PROOF Contents List of Illustrations and Maps viii Preface x Introduction 1 Part I Continental Imperialism 1 Empire: National Projects of ‘Space’ and ‘Race’ 15 2 Racial ‘Othering’: ‘Manufacturing Difference’ 46 Part II Settler Colonialism 3 Conquest and Expansion: ‘Obtaining’ New ‘Living Space’ 81 4 Colonization: ‘Peopling’ the Empire 112 5 ‘Out-Group’ Policy: ‘Eliminating’ the ‘Natives’ 143 Part III Frontier Genocide 6 War and Genocide: ‘Cleansing’ the Lebensraum 179 Conclusion 212 Notes 219 Bibliography 250 Index 277 vii April 29, 2011 9:17 MAC/TAWN Page-vii 9780230_275157_01_prexii PROOF 1 Empire: National Projects of ‘Space’ and ‘Race’ Lacking the insatiable appetite for overseas expansion, Early America and Nazi Germany both preferred, instead, to establish a contiguous, land-based continental empire, aimed at finding new land for agrar- ian settlement, providing food for a growing population, and securing the future of the nation-state. As envisioned by their creators, both projects of empire, moreover, entailed internal national consolidation, as well as the external conquest of indigenous peoples. Both the Early American and Nazi-German expansionist ideologies and projects were informed by the notion of the need for additional ‘living space’ in concrete, specific geographical areas of expansion and by agreed, gen- eral ideological beliefs shared by expansionist political leaders and propagandists. In the Early American and Nazi-German cases, political leaders were strongly influenced by imperialist discourses, discourses founded on strikingly similar notions of ‘space’ and ‘race’. The declared ideologi- cal goal of Early American political leaders and expansionists was to ‘acquire’ ‘living space’ in the ‘American West’ for ‘white’ agricultural settlement and to ‘cleanse’ the new ‘living space’ for ‘white’ settlers by the displacement of Native Americans. The declared ideological goal of Hitler and radical Nazis was to ‘acquire’ Lebensraum (living space) in ‘the East’ for ‘Aryan’ agricultural settlement and to ‘cleanse’ the new ‘living space’ for ‘Aryan’ settlers by the displacement of Jews and Slavs. In both cases, these ideological discourses reflected strongly held polit- ical and intellectual elite preoccupations and obsessions with territorial expansion, racial prejudice/division, and an agrarian idealism. Backed by an agrarian state ideology, a commitment to national expansion and notions of racial superiority would serve to reinforce ‘eliminationist’ thinking in both the ‘American West’ and the ‘Nazi East’. 15 April 29, 2011 9:23 MAC/TAWN Page-15 9780230_275157_03_cha01 PROOF 16 Continental Imperialism Throughout its colonial, Revolutionary, and early national periods, many leading American political leaders and opinion-makers eagerly promoted visions of a land-based, continent-wide American empire. For many of these continental visionaries, the notion of a land empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean was based on a national ‘destiny’ made ‘manifest’ by ‘Providence’. In addition, there were strong ideological and racial motivations behind American con- tinental expansion. Along with enhanced security, empire was, in fact, the chief motivation for the creation of a union of states. Right up to the eve of the American Civil War, an expansionist consensus unified the American nation and supplied an ultimate rationale for its existence.1 In Early American empire-building, ‘acquisition’ of indigenous lands and ‘white’ settlement on the American continental landmass were ‘the right and left hands of the same imperial organism’.2 Nazi Germany’s declared mission, as voiced by Hitler and other Nazi ‘true believers’, was racial empire-building in ‘the East’. In Germany, the idea of territorial expansion was focused eastward, on lands adjacent to the German nation-state – especially in Poland and the Baltic States – in what was viewed historically as Germany’s ‘frontier’ territories.3 During the Nazi era, a consensus formed within German society, backing ter- ritorial expansion into the ‘eastern lands’. Broad segments of German society, moreover, supported and promoted the national project to transform ‘the East’ into ‘Aryan’ German ‘living space’.4 In the eyes of Nazi expansionists, ‘the East’ was Germany’s ‘manifest destiny’. Under their leadership, Eastern Europe would become Nazi Germany’s ‘Wild East’, a vast expanse – similar to the ‘wide open spaces’ of the ‘American West’ – to be transformed by massacre, racial ‘cleansing’, and colonial ‘settlement’. Antecedents In both cases, these expansionist ideologies had inherited legacies that would ultimately influence and shape the resultant continental imperi- alist discourse. In the American case, the development of British colonial North America provided ideas of providential destiny, as well as strong expansionist impulses, which caused the ruling colonial elite to seek independence from the British metropole in order to build an empire of their own on a continental scale. While the early colonial experi- ence produced the idea of a providential ‘right’ and ‘destiny’ of western expansion, the American Revolution provided both the vision and the ideology supporting a continent-wide ‘western empire’. In the German April 29, 2011 9:23 MAC/TAWN Page-16 9780230_275157_03_cha01 PROOF Empire: National Projects of ‘Space’ and ‘Race’ 17 case, Lebensraum eastern territorial expansion won out over an alter- native vision of a maritime-based colonial and commercial empire. In Germany, a prehistory of nationalist, imperialist, and racialist ideas anticipated much of what would become the Nazi worldview, ideas that Hitler would integrate and radicalize into a lethal ideology combin- ing ‘racial purification’ and territorial expansion. Interestingly, one of Lebensraum’s early theorists was part of a transatlantic dialogue with the leading American proponent of the ‘frontier thesis’ of American history, providing evidence of a shared genealogy between the two expansionist discourses. Early America British North America was colonized through conquest, with an expansionist justification built on ideas of providential ‘destiny’, ‘mis- sion’, and ‘chosenness’ to carry out God’s will. In the early seventeenth century, the New England Puritans considered themselves the ‘chosen’ founders of a ‘New Israel’ in the North American wilderness. Indeed, the powerful Puritan theology of ‘chosenness’ proved decisive for the course of continental expansion.5 As economic development propelled the first settlements outward, colonial expansionism found a waiting justification in the Puritan theology/ideology. So strong was their notion of providential and historical ‘destiny’ that New England’s settlers saw the ‘clearing’ of Native American communities by disease as evidence that God ‘intended’ the colonists to possess Indian lands. In addition to religious belief, early settlers created self-serving myths as a rationaliza- tion for the invasion and conquest of indigenous peoples. The so-called conquest myth, for instance, proclaimed that America was ‘virgin land’, a ‘pristine wilderness’, inhabited by ‘non-peoples’ called ‘savages’ who were ‘incapable of civilization’. Accordingly, European explorers and settlers were commanded by divine sanction or by the necessity of ‘progress’ to conquer the ‘wilderness’ and make it a ‘garden’: to bring ‘civilization’ to the ‘savage wilderness’. In the early nineteenth century, Manifest Destiny would become a catchphrase for the idea of a providentially or historically sanctioned right to continental expansionism. When it was coined in the 1840s, the notion of America’s ‘manifest destiny’, however, was anything but new. It can be traced back to the earliest moments of English colonization in North America. Already, in 1616, an early agent of British colonization wrote of the colonists as a ‘peculiar people marked and chose by the finger of God to possess’ the ‘vacant’ lands of North America.6 Puritans April 29, 2011 9:23 MAC/TAWN Page-17 9780230_275157_03_cha01 PROOF 18 Continental Imperialism envisioned that American settlement would be a providential ‘city upon a hill’. American ideas of ‘empire’ date, then, from the first English settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts. ‘The early colonies were no sooner established in the seventeenth century’, writes historian Richard Van Alstyne, ‘than expansionist impulses began to register in each of them. Imperial patterns took shape’, he notes, ‘and before the middle of the eighteenth century the concept of an empire that would take in the whole continent was fully formed.’7 Over time, moreover, many in the ruling colonial elite became con- vinced that they wanted to rule those territories and indigenous peoples themselves, instead of acting as agents for Great Britain. In the Decla- ration of Independence, one of the leading Virginian expansionists and land speculators, Thomas Jefferson, charged King George III – among other things – with blocking ‘new appropriation of [Indian] lands’ by the colonists. Not surprisingly, many of Virginia’s most prominent Revolu- tionary leaders were also major speculators in ‘western’ lands. Angered by the direction of British colonial policy, they wanted to break away from the British metropole in order to establish their own empire. As leaders of the newly independent American nation, these men would shape the destiny of the new nation. Indeed, there were no more self-assured imperialists than America’s ‘founding fathers’, unbridled imperialists reaching out for ‘empire’