periority and inferiority could
thus be established was Joseph A. de Gobineau, a French anthropologist.
Herbert Spencer took Darwin's concept of the survival of the fittest and
used it as a scientific justification for the competitive spirit, It
became the basis of the explanation why some individuals moved up the
social ladder while others remained behind. Racial thinkers applied the
concept of human competitiveness to racial conflict instead of to
individual competition. In its usual form the Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic
race was depicted as superior, and the Semitic and Negroid races as
inferior. Human history was explained as the history of race conflict,
and racial hostility was justified because, through this conflict, the
superior types would survive and human civilization would be elevated.
The concept of human equality was reduced to a meaningless abstraction,
Scholars like William Graham Sumner insisted that the founding fathers
only intended human equality to refer to their own kind of people.

To Thomas Nelson Page, in the North American Review, it appeared that the
African race had not progressed in human history. It had failed to
progress in America, not because it had been enslaved, but because it did
not have the faculty to raise itself above that status. He continued to
argue that its inability to advance in the scale of civilization was
demonstrated by the level of social and political life to be found in
Liberia, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil. In the same journal,
Theodore Roosevelt announced that the African was a member of "a
perfectly stupid race" which was kept down by a lack of natural
development. Another one whose views became influential was Josiah
Strong. A prominent clergyman at the turn of the century, he was of the
opinion that the pressure of population expansion would eventually push
the whites, who had superior energy and talent, into Mexico, South and
Central America, the islands of the seas, and eventually into Africa
itself. This expansion would lead to racial conflict which would
culminate in the survival of the fittest through the victory of the white
over the colored races of the world. Strong's belief that white racial
superiority would naturally lead to racial imperialism and world
domination by the white race was shared by many contemporary Americans. A
few of those who shared his ideas were Senator Albert Beveridge, Senator
Cabot Lodge, John Hay, Admiral Alfred T. Mah