Banquet at Delmonico's

by Barry Werth

In Banquet at Delmonico's, Barry Werth, the acclaimed author of The Scarlet Professor, draws readers inside the circle of philosophers, scientists, politicians, businessmen, clergymen, and scholars who brought Charles Darwin's controversial ideas to America in the crucial years after the Civil War.The United States in the 1870s and '80s was deep in turmoil--a brash young nation torn by a great depression, mired in scandal and corruption, rocked by crises in government, violently conflicted over science and race, and fired up by spiritual and sexual upheavals. Secularism was rising, most notably in academia. Evolution--and its catchphrase, "survival of the fittest"--animated and guided this Gilded Age.Darwin's theory of natural selection was extended to society and morals not by Darwin himself but by the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, father of "the Law of Equal Freedom," which holds that "every man is free to do that which he wills," provided it doesn't infringe on the equal free