Social Darwinism: Business Analysis

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In the height of the Industrial revolution in the late nineteenth century amid all the factories emerging and wealth to be gained there came this new idealism among the business owners known as Social Darwinism. As men were becoming increasingly richer, the workers who were made up of mostly lower class citizens and women, became increasingly looked down upon. In order to justify this behavior, wealthy tycoons embraced Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher’s Darwinism outlook on the social races (Schultz, 2014). Social Darwinism became a way to justifiably classify people due to their stature in the social ladder, it brought along the ideas of eugenics, and created unrest with the Christian societies Social Darwinism developed out of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in which plants and animals compete for survival. The coined phrase “survival of the fittest” became the ultimate reasoning behind the concept of social Darwinism (Lewis,2016). This was used to keep immigrants, women, slaves, and even the Native America’s from having rights the same as the …show more content…
Eugenics comes from the Greek word eugenav, which means to be “well-born” and sparked a debate throughout the world on how it may be possible to breed the perfect race (Lewis, 2016). This idea spurred the notion that man’s moral choices could be explained by their own genetic makeup and caused many American’s to consider a bill for sterilization of the immigrants coming into the country (Leonard, 2005). Eugenics also introduced the ideas of birth control among the lower classes. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 and insisted “America must remain American” (Leonard, 2005). This bill slowed the amount of immigrants coming from eastern and southern Europe. Ultimately, the theory of eugenics was proven biologically flawed and many American’s turned their backs on the idea after World War