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Essay On Social Darwinism

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Industrialism is one of those of concept that has its good and bad contributions to this nation that people created and developed over time to survive. I believe if we are going to talk about industrialization, we need to connect the concept to Social Darwinism. In A People and A Nation, Norton and authors define Social Darwinism by Charles Darwin’s theory of “survival of the fittest” to the free-market system, arguing that competition would weed out weaker firms and allow stronger fitter firms to thrive” (466). If we look by human development, we can see that humans feed off of progress and to create survival following the wars and great depression. Especially in the technology game, technology of this time brought people telephones, electric …show more content…

However, with all the new jobs, and new inventions, there are women and men being over worked and underpaid. Because we have to remember even though there was much talent creating change, the end result as Charles Darwin put is “survival to the fittest” owners of these new company need manpower but wanted big profit. Organizations were created to help workers receive what they deserve such as Knights of Labor, American Federation of Labor (AFL), and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) (472-473). The Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) tried to organized list of people that “welcomes unskilled and semiskilled workers including women, African Americans and immigrants” (472-472). The Knight of Loabor hit a spiral downward of participates due to their militant approached to their strike against Pacific Railroad where owner, Jay Gould would not negotiate (472). The American Federation of Labor (AFL), led by Samuel Gompers fought for “higher wages, shorter hours, and the right to bargain collectively” (473). They tried to stay away from politics, and felt that a woman’s place was at home and not in the work place (473). All of these organizations set out to support the workforce in the growing economy, sometimes it worked and sometimes it did

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