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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Social Darwinism on the Menu, February 1, 2009
This review is from: Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America (Hardcover)
On November 8, 1882, many of America's elite in the field's of politics, business, and science gathered in Delmonico's banquet room in New York City to celebrate the triumph of Social Darwinism. The theory was deemed "the greatest conception of modern times, if not, indeed, all time." The banquet was in honor of Herbert Spencer, the theory's most well-known advocate. It was the culmination of Spencer's three-month visit to America, a country that was very receptive to his ideas.
Barry Werth begins his story a decade prior to the banquet and focuses mainly on the rivalry between the ideas of Charles Darwin, the naturalist, and Spencer, the philosopher. Although Spencer had initially published work on social development, it was Darwin's publication of The Origin of the Species that popularized the idea of natural selection and evolution. Darwin, being empirically minded, confined his theory to the biological world. He believed that one could only have knowledge of that which could be observed. Spencer, on the other hand, applied the theory of evolution to all manner of things, not only to the social realm, but all areas of human activity. Spencer was more given to sweeping generalizations than the painstaking research practiced by Darwin.
It is not difficult to see why Spencer's speculations found fertile ground in America: the country was emerging from the rubble of the Civil War and rapidly becoming a world power. It's new self-image was that it was a prime example of "the survival of the fittest" - a phrase coined by Spencer. In Spencer's cosmology it meant that the strongest and the most righteous ultimately prevailed.
The characters that animate Werth's chronicle of this period were mostly on the side of Spencer, and they illustrate the incredible versatility of the theory of evolution. Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, believed firmly in Spencerian competition and progress, as well as his own superiority in its outcome. William Graham Sumner, the famous Yale sociologist, declared social welfare programs useless since, in his view, the needy will always be needy no matter how much assistance they receive.
Spencer, surpisingly, also had followers in the church. Henry Ward Beecher, who was arguably the most popular minister in America in his day, was famous for reconciling evolution with Christianity. His reasoning went something as follows: not only did God create all things, His wisdom was so great that He made all things create themselves. How many people actually believed that remains a mystery.
Werth's story is a very entertaining and informative work of intellectual history, but we are left wondering, in the end, how much of the theory of evolution was actually accepted by the population beyond Delmonico's banquet room. Although Spencerism was triumphant among some of the elites, a majority of the population probably still believed that God created all things the old-fashioned way.
Today, Darwin's more scientific approach is favored and Spencer's philosophy has largely been discredited, as his theories were used to support racism and eugenics. Even so, Darwin's theory must still compete with today's proponents of "intelligent design" - a good indicator that not much progress has been made and that the fittest theory is still struggling for survival.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Save room for dessert, March 22, 2009
This review is from: Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America (Hardcover)
Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America
In Banquet at Delmonico's Barry Werth pieces together narrative sketches involving about a dozen prominent American men (and one woman) who were influenced by the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin, but more especially by those of Herbert Spencer. Apparently his primary intent is to convey how evolutionary thought was interpreted and received in America in the 1871-1882 period. He also seeks to summarize aspects of the lives and thought of his chosen protagonists and to cover some selected highlights of American history in that era.
Each chapter covers a single year and skips across vignettes involving the principal characters. Chapter Three (1873), for example, involves the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, Darwin himself and his English disciple Thomas Huxley, Spencer, the theologian Charles Hodge, the liberal minister Henry Ward Beecher, and the naturalist Louis Agassiz.
I found this method of organization to be choppy. Often each segment is too brief -- just as a thread of an idea or a life is established it is broken by an abrupt transition to some other character. Further, much of this material is not even directly relevant to the main theme of the book. For instance, there are far too many pages devoted to the adultery tribulations of Henry Ward Beecher. In fact, one would not even have to read most of the chapters in the main body of the text to get to the substance that Werth has to offer. For readers with less of an appetite I would suggest a look at the three preface pages that summarize the principal characters; attention to Chapter Twelve, which covers the speeches at the actual 1882 "Banquet at Delmonico's" (a tribute to Spencer organized by his chief American promoter, Edward Youmans); and a read of the Epilogue, which touches on the implications and later consequences of many of Spencer's ideas
Spencer's influence in America was undoubtedly significant, but almost surely stimulated more harm than good, since his interpretations of evolution were wrong or misguided on several counts. He inappropriately extrapolated the biological principle of natural selection to society, which he conceived as an organism trending from simpler to more complex systems. For Spencer, evolution was not morally neutral, but teleological and progressive. He defended "use inheritance," essentially the Lamarckian view that acquired characteristics can be passed on to the next generation. He inspired "social Darwinism," which entailed the belief that government should stay out of the way and let survival of the fittest shape men's destinies. And some of his prominent interpreters (though not all) became advocates of American imperialism, under the rationale that other peoples would be better off if brought under the guidance of a superior race.
At points Werth addresses key elements of this assessment, but it is not his main thrust. Rather, he seems to be aiming to convince us that evolution "triumphed" in America in this period. That is a dubious conclusion, however. First, Werth has written just about an intellectual elite. We well know from subsequent history that there was then, and may still be now, no triumph of evolutionary thought at the broad popular level. And second, even among the intellectuals within the author's scope, the notions of evolution that each accepted were far from uniform and, in many cases, were incompatible with what most biological scientists now understand evolution to be. The majority of Werth's chief American characters subscribed to one version or another of what today would be called "intelligent design."
If you are just seeking an introductory overview of the principal players who interpreted evolution in America in this period, you will likely find Banquet at Delmonico's to be helpful. In Werth's favor, he is a skilled writer and a competent historian. But if you seek more depth on either the subject (the acceptance of evolution in America and Spencer's influence) or the individuals Werth writes about, you may want to turn elsewhere. There are good recent biographies of many of the principals (Applegate on Beecher and Nasaw on Carnegie, for example). If your interest is mostly in the relevant ideas, then you could do no better than to start with Richard Hofstadter's classic Social Darwinism in American Thought.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
No Ideas, March 17, 2009
This review is from: Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America (Hardcover)
The most conspicuous absence in Werth's well-researched book is the lack of a lengthy discussion of the particularities of either Spencer or Darwin's ideas. He sets up an ideological competition between Darwin and Spencer, but the reader is never treated to its nuances. We assume it exists, but we never learn its particularities.
Instead, Werth primarily concerns himself with where the main characters were, who they were debating with, and what books they were writing. He spends chapter after chapter describing in exhaustive detail about the alleged affair between Henry Ward Beecher and one of his female parishioners without explaining why the affair was important to the debate concerning evolution. Was it because the affair had a transformative effect on Beecher himself? Did it discredit him? Did it change his viewpoints concerning evolution? Werth never explains.
It's a well researched, pretty well written book. But Werth's apparent insecurity with discussing the ideological debate - the very subject of his book, no less - is a big flaw. It's interesting to read about the comings and goings of famous men, but in the end that's all the book has to offer.
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