# Blood and Soil **Blood and soil** — German *Blut und Boden* — is the doctrine that a nation is a racially defined people ("blood") permanently fused to a settlement territory ("soil"). The phrase circulated in late-19th-century German romantic-nationalist writing and was systematized by **Richard Walther Darré** in his 1930 *Neuadel aus Blut und Boden*, three years before he became Hitler's minister of food and agriculture. Under the Nazi regime it supplied both an agrarian settlement policy and a racial-eugenic program: the peasantry was cast as the reservoir of Nordic stock, and the demand for territory followed from it. See [[Ecofascism]] for the conservation-policy branch of the same doctrine. Its most audible American appearance came on the night of **August 11, 2017**, when torch-carrying marchers at the [[Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally]] chanted "blood and soil" alongside "Jews will not replace us." ## Why It Matters Here The formula is the alternative to a creedal account of nationhood: if the nation is descent plus territory, then founding documents, principles, and naturalized citizenship are all secondary. Heather Cox Richardson invoked the term on July 27, 2026 to characterize the administration's rewriting of the American founding — the argument, she wrote, that the United States "was founded as a white nation whose citizens are defined by their European heritage and the land they inhabited." That framing is the ideological stake in the campaign against the [[Smithsonian Institution]] and in the [[America 250]] commemoration. ## The doctrine's American career The phrase crossed the Atlantic twice. In the 1930s the Nazi agrarian program was admired by American agrarians and eugenicists who shared its premise — [[Madison Grant]]'s conservationism and his race theory were one worldview, and the Dust Bowl decade produced its own "back to the land" romanticism. After 1945 the term survived only as an accusation until the 2010s, when the [[Alt-Right]] revived it as a slogan and Charlottesville made it a chant: an explicit claim, by people who knew its source, that American nationhood was descent plus territory. The 2026 founding-narrative campaign does not use the words; it uses the argument — that the founders built a nation for their own posterity, and that the creedal reading of 1776 is a later imposition. The vault keeps the German term because the American version borrows its structure exactly: a people, a land, and an enemy defined as whoever is neither. See [[Ethnonationalism]] for the family and [[Great Replacement Theory]] for the demographic engine. ## See Also - [[Ethnonationalism]] — the broader ideology - [[Great Replacement Theory]] — the contemporary demographic-panic version - [[Ecofascism]] — the conservation branch of the same Nazi-era doctrine - [[Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally]] — the 2017 chant