A crowning achievement in the march of “civilization,” Roosevelt had opined in his book The Winning of the West, was the white triumph over the vast Native population in North America. The conquered peoples, Roosevelt asserted without any actual knowledge, lived an existence “but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid and ferocious than that of the wild beasts.” (Hitler also took note of that empire-building march with the U.S. cavalry as the spear’s point. Americans had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand,” he said, “and now keep the modest remnant under
...more
