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By Root 373 0

crammed into windowless rooms, street urchins played in trash-filled alleys, and homeless men sprawled head to toe on bare wood planks in primitive lodging houses. It is a fair guess that the vision of an ever-richer future was lost on the members of this rapidly growing underclass. To the general public, bedazzled by the posturing of the rich and the nouveaux riches, the poor had remained conveniently invisible. Then a reporter named Jacob Riis wrote about them in newspaper articles and in a book, How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890. Riis, a Danish immigrant who had experienced poverty firsthand, backed up his writing with stark photographs that shocked readers: haggard men staring from the floor of a flop house, and smudge-faced toddlers in a tenement kitchen wide-eyed in the glare of Riis’s flash-powder illumination. Other writers and social critics described the plight of women and children working backbreaking shifts under deplorable conditions in factories and sweatshops.

To explain the gap between the opulence of the rich and the misery that the work of Riis and others revealed, self-made magnates like Andrew Carnegie embraced a convenient idea: “survival of the fittest,” the catchphrase of a philosophy that came to be known as “social Darwinism.” Before Charles Darwin ever used the saying, it was made famous by the British social philosopher Herbert Spencer. Spencer advanced a worldview in which everything under the sun would continually get better and better, if only humankind would avoid interfering with nature’s inexorable progression toward perfection. When Darwin published his world-shaking Origin of Species, in 1859, Spencer pounced on the idea of “natural selection” and extended it to the realm of human interaction and commerce. (Darwin eventually picked up Spencer’s “survival of the fittest” epithet and used it in his own writings.) Spencer asserted that governments should stay away from any kind of business regulation. A laissez-faire approach would ensure optimal economic development—the strongest businesses would thrive and those that couldn’t keep up would be swept aside.

This way of thinking was tailor-made for men like Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, eager to reconcile their ruthlessly monopolistic business practices and, in Carnegie’s case, brutal treatment of workers with their self-image as God-fearing Christians. “We accept and welcome . . . the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few,” Carnegie said, “as being not only beneficial but essential to the future progress of the race.”

Some pushed the eugenic interpretation of the gap between the haves and the have-nots a step further. S.C.T. Dodd, the vaunted general counsel for Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, asserted that poverty exists “because the nature of the devil has made some men weak and imbecile and others lazy and worthless, and neither man nor God can do much for one who will do nothing for himself.”

In the face of such smug sophistry, Americans in need of a moral compass to help guide them might find that even their church had been co-opted. Protestantism was America’s religion at the time—two out of three churchgoers identified with one of the many Protestant denominations. As part of the Establishment, much of the mainstream Protestant church found itself in sync with business. According to historian Sidney Fine:

Nowhere . . . did the business spirit find greater favor than in the Protestant church. . . . Wealthy business figures were appointed to church boards in increasing numbers, and men of business ability were in demand to serve as church officials. Even the Baptists, who had prided themselves on being a poor man’s denomination, ceased to express contempt for wealth. . . .

However, strong voices would emerge within the church and the churchgoing laity, who resisted the sweep of materialist values and the self-justifying rationales of the well-healed. Protestant clergymen Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch were among the most renowned critics of Gilded Age materialism