John D. Rockefeller Jr., the son of the founder of Standard Oil, once remarked to his Baptist Bible class that the Standard Oil Company, like the American Beauty rose, resulted from “pruning the early buds that grew up around it.” The elimination of competition, he declared, was “merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.” The comparison of the business world to the natural world resembled the theory of evolution formulated by the British naturalist Charles Darwin. In his monumental work On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin theorized that in the struggle for survival, adaptation to the environment triggered among species a natural selection process that led to evolution. Herbert Spencer in Britain and William Graham Sumner in the United States developed the theory of social Darwinism. The social Darwinists insisted that societal progress came about as a result of relentless competition in which the strong survived and the weak died out.

In social terms, the idea of the “survival of the fittest,” coined by Spencer, had profound significance, as Sumner, a professor of political economy at Yale University, made clear in his book What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883). “The drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things,” Sumner insisted. Conversely, “millionaires are the product of natural selection,” and although “they get high wages and live in luxury,” Sumner claimed, “the bargain is a good one for society.”

Social Darwinists equated wealth and power with “fitness” and believed that any efforts by the rich to aid the poor would only tamper with the laws of nature and slow down evolution. Social Darwinism acted to curb social reform while glorifying great wealth. In an age when Rockefeller and Carnegie amassed hundreds of millions of dollars (billions in today’s currency) and the average worker earned $500 a year, social Darwinism justified economic inequality.

Carnegie softened some of the harshness of social Darwinism in his essay “The Gospel of Wealth,” published in 1889. The millionaire, Carnegie wrote, acted as a “mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they could or would do for themselves.” Carnegie preached philanthropy and urged the rich to “live unostentatious lives” and “administer surplus wealth for the good of the people.” His gospel of wealth earned much praise but won few converts. Most millionaires followed the lead of Morgan, who contributed to charity but hoarded private treasures in his marble library.

With its emphasis on the free play of competition and the survival of the fittest, social Darwinism encouraged the economic theory of laissez-faire (French for “let it alone”). Business leaders argued that government should not meddle in economic affairs, except to protect private property (or support high tariffs and government subsidies). A conservative Supreme Court agreed. During the 1880s and 1890s, the Court increasingly reinterpreted the Constitution, judging corporations to be “persons” in order to protect business from taxation, regulation, labor organization, and antitrust legislation.

Only in the arena of politics did Americans tackle the social issues raised by corporate capitalism.