s well a highly active private sector welfare network shaped by the increasing power of organized labor (Sexton, 1991, p. 76). The rise of labor, according to sociologist, and anthropologist Patricia Cayo Sexton, was largely in response to the pressures imposed upon workers by entrepreneurs capitalizing on the Industrial Revolution. The latter lobbied heavily against a social welfare state on the premise that it violated the concepts of Social Darwinism and of capitalist laissez faire. As Sexton notes, the mood of the day permeated throughout American ideology, even in the justice system. “The law upheld hostile employer acts but punished those of labor; according to historian Irving Bernstein, no other advanced nation in the world had conducted industrial relations with ‘such defiance’ . . . ” (Sexton, 1991, p. 73) Herein lay the conflict of pure Social Darwinism. The struggle was the law of life, in the financial markets as Darwin’s biological pool. Men fed upon men; The fittest survived and the weak were their rightful prey. At the post Civil war height of laissez faire, the most greedy robber barons invoked Social Darwinism to collect hundreds of millions of dollars, benefitting from what many considered unfair advantages. In fact, a recent ranking of the forty wealthiest Americans of all time shows that only three of them did not make their fortunes during the Industrial Revolution (Klepper, Gunther, 1998, p. 56). By the late nineteenth century, the growth of huge monopolistic corporations created concentrations of power controlling most commodities as oil, railroads, steel, agriculture, and the banks that funded them. They were accountable to no one and needed by everyone (Goldfield, et al, 1998, P. 564-573). Child labor was a regrettable by product of Social Darwinism. Nearly one-third of the textile force in the southern United States in the early 1900's consisted of ch...
