The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Reform: A Rhetorical History of the United States, Volume V

The years between 1870 and 1910 were filled with dramatic social, political and economic changes in the United States. In response, public discourse of the "Gilded Age" often drew on the tenets of Social Darwinism.
The application of oversimplified Darwinian principles to social issues exerted a powerful influence on the discourse of the era. While the principles were used to support arguments for social changes that envisioned a gradual evolution of a species toward greater perfection, su...