Understanding Social Progress

ASU HST 200 (Historical Themes) The Growing Pains of Urbanization, 1870-1900 Understanding Social Progress Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was a major concept of the nineteenth century that made the transition from the clear-cut world of science to the more ambiguous arena of social and economic success. British biologist Charles Darwin argued that natural selection, not supernatural intervention, is the primary process by which species originate and evolve in his 1859 treatise On the Origin of Species. The theory soon came under fire from the Anglican Church (though a liberal branch of the church accepted the idea that natural selection was a part of God's plan) and later from a large number of people, both domestically and internationally, who believed that the theory directly contradicted God's role in the creation of the earth. The idea of evolution was contentious in the public domain for decades, despite the fact that biologists, botanists, and the majority of the scientific establishment at the time of Darwin's publication broadly embraced it as a theory that consolidated much of the prior research in the area. Herbert Spencer, a political philosopher, advanced Darwin's theory of evolution by developing the expression "survival of the fittest" and later popularizing the term "social Darwinism," which holds that society evolved similarly to a natural organism and that certain people will succeed owing to innate racial and ethnic characteristics and their capacity for adaptation. According to this paradigm, as long as everyone had access to the path to success, any combination of attributes and abilities—intellect, inherited riches, and so forth—combined with the capacity for adaptation would allow Americans to climb or fall on their own will. Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner rose to prominence as the most outspoken supporter of social Darwinism. It is hardly unexpected that individuals who amassed riches during this period praised this philosophy highly, even though Darwin would have rejected it as a grotesque misinterpretation of his scientific findings. Although detractors of this notion quickly pointed out that those who did not achieve frequently did not have the same chances or an equal playing field as those who did, they regarded their success as evidence of biological fitness. The idea eventually gained notoriety in the 1930s and 1940s when eugenicists started to apply it to their beliefs of racial genetic superiority. Other intellectuals of the time developed more sophisticated interpretations of Charles Darwin's theories, emphasizing various realism theories that attempted to uncover the reality behind the changes that had occurred in the United States. These theorists held that before social structures and ideas could be accepted, they needed to be demonstrated to be effective. One of the main proponents of the closely related idea of pragmatism, which maintained that Americans should try out various theories and viewpoints rather than presuming that outdated, widely accepted models accurately represented American society, was the philosopher William James. A cohesive truth, in James's opinion, could only be discovered by connecting concepts, ideas, and assertions to real things and events. His writings had a significant impact on later avant-garde and modernist literary and artistic movements, particularly in regards to their comprehension of the observer's, artist's, or writer's role in forming the society they tried to observe. John Dewey developed the instrumentalism thesis, which promoted the use of education in the pursuit of truth, by building on the notion of pragmatism. Dewey thought that the best means of reform and improvement was education, more especially the application of the scientific method to observation and change. American culture as it kept becoming more and more intricate. In light of this, Dewey was a strong proponent of educational changes aimed at forming an enlightened American populace, which would in turn serve as the cornerstone for additional, desperately needed progressive social reforms. Apart from Riis's popularization of photography, realism was also adopted by authors and other artists. Partly in reaction to the more romantic works of their predecessors, they attempted to depict real-life vignettes in their stories. The Ashcan School of Art was founded by visual artists including George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and Robert Henri, among others. Its main goal was to portray the rapidly urbanizing American culture around the turn of the century. Typically, the subjects of their works were working-class leisure and recreation as well as workingclass urban life, including tenement buildings and slums. Realism in literature was also made popular by journalists and novelists. This popular style was exemplified by writers like Rebecca Harding Davis, who published Life in the Iron Mills in 1861, and Stephen Crane, who wrote bleak stories about life in the slums or during the Civil War. Whether it was the truth of the pioneer spirit, as shown in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, or the problem of corruption in The Gilded Age, co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner in 1873, Mark Twain also aimed for realism in his writing. Despite this, these realists' stories and artwork might be extremely stylized, contrived, and even manufactured because their aim was to accurately depict the societal truths that they believed needed to be changed. Some writers, like Jack London, the author of The Call of the Wild, subscribed to naturalism, a school of thought that held that the only laws that genuinely applied to humans were those found in nature and the natural world. Many people consider Kate Chopin to be the greatest female novelist and short story writer of the late nineteenth century. She paved the way for later generations of feminist writers by attempting to present a realistic picture of women's life in America in the late nineteenth century. Chopin's introspective writings on her experiences as a southern woman established a type of creative nonfiction that reflected the challenges of American women via their own unique experiences, even though she never considered herself a feminist in the traditional sense. She was also one of the first writers to publicly discuss the racial issue of miscegenation—a term used to refer to interracial relationships but typically associated with negative connotations. Chopin delves deeply into the Creole community in her home Louisiana in Desiree's Baby, exposing bigotry in a way that is uncommon in literature from that age. Paul Laurence Dunbar was an African American poet, dramatist, and novelist of the realism era who addressed racial concerns when most reform-minded Americans chose to concentrate on other matters. In addition to writing in conventional English, Dunbar also wrote in Black vernacular, which he used to great effect to depict the highs and lows of African American life. Even though Dunbar first had trouble securing the financial backing and support needed to pursue a full-time writing career, his later collaboration with literary critic and Atlantic Monthly editor William Dean Howells served to solidify his reputation as the most accomplished African American writer of his time. Similar to Chopin and Harding Davis, Dunbar's literature brought to light aspects of the American experience that the nation's majority population did not fully comprehend. Through their writing, these authors gave readers a glimpse into a society that they would not have known much about and a voice to underrepresented groups, such as African American males, southern women, or iron mill workers.