Herbert Spencer, The American Economy And The Gilded Age

Clyde Love
February 7, 2023
US History 3
Ms. Gordon
Herbert Spencer, the American Economy, and the Gilded Age The Gilded Age was a time where the American economy grew greatly and many new medicines and inventions were made available to far more people. When the age started, some people were able to profit greatly from industrialization. Many of them faced the question of what to do with the mass amount of wealth they had acquired. This was when philanthropy was first introduced. Herbert Spencer claimed that in America, everyone had the chance to prove themselves, and those who belonged with the rich would become rich. Michael Crabtree’s interview challenges Herbert Spencer’s Survival of the fittest by showing the hypocrisy of his ideology

While Spencer’s ideas made sense, they couldn’t be applied in society due to children's lack of access to education, unsafe and unfair working conditions, and many other issues during the Gilded Age. While the profit during the Gilded Age is something to take note of, if you take a look beneath the surface you will see the many terrible things that happened in order to make that profit take place. Michal Crabtree’s interview is an example of this. In his interview, Crabtree talks about his experience as a child laborer. First, he discusses the hours saying that he typically worked “from 6 in the morning to 8 at night” at a minimum with just a one hour break for food and water (Crabtree interview). With this schedule, Crabtree had no time for school, in fact he had no time for anything. He would get home, “get a little bit of supper… and go to bed” (Crabtree interview). In Spencer’s publication, he claims that the

Spencer’s Survival of the fittest says that if a man makes an incorrect decision, “he has acted under the guidance of his own free will, and, if he suffers, he has no one to blame but himself” (Survival of the fittest). Spencer also believed that “the world generally learns more by its mistakes than by its successes” (Survival of the Fittest). While this philosophy seems sound, the issue lies in the fact that choosing work over education for many was quite literally their only option. How can choosing work over education be a mistake to learn from and become wiser from when such a choice is the only one to be made? The answer is that it is not a mistake for the American people to learn from, but instead a fault within the American economic system during this time period. For these reasons and more, Spencer’s survival of the fittest created interesting and eloquent theories and observations that failed to play out correctly in the Gilded Age society, and would likely also fail to be carried out correctly in our modern