Zoogenics

Social Darwinism & Racist Science

I taught American history in a large, diverse, public high school for 13 years. Almost every year, students were shocked to hear of America’s experiments with eugenics and the widespread acceptance of scientific racism. What they previously thought were aberrations—the Nazi regime and the Holocaust—they came to realize were in fact the outworking of a widespread movement of the modern world that was considered an enlightened, progressive, and scientific position to hold. The story is complex, but it certainly intersects with the rise of Darwinism and its stepchild, social Darwinism, which was a variegated attempt by several thinkers to apply the principles of evolution beyond biology to social and cultural matters. One of these figures, Herbert Spencer, coined the term “survival of the fittest,” which was incorporated into later editions of On the Origin of Species.¹

Darwinian Dominance

Even before Darwin stepped aboard the HMS Beagle, the mood of science was moving in an evolutionary direction. As historian Jacques Barzun explained in his magnum opus, From Dawn to Decadence, science had been advancing “a bold hypothesis based on the comparative study of animal forms: evolution.”² Thus, when Darwin published Origin, it was not so much the idea of evolution that was new, but his mechanism for it, natural selection. “Darwin proposed a purely mechanistic operation,” Barzun states, that “made the old idea of evolution fit under physics by means of the idea of Natural Selection.”³ Worth noting here as well, is Darwin’s use of the phrase “favoured races” in his subtitle. Barzun explains that in using this phrase, Darwin was simply “referring to the varieties of any animal species. But another group of scientists and publicists, using the same words, meant specifically varieties of men.”⁴

This brings us to the connections between Darwinism as a scientific paradigm and racism as a social system and way of thinking. Barzun notes:

The 19th century was the heyday of physical anthropology, which divided mankind into three or more races. It was taken for an exact science in spite of its conflicting statements, and it was also the playground of historians, social theorists, and politicians…. Not all who argued about race…believed the same solemn fictions, but almost all educated westerners believed in the root idea that race equals character and uttered some fiction of their own.⁵

It was in this milieu that support for eugenics, social Darwinism, and racial hierarchy were deemed progressive positions to hold, thanks to the credibility lent them by “science.” “The vogue of natural selection,” says Barzun, “bred the doctrine that nations and other social groups struggle endlessly in order that the fittest shall survive. So attractive was this ‘principle’ that it got the name of Social Darwinism.”⁶

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Darwinism created racism (racism is much too ancient for that) or that Darwinism is even the main cause of racism (humankind is much too good at “othering” for that). My point is that, as Darwinism swept through science, academia, and society at large, racism took on a more “enlightened” tinge. Cloaked in the scientist’s lab coat, Darwinism lent an air of respectability to racism.

As just one example, it was the early 1900s that saw the massive extension and widespread social acceptance of the KKK, as it grew to its largest membership ever and expanded its targets to include not only blacks, but also Jews, immigrants, Catholics, and others who didn’t fit in the WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) category. The ideas and patterns of living of this era made the KKK an intuitive and plausible—even popular—group to join. This social environment also justified the little-known outrage of human zoos.

Man as Spectacle

In 1859, the famed entertainer P.  T. Barnum placed William Henry Johnson, a black man, on display at the American Museum in New York City. Johnson was billed as a missing link between apes and humans and drew huge crowds. Johnson was part of a larger fascination with “freak shows” of the era, which frequently featured some sort of exotic human. Another example was Krao, who was put on display in the 1880s as living proof of the link between man and monkey. Krao merely suffered from hypertrichosis, a rare condition that leads to the overproduction of hair on the body. Such shows were more than just a fringe curiosity or historical oddity; they were gaining purchase as justifications for racial hierarchy, and they began to take on even more sinister forms at the great temples to human progress known as the World’s Fairs. In fact, these global events were frequently designed around scientific racism and evolution.

In 1893, Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. At the center of the massive complex was the “White City,” with stately buildings illuminated by electric light. But on the fringes of the fair were exhibits displaying non-white peoples. Perhaps most revealing was “an exhibit featuring sixty-nine Fon, black African people colonized by the French. Onlookers gawked at these human beings, and one journalist remarked on their ‘barbaric ugliness.’” Black leaders like Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells decried this blatant display of “racial hierarchy.”⁷

But such displays continued, nay, intensified. Eight years later, the entire 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo (the fair where President William McKinley was assassinated) exuded the social Darwinist mood. Central areas and buildings highlighted the accomplishments of whites, while the fringes of the fair hosted exhibits like “Darkest Africa,” in which indigenous people were presented as backwards curiosities or evolutionary inferiors.⁸

For much more on this memory-holed era of racist ideology masquerading as science, see John West’s documentary, Human Zoos: America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism (available on YouTube). Human Zoos draws special attention to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, where thousands of indigenous people from all over the world were imported and displayed as evidence for human evolution, with whites presented as the pinnacle. Perhaps most offensive is the story of Ota Benga, an African pygmy who was placed in an exhibit in the Bronx Zoo. Hundreds of thousands of zoo-goers came to see the man on display. Clergy especially protested the spectacle, but zoo and government officials ignored them. Despite his eventual release later that year, within a decade, Ota Benga was found dead by suicide. While the era of human zoos came to a close, the documentary also draws attention to the eugenics movement that grew to prominence in that era, with countless Americans undergoing compulsory sterilization. Many states passed sterilization bills and created eugenics programs and boards which were discontinued more recently than we’d like to admit.

These are the dark places to which man goes when he views himself as just material, a mere brute struggling to survive. Such sordid parts of our past remind us that we must never give up on the dignity of each human being, for each human being is made in the image of God.

Notes
1. The term first appears in the 1869 edition. “Survival of the Fittest,” Britannica (Jan. 29, 2025).
2. Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present…500 Years of Western Cultural Life (2001), 502, 455.
3. Ibid., 570–571.
4. Ibid., 577.
5. Ibid., 577–579.
6. Ibid., 571–572.
7. Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (2019), 111.
8. “Murder at the Fair: The Assassination of President McKinley,” directed by Joe Berlinger (2006: The History Channel), DVD.