by Larry Lounsbury

Created on: June 18, 2009   Last Updated: July 15, 2009

Social Darwinism


The struggle for a free country with different races and cultures, joined together with inalienable rights, was considered by early historians and social scientists to be a relevant theory. In reality, a type of melting pot slowly began to emerge in America that coated over the races with a unique type of cultural relevance.


The Revelation of religious society in America was slowly being intertwined as a rocky marriage born of ideas from the social Darwinism of men such as Herbert Spencer.Reformers on both sides raised questions about established conditions and their ideas on reforming society. Some saw the Gilded age as a time of the survival of the fittest, others saw a great divide rapidly forming between the masses. While the wealthy class was becoming far richer, the working class began to take on the social stagnation of a population without a true goal (Divine, 2002, p.627-28)

At first, Southern politicians began to war with each other over how to reform it, then how to redeem it through commercial and industrial interest that vied for control over agrarian groups. The dreams of a reformed South slowly cast a pall over the once bright dream of the enslaved. Share cropping and credit deals forced families to return to a type of servitude that charged extortionate prices for goods they bought on credit. The facade of good jobs and better homes was shattered as the promised allure of streets paved with Gold was washed away in a tide of political and business ventures that left Chinese immigrants underpaid on a railroad to hell (Divine, 2002, p. 518).


The social movement saw men such as Henry McNeal Turner propose black emigration to Africa. Although emigration became a popular movement among blacks most refused to give up hope of an eventual equality in America. The Erie Canal, and the rapidly expanding railroad opened previously uncharted Indian land to communities bent on finding their fortune in gold and land. In order to open up more land, the government started programs that stripped the Indians of their land through means of killing off their precious buffalo. The symbolic American melting pot killed certain Indian groups also to the brink of extinction. The Indians are said to have been killed in various genocide acts in early America and later. The social dysfunction that white society felt about the Indians caused some truly appalling moral judgments (Divine , 2002, p. 535).


Morals were devised from the strict code of Victorian

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