He was an early opponent of the welfare state. He viewed individual competition for property and social status as a tool for eliminating the weak and immoral of the population. Galton proposed to better humankind by propagating the British elite. Eugenics became a popular social movement in the United States that peaked in the s and s.
The eugenics movement in the United States focused on eliminating undesirable traits from the population. During the first part of the twentieth century, 32 U. Hitler began reading about eugenics and social Darwinism while he was imprisoned following a failed coup attempt known as the Beer Hall Putsch.
Hitler adopted the social Darwinist take on survival of the fittest. He believed the German master race had grown weak due to the influence of non-Aryans in Germany. The Nazis targeted certain groups or races that they considered biologically inferior for extermination. These included Jews, Roma gypsies , Poles, Soviets, people with disabilities and homosexuals. By the end of World War II , social Darwinist and eugenic theories had fallen out of favor in the United States and much of Europe—partly due to their associations with Nazi programs and propaganda, and because these theories were scientifically unfounded.
The world was in the midst of vast and frightening changes — industrialization, urbanization, immigration, class war, and mass poverty — which no one understood and to which no one could offer solutions. Extrapolations from Darwinism, with its emphasis on evolutionary progress, offered reason for hope that a new and better social order could emerge from the turbulence.
At the same time, by highlighting competition and the survival of the fittest as the drivers of evolution, it seemed to explain both the emergence of the fittest — fabulously wealthy elites and giant corporations, as well as the unfit — the masses of poor in the teeming city slums. Social Darwinism, as it came to be known, served the purposes of both liberals and conservatives. Because conservatives believed that many of the traits associated with unfitness — propensities for idleness, criminality, sexual misbehavior, and alcoholism — were passed along from generation to generation by heredity, much like hair and eye color, they grimly predicted the growth of a permanent criminal underclass unless steps were taken to prevent it.
They were particularly concerned with the impact of sentimental and impulsive charity on the poor. The streets of New York became thronged with this ragged, needy crowd; they filled all the station-houses and lodging places provided by private charity, and overflowed into the island almshouses. Street-begging, to the point of importunity, became a custom.
Ladies were robbed, even on their own doorsteps, by these mendicants. Petty offenses, such as thieving and drunkenness, increased.
One of the free lodgings in the upper part of the city, established by the Commissioners of Charities, became a public nuisance from its rowdyism and criminality Pauperism , Poor relief, conservatives believed, destroyed the work ethic that motivated the poor to work.
To others the fierce desire for social justice obliterates all fear of a general catastrophe. And our views of poverty and social betterment, or what is possible and what is not, are still largely conditioned by it.
Our social life is aimless without it, we are a crowd without a common understanding. And an educational movement is more tenacious than any other sort of social or political movement whatever. A theory arising in the late nineteenth century that the laws of evolution , which Charles Darwin had observed in nature, also apply to society.
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Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Introduction Social Darwinism is a complex and controversial topic, a package of ideologies supposedly inspired by biological evolutionism that is of interest to scholars of both the life and the social sciences.
General Overviews There are few wide-ranging studies of social Darwinism, in part because so many different ideologies have been associated with the movement, but also because the national contexts in which these ideologies developed are very different.
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