1. "Gilded Age"
S ee handout

2. Meaning of Gilded??
The term "Gilded Age” was created by Mark Twain to describe how American society during the late 1800’s. Everything seemed shiny and golden on the outside, but underneath was a society filled with poverty, crime, and a large disparity between the rich and the poor.
Bottom Line = Something is gilded if it is covered with gold on the outside but made of cheaper material inside.

3. A Changing Culture (Outside)
Many new inventions led to industrial growth (Cause)
Farm machines meant less need for farm labor (effect)
Factory jobs and service jobs in the cities (effect)
Disposable income drives new industry and wealth (effect)
Growing income gaps.

4. Social Gospel Social Darwinism Political Machines Americanization
Terms
Social Gospel
Social Darwinism
Political Machines
Americanization

5. Social Problems Sweat Shop
Discrimination (blacks, minorities, immigrants, women)
Corrupt Political Machines
Poor Working Conditions
No Equality between Lower Class and Upper Class
Sweat Shop

6. The Jungle
Upton Sinclair wrote a book to expose and explain the difficulties of the immigrant experience. The book led directly to the Meat Inspection Act.
Sinclair said- “I aimed for the country’s heart and I hit its stomach.”

7. Social Problems  Social Gospel
Social Gospel – Reaction to social problems
Movement strove to improve conditions in cites according to the biblical ideals of charity and justice.
Government had no real role in public assistance.

8. Social Gospel- Billy Sunday
“Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.”
“The fellow that has no money is poor. The fellow that has nothing but money is poorer still.”

9. Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism is an ideology of society that seeks to apply biological concepts of Darwinism or of evolutionary theory to sociology and politics, often with the assumption that conflict between groups in society leads to social progress as superior groups outcompete inferior ones. (Wikipedia)

10. Social Darwinism Defined
Social Darwinism is the (mis)application of and (over) extension of Darwin’s theory to explain human society.
Social Darwinism uses Darwinian ideas like “evolution”, “fitness”, “struggle for survival” to “explain” and “justify” human inequalities in wealth and power.

11. Types of Social Darwinism
Individualistic Social Darwinism
Collectivistic Social Darwinism

12. 1. Individualistic Social Darwinism: (a) misuse of “struggle” and “struggle for survival”.
Individualistic social Darwinism claims that human society, like nature, is involved in a constant “struggle for survival” between individuals in society.
The individuals may be businessmen competing (“struggling”) against other business men for profits and economic “survival”.
The individuals may also be individual workers seeking to “survive” by competing (“struggling”) to get hired, earning wages, promotions, etc…

13. Individualistic Social Darwinism (b) misuse of “fitness”, “survival of the fittest” and “evolution”
As in Darwin’s theory, the “struggle for survival” assures that only the “fit” survive (“survival of the fittest”)
Social Darwinists claim the continuous selection of fitter (human) individuals, drives “social evolution”.
Individualistic social Darwinists also claim that “social evolution” tends toward the overall “good” of the human race.

14. Individualistic Social Darwinism (c) consequences for social policy
If “social evolution” is for the overall good of society, and if it is driven by continuing “struggle”, then:
nothing should be done to reduce the intensity of the “struggle for survival”.
Thus, laws or government policies benefiting the poor (“the unfit”) should be reduced or eliminated.

15. Individualistic Social Darwinism: (d) Key role of Herbert Spencer
One of the “founders” of Social Darwinism was:
Spencer coined the terms “survival of the fittest” and “struggle for survival” even before Darwin published Origin.
If they [all people] are sufficiently complete to live, they do live and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete, they die, and it is well they should die.
- Herbert Spencer, Social Statics
Herbert Spencer ( )

16. Individualistic Social Darwinism: William Graham Sumner
In the USA, William Graham Sumner ( ), an admirer of Spencer, echoed the same views:
“The millionaires are a product of natural selection…”

17. Individualistic Social Darwinism (e) connection to economic liberalism
Spencer and Sumner were also supporters of economic liberalism. This idea dates back to Adam Smith ( ) who argued in his famous Wealth of Nations (1776) against government regulations and monopolies typical of the pre- industrial era.
In many ways Adam Smith was the intellectual father of modern industrial capitalism.

18. Individualistic Social Darwinism (f) connection to laissez-faire
Laissez-faire, like economic liberalism, opposed government interference in the economy (no taxes, laws and regulations).
Such measures would hinder individual freedom and economic competition, the engine of economic growth (and thus, supposedly, improved conditions for all).

19. 1. Individualistic Social Darwinism: (g) connection to “self-help” idea.
Laissez-faire was also seen as a kind of “self-help” and as such, was the best way to ensure the development of individual freedom and responsibility

20. 1. Individualistic Social Darwinism: (g) connection to “self-help” idea.
Samuel Smiles, one of the most famous proponents of laissez-faire and “self-help”, put it this way in 1859:
'Whatever is done for men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over- guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless.'

21. 1. Individualistic Social Darwinism
Thus individualistic social Darwinism fit well into the already existing ideas of economic liberalism, laissez- faire and self-help.
individuals are responsible for their own lives and should not look to anyone else to take care of any of their needs.
The publication of Origin of Species by Darwin in 1859 reinforced the same viewpoint and gave them a supposedly scientific basis.

22. Social Darwinism
"The law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, [but] it is best for the race , because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department." ---Andrew Carnegie, "The Gospel of Wealth, (1889)
"A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be...The law of survival of the fittest was not made by man, and it cannot be abrogated by man. We can only, by interfering with it, produce the survival of the unfittest." --- William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883)

23. Social Darwinism argues that people get what they deserve.

24. It is sometimes perceived negatively.

27. Effects of Social Darwinism
Social Darwinists don’t believe that the government should help people. They oppose natural rights theories.
But in the absence of organized government support, political machines gained momentum.

28. Political Machines
Urban political machines, built largely on the votes of diverse immigrant populations, dispensed jobs and assorted welfare benefits while offering avenues of social mobility at a time when local governments provided a paucity of such services.

29. Social Darwinism and Education
The theory of Social Darwinism also dictated that immigrants lose their native culture and assimilate into American culture. This assimilation was called Americanization. Schools were a central part of this movement.

30. Americanization
The Americanization movement was a nationwide organized effort in the 1910s to bring millions of recent immigrants into the American cultural system. 30+ states passed laws requiring Americanization programs; in hundreds of cities the chamber of commerce organized classes in English language and American civics; many factories cooperated.

31. Activity: Social Darwin or Social Gospel?
As you read the quote or the autobiographies, try to figure out if they believe in the ideology of Social Gospel or Social Darwinism.

32. William Graham Sumner
Before the tribunal of nature a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence... —William Graham Sumner, "Earth-hunger, and other essays," p. 234.

33. William Graham Sumner 1840-1910)
was a leading American social scientist of the late 19th century
Yale Professor
Defended radical laissez- faire as being justified by laws of evolution
He heavily criticized socialism/communism

34. William Graham Sumner
Social Darwinist

35. 1862 –1935 Billy Sunday Who was He? A Evangelical minister
What was he in favor of?
1. Prohibition
2. Against child labor
3. For woman’s right to vote
4. Against big business
5. Churches helping the poor

36. William Sunday
Sunday was a lifelong Republican, and he espoused the mainstream political and social views of his native Midwest: individualism, competitiveness, personal discipline, and opposition to government regulation. Writers such as Sinclair Lewis, Henry M. Tichenor, and John Reed attacked Sunday as a tool of big business, and poet Carl Sandburg called him a "four- flusher" and a "bunkshooter."

37. Nevertheless, Sunday sided with Progressives on some issues
Nevertheless, Sunday sided with Progressives on some issues. For example, he denounced child labor and supported urban reform and women's suffrage. Sunday condemned capitalists "whose private lives are good, but whose public lives are very bad," as well as those "who would not pick the pockets of one man with the fingers of their hand" but who would "without hesitation pick the pockets of eighty million people with fingers of their monopoly or commercial advantage."

38. He never lost his sympathy for the poor, and he sincerely tried to bridge the gulf between the races during the zenith of the Jim Crow era, although on at least two occasions in the mid-1920s Sunday received contributions from the Ku Klux Klan.

39. William Sunday
Social Gospel

40. William Gladden
In 1875, Gladden became the Congregationalist pastor in Springfield, Massachusetts. He published Working People and their Employers in 1876, which advocated the unionization of employees; Gladden was the first notable U.S. clergyman to approve of unions. Gladden did not support socialism or laissez faire economics, advocating instead the application of "Christian law" to issues. He was a charter member of the American Economic Association.

41. Washington Gladden
Social Gospel

42. HG Wells
Wells contemplates the ideas of nature and nurture and questions humanity in books such as The Island of Doctor Moreau.
Not all his scientific romances ended in a Utopia, and Wells also wrote a dystopian novel, When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, rewritten as The Sleeper Awakes, 1910), which pictures a future society where the classes have become more and more separated, leading to a revolt of the masses against the rulers.

43. The Island of Doctor Moreau is even darker
The Island of Doctor Moreau is even darker. The narrator, having been trapped on an island of animals vivisected (unsuccessfully) into human beings, eventually returns to England; he finds himself unable to shake off the perceptions of his fellow humans as barely civilized beasts, slowly reverting to their animal natures.

44. H.G. Wells
Social Darwin

45. Dwight Moody
"If this world is going to be reached, I am convinced that it must be done by men and women of average talent."
With his boundless physical energy, natural shrewdness, self-confidence, and eternal optimism, Dwight Lyman Moody could have become a Gilded Age industrial giant like John D. Rockefeller or Jay Gould. Instead, he became one of the great evangelists of the nineteenth century.

46. Dwight L. Moody
Social Gospel

47. Herbert Spencer
Spencer is best known for coining the expression "survival of the fittest", which he did in Principles of Biology (1864), after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
This term strongly suggests natural selection, yet as Spencer extended evolution into realms of sociology and ethics

48. Social Darwin Herbert Spencer
Coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”

49. Jane Addams
a pioneer American settlement social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace.
In an era when presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson identified themselves as reformers and social activists, Addams was one of the most prominent reformers of the Progressive Era.

50. She helped turn America to issues of concern to mothers, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace. She said that if women were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better places to live, they needed the vote to be effective in doing so. Addams became a role model for middle-class women who volunteered to uplift their communities.

51. In 1931 she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
and is recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the United States.
In 1889 Addams and her college friend and intimate partner Ellen Gates Starr co-founded a settlement house, the Hull House, in Chicago, Illinois. Hull House offered a comprehensive program of civic, cultural, recreational, and educational activities

52. Jane Addams
Social Gospel

53. Wrap-Up
Pair-Share
What are the similarities and differences between the ideologies of Social Darwinism and Social Gospel