It All Began With Woodrow Wilson

During the presidential election campaign of 1912, Wilson explicitly invoked Darwin to justify an evolutionary understanding of the U.S. Constitution that would allow the federal government to dramatically expand its powers over the economy.

According to Wilson, the Constitution betrayed the Founders’ “Newtonian” view that government was built on unchanging laws like “the law of gravitation.”  In truth, however, government “falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life.  It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.”  Hence, “living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.  Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of Life … [I]t must develop.”  Wilson averred that “all that progressives ask or desire is permission — in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word — to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.”

The doctrine of the evolving Constitution articulated by Wilson and other Progressives opened the door to much greater regulation of business and the economy, eventually paving the way for the New Deal.  But once the door was opened to regulate the rich, there was no reason increased government powers should not also be used to regulate the poor.  The stage was thus set for a different kind of Social Darwinism, one based not on laissez faire but on the idea that government should scientifically plan and regulate even the most intimate questions of family life.

John G. West, "Darwin Day in America: How our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science," p.122