Soc. Darwin. II

The most original thinker among the American Darwinists was William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) , who preached a brand of Social Darwinism that was more rigorous and less optimistic than Herbert Spencer.

One of the earliest (and most acerbic) champions of inequality was William Graham Sumner, a Yale sociologist and one of the best-known public intellectuals of the late 19th century. Sumner started his career as an Episcopal priest, tending to the pastoral needs of a New Jersey flock. Within a few years, however, he concluded that his temperament—famously standoffish and blunt—was better suited to scholarly endeavors. As a professor, he helped to pioneer the new discipline of sociology, coining such lasting terms as ethnocentrism and folkways in his studies of American culture. He also made a name for himself as a staunch anti-imperialist and principled opponent of the Spanish-American War. 

But it was in the realm of economic philosophy that Sumner carved out his most controversial and lasting influence. In 1883, he composed a short book-length essay titled “What Social Classes Owe to Each Other.” His answer? Absolutely nothing. 

In making his case for laissez-faire, Sumner highlighted one of the enduring paradoxes of American politics. “It is commonly asserted that there are in the United States no classes, and any allusion to classes is resented,” he noted. “On the other hand, we constantly read and hear discussion of social topics in which the existence of social classes is assumed as a simple fact.” This was particularly true of the 1870s, which witnessed a serious financial panic and depression, followed by a major national railroad strike. In response, reformers began to argue for government to take a greater role in aiding the poor and in softening the rough edges of industrial capitalism.

Sumner’s essay rejected all such nonsense. “It is not at all the function of the State to make men happy,” he declared. “They must make themselves happy in their own way, and at their own risk.” Today, he would be called a libertarian. At the time, the term of choice was “Social Darwinist.” One of the more fashionable theories of Gilded Age class relations, Social Darwinism attempted to apply the laws of evolution to human society, and thus to explain why those who ended up on top were necessarily “the fittest” among men.

Sumner was unabashed in his admiration for millionaires, and indignant at criticism lobbed in their direction. “The rich are good-natured,” he insisted, model citizens to be applauded for their initiative and patience with lesser souls. He approved the “aggregation of large fortunes” as “a necessary condition of many forms of social advance.” Toward that end, he argued strenuously against restrictions on Wall Street stockjobbing and other forms of speculative gain. “To denounce financial devices which are useful and legitimate because use is made of them for fraud is ridiculous,” he wrote. Also to be avoided were government investigative commissions, increased taxes, and Sunday-morning haranguing about how the rich owed something to the poor.

All of this offered a portrait of the elite utterly at odds with the Gilded Age stereotype: Rich men were virtuous, not “wicked”; self-disciplined, not profligate. Much of the staying power of Sumner’s arguments came from his ability to describe the class divide in cultural rather than economic terms. On one side were the virtuous rich, guardians of liberty and individual ambition. On the other were a host of interlopers seeking to drain wealthy entrepreneurs of their creativity, freedom, and resources. “If you get wealth, you will have to support other people,” he complained. “[I]f you do not get wealth, it will be the duty of other people to support you.” Call it the politics of resentment, 19th-century style.

Sumner’s list of deadbeats and drags on society will be familiar to any casual observer of modern conservative politics. First were the social reformers (usually well-educated Northeasterners, preferably women), whom Sumner chastised for their arrogance, hypocrisy, and dangerous utopian schemes. Next came government bureaucrats, typified by the “obscure clerk” whose small-minded enforcement of rules threatened to crush the nation’s visionary spirits. Finally, there were the poor themselves—often “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.” “A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be,” Sumner argued with his trademark bluntness. He even went so far as to denounce democracy itself, viewing mass voting as a modern experiment perilously close to mob rule.

Ultimately, though, it was neither the rich nor the poor who were the greatest objects of Sumner’s concern. Even as he cheered the richest of the rich, he positioned himself as the champion of a far more humble social figure, an ordinary taxpayer-citizen dubbed the “Forgotten Man.” In Sumner’s formulation, the “Forgotten Man” was the backbone of American society, the sort of fellow who “watched his own investments, made his own machinery safe, attended to his own plumbing, and educated his own children.” It was this earthy taxpayer-citizen—not the wealthiest Americans—who truly stood to suffer under a regime of government regulation and social reform. “He is an obscure man,” Sumner explained. Moreover, this hidden figure was usually too busy or too disgusted to engage in political debate. “He might grumble sometimes to his wife,” Sumner wrote, “but he does not frequent the grocery, and he does not talk politics at the tavern. So he is forgotten.”

Sumner, like Darwin and Spencer, accepted the theory of competition as a law of nature. But, unlike Spencer, Sumner did not feel that the pressure for food or the struggle for life made for inevitable progress

According to Sumner, there would always be inequities in society, and there would always be a group of people at the bottom of the social pyramid because men are not equal. Sumner felt private property was an important feature of society in the struggle for existence in that it produced inequalities between men . Property allowed some men to enjoy more rights and privileges in society than other men.

Nature grants her rewards to the fittest if there is liberty. "Liberty means the security given to each man that if he employs his energies to sustain the struggle on behalf of himself and those he cares for, he will get from nature in just proportion to his works ."

In other words, liberty means the existence of laissez-faire . For Sumner, this was the system of nature.  The inequalities would be relieved , but survival of the unfit would be furthered and liberty would be destroyed.  Democracy, according to Sumner, was not based on reason, but created by the opportunity founded in the landed frontier. Democracy was created by the opportunity found in the landed frontier. As the landed frontier diminished so would democracy; hence , showing itself to be merely a temporary condition .

As Sumner's arguments became accepted in society , the anti-government  appeal did more than merely paralyze political initiative.

It also shifted the governmental balance away from the executive and legislative branches to the judicial.

"The task of constitutional government ," declared Sumner, "is to devise institutions which shall come into play at critical periods to prevent the abusive control of the powers of a state by the controlling classes in it." Sumner meant the judiciary.

From the 1870's on, the courts increasingly took this protective role of property and the right to acquire it. During the 1870's and 80's, the judicial attack was directed mainly against the social welfare and regulatory laws created by the states.

During the 1870's and 80's, the judicial attack was directed mainly against the social welfare and regulatory laws created by the states.

The major weapon used by the Supreme Court was the Fourteenth Amendment , which prohibited the states from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or property , without due process of law." This due process clause, intended to protect the civil rights of the freed slaves. gradually became a tight restraint against state interference with economic and business activity.

In the 1880's and 90's, the Supreme Court erected similar barriers against the federal government through narrow interpretations of the Constitution. As discussed under the development of the railroads. the Court ruled in 1895 that the power to regulate interstate commerce did not cover manufacturing, and the power to tax did not extend to personal incomes.

Finally, since economic success was the mark of fitness and since fitness can be equated with goodness, Sumner felt the rich were not only the highest products of the evolutionary process , but morally they were the best members of society.

The opposite, of course, held true for the poor. As material ·wealth had become a sign of goodness and usually met acceptance within our society, wealth had become an absolute value.