Confessions of a Free Speech Lawyer: Charlottesville and the Politics of Hate

by Rodney A. Smolla

The chant “Blood and Soil,” popular among alt-right American supremacists, conjured an idealized German past. “Blood and Soil,” or Blut und Boden in German, paid homage to idealized pure German “blood” and the organic connection of pure German blood to the physical German landscape. Blut und Boden was appropriated by the Nazis and used to conjure an almost mystical union between the authentic German-Nordic race and the territorial state of Germany. The phrase contemplated those who were not of pure German blood as invading nomadic races. Jews were the worst of the invaders. In a book published in 1930 titled Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (A new nobility based on blood and soil), writer Richard Walther Darré argued that Germany should pursue a systematic eugenics program to purify the German race and strengthen the nation. Nazi Germany did indeed embark on a radical eugenics program to purify the human race. Remarkably, the German eugenics experiment had its roots in Virginia. The story of that Virginia experiment in eugenics, an experiment that would be followed by Hitler and the Third Reich, is best told through the saga of a Virginia woman, Carrie Elizabeth Buck, who lived a large part of her life in Charlottesville.