Social Darwinism and the PoorThe impact of British biologist Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), The Descent of Man (1871), and other writings went well beyond the audience of natural scientists to whom it was addressed. Throughout the western world, journalists, academics, and social reformers were quick to appropriate Darwin’s theories about the evolution of life forms to explain trends in social and economic life.

Under the circumstances, this is not surprising. The world was in the midst of vast and frightening changes — industrialization, urbanization, immigration, class war, and mass poverty — which no one understood and to which no one could offer solutions.

1. Why did Social Darwinism appeal to many people?

Extrapolations from Darwinism, with its emphasis on evolutionary progress, offered reason for hope that a new and better social order could emerge from the turbulence. At the same time, by highlighting competition and the survival of the fittest as the drivers of evolution, it seemed to explain both the emergence of the fittest — fabulously wealthy elites and giant corporations, as well as the unfit — the masses of poor in the teeming city slums.

2. In what ways could Darwinism be seen as offering hope to a society that was struggling?

3. How did Social Darwinism “explain” the difference between the rich and the poor?

Social Darwinism, as it came to be known, served the purposes of both liberals and conservatives. Because conservatives believed that many of the traits associated with unfitness — propensities for idleness, criminality, sexual misbehavior, and alcoholism — were passed along from generation to generation by heredity, much like hair and eye color, they grimly predicted the growth of a permanent criminal underclass unless steps were taken to prevent it. They were particularly concerned with the impact of sentimental and impulsive charity on the poor.

4. What characteristics did 19th century Conservatives regard as being socially undesirable?

5. What did 19th century Conservatives believe about the “traits associated with unfitness?”

According to 19th century Conservatives, spontaneous responses to suffering attracted impostors and vagrants from every direction to enjoy the public benefaction,” drawing to the cities the floating vagrants, beggars, and paupers, who wander form village to village throughout the State. The streets of New York became thronged with this ragged, needy crowd; they filled all the station-houses and lodging places provided by private charity, and overflowed into the island almshouses. Street-begging, to the point of importunity, became a custom. Ladies were robbed, even on their own doorsteps, by these mendicants. Petty offenses, such as thieving and drunkenness, increased. One of the free lodgings in the upper part of the city, established by the Commissioners of Charities, became a public nuisance from its rowdyism and criminality.

6. Who did 19th century Conservatives believe would become a problem if aid was provided to the poor?

Poor relief, conservatives believed, destroyed the work ethic that motivated the poor to work. “The public example of alms induce many to be paupers who were never so before, while they do not at all relieve the truly deserving, who hesitate to be exposed to such publicity. They are, in fact, an especial assistance to the idle, and a reward to the improvident.

7. What did 19th century Conservatives believe “poor relief” would do to the poor?

Preventing the growth of this criminal class called for strict measures, beginning with a thorough and discriminating supervision of all charities, public and private; the most careful attention to the education and employment of the poor and their children; the placing of pauper children in good families, at a distance, if possible, form degrading associations; a rigid and exact system of in-door relief, accompanied with labor; the reduction of out-door relief in cities, and the encouragement of emigration to rural districts from the crowded centres of poverty and crime, which most of our largest cities have now become. The position of New York in this respect is exceptional, because it yearly receives a quarter of a million immigrants from foreign countries, and this exposes it to peculiar evils and dangers. While this should be borne in mind, it should not be made an apology for neglect nor an occasion for abuses, but should lead to increased vigilance and activity on the part of magistrates and citizens.”

What “strict measures” did Conservatives call for with regards to aid to the poor?

In a word, 19th century Conservatives not only blamed the poor for their poverty, but also the dispensers of “indiscriminate” and “sentimental” charity, whose well-intentioned, but ill-informed benevolence served both to

perpetuate the sufferings that they sought to ameliorate and to compound them by encouraging the survival of the unfit.

8. Who did 19th century Conservatives blame for poverty?

9. What did 19th century Conservatives believe about those who provided charity to the poor?

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the most extreme of the conservatives, combining ideas drawn from Darwin, with those of his contemporary Francis Galton, produced theories which urged actions to prevent the disabled and other “unfit” people from reproducing by segregating them from society in almshouses, asylums, and other congregate institutions and through sterilization, or surgically modifying them so that they cannot have children. These practices were enacted into law by many states and were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, with Justice Holmes memorably defending government’s right to incarcerate and sterilize by declaring “three generations of imbeciles is enough!”

10. What did the most extreme of the conservatives believe should be done to those who were “unfit?”

11. What did the Supreme Court argue about the government’s right to forcibly sterilize people that they regarded as “imbeciles?”

Although liberals also drew on Darwinism, they did so in a very different spirit. Where the conservatives emphasized the role of nature — competition, natural selection, and heredity — in shaping

evolution, liberals stressed the role of nurture — humanity’s ability to manipulate the environment to foster evolutionary progress.

12. How did 19th century liberals view Social Darwinism?

They believed that education, good nutrition, and healthy living conditions could eliminate poverty and criminality. As steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, one of the country’s leading social Darwinists put it, “The best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise – free libraries, parks, and means of recreation, by which men are helped in body and mind; works of art, certain to give pleasure and improve the public taste; and public institutions of various kinds, which will improve the general condition of the people; in this manner returning their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good.”

13. How did 19th century liberals poverty and “criminality” could be eliminated?

Social Darwinism: Liberalism and Conservatism

Views of Social Darwinism Policies to implement this view

Conservatives

Liberals

Carnegie echoed the conservatives’ criticism of sentimental philanthropy. One of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race,” Carnegie declared, “is indiscriminate charity. It were better for mankind that the millions of the rich were thrown into the sea than so spent as to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy. Of every thousand dollars spent in so called charity to day, it is probable that nine hundred and fifty dollars is unwisely spent — so spent, indeed, as to produce the very evils which it hopes to mitigate or cure.”

14. How did Carnegie feel about providing aid to those that he believed were unworthy?

Carnegie believed that the inequality that inevitably resulted from industrial capitalism was not inherently bad. Competition in society, as in the natural world, sorted people out according to their abilities. But this inequality did not preclude everyone, from millionaire to industrial worker, from playing a useful part in the collective task of human progress.

15. What did Carnegie believe resulted from industrial capitalism?

16. What did Carnegie believe was required of every person?

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, as charities reformers and philanthropists began to systematically study the poor and the causes of poverty, a more discerning perspective on these issues began to emerge which drew on both the liberal and conservative variants of social Darwinism. Amos G. Warner’s American Charities: A Study in Philanthropy and Economics (1894), which became the standard text for social workers in the first quarter of the twentieth century, broke down the causes of poverty into those “pertaining to the individual,” which included race, ethnicity, family, sex, age, habits and personal characteristics, and disease, and those “pertaining to environment,” which included climate, accidents, unhealthful occupations, work of women and children, abode (housing), involuntary idleness (unemployment), diet, clothing, and lack of medical care (Warner 1894, 56). He envisioned two basic approaches to addressing these causes, “therapy” (by which he meant such things as medical treatment, the elimination of child labor, and the improvement of working conditions) and “hygiene,” (which included remedies ranging from improvements in “conditions of life” through institutionalization and sterilization of the unfit.

17. What two types of causes of poverty were there according to Warner?

As a charity reformer, Warner was harshly critical of the almshouse as a means of addressing poverty, disability, and dependency, scorning their undifferentiated approach to a wide range of problems that were products of different causes. The almshouse, he wrote, “acts as the charitable catch-all for the community. Idiots, epileptics, incurables, incompetents, the aged, abandoned children, foundlings, women for confinement, and a considerable number of the insane, the blind, and the deaf and dumb are all dumped together.”

18. What was Warner’s chief concern with how almshouses treated the poor?

Such institutions served only to perpetuate criminality, poverty, and deviance, according to Warner.

Warner and other early twentieth century reformers championed the establishment of specialized institutions that could classify, treat, supervise, and reform the dependent and disabled. The chief task of these new institutions was to differentiate the dependent and disabled according to the nature and sources of their problems, separating “all those requiring special scientific treatment” including “the defective classes of teachable age, the deaf, the dumb, and the blind,” as well as the insane, identifying those whose problems were not amenable to therapy — the feeble-minded and epileptic — and channeling them into custodial

institutions.

19. What did Warner believe would help to get the poor the assistance they needed?

Similarly, orphaned and abandoned children, who constituted a substantial proportion of the almshouse population would have to be sorted according to their needs and abilities. “Sequestration, and discipline first,” wrote a Connecticut physician in 1902, “then education in its present day comprehensive sense, are the rational steps towards an ideal standard for the management” of youngsters in need of care and supervision.

20. What did the Connecticut physician regard as the appropriate way to teach a child?

Reformers did not confine their energies to treating the dependent and disabled. They were also actively engaged in changing the conditions of life for the poor, advocating for the elimination of slums, the enactment of public health legislation, crusading for the elimination of child labor, championing mandatory school attendance laws, and fighting for the creation of parks and playgrounds — all this premised on the Darwinist idea that a healthy, orderly, and just society fostered the conditions for social, political, and economic progress.

21. Who else did these reformers hope to help?

What goals did the reformers have for improving the conditions of the working class?

Social Darwinism never constituted a formally articulated philosophy; it was used in a variety of often contradictory ways by writers and thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Regardless of the social and political agendas it gave rise to, the one thing all had in common was a scientific data-based approach to defining and offering solutions to social problems. Whether used to justify laissez-faire or activist public policies, social Darwinism provided a vocabulary and set of concepts that facilitated the emergence of the social sciences and their application to such pressing problems as poverty and social justice.

22. What tenet did all the competing visions of Social Darwinism have in common?

Eugenics movement

The eugenics movement had a significant influence on U.S. immigration policy. Politicians, reformers, and civic leaders imbued with a sense of Americanism and scientific justification enacted laws to limit immigration to what they regarded as “desirable” types. The intersection of scientific theory on heredity, the tendency of progressive reformers to control their environment, the popularity of nativist groups, and struggling immigrant laborers created a perfect storm for changing immigration policy and attitudes during the early years of the twentieth century. The eugenics movement set out to define the “real Americans” in society and decide who should inherit the nation’s future.

What four events led to the emergence of Eugenics in America?

23. What was the goal of the eugenics movement?

During the late nineteenth century, scholars and scientists applied naturalist Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory of natural selection to social, political, and economic development. The consequent derivative theory that became known as “social Darwinism” served as the backbone ideology of the eugenics movement. During the 1880’s, Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton coined the term “eugenics,” which he defined as the theory of hereditary improvement of the human race by selective breeding. Eugenicists—those who subscribed to this theory— believed that heredity largely determined success and development. Whereas Social Darwinists carried racist and classist views, for the most part they believed that society would naturally sort people. Eugenicists took this a step further, believing that conscious policy should be used to create more “evolved” society through the use of breeding programs and sterilization to actively “improve” the human race. Consequently, they encouraged the breeding of people with the most desirable traits while discouraging the perpetuation of those with the least desirable traits. According to their theories, eliminating unfit members of society would result in a more enlightened civilization.

Compare and Contrast: Social Darwinists and Eugenicists

Compare Contrast

24. How did Eugenicists believe that a better society could be created?

25. What did Eugenicists believe would happen if all of the “unfit” members of society were “removed?”

Within the United States, the opportunities and challenges of the early twentieth century brought the eugenics movement to the forefront of progressive reform efforts, specifically related to limiting the influx of immigrants. After the U.S. Civil War ended in 1865, increasing numbers of Asians and eastern and southern Europeans came to the United States in search of brighter futures. Many well-established American citizens opposed the growing foreign population and demanded a return to the core Anglo-American Protestant values and the stock of people upon which they believed the United States had been built. Publication of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race in 1916 had a strong influence on popular audiences. Grant presented data that, he argued, proved that the northern European races that had founded the United States were of superior hereditary stock.

26. Where were new immigrant groups coming to the United States from after the Civil War?

27. How did “well-established” American citizens feel about this increased immigration?

28. What did Madison Grant believe regarding race?

Eugenics, rising xenophobia, and the progressive spirit of the early twentieth century resulted in new restrictive rules in U.S. immigration policy. Advocates of the eugenics movement pressed state and federal governments to take action to foster eugenics goals. Eugenicists succeeded in influencing the passage of state laws supporting intelligence testing and the forced sterilization of persons deemed unfit to bear eugenically sound offspring. The federal Immigration Act of 1924, spearheaded by Washington congressman and Eugenics Research Association president Albert Johnson, established an immigrant quota system based on country of origin. Eugenicists believed that the limitations would rescue the hereditary stock of the nation from so-called inferior races. Congress adjusted the quotas several times, but the basic law remained in effect until 1965.

29. What policies did Eugenicists get passed at the local levels?

30. What federal policy did Eugenicists get passed?