636 ★ CHAPTER 16 America’s Gilded Age
and animal species best suited to their environment took the place of those less
able to adapt.
In a highly oversimplified form, language borrowed from Darwin or devel-
oped by his followers, such as “natural selection,” “the struggle for existence,”
and “the survival of the fittest,” entered public discussion of social problems in
the Gilded Age. According to what came to be called Social Darwinism, evolu-
tion was as natural a process in human society as in nature, and government
must not interfere. Especially misguided, in this view, were efforts to uplift
those at the bottom of the social order, such as laws regulating conditions of
work or public assistance to the poor. The giant industrial corporation, Social
Darwinists believed, had emerged because it was better adapted to its environ-
ment than earlier forms of enterprise. To restrict its operations by legislation
would reduce society to a more primitive level.
Even the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s did not shake the widespread
view that the poor were essentially responsible for their own fate. Charity
workers and local governments spent much time and energy distinguish-
ing the “deserving” poor (those, like widows and orphans, destitute through
no fault of their own) from the “undeserving,” a far larger number. Failure
to advance in society was widely thought to indicate a lack of character, an
absence of self- reliance and determination in the face of adversity. As late as
1900, half the nation’s largest cities offered virtually no public relief, except to
persons living in poorhouses. To improve their lot, according to the philosophy
of Social Darwinism, workers should practice personal economy, keep out of
debt, and educate their children in the principles of the marketplace, not look
to the government for aid.
The era’s most influential Social Darwinist was Yale professor William
Graham Sumner. For Sumner, freedom meant “the security given to each man”
that he can acquire, enjoy, and dispose of property “exclusively as he chooses,”
without interference from other persons or from government. Freedom thus
defined required frank acceptance of inequality. Society faced two and only
two alternatives: “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not- liberty, equality,
survival of the unfittest.” In 1883, Sumner published What Social Classes Owe
to Each Other. His answer, essentially, was nothing: “In a free state,” no one was
entitled to claim “help from, and cannot be charged to [offer] help to, another.”
Government, Sumner believed, existed only to protect “the property of men
and the honor of women,” not to upset social arrangements decreed by nature.
Liberty of Contract
The growing influence of Social Darwinism helped to popularize an idea that
would be embraced by the business and professional classes in the last quarter