A Tale of Two Worksites

Natural History, Oct, 1997 by Stephen Jay Gould

battle of life; or one might, like Herbert

Spencer, promise that, whatever the

immediate hardships for a large portion of

mankind, evolution meant progress and

thus assured that the whole process of life

was tending toward some very remote but

altogether glorious consummation. But in

either case the conclusions to which

Dawinism was at first put were

conservative conclusions. They suggested

that all attempts to reform social processes

were efforts to remedy the irremediable, that

they interfered with the wisdom of nature,

that they could lead only to degeneration.

The industrial magnates of America's Gilded Age ("robber barons" in a terminology favored by many people) loved the argument against regulation, evidently for self-serving reasons, however much they mixed their lines about nature's cruel inevitability with expressions of standard Christian piety. John D. Rockefeller stated in a Sunday school address:

The growth of a large business is merely a

survival of the fittest . ... The American

Beauty rose can be produced in the

splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to

its beholder only by sacrificing the early

buds which grow up around it. This is not

an evil tendency in business. It is merely

the working-out of a law of nature and a

law of God.

And Andrew Carnegie, who had been sorely distressed by the apparent failure of Christian values, found his solution in Herbert Spencer, then sought out the English philosopher for friendship and substantial favors. Carnegie wrote about his discovery of Spencer's work: "I remember that light came as in a flood and all was clear. Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution. `All is well since all grows better' became my motto, and true source of comfort." Carnegie's philanthropy, primarily to libraries and universities, ranks as one of the great charitable acts of American history, but we should not forget his ruthlessness and resistance to reforms for his own workers (particularly his violent breakup of the Homestead strike of 1892) in building his empire of steel -- a harshness that he defended with the usual Spencerian line that any state regulation would derail an inexorable natural process eventually leading to progress for all. In his most famous essay (entitled "Wealth," published in the North American Review, of 1889), Carnegie stated:

While the law may be sometimes hard for

the individual, it is best for the race,

because it insures the survival of the fittest

in every department. We accept and

welcome, therefore, as conditions to which

we must accommodate ourselves, great

inequality of environment, tile

concentration of wealth, business, industrial

and commercial, in the hands of a few, and

the law of competition between these, as

being not only beneficial, but essential for

the future progress of the race.

I don't want to advocate a foolishly grandiose view about the social and political influence of academic arguments -- and I also wish to avoid the common fallacy of inferring a causal connection from a correlation. Of course I do not believe that the claims of social Darwinism directly caused the ills of unrestrained industrial capitalism and suppression of workers' rights. I know that most of these Spencerian lines acted as mere window dressing for social forces well in place and largely unmovable by any merely academic argument.