lie says that, aside from Carnegie, who in his Autobiography wholeheartedly endorsed Spencer's theory, relatively few--and fewer still who were systematically articulate about it--businessmen could really be called Social Darwinists. He cites the view that Darwinism "may have done no more than furnish new terms for old ideas in the years after Appomatox, and that businessmen . . . would not have been ideologically naked without the Spencerian formulation."
To be sure, Social Darwinism can be seen as a reworking of Puritanism, which in its earliest flowering in New England had as a major tenet of belief that God smiles materially on the spiritually just but not on the immoral or unworthy. In the last years of the nineteenth century, however, the landscape and general experience of America went far beyond the confines of early New England society, and there is compelling evidence that those who were best positioned materially expressed a psychological temperament that was consistent with Darwinism and that fed into what was to become Progressivism's response
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