Socialism,MarriageandtheAssaultonEvolutionary.docVIP

“Socialism, Marriage and the Assault on Evolutionary Science in the USA: A historical reexamination of David Goldstein and Martha Moore Avery’s Socialism: The Nation of Fatherless Children (1903)” Carl Weinberg - Butler University in Indianapolis Among progressive-minded people in the United States today, it is a truism that hostility to evolutionary science springs from religion-inspired ignorance. In his widely-read book What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, historian and journalist Thomas Frank calls the movement for “biblical creationism” in his state a “barking idioc[y]” that is “synonymous with backwoods cluelessness . . . “ Close examination of anti-evolutionism’s history, however, indicates that this is a superficial view. As much as creationists drew strength from various brands of religious fundamentalism, anti-evolutionism was a key ingredient of conservative movements aimed at defending the secular political and economic status quo of capitalism. Creationist arguments provided the ideological glue that held together various pieces of the anti-socialist argument: socialists promote Darwinism; as materialists, socialists and Darwinists both deny the existence of free will; without free will, there is no basis for a moral code; this leads to unrestrained workers’ revolt, animalistic “free love,” the destruction of marriage, the family, and ultimately civilized life. Therefore, anti-evolutionism will preserve capitalist civilization and avoid the socialist nightmare. To provide a window into the neglected connection between anti-socialism and anti-evolutionism in the US, this paper examines a little-known but influential anti-socialist tract from the early twentieth century US: David Goldstein and Martha Moore Avery’s Socialism: The Nation of Fatherless Children. Goldstein and Avery were both former leaders of the Socialist Labor Party in Massachusetts who underwent a conversion to both militant Catholicism