The Progressive Era: A History From Beginning to End by Hourly History

Author:Hourly History [History, Hourly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hourly History
Published: 2018-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

The Dark Side of Progressivism: Forced Sterilizations and Eugenics

“False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science.”

—Charles Darwin, 1871

In 1859, Charles Darwin published the first of his three most seminal works, On the Origin of Species. In it, Darwin described his theory of natural selection: All organisms reproduce, and within each species each organism differs slightly. All organisms compete for survival. As the environment changes, the organisms that best adapt to that change survive while those that didn’t die. In time, an entirely new species might evolve. This was a radical notion to say the least. It posited that the planet and its inhabitants were changed by natural forces and the environment. It was not a divine plan, which was the prevailing theory for centuries.

Darwin did not mention human beings very much in the first book, but The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871, brought up that issue head-on. He applied the evolutionary ideas he had first outlined in Origin of Species to human development. He demonstrated the connections between animal and human behaviors and physical transformation. Darwin’s final book, The Expression of the Emotions of Man and Animals, continued this discussion by investigating the continuity of emotional expression between humans and animals.

These ideas caused a great deal of controversy almost from the time they were published. The discussion that humans were in any way descended from animals went against millennia of theology that humans were created by the divine. It is a debate that still occurs across the United States.

Darwin’s theories, however, weren’t just used and debated on theological and scientific grounds. The idea of natural selection was most notably applied to society by English philosopher Herbert Spencer. The theory of Social Darwinism could more aptly be named Social Spencerism. In essence the theory is the idea that the society, like nature, is bent toward survival of the fittest. Spencer believed that the state and other public institutions shouldn’t interfere with the harsh processes of life. Events should unfold as they are intended, and the strongest will survive. As Spencer would surmise, “to aid the bad in multiplying is in effect the same as maliciously providing for our descendants a multitude of enemies.” In other words, let the weak fall away so our descendants won’t have to take care of them or provide for them. Spencer actually espoused these ideas before Darwin published his books, but Darwin gave Spencer a framework to apply to his theories.

It does beg the question, was Darwin a Social Darwinist? It seems that the answer is a qualified yes. Darwin did believe that the idea of survival of the fittest applied to the social hierarchies of his contemporary world—namely that Western civilization, especially that of Great Britain, was the highest class of the modern world. He also believed that inherited wealth allowed the descendants of the upper class to focus on art and culture, which would in turn inspire the lower class. However, Darwin also noted that the human capacity for sympathy and empathy were part of the evolutionary development.

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