Tim Leonard of Princeton has posted a very interesting and important paper on Hofstader's influential book, and what he calls the "myth of Social Darwinism". Leonard points out, among other things, that the association of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner with "Social Darwinism" is almost entirely a product of Hofstader's work, and that Hofstader merely used "Social Darwinism" as an epithet to discredit (libertarian) views he opposed. More generally, Hofstader's book "gave impetus to the novel assocation of Social Darwinism not only with laissez-faire," but with racism and imperialism. "Never mind that the set of Gilded Age and Progresive Era writers who endorsed laissez-faire, racism, imperialism and eugenics is essentially empty.... [Sumner, in fact, was a leading opponent of the Spanish-American War] 'social Darwinism' functions as a synecdoche for all that an early-1940s New Deal liberal (and many cince) would regard as retrograde and reactionary."
Excellent article on Hofstader's Social Darwinism in American Thought:
I really think that at least part of the opposition to teaching evolution in schools is that that people mistakenly believe that evolution and social Dawinism are the same thing. They are not, of course. If people realized that social Dawinism is something altogether different, I think some of the opposition to evolution will melt away. (Not all, of course)
However, there is now an entire industry created attempting to discredit evolution, and once that happens, facts are no longer relevant. For these people, it's in their own interests to confuse the two, and that's why I don't have much hope it will change much.
I think everyone has that friend that occasionally spouts out that we should sterilize all the idiots, and I think the near universal reaction is a nod and a noncommittal noise.
But I'd agree I don't see much of a tie between "social darwinism" and opponents of evolution except to the extent that Evolution deniers attempt to baldly tie evolution in with Nazi-like eugenics ideas. (IE "hitler believed in evolution")
If anything, I think I see more "social darwinism" (used in the common somewhat derogatory sense that it's usually used in today) in people who are also typically opposed to evolution. Sometimes it's dressed up in religious terminology, but the real difference between "Social darwinism" and some applications of "prosperity gospel" isn't much, they both result in the conclusion that the poor deserve their status.
But the paper is very useful for pointing out the cultural contingency of the association of evolutionary ideas with fascism.
But this paper makes Holmes look even more impressive in that regard.
I don't disagree, though Holmes's dissent is often interpreted to mean something different. Because Holmes was an admirer (at various points) of Spencer along with various social evolutionary, eugenicist and protofascist thinkers, readers often take it to mean that while he preferred as a matter of his own views that a social Darwinist outcome occur, he thought himself bound by judicial restraint and the meaning of the 14th amendment to hold otherwise.
I suspect that the current disfavor for the term lies in it's frequent invocation by people unwilling to acknowledge that external factors such as birth/luck/government policy played a part in their success. Since they believe they made the big time entirely on their own merits, everyone who failed did so because of their own flaws.
Good point. C. S. Lewis wrote in the same vein. Though I'm too lazy right now to try to look up the exact title(s) where he did this, ISTR that Shelley and perhaps also Pope were cited.
I still think Holmes is a bad example of what most people thought. But how do you reconcile his opinion in Buck v. Bell?
Read University of Chicago Zoology Professor Horatio Hackett Newman's Readings in Evolution, Genetics, and Eugenics (University of Chicago Press, 1921), starting at page 465 for a discussion of how governments have solved the problems of feeblemindedness by passing eugenics laws, and fear of how the inferior forms of humans were increasing in America.
Starting on p. 475:
Here's another book, by Southwestern College Biology Professor William M. Goldsmith, The Laws of Life: Principles of Evolution, Heredity and Eugenics (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1922). Again, all three of these are brought together, and starting on page 398 is a chapter whose title alone tells you where this is going: "Moulding the Super-Man." The topics to be covered are also pretty typical of where this stuff was headed:
I could keep going, but this is the sort of racist trash also appears repeatedly in Democratic newspapers of the period 1916-23 that I have read while researching other topics, such as the Sacramento Bee, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The Bee was quoting a prominent birth control advocate of the time about the dangers of the black race outreproducing the white race--and that was the reason why birth control had to be legal. The Chronicle article warned of the danger of "race suicide" if little (white) boys had to grow up in apartments instead of houses.
Were Republican-leaning papers any better? (Not a rhetorical question; I genuinely don't know.)