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That light came in as a flood and all was clear. Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I found the truth of evolution. ‘All’s well since all grows better’became my motto… Man was not created with an instinct for his own degradation, but from the lower he had risen to the higher forms. Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection …

In a country greatly endowed with material resources, as well as with an efficient and flexible system of production which was able to manufacture goods on a colossal scale and a fast-growing domestic market, Social Darwinism flourished, fitting well with the rugged individualism of the frontier spirit, or the exploitation of the immigrant worker, depending on the point of view. Carnegie welcomed the opportunity it brought:

We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment; the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few; the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential to the future progress of the human race.

For John D. Rockefeller,

The growth of a large business is merely the survival of the fittest. The American Beauty rose can be produced in the splendour and fragrance which bring cheer to the beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up round it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working out of a law of Nature and a law of God.

One of the leading supporters of the movement in America was William Graham Sumner, Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University, which, under his influence, became the centre of Social Darwinism in the country. Sumner thought that political equality entailed having no claims on government - no poor relief, welfare, and the like. To have such claims would render men less free, yielding up their desire to fend for themselves. As he put it, ‘If it be said that to be free on the terms accessible to poor men is harsh, freedom is harsh.’In his book What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other, published in 1883, Sumner wrote that the debt was ‘nothing’. He encapsulated his views in his concept of the ‘Forgotten Man’.

How the Fundamentalists saw the effects of Darwin’s materialism: a gradual rejection of belief in the spiritual and a descent to atheism. Note the three types felt to be most at risk: the student, the ‘educated’preacher and the scientist.

When A and B combine to make C give something free to D, then C is the forgotten man who by contriving to acquire enough substance to be levied upon [by taxes] is thereby rendered eligible to be victimised in behalf of the less deserving D.

Competition between men for available resources was right and natural. The struggle for existence on the social level was represented by man’s struggle with nature to yield up subsistence. The capitalist system was the best suited to both activities. As Sumner put it:

Millionaires are a product of natural selection…. Let it be understood that we cannot go outside this alternative: liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest.

When Spencer visited New York in 1882 to mark the high point of his influence in the United States, Carnegie and other major businessmen in New York were his hosts. Spencer won America as no philosopher had ever won a country. From the Civil War to the New Deal under Roosevelt, businessmen explained their actions in terms of Social Darwinism. Everybody, down to the office boy hurrying to his three dollar a week job, was, by his speed and diligence, contributing to the good and to the progress of mankind. American ‘get up and go’had found a scientific raison d’etre. It remains at the root of American life today.

Darwin was to have one last, major success in perhaps the most unexpected of quarters. When he read Origin, Marx wrote to Engels: ‘Origin is the natural