He concluded that some people were destined for wealth and power because they were naturally stronger. Poverty would always exist, Spencer concluded, because the stronger members of society would triumph over the weaker members.
Social Darwinism provided wealthy and powerful people with a justification for their existence. Business owners utilized Social Darwinian beliefs to justify monopolies. Rockefeller, president of the Standard Oil Company and an Ohioan, once contended that "the growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest. The Progressive Movement originated partly as a response to Social Darwinism.
Progressives believed that God did not sentence some people to lives of poverty. Rather, poverty resulted primarily from the greed of other people. Spencer opposed any laws that helped workers, the poor, and those he deemed genetically weak. 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.
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Born into a freethinking family of English physicians in , Charles Darwin suffered from a host of conditions Darwin was born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln. Both Darwin and Lincoln were born on February 12, , but in much different settings. Socialism describes any political or economic theory that says the community, rather than individuals, should own and manage property and natural resources.
The Scopes Trial, also known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was the prosecution of science teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution in a Tennessee public school, which a recent bill had made illegal. The trial featured two of the best-known orators of the era, William Roosevelt in , created Social Security, a federal safety net for elderly, unemployed and disadvantaged Americans.
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