1898, A Vintage Year for United States Empire Building

Posted on July 24, 2020February 28, 2021 by E Curb Nottus

Economic history, International Relations, Military history, Political geography, Regional History

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography” ~ Mark Twain (attributed)✱

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The axiomatic nature of the above much-referenced quotation resounds most strongly in the year 1898. In that year the US expanded its offshore territorial acquisitions in different parts of the Pacific and in the Caribbean. It secured the islands of Cuba, the Philippines❂, Guam and Puerto Rico as a result of a short, opportunistic, one-sided war with a declining European power. At the same time Washington annexing the Hawaiian Islands, closed the door on four years of ‘independent’ republicanism which followed a successful coup by American businessmen against the indigenous Hawaiian monarchy.

🔺 Flag of the short-lived Hawaiian Republic

What triggered US involvement in a Cuban conflict against far-off Spain? The immediate pretext was the sinking of the American battleship Maine in Havana harbour. The explosion is generally believed to have been an accident but leading American newspapers (the Hearst press and to a lesser extent the Pulitzer publications) drove the charge of war jingoism within the country, declaring Spain culpable for the loss of life on the Maine. This and the ongoing reporting of the Cuban insurrection which deliberately exaggerated Spanish atrocities against the Cubans—examples of the “yellow journalism”◬ practiced especially by Hearst—helped to create a groundswell of popular support and agitation for war whilst boosting the newspapers’ sales.

🔺 “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” (source: www.pri.org)

Humanitarian concern for the Cuban people?
In response to the charge that the US engineered the war as a grab for territory (á la Mexico 1846), apologists for the US intervention clothed the action in the garb of a humanitarian attempt to free the Cuban people from the colonial yoke of imperial Spain [Foner, Philip S. “Why the United States Went to War with Spain in 1898.” Science & Society, vol. 32, no. 1, 1968, pp. 39–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/404402321. Accessed 21 July 2020]. The McKinley Administration in Washington DC also justified it as an imperative to act given the political instability in Cuba, so close to US soil, and certainly Washington as the hegemonic regional power with a self-appointed role as regional ‘policeman’ had an interest in ridding the Western Hemisphere of the remnants of an old European colonial power [‘The Spanish-American War, 1898’, Office of The Historian, www.history.state.gov/].

Contemporary criticisms of aggressive US foreign policy
Washington’s rapid trajectory towards war in 1898 drew a skeptical response internationally. Keir Hardie, British labour leader, stated that he “cannot believe in the purity of the American motive”, seeing rather the hand of “trusts and Wall Street financiers intent on extending American dominance over Cuba, Latin America, and the Far East”. The French government agreed that the professed humanitarian concerns were “merely a disguise for (US) commercial desires” to conquer the Caribbean and Latin America. Non-mainstream press in the US like the socialist The People and the New York Tribune argued that the US government ’s real aim was to ”divert attention from economic evils at home” and to protect the US’s extensive interests in Cuba [Foner, Philip S. “Why the United States Went to War with Spain in 1898.” Science & Society, vol. 32, no. 1, 1968, pp. 39–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/404402321. Accessed 21 July 2020].

An economics-driven war
In fact economics was the principal driver of America’s intervention in Spanish Cuba. First, the US was massively invested in the island in the 1890s, importing sugar (predominantly), plus tobacco and minerals from Cuba…the US’s Cuban business ventures were valued at about $50 million in 1895 [‘American Business in Cuba 1898-1959: A Brief Overview’, (Lisa Reynolds Wolfe), Havana Project, 17-Aug-2011, www.havanaproject.com]. The Maine was in Havana harbour to protect these same American interests when it met with disaster. So, rather than a humanitarian motive to aid the beleaguered Cubans, the intervention can be seen as pure economic self-interest: “halting a nationalistic revolution or social movement that threatened American interests” and the subsequent withholding of sovereignty to Cubans (and to Filipinos) [Paterson, Thomas G. “United States Intervention in Cuba, 1898: Interpretations of the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War.” The History Teacher, vol. 29, no. 3, 1996, pp. 341–361. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4944551 . Accessed 21 July 2020].

🔺 President McKinley

The contemporary state of the American economy was a factor in America’s timing to act. Economic depression and unemployment was plaguing the country. New markets needed to be found for US goods, this meant not only Cuba and the American ’backyard’, but even extending to the Philippines and the lucrative Chinese market (Paterson). Tom Fiddick argues that the real reason President McKinley backed by the American capitalist class opted for war—having seen Spain‘s failure to pacify the Cuban rebels—was to make certain that the insurectos did not succeed in liberating the island and thereby pose a threat to US business interests in Cuba [Fiddick, Tom. “Some Comments on Philip S. Foner’s “Why the United States Went to War with Spain”.” Science & Society 32, no. 3 (1968): 323-27. Accessed July 22, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40401358].

🔺 Battle of Guantánamo Bay (Cuba)

US strategy thinking around imperialist objectives was evident prior to the move to war in 1898 – plans were already afoot for the establishment of naval bases in the strategically important Caribbean and in Hawaii, a precondition to expanding economically further into Latin America and into Asian markets. This “game plan” also envisioned US control of the Isthmus of Panama, an objective secured a few years after the victory over Spain (Foner).

Underpinning ideology for upping territorial expansion
The hawkish US foreign policy in 1898 accords with the prevailing 19th century belief of “Manifest Destiny”, a view that settlers in the US were destined to expand inexorably across the continent of North America◙. Correspondence between key players (T Roosevelt and HC Lodge) disclose that the McKinley Administration was committed—before the outbreak of hostilities—to “intervention in Cuba as a stepping stone for expansion in the Far East through the acquisition of Spain’s Pacific possessions”. Foner notes that Cuba comprised the ‘fulcrum’ providing the opportunity for US occupancy of the Philippines as “a base at the doorway to China’s markets” for US capitalists. Also shaping this was the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis—the idea that American democracy was defined by a moving frontier line—if America’s frontier at home was closing off as was thought by some, then the most viable course may be to seek new frontiers abroad. The increasingly dominant current in international thought, social Darwinism, was also informing American thinking…the national assertiveness shown in 1898 can be seen as a quantum leap in the “deliberate, calculated pursuit of United States’ greatness” (Paterson).

🔻 Battle of Manila Bay (Phil.)

Hawaii, a foothold on the “American Lake”
The groundwork for the US’s absorption of the Hawaiian islands as part of the Manifesto Destiny credo was laid five years earlier when a group of American sugar planters under Sanford B Dole✦ overthrew Queen Liliuokalani, replacing the monarchy with a provisional government with Dole as president. The coup was tacitly recognised by the US government (with US marines despatched to Hawaii to protect US citizens), although President Cleveland tried unsuccessfully to reinstate the monarchy. His successor William McKinley, recognising the strategic importance of Pearl Harbour as a naval base in the war with Spain, “rubber-stamped” the formal annexation of the islands by the US in August 1898 [‘Americans overthrow Hawaiian monarchy, History, www.history.com/].

🔺 US sailors and marines in Honolulu c.1894

Footnote: A “Spanish-American War”
Thomas G Patterson notes the exclusionist nature of the name given to the 1898 conflict – the omission of reference to Cuba and Philippines in the title—in effect “air-brushing” the native populations out of the conflict—was (Paterson suggests) an attempt by the victors to obscure uncomfortable truths, the denial of full-fledged independence to Cubans and Filipinos once freed from Spanish control, and to try to avoid America’s role in the affair being labelled as ‘imperialist’ (Paterson).

🔻 1900 map (Source: Pinterest)

PostScript: The Filipino insurgency
After the Spanish defeat Filipino nationalists under Emilio Aguinaldo asserted the Philippines’ independence (proclaiming the First Philippine Republic) in 1899. This action was opposed by the US and a conventional-cum-guerrilla war ensued until 1902 when US forces finally subdued Aguinaldo’s army and the Philippines were made an unincorporated territory of the US (although a number of splinter groups of local insurrectos continued to fight the US military occupation for several years) [‘The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902’, Office of The Historian, www.history.state.gov/].

🔻 Flag of the República Filipino

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✱ this famous but elusive quote has also been attributed, in slightly modified form, to Ambrose Bierce

❂ the US government paid Spain $20 million, compensation for the loss of infrastructure in the Philippines

◬ characterised by sensationalism (eg, eye-catching headlines) typically with scant regard for accuracy

◙ US business giant Standard Oil for instance talked about its ”Manifest Destiny being in Asia” (Foner)

✦ calling themselves the “Committee of Safety”

The Eugenics Movement in Australasia I: Preserving the White Elite from Dysgenic Degeneracy

Posted on November 21, 2016April 16, 2022 by funambulator@live.com

National politics, Popular Culture, Racial politics, Social History

The belief in eugenics, the science (or as modern eyes would see it — the pseudoscience) of “improving the quality of the human race, especially by selective breeding”❈, had a powerful hold on societal thinking in Australia and New Zealand in the first half of the twentieth century, as it did elsewhere in the world, predominantly in western countries or western-implant societies.

href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/image.jpg”> Sir F Galton[/

The term “eugenics” itself was coined in the latter 19th century by English polymath and statistician Francis Galton, whose views had been informed by the theories on “the preservation of favoured races” (Origins of the Species) of his second cousin Charles Darwin (coincidentally Darwin’s son, Leonard, was a leading eugenicist in Britain)⍍. Galton linked heredity to Social Darwinism. Sometimes called “race science” or more euphemistically “racial hygiene”, eugenics ideology in its day had a duality to its basis that was inherently contradictory. On the one hand it assumed the natural superiority of the white race (because of its ‘good’ genes), on the other, that same ‘superior’ stock was being assailed by a countervailing threat of physical, psychological and moral degeneration of the race coming from those elements of society labelled as ‘inferior’ (the dysgenic or cacogenic sections of society).

A cycle of low fertility rates in the West commencing in the late 19th century together with rising levels of crime and the emergence of welfare state dependency provoked concerns of moral and physical degeneracy of the white race[1]. In Australia this concern prompted a Royal Commission into the Decline of the Birth Rate in NSW in 1904. The widespread perception in Western countries was that the decline was hitting the “good stock” hardest, as a consequence ‘inferior’ people of “low racial stock” were out-breeding the ‘superior’ stock of the country❇.

White societies like Britain and the Dominions were viewed as becoming ‘soft’ and ‘weak’ and the foundations being laid for the welfare state in the UK were attacked as contributing to this ‘decay’ – the survival and multiplication of the poor, the deranged and other “social undesirables” was a financial burden on the state, driving up the welfare costs. Even the man who later provided the blueprint for the British welfare state post-WWII, pursued a strong eugenics agenda. William Beveridge in 1909 called for the ‘defectives’ within society to be denied their “citizen rights” – “the franchise … civil freedom and fatherhood”[2].

Britain, the US, New Zealand, Australia and other countries were informed by ‘scientific’ notions of eugenics and sought to implement policies and practices which remedied this trendஐ. This was a two-fold process, the first involving so-called positive eugenics – elevating or ‘purifying’ the racial stock by encouraging the so-called ‘fit’ people in society to procreate more (in New Zealand the act of providing literature on contraceptives was proscribed in the 1900s). Simultaneously the states sought to deal with negative eugenics (or more precisely ‘dysgenics’¤), identifying those members of society thought to be ‘unfit’ for procreation (people of unsound mind, of physical deformity, the intellectually-handicapped, the epileptic, the criminal classes including prostitutes, slum dwellers, homosexuals, dipsomaniacs, the indigenous non-white population and other marginalised sections) and either segregating them, preventing them from marrying or having them sterilised to stop their sexual reproduction[3].

Some of the contemporary popular fiction produced in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, etc. played on the anxieties of a “race war” which put the supremacy of the white European in peril. Influential writers such as Charles H Pearson in Australia, helped to shape these perceptions with books like National Life and Character: a Forecast which argued that it was the “racially defiled” non-white races with their higher birth-rates, not the white race with its relentless imperial juggernaut, that was on the ascendency[4].

What sectors and groups of society were in the Vanguard of the Eugenics Movements in Australasia?
The eugenicists and fellow travellers of the eugenics movement were drawn from the elite circles of Australian and New Zealand society§ – including politicians, scientists, medical practitioners, educators, academics, social workers, women’s groups, churches and clergymen (excluding the Catholic Church). Other professionals such as psychiatrists, anthropologists and magistrates aided and abetted the work of the movement. Eugenics was not a left /right thing, support for it came from across the political spectrum – from socialists and conservatives both.

Opponents of Eugenics in Australasia
Although eugenic thought was accepted as the normative approach to tackling social problems in the interwar period, it was not universally countenanced by all sectors of Australian and New Zealand society. Opposition to eugenics came from organised working class elements, ie, the trade unions, as well as from the Catholic Church, from moral campaigners (concerned that sterilisation might lead to increased promiscuity), from some medical practitioners (also concerned that the poorly educated sterilised would be sexually indiscriminate and spread VD[5], plus wary of the legal ramifications of sterilising citizens), and from public intellectuals and scientific dissenters.

The eugenics movement in Aeotearoa
New Zealand in the first 40 years of the 20th century presents a similar story to its large trans-Tasman neighbour. The New Zealand Eugenics Education Society, founded in 1910, led the call for eugenic measures necessary it claimed to manage the population and ensure a healthy country. Grass roots pressure prompted a government investigation in 1924 which concluded that there was a birth-rate disparity distorting the population’s genetic balance – “the ‘fit’ were being swamped by the ‘unfit'”. It informed a view that NZ was in racial decline as a consequence of growing numbers of the feeble-minded and social defectives which eugenicists argued posed a social menace[6].

PM Stout (Picture: www.digitslnz.org)

Chief Justice Sir Robert Stout was one of the leading figures in NZ eugenics in the first half of the century. Stout, in a discursive and often anecdotal lecture to the Wellington Eugenics Society in 1912, espoused the standard eugenicist position. Stout linked heredity to fatal diseases, condemned high levels of alcohol consumption and cigarette-smoking, and warned that “the peerage” was committing “race suicide”, “the best blood” was being “enervated” and supplanted by the “second best”, “the extinction of the race was being seen everywhere”, etc[7]. Chief Justice Stout’s race views carried even more weight because he had previously been premier of NZ in the late 19th century. William Chapple was another leading NZ eugenicist who was influential in the NZ movement through his dual roles as medical practitioner and Liberal Party politician. His book Fertility of the Unfit advocated enforced sterilisation in certain circumstances.

In touch with the latest currents in eugenics thinking in Britain and the US, eugenicists in Australia and New Zealand whole-heartedly set about rejuvenating the racial ‘fitness’ of Australians. This would be achieved they believed by encouraging the elite in society to procreate, whilst at the same time, with the aid of legislators, denying those they labelled as “social misfits” or ‘degenerates’ that same right to reproduce[8].

PostScript 1: British Models
The Australian and New Zealand eugenics movements took impetus from the larger and more advanced movements in Britain and the US. The leading British eugenicists themselves acknowledged a debt to Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting movement. Baden-Powell’s emphasis on the traits of character[9], discipline, citizenship and patriotism were appealing to eugenicists such as Karl Pearson and Caleb Saleeby. Dr Saleeby wrote in ‘The progress of eugenics’: “If national eugenics is ever achieved in Great Britain, it will come through the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides”[10].

PostScript 2: Eugenics, an agricultural template
Sidestepping the moral and ethical considerations, some contemporary eugenics enthusiasts made the argument for efficacy based on agricultural models. They advocated the utilisation of the successful principles of selective stock and plant breeding, applying them to the reproduction of humans to improve the quality of future generations. One US agricultural society member in 1911 summed it up in a straightforward, no nonsense sort of way, “better horses, better cattle, better hogs …. (why not) … better babies?”[11] The agriculture/eugenics nexus has a further dimension in the US … two of America’s foremost eugenicists, Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, had been chicken breeders.

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌
❈ some basic definitions to begin with – the etymology of the word ‘eugenics’ is Greek, from eugenes, root derivation: eu-, ‘good’ or ‘well’, + -genos, ‘birth’ or ‘stock’ … contrast with dysgenics, dys (‘bad’ or ‘ill’) + -genos, Collins Concise Dictionary (Australian Edition, 1995)
ஐ the US in particular was a hotspot of the eugenics movement, producing pro-eugenic films like The Black Stork (1917) which preached a chilling message of “Kill defectives, Save the Nation”
¤ this dysgenic sensibility, that race disintegration was occurring was so universally pervasive in the early 1900s that even black intellectuals in America led by W E B DuBois advocated that the ‘Negro race’ guard against racial decay by elevating up the “talented tenth” of the black community
⍍ Charles Darwin himself was ahead of the movement expressing elitist eugenics views in 1871 in The Descent of Man, “We civilised men…. do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick.. . thus the weak members of society propagate their kind.”
❇ the offspring of “low stock” were characterised as “the increasingly disproportionate progeny of the criminal” who were “swamping civilisation”, R Waddell, (Preface) The Fertility of the Unfit, cited in E J Wilson, ‘Eugenic ideology and racial fitness in Queensland, 1900-1950’, Unpub. PhD thesis (Department of History, University of Queensland, May 2003),
www.espace.library.uq.edu.au
§ pointedly, many of the top figures (especially the medical doctors) in the Aust/NZ eugenics movements were born in Britain and migrated to the Antipodes

[1] the self-doubt harboured by Britons and by colonials in other dominions of the Empire was accentuated by a further sense of diminution after the Anglo-Boer War felt by the British professional classes, resulting what has been described by C L Bacchi as a “gloomy heredity determinism”, C L Bacchi, ‘The Nature-Nurture Debate in Australia, 1900-1914, Historical Studies, (19) 1980, quoted in M Cawte, ‘Craniometry and Eugenics in Australia: R.J.A. Berry and the Quest for Social Efficiency, Historical Studies, (22) 1986
[2] D Sewell, ‘How eugenics poisoned the welfare state’, The Spectator, 25-Nov-2009, www.spectator.co.uk
[3] ‘Story: Contraception and sterilisation Page 5 – Information about contraceptives’ Encyclopedia ; ‘Eugenics – Positive And Negative Eugenics’, http://medicine.jrank.org/pages/2210/Eugenics-Positive-Negative-Eugenics.html; some eugenicists, driven by fear of miscegenation, advocated complete segregation of races, especially prominent in South Africa and the USA; S Dubow, ‘Placing “Race” in South African History’, in W Lamont [Ed.], Historical Controversies and Historians, (1998),www.disciplinas.stoa.usp.br
[4] ‘Charles Henry Pearson’, Wikipedia, www.en.m.wikipedia.org. The race war notion – especially in regard to Japan’s emerging Pacific presence – found a fervid home in the Australian and New Zealand press and literature in the early century, eg, ‘The Commonwealth Crisis’, published in The Lone Hand, presents a fantasy scenario of a Japanese invasion of the Northern Territory, D Walker, ‘National Identity’, in J Jupp [Ed.], The Australian People: An Encyclopaedia of the Nation, Its People and their Origins
[5] Venereal disease was exceptionally virulent during the Great War, and in the prevailing eugenics environment in Australia, an indicator of what constituted racial ‘unfitness’ … the dilemma for society’s ruling elite as the war went on was that ‘respectable’ citizens also found themselves victims of the disease!, M Larson, ‘The iconography
[6] A Wanhalla, ‘New Zealand’, 23-Oct-2014, (Eugenics Archive NZ). Retrieved 8-Nov-2016 from www.eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/connections/544873c7d861fb0000000001
[6] ‘Eugenics – Problem of the Race – a lecture by Sir Robert Stout’, Evening Post (Wellington), 6-Aug-1912 https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/EP19120806.2.53
[7] Neo-Malthusian ideas informed eugenics thinking, especially regarding fertility control, R A Soloway, ‘Neo-Malthusians, Eugenists, and the Declining Birth-Rate in England, 1900-1918’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1978)
[8] Baden-Powell declared in 1911: “Our business is to … pass as many boys through our character factory as we possibly can”, M Rosenthal, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the origins of the Boy Scout movement
[9] M A Hasian, The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought
[10] C Muir, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History

Seeking Paraíso in 19th Century Paraguay: Two Models of Utopian Society, Nueva Germania and Nueva Australia

Posted on August 1, 2014May 27, 2019 by funambulator@live.com

Racial politics, Regional History, Social History

Visionary thinkers in the 19th Century such as Robert Owen, Comte de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, provided the impetus for a whole host of attempts to create new communities which aspired to an ideal or utopian existence. Old Europe looked towards to the ‘New World’, the Americas, as the optimal location for the realisation of an ideal society. Many transplanted “would-be” utopian communities ended up in the United States (with bucolic names like New Harmony, Icaria, Fountain Grove and Altruria), but increasingly many seekers of a better life looked optimistically to the less developed reaches of South America as fertile ground for a model community (the US National Parks Service on its website www.nps.gov identifies literally hundreds of communal utopian experiments in the early period of the United States – article “The Amana Colonies: Utopias in America”).

In this piece I want to focus on two late 19th Century Paraguayan utopian experiments, the colonies of Nueva Germania and Nueva Australia. The German and the Australian colonies were both spectacularly unsuccessful in their aims, hardly surprising perhaps considering how unrealistically high they had set the bar, and how incredibly idealistic were their aims. On the surface the German and the Australian utopian experiments seem very different beasts, one a haven for Nordic exclusionists and the other for disillusioned Antipodean agrarian labourers, ideologically though, as I will attempt to show below, the two colonies had much in common in their character and aspirations.

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Neu Deutschland im Amerika: Germany’s “would-be” Aryan colony in the Americas
New Germany in Paraguay was the brainchild of Elizabeth Nietzsche and Bernhard Förster, the sister and brother-in-law of the great German philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche. Förster had been prominent in the far right German People’s League, known for its extreme anti-Semitic nationalism. His big idea, supported by his wife, Elizabeth, was to create a model German community in the Americas which embodied Aryan racial purity, free from what the Försters believed to be the “virulent contamination of Europe by Jews”. In the febrile minds of the anti-Semitic couple, the virgin ground of depopulated rural Paraguay held the promise of creating an exclusively Aryan society.

In 1886 Förster and Nietzsche organised the emigration of a small number of select families from Saxony (who were characteristically Nordic in appearance) to South America. The scheme of the Försters was to build the foundations of a supreme Aryan ‘New World’ colony in the Paraguayan jungle. Förster’s hopes initially were high for Nueva Germania, envisaging an “idyllic Naumburg on the Aguarya-umi” River [Ben MacIntyre, Forgotten Fatherland]. In addition to the racial dimension, Förster and Frau Förster-Nietzsche’s Aryan utopia was based on the pillars of German nationalism, Lutheranism and vegetarianism [JF Williams, Daniela Krause & Harry Knowles “Flights from Modernity: German and Australian Utopian Colonies in Paraguay 1886-1896?”, Journal of Australian Studies (1 Sept 2001)].

The dreams of a German-South American Paráiso en Tierra very soon came to dust as the colony abjectly failed to establish any cohesion or viability. A combination of factors contributed to this including disease affecting the colonists, crop failure and infighting among the migrants from Saxony [Simon Romero, “German Outpost Born of Racism in 1887 Blends into Paraguay”, New York Times, 6 May 2013]. The fact that only a small proportion of the settlers were actually farmers was a factor in the colony’s inability to yield sufficient crops on their land [James Brooke, “Nueva Germania Journal; from a Bigot’s Planting, a Garden Assimilation”, NYT, 18 March 1991].

The elitist personal behaviour of the Försters in Nueva Germania affected the colony’s cohesion and disaffected its members. This manifested itself in displays of megalomania by Förster and the Försters’ demonstrably obvious social and economic advantage which markedly set them apart from the other colonists who were for the large part fairly impoverished families. For example, the Försters built themselves an elegant mansion in the San Pedro wilderness called ‘Försterhof‘, in stark contrast to the meagre and pitiful living conditions of the other settlers; the commune’s farmers in the fields were forced to stop work and submissively bow to Förster every time the overbearing leader rode past! [Romero, op.cit].

Other factors (including biological) undermined any prospect the colony of Nueva Germania ever had of flourishing. A community of only 14 families (as it was originally) would almost inevitably be vulnerable to the likelihood of some degree of inbreeding, especially given the racial homogeneity doctrine on which the commune was based [MacIntyre, op.cit.]. This only served to undermine harmony in the commune and exacerbated tensions among the settlers.

Commune leader Förster, in heavy debt, facing the spectre of bankruptcy and in despair at the utopian disaster, committed suicide in 1889. Nueva Germania struggled on without its main spearhead, now led by Elizabeth Nietzsche who made an attempt to recruit more members from the Fatherland – with little return for her efforts. However in 1893 Frau Förster-Nietzsche abandoned the Aryan Paraíso and it’s settlers, returning to Germany to take charge of her famous brother’s affairs and care for him (Nietzsche had fallen into a state of insanity probably as a result of contracting syphilis). In the years after the philosopher’s death in 1900 the warped Elizabeth proceeded to convert him into a kind of intellectual “pin-up boy” on behalf of the emerging Fascist and Nazi movements of Italy and Germany. Significant to note that Nietzsche, when still in full control of his faculties, had been on record as expressing his complete disapproval of anti-Semitism and of the Försters’ plans for establishing an Aryan colony. Elizabeth, who later became a wholehearted supporter of Hitler, criminally and comprehensively traduced her brother’s reputation by falsely resurrecting Nietzsche as a prophet of the German “master race” to come. [J. Golumb & RS Wistrich (Eds), Nietzsche, Godfather of Nazism? On the Uses & Abuses of a Philosophy.]

Following Elizabeth’s departure from Paraguay, the San Pedro-based colony of German farmers did not disappear altogether but limped on, surviving by scrimping together a bit of income from the growth of yerba mate and other subsistence crops. Nueva Germania (NG) still exists today in San Pedro – as far as ever from being remotely anything like a utopian community. With the bursting of the racial purity myth, the small group of German settlers intermarried with the local Mestizo–Guaraní-Spanish people, and as a result are not conspicuous from the rest of the Paraguayan population. They tend to speak Guaraní, the widely-spoken native language, in preference to German, and are set apart from other Paraguayans only by the retention of German family names (Fischer, Küch, Haudenschild, Stern, and so on).

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Australian economic and labour woes in the 1890s: Seeking a socialist paradise new start
The colony of ‘New Australia’ had its origins in the economic conditions and labour relations in pre-Federation Australia, especially in eastern Australia. In the early 1890s the onset of a crippling financial depression and a series of shearers’ and dock strikes in Queensland suppressed heavy-handedly by British troops fostered widespread disillusionment among bush workers. An idealistic English socialist journalist, William Lane, a maverick of the Australian labour movement, formed the New Australia Cooperation Settlement Association (NACSA) with the aim of establishing a “workers’ paradise” in South America.

The Association looked initially in Argentina for land to settle, but when this proved fruitless, Lane turned to neighbouring Paraguay where they found a government much more amenable. Lane’s scheme to export Australian workers suited the Paraguayan Government which was desperate to replenish the loss of manpower in the 1860s suffered in a disastrous war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Paraguay, hopelessly outmatched, by war’s end, lost its territorial access to the sea and somewhere between 60 and 70 per cent of its male population during the war, leaving the country with an estimated total of only 28,000 adult males [Thomas Whigham, “The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone”, Latin American Research Review (1999)].

Consequently the Paraguayan Government freely granted NACSA an ample tract of grasslands near Villarica (in the modern-day Caaguazú Department),south-east of the capital, Asuncíon, to the new settlers. Lane brought over 200 colonists to Paraguay including the famous Australian socialist poet, Mary Gilmore, who was the colony’s schoolteacher. The settlement which became known as Colonía Nueva Australia met with formidable obstacles right from the outset.

A big part of the problem was the leadership itself. William Lane imposed strict rules on the community which alienated many who had followed him on the venture. Members of the colony were forbidden to drink, which given the combination of the oppressive heat and the plentiful supply of cheap caña (sugar cane rum) in Paraguay, was not a realistic proposition. Lane banned the male colonists from having sexual liaisons with the local Guaraní women, who given that they were 80 per cent of the population, was also an impractical notion. He also displayed a puritan streak by insisting that all members of the commune marry for life. In Lane’s own words, the colony was “a commonhold of English speaking whites, who accept among their principles, Life marriages, Teetotalism and the Colour Line.” [Cosme Monthly, Sept 1896].

‘Commandant’ Lane – a left-wing “Captain Bligh”
William Lane was by nature “autocratic, under pressure his simplistic communism and mateship developed a non-denominational but distinctly religious tinge” [Gavin Souter, ‘William Lane’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 9, (MUP), 1983]. Lane’s leadership style, like Föster’s, clearly inclined towards millenarianism and the messianic [John Kellett, “William Lane and ‘New Australia’, Labour History, 72 (May 1997)]

Racism was always a key feature of Lane’s credo of utopian socialism and his overall philosophy. Back in Australia, this had already shown itself in his race novel, White or Yellow? and in his strident opposition to the introduction of Polynesian labour in Australia. Lane’s vision of utopian socialism put great store on the exalted nature of ‘mateship‘, but as the South Australian Register reported on 1 January 1895, many of the settlers thought the leader impractical, “there was too much talk about mateship and not enough of crops and cattle” [Kellett, ibid.].

Added to this, the conditions under which the Nueva Australinos found themselves were very harsh, the climate was inhospitable, the land was not as arable as had been hoped (less like outback Queensland than initially thought); mosquito and parasite infestation plagued them, tigrés or jaguarés prowled around the camps at night [Ben Stubbs, “The New Australians of South America”, www.australiangeographic.com.au]

Nueva Australia was established on the basis of a socialist cooperative enterprise, the colonists were compelled to commit all of their personal savings to a communal fund. Once underway, all cash in the colony was held collectively. Inevitably, this lead to bickering which was ongoing. Some members were accused of withholding money from the collective ‘kitty'[The West Australian, 29 December 1893, The Brisbane Courier, 9 July 1894]. Harmony within the colony by now was already strained.

Things only deteriorated, an anti-Lane faction developed and Lane expelled some of these dissenters from the commune. At the same time Lane was accused of favouring a friend of his who had transgressed the colony rules [JB Henderson, William Lane, the prophet of Socialism”, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 8(3) 1968]. Inevitably there was a backlash against Lane’s ‘Law’ by the majority of the settlers. Ideological disputes and personality clashes intensified to the point where Lane was forced to break away from the original settlement and start a new community (he called Colonía Cosme) which adhered to his over-the-top brand of puritanism. The rebels under trade unionist Gilbert Casey maintained the original settlement, Nueva Australia, but disbanded the communistic methods in favour of a more individual approach to financial arrangements.

Both colonies continued to struggle for viability. The Australian newspapers of the day regularly reported entreaties to the authorities from individual families for assisted passage back to Australia owing to their destitution [Brisbane Courier, 12 February 1896, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW), 20 January 1897]. Lane tried to recruit new members to Cosme from England but was only at best marginally successfully. By 1899 Lane himself had abandoned his own utopian project and returned to Australasia, eventually to do a political volte-face, becoming a conservative journalist in New Zealand.

By the end of the 1890s it was transparent to all that both utopian experiments were abject failures and the Paraguayan Government stepped in and ended the communal nature of the colonies, offering the remaining members (such as there were) individual plots of land to work. In this transformed fashion the settlements stumbled on, sans communism. Today the remnants of Lane’s idealist vision remain in two townships, one called Nueva Australia and the other (somewhat curiously), Nueva Londres.

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“Eugenically-pure”(sic) New Australia
One of the most pervasive and influential ideas in Western thinking in the late 19th Century was the notion of eugenics. This pseudo-scientific belief underpinned the theoretical framework of both Paraguayan utopian societies. The practice of strict racial separation, whether that be white/native American or German/Jew, was an essential tenet of Nuevo Germania and New Australia, based on the supposed inherent superiority of people of English/German stock. The widespread acceptance of Social Darwinism at that time fed into that self-perception of superiority. Lane envisaged a new type of Australian man of pure English (Anglo-Saxon) stock forged out of the South American jungle, an antidote to racial decay of the white man…the theoretical underpinnings of Lane’s ‘New Australia’ brought him uncomfortably close to Förster’s vision for Nueva Germania – an Australian colony in the wilderness providing the breeding ground for a new, higher and purer ‘race’ (sic) of Saxon stock [MacIntyre, op.cit; Williams, Krause & Knowles, op.cit.].

As indicated above, there were a number of distinct similarities between the leaders of the German and the Australian aspirational utopian colonies in their beliefs and prejudices. Both were religious fanatics imbued with peculiar forms of Agrarian Christian Socialism. Both were wowsers and racists harbouring a deep fear of miscegenation [Williams, Krause & Knowles, op.cit.].

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Remnants of Nueva Australia

PostScript: Inflexible, impractical, headstrong leadership and a failure to adapt to Paraguayan conditions
The Australian and German colonies in Paraguay in practice were neither utopian or viable. They failed, partly because, on both counts, there was a sense of unreality about the entire project. Poor leadership retarded the communes’ development. Lane and Förster’s fantastically dreamy visions were not rooted in anything concrete. “Authoritarianism for authoritarianism’s sake” succeeded only in alienating the settlement members. Both leaders were unrealistic in expecting them to blithely accept unreasonable demands that they abstain from drink, from meat, from physical contact with the local women, forgo money, and so on. In addition to all of this, the harshness of conditions in the jungle and wilderness of Paraguay tested the new settlers and repeated crop failures prevented them from making a decent economic livelihood from the land, condemning those that remained to a life of subsistence agriculture.