William Graham Sumner – Social Darwinist Sumner was a follower of the ideas of Darwin and the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer. He is considered a vigorous and influential social Darwinist in America. He was a professor at Yale College. He developed the concepts of Folkways, diffusion and ethnocentrism. He's not as tall as Spencer but his ideas were bold enough to be recognized. He played three important roles in the development of American thought: he was a great Puritan preacher, an exponent of the classical pessimism of Ricardo and Malthus, and an assimilator and popularizer of evolution. He was able to build a bridge between the economic ethics driven by the Reformation and the thought of the 19th century. William Graham Sumner came from a hard-working family. He grew up in an environment where he was taught to respect Protestant economic virtues. Hard work and efficient use of money leads to success. After reading Illustration of Political Economy written by Harriet Marti, he became aware of the wage fund doctrine and other theories associated with it. His understanding of capital, labor, money and commerce was based on the book Illustration of Political Economy. He has published books like Earth Faim, The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over, The Forgotten Man, Folkways and others. His intellectual ideas were disseminated in the columns of popular newspapers and from the lecture platform he waged a holy war against reformism, protectionism, socialism and government interventionism. Sumner was greatly influenced by Spencer's ideas. He was unclear about Spencer's ideas regarding creating a systematic science of society after his graduation. However, Spencer's proposals helped Sumner solve the problems and problems that a middle-class man has to face in such a system. He attacked democracy, but he had no sympathy for plutocracy. He was on the verge of resigning from Yale due to the argument with President Porter over the overuse of the book The Study of Sociology as a textbook. It never faded despite numerous criticisms. The Republican press and Republican Yale alumni were fighting for his dismissal from Yale. Folkways was one of his best works, but the ideas presented in Folkways were never reconciled with the rest of his thinking. Folkways were seen as the product of natural forces as evolutionary growths. Works Cited: Porter, Duncan M. and Graham, Peter W. The Portable Darwin. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea. London: University of California Press, 1989.