Social Darwinism In American Literature

Literature is a way to tell a story to its readers in the hope that they learn something. Regardless of the story, the author creates this story not just for the sake of entertainment, but in hopes of changing the way people think and view their own lives. Through the writings of Charles Darwin, W.E.B. Dubois, and Rachel Carson, we see three stories very distinct from each other in terms of the subject of their writing, but all three authors write these pieces of literature for the purpose of critiquing the societies that people live in. All three authors speak of a sense justice that has been altered by humans and creates a system that is not able to function to its full potential because damages to the structure of the organisms. By developing
Dubois' writing The Souls of Black Folk, Dubois shows how this idea of justified actions through social Darwinism has corrupted human societies. After the civil war, the reconstruction period began as people began to try and integrate blacks into their society post slavery. The sudden end of slavery left millions of blacks without anything to their names. Many Americans thought of America as "a rich land awaiting development and filled with black laborers"(Dubois 21) who were capable of finding paid work using the abilities they had gained from slavery. The problem with this concept is that we instead "have a mass of workingmen thrown into relentless competition with the workingmen of the world, but handicapped by a training the very opposite to that of the modern self-reliant democratic laborer"(Dubois 21). The idea of fair competition that is discussed in Darwin's On The Origin of Species is not in this society as people are not given a fair opportunity to succeed. This idea of a just chance of survival has been destroyed "after the brains of the race have been knocked out by two hundred and fifty years of assiduous education in submission, carelessness, and stealing"(Dubois 21). The equal opportunity to better one's life which is shown in the justice of the natural world is broken and set aside by American's own interpretation of this justice where the exploitation of blacks is justified due to the genetic inferiority of blacks. This exploitation of blacks also leads to the stagnation of the societies' advancements. Because white people have accumulated such an advantage over black people economically and socially, there is no longer a need to compete against them. Dubois even stated that "the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro"(Dubois 15), showing that a Negro who is able to compete with white people for work is something that should be understood as not just an inferior being. Creating a society of equal education levels