Social Darwinism and the Poor. by Peter Dobkin Hall, School of Public Affair, Baruch College, City University of New York. The impact of British biologist Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (), The Descent of Man (), and other writings went well beyond the audience of natural scientists to whom it was addressed. Throughout the western world, journalists, academics, and social Free Charles Darwin Essays and Papers. Page 1 of 50 - About essays. Satisfactory Essays. Charles Darwin. Words. 3 Pages. Charles Darwin. that humans have evolved over the years into the people they are today. Charles Darwin is not the founder of evolution, but with help from history and these scientists, Thomas Henry Huxley, Alfred Wallace and John Gould, he was able to develop the Darwin Essay takes challenges from students: “Write my essay for me if you can!” Essay writer from the best essay writing service of Darwin's essay is a company wit highly demanded professionals and every writer is an expert in a specific field. If you wonder: "If an essay typer is legal?" -
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The impact of British biologist Charles Darwin’s Origin of SpeciesThe Descent of Manand other writings went well beyond the audience of natural scientists to whom it was addressed.
Throughout the western world, journalists, academics, and social reformers were quick to appropriate Darwin’s theories about the evolution of life forms to explain trends in social and economic life. Under the circumstances, this is not surprising. 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 charles darwin essay explain both the emergence of the fittest -- fabulously wealthy elites charles darwin essay giant corporations, as well as the unfit -- the masses of poor in the teeming city slums, charles darwin essay.
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. Spontaneous responses to suffering attracted impostors and vagrants from every direction to enjoy the public benefaction,” drawing to the cities the floating vagrants, beggars, and paupers, who wander form village to village throughout the State.
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, charles darwin essay, became a custom. Ladies were robbed, charles darwin essay, 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, charles darwin essay, destroyed the work ethic that motivated the poor to work.
They are, in fact, an especial assistance to the idle, and a reward to the improvident Pauperism Preventing the growth of this criminal class called for strict measures, beginning with a thorough and discriminating supervision of all charities, public and private; the most careful attention to the education and employment of the poor and their children; the placing of charles darwin essay children in good families, charles darwin essay, at a distance, if possible, form degrading associations; a rigid and exact system of in-door relief, accompanied with labor; the reduction of out-door relief in cities, and the encouragement of emigration to rural districts from the crowded centres of poverty and crime, which most of our largest cities have now become, charles darwin essay.
The position of New York in this respect is exceptional, because it yearly receives a quarter of a million immigrants from foreign countries, and this exposes it to peculiar evils and dangers. While this should be borne in mind, it should not be made an apology for neglect nor an occasion for abuses, but should lead to increased vigilance and activity on the part of magistrates and citizens In a word, conservatives then as now not only blamed the poor for their poverty, but also charles darwin essay dispensers of “indiscriminate” and “sentimental” charity, whose well-intentioned, but ill-informed benevolence served both to perpetuate the sufferings that they sought to ameliorate and to compound them by encouraging the survival of the unfit.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, the most extreme of the conservatives, combining ideas drawn from Darwin, with those of his contemporary Francis Galton, produced theories which urged actions to prevent the disabled and other “unfit” people from perpetuating their kind by segregating them from society in almshouses, charles darwin essay, asylums, and other congregate institutions and through sterilization. These practices were enacted into law by many states and charles darwin essay upheld by the U.
Supreme Court, with Justice Holmes memorably defending government’s right to incarcerate and sterilize by declaring “three generations of imbeciles is enough! Bell Although liberals also drew on Darwinism, they did so in a very different spirit. Where the conservatives emphasized the role of nature -- competition, natural selection, and heredity -- in shaping evolution, liberals stressed the role of nurture -- humanity’s ability to manipulate the environment to foster evolutionary progress.
They believed that education, good nutrition, and healthy living conditions could eliminate poverty and criminality. As steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, one of the country’s leading social Darwinists put it, "The best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise - free libraries, parks, and means of recreation, by which men are helped in body and mind; works of art, certain to give pleasure and improve the public taste; and public institutions charles darwin essay various kinds, which will improve the general condition of the people; in this manner returning their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good.
One of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race,” Carnegie declared, "is indiscriminate charity. Charles darwin essay were better for mankind that the millions of the rich were thrown into the sea than so spent as to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy.
Of every thousand dollars spent charles darwin essay so called charity to day, it is probable that nine hundred and fifty dollars is unwisely spent -- so spent, indeed, as to produce the very evils which it hopes to mitigate or charles darwin essay. Competition in society, as in the natural world, sorted people out according to their abilities, charles darwin essay.
But this inequality did not preclude everyone, from millionaire to industrial charles darwin essay, from playing a useful part in the collective task of human progress. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, charles darwin essay, as charities reformers and philanthropists began to systematically study the poor and the causes of poverty, charles darwin essay, a more discerning perspective on these issues began to emerge which drew on both the liberal and conservative variants of social Darwinism.
Amos G, charles darwin essay. Warner’s American Charities: A Study in Philanthropy and Economicswhich became the standard text for social workers in the first quarter of the twentieth century, broke down the charles darwin essay of poverty into those “pertaining to the individual,” which included race, ethnicity, family, sex, age, habits and personal characteristics, and disease, and those “pertaining to environment,” which included climate, accidents, unhealthful occupations, work of women and children, abode charles darwin essayinvoluntary idleness unemploymentdiet, clothing, and lack of medical care Warner He envisioned two basic approaches to addressing these causes, “therapy” by which he meant such things as medical treatment, the elimination of child labor, and the improvement of working conditions and “hygiene,” which included remedies ranging from improvements in “conditions of life” through institutionalization and sterilization of the unfit.
As a charity reformer, Warner was harshly critical of the almshouse as a means of addressing poverty, charles darwin essay, disability, and dependency, scorning their undifferentiated approach to a wide range of problems that were products of different causes.
The almshouse, he wrote, "acts as the charitable catch-all for the community. Idiots, epileptics, incurables, incompetents, the aged, abandoned children, foundlings, women for confinement, and a considerable number charles darwin essay the insane, the blind, and the deaf and dumb are all dumped together.
Warner and other early twentieth century reformers championed the establishment of specialized institutions that could classify, treat, supervise, and reform the dependent and disabled. The chief task of these new institutions was to differentiate the dependent and disabled according to the nature and sources of their problems, separating “all those requiring special scientific treatment” including “the defective classes of teachable age, the deaf, the dumb, and the blind,” as well as the insane, identifying those whose problems were not amenable to therapy -- the feeble-minded and epileptic -- and channeling them into custodial institutions Warner Similarly, orphaned and abandoned children, who constituted a substantial proportion of the almshouse population would have to be sorted according to their needs and abilities.
Reformers did not confine their energies to treating the dependent charles darwin essay disabled. They were also actively engaged in changing charles darwin essay conditions of life for the poor, advocating for the elimination of slums, the enactment of public health legislation, crusading for the elimination of child labor, championing mandatory school attendance laws, and fighting for the creation of parks and playgrounds -- all this premised on the Darwinist idea that a healthy, orderly, and just society fostered the conditions for social, political, and economic progress.
Social Darwinism never constituted a formally articulated philosophy; it was used in a variety of often contradictory ways charles darwin essay writers and thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Regardless of the social and political agendas it gave rise to, the one thing all had in common was a scientific data-based approach to defining and offering solutions to social problems.
Whether charles darwin essay to justify laissez-faire or activist public policies, social Darwinism provided a vocabulary and set of concepts that facilitated the emergence of the social sciences and their application to such pressing problems as poverty and social justice. James Hendren Bell, Superintendent of the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded. Edwin A. Bridgeport: The Farmer Publishing Company.
Richard Hofstadter. Social Darwinism in American Thought. Boston: Beacon Press. American Charities: A Study in Philanthropy and Economics. New York: Thomas Y. WE WELCOME YOUR FEEDBACK!
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A Report about Charles Robert Darwin. My report is about a Marine scientist, English naturalist, geologist, and biologist named Charles Robert Darwin. He was born February 12, in Shrewsbury, England and died August 19, in Downe, Kent. He was best known for his contributions to the science of evolution Darwin Essay takes challenges from students: “Write my essay for me if you can!” Essay writer from the best essay writing service of Darwin's essay is a company wit highly demanded professionals and every writer is an expert in a specific field. If you wonder: "If an essay typer is legal?" - Free Charles Darwin Essays and Papers. Page 1 of 50 - About essays. Satisfactory Essays. Charles Darwin. Words. 3 Pages. Charles Darwin. that humans have evolved over the years into the people they are today. Charles Darwin is not the founder of evolution, but with help from history and these scientists, Thomas Henry Huxley, Alfred Wallace and John Gould, he was able to develop the
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