The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (17 page)

So how do we explain this? Let’s start with its eugenic connotations. One important part of the answer is that Social Darwinism as a phrase was born in Europe and, over there, it was often used as an ugly and bastardized Nietzschean racial philosophy of the strong against the weak. Meanwhile, in America, it became associated with figures like Spencer and Sumner who were philosophical “radical individualists,” or what today we would call libertarians.

In a sense, this shift is a reversal of what happened to the word liberal when it crossed the Atlantic Ocean. In Europe, where the word originated, liberal still means something like libertarian. But in the United States liberal has come to mean a moderately left-wing statist. That switcheroo took place in the late 1920s and early 1930s, because Progressives (and later, Communists) had so poisoned “progressive” that they had to change their brand.

Another piece of the puzzle stems from the fact that liberals overly revere Darwin (while many conservatives do not revere him enough, alas). And since he must not be blamed for anything bad done in the name of evolutionary theory, they peeled off from the pack that handful of nineteenth-century intellectuals and thinkers who were actual libertarians and blamed them for any and all of the fallout from Darwinism. Specifically, everything bad that comes out of evolution is hung on the notion of “survival of the fittest,” a phrase Spencer coined. Indeed, you can find scores of letters to the editor and blog posts by disgruntled Darwin fans angrily explaining that Darwin didn’t
invent
the phrase “survival of the fittest,” and so therefore he cannot be blamed for eugenics, war, or any other cruelty associated, fairly or unfairly, with the doctrine of evolution. Meanwhile, Spencer, who believed almost none of the things he is said
to have believed, is responsible for everything bad that resulted from Darwinism. It’s an astoundingly weak argument.

Some claim Darwin never even uttered the words “survival of the fittest.” While I’m not sure why that would be important, it’s simply not true. Darwin just didn’t say it
first
. Indeed, in later editions of
The Origins of Species
, Darwin replaced “natural selection” in some passages with “survival of the fittest.” The waters get muddier still. That phrase was preceded by Thomas Malthus’s “
struggle
for the fittest” and the “struggle for existence,” and Malthus was a major inspiration for Darwin’s theory of evolution. Malthus is also a darling of progressive thought, because his argument that humans cause scarcity is an inspiration for environmentalism, socialism, and other leftist doctrines. Here is Darwin in his own words from his
Autobiography
:

In October 1838… fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement “Malthus on Population,” and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result would be the formation of new species.
⁶

And here he is openly and deliberately applying Malthus in the updated 1859 edition of
The Origin of Species
:

Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life. It is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage. Although some species may be now increasing, more or less rapidly, in numbers, all cannot do so, for the world would not hold them.
⁷

Why survival of the fittest should be assigned the blame above and beyond so many other far more noxious notions and doctrines is beyond me, save as a way of passing the blame onto intellectual enemies. Its effectiveness as a verbal bludgeon cannot be denied, because it is taken as a given by almost all liberals that there’s a direct line from Spencer to Hitler, all because of that phrase and the images of concentration camps that it conjures. That’s largely why Spencer may be the single most unfairly vilified thinker of the nineteenth century. While hundreds of millions have been killed by the faithful application of Karl Marx’s ideas, Marx still enjoys a deep reservoir of respect and an army of apologists. And, perhaps more shocking, Darwin is still found utterly blameless on that score, even though he was in fact the inspiration for a good deal of Marx’s work. Marx reportedly wanted to dedicate
Das Kapital
to Darwin, but Darwin talked him out of it (this may be a myth, but it’s clear that Marx was deeply influenced by Darwin). Meanwhile, poor Herbert Spencer, one of the chief architects of what is today called libertarianism, is routinely denounced as one of the most evil figures in human history.

Even more infuriating is the simple fact that American liberalism should be squarely in the dock for the ideas routinely laid at Spencer’s feet. While Herbert Spencer was a laissez-faire liberal who wanted the state to mind its own business, ardently supported women’s suffrage, and loathed slavery, many of the progressives and liberals who hated him were committed eugenicists and racists. The economists at the heart of progressivism were all eugenicists. Charles Van Hise, the president of the University of Wisconsin during its progressive heyday, founder of the conservation movement, and adviser to Teddy Roosevelt, believed, “He who thinks not of himself primarily, but of his race, and of its future, is the new patriot.”
⁸
He added, “We know enough about agriculture so that the agricultural production of the country could be doubled if the knowledge were applied;… we know enough about eugenics so that if the knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation.”
⁹

The most famous intellectual at the University of Wisconsin was arguably E. A. Ross—coiner of the phrase “race suicide,” and one of America’s leading “raceologists” at the turn of the twentieth century. “The theory that races are virtually equal in capacity,” warned Ross, “leads
to such monumental follies as lining the valleys of the South with the bones of half a million picked whites in order to improve the conditions of four million unpicked blacks.”
¹⁰

The minimum wage was defended by progressive economists with explicitly Social Darwinist language. The fear was that since black and, especially, Chinese laborers needed so much less to get by, the unfittest might survive at the expense of the fittest (i.e., Whites). Or, as Ross put it, “The Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him.”
¹¹
Raising the minimum wage to a white man’s worth would help lock out the unfit and, hopefully, cause them to die out from destitution. “No consistent eugenist [
sic
] can be a ‘Laisser Faire’[
sic
] individualist,” wrote the hugely influential British socialist Sidney Webb, “unless he throws up the game in despair. He must interfere, interfere, interfere!”
¹²

There’s a tendency among liberal historians to claim that there were conservative eugenicists and liberal eugenicists, and the liberals were all decent because they just wanted to improve everyone’s environment, while the conservatives were cruel, Spencerian racists who wanted to weed out the inferior races. But while it is surely the case that there were racists on what passed for the right, and even a few eugenicists, the more glaring truth is eugenics was overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the Left. Remember, progressives saw eugenics as compassionate policy making, not punishment. Conservatives and classical liberals were evil because they didn’t care enough about the poor to sterilize them for their own good. When the debate about eugenics was most active, the world’s foremost opponent was the Catholic conservative G. K. Chesterton, while the most famous eugenicists were socialists like H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw.

One can see this divide perfectly in Herbert Croly’s effort to make peace between the two factions. For example, he wrote in an unsigned
New Republic
editorial in 1916:

We may suggest that a socialized policy of population cannot be built upon a laissez faire economic policy. So long as the state neglects its good blood, it will let its bad blood alone. There is no certain way of distinguishing between defectiveness in the strain and defectiveness produced by malnutrition, neglected lesions originally
curable, or overwork in childhood. When the state assumes the duty of giving a fair opportunity for development to every child, it will find unanimous support for a policy of extinction of stocks incapable of profiting from their privileges.
¹³

In other words, once we get a fully realized welfare state up and running, we’ll be able to pick out those who belong to the unredeemable stocks of the unfit from those who are unworthy because of poverty, at which point we’ll be able to work on making the former group extinct.

Consider Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court justice who was an impassioned eugenicist and believed that “building a race” was central to his entire worldview. The revered liberal lion of the court authored the
Buck v. Bell
decision, which held that the state had the constitutional right to forcibly sterilize unfit women (it was an 8–1 decision with all of the liberals, including Louis Brandeis and Harlan Fiske Stone, concurring, and only the archconservative Catholic Pierce Butler dissenting). Holmes later became a hero to progressives for his dissent in the
Lochner
decision, in which he mocked Herbert Spencer’s libertarian views (“The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s
Social Statics
,” Holmes wrote).

What united all of these figures, from Croly and Holmes to Jane Addams and W. E. B. Du Bois, was their adherence to what the liberal historian Eric Goldman calls Reform Darwinism. But it was the libertarians who believed that the State had no role in choosing worthy and unworthy races who have come down in history as the racists and Hitlerites. The outright reversal and widespread ignorance of the historical record on this matter is a disgusting intellectual scandal that lives on to this day.

Which brings us to the poor “robber barons,” the rich and successful champions of commerce from the nineteenth century who put the gild on the Gilded Age. The argument goes like this: Darwinism arrived on the scene around the same time that American capitalism took flight. The robber barons—who were neither robbers nor barons—therefore must have been inspired by Darwin’s theories to justify their dog-eat-dog theories of capitalism.

We owe this argument almost entirely to Richard Hofstadter’s book
Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915
, which first appeared as his
PhD thesis in 1938 and subsequently as a book in 1944. It was Hofstadter who argued that the robber barons had found an ideological rationalization for their rapacious ways in Social Darwinism. Hofstadter writes:

With its rapid expansion, its exploitative methods, its desperate competition, and its peremptory rejection of failure, post-bellum America was like a vast human caricature of the Darwinian struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. Successful business entrepreneurs apparently have accepted almost by instinct the Darwinian terminology which seemed to portray the conditions of their existence.
¹⁴

Other historians were quick to follow. Merle Curti in
The Growth of American Thought
argued that Social Darwinism “admirably suited the needs of the great captains of industry, who were crushing the little fellows when these vainly tried to compete with them.” Henry Steel Commager wrote in
The American Mind
that “Darwin and Spencer exercised such sovereignty over America as George III had never enjoyed.”

And then there’s Robert Reich, who has been regurgitating these arguments with an almost bulimic regularity. Social Darwinism, he writes,

offered a perfect moral justification for America’s Gilded Age, when robber barons controlled much of American industry, the gap between the rich and poor turned into a chasm, urban slums festered, and the wealthy bought off politicians. It allowed John D. Rockefeller, for example, to claim that the fortune he had accumulated through the giant Standard Oil Trust was “merely a survival of the fittest,… the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.”
¹⁵

Reich then adds: “The Modern Conservative movement has embraced Social Darwinism with no less fervor than it has condemned Darwinism.”

It is less out of a respect for the author than an admiration for the concision of the passage’s inaccuracy that I single it out as an example, for just about
everything in it is untrue or misleading. Let’s start again with the robber barons, enduring bogeymen in the liberal imagination. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there were actual robber barons—European feudal lords who shook down unfortunate travelers in their realm. In nineteenth-century America the term emerged as a catchall for brigands, highwaymen, and carpetbaggers. After the Civil War it was occasionally used to describe wealthy captains of industry.

But it wasn’t until Matthew Josephson’s intellectually bankrupt 1934 book,
The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901,
that the term stuck as a description of those leeches of the liberal imagination. Josephson was a relentless partisan for socialist economics, and his book amounted to little more than a comic book without pictures. His unifying thesis was to take seriously Balzac’s dictum that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” He assumed that wealth was and is by its very nature felonious.

This didn’t just go for individual robber barons but for the entire nation as a whole. Generations of left-wing historians and muckraking journalists cast the post–Civil War expansion as a time of unprecedented exploitation. America, in effect, had committed some kind of crime by prospering.