subjugation to Adam. Kimberly A. Hamlin has recently shown that the few nineteenth-century feminists who invoked Darwin typically celebrated him for observing “that in all species, except among humans, females selected their sexual mates,” thus justifying female choice. In addition, Darwinism invalidated the entire account of Adam and Eve.¹⁶

From time to time Darwinism was used to justify imperialism and war, but this, too, happened infrequently. Like the other ideologies we have examined, imperialism hardly needed scientific justification. Besides, even Herbert Spencer denounced imperialism as a “new barbarism.”17 Public perception of a linkage between Darwinism and war grew markedly during the Great War in Europe from 1914 to 1918, owing to allegations that Darwin’s biology had played a role in persuading the Germans to declare war. Adopting the not-yet-familiar phrase “social Darwinism” for his title, David Starr Jordan (1851–1931), a prominent biologist and the founding president of Stanford University, dismissed the “dogma” that Darwinism justified war. “This ‘biological argument for war,’ ” he declared, “has no scientific validity and no legitimate relation to the teachings of Darwin.”¹⁸

Thus far I have focused on the limited ways in which Darwinism influenced social thought and behavior in the United States. I have not said much about social Darwinism, largely because few, if any, Americans mentioned it before the early twentieth century. Although scattered references to Darwinisme social, Darwinismo sociale, and Sozialdarwinismus began appearing in continental Europe about the early 1880s, the phrase “social Darwinism” seems to have first appeared in American publications in 1903, when the sociologist Edward A. Ross (1866–1951) applied it to those who saw “in the economic struggle a twin to the ‘struggle for existence’ that plays so fateful a part in the modification of species.”¹⁹ For decades thereafter, its meaning remained uncertain, though it typically carried a sinister connotation.

An early discussion at the 1906 meeting of the American Sociological Association revealed the confusion. The Dartmouth sociologist D. Collin Wells (1858–1911), perhaps the only American at the time to call himself a social Darwinist, presented a paper titled “Social Darwinism,” explaining that he had borrowed the unfamiliar term from European writers to refer to “the gradual appearance of new forms through variation; the struggle of superabundant forms; the elimination of those poorly fitted, and the survival of those better fitted, to the given environment; and the maintenance of racial efficiency only by incessant struggle and ruthless elimination.” The content of his talk surprised his commentator, Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913), the anti-Spencerian president of the association, who explained his confusion:

In Europe, especially on the continent, there has been much discussion of what they call “social Darwinism.” Not all scholars there agree as to what it is, but certainly none of them use the expression in the sense that Dr. Wells uses it.… Over there the discussion of this topic relates to two problems: first, the economic struggle, and, second, the race-struggle. Those who appear to defend this “social Darwinism” are biologists mainly and not sociologists at all. Most of the sociologists attack it.20

In the United States, in contrast, sociologists were virtually the only ones talking about social Darwinism.

The same year that Wells’s article appeared, Ward damned his fellow sociologists for generally failing to understand “the true nature of the biological struggle” when writing about so-called social Darwinism. Many of them, he scolded, did not even recognize the distinction between Darwinian and Lamarckian evolution or understand the process of natural selection. But heedless of their ignorance and confusion, “certain of them have invented the phrase ‘social Darwinism,’ and have set it up as a sort of ‘man of straw’ in order to show their agility in knocking it down.” In their eagerness to discredit suspect economic and racial theories, they had conjured up social Darwinism “in their own imagination” and set out to combat it “as valiantly as Don Quixote battled with the windmills.”²¹

In 1944, the newly minted American historian Richard Hofstadter launched his career as a major interpreter of American culture with a slim volume titled Social Darwinism in American Thought. In it he attempted to show how the advocates of such conservative “social ideologies” as free trade, militarism, racism, imperialism, and eugenics had used Darwinism to advance their goal of rugged individualism.²² Although he warned that it would “be easy to exaggerate the significance of Darwin for race theory or militarism either in the United States or in western Europe,” many readers, including fellow historians, did exactly that.23 With the publication of Hofstadter’s monograph, “social Darwinism” became a trope in American histories, despite the accumulating evidence that its very existence was problematic.

It remains alive down to the present. The title of a recent essay by the historian of science Mark A. Largent says it all: “Social Darwinism Emerges and Is Used to Justify Imperialism, Racism, and Conservative Economic and Social Policies.”²⁴