page_1000 < previous page page_1000 next page > Page 1000 men like Andrew Carnegie argued that unrestrained competition was simply natural selection at work, steadily improving the national economy by weeding out the unfit. Social Darwinism also appealed to those who opposed social legislation. Exponents of Spencer's work like Charles Sumner of Yale University quoted him to show that human intervention could not hasten the pace of evolution or ease the merciless struggle for existence dictated by natural law. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Social Darwinism provided a powerful defense for the status quo, but toward the end of the century, its influence on domestic policy waned as dissatisfaction with the effects of unlimited economic and social laissez-faire began to spread through American society. At the same time, however, the United States was beginning its imperialist adventures abroad, and soon the Darwinian arguments were being used, with a new racist tinge, to justify the conquest of weak countries by strong ones. Social Darwinism was rarely cited after about 1914, but it had helped shape the pattern of American thought, and its influence is still recognizable, even today. Social Gospel Social gospel, also known as Christian socialism, was a moral reform movement of the late nineteenth century that helped pave the way for the progressive movement. Rapid urbanization and industrialization in the 1880s and 1890s aroused the interest of many Protestant clergymen in the need to secure social justice for the poor. They aimed to expand their appeal in the cities, where the Roman Catholic church was especially popular among the large immigrant population. The leaders of the social gospel movement were Washington Gladden, who sympathized with workers and urged them to seek unity in Christianity, William Dwight Porter Bliss, who worked with the Knights of Labor and the Socialist party, and especially Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist minister in New York City who called for a democratic cooperative society to be achieved by nonviolent means. The social gospel movement had mixed results. It attracted a number of followers and helped liberalize organized religion and link Christianity with progressivism. It contributed to the efforts of political and social reformers like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jane Addams, and economist Richard Ely, all of whom were moved to look at reform in moral terms. But it failed to win over many urban immigrants, and it proposed few lasting solutions to urban problems. See also Progressivism; Religion. Socialism Socialism, as concept and social movement, has played a vital role in American society as a voice of opposition to class and sex exploitation, to race or ethnic hatreds, to imperial cupidity, and to the acquisitive mentality of the dominant classes at large. Judged by the standard of the ordered class movements of other (especially European) societies, it has been relatively weak in the United States. Yet faced with the monolith of modern capitalism, it has been surprisingly versatile, at times actually threatening the system or forcing major institutional improvements through the promulgation of a popular alternative worldview and the organization of widespread social resistance. The origins of American socialism lay in the mostly (but not entirely) religious communal settlements of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Especially notable in the Radical Reformation's diaspora to Pennsylvania, but also scattered throughout other colonies and then the newly emerging nation, these sought to offer models of social cooperation. Characteristically, the colonists engaged in nongenocidal relations with nearby Native Americans, practiced a greater degree of sexual equality than the outside world (a pattern often maintained through celibacy), and undertook agrarian or small-crafts production. These colonies made notable contributions to American crafts and culture. The Ephrata Colony, for instance, served as a major publication and educational center in the early eighteenth century, establishing a substantial tradition of German-American literature. The Shakers, famed for their "plain ways" and their  < previous page page_1000 next page >