Spencer at Delmonicos

Herbert Spencer, the 19th-century British philosopher, is remembered today as the forbidding -- almost forbidden -- father of "Social Darwinism," a school of thought declaring that the fittest prosper in a free marketplace and the human race is gradually improved because only the strong survive. In Barry Werth's satisfying "Banquet at Delmonico's," Spencer is also a querulous 62-year-old celibate whose 1882 American tour culminates in a feast to which are invited the "mostly Republican men of science, religion, business, and government" who shared and spread the Spencerian creed.

Banquet at Delmonico's By Barry Werth (Random House, 362 pages, $27)
Applying Darwinian insights about evolution to political, economic and social life -- though he did not himself use the term "Social Darwinism" -- Spencer concluded that vigorous competition and unfettered capitalism conduced to the betterment of society. He predicted that the American, raised in liberty, would evolve into "a finer type of man than has hitherto existed," dazzling the world with "the highest form of government" and "a civilization grander than any the world has known." Somehow I don't think he had Rod Blagojevich and Justin Timberlake in mind. Though as Henry Adams commented at the time: "The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin."
The public clamor over the visit of a dyspeptic foreign philosopher to these shores was partly due to the indefatigable promotion of Edward Livingston Youmans, Spencer's chief American proselytizer, who called his beau ideal the most original thinker in the history of mankind. Youmans is among the several critics and apostles of Spencer and Darwin whose profiles Mr. Werth skillfully interweaves in this Gilded Age tapestry.
Mr. Werth wisely elevates to co-leading man the Brooklyn pastor and Christian Darwinist Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87), star of his era's marquee sex scandal. Beecher, whose sister Harriet had written "Uncle Tom's Cabin," almost surely bedded the comely Elizabeth Tilton. His mistress told her husband, who told Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who told the flamboyant priestess of free love Victoria Woodhull, who told the world, vowing: "I will make it hotter on earth for Henry Ward Beecher than Hell is below."
Beecher, after trying to buy the silence of the cuckold, denied everything with a plausibility rivaling Bill Clinton's disclaiming carnal knowledge of Gennifer Flowers. To his horror, those who trusted Beecher implicitly insisted upon a full airing of the scurrilous charges, confident that their shepherd would be absolved and his libeler humiliated. Salacious entertainment ensued. Beecher emerged from a six-month civil trial for adultery (the jury deadlocked) an open dissenter from Christian orthodoxy, mocking the idea of Hell and asserting that "God made laws to be broken" -- among them, no doubt, the Sixth Commandment.
Beecher endorsed Spencerian capitalism when it was au courant and striking workers when they were all the rage. He swung like a weather vane and was a reliable shill for the Republican Party, though instead of Christ on the cross he settled for James Garfield, who ended up, thanks to an assassin's bullet, a martyr to civil- service reform. (Of all the mundane causes to die for!)
A more principled admirer of Spencer was William Graham Sumner, an Episcopalian rector who traded in God for laissez-faire. "It was as if I put my [religious] beliefs into a drawer, and when I opened it there was nothing there at all," he explained of his loss of faith. Sumner preached his substitute trinity of free trade, hard money and peace from the classroom at Yale. Like Spencer, he condemned militarism, which "will lead us to ruin" since the finer qualities of the republic are debased by "war, debt, taxation" and "a grand governmental system."
Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born steel titan, agreed. Reading Spencer convinced Carnegie that progress was godliness and that "all is well since all grows better." He saw no "conceivable end" to man's "march to perfection." Carnegie buddied up to Spencer on the philosopher's ocean crossing, though he was taken aback when, expecting his hero to discourse on topics lofty, he heard him chew out a waiter for serving the wrong kind of cheese. Spencer offered the good- humored defense that "no man is equal to his book."
The climactic 1882 banquet at the ritzy Manhattan restaurant Delmonico's was an epicure's delight but something of an oratorical dud. Spencer was bored by the fawning tributes and baffled the audience with a talk touting the virtues of relaxation. Not what they expected from the philosopher of Social Darwinism!
Within a year, Spencer would realize that his naïve faith in human progress was a spectacular miscalculation. Rather than evolving toward a stateless utopia, the nations of the world were tending toward regimentation and regulation. Industrial capitalism was as capable of producing munitions and shackles as cultivated intellectuals. This was not the way it was supposed to evolve.
Spencer himself was evidence that ideology is no guide to daily living. He and Youmans, the genius and his publicist, nagged and fussed over each other like an old married couple. Spencer "meddles with me, and criticizes me, and takes care of me, all for my good, of course, in the most assiduous manner," wrote Youmans. The Social Darwinist, faced with a weak and ailing friend, opted for altruistic intervention.
His wealthiest acolyte, Andrew Carnegie, would see his "Spencerian faith in reason and progress" shattered by the barbarism of World War I. Carnegie's greatest legacy would owe more to old-fashioned charity than Social Darwinism: He gave away money to build small-town libraries and restore church organs.
Mr. Kauffman's most recent books are "Ain't My America" (Holt/Metropolitan) and "Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin" (ISI Books).