Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America 1609-2009 (Atlantic World)

Going Dutch

Atlantic World Europe, Africa and the Americas, 1500–1830 Edited by

Benjamin Schmidt University of Washington

and Wim Klooster Clark University

VOLUME 15

Going Dutch The Dutch Presence in America, 1609–2009

Edited by

Joyce D. Goodfriend, Benjamin Schmidt and Annette Stott

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2008

Cover photograph: From the collection of the Afchemuseum, Hoorn, The Netherlands. This book is printed on acid-free paper. A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISSN 1570-0542 ISBN 978 90 04 16368 3 Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishers, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...................................................................... List of Contributors .................................................................... Acknowledgements .....................................................................

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INTRODUCTION Holland in America .................................................................... Joyce D. Goodfriend, Benjamin Schmidt, and Annette Stott

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PART I

COLONIAL DUTCH INFLUENCES Chapter One Dutch Art and the Hudson Valley Patroon Painters ............. Louisa Wood Ruby Chapter Two Erasing the Dutch: The Critical Reception of Hudson Valley Dutch Architecture, 1670–1840 .................................. Joseph Manca

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PART II

NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN INTERPRETERS OF DUTCHNESS Chapter Three The Ghosting of the Hudson Valley Dutch .......................... Judith Richardson Chapter Four A Brahmin Goes Dutch: John Lothrop Motley and the Lessons of Dutch History in Nineteenth-Century Boston .... Mark A. Peterson

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MIGRATION AND ASSIMILATION Chapter Five “But tho we love old Holland still, we love Columbia more,” the Formation of a Dutch-American Subculture in the United States, 1840–1920 ................................................ Hans Krabbendam Chapter Six Churches Bigger Than Windmills: Religion and Dutchness in Minnesota, 1885–1928 ....................................................... Robert Schoone-Jongen Chapter Seven Windmills on the Plains: Vision and Social Memory in Two Dutch Communities in Iowa ......................................... Julie Berger Hochstrasser

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PART IV

DUTCH ART AND AMERICAN COLLECTORS Chapter Eight Great Expectations: The Golden Age Redeems the Gilded Era .............................................................................. Nancy T. Minty Chapter Nine Old Masters in the New World: The Hudson-Fulton Exhibition of 1909 and its Legacy ........................................ Dennis P. Weller

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PART V

DUTCH CULTURAL INFLUENCES IN MODERN AMERICA Chapter Ten Crossing the Frontiers of the Unknown: Fred. L. Polak’s Road to Pioneer of Futures Studies in the United States ..... Tity de Vries Chapter Eleven From Bauhaus to Our House to Koolhaas: The Ofce for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and Modern American Culture .................................................................................... Christopher Pierce

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EPILOGUE Dutchness in Fact and Fiction .................................................... Willem Frijhoff

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Index ...........................................................................................

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Chapter One Fig. 1 Unidentied Dutch artist, Reverend Lazare Bayard, 1636, oil on wood panel, 45 u 33 in., New-York Historical Society, inv. no. 1915.5 ........................................................... Fig. 2 Unidentied Dutch artist, Portrait of a Man, 17th century, oil on canvas, 21 ½ u 16 ½ in., National Gallery of Art, inv. no. 1947.17.98 ........................................ Fig. 3 Michiel van Musscher, Pierre de Peyster, 1683, oil on canvas, 23 u 20 ¼ in., National Society of Colonial Dames in the State of New York ........................................... Fig. 4 Gerrit Duyckinck, Abraham de Peyster, oil on canvas, 30 u 25 in., Museum of the City of New York, inv. no. 59.84.1, gift of Miss Augusta De Peyster ................. Fig. 5 Nehemiah Partridge (attrib.), Johannes de Peyster III, 1718, oil on bed ticking, 44 u 38 ¼ in., New-York Historical Society, inv. no. 1950.236 ...................................... Fig. 6 Sir John Smith after Sir Godfrey Kneller, Sir John Perceval, mezzotint, Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations ............................................................................. Fig. 7 Nehemiah Partridge (attrib.), Ariaantje Coeymans (Mrs. David) Verplanck (1672–1743), 1718, oil on canvas, 71 u 39 in., Albany Institute of History & Art, inv. no. 1938.5, bequest of Miss Gertrude Watson ............... Fig. 8 Gerrit Duyckinck (attrib.), Mrs. David Provoost, ca. 1700–1710, oil on wood panel, 30 u 25 in., New-York Historical Society, inv. no. 1924.10 ........................................ Fig. 9 Gerardus Duyckinck I (attrib.), Elsie Rutgers Schuyler (Mrs. Petrus) Vas, 1723, oil on canvas, 44 u 35 in., Albany Institute of History & Art, inv. no. 1957.104, gift of Dorothy Trent Arnold (Mrs. Ledyard, Jr.) Cogswell .............

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Fig. 10 Pieter Vanderlyn (attrib.), Pau Gansevoort, formerly known as Pau de Wandelaer, ca. 1730–1740, oil on canvas, 44 ¾ u 35 ¼ in., Albany Institute of History & Art, inv. no. 1940.600.28, gift of Catherine Gansevoort (Mrs. Abraham) Lansing ........................................................

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Chapter Two Fig. 1 James Eights, North Pearl and State Streets—At and Near the Corner—As It Was in 1814, 1849, watercolor, Albany Institute of History and Art, bequest of Ledyard Cogswell, Jr., inv. no. 1954.59.65 ............................................................ Fig. 2 James Eights, North Pearl Street—from Steuben Street South—As It Was in 1812, 1850, watercolor, Albany Institute of History and Art, bequest of Ledyard Cogswell, Jr., inv. no. 1954.59.64 .................................................................. Fig. 3 Old Dutch Church, Sleepy Hollow, New York, ca. 1690–1700, altered ca. 1837. Photo: Joseph Manca ....... Fig. 4 Old Dutch Church, Sleepy Hollow, New York; reconstruction of original appearance. Photo: Joseph Manca Fig. 5 Philipse Manor Hall, Yonkers, New York, ca. 1719–1730, other additions ca. 1745–1755. Photo: Joseph Manca .............................................................. Fig. 6 DeWint House, Tappan, New York, dated 1700. Photo: Joseph Manca .............................................................. Fig. 7 George Harvey (architect), Sunnyside (home of Washington Irving), 1835–1837, Tarrytown, New York. Photo: Joseph Manca ..............................................................

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Chapter Seven Fig. 1 Orange City’s Visitor’s Center and Chamber of Commerce, Orange City, Iowa. Photo: Julie Hochstrasser ... Fig. 2 Orange City High School Marching Band. Photo: Julie Hochstrasser .................................................................... Fig. 3 Orange City Folk Dancers at the Tulip Festival. Photo: Anne Rosenberg ..........................................................

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list of illustrations Fig. 4 Vermeer Windmill, Pella, Iowa. Photo: Julie Hochstrasser ............................................................................ Fig. 5 Tulip Festival Parade, Orange City, Iowa. Photo: Julie Hochstrasser ............................................................................ Fig. 6 Holly Streekstra, Diasporic Travel Kit, 2004, mixed media, 18 u 12 u 12 in., property of the artist, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Photo courtesy of the artist ...................... Fig. 7 Boys Dousing the Streets (and each other!) before the Orange City Tulip Festival Parade. Photo: Julie Hochstrasser Fig. 8 Ceremonial Scrubbing of the Streets, Tulip Festival, Orange City, Iowa. Photo: Julie Hochstrasser ....................... Fig. 9 The Klompen Maker, Tulip Festival, Orange City, Iowa. Photo: Julie Hochstrasser .............................................

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Chapter Eight Fig. 1 Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, The Toilet of Bathsheba, 1643, oil on wood, 22 ½ u 30 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913, 14.40.651 ........................................................ Fig. 2 Workshop of Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, The Finding of Moses, seventeenth-century, oil on canvas, 19 1/8 u 23 11/16 in., Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917 .......................................... Fig. 3 Sir Thomas Lawrence, Julia, Lady Peel, 1827, oil on canvas, 35 ¾ u 27 7/8 in., Henry Clay Frick Bequest 1904.1.83, Copyright The Frick Collection, New York ........ Fig. 4 Anthony van Dyck, Margareta Snyders, c. 1620, oil on canvas, 51 ½ u 39 1/8 in., Henry Clay Frick Bequest 1909.1.42, Copyright The Frick Collection, New York ........

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Chapter Nine Fig. 1 William (Wilhelm) Valentiner (far left) with museum visitors, circa 1956. Photo courtesy of North Carolina Division of Archives and History and The News and Observer, Raleigh, NC ..................................................................

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Fig. 2 Hendrick van Vliet, Interior of the Old Church in Delft, 1656, oil on canvas, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Bequest of Ellen Howard Bayard (BMA 1939.185) .............. Fig. 3 Gerard Terborch and Gesina Terborch, Posthumous Portrait of Moses Terborch, circa 1668, oil on canvas, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-4908) ................................ Fig. 4 View of Galleries in the Loan Exhibition of Paintings by Old Dutch Masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1909, image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art ........................................................................................... Fig. 5 Johannes Vermeer, Girl Asleep at a Table (A Maid Asleep), 1656–57, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Benjamin Altman 1913 (14.40.611), image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art ......................... Fig. 6 Rembrandt van Rijn, Lucretia, 1664, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Andrew W. Mellon Collection (1937.1.76), image © 2006 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington .................................................... Fig. 7 Jan Lievens, The Feast of Esther, Raleigh, ca. 1625–26, oil on canvas, North Carolina Museum of Art, (inv. 52.9.55), Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina ......

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Chapter Eleven Fig. 1 Timothy Greeneld-Sanders, Portrait of Philip Johnson Group, 1996, Courtesy of Timothy Greeneld-Sanders, all rights reserved .................................................................... Fig. 2 Madelon Vriesendorp, Flagrant Délit, painting .............. Fig. 3 Wolfgang Tillmans, Rem Koolhaas, Sitting, 2000, c-type photographic print, Courtesy Maureen Paley, London ......... Fig. 4 McCormick-Tribune Campus Center, Courtesy of Philippe Ruault ....................................................................... Fig. 5 McCormick-Tribune Campus Center and Commons Building, Courtesy of Iwan Baan .......................................................... Fig. 6 Seattle Central Library, Courtesy of Philippe Ruault ......... Fig. 7 South Elevation: McCormick-Tribune Campus Center, Drawing by OMA .................................................................. Fig. 8 Floor Plan: McCormick-Tribune Campus Center, Drawing by OMA ..................................................................

292 294 300 308 309 309 311 313

list of illustrations Fig. 9 Legibility Section: Seattle Central Library, Drawing by OMA ......................................................................................... Fig. 10 Program Diagram: Seattle Central Library, Drawing by OMA ....................................................................................... Fig. 11 Interior: Seattle Central Library, Courtesy of Iwan Baan ... Fig. 12 Mies Entrance: McCormick-Tribune Campus Center, Courtesy of Iwan Baan .......................................................... Fig. 13 Exterior: McCormick-Tribune Campus Center, Courtesy of Iwan Baan ...............................................................................

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Willem Frijhoff is Professor of Early Modern History at the Free University, Amsterdam, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He also chairs the Division of Arts and Social Sciences of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published several books of cultural history, including a biography of Everhardus Bogardus (1995, English ed. 2007) and a synthesis of Dutch culture in the Golden Age (with Marijke Spies), 1650: Hard-won Unity (2004). Joyce D. Goodfriend, Professor of History at the University of Denver, received her PhD from UCLA. She is the author of Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton University Press, 1992) and the editor of Revisiting New Netherland: Perspectives on Early Dutch America (Brill Academic Publishers, 2005), as well as many essays on the Dutch in New Netherland and colonial New York. Julie Berger Hochstrasser is Associate Professor of Early Modern Northern European Art at the University of Iowa. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program, Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, and American Council of Learned Societies. Her book Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age appeared in 2007. Her current research addresses global exchanges in visual culture with special regard to Dutch colonial history. Hans Krabbendam, Assistant Director of the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg, holds degrees from Kent State University and Leiden University. He has edited fourteen collections on European-American relations and is the author of The Model Man: A Life of Edward W. Bok, 1863–1930 (2001) and of Vrijheid in het Verschiet (2006). This general overview of Dutch immigration to the United States between 1840 and 1940 will appear in an English translation. Joseph Manca is Professor of Art History and Chairman of the Department of Art History at Rice University, where he has taught since 1989.

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He holds a PhD from Columbia University and has published several books and numerous articles in the areas of Italian Renaissance and early American art and architecture. Nancy T. Minty, a Canadian art historian living in New York City, completed her doctorate at New York University with a dissertation on the history of American collections of Dutch and Flemish painting. She has worked extensively as a curator, both privately and in North American museums. She is currently employed at ARTstor. Mark A. Peterson received his PhD in history from Harvard University, taught at the University of Iowa from 1998–2007, and is now Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His rst book, The Price of Redemption: the Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford) will soon be joined by a history of Boston, tentatively entitled A Christian Athens: Boston in the Atlantic World, 1630–1865. Christopher Pierce (PhD University of Edinburgh), Head of the Research Student Division in the Faculty of Arts and Architecture at the University of Brighton, has worked as an architect in leading rms in Europe and America and is a regular visiting lecturer in Europe and the United States. His research specializations include architecture and urbanism 1550–1700, as well as modern and contemporary architectural theory. He is currently working on a monograph of the renowned British architect, Richard Seifert. Judith Richardson joined the faculty of the Department of English at Stanford University upon completion of her PhD at Harvard University. She teaches and publishes in the eld of nineteenth-century American literature, with emphases on women authors and the theme of haunting. The latter is the subject of her book Possessions: the History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (Harvard, 2003). Louisa Wood Ruby is Head of Photoarchive Research at the Frick Collection and Art Reference Library in New York City. She has published extensively on Dutch and Flemish drawings, including a catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Paul Bril (Brepols, 1999), the subject of her PhD dissertation at New York University. Currently she is Project Scholar for the NEH-funded project, Rembrandt and Collections of His Art in America, and is also researching collections of Dutch art in seventeenth-century New York.

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Benjamin Schmidt (PhD Harvard University) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington. He has published broadly on early modern history, including Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (2001), which received the Gordan Prize from the Renaissance Society of America. His books also include Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts (with Pamela Smith, 2007) and an edition of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Discovery of Guiana (2007). A former member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), he has also received fellowships from the NEH, American Council of Learned Societies, and Getty Research Institute. Robert Schoone-Jongen received his PhD from the University of Delaware. He is on the faculty of the History Department at Calvin College where he specializes in nineteenth-century United States and immigration history. His publications often focus on the Dutch-American experience in the Midwest. Annette Stott (PhD Boston University), a former Fulbright scholar in the Netherlands and Mellon Fellow at Harvard, is Associate Professor of Art History and Director of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Denver. She has published widely on Dutch-American cultural relations, including her book Holland Mania: the Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture, and she has a forthcoming volume on Cemetery Art on the American Frontier. Dennis P. Weller (PhD University of Maryland) is Curator of Northern European Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, Adjunct Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a former Mellon post-doctoral fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has written and organized exhibitions on Dutch and Flemish art, including Sinners and Saints, Darkness and Light: Caravaggio and His Dutch and Flemish Followers; Like Father, Like Son: Paintings by Frans Hals and Jan Hals, and Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age. Tity de Vries is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Groningen where she teaches American and contemporary history. Her research focuses on cultural aspects of the Cold War, which was the main topic of her dissertation, “Complexe consensus: Amerikaanse en Nederlandse intellectuelen in debat over politiek en cultuur, 1945–1960,” published in 1996. She is currently working on a biography of the internationally active Dutch journalist Sal Tas.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors wish to thank Hendrik van Leusen and Hylke Faber of Brill for lending their support to this volume and for ensuring its efcient production. We are grateful also to series editor Wim Klooster for his rapid review of the manuscript and ne editorial suggestions. Finally, the expertise and professionalism of our essayists have made our job much easier, and we thank them not only for their contributions, but also their attentiveness to the many details of revision.

INTRODUCTION

HOLLAND IN AMERICA Joyce D. Goodfriend, Benjamin Schmidt, Annette Stott

The Dutch presence in colonial America and the United States has been profound and extensive. Dating back at least to the original entrance of Henry Hudson (who sailed in 1609 for the Dutch East India Company) into the river that now bears his name, it includes the forty-year span of the colony of New Netherland (from 1624 to 1664, with a brief ‘restitution’ in 1673–1674) and its long-lived residues in New York and the Middle Atlantic states; it incorporates the waves of Dutch immigrants who arrived in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century through the post-World War II period; and it embraces a broad range of cultural, political, and economic engagements between the Netherlands and America over the course of four centuries. The story of the Dutch in America provides an ample and fascinating narrative that, despite its exceptional interest and signicance, has never been properly told. The present volume confronts this neglect. It brings together a multidisciplinary and far-reaching set of essays that seeks, in broad terms, to characterize the Dutch experience in America, while also determining its particular parameters, its causes and effects, and, most vitally, its wider implications for the history of the United States. Taken together, the contributions to this collection grapple with the place of the Dutch in American society and the role of the Dutch in American history and culture. Ultimately, this volume considers the history of Dutch-American identities by addressing a deceptively simple question: How have the Dutch fared in America? The simplicity of this question belies the daunting challenge of a singular, comprehensive answer that spans the many topics pertaining to the Dutch experience in America. It also places in stark relief the difculty of conceptualizing the diverse ways the Dutch have inserted themselves over the years into American society and culture, as well as the transformative and transitory nature of these interventions. Even the basic question of identity—who are ‘the Dutch’?—can be stubbornly complex and maddeningly elusive. Furthermore, as demonstrated in

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several of the contributions to this volume, it is a question that reveals the inuence of outsiders in dening the Dutch. The experience of the Dutch in America and the quality of ‘Dutchness’ as developed in America reect an ongoing process of negotiation, which incorporates, not least, the commentary of others on the Dutch presence in America. Even before the colony of New Netherland was taken over by the English in the late seventeenth century, Dutch people and Dutch culture had been the subject of wide-ranging ruminations by other Americans, especially British colonists, who found their Dutch neighbors, by turns, admirable and incomprehensible. From the onset of British rule, matters Dutch persistently mattered, yet increasingly, it seems, in negative ways. Forced to forfeit their independence to the English Crown, Dutch Americans frequently found themselves disparaged and dismissed as irrelevant, their temperament caricatured, and even their building styles derided. This would have a lasting effect. For it is a truism of historiography that the winners get to write the history books; and, despite a heightened consciousness of their own Dutchness (discernible already in eighteenth-century documents) and their own attempts to preserve their stories, Dutch Americans have long had to cede the historical narrative to the English-speaking victors in a nation that has traditionally underscored its ties to Great Britain. New Englanders were largely responsible for the foundational omission of Dutch Americans from the master narrative of United States history. No matter how frequently descendants of New Netherlanders fulminated against the New England-dominated version of the country’s origins, they remained relatively impotent in establishing the proper place of the Dutch in American history. The erasure of Dutch Americans—a process of cultural and social obscuring that may be likened, in Judith Richardson’s poetic turn of phrase, to a ‘ghosting’—continued into the early nineteenth century. By this time, Dutch Americans were fair game in a culture conditioned to consider them inferior. Writing under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, Anglo-New York author Washington Irving invented a cast of bumbling Dutch-American characters for his famous History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, and crowned this success with such memorable Hudson Valley gures as the indolent Rip Van Winkle. American illustrators further disseminated antiDutch sentiments through their popular depictions of Dutch-American ‘Knickerbockers’. And yet the derision, neglect, and erasure of the Dutch represent only one side of the story.

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Eighteenth-century America also produced admirers of the Dutch in the form of revolutionary-period statesmen. These included such famous Hollandophiles as John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, who looked to Dutch models and Dutch ideals when it came time to design early American institutions. Indeed, it might be said that the Founding Fathers were the rst to ‘nd’ the Dutch, but they found them in the sophisticated courts and urbane cities of Holland, not the sleepy valleys surrounding the Hudson River. It was, in truth, the (old) Netherlands Dutch, not the New Netherland Dutch or Dutch Americans, whom Adams and Franklin admired. They hoped that the Netherlands would support the descendants of its former colony in North America as the colonists-turned-revolutionaries attempted to throw off the yoke of Holland’s old rival, England. Ironically, the New England historian John Lothrop Motley followed Adams’s and Franklin’s lead when he wrote his famous histories of the Dutch Republic. He, too, perceived the old Netherlands Dutch as venerable, laudable, and even heroic, and he imagined that they possessed several qualities widely considered by Americans themselves to be inherently ‘American’. At the very moment when editions of Irving’s tales and portfolios of Knickerbocker images were disseminating a comic anti-Dutch-American perspective, Motley reinforced positive attitudes toward the Netherlands Dutch, especially those of the seventeenth century.1 By the late nineteenth century, this bifurcation in American opinion between the heroic Dutch of the Motherland and the risible Dutch of New Netherland had resolved itself into a generally high regard for both the Netherlands Dutch and for Dutch Americans. The Dutch rose in esteem as American opinion-makers of the nineteenth century praised the political institutions of the Netherlands, the perceived character of the hard-working and commercially inclined Dutch people, and the putatively ‘democratic’ values of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. By the turn of the twentieth century, some historians and genealogical societies were laboring to rehabilitate the Dutch colonists and incorporate them into written histories of the origins of the United States. Industrial magnates avidly collected Old Dutch Masters, while the American middle classes displayed a taste for Dutch colonial

1 See, above all, John Lothrop Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic: A History, 3 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856), and History of the United Netherlands, 4 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1860–1867).

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revival architecture and Dutch-inspired interiors. Indeed, for a brief moment in the ultranationalistic (and harshly xenophobic) climate of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Catholic and Jewish immigrants from southern and eastern Europe poured into the United States, the overwhelmingly Protestant Dutch Americans were elevated into the pantheon of the truest Americans. Meanwhile, because of its roots in a distant yet enviable colonial past and its modern status as a commercial center, New York and its citizens—Dutch and non-Dutch alike—reclaimed the city’s now attractive Dutch heritage. The second wave of Dutch immigrants who settled the Midwest in the latter half of the nineteenth century, although in some ways disassociated from their colonial Dutch cousins, shared their northern European heritage, and they, too, beneted from their ‘whiteness’. They blended into the great American heartland by calling no special attention to themselves, all the while establishing their churches, farms, and communities in ways that contributed to America’s prevailing view of itself. In the post-World War II period, as new immigrants and new cultural forms from the Netherlands arrived in the United States, the Netherlands Dutch began once more to dominate the unfolding story of the Dutch in America. Even as descendants of the nineteenth-century immigrants enshrined their Dutchness in annual festivals and habits that harked back to much earlier icons of Dutch identity—windmills, tulips, kermis, overt demonstrations of cleanliness—new forms of Dutchness arrived. Dutch artists and architects ranging from Piet Mondrian to Rem Koolhaas, Dutch academics such as the sociologist Fred Polak, and a succession of Dutch designers all imported modern Dutch ideas and forms into the United States. Postwar Americans also admired and even celebrated recent displays of Dutch independence and courage, such as the widely popular story of Anne Frank. Yet it was not until the nal decades of the twentieth century that historians began seriously to research and rethink the history of the Dutch in colonial and nineteenth-century America, once again bringing Dutch Americans into the story of the Dutch in America. In this most recent historiographic moment, scholars have sought to earn for all categories of ‘the Dutch’ admittance into the master narratives of American social, political, and cultural history. This brief overview—and this volume’s rich spread of essays—may serve to remind us, of course, that there are several versions of Dutchness in America (a problem tackled in Willem Frijhoff ’s concluding essay). In our consideration of the reputation and contributions of the Dutch in America, we have set our sights broadly in order to take in

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several variants of things Dutch: Dutch women and men in colonial North America and their Dutch-American descendants; Dutch immigrants of subsequent centuries and their Dutch-American descendants; Americans sojourning in the Netherlands and adopting Dutch forms; the continuous stream of Dutch ideas and Dutch material culture entering the United States; and the inuence of all of these upon other (non-Dutch) Americans, who inected Dutch ideas and cultural habits in their own manner. This volume offers a series of investigations into a fascinating, four-century-long process of cultural give-and-take, in the hope of attaining a fuller understanding of Dutchness in America.

Looking Backward: Historiographic Matters While the enduring history of the Dutch in America offers a lengthy and consistently interesting narrative, the historiography pertaining to the topic provides far less material and concentrates on fewer storylines. The modern historiography of the Dutch-American experience began in earnest only in the mid-1970s and has tended to follow several separate, if never quite intersecting, streams of inquiry. Each of these scholarly streams has pushed into new territory, yet without ever really converging with the others to formulate a comprehensive argument. One major area of inquiry is directed toward New Netherland and the subsequent history of the Dutch in eighteenth-century British New York and New Jersey, while another branch investigates the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigration from the Dutch countryside to Michigan, Iowa, and other midwestern states. A third area of investigation considers the reception of Dutch and Dutch-American culture in colonial America and the United States, and spans the entire period of study. Yet there have been few attempts to relate cultural affairs to patterns of settlement and migration. Specialists have generally concentrated on one or another of these topics with little concern to create a continuously owing narrative that encompasses the whole experience of the Dutch in America.2

2 The historiography of the Dutch in early America has been reviewed in two essays by Joyce D. Goodfriend: “The Historiography of the Dutch in Colonial America,” in Colonial Dutch Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Eric Nooter and Patricia U. Bonomi (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 6–32; and “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History,” New York History 80 (1999): 5–28.

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The initial thrust of research centered on New Netherland, detailing the colony’s origins in the Dutch West India Company, the vicissitudes of its brief history, and its legacy under English rule. This research has been partly recuperative. Committed to establishing the Dutch place among America’s founders, historians have documented the economy, government, diplomacy, and religion of New Netherland. They have also analyzed early relations between the Dutch and indigenous peoples, and they have chronicled the evolution of African slavery in the colony.3 Not unlike studies of the British colonies, however, the parochial nature of this scholarship has shifted as it has matured, and the narrow focus on New Netherland has lately yielded to a more expansive approach that considers the Dutch colony in the wider world. This has meant, above all, placing New Netherland in the context of the vast Atlantic: tracing the New World colony’s origins back to the Old World, examining developments in New Netherland in light of ‘old’ Netherlands politics, and considering the Dutch enterprise in the Americas together with colonial ventures in Africa and even Asia.4 Much of the current research on New Netherland declines to adhere to strict political, geographical, or even temporal boundaries; it takes for granted that the story of the Dutch in early America extends well beyond the inauguration of English rule of the region in 1664. By insisting that the impact of the Dutch can be fully appreciated only by investigating the experiences of Dutch settlers and their descendants in New York and New Jersey in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scholars

3 Alice P. Kenney, Stubborn for Liberty: The Dutch in New York (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1975); Oliver A. Rink, Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); George L. Smith, Religion and Trade in New Netherland: Dutch Origins and American Development (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973); Gerald F. De Jong, The Dutch Reformed Church in the American Colonies (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978); Allen W. Trelease, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960). 4 Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (New York: Doubleday, 2004); and Joyce D. Goodfriend, ed., Revisiting New Netherland: Perspectives on Early Dutch America (Leiden: Brill, 2005). On the ‘Atlanticist’ approach, see Pieter C. Emmer, The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580 –1880 (Ashgate: Aldershot, 1998); Wim Klooster, The Dutch in the Americas 1600 –1800 (Providence, RI: John Carter Brown Library, 1997); Jan de Vries, “The Dutch Atlantic Economies,” in The Atlantic Economy During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel, ed. Peter A. Coclanis (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 1–29; and Benjamin Schmidt, “The Dutch Atlantic: Provincialism and Globalism,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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have demonstrated the enduring imprint of Dutch social patterns and cultural values on American life.5 Scholars have also expanded their research in terms of sources used, topics pursued, and methods applied to the Dutch experience in America. They have had much success, for example, bringing the sophisticated techniques of cultural anthropology and archaeology to New Netherland in order to explicate the course of individual settler’s lives and Dutch interactions with native peoples.6 There are studies that analyze how and what the Dutch thought of their Native American neighbors—both from the conceptual perspective of the Old World and from the Dutch colonial perch in New Netherland.7 And specialists in visual and material culture have contributed studies of Dutch architectural forms, Dutch furniture design, old New York silver, Dutch-inspired portrait paintings in the Hudson Valley, and more. In fact, the period before the Revolutionary War represents the only chapter in American art history in which the Dutch presence has entered the mainstream. Most of the standard surveys of American art begin by examining the distinctive national art forms that colonists brought to America, including sections on New Netherland and its art and architecture.8 Architectural historians likewise explore in their surveys Dutch contributions to colonial American architecture, often with more depth and detail than in the literature on other art forms.9 Yet 5 Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Firth Haring Fabend, A Dutch Family in the Middle Colonies, 1660–1800 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Simon Middleton, From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 6 Willem Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz: Een Hollands Weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf, 1607–1647 (Nijmegen, 1995); and Donna Merwick, Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). Merwick has also offered rich studies of the colony’s interactions with its neighbors, both native and European: Possessing Albany, 1630 –1710: The Dutch and English Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 7 Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570– 1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Paul Otto, The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley (New York: Berghahn, 2006); and Merwick, Shame and the Sorrow. 8 See, for example, Wayne Craven, American Art, History, and Culture, rev. rst ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2003); and Frances Pohl, Framing America: A Social History of American Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002). 9 Hugh Morrison devoted a chapter of his Early American Architecture from the First Settlements to the National Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952) to Dutch and Flemish colonial styles, establishing a precedent that others have followed. There

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with all this attention to the Dutch in surveys of American art history, there is no comparable corpus of monographs specically focused on the period of Dutch-American colonial art. The rst effort to explore this eld as a whole and on its own merits—Roderic Blackburn and Ruth Piwonka’s collection of essays on Dutch art and material culture from the middle colonies—still stands alone.10 Individual articles have followed, to be sure, but one cannot turn to a more recent book for a comprehensive overview of colonial Dutch-American art. Consequently, the body of scholarly literature dealing with colonial Dutch art and architecture does not measure up to that of colonial Dutch political, economic, and social history in either depth or breadth. The second focus of scholarly research, after the colony of New Netherland and the Dutch legacy in the Middle Atlantic states, has been the mid nineteenth- and early twentieth-century migrations from the Netherlands to the United States, which brought Dutch settlers to the rural Midwest, mostly between 1840 and 1920. Research in this area, originally oriented toward local and especially religious history (chronicling the foundation and development of small Dutch communities and churches in midwestern states), has shifted since the 1970s, under the inuence of the so-called new social history. The key gure in this eld is Robert Swierenga, who, along with like-minded social historians, assembled massive databases from ship passenger lists and census records. These sources of data, in turn, have allowed historians to address critical issues pertaining to the study of immigrants and ethnic groups in the United States. Using a sociological lens, scholars have been able to illuminate the settlement patterns, work habits, political behavior, and religious activities of these later Dutch immigrants and their progeny.11 A complementary stream of research has

are also several focused studies covering all periods of Dutch-American architecture, including David Steven Cohen, The Dutch-American Farm (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Vincent Schaefer, Dutch Barns of New York: An Introduction (Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 1994); Kevin Stayton, Dutch by Design: Tradition and Change in Two Historic Brooklyn Houses (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1990); Harrison Meeske, The Hudson Valley Dutch and Their Houses (Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 2001); and Roderic H. Blackburn, Dutch Colonial Homes in America (New York: Rizzoli International, 2002). 10 Roderic H. Blackburn and Ruth Piwonka, eds., Remembrance of Patria: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America, 1609 –1776 (Albany, NY: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1988). 11 See, above all, Robert P. Swierenga, Faith and Family: Dutch Immigration and Settlement in the United States, 1820 –1920 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 2000).

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investigated these immigrants in primarily religious terms and has seen in their stories important chapters in the history of those Protestant denominations with which they identied: the Reformed Church and the Christian Reformed Church. Of late, historians of late nineteenthand twentieth-century Dutch America have recognized the limitations of a near-exclusive focus on rural Protestants and have broadened their research to include Catholic and Jewish immigrants, as well as those settled in urban areas such as Chicago.12 Suzanne Sinke’s work on Dutch immigrant women has further expanded the range of research, which now goes well beyond males in the public sphere.13 This second area of research, inherently rich and textured as it may be, does not attempt to make connections with parallel studies of New Netherland. Even as scholars of Dutch America have explored new avenues of investigation and responded to shifting emphases in historiography, their work has continued to run in separate channels. We lack a thorough study that bridges the two Dutch Americas, as it were. There are signs pointing in this direction, however. The story of the New Netherland Dutch has been pushed forward into the nineteenth century in Firth Fabend’s study of religious practices and ethnic identity in Dutch New York and New Jersey, but only Reformed Church histories have made substantial links to the history of the later Dutch immigrants.14 On the other side of the temporal divide, the saga of the Midwest Dutch communities has been pushed back to the early national period and supplemented by coverage of the spurt of post–World War II immigration from the Netherlands to the United

12 Robert P. Swierenga, The Forerunners: Dutch Jewry in the North American Diaspora (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994); Robert P. Swierenga, Dutch Chicago: A History of Hollanders in the Windy City (Grand Rapids, MI: Van Raalte Institute and Eerdmans, 2002); Robert P. Swierenga, Donald Sinnema, and Hans Krabbendam, eds., The Dutch in Urban America (Holland, MI: Joint Archives of Holland and Hope College, 2004). 13 Suzanne M. Sinke, Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). Information on the lives of Dutch immigrant women can also be gleaned from the correspondence contained in Herbert J. Brinks, ed., Dutch American Voices: Letters from the United States 1850–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 14 Firth Fabend, Zion on the Hudson: Dutch New York and New Jersey in the Age of Revivals (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). See also Bertus Henry Wabeke, Dutch Emigration to North America 1624 –1860 (New York: Netherlands Information Bureau, 1944).

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States.15 Nonetheless, outside of the domain of ecclesiastical history, little has been written on the interactions between new immigrants and old, between the descendants of New Netherland and the later migrants from the ‘old’ Netherlands.16 More broadly, little has been done to marry the social and demographic approaches of the work on the later Dutch-American period with the political and cultural explorations of the earlier New Netherland moment of the story. Thus are we left with a bifurcated scholarship, divided not only temporally but spatially as well, and engaged in by two discrete sets of experts. One group of historians focuses on the mid-Atlantic region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while the other trains its sights on the Midwest from the mid nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The very few exceptions to this rule of historiographic disjunction are revealing for both their timing and impetus. Two scholarly moments and contributions stand out for the way they instigated and reected efforts to compose a continuous history of Dutch Americans. The rst came from outside the community of scholars associated with research on the Dutch in America. In the wake of World War II, with Americans in the mood to celebrate the virtues of their democratic society, a now obscure novelist, Arnold Mulder, contributed a volume to the Peoples of America series that highlighted the accomplishments of Dutch Americans from both eras of migration. Some twenty years later, with the burgeoning of ethnic history in the 1970s, publishers hastened to commission authoritative histories of various American ethnic groups. It was in this context that the only full-length, scholarly study of the Dutch experience in America appeared, authored by Gerald de Jong, which was soon followed (in the 1980s and 1990s) by brief, synthetic accounts of Dutch-American history, commissioned for major reference works. In a certain sense, publishing demands stimulated this scholarly integration.17

15 Henry Lucas, Netherlanders in America: Dutch Immigration to the United States and Canada, 1789 –1950 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1955). 16 Exceptions are Kenney, Stubborn for Liberty, and Gerald F. De Jong, “Dutch Immigrants to New Jersey Before World War I,” New Jersey History 94 (1976): 69–88. 17 Arnold Mulder, Americans From Holland (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1947); and Gerald F. De Jong, The Dutch in America 1609 –1974 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975). See also Robert P. Swierenga, “Dutch,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980); and Herbert J. Brinks, “Dutch,” in Encyclopedia of American Social History, ed. Mary K. Cayton, Elliott J. Gorn, Peter Williams (New York: Scribner’s, 1993).

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When we turn from these mostly social and political perspectives to cultural and visual ones, we nd that art historians, too, have focused on two periods in Dutch-American history: the colonial and the second half of the nineteenth century. They have not, however, done so as exclusively as other historians, nor have they made the same geographic associations. To begin with, art historians have barely considered the visual culture of the midwestern communities established by Dutch immigrants during the nineteenth century, remaining focused instead on national art forms. Unlike the tight, if split, perspective of the social, economic, and religious studies of the Dutch-American experience, art historical scholarship has produced a haphazard collection of studies and references to Dutch inuences in American art that cover the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century. Thus, the two primary histories of American marine painting each include a discussion of the Dutch seventeenth-century genre and its impact on the development of American seascapes as just one of several inuences they consider.18 Likewise, specialists in American landscape painting have noted in passing that landscapes produced in seventeenth-century Holland inuenced the Hudson River School artists of the early nineteenth century, yet without fully exploring the signicance of that connection. The relationships between the Dutch seventeenth-century still-life tradition and American still-life painting are also generally acknowledged—especially with regard to the Baltimore Peales, the German immigrant Severin Roesen, and the trompe-l’oeil master William Harnett, each of whom drew upon a different Netherlandish tradition—but, again, without sustained study. Other scholars have focused on individual artists whose work plainly reveals Dutch inspiration, such as the American genre painter Francis William Edmonds.19 Collectively, however, the art historical recognition of Dutch-American artistic relationships occurs in the form of scattered references to ill-dened inuences and afnities of the past. This scholarship remains in its infancy, more a topic of passing interest than sustained analysis. The one area where scholars of Dutch-American visual culture have begun to develop a solid body of historical literature involves two distinct, yet in certain ways overlapping, phenomena, both of 18 Roger B. Stein, Seascape and the American Imagination (New York: C. N. Potter, 1975); John Wilmerding, American Marine Painting (New York: Abrams, 1987). 19 H. Nichols B. Clark, Francis W. Edmonds: American Master in the Dutch Tradition (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988).

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which occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the accumulation and exhibition by American collectors of Old Master paintings from the Netherlands, and the expatriate movement among American artists, which encompassed notable colonies in Holland. Art exhibitions and their scholarly catalogs have played a key role in developing the historiography of these two subjects. The rst area of study—the collection, exhibition, and analysis of Netherlandish painting, sculpture, and graphic work in the United States—took root with the publication of Peter Sutton’s guide to Dutch art in American collections. Soon after, a blockbuster exhibition of Dutch paintings housed in American museums, and its massive catalog, greatly expanded this line of inquiry.20 One of the contributors to the catalog, Walter Liedke, has elaborated on the subject in an important follow-up essay, which notes that American scholars of the twentieth century have played a disproportionate role in the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Netherlandish art, especially painting. He traces the impetus for this later American interest to the great nineteenth-century collectors, whose new wealth and afnity for Golden Age art led to the formation of the core collections of Dutch art in the United States. Many of these collections are unsurpassed outside of the Netherlands.21 We note in passing that the reverse—American art in Dutch collections—has received virtually no attention, and, by contrast, there is very little of it.22 Research on the other phenomenon—turn-of-the-century art created by American artists residing abroad—gained momentum following a 1976 exhibition on American expatriate painters of the late nineteenth century, which brought attention to three nearly forgotten American artists who worked in the Netherlands: Gari Melchers, George Hitchcock, and Walter MacEwen.23 This exhibition also paved the way for a surge in the 1980s and 1990s of innovative work on American

20 Peter C. Sutton, A Guide to Dutch Art in America (Washington, DC: NetherlandsAmerican Amity Trust and Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986); Ben Broos, Great Dutch Paintings from America (The Hague: Mauritshuis and Zwolle: Waanders, 1990). See also Ronni Baer, The Poetry of Everyday Life: Dutch Painting in Boston (Boston: MFA Publications, 2002). 21 Walter Liedtke, “The Study of Dutch Art in America,” Artibus et Historiae 21 (2000): 207–220. 22 One small exhibition considered American art in Belgian collections: Jennifer Martin Bienenstock, The Forgotten Episode: Nineteenth Century American Art in Belgian Public Collections (Brussels: American Cultural Center, 1987). 23 Michael Quick, American Expatriate Painters of the Late Nineteenth Century (Dayton, OH: Dayton Art Institute, 1976).

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artists abroad, albeit focused on expatriates in France, Germany, and Italy. Meanwhile, awareness of American artists in the Netherlands developed more slowly, achieving its broadest expression to date only in a dissertation.24 Ironically, all these studies suggest that expatriate American artists sought to create a national form of painting. Insofar as they wanted to compete on an equal footing with long-established European art traditions, however, they looked across the Atlantic for their inspiration. Given this context, it is not surprising to nd that turn-of-the-century Americans who painted the Dutch scene took equal delight in creating history paintings of the earlier Dutch colony in America and in producing travel views of the Netherlands of their own day. American expatriate artists, in short, explored a broad range of Dutchness and Dutch-Americanness.25 Was there a connection between these two phenomena, namely the collection of Dutch art by Americans and the production of Dutchinspired art by American expatriates in the Netherlands? This is one of the arguments proposed in Annette Stott’s book-length study of ‘Holland mania’, which seeks to bring together both sides of this story and which also addresses several of the larger themes of the DutchAmerican experience: Dutch culture in America, Americans in the Netherlands, growing nostalgia for older forms of Dutchness, and, most generally, the various ways the Netherlands inuenced American visual forms and ideas at the turn of the twentieth century.26 Stott points out that the appeal of the Old Dutch Masters, to a large degree, encouraged American artists to visit the Netherlands, where they created their own vision of a country that they considered frozen in time. American

24 Annette Stott, “American Painters Who Worked in the Netherlands, 1880–1913” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1986). 25 Note that while American scholars often place the experience of expatriate artists in the context of other American art, the Dutch literature puts it in the international context that existed in several of the colonies. See, for example, Hans Kraan, Dromen van Holland: Buitenlandse Kunstenaars Schilderen Holland, 1800–1914 (Zwolle: Waanders, 2002); Saskia de Bodt, Schildersdorpen in Nederland (Warnsveldt: Terra, 2004); Dromen van Dordrecht: Buitenlandse Kunstenaars Schilderen Dordrecht, 1850–1920 (Bussum: Thoth, 2005); B. W. E. Veurman, Volendammer Schildersboek (The Hague: Krusemans, 1979); Gusta Reichwein, Vreemde Gasten: Kunstschilders in Volendam, 1880–1914 (Enkhuisen: Zuiderzeemuseum, 1986); Dietrich Bieber, Katwijk in de Schilderkunst (Katwijk: Genootschap “Oud Katwijk,” 1995). The most recent book-length study of an American expatriate in the Netherlands is Alexandra Gaba-Van Dongen, Dromen van Rijsoord: Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley, 1860–1958 (Bussum: Thoth, 2005). 26 Annette Stott, Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1998).

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artists romanticized Holland, imagining that this small, yet inuential, nation shared many of their own democratic, republican, agrarian and Protestant values. Their vision of the Netherlands—conveyed in the form of paintings, prints, photographs, and published travelogues, which returned with them to the United States—meshed with that of the wealthy collectors of seventeenth-century artworks being assembled in American museums. Both bodies of art—the imported Dutch and the American-made—helped to inspire a broad range of visual forms produced in America, from popular dress and interior decoration to magazine illustration and domestic architecture. These forms reected a fascination with Dutch culture, and they ushered in modern American notions of Dutchness. For all its transdisciplinary breadth, however, Stott’s book remains narrowly focused on a single moment, the turn of the twentieth century. It views earlier Dutch inuences in America, including colonial New Netherland, through the eyes of that later time period. Nevertheless, it may provide a model of interdisciplinary research for other moments in American history that beg for further and sustained analysis. In contrast to work done in history and art history, three disciplinary areas remain grossly understudied with regard to Dutch inuences in America: literature, music, and theater. Of these, perhaps relatively more attention has been paid to literature, although literary scholars have taken a highly selective approach toward their subject. While literary studies may briey discuss several pertinent, if disparate, themes—Dutch-American texts in early American literature, Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker characters, Edith Wharton’s use of Dutch names to connote old New York aristocracy, Mary Mapes Dodge’s best-selling tale of Hans Brinker, ethnic Dutch-American novelists, travel literature related to Holland—no single work has pulled these scattered investigations into a single, authoritative narrative of the Dutch inuence in American letters.27 Unlike the art historical literature,

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See, for example, Ada van Gastel’s essay, “Ethnic Pluralism in Early American Literature: Incorporating Dutch-American Texts into the Canon,” in Early American Literature and Culture: Essays Honoring Harrison T. Meserole, ed. Kathryn Zabelle DerounianStodola (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1992); and the chapter on “Four Renegade Novelists” in James D. Bratt, Dutch Calvinism In Modern America: A History Of A Conservative Subculture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), 159–183, 284–290. An early attempt to survey literary sources focused almost exclusively on Washington Irving, with mere mentions of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville, and devoted fully half of its space to illustrations rather than texts. See Ann C. Woods, “Dutch Inuences in Nineteenth Century American Literature,” in The Dutch and

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which also lacks a comprehensive narrative, not even discrete periods or genres have received concentrated and exclusive attention. Even fewer musicologists, moreover, have taken a sustained interest in the important connections between the Netherlands and America. A 1980 symposium at the University of California in Los Angeles resulted in a collection of short essays, two of which focused on music and musical instruments in New Netherland.28 Yet, apart from these and a few other scattered and similarly brief forays into colonial Dutch-American music, the eld remains unexplored. (The single exception may be the history of the carillon in America.)29 Dutch-American theater we must pass over entirely, raising the topic here only to point out the need for any work in this area. There is, indeed, much fertile ground for the scholar interested in Dutch-inuenced theatrical, musical, and literary culture in America. In addition to these and many other gaps in the story of the Dutch in America, we also lack a conceptual framework that treats the subject in terms of the whole rather than the parts. Dutch-American studies remain subdivided into discrete categories that are generally demarcated by chronology, geography, or disciplinary perspective. Surmounting this compartmentalization will require scholars to transcend disciplinary and temporal boundaries. Rather than simply deepen the inquiry into New Netherland, for example, or intensify the extant studies of Dutch immigration or New World Calvinism, scholars must also embrace a broader perspective centered on the American cultural landscape and its evolution across time and space. A variety of cultural approaches might provide such a perspective. For example, questions of whiteness and privilege bridge both the temporal and geographic foci of current historical scholarship. Questions of ethnic identity formation and reconguration combine visual and literary investigations with political, economic, and religious matters. The full realization of such frameworks may still lie in the future, but we must move steadily forward in this direction.30

America, eds. Maurice Bloch and Robert L. Tusler (Los Angeles: UCLA Publication Services, 1982), 61–68. 28 Thomas Neenan, “Music in New Netherland: The First Century,” and Jonathan Paul Couchman, “Musical Instruments in New Netherland,” in Dutch and America, 45–50 and 51–54. 29 See, for example, Karel and Linda Keldermans, Carillon: The Evolution of a Concert Instrument in North America (Springeld, IL: Springeld Park District, 1996). 30 A compilation of approximately eighty essays by Dutch and American authorities on Dutch-American relations is currently underway under the auspices of the Roosevelt

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joyce d. goodfriend, benjamin schmidt, annette stott Looking Forward: Current Research

The essays in this volume address some of the key moments in the larger narrative of America’s evolving conception of, and interaction with, Dutchness. Taken together, they begin to breach some of the barriers—chronological, geographical, disciplinary—that have stood in the way of a more integrated brand of Dutch-American studies, bringing into conversation scholars from different specialties and time periods, from the Netherlands and the United States. The present volume groups essays together under thematic rubrics that emphasize the cultural core of the Dutch-American identity. It does not attempt to chronicle the entire history of the Dutch in America, but it does provide snapshots of outstanding, recent scholarship, which we hope will clear the way for the development of just such a chronicle. Several recurring themes run through the volume. The history of the Dutch people in the United States is one. American perspectives on the Netherlands, Dutchness, and the qualities of Dutch-Americans is another. Both of these themes explore Dutch inuences in the United States; combined, they highlight the varieties of Dutch and DutchAmerican identities. They also point to the very difculty of dening Dutchness in an immigrant society that has become increasingly cosmopolitan and global over time. Other themes that emerge suggest several other important Dutch-American dialectics: the American erasure of Dutchness and the persistence of forms and qualities of Dutchness; the derision of things Dutch-American, followed by (or even simultaneous with) the admiration of things Dutch (or things perceived to be more acceptably Dutch); the assimilation of Dutch ideas, styles, and ethnicity into American society, along with the emergence of ‘stubborn’ Dutch forms and identities that differentiate American Dutchness. While the individual essays in this volume range broadly over time, recording crucial shifts over extensive periods, they also follow a chronological logic. They begin in the colonial period (Part I); continue with the formative moments of the Early Republic and Civil War era (Part II); pick up new questions and fresh Dutch immigrants in the mid-to-late nineteenth and

Study Center in Middleburg, the Netherlands. Planned for release in 2009, it may ll some of the gaps in the current literature and provide another foundation from which to launch the kind of integrated history that we envision.

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early twentieth centuries (Part III); consider the highpoints of American ‘Holland mania’ in the Gilded Age and early twentieth century (Part IV); and take the story right into the twenty-rst century, when one of the most famous Dutchmen since Rembrandt, Rem Koolhaas, lands in America. The volume concludes with a meditation on the rich and elusive nature of ‘Dutchness’. The opening pair of chapters (Part I) considers Dutch cultural inuences in colonial America. Both relate stories of erasure: the effacement of the not insignicant role played by Dutch painters in the early history of colonial art, and the eradication (in this case, quite literally) of Dutch architectural forms during the high period of Dutch ‘ridicule’, from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Louisa Wood Ruby’s essay explores one of the earliest ‘schools’ of American art, the Hudson Valley patroon painters, who produced portraits of colonial New Yorkers in a style that has long and reexively been taken to be ‘English’. Not so: not only is this stylistic attribution false, as Ruby amply demonstrates, it also disguises the vital role of Dutch portrait traditions in the making of American art. By recuperating the part of the Dutch in the history of American portraiture—and in other genres that likewise were inuenced by the prevailing Netherlandish modes of seventeenth-century art—Ruby also makes a critical point about American style in this period. For the English patrons of this portraiture, well aware as they were of seventeenth-century artistic traditions, knew they were getting a ‘Dutch’ style and thus expressly embraced Dutch cultural forms. And to later collectors of around 1900, who greatly favored these paintings (Ruby notes that turn-of-the-century Americans valued colonial portraiture highly), they also represented a Dutch set of values and, implicitly, a Dutch lineage, which by this time seemed well worth embracing. The English visitors who commented on the buildings they observed in the late eighteenth-century Hudson Valley certainly did not embrace the Dutchness of their style. In the many travel journals, printed accounts, and casually jotted-down observations discussed in Joseph Manca’s sweeping essay, there is a distinct air of erasure; witnesses of Dutch architecture would just as well do away with it. The Dutch structures scrutinized in this period (roughly 1750 to 1850) appeared to outsiders (namely, the English) as ‘Gothic’ and ‘Frankish’. The Dutch inhabitants of these old buildings were thought to have failed to embrace ‘modern’ methods of building—and, by extension, of

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living—and for this they were roundly decried. Manca’s essay reveals the acute hostility toward Dutch architectural forms at this high moment of anti-Dutch-Americanism, when the original settlers of the Hudson Valley came to be viewed by their English neighbors as benighted and backward. Yet Manca’s essay, in a certain sense, also illustrates the persistence of Dutch forms: Dutch buildings and Dutch architectural styles lasted, after all, long enough into the nineteenth century to merit such enduring mockery. Manca’s study also underscores how much we have lost to this period of acute ‘erasure’. In some cases, the fault lies with the Dutch Americans themselves, who self-consciously turned their backs on the ‘ancient’ styles of the pre-British period, showing their own unease and their preference for the cool lines of Georgian classicism. Manca’s essay, which strikes an almost wistful chord, refreshes our knowledge of these Dutch colonial structures while also demonstrating, incidentally, the shift in tastes and values that has led in recent years to several successful projects of restoration. The essays in Part II press ahead into the nineteenth century and consider the great ‘Dutch’ literature of Washington Irving and the epic Dutch history of John Lothrop Motley. During the period covered in this section—from around 1820 to the nal decades of the century—the Dutch are ‘rediscovered’ in American letters, for better or worse. For better, in that Irving’s Knickerbocker tales had the virtue, at least, of bringing the ethnic Dutch settlers of New Netherland back on to the stage of American culture and that in the prose of Motley the Dutch even played the part of heroes. For worse, however, in that Irving’s tropes of torpid and incurious Dutchmen established stereotypes of great durability, and insofar as Motley’s Dutch protagonists came from the ‘old’ Netherlands rather than the ‘new’. Judith Richardson’s essay complicates the concept of erasure by reminding us that dispossession is never quite permanent: it can often lead to a recuperation, something she likens to a ‘ghosting’, or haunting, whereby the displaced reinserts itself into cultural memory. In her sensitive reading of Irving’s New York stories and of several other authors of nineteenth-century New York, Richardson shows how the Hudson Valley served as one of the seminal sites of American hauntedness, and how this, in turn, placed the Dutch and their literary ghosts at the very foundations of American cultural memory. The ghosts of New Netherland (Native American no less than Dutch) reect the sense of alienness and obscurity that had become attached to regional Dutch history during later periods of Anglo-American settlement. Hauntings

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returned the Dutch to the region, albeit in spectral forms. This form of cultural persistence, ultimately, was a mixed blessing for Dutch Americans. Irving’s tales privileged the Dutch as somehow aboriginal to the region, and thus at the core of American historical memory. At the same time, however, it relegated them to a lost past and left them vulnerable, as Richardson points out, “to a series of ulterior appropriations”. They became the Dutch of poetic memory rather than the living descendants of the early Dutch-American settlers. This sleight of hand, which simultaneously focuses attention on the Dutch only to underscore their absence, is carried out in another form in the writings of John Lothrop Motley, the subject of Mark Peterson’s essay. A well-traveled Boston Brahmin, Motley was among the leading historians of mid nineteenth-century America and author of a series of renowned, multivolume histories of the Dutch Republic. He did as much as anyone to elevate the status of the Dutch in America. Yet Motley and his Dutch actors, who perform so valiantly on the stage of world history, execute a double act of cultural and social effacement. First, by so grandly narrating the history of the Dutch Republic—and doing so in publications that reached a diverse and inuential audience—Motley replaced the Dutch American, barely a footnote in the history of America, with the Dutch of the Netherlands, the instigator of a great Protestant commercial republic. Second, by afliating Dutch history with the Boston intelligentsia—the intellectual guardians of the ‘Hub of the Solar System’—he also removed the Dutch from their historical stomping ground in New York. In fact, Motley’s historical writings, as Peterson illustrates, served an important purpose in a larger project of nation building and identity formation, as they appeared at a critical juncture in United States history: the cusp of the Civil War. At this delicate moment for the young American republic, the model of the ‘United’ Provinces (as the Dutch Republic had been known) supported a Federalist position (favored by Motley), in a hopeful and republican vein. Motley’s project looked beyond the Netherlands, too, by enlisting its history, as Peterson demonstrates, to enhance the reputation of the city of Boston, which saw itself by now as the New World heir of the once-mighty maritime state of Holland. Part III contains three essays on migration and assimilation that shift the focus to Dutch immigrants in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Hans Krabbendam’s broad-ranging chapter argues that the relatively small number of Dutch immigrants who were concentrated in carefully selected settlement areas in the Midwest effectively used

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church and family ties to build and maintain a durable Dutch-American subculture. Krabbendam details how the concerted action of a group of Dutch religious dissenters motivated community development and solidarity. Their efcient use of older colonial networks and of circumstances in the Netherlands allowed these immigrants to make a stable transition in the United States. Aided by various modes of internal and external communication, the Dutch in America retained their cohesion for over a century. Robert Schoone-Jongen takes a more case-specic approach in his essay on Dutch settlements in Minnesota from 1885 to 1928. SchooneJongen argues that the Dutch Americans who settled on the Great Plains during the late nineteenth century planted a particular form of Dutchness in the region. To most of these settlers, genuine Dutchness lay in two traditions: Calvinist orthodoxy and agrarian community. The Reformed churches organized in places such as Minnesota passed their particular faith, as dened by the Synod of Dordrecht of 1618–1619, to the next generation, while the farms of these communities, as developed by the settlers, linked generations of fathers and sons through inheritance. The combination of farmable property and viable churches determined the durability of each settlement’s sense of its ‘Dutch’ character. Julie Hochstrasser’s essay takes another approach to the persistence of Dutch culture in America. She investigates the role played by visual culture in preserving a Dutch heritage in two Iowa towns with strong immigrant populations: Pella and Orange City. The windmills, tulips, and wooden shoes celebrated in such diverse visual aspects as their preserved and reconstructed architecture, their annual tulip festivals, and even their civic websites, all date from the ‘cultural moment’ of their arrival in the mid-nineteenth century. The evolution of the tulip festivals, and even the scholarly analysis of their stereotypical imagery, amply demonstrates the centrality of shared vision as a crucial mechanism in these communities for the preservation of the social memory of the Netherlands. In Part IV, a closely related pair of essays by Nancy Minty and Dennis Weller explores the collection and display of Old Dutch Masters at the turn of the twentieth century. Both authors recognize that the United States led the world at this time in collecting Dutch paintings, to a large degree due to the accumulation of great wealth by a relatively small number of industrialists. This is a subject that has received a fair amount of scholarly attention. Nevertheless, Minty is the rst to

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place this activity in the context of the American Gilded Age, focusing on that era’s urge to polish its industrial and acquisitive tarnish. She interrogates the motivations of collectors from J. P. Morgan to Andrew W. Mellon, arguing that they and their dealers, like others of their era, understood the subject matter and style of seventeenth-century Dutch painting to be morally ‘honest’, unremittingly democratic, and of the highest artistic value. Collecting and presenting this art to the American public in exhibitions not only demonstrated their cultural sophistication and counterbalanced the suspicion of bourgeois naïveté that always clung to the nouveaux riches, but also offset some of the negative reputation they had acquired through their ruthless repression of labor disputes, monopolistic pursuits, and unethical—if not unlawful—manipulation of markets and nances. Indeed, the art of the Dutch Golden Age redeemed the American Gilded Era, as Minty cleverly puts it in the title of her essay. Industrialists hoped that donating their laundered booty (as it were) to the nation in the form of Dutch paintings would help redeem themselves. And, by extension, paintings that became the core of prominent American collections might be understood as attempts to cleanse and brighten the sullied underside of the Gilded Era. Even these terms—‘gilded’ and ‘golden’—suggest an American view of American society as somewhat crass in relation to the solid value of an older Dutch culture. Dennis Weller examines one particular exhibition to which these collecting magnates lent their Dutch masterpieces, the Hudson-Fulton Exhibition of 1909. Organized by famed connoisseur and shaper of American taste Rudolf Valentiner, the exhibition’s larger purpose embraced, rst, a commemoration of Henry Hudson’s discovery of the river named for him on an 1609 expedition nanced by the Dutch and, second, a celebration of Robert Fulton’s design of the rst steamboat to navigate the Hudson River (launched in 1807). The exhibition provided the rst major public display of Dutch painting in America and, as such, provides a starting point for understanding American attitudes toward this art. Weller analyzes the subjects and styles of the paintings included in the show, suggesting reasons for their relatively limited range. He looks closely at the exhibition and its multiple catalogs as an expression of contemporaneous American attitudes toward Dutch art, especially those of the curator; and he examines the impact of this event on future exhibitions of Dutch seventeenth-century art in America, up to the present time. Both Minty and Weller deal with the wealth of misattributions that complicates any study of American

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collecting and Dutch art, with Weller focusing more particularly on the state of connoisseurship in the twentieth century. Weller also provides a useful chart of the present locations of the Hudson-Fulton paintings, so far as can be discovered. While Minty and Weller treat a unied era of singular American regard for one period of Dutch art, the next two chapters, in Part V, look at the disparate inuences of two distinct Dutchmen who managed to inspire late twentieth-century American life—albeit in different ways. Tity de Vries analyzes the impact of the Dutch economist and sociologist Fred Polak on the development of a new branch of postwar academic inquiry, the eld of future studies. Inspirational to North American thinkers such as Alvin Tofer, author of Future Shock, and the Canadian media critic Marshall McLuhan—both of whom ultimately became far better known in the United States than Polak himself—Fred Polak nevertheless deserves credit for his early motivational role in this developing eld. De Vries charts Polak’s success in the United States, despite a very short residence there, and accounts for the distinctions between Dutch and American scholarly practices and philosophies. She shows, inter alia, the continuing attraction of the United States to Dutch immigrants, in this case in the postwar period. Christopher Pierce brings this volume right up to the present in an essay on the Rotterdam-born architect Rem Koolhaas and the work of his Ofce for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Pierce uses Koolhaas’s American oeuvre—literary as well as architectural—to reect on how Americans look at the American city and its buildings. He situates Koolhaas’s work and his recent success in the United States in the context of American urbanism and thought, arguing that the Dutchborn architect inverts important aspects of American culture to design excellent buildings. Pierce points out that, while American architects are often sidelined by their moral preoccupations, in Koolhaas the intelligentsia has found an unlikely antihero who talks ‘American’ better than the natives. Koolhaas has recently received considerable attention in the American press, and only time will tell what impact he will have in the United States. Yet his case nicely demonstrates an element of cultural exchange that is touched upon in several essays in this volume, namely the ready reception in America of a variety of Dutch visual forms. This, of course, is a much broader and hardly Dutch-specic story. Yet Pierce’s essay succeeds in showing how modern and postmodern Dutch sensibilities have easily interchanged with American culture, and often with stunning effects.

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In this volume’s concluding essay, Willem Frijhoff considers, very broadly, the concept of ‘Dutchness’ and its multifaceted richness. This entails a survey of several intersecting perceptions of Dutchness: those of the inhabitants of the Netherlands, those of outsiders describing them, and those of people of Dutch descent who have settled in the United States. These three forms of perception have subsequently interacted with other ethnic images in American history and among themselves, creating shifting references to ‘Dutch’ identity. The concept of Dutchness, Frijhoff reveals, is a slippery prey. It comprises not only the way Dutch people behave and see themselves, but also the way others have constructed Dutch identities. This second form of cultural vision, embedded and contextualized in the experience of the non-Dutch, clearly changes over time. It entails, moreover, not only bona de experiences, but also narratives about the Dutch that are expressly ctional. In an immigrant country like the United States, Frijhoff proposes, things can become still more complex. The experiences and visions that Americans may have of present-day Dutch people in Europe interfere with the historical and imagined identities of several layers of Dutch immigrants, who have integrated in different ways into American society. Frijhoff ’s essay explores these questions, as well, against the background of present-day unease in the Netherlands about Dutch identity in a multicultural Europe. The nal essay of this volume engages, in a sense, with one of the central concerns of the collection as a whole. It seeks to unravel and contextualize the notion of Dutchness as a composite of perceived facts and imagined ctions, in which the old and new Netherlands, colonial and present-day America, interact and intersect in the creation of a Dutch-American identity. We are not proposing that this volume establishes any denitive parameters of Dutchness or denes the eld of Dutch-American studies. We do believe, however, that the rich essays and broad topics explored in this volume will stimulate more work and perhaps also more complexity, as bets our topic of the Dutch experience in America.

PART I

COLONIAL DUTCH INFLUENCES

CHAPTER ONE

DUTCH ART AND THE HUDSON VALLEY PATROON PAINTERS Louisa Wood Ruby

One of the earliest “schools” of American painting, the Hudson Valley patroon painters, has often been considered to have derived from seventeenth-century English portraiture. Portraits of English aristocrats appealed to Dutch patroons as displays of the kind of social status they aspired to in their new country. British mezzotints after original paintings by Sir Godfrey Kneller and others provided the patroon painters with readily available models on which to base their portraits of wealthy Dutch Americans. Unfortunately, this convincing analysis vastly underestimates the inuence of Dutch art and taste on the development of these paintings. Frequently overlooked in the discussion of the appeal of British portraiture to Dutch patroons is the fact that English portraiture of the seventeenth century was, in fact, a direct descendant of the Netherlandish portrait tradition. Kneller, the main source for the mezzotints that ooded New York, was trained in Amsterdam. Sir Peter Lely was born in Holland, and of course Sir Anthony Van Dyck was from Antwerp. Wealthy Dutch families in New York would have been aware of the Netherlandish tradition through works of art they brought with them from their homeland. Indeed, the rst paintings produced in New Amsterdam and early New York were essentially Dutch, since no other tradition existed here at the time. When British mezzotints nally arrived in 1710, they did indeed appeal to the patroon families, most likely because they were works grounded in the Dutch tradition, then overlaid with elements of British culture and style. They were thus a perfect reection of who these families had become—Dutchmen whose own culture and tastes were being slowly overwhelmed by their new British government. While the Hudson Valley patroon portraits are generally considered the rst indigenous “school” of American portraiture, they were certainly not the earliest portraits produced in this country, or even in

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New York.1 The earliest painting to be considered a Hudson Valley patroon portrait is dated 1718, nearly a full century after the rst boat of Dutch settlers arrived on the island of Manhattes.2 The rst Dutch settlers were mostly not very wealthy and did not have the leisure to have portraits made of themselves. Probably, in the beginning, very few Dutchmen actually brought over any pictures with them from their homeland either; in the 1620s and 30s, they were far more concerned with basic survival. Once things became more settled, in the 1640s and 50s, both things begin to occur. Not only are there existing portraits painted in New Amsterdam from this time, but ships now making the ocean voyage were laden with goods other than just the bare necessities of life. This is not surprising, since inventories from seventeenthcentury Dutch households have shown that an unusually large number of people in the Netherlands itself at this time possessed pictures.3 The idea of owning pictures was clearly held in high esteem. What pictures came to New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century? Apparently there were quite a few, for there were not enough painters in this country at the time to produce the thirty-nine pictures listed in Mayor Cornelis Steenwyck’s ne house or the sixty-one in the barbersurgeon Jacob De Lange’s inventory of 1685 or even the nineteen in Sara Webbers’ of 1685 or the seventeen in Maria Van Varick’s of 1696.4 A landscape by Vincent Adraiaensen, known as Leckerbetien (1595–1675), is mentioned in the will of Hendrick Kip (arrived in

1 James Thomas Flexner rst coined this term in his book First Flowers of our Wilderness: American Painting (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1947), 69. There are about one hundred of these portraits in existence. 2 The rst boats of Dutch settlers began coming over in 1624, although it is unclear whether any of them originally stayed in Manhattan or if they all traveled on to (present-day) Albany. See Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 37, See also Charles T. Gehring, ed., Annals of New Netherland: The Essays of A. J. F. van Laer (Albany: New Netherland Institute, 1999). 3 The notion of a “painting in every Dutch home” that was fueled by contemporary travelers’ accounts of the Netherlands, such as John Evelyn or Peter Mundy is not quite accurate. As Julie Hochstrasser has pointed out, in “Imag(in)ing Prosperity: Painting and Material Culture in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Household,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 51 (2000):195–236, it was not every household that owned works of art, but rather the ones on the wealthier end of the scale. Houses with less tangible property were not inventoried as often and probably were not visited by wealthy seventeenth-century travelers. 4 Kenneth Scott, Genealogical Data from Inventories of New York Estates 1666–1825 (New York: New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, 1970), 39, 159, 160, 171.

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New Amsterdam in 1637, dies in 1671), along with other paintings.5 A majority of the paintings in these inventories were marine views (“a small sea”), landscapes (“a small country”), battles, still life (“a ower pot”) and genre, and most are lost to history, for the only extant pictures with long provenances that we know are portraits. A clue as to what happened to these pictures may be found in Pierre Eugene du Simitière’s offering for sale in 1779 “pictures chiey painted in oils, on boards . . . of those kinds the Dutch settlers brought a great many with their other furniture.” He had found them in New York City garrets where they had “been conned as unfashionable when that city was modernized.”6 Apparently portraits remained fashionable, and may have been saved because they represented revered ancestors. They are also better documented than landscapes, genre pictures and still lives because the sitters have dates and so can be more easily connected to living artists. The portraits that we know were brought over include pendants of Peter Stuyvesant’s in-laws, Reverend and Mrs. Lazare Bayard, by an unknown artist (Fig. 1). These were brought over either when Stuyvesant came to New Amsterdam in 1647, or in 1654, when his sister Anna Stuyvesant, who also married a Bayard, came over. She also brought with her a portrait of herself and her husband at their homestead in Alphen, Holland, from 1644, which is a landscape as well. All of these pictures are currently in the New-York Historical Society and are not attributed to any particular artist.7 The portraits are in the style of early seventeenth-century Dutch portraitists such as Michiel van Mierevelt (1567–1641), very simply dressed gures in three-quarter length with only minimal hand gestures, making them appear somewhat rigid and static. The landscape with the Bayards is quite similar in style and composition to works by Gerard Donck (. 1627–1640), such as his Jan van Hensbeeck, and Family in the National Gallery of London.8 Oloff 5 Simon Hart, “How Hendrick Kip bequeathed his Estate,” De Halve Maen 37, 3 (6 October 1929): 54. 6 Flexner, 66. 7 Unidentied artist, Reverend Lazare Bayard, oil on wood panel, 45 u 33 in., New York Historical Society, inv. no. 1915.5; Unidentied artist, Mrs. Lazare Bayard, oil on wood panel, 45 u 33 in., New York Historical Society, inv. no. 1915.6; Unidentied artist, Bayard Homestead, Alphen, Holland, oil on wood panel, 34 ½ u 48 in., New York Historical Society, inv. no. 1915.7. All paintings are illustrated on the Historical Society’s website. 8 Gerard Donck, Jan van Hensbeeck and Family, National Gallery of London, oil on panel, 76 u 106.2 cm. inv. no. NG1305.

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Fig. 1. Unidentied Dutch artist, Reverend Lazare Bayard, 1636, oil on wood panel, 45 u 33 in., New-York Historical Society, inv. no. 1915.5.

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Stevense van Cortlandt brought over a portrait of his mother, Katrien, by Mierevelt, in 1638,9 and Domine Johannes Weeckstein of the Dutch Reformed Church in Kingston brought over the portrait of himself by Mathijs Naiveu (1647–1726), a student of Gerard Dou, in 1683.10 While the lack of provenance for many landscapes, still lives and genre pictures makes it difcult to determine which picture in these genres may have been brought over to America from the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, based on the few portraits and landscapes that are documented, we could venture a guess as to what they were like. Simple, cheaper paintings are what came over at rst, not grand pictures by Rembrandt, Ruysdael, or other well-known painters, which were owned by the people who were better situated in Holland and so were not the ones emigrating. Kiliaen van Rensselaer, one of the rst and most successful of the Dutch patroons, for instance, never set foot on these shores.11 The number of painters and pictures produced in Holland in the seventeenth century was legion. It has been surmised that as many as 200,000 paintings were made for and sold in the marketplace, and as can be imagined, not every painter was of the highest caliber. There were many, many, second- and even third-rate painters producing pictures, and it is most likely many of these that made their way over to New Amsterdam. In my research I have discovered examples of paintings other than portraits that might have been brought over to the New World from Holland, paintings that are now attributed to anonymous painters of either the Dutch or American school whose provenance goes no further back than the mid-twentieth century.12 It is quite possible that some of

9 Michiel van Mierevelt, Katrien van Cortlandt, oil on panel, 43 ¾ u 33 ½ in., Museum of the City of New York, inv. no. 73.230.2. Illustrated in Jerry E. Paterson, The City of New York: a History Illustrated from the Collections of the Museum of the City of New York (New York: Abrams, 1978), n.p. 10 Mathijs Naiveu, Domine Johannes Weeckstein, oil on canvas, 27 ¼ u 22 ¾ in., New York Historical Society, inv. no. 1950.6. 11 Kiliaen Van Rensselaer was given the rights to a large tract of land around Albany in the 1630s by the Dutch West India Company and really was the only patroon to make his colony successful, probably as a result of its prime location on both the Hudson and Mohawk rivers. The rst Van Rensselaer to come over was Kiliaen’s son Jeremias. See Charles T. Gehring, Annals of New Netherland: Privatizing Colonization: The Patroonship of Rensselaerswijk (Albany: New Netherland Institute, 2000). 12 Very helpful in this regard has been the Frick Art Reference Library’s Photoarchive. The Frick has an important collection of photographs of early American paintings that were taken on photograph campaigns to private homes that Miss Frick and her staff photographer undertook in the 1920s–1960s.

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these pictures were brought over in the seventeenth century, and so are technically “Dutch”, but that the history of their ownership has been lost. On the other hand, they could be examples of early “American” landscapes, still lives and genre pictures, in the sense that they were painted on these shores. Histories of American art never even mention the possibility that such pictures were painted here, because none remain that are documented.13 But it stands to reason that they existed, given the propensity of the Dutch to document their surroundings, and the fact that they continue to appear in New York inventories through the 1750s. In 1750, for example, the sale of Gerardus Duyckinck II’s estate included “prospects, History, Sea Skips and Lands Skips . . .”14 Take for example, a landscape that belonged to the Augustus Van Cortlandt collection (a good Dutch-American name) in 1946. It shows a view up a village street with gabled houses and gures riding in carts loaded with hay or walking to market. 15 There is no real way to determine if this picture was painted in the Netherlands or in New York. The houses appear Dutch, but then so do those in the drawing of a Dutch Cottage on Beaver Street, New York from 1679, now in the New York Public Library.16 Without identiable landmarks, there is no way of knowing where this scene was painted. Similarly, a rather unskillfully painted genre scene that was in a private collection in Albany in 1965 could be early American just as much as it could be Dutch.17 Just because the gures are dressed in Dutch seventeenth-century clothing and appear in a seventeenth-century Dutch cottage interior does not mean the painting is Dutch. At the time, Dutch Americans were wearing the same outts and building the very same houses as the Dutch in Holland. In fact, it really makes no difference if these pictures were painted here or in Europe, because the

13 Wayne Craven, Colonial American Portraiture: the Economic, Religious, Social, Cultural, Philosophical, Scientic and Aesthetic Foundations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 97: “Painting, as produced in what had now become New York, would accordingly be deprived of . . . landscape, still life and genre . . .” 14 Roderic H. Blackburn and Ruth Piwonka, Remembrance of Patria: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America, 1609–1776 (Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1988), 244. 15 Photograph in the Frick Art Reference Library, attributed to the Dutch School, seventeenth century. 16 Illustrated in Gloria Deak, Picturing America, 1497–1899, II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), g. 64. 17 Photograph in the Frick Art Reference Library, attributed to the American School, seventeenth century.

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traditions were the same at the time. The majority of people living in New Amsterdam were Dutch and they were painting what they knew. There was no local tradition to blend with, they built Dutch homes and Dutch style furniture, ate Dutch food and spoke the Dutch language. The only way to know the nationality of the painter would be if further provenance could be found for the picture. The earliest extant picture other than a portrait that has a documented provenance dating to even the eighteenth century is a still life currently in the Van Cortlandt Manor house in New York.18 It was listed in the inventory of Pierre van Cortlandt from 1800, which means it was painted earlier than that, most likely at some point late in the eighteenth century. Not surprisingly, the families who brought pictures over were among the rst to have their own portraits painted on these shores. These pictures, though technically American, were painted in the style of contemporary Dutch portraiture, the only tradition represented here at the time. There is a portrait of Cornelis Steenwyck in the New-York Historical Society, for instance, that was long thought to be painted in the Netherlands by his brother-in-law, Jan van Goosen, but now is considered to have been painted in this country.19 The artist it is attributed to (with some doubt) is named Henri Couturier. Couturier was a Dutch artist trained in Leiden (at the same time as Gerrit Dou (1613–1675)), who then moved to Delaware in 1660 and to New York after that. The painting shows the mayor of New York in a typically Dutch outt of the time, a wide square lace collar over a black velvet coat with slashed sleeves, and a black hat. He is shown in three-quarter length in an oval frame in front of a landscape, with a cityscape of New Amsterdam appearing below the oval in a separately painted cartouche. Besides the depiction of New York, which is probably from a print, it is understandable that the picture was rst attributed to an artist, Goosen, who never came to New York, but it is far more likely to have been painted in this country, since there is no evidence beyond family lore that Steenwyck visited Holland as an adult.

18 Unidentied artist, Still Life, oil on canvas, 25 ¾ u 29 ¼ in., Van Cortlandt Manor Collection, inv. no. VC.58.6a–b. Illustrated in Kathleen Eagen Johnson, The Limner’s Trade: Selected Colonial and Federal Paintings from the Collection of the Historic Hudson Valley (North Tarrytown, NY: Philipsburg Manor Gallery, 1996), 11. 19 Attributed to Hendrick Couturier, Cornelius Steenwyck, oil on canvas, 32 ¹/8 u 25 ¹/8 in. New York Historical Society, inv. no. 1882.172.

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The picture of Steenwyck was attributed to Couturier because of the similarity of its brushwork and technique to that found in two portraits of Peter Stuyvesant and his son Nicholas now in the New-York Historical Society.20 Since Couturier’s wife testied in 1663 that he had painted portraits of Peter Stuyvesant and his son Nicolas, all three portraits were tentatively assigned to him. However, the portrait of Nicholas is dated 1666, so the “proof ” for the Couturier attribution is called into question.21 The portrait of Peter Stuyvesant is very much in the style of portraits by such Dutch artists as Michiel van Mierevelt or Gerrit van Honthorst and is particularly reminiscent of their paintings of the Electors of Palatine or the Princes of Oranges. Stuyvesant must have found this style and costume tting for his role as Director-General of New Amsterdam. He is depicted in half-length, in an oval frame, wearing armor, with an orange scarf draped over his right shoulder, a square white collar, and a small black cap on his head. He looks out at the viewer with a benign, fatherly expression. The American desire to identify and own portraits of famous men of early New York, such as Steenwyck or Stuyvesant, was very strong in the early part of the twentieth century. At that time, as Annette Stott has documented, there was a kind of “Holland Mania” resulting from a desire to create a national identity and dene a past separate from the British.22 As a result, unscrupulous dealers and collectors inscribed the names of important men of the day such as Frederick Philipse or Oloff Stevense van Cortlandt on several seventeenth and early eighteenth-century portraits, and attributed them to known artists such as Couturier or Evert Duyckinck III.23 Similarly, families were eager to have portraits of their ancestors. At least two portraits were attributed

20 Attributed to Henri Couturier, Governor Peter Stuyvesant, oil on canvas, 22 ½ u 17 ½, inv. no. 1909.2; Nicholas William Stuyvesant, oil on canvas, 35 u 25 5/8 in., inv. no. 1905.292. 21 Flexner, 289–90. 22 Annette Stott, Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1998). 23 Thomas B. Clarke’s collection, that ended up in the National Gallery, Washington, was particularly egregious in this way. The so-called Frederick Philipse and Oloff Stephanse van Cortlandt are now in the National Gallery as Unknown eighteenth century, Portrait of a Man, oil on canvas, 28 5/8 u 23 ¾ in. 1947.17.33 and Unknown seventeenth century, Portrait of a Man, oil on canvas, 28 ½ u 23 in., inv. no. 1947.17.34. Illustrated in National Gallery of Art, European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue (Washington, DC: The Gallery, 1985), 410 and 407.

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to a man who according to seventeenth-century records never seems to have painted: Jacob Gerritsen Strycker (1651–1687).24 These portraits were allegedly of himself and his brother Jan (Fig. 2), but no records of his artistic activity can be found before some family papers that were written up in 1887.25 All of these paintings are now assigned to unknown artists from the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries, and because of unreliable information, are considered to portray unidentied sitters. Although these portraits have been brought down to the level of anonymous sitters by anonymous artists, they are not insignicant for the early history of art in America, for they do represent the kinds of portraiture being produced in New Amsterdam in the 1600s. This is especially true of the so-called Stryckers and Oloff Van Cortlandt, which were probably painted in the seventeenth century and could have been produced here. It is also not unlikely that Oloff Van Cortlandt had his portrait painted. The Strycker portraits are earlier, probably from the 1650s, and are based on the simple Dutch portrait tradition such as represented by the Bayard or Mierevelt portraits mentioned above that the artist could have seen in New Amsterdam. The gures are shown bust-length, with simple, unadorned (even unkempt) hair, simple collars and black garments. The Van Cortlandt portrait, as evidenced by the costume, is from a later date, when Dutch fashion had begun to be inuenced by the French. The man is three-quarter length, with a long wig and a cravat instead of the simple square collar, and a red cloth draped around his chest. How did the artist learn of these new traditions? Besides seeing fashion changing in New York, could he have known later Dutch portraiture? While it is fairly widely known that the portraits of the Bayards, Katrien van Cortlandt and the others I’ve mentioned came over to New Amsterdam/New York in the seventeenth century, it is not generally well known that two portraits by Michiel van Musscher of members

24 Formerly Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 41.33. Illustrated in Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Paintings, a Catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 1 (Greenwich, Ct.: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1965), 281. Dutch seventeenth century, Portrait of a Man, oil on canvas, 21 ½ u 16 ½ in., National Gallery of Art, inv. no. 1947.17.98. Illustrated in National Gallery of Art, European Paintings, 142. 25 A history of this can be found on the Photoarchive mounts of these paintings in the Frick Art Reference Library.

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Fig. 2. Unidentied Dutch artist, Portrait of a Man, 17th century, oil on canvas, 21 ½ u 16 ½ in., National Gallery of Art, inv. no. 1947.17.98.

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of the De Peyster family also came over, probably in 1684 (Fig. 3).26 These are of a different caliber than the other paintings we have been discussing, representing a much more sophisticated trend in Dutch portraiture from later in the century. Rather than going back to simple Dutch portraits from early in the century like those of the Bayards and the Mierevelt, the Musschers are in the tradition as practiced by well-known later artists such as Gerard Terborch and Frans van Mieris. They show a man, wearing a long wig, with frilly cravat and sleeves emerging from a purplish long coat lined along the chest in red, with his left arm on a table that is covered by an oriental carpet. The woman is wearing a sumptuous dress with a similarly frilly and quite revealing neckline, with slashed sleeves and showing a white undergarment, with her arms around a young girl similarly dressed and holding fruit. Both have landscapes in the background. Originally, it was thought that these portraits represented Abraham de Peyster (1657–1728), who held a string of prominent positions in New York, including Alderman, Mayor, Acting Governor and Justice of the Supreme Court, and his wife, Katrina. With his wealth of genealogical knowledge, however, Waldron Phoenix Belknap claried the fact that Abraham and Katrina were not married until 1684, a year after the pictures were painted (they are dated 1683), and that therefore the child in the picture could not be theirs. He surmised that the pictures are actually of Katrina’s father, Pierre de Peyster and his second wife, Petronella van Kesteren, Katrina’s stepmother, and that the child in the picture most likely represented one of her half-sisters, born in 1675 and 1677. When Abraham went to Holland to bring Katrina back as his bride, she must have brought the portraits with her to remember her father and stepmother by. Most likely, they hung in the “grote kamer” of their home on Pearl St., where Katrina became “widely known as a hostess” to the elite governing body of New York.27 With such a prominent position, they would have been seen by many of the important people of the day.

26 Michiel van Musscher, Pierre de Peyster, oil on canvas, 23 u 20 ¼ in.; Petronella de Peyster, oil on canvas, 23 u 20 ¼ x in., the National Society of Colonial Dames in the State of New York, no inv. nos. Published in Waldron Phoenix Belknap, American Colonial Painting: Materials for a History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1959), 38–9. Extensive notes on the sitters from Belknap on the Photoarchive mounts of the Frick Art Reference Library. 27 Belknap, 38.

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Fig. 3. Michiel van Musscher, Pierre de Peyster, 1683, oil on canvas, 23 u 20 ¼ in., National Society of Colonial Dames in the State of New York.

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Did these pictures have an impact on the subsequent production of paintings in New York? First, as was the case with other families who brought portraits with them from the Netherlands, these pictures inspired members of the De Peyster family to have their portraits painted. Abraham, in fact, did have his portrait painted (Fig. 4), as did his brother Isaac, probably around 1700.28 In 1718, Johannes de Peyster III, Abraham and Isaac’s nephew, was one of the rst to have a portrait painted by one of the so-called Hudson Valley patroon painters, using a mezzotint after an English portrait as a source of pose, costume and backdrop (Figs. 5 and 6).29 Could this be a coincidence? The New York artists who were available to paint Abraham’s generation were not able to produce portraits on the same level as the Musschers. In his portrait, Abraham has the long-haired wig and cravat, signs of status, but the technique is quite coarse and the painting has none of the complexity and interest of the Musschers.30 The portrait of Isaac, by an unknown artist, has intricate patterning on the coat and in the lace, but is quite simply painted overall. Interestingly, the sitter wears no wig. While Johannes de Peyster III would have known these painting of his uncles, he would also have been aware of the Musschers that hung in Abraham’s house. They were in the latest Dutch style, smoothly painted, in the elegant, sophisticated clothes based on the Frenchinuenced styles of the late seventeenth century. When he moved to Albany from New York in 1713, Johannes married into a prominent Dutch family, the Schuylers (who also collected paintings), and began a successful career that led to his election to several prominent positions, including mayor. When this ambitious young man wanted his portrait painted, he must have looked back at these wonderful works by Musscher and decided to choose not a local artist like those who painted his uncles, but one who could paint him with the aristocratic bearing of his Dutch ancestors. The obvious choice in Albany was an

Gerrit Duyckinck, Abraham de Peyster, oil on canvas, 30 u 25 in., Museum of the City of New York, inv. no. 59.84.1, gift of Miss Augusta de Peyster; Unidentied artist, Isaac de Peyster, oil on canvas, 29 ½ u 25 ¼ in., New York Historical Society, inv. no. 1960.55 29 Attributed to Nehemiah Partridge, Johannes de Peyster, 1718, oil on bed ticking, 44 u 38 ¼ in., New York Historical Society, inv. no. 1950.236. Print: Sir John Smith after Sir Godfrey Kneller, Sir John Perceval, mezzotint, New York Public Library. 30 The technique does not seem the same to me as that in other portraits by Gerrit Duyckinck, but is attributed to him by the museum. 28

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Fig. 4. Gerrit Duyckinck, Abraham de Peyster, oil on canvas, 30 u 25 in., Museum of the City of New York, inv. no. 59.84.1, gift of Miss Augusta De Peyster.

Fig. 5. Nehemiah Partridge (attrib.), Johannes de Peyster III, 1718, oil on bed ticking, 44 u 38 ¼ in., New-York Historical Society, inv. no. 1950.236.

Fig. 6. Sir John Smith after Sir Godfrey Kneller, Sir John Perceval, mezzotint, Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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itinerant artist from New England, who also passed through New York and Virginia, named Nehemiah Partridge.31 Partridge’s work was sophisticated because he based it on British mezzotints of aristocratic English sitters. In De Peyster’s portrait, he used a mezzotint after Kneller’s portrait of Sir John Perceval, copying the exact pose right down to the nger position, painting a similar landscape, a similar jacket and a similar swag.32 He has, however, changed the cravat and made the face simpler and sharper in the process. De Peyster’s mouth is smiling and not pursed like Perceval’s, his pose is less twisted, and as a result, he appears more open and approachable to the viewer. This is reinforced by the fact that De Peyster’s body is cut off at the thighs, so his body is closer to the picture plane. Other New York portraits by Partridge include two fantastic fulllength portraits of Ariaantje Coeymans and Pieter Schuyler in Albany (Fig. 7).33 She was a rich Dutch-American heiress who married for the rst time at age 51, when this picture was painted. She stands in a full length gown embroidered at the bottom, with a simple necklace of corn kernels and similar earrings, her hair tied back primly, right hand across her waist and pink ower in her left hand. This is the rst known full-length portrait of a woman painted in this country. Pieter Schuyler was a founding father of the Albany area, and was possibly the one who discovered Partridge in Boston and brought him back to paint in Albany.34 He sports a long wig and cravat, a red coat with waistcoat and breeches, a black hat under his left arm and one gloved hand holding the glove of the opposite, pointing hand. For the backgrounds of both pictures, Partridge used a mezzotint by G. Beckett after Kneller’s Lady Bucknell.35 These are a few of the many portraits by Partridge that he based on English mezzotints. Always, however, he simplied his printed sources, making them less pretentious and giving them a more straightforward, 31 Mary Black, “Early Colonial Painting of the New York Province”, in Blackburn and Piwonka, Remembrance of Patria, 236. 32 Belknap owned the painting of Johannes de Peyster, and his was the rst portrait to be connected to a British mezzotint. Belknap, 285. 33 Nehemiah Partridge: Ariaantje Coeymans, oil on canvas, 71 u 39, Albany Institute of History and Art, inv. no. 1940.665.1; Peter Schuyler, oil on canvas, 87 ¾ u 51, Collection of the City of Albany, Ofce of the Mayor. Illustrated in Black, “Early Colonial Painting,” 218 and 219. 34 Black, “Early Colonial Painting,” 209–210. 35 G. Beckett after Sir Godfrey Kneller, The Lady Bucknell, mezzotint. Illustrated in Blackburn and Piwonka, 249.

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Fig. 7. Nehemiah Partridge (attrib.), Ariaantje Coeymans (Mrs. David) Verplanck (1672–1743), 1718, oil on canvas, 71 u 39 in., Albany Institute of History & Art, inv. no. 1938.5, bequest of Miss Gertrude Watson.

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open appearance. While this very well may have been a result of his inferior artistic skills, it may also to some degree reect the natures of his sitters, who had grown up in a more primitive land with less sophisticated social strata and mores. What was the appeal of British portraits to Dutch patroons such as De Peyster, Coeymans and Schuyler? One aspect certainly was that they showed landed English aristocracy with social status that the newly minted patroons apparently aspired to. As mentioned, Johannes de Peyster III ambitiously married into a prominent Albany family and held several government ofces. Ariaantje Coeymans was the daughter of a large landowner around Albany, and thus could be considered a kind of colonial aristocrat. And the social and political position of Pieter Schuyler is well documented. To this group of high-level Dutch Americans, contact with and understanding of the English was a necessity. In order to succeed in the British-dominated government, they had themselves portrayed in the manner of English lords and ladies as depicted by Kneller and others. Another, very signicant aspect of the appeal of British portraiture to Dutch patroons that is consistently overlooked: English portraiture of the seventeenth century was almost inextricably linked to the Dutch, or at least the Netherlandish, portrait tradition. First, it was strongly conditioned by a most important factor—Van Dyck: “Indeed the impact of Van Dyck’s stay in England was to be, in artistic terms, as revolutionary as the era of political upheaval which it preceded. . . . The achievements of Van Dyck remained above all those which, for the rest of the century, painters would both strive to emulate and judge themselves against.”36 Sir Peter Lely, who succeeded Van Dyck in the fashionable world of English portraiture, was Dutch and traveled back and forth freely between the two countries during his life.37 Sir Godfrey Kneller, whose portraits were copied the most in the prints that came to New York, trained in Holland, probably under Ferdinand Bol and a bit under Rembrandt himself.38 Even the more conservative British school of portraiture was inuenced by the Dutch; Cornelis Johnson

36 Brian Allen, Richard Charlton-Jones, et al., The British Portrait, 1660–1960 (Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1991), 76. 37 Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530 to 1790 (London and Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1953), 62–67. 38 J. Douglas Stewart, Sir Godfrey Kneller and the English Baroque Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 2.

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(1593–1664), its greatest practitioner, was of Dutch descent, lived in a Dutch community in London, probably trained under a Dutch master, and eventually left for Holland in 1643. You cannot really separate English portraiture from Dutch portraiture at the time, and Dutch New Yorkers such as the De Peysters would have seen little difference between the portraits of their ancestors by Musscher and the portraits of English lords and ladies being sent over in the form of prints. When British prints arrived in New York, they did not arrive in a vacuum. As outlined, there were many Dutch paintings in New York in the seventeenth century. When the prints arrived, they appealed as updated versions of the Dutch style the patroons were accustomed to, not as new revelations to an untutored clientele. There are a multitude of interlocking reasons why the Dutch contributions to these patroon portraits has been overlooked in the history of American art. First, and most importantly, historians of American art generally have had the same training in American history as American historians. This unfortunately includes a tendency to ignore any Dutch contributions to American culture. As Joyce Goodfriend put it so aptly: “chroniclers of the American past . . . placed their imprimatur on a version of national origins centered on the English Settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts Bay.”39 There is a regrettable propensity in art history to unite New York with the entire Atlantic coast as “the American colonies” and ignore any historical differences between these many areas.40 This pre-existing prejudice was compounded by the signicant discovery by Waldron Phoenix Belknap that the sources for many mid eighteenth-century American portraits were British mezzotints. 41 Many of these painters, such as Smibert and Copley, are quite signicant in the development of American painting, and so the fact that many of the earlier, less signicant Hudson Valley patroon painters used them, too, generally allowed all the “colonial painters” to be discussed together as being dependent on British sources. To make distinguishing the original contributions of the Hudson Valley patroon painters even more difcult, the names and identities of

39 Joyce Goodfriend, ed., Revisiting New Netherland: Perspectives on Early Dutch America (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 3. 40 Deborah I. Prosser, “Visual Persuasion: Portraits and Identity among Colonial American Artists and Patrons, 1700–1776” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1997), 161–165. 41 Belknap, 271–329.

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the painters of the Dutch in New York are actually very little known outside a very small group of art historians. Historically, they were known by the names of the sitters they painted, and so were referred to as the “Beekman Limner” or the “De Peyster Limner”. The art historian whose work claried the different identities and artistic personalities of the Hudson Valley patroon painters was Mary Black, who served as Director of both the Abbey Aldrich Rockefeller Museum in Williamsburg and the Museum of American Folk Art in New York before she became Curator at the New-York Historical Society. However, while most of her work was published in one form or another, she died before she was able to curate a planned exhibition of these artists which would have clearly shown the differences between their hands and dened their identities to future art historians. As it stands, there is no one publication where all the works by each artist are clearly illustrated, so it is difcult to get a full sense of any one of them.42 Once one does, however, it becomes clear that while certain of the patroon painters are almost completely beholden to British precedents, others were either never exposed to them or chose to ignore them. The artists who fall into these latter categories retained much of the characteristics of Dutch art and culture. It is often wrongly assumed, for instance, that Gerrit Duyckinck (1660– 1710), one of the rst of the patroon painters, used mezzotints for sources, when in fact there is not one painting attributed to him that shows this.43 His paintings, such as the pendant portraits of himself and his wife, or those of Mr. and Mrs. David Provoost (Fig. 8), are simplied versions of the Dutch models he could have known in this country, portraits brought over with some of the original settlers such as those of the Bayards or Katrien Van Cortlandt discussed above.44 Only the long wigs worn by the men indicate their date later in the century. Gerrit apparently has been confused with both his son and his nephew, who started using British mezzotints for their paintings in the

42

The most comprehensive of her publications is Black, “Early Colonial Painting”, but even in this publication, the paintings by each artist are not illustrated together. 43 See for example: Ann Lenard, “Inuences in Early Dutch-American Painting,” in The Dutch and America (Los Angeles: University of California, 1982), 37–40; Prosser, and Robin Simon, The Portrait in Britain and America: with a Biographical Dictionary of Portrait Painters, 1680–1914 (Oxford: Phaidon, 1987), 22. 44 Gerrit Duyckinck, Self-Portrait of Gerrit Duyckinck, Mrs. Gerrit Duyckinck, Mr. David Provoost, Mrs. David Provoost, each: oil on wood panel, 30 u 25, New York Historical Society, inv. nos. 1918.1; 1918.6 1924.4; 1924.10.

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Fig. 8. Gerrit Duyckinck (attrib.), Mrs. David Provoost, ca. 1700–1710, oil on wood panel, 30 u 25 in., New-York Historical Society, inv. no. 1924.10.

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1710s. There is, in fact, no evidence that these mezzotints came to this country any earlier than about 1710, the year Gerrit died.45 Gerrit’s son and nephew, Gerardus I and Evert III Duyckinck, were two of the most popular portrait painters in New York City in the 1720s and 30s and did make extensive use of British mezzotint sources in their portraits. The painting style of Gerardus I (1695–1746) was positively identied when a religious painting was found to contain his signature and the date 1713.46 Although there has been no positive identication of a print used for this painting, it was probably based on a print after an Italian painting of the Birth of the Virgin. Many similar small religious paintings from colonial Dutch artists were copied from prints in Dutch Bibles, but this particular subject is not included in the Dutch version of the Bible.47 From this painting, identications of other works by Gerardus were made by Mary Black, such as a portrait of Elizabeth Van Rensselaer, who happened to be Gerardus’ sister-in-law.48 An exceptional portrait of Mrs. Petrus Vas now in the Albany Institute (Fig. 9), was long thought to be by Pieter Vanderlyn, her son-in-law, but now because of the technique and Mary Black’s discovery of familial and geographic connections between the sitter and Gerardus, the latter’s authorship has been conrmed.49 Apparently, the mistake was made because documents show that Pieter Vanderlyn painted a portrait of Mrs. Vas’ husband, Domine Petrus Vas, that has been destroyed. The heirs then assumed that the portrait of his wife was a pendant portrait by the same artist. Gerardus Duyckinck’s authorship is conrmed by the inscription, which closely resembles his signature on the Birth of the Virgin, and the style. Further connections include the fact that he lived the end of his life in Kingston, and was buried in the Dutch Reformed churchyard there, where Petrus Vas was Domine.

45 Craven, 127, discusses English Governors bringing prints over in the rst quarter of the eighteenth century, as does Prosser, 161. 46 The painting was found in 1978 by the Chicago art dealer Richard H. Love, according to Black, “Early Colonial Painting,” 243, with illustration. 47 For more on these religious paintings, see Ruth Piwonka, A Remnant in the Wilderness: New York Dutch Scripture History Paintings of the Early Eighteenth Century (Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1980). 48 Attributed to Gerardus Duyckinck, Elizabeth Van Rensselaer, oil on canvas, 45 ½ u 36 ³/8 in., New York Historical Society, inv. no. 1924.5, illustrated in Black, “Early Colonial Painting,” 251. 49 Gerard Duyckinck, Mrs. Petrus Vas, oil on canvas, 45 ¼ u 36 ½ in., Albany Institute of History and Art, inv. no. 1957.104. Discussion in Black, “Early Colonial Painting,” 216.

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Fig. 9. Gerardus Duyckinck I (attrib.), Elsie Rutgers Schuyler (Mrs. Petrus) Vas, 1723, oil on canvas, 44 u 35 in., Albany Institute of History & Art, inv. no. 1957.104, gift of Dorothy Trent Arnold (Mrs. Ledyard, Jr.) Cogswell.

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Gerardus is also the author of pendant portraits of Moses Levy and his wife, and Jacob Franks and his wife, respectively, in the Museum of the City of New York and the American Jewish Historical Society.50 Mrs. Franks is based almost line for line on a print by John Smith after Sir Godfrey Kneller. For one of his three paintings of the younger cousins of Johannes de Peyster III, that of James de Peyster (for these three pictures he was known as the “De Peyster Limner” before his identity was discovered), Gerardus worked from a mezzotint by Smith after Kneller of Lord Buckhurst and Lady Mary Sackville. For this painting he used only the gure of the little boy, carefully excising Lady Sackville, but including the deer Lord Buckhurst is petting.51 Another portrait of a child by Gerardus, the Wilhelmina Ritzema in the New-York Historical Society, has no known print source. The headgear that she wears is actually a Dutch item of clothing put on children to serve as a bumper, and the ginger cookie she holds is a purely Dutch food item. So even though Gerardus was often using prints as sources, he was capable of tailoring his paintings to the desires of his clients, and perhaps also beginning to look around his world and paint actual observations.52 Gerardus’ cousin, Evert III Duyckinck (c. 1677–1727) was born in Holland, as his father had briey left New York and gone back to Holland as a mate on a ship.53 He became a freeman in New York in 1698, as a limner, after his parents returned to New York, where his father died. His mother remarried and his two half-sisters married into the Beekman family, a prominent upstate New York patroon family. Through this connection, he painted several portraits of the Beekman family. In fact, before he was positively identied, he was known as “The Beekman Limner”.54 Gerardus Beekman’s portrait is based on Smith’s print after Kneller of Lord Torrington, particularly in the

50 Attributed to Gerardus Duyckinck, Moses Levy, Mrs. Moses Levy, both: oil on canvas, 43 ¼ u 34 ¾ in. Museum of the City of New York, inv. nos. 36.343.1 and 36.343.2; Mr. Jacob Franks, Mrs. Jacob Franks, both: oil on canvas, 44 u 35 in.; American Jewish Historical Society, no inv. nos. Illus. in Richard Brilliant, Facing the New World: Jewish Portraits in Colonial and Federal America (New York: Prestel, 1997), 27–29. 51 Attributed to Gerardus Duyckinck, De Peyster Boy with Deer, New York Historical Society, oil on canvas, 50 ¼ u 41 in., John Smith after Sir Godfrey Kneller, Lord Buckhurst and Lady Mary Sackville, mezzotint, illustrated in Belknap, XLI, g. 50. 52 Attributed to Gerardus Duyckinck, Wilhelmina Ritzema, oil on linen, 32 u 25 in., New York Historical Society, inv. no. 1974.22. See Mary Black, “Remembrances of the Dutch Homeland in Early New York Provincial Painting,” in New World Dutch Studies: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America 1609–1776, 125. 53 Ibid., 125. 54 Black, “Early Colonial Painting,” 233.

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pose, but without the background and with the addition of the book, perhaps a Bible, under his hand. The New-York Historical Society owns two particularly charming portraits of Evert’s half-nieces Cornelia and Magdelena.55 Both girls wear pearl necklaces, and Cornelia even wears a pearl earring of the type found in many Dutch portraits of the seventeenth century. Both have the long, attenuated faces that are characteristic of the style of Evert III that can be seen in his portraits of his rst cousin Catherine Van Zandt and her husband in the same museum.56 Mrs. Van Zandt holds up a tulip in her right hand, a particularly beautiful one that in Holland at the time could have been worth $100, or enough to keep a laborer and his family clothed and fed for a few months.57 Its inclusion clearly is a reference to the lady’s extreme wealth, but also to her Dutch heritage as well. John Watson was a Scottish immigrant who painted in New York City in the 1720s. Originally he was a house and sign painter, and eventually made many portraits of the Van Rensselaer family. For this he was for a long time known as the “Van Rensselaer Limner”. His portrait of Mrs. Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, the wife of the 3rd Lord of the Manor, from 1725, is based on the print after Kneller’s portrait of the beautiful Sarah, Duchess of Marlboro, but is a much rougher, simpler and less attractive version. Watson did not understand, or at any rate did not portray, the expression of the leisurely British aristocrat. Instead, he painted a solid, rather unattractive, heavily jowled woman with dark eyebrows whose hand oats without purpose beside her neck.58 It is probably a much truer likeness of this Dutch American whose life, although privileged, was most likely much more difcult here in the wilderness than was that of the model for her portrait.59

55 Evert Duyckinck III, Colonel Gerardus Beekman, oil on linen, 30 ¹/8 u 25 in.; Magdelena Beekman, oil on linen, 31 u 25 in.; Cornelia Beekman, oil on linen, 31 u 26, New York Historical Society, inv. nos. 1978.59; 1974.61; 1975.35. 56 Attributed to Evert Duyckinck III, Mr. and Mrs.Wynant Van Zandt, oil on canvas 44 u 34 in. each; New York Historical Society, inv. nos. 1943.69 and 1943.70. Although the New York Historical Society calls these John Heaton, a comparison of their long, attenuated faces with those in other works by Duyckinck leads me to accept Mary Black’s attribution made in “Early Colonial Painting,” 240. 57 Even after the crash of the “tulip mania” in Holland in 1637, tulips remained very popular and commanded high prices such as this. 58 Attributed to John Watson, Mrs. Kiliaen Van Rensselaer, 1725, oil on canvas, 50 u 41 ½ in., New York Historical Society, inv. no. 1950.242. John Simon after Sir Godfrey Kneller, Duchess of Marlborough, mezzotint. Both illustrated in Belknap, xxxiv. 59 Craven, 137.

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From these examples of three New York City patroon painters, the two Duyckinck cousins and John Watson, we see that despite their basic dependence on prints after English sources, they often included some kind of observed element, such as the headgear of the child, the tulip of Mrs. Van Zandt, or the plain, care-lined face of Mrs. Van Rensselaer. In fact, none of the portraits that are based on the prints replicate them exactly. It is interesting that the added elements identify the sitters as having Dutch heritage. Clearly they did not want to emulate the British to the exclusion of their own culture. Instead, these elements declare it. These elements also add a sense of realism to these pictures that removes them from the ideal, as well as from the pretensions of British aristocrats. These portraits show simpler people, Dutch people, who had fought to create their own republic, not hereditary landowners with royal bloodlines. It was these people and their portraits who helped dene what is now considered to be the unique American character.60 All of these New York painters, especially the Duyckincks, used European modeling and glazing techniques. These techniques were not known upriver around Albany by the painters who worked there after Nehemiah Partridge. The later painters in Albany painted with a “decorative naivete” that would not have been acceptable in New York.61 In fact, this naivete, which others have observed, stems not only from the technique of the Albany painters, but also from the previously unobserved fact that they rarely, if ever, used British mezzotints as sources. This observation has escaped notice because Mary Black’s work at distinguishing the works of the painters from one another and giving them identities has not been fully integrated into the literature.62 Pieter Vanderlyn, one of the main Albany painters in the 1730s and 40s, was born in the Netherlands, moved to Kingston in 1722 from Curacao, and married Gertrude Vas, the daughter of Petrus Vas, the Domine of the Dutch Reformed Church, and his wife (Fig. 9). He has a at, decorative, naive style that can be seen in paintings such as his

60

Ibid., 138. See Richard H. Saunders, American Colonial Portraits, 1700–1776 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Portrait Gallery, c. 1987), 5. 62 Further work needs to be done on many of the paintings to conrm much of Mary Black’s work. It is difcult to say why this has not been done—perhaps because it is such a small area of expertise, with paintings that are generally considered to be “naive”. It is, however, a ripe area for research and publication, and would benet greatly from the kind of exhibition that she had been planning. 61

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portraits of the Gansevoorts now in a private collection.63 Behind Mr. Gansevoort is a naturalistically painted landscape with geese (Gans in Dutch) in a pond, and behind Mrs. Gansevoort is a ford (Voort in Dutch). Thus the painter has cleverly designed a rebus of the sitters’ last name.64 The landscape behind Mrs. Gansevoort is almost identical to that in another picture by Vanderlyn, a portrait of their son, Harme Gansevoort, indicating it is probably from a print, most likely a Flemish landscape.65 In the portrait of Pau de Wandelaer in the Albany Institute, however, Vanderlyn painted the rst landscape based on his actual surroundings. The picture shows the Hudson River with the Catskills in the background, and a Dutch sloop ying the British Union Jack; there is an American Goldnch in the sitter’s hand (Fig. 10).66 The clothing of these Albany folk is simple and unadorned broadcloth, and they are wearing their hair naturally, with no wigs. This undoubtedly reects local tradition, and certainly did not come from British prints. Another Albany artist who appears not to have used prints as sources is John Heaten, an artist of uncertain nationality, who married a Dutch woman. He painted in a consistent and limited format, using a direct painting technique and no glazing or modeling.67 In his portrait of Abraham Wendell, he painted a naturalistic view of Wendell’s farm in the background, complete with gristmill and a Dutch “boat wagon”, so known because of its shape, behind him.68 Together with Pieter Vanderlyn, Heaten pioneered the great American landscape tradition. In fact, Heaten almost certainly painted an overmantle of the Van Bergen farm west of Catskill now in the Fenimore Art Museum. In Heaten’s wonderful portrait of Magdalena Douw in Winterthur, the sitter wears a local version of fashionable dress, complete with a traditional Dutch

63 Attributed to Pieter Vanderlyn, Leendert Gansevoort, oil on canvas, 47 ½ u 35 ½ in.; Catarina Gansevoort, oil on canvas, 47 ½ u 35 ½ in. Illustrated in Black, “Early Colonial Painting,” 226–227. 64 Alice P. Kenney, The Gansevoorts of Albany: Dutch Patricians in the Upper Hudson Valley (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1969), 41. 65 Pieter Vanderlyn, Harme Gansevoort, Hirschl and Adler Gallery, New York, 1990. Illustrated in Antiques, 137, 2 (19 February 1990): 375. 66 Attributed to Pieter Vanderlyn, Pau de Wandelaer, oil on canvas, 44 ¾ u 35 ¼ in., Albany Institute of History and Art, in. no. 1940.600.28. Black, “Early Colonial Painting,” 235. 67 Saunders, 5. 68 John Heaten, Abraham Wendell, oil on canvas, 35 ½ u 29 5/8 in., Albany Institute of History and Art, inv. no. 1963.47. Illustrated in Black, “Early Colonial Painting,” 224.

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Fig. 10. Pieter Vanderlyn (attrib.), Pau Gansevoort, formerly known as Pau de Wandelaer, ca. 1730–1740, oil on canvas, 44 ¾ u 35 ¼ in., Albany Institute of History & Art, inv. no. 1940.600.28, gift of Catherine Gansevoort (Mrs. Abraham) Lansing.

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choker on her neck.69 The rounded arches through which the Catskills appear were based on illustrations in Dutch Bibles that came to the Hudson Valley around 1700.70 Illustrated Dutch Bibles were a main source for many religious paintings produced in the Albany area in the rst half of the eighteenth century. Possibly because they do not t in neatly with the British predilection for portraits, or because of their repetitive nature, these paintings are often left out of histories of American art.71 They were, however, a major source of decoration for Dutch Americans living in and around Albany throughout the eighteenth century, and over forty survive to this day. Although the Dutch Reformed Church did not allow paintings in churches, it did allow religious paintings in homes. As soon as the Bibles with illustrations based on seventeenth-century Dutch paintings began arriving in New York, artists such as Gerard Duyckinck and others began copying them on canvas. According to Ruth Piwonka, the “Dutch in New York saw themselves, like the Biblical Israelites, as a remnant in the wilderness, in danger of losing their culture and their identity as a people.”72 They thus clung tightly to their religion, which the English allowed them to practice in their own native language. They were very well acquainted with the Bible and desired to have scripture paintings in their homes. Almost all inventories of goods belonging to Dutch Americans in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century include Bibles, and many illustrated Bibles from 1702–1744 from Hudson Valley collections still exist.73 In fact, there were not all that many non-Dutch settlers in Albany, so Dutch culture (in the form of houses, churches, manners, customs, language and art) continued for a much longer period of time. As the Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm said in 1749 when visiting Albany: “The inhabitants of Albany and its environs are almost all Dutchmen. They speak Dutch, have Dutch preachers, and the divine service is 69 John Heaten, Van Bergen Farm, oil on cherry boards, 15 ¼ u 87 5/8 in., Fenimore Art Museum, inv. no. N366.54, illustrated in Blackburn and Piwonka, 27; Attributed to John Heaten, Magdalena Douw, oil on canvas, 51 ¹/16 u 33 in., Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, inv. no. 63.852. illustrated in Black, “Early Colonial Painting,” 229. See Robert G. Wheeler, “The Albany of Magdalena Douw,” Winterthur Portfolio 4 (1969): 63–74. 70 Kenney, 41. 71 The most extensive work to date has been done by Piwonka, Remnant in the Wilderness. 72 Ibid., 11. 73 See Scott, Genealogical Data.

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performed in that language. Their manners are quite Dutch and their sparing manner of living, too.”74 This is undoubtedly why painters such as Vanderlyn and Heaten did not use British mezzotints as sources. Neither these painters nor their solid, middle-class Dutch-American patrons had as much exposure to these prints as their counterparts who traveled and worked in New York or Boston. Even if the Gansevoorts and Wendells did know the British prints, they clearly did not choose to have them emulated. In New York City, the British, and consequently, their prints, had a much stronger inuence. There, Dutch houses, language and even art were outmoded much sooner, so that painters were much more likely to wholeheartedly adopt the mezzotints as sources. Painters in New York City such as the younger Duyckincks and John Watson, or itinerants, such as Nehemiah Partridge, were more aware of “sophisticated” trends. These painters were painting the wealthiest patrons who were most connected to the British and had the most desire to emulate them. Nonetheless, as noted above, even these Dutch patroons allowed or even requested the painters to make changes to their sources to reect their Dutch background. Until now, much of the art brought over, produced or inuenced by the Dutch in New York has been either unknown or ignored. While there have been occasional attempts at including the inuence of Dutch art on the development of art in the Hudson Valley, when it is expanded to inuence on American art in general, it has been summarily dismissed.75 As mentioned, this situation closely parallels and is partly a result of the situation in other areas of American history, where there has been an “erasure” of the Dutch. One of the reasons it was easy to “erase” Dutch art from consideration as a backdrop to American art is that we are unable to identify more that just a few paintings that were denitely imported to, or made in New York in the seventeenth century. Most of the extant examples are portraits, because provenance information for Dutch-American landscape, still life and genre pictures simply does not exist. The fact that they were here, and that they continued to be made, is clearly documented in inventories from the mid-seventeenth

74 Peter Kalm, Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America: The English Version of 1770 (New York: Wilson-Erikson Inc., 1937). 75 Walter Liedtke, “Dutch Paintings in America: The Collectors and Their Ideals,” in Great Dutch Paintings from America (The Hague: Mauritshuis; Zwolle: Waanders, 1990), 19.

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through the mid-eighteenth centuries. Dutch art in all its forms was the rst art to come to New York, and the rst art to be produced here. Its inuence lasted well into the eighteenth century and through an onslaught of British portraiture, which was in itself an offshoot of the Netherlandish portrait tradition. It was the combination of British and Dutch portraiture reinterpreted by the early settlers that created a uniquely American art form. With continued close study of the extant materials, further discovery of Dutch paintings in New York in the seventeenth century and the sorting out of hands, the true impact on Dutch art and taste on the development of early American painting may one day be accurately assessed.

CHAPTER TWO

ERASING THE DUTCH: THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF HUDSON VALLEY DUTCH ARCHITECTURE, 1670–1840 Joseph Manca

Before the mid eighteenth century, attitudes toward Hudson Valley Dutch architecture were generally positive and from the second half of the nineteenth century, the “Dutch Colonial” developed a broad following in America. However, during a crucial period from the middle of the eighteenth century to the mid nineteenth century—under the inuence of Georgian classicism and the subsequent neoclassical movement—the Dutch building style was widely disparaged. This was when much early Dutch architecture was demolished or left to fall into ruin. Looking at the critical reception of early Dutch architecture throws light on the declining critical fortunes of traditional—indeed medieval—architecture in the face of the rising taste for classical forms. During this negative period, there was also a growing distaste for the persistent clannishness and perceived peculiarity of the Dutch Americans themselves, who seemed to set themselves off from other Americans. Ethnic resentment existed on both sides, and this colored the perceptions of non-Dutch observers, who regarded Hudson Valley Dutch buildings as disturbing architecture by an odd and separatist people. All of these early comments call attention to the cultural aspects of the ethnic tensions that occurred between the Dutch and the English populations in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and help to account for the loss of so much early Dutch architecture. Long after the English took over rule of New Netherland, the Hudson Valley Dutch retained certain aspects of their own customs, including language, religion, patterns of social intercourse, and diet.1 The charac-

1 For the continuity of Old World Dutch culture into the New World context, see Alice Kenney, Stubborn for Liberty: The Dutch in New York (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1975), passim; Roderic Blackburn, “Transforming Old World Dutch Culture in a New World Environment: Processes of Material Adaptation,” in New World

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teristic components of Hudson Valley Dutch interiors, including jambless replaces, spoon racks, cabinet beds (bedsteden), and other features, attest to the continuation of the essential styles and forms of the patria (fatherland). New World Dutch architecture was based on Old World models, which underwent some evolution and adaption in America but remained recognizably distinct from British traditions. As the English visitor Thomas Pownall noted when traveling in Albany in 1755: “The Whole Town except a Few New Houses, is intirely built after the Dutch mode.”2 This “Dutch mode” was the conservative style of the fatherland, not the classicism found in architecture of the Netherlands in the seventeenth-century and later. Extant structures or artistic representations of early buildings in New York, Albany, and elsewhere show building forms that are derived from medieval European Dutch styles (Figs. 1 and 2), including the use of raised parapets, steep roofs, elbowed or stepped gables, “mouse-tooth” and other peculiar brickwork, narrow facades with gable fronts, and other forms that had ourished in the Netherlands.3 It is these buildings, with origins in another time and place, that Anglo-Americans and other non-Dutch observers singled out for their comments.

Dutch Studies: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America, 1609–1776, ed. Roderic Blackburn and Nancy Kelley (Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1987), 95–106; Roderic Blackburn and Ruth Piwonka, Remembrance of Patria: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America, 1609–1776 (Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1988); Joyce Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Joseph Manca, “On the Origins of the American Porch: Architectural Persistence in Hudson Valley Dutch Settlements,” Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture 40, nos. 2–3 (Summer-Autumn 2005): 91–132. 2 Thomas Pownall, A Topographical Description of the Dominions of the United States of America, ed. Lois Mulkearn (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1949), 38. 3 For some literature on the building forms of the Dutch in America, see Helen Reynolds, Dutch Houses in the Hudson Valley before 1776 (New York: Payson and Clarke, 1929; repr. New York: Dover Publications, 1965); Rosalie Bailey, Pre-Revolutionary Dutch Houses and Families in Northern New Jersey and Southern New York (New York: William Morrow, 1936; repr. New York: Dover Publications, 1968); Charlotte Wilcoxen, Seventeenth Century Albany: A Dutch Prole (Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1984), 87–96; Roderic Blackburn, “Dutch Domestic Architecture in the Hudson Valley,” Bulletin KNOB [Nieuwnederlandse Studiën: Een Inventarisatie van recent Onderzoek; New Netherland Studies: An Inventory of Current Research and Approaches] 84, nos. 2 and 3 ( June 1985): 151–165; Henk Zantkuyl, “Reconstructie van enkele Nederlandse huizen in Nieuw-Nederland uit de zeventiende eeuw” (“Reconstruction of Some seventeenth-century Dutch Houses in New Netherland”), Bulletin KNOB, 84, nos. 2 and 3 ( June 1985): 174–175. Clifford Zink, “Dutch Framed Houses in New York and New Jersey,” Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture 22 (Winter 1987): 265–294; Kevin Stayton, Dutch

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Two seventeenth-century accounts survive that offer at least passing judgments on Dutch building forms. The Englishman Daniel Denton saw New York in 1670, soon after the acquisition of New Netherland by the British Crown: “New York is built most of Brick and Stone, and covered with red and black Tile, and the Land being high, it gives at a distance a pleasing Aspect to the spectators.”4 Denton saw nothing negative in the style, and seemed pleased by the “red and black tile,” the checker-like or other patterning of which would have been similar to that found on English case pieces of furniture of the time, and which would soon become popular on building exteriors in America through the patterns of glazed brick. His account is hardly elaborate, but he does note the “pleasing Aspect” of the view. More thorough is another early account of the Dutch architectural style by Benjamin Bullivant. This Boston physician traveled from his home city to New York in 1697, taking the opportunity to comment on the details of daily life there as well as on the material culture. Using the word “Dutch” only specically to describe the tiles around the replaces, he still clearly does reference a Netherlandish architectural style: . . . . most of theyr new buildings are magnicent enough, ye fronts of red and yallow (or anders) brick Lookeing very prettily, some of them are 6 stories high and built with a Gable end to ye front, and so by Consequence make Very narrow garratts. The 3d story is usually a warehouse, and over it a Crane for hawleing up goods. the Lower part is comonly Very substantiall and neate. The Sealeing usually of well smoothed boards, betwixt Joyces as large as our Brest sumers, and kept so cleane by frequent washing with soape and sand, that indeed makes the Roome very pleasant. The windows are high and large, as are the stories, ten or 12 foot

by Design: Tradition and Change in Two Historic Brooklyn Houses (New York: The Brooklyn Museum, in association with Phaidon Universe, 1990); Jaap Jacobs, Een zegenrijk gewest: Nieuw-Nederland in de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Prometheus/Bert Bakker, 1999), 342–44 and passim; Harrison Meeske, The Hudson Valley Dutch and Their Houses (Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 2001); Roderic Blackburn, Dutch Colonial Homes in America (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2002); James Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial North America, 3 vols. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 1: 379–422; Janny Venema, Beverwijck: A Dutch Village on the American Frontier, 1652–1664 (Hilversum, the Netherlands, Verloren; and Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 64–79; Manca, “On the Origins of the American Porch,” 91–132; and John Stevens, Dutch Vernacular Architecture in North America, 1640–1830 (West Hurley, NY: The Society for the Preservation of Hudson Valley Vernacular Architecture, 2005). 4 Daniel Denton, A Brief Description of New-York (London: Printed for John Hancock, 1670; reprint, with bibliographical note by Victor Hugo Paltsits, New York, Columbia University Press, 1937), 3.

Fig. 1 James Eights, North Pearl and State Streets—At and Near the Corner—As It Was in 1814, 1849, watercolor, Albany Institute of History and Art, bequest of Ledyard Cogswell, Jr., inv. no. 1954.59.65.

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Fig. 2 James Eights, North Pearl Street —from Steuben Street South—As It Was in 1812, 1850, watercolor, Albany Institute of History and Art, bequest of Ledyard Cogswell, Jr., inv. no. 1954.59.64.

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joseph manca ye rst the casements of wood at bottom of the windows, and without, strong and thick shutters. The chimneys without Jawmes, hanging like the Topp of a pulpitt, but usually a good rich fringed callico, or other stuffe halfe a yard deep at ye edges, with Dutch tyles on each side the re place, carried up very High They also tyle theyr sides of ye staircase, and bottom of windows . . .5

Bullivant was clearly impressed by what he saw, noting that the Dutch houses were kept clean through scrubbing, and the facades well adorned with what we know was a lively pattern formed of variously colored glazed brick, a feature that accorded well with English taste at the time, which itself had been heavily inuenced by the Dutch and Flemish designers in all the arts. The buildings were efcient, with warehouses above, and “substantiall and neate” lower stories. The gable end is turned toward the street, a formation that Dr. Bullivant did not censure. The windows were large, the houses nicely adorned on the inside, and the rooms well sealed. Bullivant’s critical stance accords well with another early outsider account, written by Sarah Kemble Knight in 1706. This Boston lady made the remarkable journey overland from Boston to New York to transact business, and took the opportunity to comment on the architecture. She described her surroundings in Manhattan with great interest and in sharp detail: The Cittie of New York is a pleasant, well compacted place, situated on a Commodius River which is a ne harbour for shipping. The Buildings Brick Generaly, very stately and high, though not altogether like ours in Boston. The Bricks in some of the Houses are of divers Coullers and laid in Checkers, being glazed look very agreeable. The inside of them are neat to admiration, the wooden work, for only the walls plasterd, and the Sumers and Gist are plained and kept very white scowr’d as so is all the partitions if made of Bords. The re places have no Jambs (as ours have) But the backs run ush with the walls, and the Hearth is of Tyles and is as farr out into the Room at the Ends as before the re, which is Generally Five foot in the Low’r rooms, and the peice over where the mantle tree should be is made as ours with Joyners work, and as I suppose is fasten’d to iron rodds inside. The House where the Vendue was, had Chimney Corners like ours, and they and the hearths were laid with the nest tile that I ever see, and the stair cases laid all with white

5 Wayne Andrews, ed., “A Glance at New York in 1697: The Travel Diary of Dr. Benjamin Bullivant,” The New-York Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 1 ( January 1956): 65.

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tile which is ever clean, and so are the walls of the Kitchen which had a Brick oor.6

Mrs. Knight’s early account of Dutch style and interior articulation, like Dr. Bullivant’s, represents the opinion of a viewer who either did not yet know or who remained unconvinced of the superiority of the classical, Georgian forms that were just beginning to appear in Boston. Both of them would have known there a town of medieval houses with gables, asymmetrical placement of doors and windows, steep rooines, batten doors, and windows with diamond-shaped quarrels. It is thus not surprising that they accepted the Dutch style, even admiring the tall and “stately” proportions of the Dutch buildings, which later writers would see as cramped and overly vertical. Like Bullivant, Knight made no complaints about the gable front facades, and seemed intrigued by the lively brickwork with glazed bricks forming a pattern. Knight’s interest in the replace and kitchen perhaps reected her own experience in cooking or overseeing the cooking in her home. She admired the cleanliness of the interior, and was pleased by the Dutch tiles. All in all, among these early observers, the Dutch started out in quite a positive light. Moving forward in time, a description of the Dutch elements found in the architecture of Albany appears in the diary of Reverend Samuel Chandler, who visited that city in October, 1755 from his hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts. His remarks, at rst seemingly neutral, are colored with a sense of the alien: We got into Albany before sunset. The Dutch chimneys have very small Jambs with 3 or 4 rows of Tile. Some no Jambs at all. . . . Some Stone Houses many Brick and some of the streets paved though irregular and rough. Fort from the river ab[ou]t half a mile and ch[urches] are stone. the House Generally Ends to ye street and brick ends and stone and wood Back and gutters all along reaching far over the streets. . . . Brick Houses many of them curiously oured with Black Bricks and dated with the same[.] the Governours house has 2 Hearts in Black brick House chiey but one story high and Brick ends notched Like steps. Window shutters, and loop holes in sellars[.] On the Top of the Houses for weather cocks Horses Lions Geese Sloops etc. etc. Their Bells very often ringing[.] they ring and not tool for a Funeral. The settees at their doors are kept scoured very neat.7 6 Sarah Knight, The Journal of Madam Knight (New York: Peter Smith, 1935), 52–53. 7 Samuel Chandler, “Extracts from the Diary of Rev. Samuel Chandler,” New England Historic Genealogical Society Register, 17 (1863): 348.

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Chandler seems to express a bit of displeasure of the smallness or lack of the jambs in the replaces, and makes no particular note of the neness of the tiles, as had Bullivant. He points out the irregular quality of the streets, which later critics would also note in their explicit criticism of Albany and its architecture. He called attention to the restricted use of brick only for front elevations, and uses the somewhat negative word “curiously” to describe the brick patterning. We can detect an increasing sense that Dutch architecture is different, but there still remains a kind of acceptance and a continued admiration of the cleanliness of the Dutch, in this case in their scrubbing of the front benches. Unlike their European counterparts, Dutch Americans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had not integrated classical language into their architecture. During that time period, a sweeping stylistic movement had introduced classical forms to England and America. Sometimes this classical architectural language was rather restrained in application, and at other times was integrated into an ornate Baroque stylistic context, but the new manner, which in the eighteenthcentury American context is called Georgian, was seen as superior to earlier styles. Seeing little charm in the maintenance of traditional, pre-Renaissance forms, a host of observers—including Americans, Englishmen, and Continental Europeans—passed negative judgment on what they saw in the building forms of the Hudson Valley Dutch. The presence of critics of Dutch architecture from the British Isles is signicant, because these visitors hailed from the very place that was a tastemaker for mainstream Americans, who looked to Britain—both before and after the Revolution—for guidance in matters of style. Recorded examples of negative opinion begin near the middle of the eighteenth century. For example, the Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm noted in 1748–1749 after his visits to New Jersey and New York that, with particular reference to Albany, “most of the houses are built in the old Frankish way, with the gable-end towards the street, except a few, which were recently built in the modern style.”8 This sentence employs a curious word (“Frankiska” in the Swedish), as Frankish literally refers to an early medieval culture near the time of Charlemagne;

8 Adolph Benson, ed., Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America: The English Version of 1770 (New York: Dover, 1987; republication of editions of 1937 and 1966), 341. [ The original text can be found in Pehr Kalms Resa till Norra Amerika, 4 vols., eds. F. Elfving and G. Schauman (Helsingfors: Tidnings- & Tryckeri-Aktiebolagets Tryckeri, 1904–1929), III [1915]: 143.]

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it is Kalm’s way of indicating the deeply archaic nature of what he saw, and signies his understanding that Dutch-American architecture was rmly rooted in medieval traditions. The word Frankish can be regarded as a denunciation. Still, Kalm otherwise describes the Hudson Valley Dutch architecture in a more neutral manner, and if he raises other criticism it is in a moral sense: in the construction of brick-only fronts, Kalm detected an unnecessary “ostentation” that deceives the viewer into thinking that the whole structure is sheathed with brick, and not also with clapboard.9 Another writer apparently under the sway of the modern taste was James Birket, a merchant and sea captain from Antigua, who made no attempt to disguise his dislike of the Dutch buildings in New York of 1750, “too many” of which were present: Neither their Streets nor houses are at all Regular Some being 4 or 5 Story high and Others not above two, Not any of the Modern houses are built with the Gable End to the Street as was formerly the fashion amongst all the old Dutch Settlers, but are many of ‘em Spacious Genteel houses Some are built of hewn stone Others of English and Also of the Small white Hollands Brick, which looks neat but not grand, their houses are Generally neat within and well Furnished, Notwithstanding there Still remains too many of the Old Dutch houses which prevents its Appearing to Advantage.10

Birket anticipates the themes harped on by all outside observers: the Dutch turning of their gables to the street, the genteel and superior style of the non-Dutch, Georgian manner, and the deep-seated wish to see the Dutch buildings go away so that the cities would improve in appearance with the introduction of better and more modern structures. Peter Kalm wrote “Frankish,” while the more accurate word “gothic” was used by Dr. James Thacher. This military physician traveling with the Continental Army in 1778 thought that the Dutch houses in northern New Jersey had a curious look to them, and a “peculiar neatness” with their pillars in front and kitchen wings on the side, but he had also noted in 1777 that the buildings of Albany, about three hundred in number, and including a number of brick buildings with stepped gables, “are chiey in the gothic style, the gable ends to the street.” He called

9

Ibid., 21. James Birket, Some Cursory Remarks Made by James Birket in his Voyage to North America 1750–1751 (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Humphrey Milford; and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916), 43–44. 10

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the new City Hall in Albany a “decent edice,” but he referred to the old Dutch church there only as “an ancient Dutch church of stone.”11 We moderns have great veneration for ancient forms and in particular for the picturesque and emotionally evocative aspects of Gothic architecture, but in the eighteenth century through the rst quarter of the nineteenth century or so that style was often received quite negatively. Failing to incorporate the moldings, architectural orders, and so forth of the ongoing classical tradition, it connoted that which was outdated and unproportional, and the word “gothic” was also used more generally to mean anything uncouth or even barbarous. A negative cast was expressed by another colonial period commentator, Warren Johnson, brother of Sir William Johnson, the colonial ofcial in charge of Royal army fortications, who remarked on New York City’s architecture, saying that the streets are poorly laid out and narrow, fronted by “. . . Houses made of Brick, and Shingled. Some Odd old Dutch Houses, the People mostly Dutch, and have something Odd about them . . . There has been a kind of Smugling from this Place to the French, which is Stopped.”12 Here criticism of the ethnic populace is merged with that of their architecture (odd buildings by odd people), and the passage includes a reference to the issue of non-allegiance and trafcking with the French. Another late colonial Englishman voiced much the same opinion as Johnson. Lord Adam Gordon, traveling on behalf of the British Crown in the 1770s, lamented the selshness of the Dutch in Albany, with “an unwearied attention to their own personal and particular interests, and an abhorrence to all superiour powers” (i.e., presumably to the English elite and royal ofcials). As for the architecture there, “The Town is dull and ill built, having the Gavel [gable] end of their houses all to the Streets, which are very dirty and crooked, and conned by the rising grounds, close behind the Town.”13 Like Johnson, Gordon found selsh people and poor, ill-built structures, all set in a poorly planned city.

11

James Thacher, A Military Journal during the American Revolutionary War, from 1775 to 1783 (Boston: Cottons and Barnard, 1823; second edition, revised and corrected, 1827), 91 and 154. In New Jersey he was describing Paramus and Aquackanock, the latter of which comprised what is now Clifton and parts of Passaic. 12 “Warren Johnson’s Journal 1760–1761,” in The Papers of Sir William Johnson, 14 vols. (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1921–1965), vol. 13 (1962), 185. 13 Gordon’s account (“Journal of an Ofcer who Travelled in America and the West Indies in 1764 and 1765,”) can be found in Newton Mereness, Travels in the American Colonies (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 417.

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The turning of the gable end towards the street was disturbing to a number of non-Dutch, Anglo-American viewers, for whom a proper residence had to have the gable ends situated on the sides (sometimes with gambrel roofs), or have no gables at all in the case of a hipped roof, which they sometimes called an “Italian roof ” and associated it with the Renaissance tradition. The construction of narrow facades and the turning of the gable ends towards the street was a part of an ongoing European Dutch practice, encouraged by the shortage of land in Dutch cities, but it did not accord well with the taste in the period under discussion in England and America. In the mainstream AngloAmerican context, the turning of a gable end toward the street was a marker for a commercial building, or for a small, vernacular home, perhaps one thoughtlessly designed or the building site of which was constrained. As we have seen, the advent of taste for classical, Georgian architecture in the colonial period led to the erosion of the critical fortunes of the Dutch style. The advent of the new Republic and the increasing integration of the Dutch populations with others about them did little to change the attitudes toward their architecture. Indeed, the negative stance became even more pronounced, as classical ideals, now expressed in the new language of the Federal-period style, became even more fully entrenched. Meanwhile, annoyance seems to increase with the persistent elements of clannishness of the Hudson Valley Dutch. Among the more objective of observers was the writer Jedidiah Morse, who surveyed the American geographical and urban scene in the early national period, publishing his work in 1789. He commented on the houses in Albany as follows: “They are built in the old Dutch Gothic style with the gable end to the street, which custom the rst settlers brought with them from Holland. The gable end is commonly on brick, with the heavily molded ornament of slanting with notches, like stairs, and an iron horse, for a weather cock, on top.”14 The stepped gable must have seemed a purely Gothic form to Morse, as the fashion for that in English-inspired American architecture went out already in the seventeenth century, and appears, for example, in Gothic building like St. Luke’s Church in Smitheld, Virginia (nished by the 1680s). Again,

14 Jedidiah Morse, The American Geography (Elizabethtown, NJ: Printed by Shepard Kollock, for the author, 1789; reprint New York: 1970), 358.

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the word Gothic in an architectural context usually carried a disparaging connotation for eighteenth-century Anglo-American minds. Writing in this same period, the English traveler William Strickland lamented in 1795 that the town of Albany “has no beauty to recommend it,” the houses being “very irregular, most of them old in the Dutch stile, with gavel [gable] ends of heavy brick work to the street.” Stronger in tone still was the Irishman Isaac Weld, who toured broadly in the new American nation. He did not criticize the Dutch in his account of New York City, but his trip to Albany in the 1790s upset his sensibilities: “Albany is a city, and contains about eleven hundred houses; the number however is increasing fast, particularly since the removal of the state government from New York. In the old part of the town the streets are very narrow, and the houses are frightful; they are all built in the old Dutch taste, with the gable end towards the street, and ornamented on the tops with large iron weather-cocks; but in that part which has been lately erected, the streets are commodious, and many of the houses handsome.”15 These “frightful” Dutch buildings, such as those recorded by James Eights (cf. Figs. 1 and 2), often crammed onto narrow streets, stood in contrast to the more commodious and handsome houses of the Anglo-American taste. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, writing in the second decade of the nineteenth century but commenting on his recollection of the earlier architectural history of Albany, wrote the following, with useful insight into the destruction of Hudson Valley Dutch architecture: “This city is exceedingly improved. In the year 1792, there were very few houses built in the modern English manner. The body was composed of clumsy, Dutch buildings, a great number of which had been erected from eighty to one hundred years [earlier].” This New Englander noted that re had destroyed some of these outmoded Dutch buildings, but “a considerable number of houses have been pulled down to make way for better buildings, to furnish convenience, gratify ambition, or satisfy the calculations of avarice.”16 The “clumsy” Dutch buildings had failed

15 William Strickland, Journal of a Tour in the United States of America, 1794–1795, ed. J.E. Stickland (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1971). 160. Isaac Weld, Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797, 2 vols. (London: printed for John Stockdale, 1807, fourth edition; cited here from repr. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, Publisher, 1970), I, 271. 16 Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, 4 vols, ed. Barbara Miller Solomon (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), III, 296–297 [originally published as Travels; in New-England and New-York, 4 vols. (NewHaven: Published by Timothy Dwight, 1821–1822].

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to meet the modern, English-inspired ideal of classicism, and many were pulled down to make way for “better” buildings, in a ner style and more commodious of function. Even if some Georgian buildings were also pulled down in America during this time to make room for the newer Federal style, these Anglo-American buildings did not usually elicit the harsh critical language that the “frightful” Dutch buildings evoked. At any rate, the result of the process described by Dwight is that many early Dutch buildings of Albany did not survive to the age of photography, and we often have to rely on the chance survival of artworks for our record of New World Dutch buildings. The oor plans of the Dutch houses, less likely to be mentioned by observers passing by on the outside, also failed to accord with “modern” Georgian or Federal period taste. Apart from the question of classicism, Dutch houses lacked the broad central hallways that were deemed desirable according to the Georgian and Federal-period preference. Similarly, the narrow proportions of the Dutch facade elevations, a legacy of the Old World Continental preference and dense urban conditions, did not match the new English-inuenced preference for breadth of facade design. In addition, the Dutch houses had their peculiar fenestration, alien in form and failing to let light pour into the rooms as was increasingly the taste. Dutch urban houses seemed dark and closed, an appearance abetted by the physical closing of the apertures: the Maryland doctor Alexander Hamilton complained that the Albanians lived “as if it were in prisons, all their doors and windows being perpetually shut.”17 If domestic, urban Dutch architecture failed to meet the stylistic and functional norms set by the dominant Anglo population, the problem was equally acute in the ecclesiastical sphere. The earliest Dutch settlers—like some of the New England Puritans who avoided building in the manner prevalent under the aegis of the Church of England—rejected traditional architectural forms for their churches, such as length-wise axiality, dominant end towers, and altars for the eucharist, all aspects that were redolent of the oppressive traditions of earlier Church modes of building. When the New World Dutch themselves began to move away from such strict avoidance of traditional forms during the eighteenth century, they turned away from the

17 Alexander Hamilton, Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 1744, ed. Carl Bridenbaugh (Pittsburgh, PA, and London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 73.

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forms of their early church building in America. Who had a use for a small, early Dutch octagonal church like the one formerly at Bergen, New Jersey?18 The rst Dutch settlers might have wanted these, but the erce Calvinism and Lutheranism that brought about the opposition to “papist”-inspired emphasis on lengthwise orientation and axiality was abating. Indeed, the drop in church attendance caused the Hudson Valley Dutch to abandon their own church buildings, and no one else was stepping in to repair or re-use these ancient, outmoded structures, which were either in the way of urban progress or were isolated in location. A fascinating account of this process of decline of Dutch-American ecclesiastical architecture is offered by the traveler William Strickland in 1819–1820. Speaking of the area near Poughkeepsie, he noted: The Dutch language was no longer any where taught, and little used, except among some old people chiey residing in retired and unfrequented places; that the service of Religion was now performed here to the Dutch congregation in English . . . This information conrm’d the conjectures I had formed on seeing the State of their churches here and at Fishkill as well as on the road to this place, where meeting with a church in a very dilapidated condition, the church yard fences down, and every thing about it in a neglected state upon enquiry I found it to be another Dutch Church, which they who formerly frequented it, having forsaken their language, had forsaken also, being led away by other more prevailing sects.19

So, the Dutch, through assimilation, abandoned their own churches, small, dark, old-fashioned, often squarish, and crumbling stone buildings that no other population or group was willing to revive for ecclesiastical or any other purpose. The eighteenth-century church in Fishkill survives, having been used as a prison and hospital in the meantime and later altered, but that is a rare survivor. Others are gone, and mostly unrecorded in their appearance. At any rate, in Strickland’s account we certainly detect no sense of loss for such churches. Worthy of note in this discussion is one of the rare survivals from the Hudson Valley, what is known as the Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow, New York, the only extant Hudson Valley Dutch church from the seventeenth century (Fig. 3). Under the aegis of the patron Frederick

18 Hugh Morrison, Early American Architecture From the First Colonial Settlements to the National Period (Oxford: 1952; repr. New York: Dover Publications, 1987), 118. 19 Strickland, 102–103.

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Fig. 3 Old Dutch Church, Sleepy Hollow, New York, ca. 1690–1700, altered ca. 1837. Photo: Joseph Manca.

Philipse (born in 1626 in Friesland), the small stone structure dates to the 1690s. A small re served as an excuse to transform it in 1837 into a country Gothic church; after that time it was stripped of its basic Dutchness and lost the exposed beams inside (since re-exposed), offcenter side entrance, and the severity of the high, small, rectangular windows with metal bars (Fig. 4), the alteration carried out by the congregation itself, which had for generations been slowly assimilating into the mainstream of a broader non-Dutch society.20 The white coating on

20 For information on the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow (formerly North Tarrytown), see A Brief History of Tarrytown from 1680 to September 1880 (Tarrytown, NY: Geo. Wiley and Bro., 1880), 4–9; Edgar Bacon, Chronicles of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow ( New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), 40; the typed manuscript by Harold Cater, including conservation notes, “The Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow: A Study Prepared by the Staff of Sleepy Hollow Restorations for the Consideration of its Trustees,” (1 September 1956), library archives, Historic Hudson Valley, Sleepy Hollow, New York, esp. 13–17; and Lucille and Theodore Hutchinson, The Centennial History of North Tarrytown (Cambridge, MD: Western Publishing Co., 1974), 15–19 and 66–70. I wish to thank Kathleen Hamilton of Rice University’s Visual Resource Center for help with the reconstruction shown in Fig. 4.

Fig. 4

Old Dutch Church, Sleepy Hollow, New York; reconstruction of original appearance. Photo: Joseph Manca.

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the eldstone and bricks, characteristic of Dutch practice and an early and perhaps original feature of the church, is gone, as a natural stone appearance was favored by those who carried out the Gothic Revival alterations of the 1830s. The rustic location allowed the Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow to be transformed to a picturesque, country setting for weddings and other ceremonial use, while the main congregation of the Dutch Reformed group relocated to a church in Tarrytown, a Greek Revival structure that, with some alterations, also survives. As for urban churches built by the early Dutch, these also lacked champions, and were over time demolished for urban progress. Not all the opposition to Dutch architecture came from the nonDutch: a silent form of criticism of Dutch architecture was the rejection of it by ethnic Dutch patrons, many of them from the elite of society, who were on the path to assimilation and who aspired to climb higher in the ranks of Anglo-dominated society. Critical fortunes can be expressed in words, but also in deeds, and it is notable that aristocratic Dutch families themselves were turning their backs on Dutch traditions and adopting the English Georgian manner. For example, Frederick Philipse II, Lord of Philipsburgh Manor, built the southern end of his manor hall in Yonkers sometime between 1719–1730, expanding on a smaller structure from c. 1682 (Fig. 5). Rather than build in a conservative Dutch tradition, Frederick Philipse II chose to build in a style compatible with the English, Georgian manner, expressing his family’s assimilation into English colonial culture. Such changes were not incompatible with Dutch classicism itself of the eighteenth century, and these wealthy families were doubtless aware of that, but it is most likely, given the Anglo-American context, that English-inspired forms stood behind the change. The elite of the ethnic Dutch adopted British architectural taste long before many of the other Hudson Valley Dutch did, in particular those in more remote locations, many of them clinging to traditional Dutch building forms, language, dress, and religion. Other prominent Dutch families, such as the van Cortlandts and the van Rensselaers, were no less quick to turn to English Georgian fashion in architecture and the decorative arts. A signicant account marking events from before the Revolution records one observer’s appreciation for the architecture of an assimilated family. Anne MacVicar Grant, a highly observant and literate woman, had a chance as a girl to spend time in the Hudson Valley, as from 1758 to 1768 (until she reached the age of thirteen), she resided at Claverack, where her father was stationed with a Highland regiment.

Fig. 5 Philipse Manor Hall, Yonkers, New York, ca. 1719–1730, other additions ca. 1745–1755. Photo: Joseph Manca.

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Anne learned to speak Dutch early during her stay in New York. She spent time in various levels of society, and she later left us a vivid recollection of her life and thoughts in the New World. Grant’s time in the New World was a halcyon time for her, and in Albany, instead of focusing on old-fashioned Dutch houses, she noted the uncrowded aspect of the city, as if she were describing a pleasant, English country town. The town [Albany], in proportion to its population, occupied a great space of ground. This city, in short, was a kind of semi-rural establishment; every house had its garden, well, and a little green behind; before every door a tree was planted, rendered interesting by being coeval with some beloved member of the family; many of their trees were of a prodigious size and extraordinary beauty, but without regularity, every one planting the kind that best pleased him, or which he thought would afford the most agreeable shade to the open portico at his door, which was surrounded by seats, and ascended by a few steps. It was in these that each domestic group was seated in summer evenings to enjoy the balmy twilight, or serenely clear moonlight.21

She is describing the famous Dutch stoop, and its peaceable urban surroundings. Anne was also smitten by the porch at the Flats, the aristocratic, country home of Colonel Philip Schuyler and his wife, 21 Anne [MacVicar] Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady: With Sketches of Manners and Scenery in America, as they Existed Previous to the Revolution, 2 vols. (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, Pater-Noster-Row; and Mrs. H. Cook, JermynStreet, 1808; New York: Research Reprints, 1970), I, 45–46. The Schuyler house at the Flats was subjected to alterations and nally burned in 1962. For the history of the house and an illustration of the earliest photograph, see Reynolds, Dutch Houses, 94–96 and 150. Regarding the Schuyler house in Albany, Grant observed: “In front of Madame’s house was a portico, towards the street. To this she was supported, in ne evenings, when the whole town were enjoying themselves on their respective seats of one kind or other. To her’s there were a few steps of ascent, on which we used humbly to seat ourselves; while a succession of ‘the elders of that city’ paid their respects to Madame, and conversed with her by turns. Never was levee better attended” (II, 193). Similarly, in her mention of the covered porch at the Flats (I, 166), Grant offered an enthusiastic mention of the portico among country houses of the area: “This house had also two appendages common to all those belonging to persons in easy circumstances there. One was a large portico at the door, with a few steps leading up to it, and oored like a room; it was open at the sides, and had seats all round. Above was either a slight wooden roof, painted like an awning, or a covering of lattice-work, over which a transplanted wild vine spread its luxuriant leaves and numerous clusters: These, though small, and rather too acid till sweetened by the frost, had a beautiful appearance. What gave an air of liberty and safety to these rustic porticos, which always produced in my mind a sensation of pleasure that I know not how to dene, was the number of little birds domesticated there.”

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Margaretta, north of Albany near the Hudson River. Her attraction to the Dutch stoop and portico are grounded in the Anglo experience of the summerhouse, where sociability occurred in an elite and leisurely setting. Her account of the Flats, and of the city of Albany, was not focused on architectural style per se, and she was more interested in the social aspects of her stay in the region, where the elite Dutch families were eagerly embracing the English Georgian modes. Of extant Georgian residences of this type in that area, perhaps the best preserved is Philip Schuyler’s mansion in Albany, a thoroughly English Georgian residence of 1761. Even in this otherwise mostly negatively critical period during the early Republic, not all Dutch building forms were criticized by the nonDutch. One aspect of Hudson Valley architecture that received praise was the Dutch form of barn. New World Dutch barns were related to Old World farmhouses (which often comprised humans and animals living under one roof ) in form, spatial arrangements, and framing techniques, even if the New World barns had evolved and changed from the European prototypes. Dutch-American barns, greatly admired for both their form and function, were characterized early on as being like wooden cathedrals, as anking doors opened to two “side aisles,” where the animals remained behind barriers that went the length of the structure. One fed the animals from the central nave-like area, an airy space that also served as a work area and that allowed freedom of movement for laborers.22 Many of these barns have survived, and the construction formula was followed well into the nineteenth century. So far we have said little about Hudson Valley Dutch farmhouses. Urban or town residences and churches were clearly alien and sometimes repugnant to non-Dutch, and they often occupied valuable real estate and were often happily demolished. As for Dutch-American farmhouses, they were not usually subject to formal criticism, and they were often out of the way of urban development. They have survived in fairly ample numbers, roughly equivalent to the survival rate of Anglo farmhouses of the same period in New York or New England. Hudson Valley Dutch farmhouses served enough of a purpose for the

22 See Vincent Schaefer, Dutch Barns of New York: An Introduction (Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, 1994); and John Fitchen, The New World Dutch Barn: The Evolution, Forms, and Structure of a Disappearing Icon, second edition, edited and with new material by Gregory Huber (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001). See also David Cohen, The Dutch-American Farm (New York and London: New York University Press, 1992).

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rustic inhabitants who maintained them. Still, even if these survived, later owners altered many of them for stylistic reasons or because of changing domestic functions, as was true for non-Dutch farmhouses built in the older styles. Whitewash was stripped from the natural stone to conform to ideals of Romantic architecture; porches were added, some with Greek Revival details or Victorianizing trim; uppers stories were added, and wings adjoined. In many cases it has taken considerable architectural reconstruction to bring them back to their original form, if this remains possible at all. They survived as structural frames, but like much vernacular architecture—Dutch, English, German, or other—were freely altered to correspond to later tastes. At any rate, as far as the critical fortunes go, most visitors spent time describing the interior details or the residents themselves rather than leveling criticism at rustic dwellings. For example, Dr. Alexander Hamilton came across a small farmhouse in the Hudson Valley near the Hudson Highlands on his way from Albany to New York and left the following account: “We went ashore to the house of one Kaen Buikhaut, a Dutch farmer. The old man was busy in making a slaigh, which is a travelling machine used here and att Albany in the winter to run upon the snow. The woman told us she had eighteen children, nine boys and as many girls.”23 After having visited another Hudson Valley farmhouse, Hamilton described the poverty and backwardness of the residents, and also the anomalous presence of some luxury objects. As for their style, farmhouses were apparently not thought to be fair game for the kind of critical stance accorded to urban or town buildings. A question remains whether the survival rate of Dutch architecture was harmed by the poor reputation that the Dutch and their buildings had among other Americans. This brings us to very speculative grounds, as each building had its own story and its own context for demise. Some buildings burned down, especially in terrible res in New York City and Albany; some fell down; and others were in the way of urban economic development, as was true for other early structures from other ethnic groups. Indeed, much early Anglo and other non-Dutch architecture, when it fell into decrepitude or went out of style, was gladly pulled down or left to rot: Hudson Valley Dutch buildings were not alone in the American context in meeting opposition and facing destruction. Still, it is important to emphasize that Dutch architecture

23

Hamilton, 54–55, 78.

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and other material culture faced particular pressures for survival not faced by English-derived buildings and objects of material culture. Given the negative criticism that the Dutch architectural heritage faced, it is hardly by chance that so much has been lost, and that, for example, not a single building with a fully stepped gable front from the Dutch legacy has survived in America. We have already suggested one of these pressures: early Dutch architecture is essentially medieval, being rightly characterized as “Gothic” by several earlier commentators, and was created by an ethnic different from the English. The discomfort caused by the alien style was exacerbated by the poor critical fortunes of the Dutch themselves, who were generally disparaged before 1840 or so in the writings of Americans and non-Dutch travelers who came to the Hudson Valley region. Peter Kalm complained that the Dutch are avaricious and live in a closed society. He noted how the Dutch in Albany stood against the Anglo population at the time of the French and Indian War, and that the hatred of the “English” against the Hudson Valley Dutch is great, but the Dutch hate the Anglo population ten times more.24 The Marylander Alexander Hamilton admitted that the Dutch houses were clean, but he lamented that the people themselves were dirty and slovenly. Like other early observers, he complained of the excessive frugality of the Dutch, lamenting that “their whole thoughts being turned upon prot and gain which necessarily makes them live retired and frugall,” this attitude “being the common character of the Dutch every where.”25 William Strickland, an English nobleman who traveled through various part of America in 1794 and 1795, declared that the Dutch are unrened and clumsy, indolent and ignorant, and that a “residence of two centuries in this country had not been able to improve” them. For her part, Frances Wright, an English traveler to America, wrote in her travel account of 1819–1820 that the Dutch in New York “are here and there in full possession of the temple of ignorance” and in one community “have taken a century to learn half a dozen English words and to acquire the fth part of a new idea.” Not all commentators remarked negatively on the Dutch; for example, Reverend Andrew Burnaby called

24 Kalm, 343–346. A continued “mortal aversion” of the Hudson Valley Dutch for the local English population is afrmed by Strickland, 124. 25 Hamilton, 72–73.

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them “habitually frugal, industrious, and parsimonious.”26 Still, negative opinions far outweighed the positive. It is impossible to quantify exactly the role that this played in working against the survival of Dutch buildings, and doubtless the economics of land value and stylistic taste were paramount factors, but it cannot have helped that there was disrespect of the Dutch people themselves. Ethnic conict formed the backdrop to the architectural criticism, and vice versa, each fortifying the other, and we thus hear from the non-Dutch about their displeasure at the “odd buildings by odd people,” to paraphrase Warren Johnson’s rather mild assessment of the 1760s. In this question of architectural survival, perhaps more important than ethnic hatred was the fact that early national-period Americans had no great early Dutchmen to admire. There was no veneration of early Dutch leaders, as there was for Paul Revere, George Washington, and Betsy Ross, all of whose colonial residences were saved for posterity. This kind of veneration was signicant over time also for consideration of whole groups of people, especially for the early British settlers in New England, who were admired by other Anglo-Americans in the eighteenth century and later and reputed to be upstanding, literate, sturdy, and moral pioneers of a new continent. They had gained the admiration of the dominant U.S. populace from the beginning, and this had a radiating, positive effect on attitudes towards their material culture. During the course of the nineteenth century, there arose a preservation movement that venerated groups such as the Pilgrims of New England and individual Founding Fathers. It is noteworthy that two New York State farmhouses where George Washington stayed—the DeWint House in Tappan (Fig. 6) and the Jonathan Hasbrouck House in Newburgh—survived because of his association with them rather than because of their value as specimens of Dutch or Palatine German architectural traditions. A great amount of Dutch architecture was lost between 1750 and 1850, and had it survived longer might have lasted to the time of the “Holland Mania” beginning in the later nineteenth century, a period in which Dutch people and early Dutch culture became

26 Strickland, 175; see also 74, 100 note 7, 102, 123, and 163. Frances Wright, Views of Society and Manners in America, ed. Paul Baker (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 216. Andrew Burnaby, Travels through the Middle Settlements in North-America (Dublin: Printed for R. Marchbank, 1775), 143.

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Fig. 6 DeWint House, Tappan, New York, dated 1700. Photo: Joseph Manca.

attractive to mainstream Americans.27 As it is, before that time there was no compelling reason before the later nineteenth century for other Americans to preserve Dutch structures, in particular urban or town buildings, which were out of style, made by peculiar people, and stood in the way of economic progress. I would like to end this essay with a word about Washington Irving, who is a key transitional gure in the matter of the critical fortunes of the Dutch and their built environment. Historically, Irving stands between the old critical attitude and the revival mentality of the nineteenth century and later. His description in the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” of the Van Tassel farmhouse and its characteristic Dutch “piazza,” or porch, is both picturesque and warm, and extends to the decorative arts: “It was one of those spacious farmhouses, with high ridged, but lowly-sloping roofs, built in the style handed down from the rst Dutch settlers; the low, projecting eaves forming a piazza along

27 For the revival of Dutch culture in America, see Annette Stott, Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1998), especially 78–211.

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the front, capable of being closed up in bad weather . . . Benches were built along the sides for summer use; and a great spinning wheel at one end, and a churn at the other, showed the various uses to which this important porch might be devoted.”28 Irving completes the picture with a description of the interior, with its adornment of pewter on display, dried apples and peaches hung in festoons, and hanging ostrich eggs. Irving’s whole picture of the Dutch, here as in the mock-heroic History of New York, is picturesque and mirthful. His panorama of the Hudson Valley Dutch depicts a self-important, isolated, buffoonish, and blissfully ignorant people who are superstitious and pleasure-loving. Compared to some of the earlier social critics, Irving is relatively genial, and he does not echo the vitriol of some earlier commentators. Still, Irving’s written works—some of them ction, some mirthful history posing as straightforward historical accounts—fail to create any kind of serious veneration or respect for the Dutch, and he echoes the criticism of the clannishness of the Dutch as stated by earlier writers. In addition to his writings, Irving addressed the presence of the Dutch in the region in the style that he chose for his own home. Built after almost a century of published criticism of Hudson Valley Dutch architecture, Irving’s Sunnyside, designed in the mid-1830s by the painter George Harvey in collaboration with Irving, stands as an early attempt to evoke the medieval Dutch style that ourished earlier in the area (Fig. 7).29 However, despite the use (indeed, perhaps overuse) of the stepped gable motif, the house is a stylistic hybrid, with an AngloAmerican central hall, neoclassical moldings on the interior, a Chinese pagoda-like addition housing the kitchen and servants quarters, a river-front porch with English Tudor arches, and other details (chimney proles and rusticated window surrounds) that bespeak a mixture of various European traditions. It is noteworthy that there is a real Dutch house embedded in the middle, a simpler structure from the mideighteenth century that Irving used as the central building core for what he called his “Rookery;” the earlier building is disguised and effaced by Irving’s hybrid fantasy. Like the gures in his History of New York,

28 Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1849), 435–436. 29 For the architecture of Sunnyside, see Harold Cates, “Washington Irving and Sunnyside,” New York History 38, no. 2 (April 1957): 123–166, and Kathleen Johnson, Washington Irving’s “Sunnyside” (Tarrytown, NY: Historic Hudson Valley Press, 1995).

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George Harvey (architect), Sunnyside (home of Washington Irving), 1835–1837, Tarrytown, New York. Photo: Joseph Manca.

the Dutch elements in Sunnyside are ctional and self-conscious and almost tongue-in-cheek, based on real early forms but cleverly recast into an attractive work of art. Irving stood between two worlds, and he helped inaugurate interest in the Dutch during the Colonial Revival movement. After him, there would be a nostalgia for the Dutch, which later would be abetted by the immigration movement from Eastern and Southern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth century, a time when Dutch Americans, and their architecture, would be rediscovered as a “good” ethnic group, and the European roots of Dutch culture would be explored by the eager American tourists who traveled to the Low Countries. Today, the early Dutch contribution to American colonial architecture, rather than being called clumsy, frightful, and odd, is treasured, and Dutch Americans themselves admired for their cultural contributions. The change in critical fortunes, combined with the modern historic preservation movement, has helped to rescue a valuable and unique part of American architectural history.

PART II

NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN INTERPRETERS OF DUTCHNESS

CHAPTER THREE

THE GHOSTING OF THE HUDSON VALLEY DUTCH Judith Richardson

In recent years, scholars have rediscovered something that diverse Americans have known implicitly since the early days of nationhood: hauntings do important cultural work.1 For a country that came into cultural self-awareness in an era of Romanticism, a country perennially self-conscious about a perceived lack of historical depth, hauntedness has proven perversely attractive as a form of cultural memory, able to weave historical sense out of shadows and to both express and displace the social anxieties inherent in a nation built on colonialist dispossession and largely composed of strangers. While these capacities have fostered countless ghost stories throughout the United States over time, one of the seminal sites of American hauntedness—a crucial site in American history and culture in many ways—has been the Hudson Valley. And key among the multifarious factors fueling this region’s extraordinary ghostliness is the fact that it was once a Dutch colony, a phenomenon that places the Dutch, albeit in fraught ways, at the foundations of American cultural memory. Dutch colonial settlement contributed to Hudson Valley haunting in part because the Dutch, like any other group of settlers, brought to the region their own culture, which included supernatural gures and ghostlore.2 More broadly, though, and more problematically, as Dutch

1 Material in this essay is reprinted by permission of the publisher from Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley, by Judith Richardson, pp. 52–62, 128–145, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2003 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Excerpts have been adapted to further highlight relationships between haunting and Dutchness. For other instances of recent scholarly work on haunting, see Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000); and Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998). 2 See Elizabeth Paling Funk, “Washington Irving and His Dutch-American Heritage” (Ph.D. dissertation, Fordham University, 1986); and Van Cleaf Bachman, Alice P. Kenney,

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history in the region came to be obscured by subsequent waves of settlement and historical changes, the Dutch themselves came to be gured as ghostly. Starting from the pioneering tales of Washington Irving, and moving on to a deluge of regional writings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this essay explores how the Dutch have featured in the haunting of the Hudson Valley, and how hauntedness has shadowed the construction of Dutchness in America. *

*

*

In the seventeenth century, the mid-Atlantic region, especially the Hudson Valley area, was characterized by an anomalous extrusion of Dutch colonialism situated between English claims in New England and Virginia.3 Explored by Henry Hudson for the Dutch East India Company in 1609, New Netherland began to be settled in 1624, and though its population grew slowly relative to its English neighbors, and included sizable non-Dutch segments, this rst colonial layer left a Dutch imprint on the region that lasted beyond the takeover of the colony by the English in 1664, and through tides of Anglo-dominated migration into the region. Indeed, long after the Revolution that made the colonies into states, Dutch-descended families, customs, and buildings remained in place. However, for various reasons—including language barriers, the fact that many Dutch colonial documents were housed in the Netherlands, the lack of historical self-consciousness on the part of colonial Dutch settlers (as Donna Merwick writes, “the Dutch were a people reluctant with pen and paper”),4 and rapid post-Revolutionary social and political changes—Dutch colonial history, already deemed “prehistoric” by eighteenth-century historians, was largely lost to Hudson Valley inhabitants by the early nineteenth century.5

and Lawrence G. Van Loon, “ ‘Het Poelmeisie’: An Introduction to the Hudson Valley Dutch Dialect,” New York History 61 (April 1980): 161–185. 3 On Dutch history in the Hudson Valley, see Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: Brill, 2005) and Oliver Rink, Holland on the Hudson: An Economic and Social History of Dutch New York (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986). 4 Donna Merwick, Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 182. 5 Alice P. Kenney, Stubborn for Liberty: The Dutch In New York (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1975), 235. On problems of colonial Dutch historiography see Kenney, 235–254; and the “Introduction,” to Joyce D. Goodfriend, ed., Revisiting New Netherland: Perspectives on Early Dutch America (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 1–10.

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Enter Washington Irving, a young journalist and would-be writer looking for a story. Born and raised in New York City just after the Revolution, the son of an Englishman, Irving was, like his city and country, still oriented toward Britain. Yet, he had also encountered Dutch presences in his native city and its upriver hinterlands, and in this, discovered the material that would eventually propel him to international acclaim, while also putting the United States on the literary map for the rst time. Irving rst began mining New York’s unique Dutch background in humorous journalistic pieces in the early 1800s and in his 1809 hit, A History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker—a literary spoof and political satire that took the form of a comic (and frequently ctional) history of New Netherland. Though his early work shows Irving as yet ill-disposed to argue with an assessment he later parodies through his narratorial persona Geoffrey Crayon—that the United States was too new to have garnered “historical and poetical associations”6—he clearly continued to ponder the Hudson Valley Dutch as he began to develop a more Romantic eye during travels in Great Britain and Europe in the late 1810s and 1820s. Indeed, the problem of the Dutch presence in New York became for him the inspiration and prime material for his most signature, ground-breaking works, including “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820), “Dolph Heyliger” in Bracebridge Hall (1822), and “The Money Diggers” section of Tales of a Traveller (1824). What made for the sense of hauntedness so much in Romantic vogue, Irving realized, was not necessarily the substance of history but rather the elision of the past—a sense of obscurity that might come from a rapid accumulation of changes as much as from the simple passage of time. Looking back at the Hudson Valley, Irving found that just such a shadowy sense emanated from the region’s historical and social shiftiness, which worked a kind of alchemy on its Dutch heritage in particular. A fairly skeletal exposition of how Dutch underpinnings provided grounding for regional ghost stories is found in “The Haunted House” from Bracebridge Hall (1822), which is itself not so much a tale as a recipe for creating a local haunting. Geoffrey Crayon, having been asked by

6 Washington Irving, Bracebridge Hall; or, The Humorists (1822), ed. Herbert F. Smith (Boston: Twayne, 1977), 4. Further references, cited parenthetically in the text, are to this edition.

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his English hosts to tell a story, defers (as usual) to a selection from the late Diedrich Knickerbocker (Irving’s ctive Dutch-descended historian), who prefaces his main tale, “Dolph Heyliger,” with a reference to a house in old Manhattan: The house stood remote from the road, in the centre of a large eld, with an avenue of old locust trees leading up to it, several of which had been shivered by lightning, and two or three blown down. A few apple-trees grew straggling about the eld; there were traces also of what had been a kitchen-garden; but the fences were broken down, the vegetables had disappeared . . . . with here and there a ragged rosebush, or a tall sunower shooting up from among the brambles, and hanging its head sorrowfully, as if contemplating the surrounding desolation. Part of the roof of the old house had fallen in, the windows were shattered, the panels of the doors broken. . . . The appearance of the whole place was forlorn and desolate . . . . (248)

The ghostly potential of the place is not simply the result of its physical attributes—conducive as they are—but derives from the fact that these conditions are linked to a problem of historical continuity and causality. This “old mansion” in “the ancient city of the Manhattoes,” Knickerbocker tells us, is “one of the very few remains of the architecture of the early Dutch settlers, and must have been a house of some consequence at the time when it was built” (248). The prior Dutch presence, materially manifest in the structure, provides the grounding for the haunting; what is also key, though, is the lack of neighborhood knowledge by which to explain the abandonment, a historical nearsightedness resulting from the rapidity of social change in the area. The house is a ruin whose history and signicance can be apprehended only dimly: “The origin of this house was lost in the obscurity that covers the early period of the province” and “[t]he reason of its having fallen to decay, was likewise a matter of dispute.” Because the reasons for its current state are not known, “the most current, and of course, the most probable account”—the default explanation—“was that it was haunted” (249). The scene, which might otherwise be read simply as one of mundane failure, or as the evidence of social change, is allowed to take on mythic dimensions owing to both the historical ignorance and the fertile imaginations of latter-day neighbors. A local perspective is provided by neighborhood boys, including young Knickerbocker, who have imbibed inuential tales from the usual, marginal suspects: “not an old woman in the neighborhood but could furnish at least a score

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[of corroborating ghost tales]. There was a gray-headed curmudgeon of a negro who lived hard by, who had a whole budget of them to tell” (249). The boys—who know next to nothing about the house’s true history—are deeply predisposed by these stories to think the house haunted. Knickerbocker says, “the place was so charmed by frightful stories that we dreaded to approach it” (249). And so, each half-heard noise and half-glimpsed shadow is made into new tales of ghosts: “there were sure to be a host of fearful anecdotes told of strange cries and groans, or of some hideous face suddenly seen staring out of one of the windows” (249). The process and social politics of haunting starkly laid out in “The Haunted House” had received a meatier, more regionally central, and historically contemporaneous treatment in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” where Irving similarly weaves evocative landscape, historical and social disjuncture, and amenable aesthetics into a ghostly cultural inheritance for the region and nation. The story draws the reader in at the outset from the broad expanse of the Tappan Zee, through the market town of Tarrytown, and into a “lap of land among high hills.”7 Revealing that this “sequestered glen” is named “Sleepy Hollow,” owing in part to the “peculiar character of its inhabitants” (272), Irving refers to the uncanny potential in the area’s unique historical conditions. As in “The Haunted House,” he points especially to early settlement by the Dutch, whose descendants in this case still predominate in the location, while also giving attention here to the prior Native American inhabitance and to local Revolutionary incidents, including a “nameless battle” which is said to have left the neighborhood its most notable ghost: a headless Hessian trooper on horseback. In setting up his geographical and historical landmarks, the narrator also imbues the scene with an atmosphere of superstitiousness, which is attributed to the Dutch locals. The people are “given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs,” and “[t]he whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions” (273). There may be some truth in this; local Dutch lore may well have contained ghost tales. However, the scene really receives an animating bolt in the lanky form of an itinerant Yankee schoolmaster. Ichabod Crane

7 Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–1820), ed. Haskell Springer (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 272. Further references, cited parenthetically in the text, are to this edition.

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represents an actual historical phenomenon of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, what Irving calls here “the great torrent of migration and improvement” spearheaded by New Englanders, “which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country” (274).8 Irving jokes about the foreshortening of historical memory which he associates with this torrent of Yankee “progress,” writing that his protagonist came to Sleepy Hollow “in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since” (274). Still, Ichabod is a less-than-benign interloper: he beats his lessons into his pupils, and courts the belle of the neighborhood, Katrina Van Tassel, while rolling his eyes greedily over the potentially protable land of her father. The surprise, however, is that Ichabod—the representative of the race of pioneers to whom Irving attributes both a brevity of memory and a capacity to drown out existing local custom—is essential in the haunting of this neighborhood. First of all, Ichabod is not without “superstitions” of his own. He strides into Sleepy Hollow having been raised on a steady diet of Cotton Mather and witch lore, “in which, by the way, he most rmly and potently believed” (276), and “an appetite for the marvellous” as extraordinary as “his powers of digesting it” (277). Once in Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod further feeds his habit on the gossip of Dutch housewives, who “as they sat spinning by the re” told of “haunted elds and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges and haunted houses, and particularly of the headless horseman” (277). In scenes forecasting the tale’s climax, we see that these indulgences induce dire effects in Ichabod’s perception of his surroundings. “[A]s he wended his way [home],” Irving writes of one instance, “every sound of nature, at that witching hour, uttered his excited imagination”; and more than once he is “appalled by some shrub covered with snow, which like a sheeted spectre beset his very path!” (277, 278). Indeed, the ghost stories come to seem like traps set for Ichabod, who by courting the only daughter of the wealthiest man of the neighborhood has roused the ire of rival suitor, Brom Bones. Having had his imagination topped off at Van Tassel’s party, where the men told tales in a “drowsy under tone” which “sunk deep” in his mind (290), Ichabod nds himself out in the Sleepy Hollow night, at the mercy of “[a]ll the stories of ghosts

8 For the inux of New Englanders, see Dixon Ryan Fox, Yankees and Yorkers (New York: New York University Press, 1940) chaps. 7 and 8.

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and goblins” (291). Thus, when he is joined by a dark rider who he is horried “on perceiving” to be headless (293), Ichabod takes it for the famous ghost, and runs off. In part these passages demonstrate Irving’s theoretical interest in perception and imagination. But “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is not pure psychological or aesthetic experiment. Irving instead attaches the outbreak of ghostliness to decisive historical and social conditions. Ichabod’s apprehension of the ghostly Hessian is the product both of what he knows by heart, culturally, and what, as an outsider in the neighborhood, he does not know. The Sleepy Hollow Dutch may tell ghost tales, but Irving presents them as more or less aboriginal, comfortable with the ghosts, the tales, and the neighborhood, in a way that Ichabod—even as he begins to add local stories to his “budget” of tales—is not. Quite specically, the Dutch folk might recognize the midnight rider something other than a ghostly manifestation, as they have heard Brom Bones and his crew on many occasions “dashing along past the farm houses at midnight,” so that “the old dames, startled out of their sleep, would listen for a moment . . . . and then exclaim, ‘aye, there goes Brom Bones and his gang!’ ” (281). Ichabod simply does not have the wherewithal of local knowledge to suspect that the ghost might be Brom in disguise. The source of the haunting resides in the fact that neither Ichabod nor the reader can identify with certainty the mysterious other that Ichabod encounters in the dark woods of Sleepy Hollow. What haunts Sleepy Hollow is ultimately a problem of contention and distance between Dutch and Anglo-American presences. This goes both ways in the story. In fact, a Yankee counter-haunting, so to speak, is effected in the story as the ruins of the school house (Irving’s often-used symbol for the Yankee imposition in New York) are said by the Dutch locals to be haunted by the vanished schoolmaster, who they do not know has simply moved on. And yet, while the Dutch are given an air of vernacular rootedness in this place, the story’s ghostly effects are mainly properties of Anglo perception and perspective, in multiple ways. First, although the neighborhood might abound with “local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions,” the reincarnation of the ghost is occasioned by Ichabod’s appearance on the scene and his supernatural sensibilities (as well as his ambitions with regard to the neighborhood heiress), while his broader vulnerability to ghostly apprehensions is fueled by an estrangement from the local Dutch folk—a rendering of the whole community as uncanny because of its difference from the

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Anglo-American culture that had come to dominate regionally as well as nationally. Secondly, as much as the Dutch seem to get the better of Ichabod, the story of Sleepy Hollow’s Dutch ghostliness becomes primarily an Anglo-American possession. Not only might one imagine Ichabod, that “travelling gazette,” as Irving calls him (276), peddling his supernatural encounters in venues around the country, but as the narrator indicates in the story’s closing frame, the legend is being told at the corporation meeting in New York City, and it earns a place in Geoffrey Crayon’s Sketch Book, which would be an international hit. The idea that the Yankee “torrent” helped yield a Dutch ghostliness in the Hudson Valley appears elsewhere in Irving’s work. For instance, in “Conspiracy of the Cocked Hats,” an 1839 piece for The Knickerbocker magazine, Irving’s Roloff Van Ripper writes, “Poetry and romance received a fatal blow at the overthrow of the ancient Dutch dynasty, and have ever since been gradually withering under the growing domination of the Yankees.” His next statement not only half-contradicts the previous one, but also suggests the ways in which the maligned “Yankee invasion” has helped romanticize Dutchness, as he writes, “But poetry and romance still live unseen among us, or seen only by the enlightened few, who are able to contemplate this city and its environs through the medium of tradition, and clothed with the associations of foregone ages.”9 The Dutch past becomes ghostly, and thereby more valuable, because it has been forced by the glaring light of Yankee progress into the shadows. And, while Van Ripper means to suggest that the “enlightened few” who bring romance to light are descended from the Dutch, what Irving demonstrates is that production of hauntedness derives largely from the acts of intruding others, who both nd and make more alien the residues of the regional past, who read local scenes through perspectives conducive to seeing ghosts, and who go on to tell tales that inuence others’ views of the place and the people in it. Both the interloping Ichabod and the narrator of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” are implicated here. So is Irving himself. Irving’s ghosting of the Dutch becomes most explicit, of course, in “Rip Van Winkle,” which also appeared in The Sketch Book. Here the Dutch crewmen of Hudson’s Half Moon are rendered spectral xtures in the Catskill Mountains, appearing at intervals and thereby empha-

9 Washington Irving, “Conspiracy of the Cocked Hats,” The Knickerbocker, October 1839, 305.

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sizing a sense of changes that seem to happen overnight. While they maintain vestiges of Irving’s comedic stereotypes (the rst ghost Rip meets is a “short, square fellow” dressed in “antique Dutch fashion” wearing “several pairs of breeches,” and carrying a keg), the specters’ “strange and incomprehensible” aspects and their “most mysterious silence” nonetheless signify a serious problem of historical disjuncture, representing the inscrutability of the Dutch past for Irving and his generation (33–34). At the same time, Irving actively pushes his living emblem of Dutchness into premature ghostliness. Having allegedly slept through the American Revolution, Rip returns to nd his village overrun by a new race of Yankees, a discovery which leaves him in the same lost state as Hudson’s ghostly grew. As Rip exclaims, “every thing’s changed—and I’m changed—and I can’t tell what’s my name or who I am!” (29). Left behind by demographic and political change, the otherwise obsolete Rip nds his vocation as a story-teller, embodying an ambivalent view of the Dutch as primary yet mostly marginal repositories of local memory. If Rip came to be the picture of Dutchness in the Anglo-dominated culture of the nineteenth century, this is in no small part because Irving’s wildly popular stories set the historical and literary terms by which the Dutch were imagined in the United States. Irving’s representations were explicitly invoked and widely repeated in other literary treatments, visual images, theatrical productions, guidebooks, and even histories, while more diffusely, the combination of antiquity and obscurity that characterized Irving’s treatments echoed through midcentury images.10 The common equation of Dutchness with ghostliness becomes apparent, for instance, in Lydia Maria Child’s 1842 account of Dutch descendants in Tappan (whom she calls “antediluvians”), as she protests, “‘An indenable inuence of the former inhabitants,’ is indeed most visible; but then it needs no ghost to tell us that these inhabitants were thoroughly Dutch.”11 To be sure, Irvingesque caricatures provoked backlashes, particularly from New Yorkers of Dutch ancestry. And, as Annette Stott and others demonstrate, there were earnest mid- and late

10 See Annette Stott, “Inventing Memory: Picturing New Netherland in the Nineteenth Century,” in Goodfriend, ed., Revisiting New Netherland, 13–23; Kenney, 191–209; and Richardson, 64–80. 11 L. Maria Child, Letters from New-York (New York: Charles S. Francis and Co., 1843), 164, 162.

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century attempts to recover more substantial, document-based history.12 Nonetheless, the ghosting of the Dutch that Irving fostered not only continued, but reemerged with new force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period in which rampant industrial development, urbanization, and immigration yielded a reactionary obsession with “ancestors, memories, and legends,” as Michael Kammen writes in Mystic Chords of Memory.13 In the ood of local histories, reminiscences, and legend collections that appeared in this period in the Hudson Valley (many of them published, notably, by Putnam’s “Knickerbocker Press”), Dutch specters were invoked time and again as dening, though not unproblematic, aboriginal spirits of place. *

*

*

Along with the local ghost stories he collects in his 1897 Reminiscences of an Old Westchester Homestead, Westchester native Charles Pryer describes a few of his own eerie encounters, including an incident at his “Old Homestead” in New Rochelle some years earlier. After a stormy November night, a farm hand reports having seen “a light, which appeared to come from a lantern,” moving along the property as if carried by a man inspecting the buildings and animals. Though Pryer rst thinks that it was “some person, probably of dark complexion” investigating his chickens with an eye to obtaining a cheap Thanksgiving dinner, his mind is turned to the possibility of a supernatural explanation when he hears that this mysterious light has appeared on other occasions, always during stormy weather. Thoroughly intrigued, when the next stormy night arrives, Pryer takes the opportunity to see what is haunting his land. After huddling in the rain for several hours, he is about to give up when, in the orchard across the creek, a ickering light actually appears. “[W]hat was [my] disappointment,” Pryer recalls, to discover that it was only the pipe of a neighbor, who was very much alive.14 Yet, writing years later, Pryer is unwilling to give up the ghost. Instead, he chooses to believe that “it may have been the return of some ancient Sachem, who came to visit his early hunting-ground; or again,

12

See Stott, “Inventing Memory,” 23–25; and Kenney, 235–254. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 93. 14 Charles Pryer, Reminiscences of an Old Westchester Homestead (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Knickerbocker Press, 1897), 166, 167, 171. 13

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one of the rst Dutch settlers visiting the farm-yard to see if the cattle and poultry had improved since he was a resident of this sphere.”15 Having moved between suspicion of dark-complexioned thieves, and the prosaic reality of a familiar neighbor, Pryer’s ultimate speculation regarding the “mysterious lantern” is both predictable and revealing. An interlocking regional preoccupation with Indian and Dutch ghosts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries derived variously and ambivalently from the problem posed by residues of the region’s prior inhabitants, and from a search for tradition and authority that arose in response to the rapid development and population changes of the period. One need only glance through Charles M. Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (1896) to see that Indians enjoyed popularity in the late-nineteenth century lore of the Hudson Valley; at least ten of the rst twenty-one Hudson River tales involve Indians. Sites in the region were haunted by “Indian legends” of spirits in the landscape, by association with Indian tragedies,16 and, of course, by Indian ghosts: the ghost of “an Indian . . . caught stealing from the [Henry] Hudson party” that supposedly haunted Ver Planck property in Fishkill, the leaping maiden of Kaaterskill Falls, the ghost of Chief Croton, and “the walking sachems of Teller’s Point,” to offer just a few examples.17 Such Indian hauntings are not surprising: they have counterparts in American writings from the colonial period on, and occur throughout the United States.18 What makes the Hudson Valley unique, what offsets and complements the impact of its Indian ghosts, is the simultaneous presence of the Dutch as an alternate set of ghostly aboriginals. As the author of the 1868 Legends and Poetry of the Hudson asserts, “Closely blended with these Indian traditions we have the early tales and legends of the rst Dutch settlers along the rich valley of the Hudson.”19 Indeed,

15

Pryer, 173. For instances, see A. E. P. Searing, The Land of Rip Van Winkle (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Knickerbocker Press, 1884), 28, 60; Legends and Poetry of the Hudson (New York: P. S. Wynkoop & Sons, 1868), 28–30; Edgar Mayhew Bacon, Chronicles of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Knickerbocker Press, 1897), 113; and Charles M. Skinner, Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1896), 1: 58–60. 17 “Hearing Took on Historical Aspect,” Poughkeepsie Daily Eagle, February 14, 1913, 6; Searing, 60; C. G. Hine, The New York and Albany Post Road (New York: privately published, 1905), 31; and Skinner, 1: 57–8. 18 See Bergland, The National Uncanny. 19 Legends and Poetry of the Hudson, 33. 16

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if about half of Skinner’s Hudson Valley tales in Myths and Legends of Our Own Land revolve around Indian myths, an equal number feature Dutch place legends and ghosts. The “Dutch” story of a white lady at Dobbs Ferry who absconded with a young Dutch bride and groom, “Dutch” legends of the Storm Ship, of the devil at Spuyten Duyvil, of demons at the Duyvil’s Danskammer—these and other such stories reappeared time and again in regional writings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.20 Regardless of whether they were adapted from Irving or actually derived from Dutch folklore, these legends were stamped with stereotyped Dutchness in guidebooks, collections, and local histories. So, where Indian legend told of the old squaw of Ontiora (the Catskills) who controlled the weather, Dutch legend told of the “Heer of Dunderberg Mountain,” who, as Skinner recounts it: is a bulbous goblin clad in the dress worn by the Dutch colonists two centuries ago, and carrying a speaking-trumpet, through which he bawls his orders for the blowing of the winds and the touching off of lightnings. These orders are given in Low Dutch, and are put into execution by [imps], who troop into the air and tumble about in the mist.21

There were also, of course, Dutch ghosts, the most commonly invoked being the Dutch crew of the Half Moon, along with Hudson himself, rendered into a Dutchman by the common spelling of his name— “Hendrick”—in regional stories.22 And beyond calling up individual ghosts, writers of the period also evince a more broadcast sense of Dutch hauntedness. As a character in A. E. P. Searing’s Land of Rip Van Winkle says of the Catskills town of Katsbaan, “Think of all the ghosts talking Dutch, as they must, of course, in this region.”23 Dutch manor houses—Van Cortlandt, Van Rensselaer, Ten Broeck, Van Wyck—were inevitably haunted, whether by family ghosts or others, and Dutch churches, farmhouses, and taverns throughout the region repeatedly appear as both the site and the raison d’être of stories.24 In Kingston, of

20 Instances of these and other such stories appear in Legends and Poetry of the Hudson, 51–62; Skinner, 29–33, 37–40, 46–47, 49–52; Bacon, 106–108, 123–125; and Daniel Wise, Summer Days on the Hudson (New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1876), 123–127. 21 Skinner, 1: 37. 22 See Legends and Poetry of the Hudson, 54–55; Searing, 91; and Bacon, 106. 23 Searing, 111. 24 For instances, see C. G. Hine, The Old Mine Road (1908; reprint, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 31; and Charles Wilde, “Ghost Legends of the Hudson Valley,” (Master’s thesis, New York State College for Teachers, 1937), 18, 29, and 44.

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all the “old stone houses [that offer] wonderful possibilities for a fruitful imagination” and which he suspects hold “a dozen or more good ghost stories,” amateur travelogue-writer C. G. Hine is most drawn to the Old Dutch Church: “there is a mysterious something, as one stands below and gazes to the diamonded shingles and small windows, that gives the imagination play.”25 Certainly there were vast differences in the latter-day (as well as historical) status of Native American and Dutch populations in this region. Whereas Native Americans had been almost entirely driven out by the late nineteenth century, Dutch-descended people continued to live here, in some cases representing New York’s (and the country’s) most elite families. There were also signicant differences between Dutch and Indian hauntings. Whereas Indian legends were typically associated with natural features, it was often manor houses and ruins of Dutch style houses that were haunted by the Dutch; while Dutch ghosts were frequently presented as comic, along the lines laid out by Irving, Indian ghosts tended to be either more menacing or melancholy. Despite these differences, these two groups had clearly become conjoined in regional imagination by the late nineteenth century—“closely blended,” as the author of Legends and Poetry of the Hudson phrased it. Dutch folk, even as they continued to dwell in the Hudson Valley, were repeatedly pictured in these years as ancient remnants in a way that aligned them with Native Americans in aboriginal primacy and authority. A reporter writing in Rockland County in 1877, for instance, acknowledged a debt to a local shopkeeper, for sharing with him some of the “legendary lore of the Hudson . . . of original Dutch character.”26 And in the same way that writers invoked “Indian belief ” to lend an air of authenticity to regional place legends, A. E. P. Searing proved that Overlook Mountain was the place haunted by Hudson’s crew, by stating that it was there that “the early Dutch settlers believed that Hendrick Hudson kept vigil over his loved river.”27 The pairing of Dutch and Indian in the lore of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was reected not only in parallel treatments, but also in references and stories which explicitly intermingled Indian and Dutch elements. In The Land of Rip Van Winkle, Searing 25

Hine, The Old Mine Road, 24. Hal Redington, in The Rockland County Journal, October 27, 1877, 1. Emphasis mine. 27 Searing, 91. Emphasis mine. 26

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writes of a “marsh called by the Dutch, the Gröt Vly,” which held “in its bottomless depths one of those Indian demons that the Dutch held in very respectful veneration.”28 Charles Skinner also cross-references Indian and Dutch legends in a tale entitled “The Catskill Gnomes:” Behind the New Grand Hotel, in the Catskills, is . . . the place of which the Mohicans spoke when they told of people there who worked in metals, and had bushy beards and eyes like pigs. . . . They brewed a liquor that had the effect of shortening the bodies and swelling the heads of all who drank it, and when Hudson and his crew visited the mountains, the pygmies held carouse in his honor and invited him to drink their liquor. The crew went away shrunken and distorted by the magic distillation.29

And, it must be emphasized, the Indian who haunts the Ver Planck’s “Spook Field” is not just any Indian, but most dramatically, an Indian killed by a Dutch crewman on the ship of “Hendrick Hudson.”30 It would be harder to nd a ghost who better signied regional origins. While Charles Pryer’s speculations regarding the “mysterious lantern” suggest an interchangeability of Indian and Dutch ghosts, other tales of his explicitly place Indian and Dutch ghosts on the same ground. One of the most extended and interesting stories of Dutch-and-Indian haunting is recounted by Pryer under the title “A Bedford Courtship.” It is unclear whether Pryer intended irony in this title—which ostensibly refers to a courting couple who are disrupted by the ghosts—as the story derives from a historical event which one nineteenth-century historian called “by far the most sanguinary [battle] ever fought on Westchester soil.”31 In the winter of 1644, during a period of hostility between Native Americans and settlers of New Netherland, a force of men, under orders from Governor Kieft, attacked a large encampment near what is now the village of Bedford, set re to the huts, and killed anyone who tried to escape, thereby wiping out virtually the entire camp—between 500 and 700 people. “The memory of the affair,” writes Pryer, “was kept fresh among the quiet people of the place by the reports of spirit battles.” In addition to “individual spooks” which were “to be seen nearly every night,” Pryer writes that the ghastly battle replayed itself twice a year: “the whole neighborhood would

28

Searing, 113. Skinner, 1: 21–22. 30 “Hearing took on Historical Aspect,” 6. 31 F. Shonnard and W. W. Spooner, History of Westchester County: From Its Earliest Settlement to the Year 1900 (1900; reprint, Harrison, N.Y.: Harbor Hill Books, 1974), 101. 29

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be illuminated by what appeared to be the burning wigwams of the savages. Plainly by the conagration’s light could [witnesses] see the Dutch burgomaster-soldiers, holding aloft the bright yellow banner of ‘My Lord States-General,’ and coolly relieving of his head every Indian that issued from the aming huts.”32 Veering between gruesome violence and Irvingesque comedy (one specter appears in “a pair of pantaloons that might have graced the extremities of Tenbroeck, and had a nose that would have done credit to any Beakman”),33 the tale nonetheless unites the Dutch and Indians as inhabitants of an exclusive, original ghostly sphere which periodically reoccupies the neighborhood as a sort of semiannual pageant. Pryer writes of the apparitions: “On each occasion the Indians went through the same performance of rushing from their burning wigwams upon the Dutch and having their heads cut off. How their heads were put on again for the next battle is a complete mystery, but . . . enough for us to know there is one patent out in the other world that has not yet descended to us.”34 The phrasing is ingenious; borrowing the idea of patent from the Dutch colonial system of land ownership, Pryer indicates that the Dutch and Indian ghosts continued jointly to possess and occupy physical space by their haunting. The story’s title, “A Bedford Courtship,” is after all perversely tting. Clearly tales of aboriginal Dutch and Indian haunting held a preeminent place in the regional imagination of the late nineteenth and early twentieth. The question remains as to why this was the case. Looking closely, we discover that the implications of these tales are multiple, complex, and often contradictory. At some level, these hauntings were based in the prior inhabitancy and subsequent conquest and displacement of both groups in the region. Perplexing traces of previous settlements remained to provoke troubling questions regarding whose place this really was, and concomitant apprehensions of reprisal. Hints of residual guilt and fear surface, for instance, in Charles Skinner’s comments that Indian ghosts in Croton sallied forth nightly on “errands of protest,”35 while an unsettling threat of aboriginal repossession through

32

Pryer, 14, 16. Pryer, 18. The names are drawn from real Hudson Valley Dutch families, but they are also meant to be puns (Ten Broeck for ten breeches, indicating a Dutch habit of layering clothing). 34 Pryer, 16. 35 Skinner, 1: 57. 33

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haunting is reected in the fate of the young couple in Pryer’s “A Bedford Courtship.” Having unwittingly wandered onto the haunted ground, they nd themselves confronted by “the form of a Savage, with head inverted, ying from a stalwart Dutchman.”36 Though neither apparition “seemed to notice the couple intruding upon their premises” (note the plural possessive), the scene is enough to dispel the unwitting trespassers for good. Yet while Pryer offers the summation in “A Bedford Courtship” that “there is one patent out in the other world that has not yet descended to us,” these possessions—the land and the hauntings—had descended to Pryer and others who were staking claims through their ghostly afliations, or more accurately their asserted inheritances of local traditions. The curses of vanishing aboriginals, Werner Sollors has argued, were akin to blessings, as both signied a line of succession.37 As much as tales of aboriginal hauntings may have contained fearful potentials, they also conferred signicant pleasures, consolations, and benets to those who had the privilege of being haunted. Clearly related to the contemporary surge of interest in folklore, tradition, and history, the profusion of Indian and Dutch hauntings in the Hudson Valley around the turn of the century was partly an effort to attract tourists to the region. Here were two sets of aboriginals, one of which had the added attraction of being old-worldly at the same time, as A. E. P. Searing—the wife of an Overlook Hotel backer—emphasized in her description of Katsbaan (which was wellstocked with Dutch houses): “altogether the place has an old-world haunted look.”38 Closer to home, though, this profusion also connected to a search for rootedness and legitimacy—of longevity and inclusion within the “patent”—which gained urgency in the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aboriginal hauntings, especially those of a Dutch character, were activated by a sense of rapid changes in regional landscape and character, changes that included an ethnic aspect. Historian Arthur Abbott, who asserts in The Hudson River Today and Yesterday (1915) that “No page in the world’s history is more interesting than the Dutch settlement along the Hudson River,” and who imagines the Dutch spirit “brood[ing] over all like a spirit from 36

Pryer, 17–18. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 123. 38 Searing, 111. 37

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out to the past,” begins his book with this claim: “There has never been a time in the history of our nation when the story of its glorious past was so important as today. A large percentage of the millions of aliens ocking to our shores . . . know but little and consequently care less, of our institutions, their purpose and ideals.”39 Charles Pryer’s writings are similarly informed by the drastic social changes that Gilded Age immigration and urban growth had in the region, which had noticeable impacts on his native town. During the years Pryer was collecting and writing, New York City had moved up to the doorstep of New Rochelle, two major rail lines had been joined in the town, the population had nearly quadrupled since 1870, and among the new residents were a signicant number of new immigrants, as well as African Americans who had begun migrating to Northern cities in large numbers in the 1880s.40 All of these changes echo in Pryer’s Reminiscences. A noted political conservative, he laments, “All things in this section have so changed, since those times so enjoyable to me,” and describes the county as “now crowded and over-populated.” He explicitly characterizes his efforts as deriving from a desire to go back to a time before the neighborhood “was spoiled by the locomotive, the summer cottage, and worse than all, the lands speculator.” And, it is worth recalling, Pryer’s rst thought when he is told of the mysterious light, which he later imaginatively renders into the form of an ancient Indian or Dutchman, is that it was “some person, probably of dark complexion” looking to steal his poultry.41 Aboriginal hauntings emerged in the face of perceived intrusions as both items of tradition to be defended, and claims of priority and legitimacy on the part of those haunted by aboriginal ghosts, those conversant with these traditions. To a degree, this turn to aboriginal ghosts as ancestral grounding was aligned with broader genealogical and colonial revival movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and certainly it was related to the contemporaneous phenomenon that Annette Stott has labeled “Holland Mania”—a craze for all

39 Arthur Abbott, The Hudson River Today and Yesterday (New York: The Historian Publishing Co., 1915), 50, 51, 3. 40 For details, see Stephen J. Friedman, “Industrialization, Immigration and Transportation to 1900,” and Neil S. Martin, “Westchester as Evolving Suburb,” in Westchester County: the Past Hundred Years, 1883–1983, ed. Marilyn E. Wiegold (Valhalla, N.Y.: The Westchester County Historical Society, 1984); and New Rochelle Portrait of a City (New York: Abbeville Press, 1981). 41 Pryer, 2, 167.

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things Dutch that had particularly strong resonances in the New York area, leading to the founding of the Holland Society of New York in 1886, a series of publications like Catherine Van Rensselaer Bonney’s Legacy of Historical Gleanings (1876) and Mrs. John Van Rensselaer’s, The Goede Vrouw of Mana-ha-ta (1898), as well as efforts to preserve Dutch properties.42 In fact, Dutch hauntings were occasionally employed in support of what might be called “Dutch pride.” On Halloween in 1905, for instance, Albany sponsored a parade that included the “apparitions” of two hundred Dutch burghers from 1705. A verse storybook written on the occasion, entitled Mynheer Van Schlichtenhorth and the Old Dutch Burghers, told how “Van Schlichtenhorth” had made a brew that allowed the Dutch Albanians to sleep two centuries, and so they could come back for the parade. Clearly drawing on “Rip Van Winkle,” both the parade and the story emphasized Albany’s particularly strong Dutch heritage; the burghers parade on horses for which their “greatgreat-great-grandchildren pay, / For our descendants still live here, / To welcome us with hearty cheer.”43 Yet while tales of Dutch apparitions in the Hudson Valley in this period dovetailed with a rise in genealogical interest, one of the benets of aboriginal haunting was that one need not be a lineal descendant to claim possession. Dutch genealogical and historical societies, in fact, more often sought to combat the relegation of Dutchness to the realm of myth and ghostliness. Such stories, it seems, tended more to be utilized in what Sollors, speaking of the reconguration of Indians as adopted ancestors in the nineteenth century, calls a “presumptuous reconstruction of American kinship.”44 Indeed, to anyone familiar with Westchester history, it is striking that Charles Pryer evokes the spirit of an early Dutch settler on his New Rochelle homestead, since New Rochelle’s major claim to regional distinctness is that it was settled by French Huguenots—something which Pryer, a man of French and English ancestry and a member of the Huguenot Historical Society, certainly knew.45 In being haunted by Indians and, more uniquely,

42 See Annette Stott, Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1998). 43 David M. Kinnear, Mynheer Van Schlichtenhorth and the Old Dutch Burghers: A Tale of Old and New Albany (Albany: privately published, 1906), unpaginated. 44 Sollors, 125. 45 See New Rochelle: Portrait of a City, 12, 14. On Pryer, see “Death Takes Charles Pryer,” New Rochelle Pioneer, June 9, 1916; “Charles Pryer dies in New York City,” New Rochelle Paragraph, June 9, 1916 (in biographical les, Westchester County His-

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aboriginalized Dutchmen, even non-Indian and non-Dutch Hudson Valley dwellers could align themselves through a sort of imaginative osmosis with an ideal regional ancestry that conveyed rootedness and authority in a moment of social upheaval. In particular, the presence of the Dutch provided European-Americans with a “white” aboriginal haunting that combined the ancestral with the romantic uncanny, sidestepping on one side the implications of responsibility that might come with real ancestral hauntings, and on the other the racial distance and accusations contained in the ghosts of dispossessed Indians, all while imaginatively blotting out from view and legitimacy those of “dark complexion” then coming to settle in the locality. In being haunted by aboriginal ghosts, and in their possession of aboriginal traditions of hauntings, Pryer, Searing, and others sought to ll a contested territory with “natives” and to include themselves within the elect—to assert a kinship with the “original” inhabitants by legendary inheritance. Throughout his book, Pryer not only aligns himself with the old folk; he literally absorbs into his own Reminiscences a series of stories he has heard from neighborhood ancients, including “Nicholas the Hunter”—the putative source for “A Bedford Courtship,” and the very stereotype of an old Dutchman. “The instant you look upon him,” Pryer writes, “you almost forget the days of the burgomasters are over.” The storytelling session begins as Nicholas “lights his long Dutch pipe that seems coeval with the surroundings. And as the voluminous clouds ascend . . . I soon nd myself transported back a century or more.”46 Pryer, it seems, inhales the stories along with the smoke, and the legends become his own. Though Reminiscences of an Old Westchester Homestead purportedly incorporates tales from several neighborhood storytellers, in the course of the narrative, there is almost never any sense of a narrator separate from Pryer. Thus not only does Pryer choose to haunt his old homestead with original Indian and Dutch ghosts; he conates himself with the old inhabitant, whose age and Dutchness he stresses, and inherits from him legitimizing tales of haunting. Indeed, Pryer goes a step further: he may not be certain whose ghost it is—Indian sachem or Dutch settler—that haunts his homestead, but he closes the book with the forecast, “I need not be curious much longer, for ere

torical Society, Elmsford, N.Y.); and The Biographical History of Westchester County, New York (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Co., 1899) 2: 572–4. 46 Pryer, 4–5.

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many snows shall fall, I, too, must join that ghostly company.”47 He is, in other words, almost one of them. Almost. There nally remains at some level in these hauntings both the fact of and the potential for distance and displacement. As Renée Bergland demonstrates in her discussion of how the “ghosting” of Native Americans supported policies of Indian removal, aboriginal hauntings have the capacity to both ameliorate and justify the disappearances they point to.48 The old inhabitants, as ghosts, are still there, though not in any way which truly challenges latter-day possessors, and their ghosts may be used in ways that explain their disappearance or marginalization, allowing inhabitants to inherit tradition—and also territory—without assuming blame. What one nally notices in the tales of aboriginal haunting which lled the Hudson Valley imagination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is that these tales frequently involve acts of either self- or mutual destruction within the aboriginal sphere of Dutch and Indian. In one instance recounted in C. G. Hine’s West Bank of the Hudson River (1906), the Indians literally spook themselves out of the region.49 Other hauntings implicate the Dutch in the disappearance of the Indians, for instance, the Fishkillarea story, mentioned earlier, of an Indian killed by Hudson’s crewman, or a story from Nyack in which the last of the Tappan Indians haunts the Dutch settlers who had forced him from his ancestral home during the French and Indian War.50 The most striking exemplification of this tendency in regional hauntings to charge the Dutch in the disappearance of the Indians is Pryer’s “A Bedford Courtship.” The tale portrays what came to be seen as an appalling massacre, an incident that haunted local memory for generations. While Pryer, as we have seen elsewhere, works to attach himself to the legitimacy of old Dutchness, his narrative in this case clearly implicates the Dutch, and only the Dutch, as perpetrators. In describing the ghost battle which recurs twice a year, the narrator strongly emphasizes the Dutchness of the attackers: Dutch banner, Dutch names, Dutch stereotypes. Most interesting, though, is who is left

47

Pryer, 173. Bergland, 4. 49 See C. G. Hine, The West Bank of the Hudson River: Albany to Tappan (1906; reprint, Astoria, N.Y.: J. C. and A. L. Fawcett, n.d.), 113. 50 G. H. B., “Comboan’s Vall,” in “Fireside Tales,” The Rockland Record, vol. III (1940): 76–79 (in “Folklore” le, New City Library, Rockland Room, New City, N.Y.). 48

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out of Pryer’s ghost tale—Captain John Underhill, an Englishman, a “celebrated Indian ghter from New England,” and joint commander in the attack, in which both Dutch and English men participated.51 In this regard, as well, it is worth noting that the town of Bedford, though within the originally Dutch borders, was rst settled not by the Dutch, but by Connecticut Yankees. By omitting Underhill and the English, at the same time as he emphasizes Dutch elements, Pryer is able to tap into regional tradition that relies on a foundation of Dutch and Indian ghosts, while also laying blame for the disappearance of the Indians on the Dutch. So, even as the Dutch and Indians were invoked as quasi-ancestral spirits by those who, like Pryer, sought bulwarks against invading newcomers, and those like Searing who sought to encourage tourist interest, Hudson Valley ghost tales like “A Bedford Courtship” also allowed local populations to inherit the benets of possession while being exonerated from implications of dispossession. The aboriginals, according to the stories, had provided the basis for settlement by conveniently doing away with each other and themselves. Haunting was thus a double-edged sword for the Dutch, in New York and in the United States more broadly. From Irving’s time forward, tales of haunting seemed to privilege the Dutch as native—or at least naturalized—spirits of place, to situate them at the very core of historical memory in a region that itself occupied a central place in American culture. And yet, this process of ghostly aboriginalization simultaneously threatened to relegate the Dutch to the lost past, and left them vulnerable to a series of ulterior appropriations. So potent and enduring has been this ghosting of the Dutch in America, that only now, as we approach the four-hundredth anniversary of Hudson’s arrival, are Dutch history and inuences in the United States beginning to be eshed out again in earnest.52

51

Shonnard and Spooner, 100. For the recent revival of historical interest in Dutch America, see Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Writing/ Righting Dutch Colonial History,” New York History 80 ( January 1999): 5–28; and Goodfriend, ed., Revisiting New Netherland. 52

CHAPTER FOUR

A BRAHMIN GOES DUTCH: JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY AND THE LESSONS OF DUTCH HISTORY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BOSTON Mark A. Peterson

The nineteenth century is often viewed as the great age of nationalism, and this is certainly true within the connes of the nascent profession of historical scholarship. The rise of modern academic study of the past was intimately connected to the nationalism and empire-building of the great powers of Europe and the United States. Many historians saw it as their task to explain and justify the rise to power and glory of their homeland. In that context, it may seem curious that some of the most popular and inuential works on Dutch history written in the nineteenth century were produced outside the Netherlands, in a provincial American city without immediately obvious Dutch connections, by an author with no Dutch ancestry or direct ties with the Low Countries. But if we examine Boston and New England’s long historical relationship to the Netherlands and its colonies, as well as the equally lengthy tradition of historical writing in Boston, it will become clear why John Lothrop Motley, a Boston Brahmin, son of a family of merchants and clergymen typical of New England’s ruling elite, turned to the history of the Dutch Republic for guidance in negotiating the changes his home city faced in the turbulence of mid-nineteenth-century America. New England’s fascination with things Dutch is as old as New England itself. Most famously, the small band of Puritan separatists who became known as the “Pilgrims” of Plymouth Colony lived in exile in the Dutch city of Leiden for a dozen years before migrating to the New World. But the inuence of the Dutch on the founders of Plymouth’s neighbor, the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the city of Boston was equally profound. Many of the leading lights of this larger Puritan enterprise also spent time in exile or military service in the low countries, including clergymen such as William Ames, John Davenport, Hugh Peter, and Thomas Hooker, as well as political and military leaders such as Nathaniel Ward and Capt. John Underhill. London

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and East Anglia merchants and gentry who invested in the colonizing enterprise had long been engaged in trade with the Netherlands. The Dutch experiences of these founding gures shaped their views on fundamental issues ranging from church polity and theology to republican government and commercial strategies.1 In many cases, the prior experience of Dutch settlers along the Hudson Valley and Long Island Sound led the later New England colonists to “discover” elements of life in the New World vital to their survival and prosperity, such as the utility of wampum for interior trade with Native Americans, or the location of some of the best fur trading stations along the river valleys of the northeast.2 By 1653, the year that the city of New Amsterdam received a corporate charter, it could well be said that Boston and New Amsterdam resembled each other more than they did any other places in the Atlantic world. Both were outposts of small, commercial, Protestant republics in northwestern Europe, they occupied two of the best natural harbors on North America’s Atlantic coast, and they both struggled to keep aoat by linking the marketable goods from their hinterlands with the trade circuits of the Atlantic world.3 The major difference lay in their respective relations to the home country. New Amsterdam was controlled by the Dutch West India Company, a powerful chartered corporation with strong ties to the state, and was therefore very much under the thumb

1 The most important early works in American historical scholarship to advance this argument for both academic and popular audiences were Douglass Campbell, The Puritan in Holland, England, and America: An Introduction to American History (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1892), and William Elliot Grifs, The Inuence of the Netherlands in the Making of the English Commonwealth and the American Republic (Boston: DeWolfe, Fiske, & Co., 1891), followed by many other publications; see Annette Stott, Holland Mania: The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture (Woodstock, N.Y.: The Overlook Press, 1998), 81–93. 2 On the Dutch development of the wampum trade, see Lynn Ceci, “Native Wampum as a Peripheral Resource in the Seventeenth-Century World System,” in The Pequots in Southern New England, ed. Laurence M. Hauptmann and James D. Wherry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 48–68. As early as 1614, Adrian Block, the Dutch trader for whom Block Island is named, had explored the Connecticut River valley in search of fur trading opportunities, and during the 1620s, the Dutch were shipping an average of 10,000 beaver skins a year out of the region; see Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 5. 3 See Mark A. Peterson, “Cities on the Margins: New Amsterdam and Boston in 1653,” de Halve Maen, Journal of the Holland Society of New York (Summer, 2005): 32–35.

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of its transatlantic overlords.4 Boston, by contrast, was the center of its own chartered corporate colony, the Massachusetts Bay Company, and by virtue of the fact that the colonists brought their charter across the ocean with them, they ruled themselves in virtual independence of the English government.5 As a result, from its founding onward, the city of Boston and the colony it dominated developed an autonomous sense of identity that made it unique among Europe’s colonial plantations in the Atlantic world. In the context of European geopolitics of the mid-seventeenth century, this fact made the Dutch Republic all the more attractive as a model for New England to follow. The Netherlands’ eighty-year revolt against Spanish rule, nally resolved in 1648, together with the dramatic successes of Dutch worldwide commercial expansion, presented New Englanders with an example of what a small but industrious and commercially minded nation could do, even in the face of imperial opposition. The fact that Bostonians had “national” or even “imperial” ambitions for themselves from their earliest days, should not be underestimated; even Parliament at one point referred to the “kingdom” of New England in its dealings with this obstreperous colony.6 In 1651, when Parliament passed the rst of the Navigation Acts designed to restrict Dutch access to shipping and trade that England believed it should control, Boston’s sympathies naturally aligned themselves with their Dutch neighbors and exemplars. During the Anglo-Dutch wars that ensued, Bostonians refused to join the eet Cromwell had sent to seize New Netherland in 1654.7 A decade later, with Cromwell gone and Charles II restored to the throne, the expeditionary force dispatched by Charles’s brother, the Duke of York, bypassed New England entirely in the assault which 4 The most thorough scholarly study of the origins and development of the colony is Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005). 5 The historical literature on the founding of Massachusetts is immensely voluminous, but a thorough introduction to the chartering of the Massachusetts Bay Company and its removal from English oversight can be found in Charles Mclean Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934): 1:344–461. 6 Leo F. Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1542–1754, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1924–1941): 1:141–42; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1628–1686, 5 vols. in 6 (Boston, 1853–54): 2:34. 7 See Mark Peterson, “Boston Emerges: From Hiding Place to Hub of the Puritan Atlantic, 1630–1660,” unpublished paper, presented at the Northwestern University Atlantic History Seminar, Evanston, Illinois, November 17, 2006.

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took New Amsterdam for the English and created the province of New York.8 In the subsequent quarter century, the Stuart monarchs’ intervention in North American affairs drove New England and the former New Netherland apart. By expelling any ofcial Dutch presence from the North American continent, the English government truncated the evolving organic relationship between Boston and New Amsterdam, and left behind the Dutch inuence in New England as a kind of phantom missing limb, a ghostly presence that would continue to haunt the Yankee imagination for generations to come.9 Nevertheless, Bostonians continued to take an avid interest in the affairs of their fellow Protestants in the Low Countries. In 1674, The Narrative of the Most Terrible and Dreadfull Tempest, Hurricane, or Earthquake in Holland, an English translation of a Dutch pamphlet, was published in Boston by Samuel Green. But the Glorious Revolution in England, and the parallel rebellions it sparked in both Boston and New York, restored some of this Anglo-Dutch amity as well. The presence of William of Orange, the Dutch Stadholder, as William III on the English throne from 1689 onwards, his generous treatment of the New England and New York colonies in the wake of their overthrow of Edmund Andros, the colonial vice regent for James II, and his subsequent pursuit of an aggressive anti-French foreign policy, brought Dutch esteem to new heights among New England’s militant Protestant patriots. No better evidence of this feeling can be found than in the diary of a young Boston merchant named Jonathan Belcher, who traveled through the Netherlands in 1704, visiting the famous scenes of Dutch patriotic resistance to Spanish tyranny, including the palace where William the Silent was assassinated in 1584. Belcher’s diary vividly recounted the details of the death of “this glorious prince . . . the rst deliverer of the Dutch from Popery,” done in by the “cursed villany,” the “folly and madness” of a “Frenchman” who “recd money from the Spaniards” to commit murder “on so great, so good a man.”10 This powerful identication with the House 8 Robert C. Ritchie, The Duke’s Province: A Study of New York Politics and Society, 1664–1691 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977). 9 See Judy Richardson’s essay in this volume for a further exploration of this subject, along with her book, Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 10 Jonathan Belcher, Journal of a Trip to the Netherlands and Germany, 1704, Ms., Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Massachusetts, 14–16. On the House

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of Orange would stay with Belcher throughout his life. On his return to Boston, Belcher would name a street he laid out through his family estate “Nassau Street,” and in the 1750s, as Royal Governor of New Jersey, he named the main building of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) “Nassau Hall.”11 During the revolutionary crisis that nally separated thirteen North American colonies from British rule, the example of the Dutch revolt against Spain remained very much in the minds of historicallyconscious Bostonians, especially as they contemplated the challenge of forming a new independent republic. In their writings of the 1770s, both Josiah Quincy and John Adams offered Dutch resistance to Spain as a model for Massachusetts’ opposition to unjust royal authority, and later, Adams himself would serve as diplomatic envoy to the Netherlands and encourage Dutch support for the Revolutionary War.12 If anything, war and independence enhanced Boston’s ties with the Netherlands, as New Englanders could now trade there directly and legally, and Yankee sailors consequently became a more common sight in Dutch port cities, as a recent collection of portraits by a Dutch artist of New England sea captains attests.13 By the 1840s, when John Lothrop Motley began his work as a historian, more than two centuries of connection and afnity between his native city of Boston and the nation whose history he would champion stood as the deep background and provided an important context in which to undertake this task. In an era in which sectional conict made New England’s place within the American republic seem increasingly tenuous, the example of the Dutch Republic’s ability to survive internal strife as well as external oppression was not such an unlikely place for a Boston historian to turn for historical guidance.

of Nassau and the construction of Dutch patriotism, see Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 51–125. 11 Belcher, in fact, declined the college trustees’ suggestion that the building be named “Belcher Hall,” preferring to honor “the immortal Memory of the glorious King William the 3d. who was a Branch of the illustrious House of Nassau,” Michael C. Batinski, Jonathan Belcher, Colonial Governor (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 170; see also Annie Haven Thwing, The Crooked & Narrow Streets of the Town of Boston (Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1920), 228, 237–41. 12 Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 80, 95–104. 13 Peter Benes, Charles Delin: Portrait Painter of Maastricht and Amsterdam (Boston: Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, 1985).

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Nineteenth-century Boston produced an astonishing eforescence of historical scholarship. The natives of this small city, an ocean away from the archives of London, Paris, Brussels, and Madrid, took upon themselves the unlikely task of researching and narrating not only the history of the Dutch Republic, but also the rise and fall of all the great European empires of the early modern era. Leading gures in this historical renaissance included William Hickling Prescott, author of histories of Spain and Spain’s conquests of Mexico and Peru, and Francis Parkman, who wrote a seven-volume history of France and England in North America through the Seven Years’ War.14 A long tradition of historical scholarship and voluminous production lay behind this owering of New England historiography—or to put it less grandly, Bostonians had always been great scribblers about the past. Their displacement across the ocean from European centers of knowledge left them anxiously scrambling to explain, mostly to themselves, exactly who, what, where, when, and why they were in the larger course of history. Most of early Boston’s historical writers were clergymen. In the seventeenth century, Cotton Mather, minister of the Old North Church, produced a seven-volume history of New England, modestly titled Magnalia Christi Americana (the Great Works of Christ in America): “I write the wonders of the Christian religion, ying from the depravations of Europe, to the American strand.”15 Before Mather, other Boston ministers, notably his father, Increase Mather, had written somewhat briefer histories of New England events.16

14 The leading biographical studies of these three historians are: Wilbur R. Jacobs, Francis Parkman, Historian as Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991); Harvey C. Gardiner, William Hickling Prescott: A Biography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969); and Joseph Guberman, The Life of John Lothrop Motley (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). David Levin, History as Romantic Art (NY: AMS Press, 1967), treats the historical writings of these three, together with George Bancroft, as a coherent literary phenomenon. But these were not the only prominent Boston historians of the nineteenth century, a formidable group that also included Hannah Adams, Henry Adams, George Bancroft, John Fiske, Richard Hildreth, John Gorham Palfrey, and Jared Sparks, to name just a few of the more prominent gures. 15 Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, Books I and II, ed. Kenneth Murdock (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 89. 16 See Increase Mather, A Relation of the Troubles . . . (Boston: John Foster, 1677), and Increase Mather, A Brief History of the War with the Indians (London: Richard Chiswell, 1676); also William Hubbard, A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England (Boston: John Foster, 1677). On New England’s Historiography in the seventeenth century, see Stephen Carl Arch, Authorizing the Past: The Rhetoric of History in SeventeenthCentury New England (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994).

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After Cotton Mather, other ministers continued the tradition. In the eighteenth century, Thomas Prince, pastor of Boston’s Old South Church, wrote his own Chronological History of New England, . . . with an introduction containing a brief epitome of the most remarkable transactions and events abroad, from the Creation: including the connected line of time, the succession of patriarchs and sovereigns of the most famous kingdoms & empires, the gradual discoveries of America, and the progress of the Reformation to the discovery of New-England.

Writing this introduction so exhausted Prince that his subsequent account of New England history petered out within only a few years of the migrants’ arrival.17 Later in the century, other historians picked up where Prince had left off. Thomas Hutchinson, the loyalist governor of the colony, used Prince’s remarkable collection of documents as a major source for a three-volume history of Massachusetts, the last volume not completed until Hutchinson was living in exile in England, a refugee from the revolution.18 Mercy Otis Warren produced a twovolume history of the American Revolution from the point of view of the successful rebels.19 And in the wake of Hutchinson and Warren came Jeremy Belknap, minister of Boston’s Federal Street Church, a New Hampshire native who moved to Boston, where he compiled a three-volume study of his own home state to rival Hutchinson’s, and then wrote American Biography, a two-volume compendium of the lives of exemplary Americans, from Christopher Columbus to George Washington.20 By the nineteenth century, Boston’s historians were less likely to be clergymen, and more likely to be sons of the new mercantile and manufacturing elite. These commercial and industrial titans intermarried

17 Thomas Prince, A Chronological History of New England in the form of Annals (Boston: Kneeland and Green, 1736), title page. 18 Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay, 3 vols., ed. Lawrence Shaw Mayo (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936); see also Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 16–20. 19 Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 2 vols, ed. Lester H. Cohen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1989). 20 See Jeremy Belknap, American Biography: or, an Historical Account of those Persons who have been Distinguished in America . . ., 2 vols. (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer Andrews, 1794–98); and Belknap, The History of New Hampshire, 3 vols. (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1784–92). On Belknap, who was also the principal founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society, see Louis Leonard Tucker, Clio’s Consort: Jeremy Belknap and the Founding of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston: MHS, 1990).

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with the older clerical families and produced offspring endowed with the leisure borne of riches, matched with clerical habits of intensive reading, language study, and more scribbling.21 What remained constant was the need to explain themselves, to use history as a means to locate Boston in the shifting currents and tides of historical change. However, several of the most prominent and successful Brahmin historians chose to do so indirectly, not by writing their own region’s history as part of the creation of the United States, but by exploring the successes and failures of predecessor empires in order to make sense of Boston’s place in the emerging North American colossus. It was in this context, in addition to Boston’s long relationship with the Netherlands, that John Lothrop Motley came to believe that the history of the Dutch Republic might be an especially good way to think about what Boston’s identity was becoming in the turbulent middle decades of the nineteenth century. Locating Boston in space and time was not an easy task, for Boston was a peculiar place, ill-suited to the dominant modes of historical explanation, especially the nationalist forms emerging in the nineteenth century.22 Unlike most colonial possessions of European powers, Massachusetts did not become a major producer of staple crops or extractive resources desired in the home country. From its earliest days, Boston’s economy thrived on transatlantic trade, which made it a colonial competitor to, rather than a dependency of, the metropolitan trading ports of Britain and Europe.23 Bostonians also harbored their

21 On this sociological shift in the production of high culture in Boston, see James Turner, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 1–67; Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World they Made (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 113–163. 22 The literature on nationalism and the emergence of modern historical writing is extensive; for a recent useful introduction, see Peter Mandler, History and National Life (London: Prole Books, 2002), pp. 11–45. On the importance of German scholarship to this development, see Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell, eds., Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990). On its development in nineteenth-century Boston, see Garry Wills, Henry Adams and the Making of America (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 2005), pp. 33–48, 87–103. 23 Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955); Stephen Innes, Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (NY: W.W. Norton, 1995), pp. 271–307; Margaret E. Newell, From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 72–83. For a contemporary English analysis and critique of New England’s claims to autonomy, see Sir Josiah Child (1630–1699), “The Nature of Plantations, and their Consequences to Great Britain, Seriously Considered,” in Select Dissertations on Colonies and Plantations, (London: W. Hay, 1775), pp. 20–22.

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own imperial ambitions, separate from those of the home country. As the title and structure of Mather’s, Prince’s, and many other local historians’ works suggest, Bostonians imagined their city as the capital of an expanding New England interior and the principal center of commerce and culture in English North America, an image that promoted a powerful sense of identity akin to nationalism. References to the “nation of New England” abounded in the region’s literature.24 With its own national identity in the making, Boston’s history did not rest easily within the narratives of larger states or empires. Not surprisingly, one aspect of this quasi-national identity was a strong reluctance among Bostonians to submit easily to imperial authority. In the seventeenth century, this truculence appeared in the form of resistance to the Stuart monarchy’s attempts to rein in the colony’s government or revoke its charter.25 In the eighteenth century, it emerged as opposition to Parliamentary reforms in the 1760s and rebellion in the 1770s. For the rst half of the nineteenth century, Bostonians expressed profound discomfort with centralized authority under a southerndominated United States government. In 1788, Massachusetts ratied the Constitution by the narrowest of margins, despite considerable separatist sentiment in New England, and insisted on addressing its severe reservations in the form of recommended amendments.26 These amendments, a basis in part for the future Bill of Rights, were designed to guarantee the hard won and long cherished liberties of the people of the commonwealth against the encroachment of a powerful central government, regardless of whether such a government was located in 24 For a recent discussion of New England’s “national” self-consciousness, though set within a United States context rather than an Atlantic one, see Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 116. Conforti’s description of regional identity is grounded in similar process of identity formation described in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed., (London, 2001). See also David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), chapter 5; and Lewis P. Simpson, Mind and the American Civil War: A Meditation on Lost Causes (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). For discussions of New England nationalism in the late seventeenth century, see Philip S. Haffenden, New England in the English Nation, 1689–1713 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). 25 Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), and Richard R. Johnson, Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies, 1675–1715 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981, are two among many titles to address these issues. 26 Conforti, 116.

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London, Philadelphia, or the new national capital to be built on the banks of the Potomac. After Jefferson’s election in 1800, many in Boston felt betrayed by his foreign policy of embargo, followed by “Mr. Madison’s War” of 1812–1814. Taken together, the Virginia Presidents’ policies seemed designed to destroy Boston’s commercial economy, and nearly drove New England to secede from the union in the Hartford Convention of 1814.27 From the Missouri Compromise of 1819–20 onward, Bostonians protested vigorously when southern administrations pushed for the westward expansion of slave-based labor systems, as in the Mexican War of 1846–48, and it was no coincidence that radical abolitionism and the belief that the United States was ruled by a conspiratorial “slavocracy” emerged in Boston as well.28 John Lothrop Motley was born in Boston in 1814, the year of the Hartford Convention, the son of Thomas Motley, a leading Boston merchant, and Anna Lothrop, daughter and granddaughter of prominent Boston ministers.29 He was raised in a culture that looked to Europe for intellectual guidance. While he was still a small child, recent Harvard graduates like Edward Everett and George Ticknor began to make educational pilgrimages to Europe for training in the new scholarly disciplines then developing in Germany.30 As a boy, Motley showed a gift for languages, which he pursued at the experimental Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, directed by the historian George Bancroft. By the age of twelve he could read French, Spanish, German, Latin, and Greek. Motley entered Harvard College at the precocious age of thirteen, where he befriended other boys who would become

27 James M. Banner, Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815 (New York, 1970); Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 23–60; Richard Buel, America on the Brink: How the Political Struggle over the War of 1812 Almost Destroyed the Young Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 28 On New England’s conspiratorial fears in the 1840s–50s, see David Brion Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, 1971). On the role of radical abolitionists in the crisis among Boston’s elite during the 1850s, see Albert von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). 29 See Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Lothrop Motley, A Memoir (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1878), pp. 1–8, a fond biography written by a friend and fellow leading light in Boston’s literary circles. 30 David Tyack, George Ticknor and the Boston Brahmins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967): Lewis P. Simpson, The Man of Letters in New England and the South (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1973).

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leading gures in Boston’s political and literary circles—Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, among them.31 After college, he followed the example of many other contemporary Boston intellectuals and spent two years (1832–33) reading law at German universities, rst Göttingen, then Berlin. Motley managed to keep clear of the notorious ‘ghting clubs’ that plagued student life at the German universities, and therefore returned to Boston unscarred by dueling swords. But he did receive one lasting impression—he became intimate friends with Otto von Bismarck, a relationship he would cultivate for the rest of his life. Still, Motley found that travel and languages suited him better than law, and he therefore contemplated a career in diplomacy. After a brief and unfruitful posting at the American embassy in St. Petersburg in 1841–42, Motley went on to become United States Ambassador to Vienna during the Civil War, and then minister to the Court of St. James during the Grant administration.32 But all the while, from the 1850s through the 1870s, inspired by the example of Prescott’s histories of Spain and Spanish America, and encouraged by Prescott himself, Motley produced a series of multivolume works on the rise and evolution of the Dutch Republic, aiming to cover the period from the abdication of Charles V in 1555 through the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.33 A latent motive for undertaking this mammoth project can be seen in Motley’s desire to investigate the lessons that the Netherlands’ tribulations in the Eighty Years’ War might offer for New England and the United States during its own four score years of trial, from the birth pangs of the 1770s through the descent into disunion of the 1850s. In particular, Motley was taken by the many likenesses between the Netherlands and New England—the conned geographical limits on the corner of a great continent, the militant Protestantism, republican government, commercial ambitions, and intrepid seafaring capacities for world trade.34 These qualities made 31

On Motley’s experiences in college, see Holmes, pp. 9–15. The best account of Motley’s childhood, education and diplomatic career can be found in Motley’s own correspondence with family and friends, for Motley was a consistently lively and detailed writer with a gift for capturing the varied social scenes he encountered; see The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley, ed. George William Curtis, 3 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900; reprint New York: AMS Press, 1973), vols. 15–17 of The Writings of John Lothrop Motley, The Netherlands Edition. 33 On Prescott’s inuence, see Correspondence of JLM, I:221, 245–47. 34 Motley would make this comparison explicit in The History of the United Netherlands, 6 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900, reprint NY: AMS Press, 1973), vols. 6–11 of The Writings of John Lothrop Motley, Netherlands Edition, 3:482. 32

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Dutch history a powerful draw for a Bostonian attempting to assess the ability of Massachusetts to stay aoat in the troubled waters of American empire. Motley’s approach to historical writing reected the romantic conventions of his era. Inuenced by Ranke and German scholarship, he was committed to painstaking research in European archives, for which his language skills and inherited wealth prepared him well. In 1851, having made several false starts while working at home in Boston, he decided that he could not produce a history of the Dutch Republic without direct access to European archives, and soon departed for Europe with his growing family in tow.35 German romanticism also provided grounds for seeing the emergence of the nation-state as a natural and progressive form of historical evolution. In particular, Schiller’s History of the Revolt of the Netherlands, published in an English translation in 1847, had an important impact on Motley.36 The lengthy introduction to the rst of Motley’s works, The Rise of the Dutch Republic, began, in typical New England fashion, at the dawn of history. But Motley, inuenced by his friendship with the geologist Charles Lyell, was more evolutionist than creationist.37 His story began not with Adam and Eve, but with the “three great rivers—the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Schelde—[depositing] their slime for ages among the dunes and sand-banks heaved up by the ocean around their mouths.” The determinism of nature, no less surely than that of original sin and predestination, shaped the character of the people who would occupy this territory: “Thus inundated by mighty rivers, quaking beneath the level of the ocean, belted about by hirsute forests, this low land, nether land, hollow land, or Holland, seemed hardly deserving the arms of the all accomplished Roman. . . . [yet] the genius of liberty has inspired as noble a resistance to oppression here as it ever aroused in Grecian or Italian breasts.”38 Motley’s romanticism also manifested itself in his belief, following Emerson and Carlyle, in representative men—gures who distilled the spirit of an age and the character of a people, men drawn by destiny

35 Correspondence of JLM, I:157; Holmes, Memoir, p. 67. David Levin, History as Romantic Art, offers the most complete assessment of Motley’s background and inuences. 36 Friedrich Schiller, History of the Revolt of the Netherlands, trans. A. J. W. Morrison (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1847). 37 Correspondence of JLM, I: 295, 300. 38 John Lothrop Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic, A History, 5 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900, reprint NY: AMS Press, 1973), vols. 1–5 of The Writings of John Lothrop Motley, Netherlands Edition, I: 2–4.

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into positions of leadership and world-transformative power.39 His historical prose is consequently very theatrical, full of pen portraits of villains and heroes who march and strut upon the world stage. The necessary villain of Motley’s rst volume was Philip II, the Habsburg monarch who threw all of Spain’s military might into the effort to crush the Dutch Protestant revolt. As Motley described him, Philip: appeared on the whole the embodiment of Spanish chivalry and Spanish religious enthusiasm in its late and corrupted form. . . . The Christian heretic was to be regarded with a more intense hatred than even Moor or Jew had excited in the most Christian ages, and Philip was to be the latest and most perfect incarnation of all this traditional enthusiasm, this perpetual hate. . . . He was by birth, education, and character a Spaniard, and that so exclusively that the circumstance would alone have made him unt to govern a country so totally different in habits and national sentiments from his native land.40

Just as naturally, William the Silent emerges as the heroic center of The Rise of the Dutch Republic. In Motley’s view, William’s resistance to Spanish oppression was rooted in his fundamental decency, his hatred of tyranny, rather than in ideological opposition to Phillip’s Catholic treachery. Born and raised a Catholic, William gradually came to embrace Protestantism, but his virtue and tolerance, his rule through respect toward his subjects, and the egalitarian openness of the natural aristocrat are the features that Motley chooses to emphasize in portraying William. In contrast to the narrow misanthropy and religious fanaticism of Philip, William “had the good breeding which comes from the heart, rened into an inexpressible charm from his constant intercourse, almost from the cradle, with mankind of all ranks.”41 In addition, William’s political instincts were perfectly attuned to his position: “He governed the passions and sentiments of a great nation as if they had been but the keys and chords of one vast instrument, and his hand rarely failed to evoke harmony even out of the wildest storms.”42 In short, William was the perfect embodiment of the Dutch revolt, its Representative Man.

39 These ideas are developed in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures (Boston: Houghton, Mifin, 1883); and Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (London: Everyman’s Library, 1908). See also David Levin, “Representative Men,” in History as Romantic Art, pp. 49–73. 40 Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, I: 178–79. 41 Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, I: 298–99. 42 Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, V: 367.

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Although romantic in technique, the plot of The Rise of the Dutch Republic is not romantic but tragic. Motley ends this rst installment of his larger story with an extended account of William’s assassination in 1584, and wrings every drop of emotion from the tragedy. The closing sentence reads: “As long as he lived, he was the guiding star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.”43 The assassin cut William’s career short of its proper fulllment, and left the incipient Dutch republic saddled, in Motley’s eyes, with a fatal aw. The Union of Utrecht in 1579, which brought the seven northern provinces together, had stopped short of creating a true republic. Each of the seven provinces maintained its sovereignty and individual liberties. In this respect, Motley anachronistically compares them to the future United States: “[The Union] was, nally, to differ from the American federal commonwealth in the great feature that it was to be merely a confederacy of sovereignties, not a representative republic. Its foundation was a compact, not a constitution.”44 (270). In other words, William the Silent was no George Washington. Had his assassin missed the mark, William might have become Washington’s equal.45 Motley speculates that if William had lived beyond his fty-one years, “the Union of Utrecht . . . might have formed a commonwealth so much more powerful, . . . it would have been possible to unite seventeen provinces instead of seven, and to save many long and blighting years of civil war.”46 The hopeful lesson from Dutch history that Motley offered in 1856, when The Rise of the Dutch Republic appeared in print, was that the constitution over which Washington had presided might yet preserve the American commonwealth from the horrors of civil war. History was progressive, America was a recent offshoot of the same Lamarckian evolutionary tree that had produced Dutch and English liberty, and the United States might learn from its predecessors’ mistakes as well as from their successes. Two years later, when Motley began research for his next volume, taking the Dutch Republic from 1584 through the truce with Spain

43

Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, V: 337–376, quotation on 376. Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, V: 117. 45 Motley kept and cherished a letter George Washington had written in 1788 to his maternal grandfather, the Rev. John Lothrop, in which Washington voiced his approval of John Lothrop’s support for Massachusetts’ recent ratication of the United States Constitution; see Correspondence of JLM, I: 36–37n. 46 Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, V: 118. 44

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of 1609, the prospects for such progress in America looked grim.47 Guerrilla war had broken out in Kansas, and Preston Brooks, a South Carolina Congressman, had given Motley’s friend Charles Sumner, now Senator from Massachusetts, a savage beating on the Senate oor. Motley returned to the European archives, with “pickax in hand, . . . working my way pretty steadily into the bowels of the land.”48 But to his dismay he could nd no representative man to carry the Dutch story forward. In a letter to his mother, he complained, “I have not got a grand central heroic gure, like William the Silent, to give unity and esh and blood interest to the scene. The history will, I fear, be duller and less dramatic than the other.”49 John of Oldenbarnevelt, the advocate general for Holland, and Maurice of Nassau, William of Orange’s son and a military commander of genius, take leading roles among the many characters that ll Motley’s stage in this twenty-ve year span. But neither can be allowed to carry the fate of the United Provinces solely in his hands. Their virtues and defects are too mixed and contradictory to line up neatly with the forces of good and evil, liberty and tyranny, that William and Philip had so perfectly embodied in The Rise of the Dutch Republic. And the growing conict between the religious parties that Maurice and Barneveldt imperfectly represented seemed to match, in its fanatical irrationality, the deepening crisis at home in America. Where The Rise of the Dutch Republic had ended in tragedy and tears, The History of the United Netherlands closed with the truce of 1609, a moment of ominous quiet: “There was a vast lull between two mighty storms. The Forty Years’ War was in the past, the Thirty Years’ War in the not-far-distant future.”50 Motley published the rst half of the United Netherlands, an incomplete story of a republic adrift, in November 1860, almost exactly at the moment of Abraham Lincoln’s election, and then returned home to Boston in 1861 to witness the disintegration of the United States.51 Given our hindsight on the eventual outcome of the secession crisis, it is difcult for twenty-rst-century readers to recover the anxiety and

47

Correspondence of JLM, I: 276. Correspondence of JLM, I: 276. 49 Correspondence of JLM, I: 266. Motley’s feelings had not changed by the time he completed the work. Just after its publication in November, 1860, he wrote to his mother again, saying “The volumes have cost me quite as much labor as the other work; but alas! I have no William of Orange for a hero.” Correspondence, II: 107. 50 Motley, The History of the United Netherlands, VI: 365. 51 Correspondence of JLM, II: 106–136. 48

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uncertainty that seized Boston in 1860 and 1861. Motley, the returning native, captures it. Already in 1858, he feared that the continuance of New England in the union might be untenable: “A man in . . . Massachusetts must either be a rebel and bend his energies to the dissolution of the Union, or he must go heart in hand with Alabama and Carolina in acquiring Cuba and Central America, and carving out an endless succession of slave States for the future.”52 When he arrived in Boston shortly after Lincoln’s election, with seven southern provinces—or rather, states—already declaring secession from the United States and raising armies, Motley sensed an air of panic in the city, which he described later in a letter to his wife: “the Confederate ag was to wave over Washington before May 1, and over Faneuil Hall before the end of this year; there was to be a secession party in every Northern State, and blood was to ow from internecine combats in every Northern town.”53 Though desperate, these fears were not implausible—they were grounded in the recent history of a divided north and of anti-abolitionist violence, which led Bostonians to expect extreme isolation, especially if Britain chose to enter the war on the side of the South. The great and welcome surprise to Bostonians came in the spring of 1861, when the north rose nearly as one in opposition to the southern rebellion. Lincoln’s call for troops was met with unexpected enthusiasm, and northern politicians rallied for the Union.54 For the moment, his worst fears allayed, Motley returned to Dutch history, and now the lessons he had earlier drawn in The Rise of the Dutch Republic seemed more signicant than ever. In May, 1861, he penned a lengthy letter to the London Times to aid the cause of keeping England neutral, soon to be published as The Causes of the American Civil War. The secessionist south and its supporters in Britain were claiming that withdrawal from the Union was within southern rights—they had joined in a compact of sovereign states and could withdraw when the compact no longer suited them. To this, Motley argued that under the Articles of Confederation between 1776 and 1787, the United States had been

52 Correspondence of JLM, I: 343. On the attempt by various U.S. “libustering” expeditions to seize Cuba and Latin American territories, to which Motley refers in his letter, see Albert H. Z. Carr, The World and William Walker (New York: Harper & Row, 1963); Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 53 Correspondence of JLM, II: 171. 54 Motley’s comment on this sudden shift is found in the same letter in which he described Boston’s panic several months earlier; Correspondence of JLM, II: 171.

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such a compact, “like . . . the States-General of the old Dutch Republic.” But the Constitution of 1787 had altered the nature of government from a confederacy to a sovereign commonwealth with direct authority derived from and extended over all the people. “The great and incurable defect of all former federal governments, such as the . . . Germanic, Helvetic, Hanseatic, and Dutch Republics, is that they were sovereignties over sovereignties. . . . Secession is, in brief, the return to chaos from which we emerged three-quarters of a century since.”55 In the summer of 1861, as energetic preparations for a righteous war were in full swing, Motley’s belief that history was progressive reached its high point. It seemed possible that now, for the rst time, after decades of southern dominance, control of the American imperial republic was within the grasp of Boston and New England’s moral reach, and that the United States could learn from and improve upon the history of its predecessor republic. Never before were the lessons of Dutch history so clear, or so important, and this urgency caused Motley to return to The History of the United Netherlands and spell these lessons out in a detailed comparison. After reiterating the remarkable rise of a powerful Dutch global empire out of the meager and articially conned geography of northwestern Europe, Motley writes: What a lesson to our transatlantic commonwealth, whom bountiful nature had blessed at her birth beyond all the nations of history and seemed to speed upon an unlimited career of freedom and peaceful prosperity; should she be capable at the rst alarm on her track to throw away her inestimable advantages! If all history is not a mockery and a fable, she may be sure that the nation which deliberately carves itself in pieces and substitutes articial boundaries for the natural and historic ones condemns itself either to extinction or to the lower life of political insignicance and petty warfare, with the certain loss of liberty and national independence at last. Better a terrible struggle, better the sacrice of property and happiness for years, than the eternal setting of that great popular hope, the United American Republic.56

In his enthusiasm for the American cause, at the age of forty-seven, Motley volunteered for diplomatic service and was made ambassador to the imperial court at Vienna, where he negotiated a series of difcult

55 John Lothrop Motley, The Causes of the American Civil War (New York: J. G. Gregory, 1861), p. 12. 56 Motley, United Netherlands, III: 470–71. A footnote in the text of the Netherlands Edition is appended to this paragraph, and reads “Written in 1863.”

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and sensitive matters, including French and Austrian meddling in Mexico.57 As the Civil War dragged on, Abraham Lincoln grew in stature and moral authority. If Motley were to rewrite his rst opus, he may well have looked to Lincoln, rather than Washington, when sketching William the Silent, for Lincoln, like William, was the representative man who embodied his country’s virtues. In August 1864, Motley wrote to his mother from Vienna: I venerate Abraham Lincoln exactly because he is the true, honest type of American democracy. There is nothing of the shabby-genteel, the would-be-but-couldn’t-be ne gentleman; he is the great American Demos, honest, shrewd, homely, wise, humorous, cheerful, brave, blundering occasionally, but through blunders struggling onward toward what he believes the right.58

After an assassin’s bullet killed the President, which Motley described as “the Washington tragedy,” the likeness grew still more pronounced.59 Lincoln’s death, and the disaster of Reconstruction that followed, shifted Motley’s historical sensibility. Increasingly, Motley saw contingency and chance, not romantic progress, as the primary lesson of history. His own diplomatic career fell to pieces through no fault of his own—he was twice victimized by the petty and vindictive Washington politics that thrived during Andrew Johnson’s and then General Grant’s administration.60 Motley’s disillusionment was consistent with many Bostonians’ lost hopes. In the surprising atmosphere of 1861, the possibility of remaking the American Union in New England’s image had ickered to life, and grew stronger during the war. But after four years of bloody and grueling conict, after the assassination of the unlikely hero who embodied such hopes, and through the disheartening years of Reconstruction, New Englanders found themselves implicated, more deeply than ever, in an irredeemable republic with undiminished imperial ambitions. In the last of his three great works of Dutch history that Motley resumed in 1871, shortly after being ignominiously recalled by President Grant from his post as Minister to the Court of St. James, Motley took up

57

Holmes, Memoir, pp. 101–126. Correspondence of JLM, III: 35. 59 Motley to the Duchess of Argyll, May 27, 1865, in Correspondence of JLM, III: 75–78. 60 Holmes, Memoir, pp. 127–140, 155–190. 58

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the story of the United Provinces again, but on a much smaller scale. He narrowed his focus to the contest between Maurice of Nassau and John of Barneveldt ( Johan van Oldebarnevelt) for leadership of the United Netherlands. Perhaps Motley had Grant in mind when he portrayed Maurice as a brilliant general, a great military tactician, with no gift for political leadership and no rm moral convictions, who colludes with the vindictive Counter-Remonstrant party to bring down Barneveldt. On Maurice, Motley has this to say: The splendor of military despotism and the awe inspired by his unquestioned supremacy in what was deemed the greatest of all sciences invested the person of Maurice of Nassau with a grandeur which many a crowned potentate might envy. . . . [ H ]e found himself at the conclusion of the truce with his great occupation gone, and, although generously provided for by the treasury, of the Republic, yet with an income proportionately limited. Politics and theology were elds in which he had hardly served an apprenticeship, and it was possible that when he should step forward as a master in those complicated and difcult pursuits, soon to absorb the attention of the commonwealth and the world, it might appear that war was not the only science that required serious preliminary studies.61

On Grant, whom Motley met in October, 1865, he offered these simple comments, and reconstructed his own dialogue with the great general of the Army of the Republic: Did he enjoy the being followed as he was by the multitude? “It was very painful.” This answer is singularly characteristic of the man. They call on him for speeches which he cannot and will not try to make . . . I doubt if we have had any ideal as completely realized as that of the republican soldier in him.62

Maurice’s limitations as a politician in The Life and Death of John of Barneveldt are matched, in Motley’s telling by the ultimate futility that Barneveldt’s much more expert political skills meet. Though sentenced to death as a traitor, Barneveldt, in Motley’s view, had committed no real crime, and his execution seems arbitrary and meaningless. As Barneveldt is led to the scaffold, he lifts his eyes heavenward and asks,

61 John Lothrop Motley, The Life and Death of John of Barneveldt, 3 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900, reprint NY: AMS Press, 1973), vols. 12–14 of The Writings of John Lothrop Motley, Netherlands Edition, I: 7. 62 Motley to Oliver Wendell Holmes, October 10, 1865, Correspondence of JLM, III: 85–87.

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“O God, what does man come to! This, then, is the reward of forty years’ service to the state!” Then, at the moment of death: Barneveld said to the executioner: Be quick about it. Be quick. The executioner then struck his head off at a single blow. Many persons from the crowd now sprang, in spite of all opposition, upon the scaffold and dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood, cut wet splinters from the boards, or grubbed up the sand that was steeped in it; driving many bargains afterwards for these relics to be treasured, with various feelings of sorrow, joy, and glutted or expiated vengeance.63

For John Lothrop Motley, Dutch history remained compelling and dramatic to the end of his own life in 1877, three years after John of Barneveldt was published. But it had ceased to offer any useful or hopeful lessons for Boston’s future in the American imperial republic, and he ends his nal volume with words that apply nearly as well to his native country as they summarize the historical trajectory of his chosen subject: The Republic—that magnicent commonwealth which in its infancy had confronted, single-handed, the greatest empire of the earth, and had wrested its independence from the ancient despot after a forty years’ struggle—had now been rent in twain, although in very unequal portions, by the end of political and religious hatred. Thus crippled, she was to go forth and take her share in that awful conict now in full blaze, and of which after ages were to speak with a shudder as the Thirty Years’ War.64

What had begun as romance, ended as tragedy. During Motley’s lifetime, his works were immensely popular in the United States, in England, and in the Netherlands as well, where they were translated and published in Dutch. His rst work, the three-volume History of the Rise of the Dutch Republic, appeared in print simultaneously in England and America, to critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. The distinguished British historian James Anthony Froude, author of a popular history of England set in the same era as Motley’s Dutch Republic, offered glowing praise in the Westminster Review, calling it “a history as complete as industry and genius can make it, . . . the book is one which will take its place among the nest histories in this

63 64

Motley, Life and Death of John of Barneveldt, III: 225. Motley, Life and Death of John of Barneveldt, III: 293.

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or in any language.”65 Across the Atlantic, the North American Review was equally enthusiastic, but the strongest praise came from William H. Prescott, Motley’s mentor and the leading American historian, who wrote, “We may congratulate ourselves that it was reserved for one of out countrymen to tell the story—better than it had yet been told—of this memorable revolution, which in so many of its features bears a striking resemblance to our own.”66 The general public supported the critics—15,000 copies were sold in London in its rst year, and an equal number in the United States. On a subsequent visit to The Hague to pursue the research for his next work, he was received with honor by the Dutch historian Groen van Prinsterer, and by the archivist general of Holland, Bakhuizen van den Brink, who assured him that practically everyone in Holland had read his book. The King and Queen of Holland awarded him an audience, invited him to dine, praised his work, and presented him with an inscribed copy of van Prinsterer’s twelve-volume Archives et Correspondance de la Maison d’Orange.67 When the rst two volumes of his History of the United Netherlands were published in 1860, they met with similar acclaim. After the trauma of the American Civil War, and after Motley’s personal disillusionment in his work as an ambassador for the Grant administration, his subsequent historical writing, The Life of Barneveldt, with its narrower scope and tragic conclusion, met with less enthusiasm from critics and from the general public. Perhaps it was Motley’s fault, as his work now lacked the sweep, the energy, the focus, and the direction that he brought to his pre-war publications. Perhaps the American public, especially Motley’s Boston and New England readership, could no longer conceive of the American colossus emerging in the Gilded Age as the moral and political equivalent of the Dutch Republic in its Golden Age. This may have been accentuated by the fact that Motley’s religious and political sympathies rest so clearly with the defeated Barneveldt, the representative of the more “confederate” position during the conict within the United Provinces, against the victorious nationalist or “union” leader Maurice of Nassau.68 But with Motley’s early death in 1877 at the age of 63, the inuence of his works began

65 Cited in Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Lothrop Motley: A Memoir (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, & Co., 1879) 75–76. 66 Cited in Holmes, 79–80. 67 Guberman, Life of John Lothrop Motley, 53–65. 68 On the criticism Motley received for Barneveldt, see Holmes, 192–204.

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to fade, while other historians, including his teacher, George Bancroft, his peer and contemporary Francis Parkman, and younger historians such as Henry Adams, continued to ourish, their works dominating historical scholarship in America, and turning public attention directly toward the founding era of the American republic.69 Motley’s inuence would continue to be felt, however, as American writers, members of the new historical profession dominated by the emerging PhD programs, as well as more traditional amateur historians, looked to the ethnic and social roots of colonial Americans to explain the customs and practices of the United States during an era of intensive immigration from eastern and southern Europe. In the hands of popular writers such as Douglass Campbell and William Elliot Grifs, and in the work of academic historians inspired by the “germ theory” of American civilization championed by Herbert Baxter Adams of Johns Hopkins, the connections between the Dutch and English colonists of early America were rediscovered.70 J. Franklin Jameson, another leading light in the historical profession and an early president of the American Historical Association, fostered this trend by publishing a biography of Willem Usselincx, the founder of the Dutch West India Company and therefore a kind of Dutch “founding father” of an American colony, and by editing a collection of primary documents from New Netherland, published on the three-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyages, and thereby putting these sources in the hands of historians throughout the country.71 These later writers were decidedly American authors looking for America’s roots in Dutch sources. Their purposes thus commenced at a far remove from the more localized, provincial context where Motley, the Boston writer, had begun. Before the American Civil War, when Boston, the metropolis of New England and self-styled “Hub of the Solar System,” had still held out hopes for sustaining its autonomy and integrity in the face of a frequently hostile, southern-dominated United States government, and against the imperial expansionist model

69 Bancroft published his History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States in 1882, and Henry Adams would make his name as a historian with his monumental nine-volume History of the United States of America during the Jefferson and Madison administrations, published in 1889–1891. 70 Stott, Holland Mania, 81–97. 71 See J. Franklin Jameson, William Usselinx, Founder of the Dutch and Swedish West India Companies (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1887); and Jameson, ed., Narratives of New Netherland, 1609–1664 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1909).

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of southern leaders from Jefferson to Jackson to Polk, the deant little Dutch Republic in its founding era had stood for everything that Bostonians such as Motley had long held dear, including a “confederate” vision of the American union modeled very much on the Dutch example. The trauma of the Civil War, the secession of the southern “slavocracy” rather than the oppressed New England states, the surprising and reorienting victory of the Union, and the inclusion, now, of Boston and New England within the ruling coalition of a recongured United States, changed the specic meaning of the Dutch for Motley’s American successors. Unlike Motley, his successors looked less to the specic confederated structure of the government of the United Provinces or its commercial relationships around the globe. Some historians, such as John Fiske, quite specically refuted the inated claims of Campbell and Grifs for Dutch political and institutional inuence on America. Instead, they focused on more generalized qualities: the freedom-loving character of Dutch people, both women and men, their religious tolerance (within the bounds of Protestantism, anyway), and the many specic contributions made by the Dutch to middle-class American culture, from cookies and wafes to dollars and golf.72 Motley had seen the lessons of the Dutch Republic for his Boston birthplace as a tragedy, a story of republican political principles and Protestant religious convictions, capable of standing up to external oppression but defeated by internal division. His successors would transform the tale, for their own purposes, into a triumph of bourgeois virtues, a marriage of Dutch liberty and tolerance with English imperial energy, producing as its offspring an American empire of liberty, ready to take its place as the rightful heir to the destiny foreshadowed by its illustrious forebears.

72

Stott, 87–95.

PART III

MIGRATION AND ASSIMILATION

CHAPTER FIVE

“BUT THO WE LOVE OLD HOLLAND STILL, WE LOVE COLUMBIA MORE,” THE FORMATION OF A DUTCH-AMERICAN SUBCULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES, 1840–1920 Hans Krabbendam

The contours of the story of Dutch immigration into the United States in the nineteenth century are well known thanks to the comprehensive and excellent works of historians Jacob van Hinte, Henry S. Lucas, and Robert P. Swierenga. Their contributions have mapped out the geography, demography, and religiosity of the Dutch in America. However, it is possible to lose the track through the woods with their dense and detailed descriptions. The ourishing eld of Dutch immigration tends to obscure the fact that this small immigrant group was able to survive as a distinctive subculture against the odds. It is my purpose to explain this phenomenon in this essay.1 The Dutch were not unique; dozens of European immigrant groups such as German Mennonites, German Lutherans organized in Missouri and Wisconsin Synod groups, Danish Lutherans, Swedish Covenanters, Amish and Hutterites had similar experiences, but did not match the reputation of an ethnic group as completely as the Dutch. While every so often tourists stumble over one of the Tulip Festivals in the United States and consider these fairs as typical Dutch events, these are recent cultural inventions rather than the core phenomenon of the subculture. Analysis of the history

1

Jacob van Hinte, Netherlanders in America: A Study of Emigration and Settlement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in the United States of America, Robert P. Swierenga, ed., Adriaan de Wit, chief trans. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House 1985). The original Dutch edition was published in 1928; Henry S. Lucas, Netherlanders in America: Dutch Immigration to the United States and Canada, 1789 –1950 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1955: repr. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989); Robert P. Swierenga, Faith and Family: Dutch Immigration and Settlement in the United States, 1820–1920 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2000). In combination 2,250 pages. Of course, not every Dutch immigrant chose to belong to a Dutch-American network, but a substantial number did.

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of Dutch immigration leads to a list of ten factors that contributed to the formation of a durable Dutch-American subculture. Mass emigration from the Netherlands to the United States catches the eye more for being relatively late and little, than for its spectacular nature. While the Irish led the pack with over 200,000 emigrants in the 1830s, followed by 150,000 Germans, 65,000 British, and 45,000 French, the Netherlands contributed only 1,412 landverhuizers. In the following decade, the numbers from Europe swelled from half a million to 1.6 million, of which the Dutch had a share of 8,000. Similar small countries such as Switzerland, Norway, and Sweden soon overshadowed the Dutch in numbers. The Dutch suffered from the same general European economic crisis, and the potato blight, but also had to deal with political stagnation. This crisis was broadly European and pushed hundreds of thousands of emigrants from their homes and birthplaces. Compared to Irish, English, and Germans, the Dutch left relatively late and in fewer numbers. But they still belonged to the “old emigration” phase lasting till the 1880s, and created especially for the Protestant emigrants a remarkably durable Dutch-American identity in the century between 1840 and 1940 when a quarter of a million Dutch men and women made the move. Religious anxiety, caused by a serious split in the established Protestant church and fear for the future, motivated a group of dissenters to take the lead in the emigration movement, between 1831 and 1880. While these Seceders were outnumbered by other religious groups, (twenty percent were Seceders, sixty percent belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, eighteen percent to the Roman Catholic Church), their share in the immigrant movement was fteen times higher than their share in the Dutch population. They left a lasting imprint on the Dutch-American community.2

2 Robert P. Swierenga, “Pioneers for Jesus Christ:” Dutch Protestant Colonization in North America as an Act of Faith,” in George Harinck and Hans Krabbendam, eds., Sharing the Reformed Tradition: The Dutch-North American Exchange, 1846–1996 (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 1996), 35–55. One percent of the emigrants were Jews. Appendix 2 in Stephan Thernstrom, ed., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 1047.

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Preparation The seed for a distinctive Dutch-American subculture was sown in the Netherlands. The explicit wish of the founders of the rst Dutch settlements was to live together and use local autonomy to realize an ideal of a Christian (i.e. Protestant—Calvinist) community. To further this goal they founded an ofcial and well-constructed association. Even though not every member chose to settle in the community, the aim of this enterprise was clear.3 The timing of their departure was favorable and their destination strategic in the light of the continuous expansion of America. Thanks to the organization and moral leadership, solidarity increased during the experience of the passage and subsequent difculties of the pioneer phase. The rst groups made able use of the directives of the descendants of the colonial Dutch in New York state, who hoped to increase the share of the Dutch Reformed Church in the marketplace of denominations. Common purpose created power to build. Pooling nances, based on reciprocal condence between leaders and followers, all belonging to a religious minority, carried the community through the rst ve years of severe deprivation.4 Though the size of the rst groups that left in 1846–47 was considerable—a maximum of eight hundred in each group—their visibility and geographical origins from across the Netherlands carried their messages throughout the country, causing a rippling effect on potential emigrants ready to follow. These splashes in the Dutch pond drew wide attention in the media. The authorities considered emigration as a risky business, but soon it was seen as a viable, realistic solution to pressing social problems. The continuous exchange of letters—private and published—and the settlements in the Midwest in Holland and Grand Rapids in Michigan, and Pella in Iowa, encouraged others to take a calculated risk.

3 Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1978), 7–8. 4 Frank D. Lewis, “Farm Settlement on the Canadian Prairies, 1898 to 1911,” The Journal of Economic History 41 (September 1981): 517–535, and “Farm Settlement with Imperfect Capital Markets: A Life-Cycle Application to Upper Canada, 1826–1851,” Canadian Journal of Economics 24 (2001): 174–195.

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While the call of freedom from America had reached the Dutch elite rst, they were ambiguous about the new country and feared for its orderly future, hoping that the ruling classes could fend off the pressing inuence of the masses.5 The other economic classes slowly but surely discovered “America’s” advantages to them in the lack of regulations, conscription and forced labor, and in the availability of land that caused the migration to draw especially from rural areas, which contributed eighty percent of the emigrants. Conditions in the United States compared favorably with the political and economic stagnation in the Netherlands and the oppressive attitude of the Dutch authorities, especially for a group of Seceders from the established church who had founded their own congregations since 1834 as a protest against the liberal trends in the mainline church and state interference in religious affairs, which went against their conscience and curtailed their plans for the future. While the oppressive policies of the authorities had ceased by 1841, the Seceders expected little encouragement from the government. Suffering from the economic stagnation, groups of several hundreds of these Seceders made plans to leave the country and included other Protestants in their ranks. Their departure to America was well publicized and generated a lively debate about the pros and cons of emigration. Thanks to them, landverhuizing became an issue and was closely monitored by the national government. This signaled the birth of a tradition of well considered moves to the United States. The leaders of the Seceders, who joined them to prevent their scattering, linked up with the descendants of early Dutch immigrants in New York who had already reached a level of respectability in America. They used this network to build a community, which was their explicit goal. Transatlantic emigration became an attractive alternative for those who interpreted the signs of the times as being unfavorable for their old country. It is no wonder that religious leaders who had recently broken off from the established church took the lead in organizing the exodus across the Atlantic. They had gained experience in carving out a niche in Dutch society and had developed a broad set of usable skills. For example, Rev. Cornelius van der Meulen (1800–1876) had worked

5 Several of them, such as the Dutch noblemen Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp and Carel baron de Vos van Steenwijk in 1784, made inspection tours of the new republic.

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as a laborer, contractor, and trader before he entered the ministry in 1838. Between 1841 and his emigration in 1847 he served a group of twelve struggling congregations in the province of Zeeland and guided them from weak beginnings to stable and self-supporting churches. He developed a broad perspective on the world and defended a practical church order geared for growth.6 Van der Meulen and his colleagues and a number of gifted lay people drafted a plan for future communities and took their valuable experience with them to the United States. These provisions preselected immigrants; they were more than mere desperate people, they had a plan. The growth of strong social and economic ties within the United States reduced the chances of failure and reassured poverty-stricken migrants to take the risk. A great variety of Dutch citizens disembarked at the port of New York to move further west.7 In addition to regional and family ties, religious bonds provided strong and useful connections, thereby shaping communities into a coherent subculture. This process was inuenced by the following factors in America.

Settlement Patterns Indispensable ingredients for the formation of a community were geographical centers that supported continuity, had capacity for growth, attracted assistance from established Americans and developed a working relationship with the authorities. Despite the hardships of the rst generation, the experiences of the rst wave of immigrants in America were positive. The considerable personal sacrices eventually paid off. The economic growth, available space, and opportunities in America contrasted favorably with the economic depression, gloomy prospects, and growing number of restrictions in the Netherlands. The organizational preparation of groups of Protestants in different regions in the Netherlands enabled the Dutch to spread their settlements

6 Hans Krabbendam, “Forgotten Founding Father: Cornelius VanderMeulen as Immigrant Leader,” Documentatieblad zendingsgeschiedenis en overzeese kerkgeschiedenis 5.2 (Fall 1998): 1–23. 7 Simone A. Wege, “Chain Migration and Information Networks: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Hesse-Cassel,” Journal of Economic History 58 (1998): 957–986. Effects of a wave of emigration continued for years after the departure of a group. See Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 14.

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almost simultaneously according to available funds and provincial connections—Hollanders and Utrechters in Iowa and Illinois, emigrants from the Eastern part of the Netherlands and Zeelanders in New York, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Their time of arrival coincided with a stage of economic and geographical expansion in the United States that allowed immigrants temporary jobs and large tracts of land to be occupied by groups. Protestant immigrants proted from information, networks, and nancial support of the colonial Dutch descendants. Catholic and Jewish immigrants established a few communities of their own, but their urban concentration and lack of institutions other than local organizations limited their network opportunities. Therefore, I will focus on the Protestant immigrants. In the course of the nineteenth century, the balance between size, homogeneity and diversication enhanced the vitality of this group. The split into an Iowa and a Michigan settlement proved a blessing in disguise, since the two complemented each other. Iowa attracted the more well-to-do, while Michigan drew immigrants with less money. Thanks to the proximity of the railroad in 1870, Holland and Zeeland could continue to grow, while Pella stabilized. Grand Rapids was even better served by railroad lines and developed into a major center of the furniture industry. Wisconsin remained largely agricultural and lacked a visionary leader.

Variation and Growth The stability of the rst settlements guaranteed the growth and spread of new Dutch settlements after the Civil War. The composition of the early settlement had provided a center and a series of options for new arrivals. The early settlers had to pay a high price in physical suffering, but once they survived they enjoyed the best chances for economic improvement by buying cheap land. The move to the cities increased the scope of work for temporary and permanent laborers within a community setting. The settlers in Iowa planned new colonies more strategically than their cousins in Michigan, because the prairie states were more dependent on agriculture than the eastern part of the Midwest. Not every initiative succeeded. The railroads could make or break a settlement. Farmers needed access to markets, but railroads had their own interests and negotiated the best deals for themselves. When they

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did not have to compete with other companies, they kept the number of towns low and provided grain silos to increase the viability of a town. The recipe for a viable community was: “three to ve lumberyards, one or two banks, two to three general stores and farm machinery dealers, plus as many more individual trades people as could be attracted—usually a single drugstore, hotel, newspaper, butcher, restaurant, and livery stable.”8 Eager speculators and developers put more energy into selling tracts of land than into structuring a colony for survival. But thanks to the broader network, Dutch immigrants who had underestimated the risks, could relocate in another settlement. Thus even failures eventually strengthened the Dutch subculture. An example of this circulation is the Kuner story. The town of Kuner in northeast Colorado was founded in 1908 to produce cabbages, sugar beets, and especially pickles for the canning factory owned by Max Kuner of Denver. His grand design included churches, an irrigation lake, a railroad depot, and a packing plant for canning pickles, sauerkraut, and rening sugar. Dutch immigrants looking for an opportunity to buy cheap land arrived from all corners of the United States and founded a church.9 Some had abandoned ill-planned settlements such as the one in Maxwell, New Mexico; others came from urban areas in the Midwest. The investment company promised good crops and a permanent outlet, but issued more promises than expertise and funds. After 1912, when ownership of the land proved unclear, no plants were built, the water reservoirs remained shallow and wide, and droughts, grasshoppers and hailstorms destroyed the rst crops, the Dutch began to relocate. Within a decade the colonists had resettled in Denver; Lynden, Washington; Luctor, Kansas; Amsterdam, Montana; and Redlands, California, or even returned to the Netherlands. While this enterprise folded in 1918, it did feed other settlements. The great majority of the early Dutch immigrants avoided urban centers because they hoped to own farms. On the line to the Midwest, New York cities such as Albany, Utica, Rochester, and Buffalo developed into industrial centers producing textiles, steel, locomotives and machinery. The Civil War increased the need for ore, coal, and wood,

8 John C. Hudson, Plains Country Towns (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 47–62 and 100–101. 9 Hubert J. Sprik, The Kuner Story: A Historical and Commemorative Review of the Life and Times of Kuner Christian Reformed Church (1909 –1918) written mainly from the memories of the descendants (Greeley, CO: Gospel Gazette, 1972).

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which was abundantly present in New York state. Factories offered much employment and their owners persuaded a number of Dutch immigrants to settle temporarily in these cities. After the Civil War, Dutch urban settlements ourished, most notably in Grand Rapids, Paterson, Chicago, and Detroit.

Ecclesiastical Glue No other social institution contributed as much to the creation of a center and a common ideal for Dutch immigrant settlements as the church. Churches secured continuity, cohesion, and connections. Ministers who had separated from the privileged Reformed Church in the Netherlands channeled emigrants to the United States, where they easily persuaded the established clergy that they were “deserving poor.” The ministers provided both rationale and rations. Their mode of organization in a church body called a Classis, which gathered the local congregations into a mutual support system, assisted church ties and fostered loyalty and solidarity. Though outwardly the Seceders seemed a homogeneous group, they were divided into various factions. Some preferred isolation while others made efforts to connect with the mainline church and culture. The ten percent of Dutch Seceders who left the Netherlands in the rst decade after 1846 dominated the emerging communities in the Midwest. This rst wave of immigrants was determined to make their stay a success and welcomed American opportunities; those who came later expected more Dutchness than they found and distrusted the link with the East coast, which in their opinion polluted the pure body of believers. In 1857 four congregations abandoned the Reformed Church and founded the conservative and Dutch-oriented Christian Reformed Church. This latter denomination matured in the 1870s and became a substantial competitor to the old colonial Reformed Church. Some smaller settlements suffered under this fragmentation, but generally the freedom to choose a church encouraged both denominations to actively recruit new immigrants into their fold. Both of them founded a mission station in New York to meet new immigrants.10

10 Robert P. Swierenga, “True Brothers: The Netherlandic Origins of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, 1857–1880” and Melis te Velde, “The Dutch

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This growth policy drew both denominations deeper, and almost naturally, into American voluntary strategies. The lessons learned by the Reformed Church in coping with diversity—most visible in the differences between the established East Coast and the recently settled immigrant Midwest—were repeated by the Christian Reformed Church three to four decades later when it adapted its liturgy, organization, interdenominational cooperation, missions, and social work to American models. Moreover, the choice between two churches allowed Dutch immigrants to differ in religious opinions, but still be part of the same DutchAmerican subculture. The new arrivals could choose how quickly to assimilate by joining one of the two denominations. Moderate Pietists (mostly present in the Reformed Church) easily connected with the revival tradition in American Protestantism. Confessionalists, who circumscribed their contacts with other believers and unbelievers, kept the outside world at a distance. This was the policy in the Christian Reformed Church. The Calvinist church structure granted autonomy to local churches under a strong denominational umbrella. Apart from organizational cohesion, facilitated by a religious framework, the Dutch-American churches also made a substantial contribution to the shaping of Dutch-American identity by distinguishing themselves from other groups with respect to marriage arrangements, schooling, and high expectations of commitment of time, money, and loyalty. Most books in the Dutch language printed in the United States were religious, strengthening the religious nature of the Dutch-American culture even more. The Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States revived a corporate organization, placing social activities organically in a normative order, protecting the individual against undesirable intrusions of the state and the secular world. The Dutch Catholics in rural areas in Wisconsin followed this line, while the scattered Dutch Catholics in the cities took a more liberal approach.11 Their ethnic identity was built in cultural societies, organizing Kermis and Carnival. Outside these background of the American Secession from the RCA in 1857,” both in George Harinck and Hans Krabbendam, eds., Breaches and Bridges: Reformed Subcultures in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2000), 61–84, 85–100. 11 Jon Gjerde, The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830 –1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 12–15 and 271– 275. Gjerde used the term “particularism,” but as description of the Dutch Reformed, the theological term “confessionalism” is better.

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churches, and a few Presbyterian churches, only a handful of secular institutions such as Holland Societies offered meeting places for Dutch Americans, primarily the business elite.12 Were the churches the pillars of the Dutch subculture? Not exclusively so. While churches played an important role in offering an ideological and organizational framework and provided a center, they needed people in the pews. The church was the rst organization to come and the last to go. It was the key symbol for a viable community, while the families provided the building blocks for the subculture.

Family Ties More than any other European immigrant group the Dutch emigrated in family units, which created stability, prosperity, and continuity. The family emigration was a result of choices in the Netherlands. Since the Dutch were not forced out, they could make a rational choice. The best condition was to move as a family. Between 1835 and 1880, four-fths of all Dutch immigrants traveled in the company of relatives and many of the rest were en route to relatives or acted as quartermasters for their family.13 After 1880 the share of the unmarried increased. The share of Frisian singles in the period 1880–1914 increased from nine to twenty-three percent, but this did not mean a devaluation of the family. Many of them found a wife among the Dutch immigrants or let their ancée come over at a later stage.14 With a favorable “marriage market” in the United States, promising prospects, and easy procedures to arrange a wedding, the marriage rate was high. Only one percent of Frisian households in the United States in 1900 were single-family households. Almost all Dutch immigrant women found a partner, and only six percent of the men remained single.15 By contrast, the Italians, 12 Yda Saueressig-Schreuder, “Dutch Catholic Settlement in Wisconsin,” in Robert P. Swierenga, ed., The Dutch in America: Immigration, Settlement, and Cultural Change (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 119. Her research concentrated on the impact of family relations on the choice of settlement among Roman Catholic immigrants. 13 Swierenga, Faith and Family, table 2.9. 14 Annemieke Galema, With the Baggage of the Fatherland: Frisians to America, 1880–1914 (Detroit/Groningen: Wayne State University Press/Regio Projekt Groningen, 1996), 81–83. 15 Galema, 140. Suzanne Sinke, Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 18.

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with a lopsided sex ratio of seventy-eight percent men and twenty-two percent women, were “birds of passage,” often returning to their home country, or working away from home on railroads and in mines.16 Dutch families stayed together and suffered less from separation. Family dwellings in the United States were more spacious than in the Netherlands, not uncommonly double in size, and granted family members more personal space. Family life as known in the Netherlands could be continued in the new world, but never went unchallenged. Women enjoyed greater equality and children gained more importance thanks to their cash contribution to the family income and their language mediation. Some parents let their children grow more independent while others chose to shield them from American culture. In either case family life changed. Women of the second generation, especially, chose to work outside the home until marriage or the birth of a rst child. A 1907 survey among women sixteen years and older in Dutch families who had their main source of income in the furniture industry in Grand Rapids, Michigan, showed that forty-one percent of them were employed, whereas only six percent of women born in the Netherlands, and nineteen percent of the American women worked outside the family.17 Families with children could more easily convert labor into wealth. The home-loving quality of the family advanced the growth of property. In rural areas, the continuity of the family farm knitted the community together. The expectation of improvement and the willingness to make personal sacrices helped immigrant families serve a common goal, benecial to all. Family ties compensated for the emotional losses caused by emigration and stimulated investments for the future. The presence and importance of children encouraged the founding of social and cultural institutions, such as schools and libraries, and the transfer of tradition.

16 Suzanne Sinke, “Migration for Labor, Migration for Love: Marriage and Family Formation across Borders,” OAH Magazine of History 14 (Fall 1999): 17–21. 17 Reports of the Immigration Commission, Immigrants in Industry, vol. 15 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Ofce, 1911), 492, table 224.

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The transition from the Dutch language to English came gradually. The Dutch language was not considered an essential part of the identity of Dutch Americans. The Dutch language policy was mainly motivated by the desire to maintain communication between the generations and keep access to religious and cultural sources, in this order of importance. The use of English was not a case of “whether” but of “when.” The rst generation of immigrants was highly motivated to acquire English language skills in order to function economically, socially, and politically in the United States. Later followers expected to arrive in “little Holland” and were linguistically more conservative. People in isolated rural areas stuck to the Dutch language longest because the multiple generations present encouraged this. These areas made the nal shift to English in the 1950s, while most other places had made the transition during or right after World War I. The conviction to keep a distance from the world, mentally not physically, led to a network of Christian schools, both Catholic and Calvinist. Dutch immigrants had three motives in establishing schools of their own: to train their children in the basics to function in America, to teach the Dutch language as long as needed to link the different generations, and to provide their children with a distinct world view. While the educational infrastructure in the United States in the nineteenth century strengthened the formation of a Dutch subculture by providing necessary skills, it eventually undermined the internal cohesion within the ethnic group. The original group settlements had listed specic arrangements about education in their charters, including provisions to teach the English language, and local control over the appointment of staff and the curriculum. In the cities, the Dutch lacked these instruments and had to face a rapid erosion of the Christian atmosphere, which prodded them to launch their own schools.18 The rst parochial schools folded in a few years because negative arguments were insufcient to solicit continued support for an alternative educational system. In these Dutch schools, language was the key distinction. Increased integration and a new impulse to become actively involved in American society demanded a different approach, while

18 Robert P. Swierenga, Dutch Chicago: A History of the Hollanders in the Windy City (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 353.

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the founding of an umbrella organization created a support system for mobilization, fund-raising, and curriculum development. The Dutch school system reached its prewar climax in 1929, when 14,000 children received Christian education in eighty-nine schools, which increasingly became parent led.19 In Denver a Dutch community emerged around Bethesda, a sanatorium for the Christian Reformed. The Dutch founded a Christian grade school in 1910, which counted two hundred students and seven teachers by 1930. As long as newcomers poured into the settlement, Dutch was taught, but when the need disappeared, English lessons became the norm. Bible teaching was the center of the curriculum from the start and remained the distinctive feature of the “Dutch” schools. A high regard for education stimulated the build-up of a comprehensive school system. The literacy rate was more than ninety percent. The movement to found grade schools began early, but accelerated after the turn of the twentieth century because the public schools lost much of their religious atmosphere. The early need for ministers stimulated the founding of seminaries, which gradually expanded into liberal arts colleges that encouraged Christian high schools to prepare students for these colleges. These complete systems of separate education were only possible in settlements with high concentrations of Dutch immigrants. The main source of support for these schools was and still is the Christian Reformed Church. The Reformed Church ofcially supported public schools, because the East Coast establishment frowned upon sectarian education and gave priority to integration and quality. This church provided additional training in its own colleges, Central College (1853) in Pella, Iowa, Hope College (1866) in Holland, Michigan, and Northwestern Classical Academy (1882) in Orange City, Iowa. These institutions developed from preparatory schools to full colleges, while retaining their association with the Dutch Reformed churches and their seminaries. The main body of the Christian Reformed Church consisted of recent immigrants, who had more need for immediate (Christian) education than advanced degrees. It invested most in primary education and valued a separate identity, founding Calvin College in 1876, which developed into a four-year college in 1921.

19 Year book—Convention book (Chicago: National Union of Christian Schools, 1929–1930), 34.

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Dutch Roman Catholics similarly invested in parochial education, which was primarily delivered in the English language, especially since the state of Wisconsin required teaching in English in 1854. The Dutch Norbertine monks who arrived in this state in 1893 founded St. Norbert’s College ve years later, but did not cultivate Dutch ethnic identity, because the college provided education to an ethnically mixed population.

Private and Public Communication Intensive and extensive communication helped to keep the scattered parts of the subculture connected. High literacy rates, an improved postal service after 1875 which made mail delivery cheaper, faster, and more secure, and the increased need for information encouraged a massive transatlantic correspondence, connecting the immigrant communities to each other and to the old country. Between 1871 and 1919 a total of twenty-three million letters from the Netherlands were sent to America, an amount almost matched by the twenty-two million return letters. After 1870 the volume doubled every decade, thanks to the increase in immigration and the improved services.20 In years of economic decline the number of letters from America surpassed those from the Netherlands to warn prospective immigrants. Dutch immigrants received 56,684 newspapers and periodicals from the Netherlands in 1885 and returned 41,468. Apart from public information, these periodicals contained private news about deaths, births, illnesses and anniversaries of relatives and acquaintances.21 An immigrant in the small Dutch colony in Platte, South Dakota reported that the local post ofce received an average of one Dutch newspaper each day.22 Many citizens with some means subscribed to a Dutch periodical and passed the news on to their friends and relations. Following and stimulating the emigration wave of the 1880s Dutch newspapers provided specic information on the United

20 See my “Avant La Lettre: The Use of Dutch Immigrant Letters in Historical Research,” in Richard H. Harms, ed. and comp., The Dutch Adapting in North America: Papers Presented at the Thirteenth Biennial Conference for the Association for the Advancement of Dutch-American Studies (Grand Rapids, MI: Calvin College, 2001), 34–43. 21 Verslagen aan de Koning betrekkelijk de diensten der posterijen . . . 1886. 22 Albert Kuipers in De Wereldburger, 17 January 1890, 653.

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States by printing letters and testimonials. After 1890 regular and cheap passage enabled immigrants to make return trips. About seven percent of the Dutch men employed in the Grand Rapids furniture industry in 1909 had made the trip back, and Dutch visitors also came to see for themselves.23 Starting with the publication of the Sheboygan Nieuwsbode in 1849, weeklies based in Dutch settlements provided local news, practical information, and civic training. The exchange of news from different regions, reection on trends in America, and the passing down of old and explanation of new traditions assisted the immigrants in identifying with a larger hyphenated group. The indigenous Dutch-American press was part religious, part market oriented. The Sheboygan Nieuwsbode followed a Dutch model, the Zierikzeesche Courant. Most other DutchAmerican periodicals were sponsored by a political party. In Holland, Michigan, the Democrats supported De Hollander and the Republicans the more successful De Grondwet. Each region had a newspaper which circulated news from the Netherlands and the various Dutch settlements, thanks to an intricate exchange system and a wide network of agents. Pella’s Weekblad provided news in Iowa, as did the Orange City Volksvriend. Grand Rapids had no Dutch language newspaper of repute, but housed the most widely read religious periodical, De Wachter, read in nine thousand households. Chicago had Onze Toekomst, and Paterson, New Jersey, Het Oosten. Periodicals for laborers were few and short-lived. For a period of thirty years De Volksstem in De Pere, Wisconsin, was the forum for Dutch Roman Catholics in the United States, until it merged with the Belgian Catholic publication the Gazette van Moline. Both were solidly Democratic. The decline of the Dutch-American ethnic press in the 1950s along with Dutch books, which were printed on the same presses, was caused by the loss of local autonomy, a drop in the number of immigrants, and increased competition from larger newspapers. But they had lled a crucial role in promoting new areas of settlement and building a national Dutch network.

23

Immigration Commission, table 65, 15:527; table 39, 15:584.

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The growing American economy offered Dutch immigrants variety and space to make a living and enabled them to invest their surpluses for common purposes. The best chances for economic improvement lay in agriculture in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when with modest means tracts of land could be bought, which quickly increased in value. Additional industries and services rounded off a balanced local economy. After the Civil War, the emerging cities offered large scale job opportunities both for the unskilled, such as picking up garbage or teamstering in Chicago, and for the skilled and semiskilled in the machine shops of Pullman (Calumet, Illinois) or in the Paterson, New Jersey silk works, the furniture industry in Grand Rapids, and construction industry in Detroit. This concentration of similar jobs tied communities closer together and provided entry level jobs to new arrivals. These arrangements offered buffers between local households and the broader society, especially since local shopkeepers of ethnic origin introduced them to American products. From the turn of the century onwards, the second generation proted from the increasing educational opportunities and advanced in various professions. Dutch Americans gained access to better jobs in the American economy and were tied closer to it, even as they supported their own communities. It is remarkable that Dutch immigrants played virtually no role in trade relations between the Netherlands and the United States. Dutch investors invested seventy-two million dollars in 1871, when the international money market was liberalized, and this amount more than quadrupled by the end of the century.24 Until the 1880s Dutch merchants sold gin, tin, and coffee to the Americans, supplemented by tobacco, nutmeg, herring, and diamonds, adding up to D. 64.6 million in exports. Imports were more than four times higher: D. 283.5 million in imported raw materials, animal fat, petrol, cotton, and fertilizer. American exports counted for 6.5 percent of the total, while imports were calculated at 11.3 percent. But trade and immigration had little overlap. Immigrants imported only a limited number of articles for their own use: silver ornaments, Dutch bibles, and Gouda pipes for smoking.

24 Statistiek van den in-, uit- en doorvoer (‘s-Gravenhage: Ministerie van Financiën, 1863–1915).

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Although the chances for quick improvement slackened in the course of the nineteenth century, the circumstances in the United States were better than those in the old country. Between 1840 and 1890 land and labor meant economic advancement, and in the long run improved training and experience continued these prospects.

Politics Dutch-American politicians complained about the lack of political involvement of Dutch immigrants, but these complaints were only justied for the end of the nineteenth century. Political participation clearly had a high priority among the rst immigrants, who saw the benets of local autonomy. The rst generation of Dutch-American editors gladly accepted the sponsorship of competing political parties. Fear of anti-foreign legislation and chances for local development motivated the newspapers. After the Civil War most Protestant Dutch immigrants changed their loyalty from the Democrats to the Republicans, who took more action in expanding the country’s infrastructure and were politically more stable. Their approval of moral and economic structures brought them closer to evangelical allies such as Presbyterians and Methodists in the Republican Party, while Dutch Catholics consistently supported the Democrats. However, in both instances, their small size and predictable voting patterns, made the political parties take their vote for granted. Representatives from the Dutch community could count on a safe and stable power base, but there was no need to walk the political path to secure emancipation or protect an identity.25

Group Identity Identity depends on the twin concepts of separateness and continuity. Initially, the Dutch immigrants did not invest much energy in emphasizing a separate Dutch-American identity. They did not need to defend themselves against discrimination or to close ranks against threats. Their

25 Robert P. Swierenga, “Religion and Political Behavior in the Nineteenth Century: Voting, Values, Cultures,” in Mark A. Noll, ed., Religion and American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 146–171 and Swierenga, Dutch Chicago, 676–715.

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‘whiteness’ was taken for granted. Because their separateness was voluntary and visible, enforced through their own churches, extended by their schools, but never intended to be a waterproof isolation, it needed no emphasis. The rst public reection took place in 1871. The Reformed minister Henry Uiterwijk published a series of articles in the weekly De Hope in anticipation of the twenty-fth anniversary of the founding of Holland, Michigan, scheduled for 1872.26 He believed God had assigned character to peoples through a slow process of growth conditioned by geography and government. The result for the Dutch was a combination of features such as profundity, carefulness, thrift, steadfastness, and seriousness, in contrast to Americans who were quick, enterprising, generous, indulgent, and lighthearted. But instead of emphasizing these differences, he looked for similarities and praised the desire for independence and liberty that Dutch and Americans had in common. He never doubted that the immigrants would be Americans, and issued warnings to avoid the American vices of greed, speed, pride, lack of respect, and especially the denial of one’s own history. He dened a particular kind of Dutch-American manifest destiny: “to become an inspiring part of the American nation through our people’s extraordinary character and common afnities [volksgevoel ], acknowledging the inuence of our divine calling.”27 He envisioned a partnership as in a marriage, through Dutch settlements, evangelism, Christian upbringing, learning to use English, and adoption of civic pride.28 Ten days after Uiterwijk’s last installment the common bonds between the immigrants and the host nation were conrmed through the generous contributions of Americans for rebuilding the city of Holland, including his own parsonage, which was virtually destroyed by the same res that burned down Chicago. Two hours of re destroyed twentyve years of hard labor. Only a few streets, Hope College, and Van Raalte’s Pillar Church were spared. The $40,000 of private American relief funds made the Holland City News confess: “thank God that our misfortune befell us in a Christian land, and among Christian people, whose sympathetic hearts made willing sacrices for our relief.”29

26 H. Uiterwijk, “Het Hollandsch en Amerikaansch volkskarakter,” De Hope, 17, 24, 31 August; 7, 14, 21, 28 September 1871. 27 De Hope, 21 September 1871. 28 De Hope, 28 September 1871. 29 De Hope, 7 December 1871. See Donald L. Van Reken’s collection in The Holland Fire of October 8, 1871 (privately printed, 1982). Holland City News, 12 October 1872.

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Holland rebuilt and regained its former prosperity after a decade. The achievements of the heroic pioneer past and the recent reconstruction contributed to a sense of continuity with the Dutch nation. This emphasis on continuity was itself a sign of assimilation.30 When the Dutch Americans had secured their place under the sun, they ventured to appeal to mythical stories to carve out a niche for themselves among the builders of America. The Dutch beneted from historical events to underscore their status as real Americans. They could cite New Amsterdam as the prototype of future America (free, enterprising, diverse, and democratic), and the heroic role of the Dutch Reformed Church in the War of Independence as evidence for their support for the new nation. However, these ideas were only sparingly used. The New Yorkers did it to emphasize their elite position against newcomers. The Midwestern Dutch, especially the Christian Reformed, considered theological purity much more important than historical privileges.31 Only occasionally did they feel a desire to show their value as citizens who combined the best qualities of the Old World and the New. In the twentieth century they had fully arrived, as the 1907 song to commemorate the half century of the Christian Reformed Church showed. In singing the praises of the United States, it united colonial and recent immigrants: Come ye who boast of Dutch descent, Sons of New Netherland, And ye who reached our friendly shore with western pilgrim band Unite with us in festive song, Song which the heart elates And sing the praises of our land Our own United States, Our own United States. We love the land across the sea We glory in its past; We pray for its prosperity, May it forever last! But tho we love old Holland still, We love Columbia more,

30 Orm Overland, Immigrant Minds, American Identities: Making the United States Home, 1870–1930 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 31 Ibid., 78.

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hans krabbendam The land our sons and brethren ll From east to western shore, From east to western shore.32

The feeling of loyalty to the United States was so common, that it needed no song to remind the Dutch Americans of their Dutch their past.

Summary These ten factors contributed to a Dutch comprehensive Protestant immigrant network, which had matured by 1920 and which was strong enough to survive the immigration restrictions that limited new immigrants in the next decade. The volume of Dutch immigration to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a modest 200,000 (ranking 16th on the list of nationalities), but thanks to its small size, Dutch immigrants were able to know many of their countrymen personally, using church and family to build a durable subculture. Conditions in the United States compared favorably with the political turmoil and economic stagnation in the Netherlands and the oppressive attitude of the Dutch authorities in the middle of the nineteenth century. The concerted action and detailed plans of the group of Seceders, which was still in the process of developing its identity, were well publicized and generated a lively debate about the pros and cons of emigration. Thanks to them landverhuizing received a label and was closely monitored by the Dutch government, while it also provided an ideal that motivated community building and reciprocal solidarity. This idealistic beginning started a tradition among Dutch citizens of considering a move to the United States as a realistic option. The leadership

32 Henry Beets, Herinneringen: Holland-American Songs, Holland Songs with English Text, Series 1 (Chicago: Paul H. Wezeman, 1907). It was the opening song in the SemiCentennial Commission, Gedenkboek van het Vijftigjarig Jubileum der Christelijk Gereformeerde Kerk A.D. 1857–1907 (Grand Rapids: 1907), reprinted in Walter Lagerwey’s collection, Neen Nederland, ‘k vergeet u niet. Een beeld van het immigrantenleven in Amerika tussen 1846 en 1945 in verhalen, schetsen en gedichten (Baarn: Ten Have, 1982), 62. It was sung at the 400th commemoration of the birthday of William of Orange on 24 April 1933 in Chicago, but not at the visit of Princess Juliana on 12 May 1942. The “Wien Neerlandsch Bloed” was sung at the 60th anniversary of the Holland and Zeeland colonies held in Zeeland in August 1907.

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connected with the descendants of earlier Dutch immigrants who had already achieved respectability in America. Its use of this network to build a community was an explicit goal. Circumstances in the Netherlands did not push people out, but allowed them to make calculated decisions. Since land was the strongest incentive, most immigrants moved in family units. This Dutch folk migration was comparable to the Scandinavian emigration movement. Religious identity supported a separate educational system, a national ecclesiastical network, and the temporary retention of the Dutch language, until it no longer served as the major mode of communication among the immigrant generations and in the church. Aided by a rich body of ethnic periodicals, an intensive letter exchange with the old country, a select number of settlements, and institutional support, the Dutch in America compensated for their relatively small numbers by retaining their cohesion for over a century.

CHAPTER SIX

CHURCHES BIGGER THAN WINDMILLS: RELIGION AND DUTCHNESS IN MINNESOTA, 1885–1928 Robert Schoone-Jongen

Dutch-American Calvinist immigrants came to Minnesota in the 1880s intent on doing two things: farming new land and transmitting old values to their children. Houses and barns expressed the rst and churches symbolized the second objective. Physically their farms and churches closely resembled the structures their non-Dutch neighbors built. The doctrine taught in the churches and practiced in the homes distinguished the Dutch from the Swedish, Norwegian, and German immigrants who arrived in the state during the same period. The signboards on the Dutch churches carried the adjective “Gereformeerde” (Reformed), a word the settlers regarded as a synonym for “Dutch.” This erce religious loyalty had driven the Dutch Calvinist immigrants from the Netherlands to the United States starting in 1847, and inspired a schism among them within ten years. Ministers had led them rst to the shores of Lake Michigan and the Iowa prairies. Later, clergymen played a major part creating a chain of colonies that by the 1890s stretched from Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan to Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, and Montana.1 The vigor of each colony could be measured by two characteristics: the number and size of the congregations settlers organized and denominational afliations. Vibrant settlements usually included churches linked to both the venerable Reformed Church in America and the upstart Christian Reformed Church. From this rivalry came division, and strength.

1 For general accounts of these settlements see Henry S. Lucas, Netherlanders in America: Dutch Immigration to the United States and Canada, 1789–1950 (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1955, 1989), 34–232, 322–89, and Jacob Van Hinte, Netherlanders in America: A Study of Emigration and Settlement in the 19th and 20th Centuries in the United States of America, ed. Robert P. Swierenga (Grand Rapids, Baker Book House, 1985), 120–312, 463–568.

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When the Dutch colony of Prinsburg, Minnesota began in 1886, and the Friesland, Minnesota colony formed in 1896, denominational competition arrived with the rst settlers. Prinsburg’s endurance and Friesland’s demise were tied to the stories of their churches. Each settlement hosted rival congregations. In Friesland they actually met, albeit separately, in the same building. In Prinsburg, isolation on the prairie allowed the groups to see, and express, their commonality. These examples raise the basic question of why two similar groups of people, motivated by similar hopes, settling in similar circumstances came to such different ends. The short answer seems to be that religion, like gravity simultaneously repelling and attracting, fragmented and solidied communities. The Reformed and the Christian Reformed factions needed each other more than either realized, or admitted. In looking at each other they found their reason for existence. Left to themselves, they had difculty maintaining a strong sense of identity. Prinsburg and Friesland owed their existence to the religious tensions in the Netherlands that produced a schism in the 1830s. Economic and social conditions, especially in the borderland areas of the country, inspired a revival which, in turn, led to a secession for the Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk in 1834. In rural areas of Groningen and Friesland the Seceders (Afgescheidenen) were often of peasant stock, people who saw the traditions of the farming village under assault. Beginning in 1846, they formed the vanguard of immigration to the United States, following ministers to Holland, Michigan Pella, Iowa, and Sheboygan, Wisconsin. They arrived with an eye for good land, a heart for extended families, and an ear for sound doctrine. With few exceptions they spent their rst years in the United States unlearning their greenhorn notions about farming and accumulating modest grubstakes. Prepared for the rigors of pioneer life on the prairies, they headed west to transplant old Dutch village values in American soil.2 As they learned American farming skills, the newcomers also grappled with what it meant to be Dutch Calvinists in the United States. They

2 The best summary of Robert P. Swierenga’s seminal work on the demographics of Dutch immigration is his “Religion and Immigration Patterns: A Comparative Analysis of Dutch Protestants and Catholics, 1835–1880,” in The Immigrant Religious Experience, ed. George E. Pozzetta, vol. 19 (New York: Garland Publishing Co., 1991), 395–417. A Dutch-American real estate promoter, Theodore F. Koch, stated that the most successful settlers had been in the United States between eight and twenty years before moving to the prairies. (“Notes on an Interview with Mr. Theodore F. Koch, September 14, 1934,” typescript, Minnesota Historical Society, 7).

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began with the premise that Dutch and Calvinist were coequal concepts, convinced that they were God’s chosen people. Religious apostasy had provoked divine disfavor against the Netherlands and driven this faithful remnant to create “pure” communities in America, settlements that would be beacons of goodness in their adopted homeland. Beacons needed to be both visible and distinguished from their surroundings. Differences over the best means of achieving both objectives led to the schism that created the Christian Reformed Church in 1857. This group worked on the assumption that separation was the best way to maintain doctrinal purity. Their opponents in the Reformed Church in America favored visibility in the general society as a way to spread the Calvinist worldview. While they were all Dutch Americans, one faction emphasized “Dutch-ness,” the other “American-ness.”3 This debate over the relationship between Dutch and American generated an accountability factor within the entire Dutch-American community. Every migrant group confronted the issues as the forces of assimilation and accommodation vied with the desire to protect a cultural heritage brought from abroad.4 Taken to either extreme the roads led to ethnic oblivion or cultural irrelevance. Taken together, they explain why immigrants formed exclusive enclaves. Religion lent a greater sense of urgency to Dutch Calvinist desires both to preserve identity and redeem the world.5 The search for good land and theological purity created an alliance between a Dutch-American real estate promoter and a Christian Reformed minister. Theodore F. Koch (1854–1940) came to the United States in 1884 to sell purebred Frisian-Holstein livestock. While waiting

3 For three views of the dynamics that surrounded this schism see Elton J. Bruins, The Americanization of a Congregation (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1995); Elton J. Bruins and Robert P. Swierenga, Family Quarrels in the Dutch Reformed Churches of the Nineteenth Century (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999); Janet Sjaarda Sheeres, Son of Secession: Douwe J. Vander Werp (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2006). 4 Allen G. Noble, “The Immigrant Experience in the Nineteenth Century and Afterwards,” in To Build in a New Land: Ethnic Landscapes in North America, ed. Allen G. Noble (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 402–406, and Dirk Hoerder, “From Migrants to Ethnics: Acculturation in a Societal Framework,” in European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives, eds. Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Moch Page, (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 211–62. 5 Timothy L. Smith, “New Approaches to the History of Immigration in TwentiethCentury America,” American Historical Review 71 (1966): 1265–1279, and Jay P. Dolan, “The Immigrants and Their Gods: A New Perspective in American Religious History,” in Religion in American History: A Reader, eds. Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 151.

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for his animals to clear quarantine, he ventured west in the company of Martin W. Prins, Jr. to inspect investment possibilities on behalf of Prins and Zwanenburg, Dutch bankers and immigration agents. While still a boy, Koch’s clerical counterpart, Cornelius Bode (1843–1917) arrived in the United States from Ostfriesland, just over the border from the Netherlands. As an adult he farmed in Illinois, until he felt called to the ministry. He was ordained in the Christian Reformed church in 1879 and spent the rest of his life preaching and traveling among the Dutch and Ostfrisian enclaves of the upper midwest. In 1886 he paid his rst visit to Central Minnesota, and met Theodore F. Koch. Bode saw the area as a new place in which generations of farm families could live together, mirroring God’s covenant with believers by mutually supporting each other. Koch saw a place to make a prot for himself and his investors. Born near Arnhem, the Netherlands, the son of an estate manager, Theodore F. Koch became an entrepreneur, a consummate middleman who linked potential settlers, railroad land ofces, steamship immigrant agents, and European nanciers.6 This stocky man with the Van Dyke beard, thick eyeglasses, and bristly head of hair, marshaled the Calvinist cadres that came to Minnesota between 1885 and 1900. The sort of person contemporary newspapers characterized as “bustling” and “energetic,” Koch personied the multi-lingual insider/outsider: an immigrant with contacts in America’s high places. He rst led his prospects to a place he dubbed Prinsburg, eleven miles from the nearest rail line. A decade later he trooped them to a depot he named Friesland, located on a secondary mainline of the Northern Pacic railroad. Prinsburg lies one hundred miles due west of Minneapolis, Friesland about seventy-ve miles north of the Twin Cities. Theodore Koch saw himself as a person who ensured that fathers and sons could farm together and live among likeminded people who spoke the same language.7 During his career Koch earned the trust of a diverse group of people. The Dutch foreign ministry bestowed its

6 The best single source on the career of Theodore F. Koch is the typescript memoir he dictated to a scribe in the 1930s. (“Memoirs of Theodore F. Koch, 1935”) There are only two copies of this memoir in existence, held by members of his family. I am grateful to his granddaughter Virginia Koch Schilz of Austin, Texas who loaned me her copy of the work so that I could transcribe it on to a computer. My transcription is the source that I use in this essay. The page numbers used here refer to the original version’s pagination. 7 Interview Notes, 5.

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approval through a vice-consulship. German nanciers entrusted him with the funds he used to nance his new communities. Himself a Unitarian, Koch assiduously curried the favor of both Roman Catholic prelates and devout Calvinist ministers. Rev. Cornelius Bode was one of people who opened the gate to the Dutch Calvinist fold to Theodore Koch.8 Bode may have hailed from the Hannover side of the Ems River, but he grew up in a religious milieu saturated in Dutchness. Since the days when the Dutch controlled both banks of the river, a Calvinist subculture existed among the Ostfrisians.9 Their ministers were Dutch educated, their theology a carbon copy of the Hervormde Kerk’s basic tenets. When controversy enveloped the Dutch churches in the 1830s, the Ostfrisians also chose sides. Bode imbibed the stringent version of Dutch Calvinism. By the time he was ordained as a minister at the age of thirty-six, he could speak ve languages (English, Dutch, German, Platdeutsch, Frisian) and read at least two others (Greek and Hebrew). Apparently he continued drawing an income from his farm land in Illinois since he had cash to invest in Dutch-American colonies throughout Minnesota. An accomplished farmer and a trained theologian, the avuncular Rev. Bode became a very inuential person among the Dutch, affectionately known as “Uncle C.”10 According to legend, he was on a rst name basis with most every railroad conductor in the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Iowa. 11 In 1886 he arrived in Prinsburg, extended his usual hearty handshake to everyone he encountered, and proceeded to help the newcomers organize one of the rst Dutch churches in the region. His brother-in-law (and former Illinois neighbor) bought hundreds of acres of land near Prinsburg and convinced other settlers to join the

8 Henry Beets, “Rev. C. Bode Called Home,” The Banner, 24 May 1917, 328–9, Wayne Brouwer, “The German Element in the CRC: The Caretakers,” The Banner, 16 May 1980, 16–18, and Fannie Smith, Pease: 100 Years (Princeton, MN: Arnold Printing Co., 1994), 128–31. 9 The Ems River became the xed border as a part of the treaties that ended the Napoleonic Wars in 1814–15. For the history of the Calvinist subculture in the borderland area see Garret J. Breuker, “German Oldreformed Emigration: Catastrophe or Blessing?” in Breaches and Bridges: Reformed Subcultures in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States, eds. George Harinck and Hans Krabbendam (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 2000), 101–14. 10 Mille Lacs County Times, 6 August 1896, 1. Smith, 128. Beets, 329. 11 The Banner, 16 May 1980, 16–18.

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colony. During the next decade Bode invested in at least two other Koch colonization projects, including the Friesland settlement. This story of two Dutch settlements opens on a clear July afternoon in 1885. A group of Hollanders dressed in long black coats that apped in the perpetual breeze of the atlands stood amid the prairie grasses and meadowlarks. At this particular spot the land actually stood a few feet higher than the surrounding terrain, although most people hardly would have noticed the difference. Sunlight poured from the immense sky and glinted on ponds and connecting capillaries. As far as the horizon stood grasses of every type, and nary a tree. Then one visitor motioned for silence. Bewhiskered chins descended onto collarless shirts; all eyes closed reverently. Some men clasped their hands behind, others in front. Whichever their preference, each grasped a cap or hat. Their leader spoke a fervent prayer, then raised his head and summoned the heavy whole notes of the Genevan Psalter. After rendering homage to the Almighty they honored their ancestors with a Dutch patriotic air. They stood at the end of a set of wagon ruts that led back eleven miles to the nearest railroad station. A newspaper account of this ersatz service noted that the men had “. . . as it were dedicated the place to Hollanders.”12 A minister wrote of this scene, “The Lord provides for His children’s needs, thus in moving west one fullls His command and sees to it that His commands are fullled on earth.”13 Theodore F. Koch stood there that day at the spot where a town would soon appear—Prinsburg. The second act begins on a winter day in early 1896, a locomotive chufng and wheezing to a stop at a isolated boxcar cum whistle stop station lying halfway between St. Paul and Duluth. A newly attached sign inscribed “Friesland” had recently replaced “Dell Grove” on both the shack and the railroad timetables. Most times when the train eased to a stop at Friesland, a bearded, rather stocky man, clambered to the ground behind the conductor, motioning to others to follow his lead. Less than twenty-four hours previous the detraining passengers had met their host at the St. Paul Union Depot. They had leaned out the windows of the day coaches, frantically waving little Dutch ags at the onlookers and gawkers. The ag wavers displayed that “Where’s-the12

De Volksvriend, 9 July 1885. De Wachter, 5 August 1885, 2. The author, Rev. Roelof T. Kuiper, was most likely one of the people present at the ceremony described in De Volksvriend account of 9 July 1885. 13

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person-who-promised-to-meet-us-here” look still familiar among travelers. Theodore F Koch stood on the platform looking for them. During late March 1896 Rev. Cornelius Bode alit at the Friesland station. As he had been doing for several months, Koch conducted a tour of the area. Bode and the businessman, submerged in furry winter wear, glided along in a sleigh, serenaded by the crunch of metal runners on dry powder. They craned their heads as best they could, adjusting to the sunny glare and the exhilarating rush cold Minnesota air produced in moist nasal passages. They surveyed a stark vista of snow banks punctuated with charred stakes reaching toward heaven. Distance meant little under the conditions; miles passed in minutes. In Dutch, English, Frisian, or German (depending on the audience) Koch proffered words of assurance, as he had ten years before in Prinsburg: This is a land with good water for man and beast; here the soil closely resembles the types they farmed in the Netherlands; ample markets lay only seventy miles south; credit terms make it all most affordable.14 Koch’s vision proved prophetic in Prinsburg, but not in Friesland. Several decades ago E. P. Thompson argued that both history’s winners and losers deserved to be studied. Given a few twists of fate, the losers could have been the winners, and vice versa. Thompson explored the “road not traveled” in the belief that un-pursued options could teach as much about the past as the historical mainstream did.15 His challenge commands an examination of places like Friesland, Minnesota, a community that struggled, lost its ethnic identity, and died, as well as a success story like Prinsburg. Why did two colonies started by similar people under similar circumstances come to such different ends? The answer lies in three places: the land, the settlers, and the churches they organized. Theodore Koch’s rst and largest Dutch-American colonization project began inauspiciously. In 1885 William D. Washburn, member of Congress and Minneapolis milling magnate, owned a bonanza farm, a fast growing nancial albatross, fteen miles from the nearest railroad. Washburn wanted to sell the operation to another investor. To the

14 De Volksvriend advertisements for Friesland and a later account of Theodore F. Koch’s address to prospective buyers in Orange City, Iowa convey a real sense of Koch’s sales patois. 30 January 1896 and “Theo. F. Koch in Sioux County,” De Volksvriend, 22 February 1900, 4, and 1 March 1900, 6. 15 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 12–3.

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south of this spread, the land belonged to either a railroad company or the state’s swamp land fund. The Hastings and Dakota division of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railway, a mainline stretching west from the Twin Cities to Aberdeen, Dakota Territory, formed the southern boundary of this area. Land sales within a few miles of the track had been brisk for a few years. But beyond that narrow strip, access issues rendered habitation tenuous at best.16 It was to this no-man’s land that the Dutch came at the behest of Theodore F. Koch and two partners: Nils C. Frederiksen and Martin W. Prins Jr. Frederiksen, a orid talking former member of the Danish parliament (and once bankrupted buccaneer) possessed the most real estate sales experience.17 Martin Prins, scion of the banking house of Prins and Zwanenburg, personally connected the project to Amsterdam investment bankers and Rotterdam shippers.18 Theodore F. Koch, the thirty-one year old commission agent from Groningen, enjoyed access to the cash reserves of a notable family of screw manufacturers in the Ruhr Valley of Germany.19 By the time Koch’s group bought the Washburn bonanza farm, won the concession to sell the railroad’s land, and purchased the state-owned sections, the Central Minnesota colony encompassed the better part of eight townships in three counties. They offered settlers an expanse of

16 Koch, Memoir, 60–3. Victor E. Lawson, Martin E. Tew, and J. Emil Nelson, Atlas and farm directory with complete survey in township plats, Kandiyohi County, Minnesota: containing plats of all townships with owners’ names . . ./published by The Farmer, a journal of agriculture; engraved by the Kenyon Company (St. Paul: Webb Pub. Co.,1915), 235; William Lass, “William D. Washburn,” Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 22 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 749–50. 17 Koch Memoir, 49–50; George R. Nielsen, The Danish Americans (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), 119–20, 133, 187–8, 190, 195. 18 Van Hinte noted that Prins and Zwanenburg served as immigrant agents for the Netherlands-American Steamship Company. They had a reputation in the Netherlands of being less than scrupulous in the methods they used and subsequent treatment of people they recruited to emigrate to the United States, Brazil, and Argentina. In the United States, Prins and Zwanenburg also acted as recruiting agents for a number of railroad companies, including the Milwaukee Road. (Van Hinte, 573–4, 604–5.) 19 For Theodore F. Koch’s connections to the Funckes see “Untitled typescript memoir of Wilhelm Funcke III” in the private collection of Liselotte Funcke, Hagen, Germany and numerous references in Koch’s Memoir, especially 27–9, 105–6. The Funckes were active philanthropists in their home town of Hagen, Westphalia, and active in local politics for well over one hundred years. Wilhelm’s great-granddaughter, Liselotte, served as Vice President of the German Bundestag during the 1970s, when she sat in parliament as a member of the Free Democratic Party, representing the city of Hagen.

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at prairie pockmarked with sloughs, streams, and marshes. Beneath the sod lay immensely fertile land with rock free topsoil reaching down two feet or more. A few weeks of sodbusting in spring could create acres of productive cropland. With grass for livestock, and rich soil for crops, the region might become a farmer’s paradise. Unfortunately, crops that could not reach markets produced no income. The roads, bridges, and drainage ditches needed for rail access also required cash. But cash came from markets, and the rst step to them lay at least ten difcult miles away in Renville. So the settlers dreamed of railroads coursing through their colony. One such rumor suggested that Prinsburg would link Lake Superior to the north with the Gulf of Mexico to the south.20 But until real roads linked the settlement to real rails, Prinsburg remained a stillborn inland hamlet, a plat with surveyed streets that were never built.21 Lacking reliable rail access, the new settlers’ main comfort rested in low land prices. The settlers came from places where land values had doubled in the previous decade. If they sold their smaller farms to the east at inated prices and made a sizeable down payment on their new Minnesota farms, they would be under less nancial strain, theoretically. For ve dollars per acre, an aspiring farmer with some spare cash could buy a signicant parcel for under $250. After spending a few hundred more for buildings and moving expenses, a yeoman could expect to have enough land to support himself and a generation of sons. But low land values meant meager tax revenues. Then there were the speculators (including several Dutch-American ministers) who exacerbated the nancial bind by refusing to improve their lands. They contributed neither revenue nor labor to local infrastructure projects. Road construction in the Prinsburg area proceeded at a glacial pace for several years as township governments gasped for funding.

20

De Volksvriend, 11 March 1886, 4, and 22 December 1898, 8. On inland hamlets see John C. Hudson, Plains Country Towns (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 26–38, and by the same author, “The Plains Country Town,” in The Great Plains: Environment and Culture, eds. Brian W. Blouet and Frederick Luebke (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 99–118. The plat of the original Prinsburg townsite is on le in the ofce of the Register of Deeds, Kandiyohi County Courthouse, Willmar, Minnesota. The streets were named: DaCosta, Bilderdyk, Bloem (for theologians) Rubbens[sic] and Rembrandt (for painters), William and Frederick (for the House of Orange), Emma and Marten (for Prins and his wife). 21

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By 1887 Theodore Koch became the sole proprietor of the project, and the sole target of complaints and criticism.22 On the positive side, that same year he had persuaded the Great Northern Railway to construct a line through the western edge of the colony, seven miles to the west of Prinsburg. Here Koch built another town, Clara City, named in honor of his new bride.23 The rst and only store in Prinsburg closed that summer, and literally moved to the new town by the tracks. Only a church building remained on the Prinsburg townsite, its council contemplating moving it to yet another location. When winter arrived in 1888, one exasperated settler compared the hamlet to Absalom’s Monument, a testimonial to futility and inated egos.24 After just three years there was good reason to wonder if the colony would succumb, despite good soil and diligent workers. In contrast to this story of early frustrations, another group of Dutch immigrants in 1896 followed Koch northward from Minneapolis to a different set of circumstances. Some of these settlers even came from the area that surrounded Prinsburg. They rst heard of this area when a restorm consumed the area’s forests and towns, killing several hundred people during September 1894. Forty years later Theodore Koch recalled that the Great Hinckley Fire made the land more accessible for farming. The best science of the day held that res both exterminated insect pests that bedeviled farm animals and improved soil fertility.25 Armed with science, and his hard learned lessons from Prinsburg, Koch published full-page advertisements extolling the invigorating life of the Minnesota woods, an Elysium devoid of cyclones, blizzards, and bad water.26

22 Martin Prins died on 17 November 1887 from an overdose of quinine he ingested to combat a case of malaria. Prins and Koch ousted Nil Frederiksen from the partnership when he failed to contribute his promised third of the capital for the venture. (Koch Memoirs, 53–4, 71) 23 Ibid., 69–70. Henry D. Minot to Theodore F. Koch (22 December 1886) and Henry D. Minot to James J. Hill (11 April 1887) in the Louis W. Hill Papers. James J. Hill Reference Library, St. Paul, Minnesota. 24 “From Prinsburg, Minnesota,” De Grondwet, 26 February 1889. Absalom’s Monument refers to the pillar that David’s son built for himself, as told in II Samuel 18:18. 25 For an account of the scientic wisdom of this period relative to re and farming see, Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 199–218. 26 The most complete sales pitch for the Friesland colony appeared as an insert in De Volksvriend, 30 January 1896. In addition when in 1900 Koch visited Northwest Iowa to promote the Friesland colony, this newspaper provided an extended summary

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Unlike Prinsburg, Friesland arose along the mainline of a real railroad. The St. Paul and Duluth linked the Twin Cities with the Twin Ports of Duluth and Superior, guaranteeing access to markets throughout Minnesota and beyond. Koch candidly stated that the rocky soil required human efforts to be rendered arable, but, he assured his readers, the resulting eld conditions would resemble closely the conditions they had known in the northern Netherlands (hence the town’s name). Better still, the rocks would prove most useful as material for house and outbuilding foundations. The region abounded in good water, much of it in streams and sloughs crisscrossing the colony. The random distribution of less gravelly tracts and less watered knolls scattered the settlers over an expansive area of approximately one hundred square miles. Stung by criticism of his failure to underwrite Prinsburg’s infrastructure development, Koch proposed that the township government of his new colony immediately nance an extensive ditch network (for which he owned the equipment) and a network of graveled roads to replace the haphazard lumber company trails. In addition, Koch offered jobs to day laborers and carpenters in need of seed money for new farms. They could build his demonstration farm, barracks for newcomers, a potato warehouse, and stores along Friesland’s main street. More adventurous folks could work in the sandstone quarries, six miles away along the Kettle River. Able-bodied workers need only mention Koch’s name to the foremen, and they would be hired right on the spot.27 Chiseling paving blocks in the Kettle River Quarry proved more lucrative than digging ditches for Koch. This, in turn, slowed infrastructure development, isolating the far-ung farms from the vital railroad. The more prosaic settlers spent their spare time converting trees into cordwood for the Twin Cities market. Settlers, who cleared a few acres before departing for work in the quarries in the spring of 1896, returned to nd their labors overwhelmed by a rapid invasion of poplars. During the fall of 1896 newspaper accounts of the Friesland colony indicated that the settlers delivered a surplus of potatoes to Koch’s new warehouse by the depot for forwarding to the Twin Cities. Others consigned cordwood to either agents in the Cities, or to Koch. Most of the pioneers had a few cows that produced enough milk to warrant

of the speech he gave to interested people. (De Volksvriend, 22 February 1900, 4, and 1 March 1900, 4). 27 De Volksvriend, 30 January 1896, 21 May 1896, and Koch, Memoirs, 111–13.

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organization of a creamery association. They fully expected to build a processing plant in the coming year.28 During the harvest season more prospects arrived in Friesland, exploring remaining tracts for good places to start farming. At least one householder spent several winters at work in the Pullman Palace Car shops near Chicago, returning in the spring.29 A bilingual newspaper, the Friesland Journal, debuted in October, replete with editorials trumpeting the virtues of William McKinley and denouncing the evils of free silver. Front-page advertisements urged readers to patronize the Friesland general store and the restaurant in the Friesland Hotel. After less than a year, the village and its surrounding settlement had a bright future. Both Prinsburg and Friesland began as pioneer outposts with uncertain prospects for success. While not identical geographically neither were they completely dissimilar. Prinsburg held the advantage in soil conditions and pastures. But with work, Friesland’s soils and meadows could be transformed into decent farmland. It also enjoyed direct rail access to the Twin Cities, the very thing Prinsburg so sorely lacked. Labor in Friesland’s elds would not be in vain. While it required years to build roads in Prinsburg and a decade for drainage ditches to snake across the prairie, Frieslanders saw these developments commence within months. Lacking outside access the Prinsburgers huddled together in a relatively tight pack on the prairies, while the Frieslanders, with rail access, sprawled over the countryside. But land alone cannot make a colony. Only people can do that. The blizzard of advertisements that swirled around Theodore F. Koch’s colonization efforts included lists of buyers and testimonials from satised customers. A promotional brochure published in 1887 ended its description of the land and litany of promises with a list of over two hundred people who had already purchased land in the Central Minnesota settlement. While there were Bohemians and Swedes on that list, the majority carried Dutch and Ostfrisian surnames. Koch included the home towns of the buyers; church records and census reports offer further information on these hearty souls, ready to cast their lot in Minnesota.30

28

Ibid., 21 May 1896, 4. Contract #4483, St. Paul and Duluth Railroad Land Commissioner Files (Northern Pacic Railroad Records in the Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society). 30 N. C. Frederiksen, M. W. Prins and T. F. Koch, Beschrijving en Inlichtingen over de Nieuwe Hollandsche Kolonie Prinsburg in Renville, Kandiyohi, en Chippewa Counties, Minnesota 29

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The Central Minnesota settlers hailed from the fringes and borderlands of Dutch society. The vast majority of buyers had been born in the Dutch provinces of Groningen, Gelderland, and Friesland, or Bentheim and Ostfriesland on the Hannover side of the Ems. They shared two other interlacing root systems: peasant farming and Seceder religion. Upon marriage, or soon before, these people immigrated to the United States, settling in established Dutch or Osfrisian enclaves in Wisconsin, Illinois, or Michigan. By 1885 they were on average forty-one years old and naturalized citizens. Most families had at least two sons approaching adulthood. Although sheltered in immigrant communities, these folks no longer qualied as gullible greenhorns. Almost without exception they were farmers looking for expanded land opportunities, men ready to cash in on rising land values in places like Chicago, parlaying their prots into larger tracts, with a clear eye toward setting up their sons in agriculture—someone like Albert Klaas Kleinhuizen, Prinsburg’s godfather. Born on March 8, 1842, in Ulrum, Groningen, Albert Kleinhuizen grew up in the cradle of the Afscheiding (the Secession).31 Ulrum lay in the northwest corner of the province on the northern edge of the Netherlands, only ve kilometers from the North Sea. By the time Kleinhuizen was born, Ulrum hosted (and/or apologized for) the oldest legally organized congregation of the Seceder Church. The Seceders dened the religious and social periphery of Dutch society. Largely rural, albeit led by urban-based ministers, the Seceders left the established church they viewed as harboring heresies. Dissatised with intellectual concessions to the Enlightenment, the Seceders clamored for the pure theology dened in the seventeenth century in the Canons of Dordtrecht and summarized in the fabled Five Points of Calvinism.32 Albert Kleinhuizen’s parents presented him for baptism in such a church, and this ethos molded his view of the world. Upon reaching the age of eighteen, Albert was inducted into the army. Beginning in 1862 he served three years in the 3rd Batallion, 3rd Company of the Grenadiers and Jagers, the royal life guards. His (Chicago: Fergus Printing Co., [1886]). These names were cross-indexed with the federal census records for 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930, the Minnesota state censuses of 1895 and 1905, and various immigration record databases. 31 Atlas of Kandiyohi County, Minnesota, 238–9. 32 On the Afscheiding see, Swierenga, Faith and Families, 153–71, and Jeanne Jacobson, Elton J. Bruins, and Larry J. Wagenaar, Albertus C. Van Raalte: Dutch Leader and American Patriot (Holland, MI: Hope College, 1996), 13–27.

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unit billeted in The Hague, in the shadow of the royal palace inhabited by the hallowed House of Orange. Having served his king in the ranks, Kleinhuizen returned to Ulrum, where he began eking out an existence as a farm laborer. In a few months time during 1867 he took two momentus steps: he married Martje Wiersum and immigrated to the United States. Hoping for a better economic future, Albert and Martje settled in the Groninger Hoek of Chicago, a neighborhood dominated by other immigrants from the coastal reaches of the province, took up farming, and joined the First Christian Reformed Church. Martje mothered eleven children during the next eighteen years. The Kleinhuizens escaped the Great Fire, survived the economic tailspin of the 1870s, witnessed the inexorable expansion of the city into the surrounding truck farms, and prospered with the inevitable increase in real estate values.33 In 1885, Albert heard the call to Minnesota. He agreed to serve as a Koch sales agent for the colony. Among his rst clients were their own brother and two brothers-in-law from Michigan. They each purchased land from Frederiksen, Prins, and Koch. Albert and Martje arrived in Kandiyohi County during March 1886, one month short of his forty-fourth birthday.34 His name appeared on the petition to organize Holland Township and the organization papers for the rst school district in the township. Albert chaired at the organizational meeting of the Prinsburg Christian Reformed Church and served as its lay leader for nearly two decades. By turns Kleinhuizen presided over the council meetings, read sermons, and shepherded the ock through the rst, hard years when no minister deigned to reside in the isolated hamlet. When their son, Nicholas, came of age, Albert and Martje turned the farm over to him and built a new house for themselves near the church. The Kleinhuizens enjoyed twenty-ve years together in Prinsburg. Fully half of their Minnesota neighbors had followed similar paths from the province of Groningen through Chicago and on to Prinsburg. The balance of the settlers were Gelderlanders who passed their rst American years near Oostburg, Wisconsin and Greenleafton, Minnesota. Most of them found permanent homes in Prinsburg and never moved

33 On Kleinhuizen’s ties to the Dutch community in Chicago see Robert P. Swierenga, Dutch Chicago: A History of Hollanders in the Windy City (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 566–67. 34 De Volksvriend, 11 March 1886, 4.

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again. Equally important, during the ensuing years most of them passed their land to sons. In truth, Koch clients were the children of Dutch peasants. Their ancestral way of life fell victim to a new economic order in the Netherlands. Farming with machines and gangs of migrant laborers supplanted the traditions of the village. Ironically, Theodore F. Koch’s entrepreneurial career began in the northern Netherlands selling American-made hay mowers to Friesland farmers.35 Now, on the other side of the Atlantic, he sold them land to replace the verdant elds from which his machines had swept them. Together Koch and his buyers selected American locales that resembled the old sod with this exception—they traded the North Sea for Minnesota lakes. Koch never published a comprehensive list of the Friesland colonists. Instead names appeared piecemeal in a series of advertisements and planted letters to the editor in Dutch-language periodicals.36 The federal census of 1900 provided another glimpse into the colony. As in Prinsburg, Koch recruited colonists with ties to Groningen and Gelderland. But the Pine County colony included a stronger Frisian presence, as well as native-born Dutch Americans, while largely excluding Ostfrisians. The average Friesland settler was thirty-nine years old, an immigrant resident in the United States for fteen years. A nomadic lot, most of them had relocated two or three times in the previous twenty years. They had ranged over the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Friesland attracted fewer speculators and absentee landlords than Prinsburg. While this eliminated Prinsburg’s problems with undeveloped tracts acting as drags on the township treasuries, it compelled undercapitalized settlers to borrow to even raise a down payment. Klaas Gerben Feyma fell into the colony’s undercapitalized class.37 He came from the extreme edges of the Netherlands—the village of Holwerd, Friesland, located on the North Sea coast. He was born there on May 16, 1849, raised in the Hervormde Kerk, and educated in the local school. As a teenager he mastered the carpenter trade. Then he 35

Koch, Memoirs, 18. De Volksvriend, 13 February 1896, 6; De Wachter, 4 March 1896, 4; De Volksvriend, 12 March 1896, 4. 37 For a more complete account of Feyma’s life see “Klaas G. Feyma: Friesland Minnesota’s Carpenter/Correspondent,” in The Dutch Adapting in North America: Papers Presented at the Thirteenth Biennial Conference for the Association for the Advancement of DutchAmerican Studies, ed. Richard H. Harms, (Grand Rapids, MI: Calvin College, 2001). 36

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joined the trek from the coastal villages to the interior towns, trading Holwerd for Leeuwarden and Franeker. There he plied his trade and married Fronkje Van Schepen. Life was difcult in the province of Friesland in the late 1870s and 1880s.38 Prices were low, labor strife high, and prospects for the future dismal. So the Feymas, now including three youngsters, joined the thousands heading for America. They arrived in New York during 1884 and settled in the small Dutch enclave of Clymer, New York, in the foothills of the Appalachians south of Buffalo. Klaas tried to support his family on the erratic income of a day laborer. At least once he crossed the Niagara River to work as a seasonal farm worker in Canada. After two tough years in New York, the Feymas moved to Dresbach, Minnesota, a narrow shelf of land across the Mississippi from the stillborn Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, Wisconsin. Neither farming nor carpentry could adequately provide for this steadily expanding family. So after ten futile, but idyllic, years by the Father of Waters, on May 29, 1896, Klaas Gerben Feyma bought an eighty-acre farm two miles from Friesland. He promised to pay the railroad company $320 for his dream. To raise the down payment, Feyma sent his oldest sons off to work on the township road gang, while he joined Theodore F. Koch’s carpenter crew. Needing a house, Feyma bought the lumber on Koch’s credit account. Koch accepted Feyma’s land contract as collateral.39 The farm’s stony ground did have potential as farm land. Working full time for Koch, Feyma made little headway against the rocks, leaving him with feed for the animals, but little for his family. Then, during the spring of 1897, Fronkje Van Schepen Feyma died giving birth to their seventh child. Klaas dutifully dug the rst grave in the Friesland colony’s cemetery. Feyma steadfastly developed his Friesland farm for ve years. But in 1901 he nally abandoned the land, moved his family ve miles

38 The best account of the woes of Friesland Province is found in Annemieke Galema, Frisians to America, 1880–1914: With the Baggage of the Fatherland (Groningen: REGIO-PRojekt Uitgavers, 1996). 39 Under the terms of the contract, Feyma could not make a payment to the railroad without the original contract. The record of payments on this document constituted the ofcial record. In addition, the physical presence of the document ensured that Feyma was in fact the owner, and not a front man for a third party speculator. All this assured Theodore Koch that he would soon receive payment for the credit he extended. (Contract #4743, St. Paul and Duluth Land Commissioner Records, NPRR Files, MHS Collections).

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to Sandstone, and spent the remainder of his days working in his woodshop, raising his children as a single parent, and tending his chickens.40 He saw most of his Friesland neighbors gradually disperse to other Dutch hamlets in North Dakota, Washington, Montana, and Minnesota. Eventually two of his own sons opted for life in the warm California sun. For twenty-seven years Feyma chronicled all this in his dispatches to Dutch-language newspapers. He also pleaded with his Dutch-American compatriots to join him in the Minnesota woods. As there were precious few takers, Dutch institutions slowly disintegrated in Pine County. One major piece of it, the Reformed Church, died with Feyma. Churches constituted the centripetal force in the settlements people like Albert Kleinhuizen and Klaas Feyma built during the nineteenth century. They and their fellow immigrants brought a penchant for ecclesiastical warfare with them to America. The greatest source of friction lay in their varying degrees of comfort with the process of Americanization. They came from the Netherlands as a faithful remnant of the Calvinist tradition. Those Dutch immigrants who favored a higher degree of cultural preservation gravitated toward Christian Reformed congregations. Immigrants who adjusted more easily leaned toward the Reformed Church in America, the body founded in New Netherland colony in 1628. These two denominations skirmished over language, lodge membership, separate day schools, denitions of appropriate church music, and closer connections with other American denominations. These debates echoed in every Dutch colony large enough to support more than one church. The presence of rival congregations served to solidify the Prinsburg colony and destroy the Friesland settlement. For a few years Friesland, Minnesota’s churches grew as prolically as the local poplar trees. Within weeks the settlers organized two congregations: one Christian Reformed, the other Reformed. Theodore F. Koch erected a church building for their joint use. Members of the Reformed church refused to sit through Christian Reformed services, and vice versa. One visiting minister ventured the opinion that the presence of a large Christian Reformed group did not bode well for

40 He dabbled in renishing and repairing furniture, making picture frames, and sold tombstones as a sideline.

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religious harmony in the new community.41 Both denominations forged ahead and by 1901 organized two more congregations to accommodate members who lived too far from the Friesland townsite to regularly attend services. The members of the Friesland colony’s Christian Reformed congregations were scattered over an area of more than one hundred square miles and cut off from each other by primitive roads. Attending services was problematic, even under the best conditions and impossible the rest of the time. With their church life in jeopardy, members of these congregations became the rst settlers to abandon the colony. These more self-consciously orthodox brothers would not stay in locations where they could not worship in exactly the right way. Invariably they moved to locales with organized Christian Reformed congregations already in place.42 The nearest of these, Pease, was located forty miles to the west. By 1903, the Christian Reformed churches had disappeared from the Friesland colony. When the Friesland Reformed Church organized, its members were concentrated within a few miles of the townsite. Some of them, including Klaas Feyma, moved to Sandstone, seven miles to the northeast. Tired from picking rocks out their undeveloped elds, these folks went to work as laborers and craftsmen. By 1901 they could organize their own congregation. In the process the Friesland congregation lost more than half of its members, a blow from which it never recovered, and ceased functioning in 1910. The Sandstone congregation struggled for another fteen years, its membership both dwindling and aging with the passing years. In 1929, just a year after Klaas Feyma’s death, it suspended services.43 The closing of the churches marked the passing of any institutionalized Dutch consciousness among the Pine County settlers. A vague sense of the old identity lingered among the children who remembered the old days, but the structures of an ethnic community failed to endure in Pine County. The town of Friesland literally disappeared into the resurgent forest.

41

De Volksvriend, 19 March 1896, 6. The author assembled a tentative list of Christian Reformed Church members through the subscriber lists published in the denomination’s ofcial periodical. These names were then cross indexed with the federal censuses of 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930. 43 Muriel Langseth, Sandstone, The Quarry City (Sandstone: Sandstone History Club, 1989),143. 42

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Once, during its declining years, the Sandstone Reformed church feebly threw out a lifeline to the nearest Christian Reformed congregation (located forty miles to the west). The Sandstone elders proposed that the churches jointly sponsor an annual meeting promoting both denominations’ foreign and domestic missions. The request received a summary rebuff; the Christian Reformed church chose to sponsor its own celebration. The Sandstone group could not misunderstand this unmistakable message.44 Ecclesiastical contacts disappeared, although individual members of the two churches maintained social contacts (funerals and Labor Day being the regular gathering times), ecclesiastical contacts disappeared. Then the Sandstone Reformed disappeared and with it Dutch identity in Pine County. In stark contrast, the Central Minnesota congregations, formed in loneliness during the 1880s, maintained a remarkable collegiality for the rst twenty-ve years. During May, 1886, Reformed and Christian Reformed congregations organized three miles apart from each other, at Roseland and Prinsburg respectively. One year later an Ostfrisian group organized another Christian Reformed congregation, one they called the Bunde Christian Reformed Church. When the railroad came to the western edge of the settlement, yet another church, the Rheiderland Presbyterian church organized among the German speakers. Its Dutch-speaking minority organized their own Reformed congregation in 1894.45 Yet another church, Emden, began when German speakers revolted against the linguistic intransigence of Prinsburg’s Dutch leaders. Both the Emden and Bunde congregations evolved into bi-lingual churches, with services in both Dutch and German. And nally, back in the west, in 1899, the Rheiderland church, appalled by the presbytery’s demand

44

De Volksvriend, 27 September 1923, 4. This information is summarized from several congregational histories: Bethany Reformed Church, Clara City, Minnesota, Centennial Anniversary (privately published, 1989); Centennial: Celebrating 100 Years of Service for Our Lord & Saviour (Clara City, MN: Bunde Christian Reformed Church, 1987); A Century of Grace: The Reformed Church of Roseland (Roseland, MN: privately published, 1986); Roseland Reformed Church: A History of the Congregation read at the Fiftieth Anniversary Observance held on September 11, 1936 (Roseland, MN: privately published, 1936); Heritage of Faithfulness: History of the Emden Christian Reformed Church, Renville, Minnesota, 1890–1990 (privately published, 1990); 100th Anniversary of the Prinsburg Christian Reformed Church (privately published, 1986). 45

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that all church records and meetings be conducted in English, reorganized as Bethany Reformed Church of Clara City.46 This complicated evolution actually signied a religious vitality that helped carry the Prinsburg colony through its starving time. Far from destroying the colony, the profusion of churches strengthened the settlement by providing acceptable religious alternatives. Each congregation’s membership records reveal a remarkable give and take, an internal migration from church to church, with little or no stigma attached to transfers. Starting in 1898 the colony’s congregations transcended both language and denomination to co-sponsor annual mission rallies that drew hundreds of members to a convenient grove for a day of preaching and missionary stories. This is not to suggest that Central Minnesota’s Dutch colony was a religiously peaceable kingdom. There were rivalries and arguments over liturgical styles, Sunday observance, and the ratio of Dutch to German language services. (and later still the introduction of English). The eventual opening of a Christian day school in Prinsburg soured relations with all the neighboring congregations. But intermarriages were common, and transfers regular, signs that the hard feelings were not too deep.47 Weekly church services and annual visits from the elders could cement a Dutch community together. These rituals helped the ocks look beyond the immediate problems to a better future. From this came endurance, the patience to wait for the day to dawn. In Prinsburg the dawn took the form of roads gradually graveled and leading to the distant railroad towns. Isolation faded and prosperity lit their farms. By 1910, as Friesland faded into the woods, the Central Minnesota congregations all built bigger buildings to house the faithful on Sunday, structures largely self-nanced and raised with local labor. The religious tradition that killed Friesland, saved Prinsburg. The geographical assets and liabilities of Prinsburg and Friesland did not determine the ultimate fate of either colony. Koch chose two sites that could sustain farming communities. Each colony contained ethnic blends mixed from different Dutch provinces and kindred souls 46 During the 1890s both the Reformed Church in America and the Christian Reformed Church had acceded to the wishes of their Ostfrisian members and allowed them to organize German speaking regional bodies (classes). 47 Central Minnesota Christian School opened its doors for the rst time in September, 1911. Its opening had been hotly debated within the community, and within the Prinsburg Christian Reformed Church, for several years. (De Volksvriend, 17 December 1903, 8, and 22 February 1911, 3).

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from the Hannover side of the Ems River. Koch provided the capital for Friesland, while he left Prinsburg to its own nancial devices. Friesland began with the vast advantage of direct rail access, while Prinsburg struggled for years to raise its vital arteries above the sloughs that coddled fertile soil while choking commerce. The colonies may not have been physically identical in the beginning, but both had assets and liabilities that could lead to either success or failure. Religious rivalry could cement a settlement in place, or scatter it. Particularly for those immigrants who came from Europe’s rich tradition of religious dissenters, faith created a durable identity that welded a sense of divine calling to the primal call to touch the land and extend a family’s biological existence for another generation. It created a cohesion that distinguished immigrants from Yankees in prairie settlements, something that connected the experiences of Dutch Seceder Calvinists to Haugean Lutherans from Norway, German Pietists, and Belgian Catholics.48 Prinsburg and Friesland helped dene different stages in the Americanization process. Gone were the brick houses and stone churches of the Netherlands, likewise the common roof house/barn. In their stead stood balloon frame houses and arched roofed barns just like the Americans built. Mechanical hay rakes, wire binders, and steam threshers did the work Westphalian migrant labor gangs once did for the Dutch in the Netherlands.49 Even the church buildings, those most sacred spaces, assumed a most American look. The rst Dutch church buildings in Prinsburg and Friesland were selected from catalogues available at every line side lumberyard in the midwest. Prefabricated windows and erector-set-like plans enabled even the rudest carpenter to be the equal of a medieval cathedral builder. But inside, where the services were held, the Dutch dissenter tradition held sway. With central pulpits, plain benches, white-washed walls devoid of pictures, inscriptions, or any other “papist” bric-a-brac, the austere interiors precluded distractions. Parishioners could hear only the truth recorded

48 On other communities of religious dissenters in the general area of Prinsburg see Joseph A. Amato, Servants of the Land: God, Family, and Farm, the Trinity of Belgian Economic Folkways in Southwestern Minnesota (Marshall: Crossings Press, 1990) and Jon Gjerde, The Minds of the Midwest: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830–1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 49 The case can be made that the essence of the European peasant village tradition reappeared each fall in the form of the threshing ritual, a mechanized communal effort to process the grain.

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in Scripture, interpreted by the Reformation era creeds, and related for today by the minister. Singing a capella from the Genevan Psalter, as translated into Dutch meter, the faithful envisioned heaven, as interpreted by Dutch speakers. The real story of immigration and ethnicity is not to be found in grand summaries and broad generalizations. The real story unfolds one family, one church, and one community at a time. In the nineteenth century, Dutch-American Calvinists did not nd their essence in Delft tiles and silver skates. To them Dutchness meant theological rigor, orthodoxy handed down for generations. Prinsburg and Friesland were born to maintain this tradition. Dutchness and Calvinism faltered and disappeared in Friesland, but they remain a visible presence in Prinsburg. A modest wooden windmill standing alongside Minnesota Highway 7 tells the average motorist that this is a “Dutch” town. A much larger structure of stone stands a few hundred feet behind the mill, a Christian Reformed church. This building provides the answer to why the mill still marks the spot Theodore F. Koch sold to Dutch immigrants over a century ago.

CHAPTER SEVEN

WINDMILLS ON THE PLAINS: VISION AND SOCIAL MEMORY IN TWO DUTCH COMMUNITIES IN IOWA Julie Berger Hochstrasser

One of the signicant waves of immigration from the Netherlands to the United States of America in the mid nineteenth century found its way to the state of Iowa, under the leadership of dissident Protestant minister Reverend Hendrik Pieter Scholte (1805–1868), who named his new “kolonie” Pella. As the community grew, an offshoot was established, christened Orange City. Today these two Iowa towns still proudly celebrate their Dutch heritage. Pella, just south of the capital city Des Moines in central Iowa, and Orange City, in the far northwest of the state, both register their ethnic roots through many conspicuous visual signs, including the cultivation of geographical landmarks, such as traditional architecture and even windmills (Fig. 1); the practice of traditional arts, such as carving wooden shoes; and the observance of annual rituals deploying an array of recognizably Dutch symbols—most notably, their spring tulip festivals. Especially for those who may never have visited either of these communities, the rst purpose of this article is simply to familiarize readers with them, with a brief review of the histories of their origins. But I focus here initially on windmills and wooden shoes and tulips because they are among the many visible signs through which these communities assert their Dutch heritage. As an art historian, my concern is with their visual culture. What is its role in the cultural life of these people? More particularly, how does visual culture function to perpetuate social memory, assert social cohesion, even inculcate societal values? What can it teach us about the power of visual culture within societies in general, but in migrated populations such as these in particular?1

1 Acknowledgements to Anne Rosenberg for her assistance with research and photography in Pella and Orange City, and to the Iowa Research Experience for Undergraduates funding from the University of Iowa which made this project possible. A preliminary draft of the rst part of this article was presented as a talk at the

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Orange City Visitor’s Center and Chamber of Commerce, Orange City, Iowa. Photo: Julie Hochstrasser.

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The “Cultural Moment” Hypothesis Much of the visual culture to which I am referring will look quite familiar, and not only to scholars of Dutch art or culture or history. It is easy to see how actively each community promotes its Dutch heritage today, perhaps most immediately on the internet. On Pella’s website, as of this writing, their landmark windmill, wooden shoes, and an advertisement for their annual tulip festival all gure prominently. The masthead greets visitors with a panorama of Pella’s own Dutch canal, with their recently-completed windmill visible on the horizon, along with insert photos of colorful wooden shoes, a young boy in traditional dress smiling at purple tulips, and Delftware displaying butter and baked goods. Below, a closeup of another windmill fronted by a glorious array of tulips in Pella’s Central Park invites clickers to “check out the Pella Tulip Time Festival Schedule,” providing this year’s upcoming dates. An animated slideshow at the center of the site provides shots not only of the windmill, wooden shoes, and tulips, but also of costumed folk dancers, carriers hauling cheeses, young soccer players, Pella’s Dutch drawbridge, more children in klederdracht (traditional costumes), and a whole bakery full of specialty foods—all looping continuously in captivating visual display. The site invokes all the senses, inviting viewers to imagine the tasty butter, cheese and pastry; the cheerful music accompanying the dancers; the thumping kick and vigorous dash of a soccer play—but it is, after all, visual imagery that conveys these messages. There is even a web-cam with which to “check the current weather conditions in Pella . . .” The site’s invitation invokes all the most characteristically Dutch symbols it can muster: “Pella, reminiscent of the Netherlands with its Dutch architecture, canal, windmills, wooden shoes and tulips, it is a European oasis in the Heartland! Visit us for a day or a weekend . . . your wooden shoes are waiting!”2 Indeed, particularly at Tulip Time, one is not disappointed. Residents dress in traditional Dutch costumes, dance traditional dances, and serve traditional foods. Lively visual display is everywhere: besides the parade,

conference “Going Dutch: Holland in America, 1609–2009,” March 25–26, 2005. I wish to thank the organizers Annette Stott, Joyce Goodfriend, and Benjamin Schmidt, for this stimulating venue for scholarly exchange. Conversations with Willem Frijhoff, Charles Gehring, Suzanne Sinke and Hans Krabbendam were of particular value in the further development of this essay. 2 http://www.pella.org, 25 October 2005.

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Fig. 2

Orange City High School Marching Band. Photo: Julie Hochstrasser.

the authentic structures of the Historical Village are crowded with demonstrations of traditional handcrafts such as Hindeloopen painting, spinning and weaving, rope-making, or carving klompen (wooden shoes), as the incessant strains of the gaily painted draaiorgel (street-organ) ll the air. One strolls the drawbridge over the sparkling canal, before the large Dutch-style red brick hotel—and of course, provided the timing is right and the wind doesn’t blow too hard that year, everywhere one looks, one is greeted by the myriad hues of a truly magnicent display of tulips. Orange City’s website, while appealing less exclusively to Dutchness for their identity (and without the snazzy animation), nevertheless presently features at least three out of eight pictures on its homepage invoking the same imagery: their own windmill, the “Pride of the Dutchmen” high-school band marching in wooden shoes (Fig. 2), and a large red blossom advertising the link for their tulip festival. These hallmarks vie with other less obviously stereotypical images such as a photo of a (very blonde and Dutch-looking) family, clearly underscoring

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their opening pitch, that “Orange City offers the best of small-town family life”3—though this “family value” in itself could be considered characteristically Dutch as well. Once one clicks on that red tulip, however, incontrovertible Dutchness reigns once more: Welkom to the Orange City Tulip Festival. The Festival of Dutch Heritage celebrated annually on the 3rd weekend in May. The celebration is held dear by Orange City’s inhabitants with a ower show, an evening performance of a Broadway play, afternoon and evening parades, and street dancing by old and young alike. It’s a time when the entire community joins together to work for a common goal; a celebration of Dutch Heritage with dancing, tulips, wooden shoes, and entertainment.4

If the stereotypes ood back in full force here, so too does the commercial edge to the Festival’s purpose: “Indeed this community invites all who visit to enjoy a unique shopping experience topped with Dutch hospitality.”5 Shopping rst!—but here too, the offer is a genuine one: their Tulip Festival teems with residents in full regalia who revisit the life of the immigrants. A narrated display of costumes of various towns and provinces of the Netherlands is interspersed among performances by folk dancers from the third grade on up to adults (Fig. 3). As in Pella—and Holland, Michigan, as well—in observance of the renowned ethic of Dutch cleanliness, they scrub the streets in preparation for the parade, which follows with horse-drawn carriages for the local government ofcials and numerous Dutch-themed oats and other entries. Both towns commemorate their heritage more abidingly, too, with many architectural touches. In the 1960s, Pella redeveloped the downtown into a picturesque Dutch village; in 1987, the City Council of Orange City passed a Dutch Storefront Program mandatory for all new construction and remodeling, which funds up to fty percent of project costs. Even Pella’s McDonald’s has a Dutch facade. The history of these two settlements makes it abundantly clear that these immigrants elected to come to the United States for its promises of greater religious freedom and more favorable economic opportunity. For even the most elemental clarication of the communities’ religious designation, one is obliged to digress however briey into the history of the Dutch Reformed Church, since it is complicated by a confusing

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http://www.orangecityiowa.com/index.html, 25 October 2005. http://www.octulipfestival.com, 25 October 2005. Ibid.

Fig. 3

Orange City Folk Dancers at the Tulip Festival. Photo: Anne Rosenberg.

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proliferation of offshoots in both Europe and America.6 While the Protestant Reformation had rst taken root in the Netherlands in 1548, based there primarily in the teachings of John Calvin, and the rst Reformed congregation in North America was established in New Amsterdam as early as 1628 as the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church (continuing to this day as the Collegiate Dutch Reformed Church), it was a nineteenth-century governmental reorganization of the various Reformed Churches in the Netherlands that instigated the Secession, which would ultimately prompt Reverend Scholte and his followers to emigrate to America and found Pella in 1847. In 1816 William I (1722–1843), King of the United Netherlands, consolidated the independent Gereformeerde Kerken, designating them to ofcial state status and renaming them as the Nederlands Hervormde Kerk (NHK; Netherlands Reformed [or Reorganized] Church). Imposing a new hierarchical church order to replace the one which had been adopted at the Synod of Dordt in 1619, he usurped the power of local clergy and antagonized parishioners as well. Resistance to the King’s control of the church came to a head with ‘De Afscheiding’ (The Separation) or Secession of 1834. Some pastors had been deposed; others led their congregations out of the Netherlands Reformed Church to establish new denominations. Hendrik Scholte was one of these latter. Finding the new order “too lax, too modern, and theologically unsound,” he seceded along with his fellow pastor Albertus van Raalte (1811–1876) to form the Christelijke Afgescheiden Kerken (CGK).7 The secessionists suffered persecution in the Netherlands. With the King refusing petitions to recognize his new denomination, Reverend Scholte was repeatedly arrested for continuing to preach outside, imprisoned in solitary connement, and ned; members of his congregation were beaten by soldiers with unsheathed swords.8 This ill treatment provoked Scholte and Van Raalte to contemplate emigration; they 6 This summary is much condensed and focused on the specics of the Iowa communities. For details on the many other divisions that ensued over the years, see the more comprehensive overview of the history of the Dutch reformed church by Michael Zwiep of the Vineland Free Reformed Church in Ridgeville, Ontario, Canada, accessible at http://www.reformedtimeline.blogspot.com. A useful timeline of this history is provided on the website http://reformed.net/church/timeline.shtml. 7 The Pella Historical Society has compiled an excellent series of educational websites; the quotation is from Muriel Kooi, “The History of Pella,” Pella Historical Society, http://www.pellatuliptime.com/history.html. 8 Leonora R. Keables Scholte, A Stranger in a Strange Land: The Story of a Dutch Settlement in Iowa (Iowa City, Iowa: The State Historical Society of Iowa, 1942, ©1939), 14–20.

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investigated Java and both North and South America as possible destinations. Meanwhile, though Scholte himself had inherited considerable wealth from his family’s work in the sugar industry in Amsterdam, poverty became so dire among the population in the wake of the potato famine of 1845 that followers of both men urged them to emigrate soon. Two colonies were drawn up, with Van Raalte at the head of the one that set out for Michigan in 1846 and Scholte embarking in spring of 1847, with eight hundred people following after him; Scholte eventually selected Iowa for his “kolonie” despite the entreaties of his comrades to join them in Michigan.9 The religious persecution they had suffered was reected in his choice of the settlement’s name, meaning “City of Refuge,” after a city in Asia Minor whence in 68 C.E., early Christians ed a reign of terror in Jerusalem, after what was considered a heaven-sent warning to “ee and take refuge in Pella of Decapolis, even though it was a pagan city.”10 Difcult as life had become for them in the Netherlands, life on the prairie also proved hard for the pioneers. Scholte bought 18,000 acres for $2,250 ($1.25 an acre),11 but when he arrived in Pella August 26th, 1847, the land lacked the 50 cabins promised with its purchase, so the settlers built makeshift sod houses, roofed with woven branches spread over with prairie grass; hence the early nickname “Strawtown,” and the deep appreciation for the ner architecture of timber and brick that came later, which not surprisingly was built on much more familiar Dutch models.12 Scholte himself, affectionately known as “Dominie” (Dutch for minister), was a versatile pioneer: he built a temporary church, took care of legal matters, made a lime and brick kiln and a sawmill, opened a bank, established a newspaper, became postmaster, notary, and land agent; served as school inspector, and on the board of newly founded Central College, was active in local and national politics, and even attended the inauguration of Lincoln in the 1860s, all the while continuing to preach until his death at 62 in 1868.13

9

Scholte, 28. This initial Afscheiding presence in America eventually led to the formation of the Hollandsche Gereformeerde Kerk (Holland Reformed Church), now known as the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC). 10 Scholte, 42. 11 Kooi, “History,” as in note 5. 12 “De Kolonie: Early Days of Pella,” Pella Historical Review, Section I-7, at http:// www.pellatuliptime.com/lessons/early.html. 13 “Hendrik Pieter Scholte,” Pella Historical Review, Section I-1, at http://www.pellatuliptime.com/lessons/dominie.html.

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Scholte’s second wife Mareah, whom he had married before his departure from Europe after the death of his rst wife Sara, had enjoyed musical training in Paris; she was deeply distraught upon her arrival on the bleak and barren prairie. Dominie, devoted, built for her over the next year right next to their original log cabin a twentythree-room mansion, which stood out as an enormous structure in the town. When at last Mareah was able to unpack the chests of goods she had brought from home, in anticipation of reconstructing the familiar comforts of the visual and material culture she knew and cherished, she was heartbroken to discover many of the velvet drapes destroyed by mold, and all but one of her Delftware dishes broken—this we learn from Mareah’s autobiography, entitled Stranger in a Strange Land.14 But she went on eventually to ll the house with furnishings from the Netherlands and St. Louis which are still on display in the Scholte House Museum.15 As Pella thrived on steady waves of new immigrants, by 1869 the area was so thickly populated that it was determined that a delegation should seek out a new site further west to establish a second colony. Led by Henry Hospers, they chose Sioux County and took possession of thirty-eight sections of land, calling the area “Holland.”16 In September 1869, seventy-ve men and three surveyors plowed and plotted the site to ready it for the arrival of the settlers. The colorful patriotism of the town’s name was explained thus: The Dutch immigrants who founded Pella had suffered so much at the hands of King William and his government that they were in no mood to remember the name of Holland’s Prince of Orange by inscribing it upon the map of their settlement in Marion County. The founders of the Dutch colony in Sioux County, however, had forgotten the persecutions instigated by their Prince, and like all Hollanders they prided themselves on being “Orangemen.”17

14

Scholte, as in note 6. “Mareah Scholte,” Pella Historical Review, Section I-2, at http://www.pellatuliptime. com/lessons/mareah.html. Compare also the later Hagens-Van Willigen House, built in the early 1940s by Cora and Maurice van Willigen to look like a combination of their childhood homes, on the concept of a Dutch Castle; this, too, is open to visitors in Pella today. 16 The other delegates were Leen van der Meer, Dirk van den Bos, and Henry John van der Waa. In addition to the history provided by James van der Zee in The Hollanders of Iowa, the Orange City Chamber of Commerce has prepared a useful packet which includes a concise history of the city. 17 “[. . .] they recalled the political cry of their ancestors, adherents of the House of 15

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In April and May of 1870 the new colonists started out on the nineteen-day journey to their new home. By 1871 a carpenter had built a few houses, and was joined by an inn keeper, a shoemaker, a barber and a blacksmith. By 1872 there were a thousand people in the community and by 1875, twenty-ve hundred. That summer, Hollanders subscribed $800 for a genuine Dutch windmill. James van der Zee reports, “As long as this old-fashioned mill ground their wheat into our, it was the one feature of the landscape which told the world of the colony’s nationality. But it was soon dismantled and supplanted by a modern steam roller-mill. As one pioneer suggested afterward, it deserved a better fate and should have been laid out where old settlers’ picnics and other community celebrations could have been held.”18 Like Mareah Scholte’s mourning over her Delftware, the comment reveals much about the symbolic power of visual culture, independent of function. The present-day windmill at Orange City’s Diamond Vogel Paint Factory was only just built in 1967 by Andrew Vogel. Originally constructed to grind test paints, it now operates strictly as a tourist attraction, while the large windmill pictured in Figure 1, built in 1972–3 by Northwestern Bank but also with Vogel’s assistance, today houses a Visitor’s Center and the Orange City Chamber of Commerce.19 Pella’s Vermeer windmill attests equally strongly to that sense of the windmill’s symbolic potential articulated by Van der Zee’s wistful pioneer. Just completed in 2002, it was built by Lukas Verbij from Hoogmade in the Netherlands, modeled after one built in 1850 in Groningen; the city took out a loan to nance its construction. At 124 feet to the tip of its most upright blade, it is the tallest working windmill in the United States, now fully operational, grinding grain and open for tours (Fig. 4). In its early days, Orange City was plagued for several dreadful years by overwhelming attacks of locusts which devoured the crops and

Orange-Nassau, “Oranje boven!” (Orange forever!) Accordingly, the title of the Dutch royal house [. . .] was placed upon the map of Iowa as “Orange City,” in Holland Township.” The town was named in 1870. James van der Zee, The Hollanders of Iowa (Iowa City, Iowa: The State Historical Society of Iowa, 1912), 145. 18 Van der Zee, 182–3. See also De Volksvriend, 19 September 1895; and The Historical Atlas of Sioux County, “Mr. Gleysteen’s article.” 19 With its 5-ton dome and the vanes weighing another 14,000 pounds, this mill proved to be quite an engineering feat, taking 14 months to build. Ultimately successful however, it stands 76 feet from the ground to the top of the vane, and can withstand 90-mile-per-hour winds—even with an inch of ice on the blades.

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Vermeer Windmill, Pella, Iowa. Photo: Julie Hochstrasser.

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threatened the survival of the community. So in the autumn of 1875, when at last a tremendous harvest was achieved, a major celebration was declared, to be marked by a big excursion from Pella to Orange City, repeating a journey of two years before. The editor of the Orange City newspaper called for an elaborate reception: “Get quartettes together, put your organs in shape, string up your violins, get out your ags and prepare garlands of owers! Orange greets Pella: Welcome, thrice welcome!”20 Again, visual display gures conspicuously in the festivities, just as in the earlier celebration when (as Van der Zee reports) “there had been a scene of indescribable enthusiasm at the same station adorned with ags and green twigs.” Altogether I would consider these to be historic precedents for today’s tulip festivals at both locations: owers, ags and music still gure prominently in the celebration (Fig. 5). Then as now, a brass band serenaded. Prayers were said and psalms sung, and two days of feasting and visiting constituted what the colony’s leader later recalled as “indeed happy days, oases on the desert of life which should long be held in remembrance and do us good.”21 In another notable precursor to the later tradition of tulip festivals, in 1895 Orange City celebrated its rst twenty-ve years by gathering, “dressed in their best,” attended by people from neighboring communities, including Pella.22 The tulip festivals celebrated today were initiated in 1935 in Pella, and in 1936 in Orange City. Both city’s events share stock elements: authentic costumes, traditional foods, a parade, and of course, tulips. Pella hosts a ower show of 25,000 blooms, by last count.23 Both parades begin with the scrubbing of the streets, followed by traditional dancers, and oats portraying Dutch customs; both local high-school marching bands parade in wooden shoes. Cart vendors peddle poffertjes (tiny pancakelike treats) and other Dutch culinary specialties—or tourists can watch them being made fresh at the Little White House in Orange City. In Pella, visitors can enjoy the Klokkenspel’s performances by eight four-foot gures moving to the melodies of a 147-bell Carillon—albeit now computer driven; but this small anachronism may serve to remind us: windmills, wooden shoes, tulips, are archetypal national symbols that date back to the birth of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. 20 21 22 23

Van der Zee, 183. Van der Zee, 183–4. Van der Zee, 189–90. On the 2005 event in Pella, see http://www.pellatuliptime.com/tulipt.html.

Fig. 5

Tulip Festival Parade, Orange City, Iowa. Photo: Julie Hochstrasser.

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Today these represent the culture and traditions of a Netherlands of popular imagination: those of a native land of some generations ago. Their symbolic expressions seem frozen in time: the costumes donned by residents for these events are rarely worn in the kingdom of the Netherlands today, except for historic reconstructions and reenactments such as the Buitenmuseum in Enkhuizen.24 If we are to judge from the visual culture of these communities, the arts that are practiced are quoted and perpetuated from the source culture as they were at the time of migration, and are preserved or revived in that state as hermetic memorials to the period of transition and reestablishment. One might even posit this as a rule of the visual culture of migrated communities—a sort of hypothesis subject to further testing. For purposes of future reference, we shall name it the “cultural moment” hypothesis. As just a few rudimentary steps in the direction of testing such a broad-reaching proposition, we might draw two very brief comparisons with other migrated communities: one quite similar, another quite different—and yet the tenet of the “cultural moment” holds for both. For an example with many similarities, compare briey the Amana colonies, not far from Pella in Iowa, founded in 1855 by German immigrants, the Community of True Inspiration. Today they too preserve a variety of traditions from their homeland: in their architecture, the practice of traditional handicrafts as at their famous woolen mill and their factory for ne handmade wood furniture; and staging festivals featuring traditional music, dance and costumes from the homeland, assorted wurst and of course, locally-brewed bier. But when we took our teenage German exchange student there a few years ago for Oktoberfest, she was astonished if not dismayed to nd it so “old-fashioned,” remarking that (as we all knew perfectly well), Germany was nothing like that any more.25 What is preserved in Amana today is the Germany of the mid-nineteenth century, the moment at which this population rst arrived. Little reference is made to the Germany of today, and still less is projected for the benet of the tourists who ock to this national historic site.

24 Klederdracht is still worn occasionally, as in the provinces of Overijssel or Volendam. On our visit to Enkhuizen in 1990, my three children donned costumes available to try on for photos; these were indeed frozen in time: when they went back to the Buitenmuseum ten years later, wishing to recreate this picture, they discovered with disappointment that the costume chest only supplied childrens’ sizes! 25 Yet Germany, too, preserves these traditions, as Oktoberfest sufces to demonstrate.

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Or on a distant shore, consider a population migrated under very different historical conditions: the Africans transported through the slave trade to the former Dutch colony of Suriname. Notwithstanding the profound contrast, in that these were people who did not choose to migrate, one nds in the visual culture of these communities a similar xation upon the “cultural moment” of their migration. When Harvard anthropologists Allen Counter and David Evans went there in the 1960s and 70s, as reported in their study entitled I Sought My Brother,26 they discovered a time capsule of African arts and culture that had scarcely changed from their seventeenth-century origins, in recognizably similar styles of architecture, drum forms, textile patterns, altars to the ancestors, costumes and details right down to the identical design and fabrication of two seeded ankle bracelets, one made in Nigeria, the other in Suriname—in other words, a rich fabric of centuries-old visual culture preserved over all that time with extraordinary integrity.27 Although these various artifacts and celebrations of culture offer insights about any community transplanted from its cultural roots to a distant place, certain critical distinctions apply. For one, the Afro-Suriname Bush population presents an irrefutable instance of the continuous survival of a migrated culture, in contrast to Dutch re-enactments that may or may not be unimpeachably authentic. Thus the visible congruences between African and Surinamese culture constitute what Eric Hobsbawm would classify as genuine “custom,” as opposed to “invented tradition.”28 We shall return shortly to evaluate the Dutch cases more fully in relation to this notion. But also and crucially, there is a fundamental contrast between those populations subjected to forced migrations, like the African or Caribbean diaspora in Suriname, and the members of Scholte’s “kolonie” who, however dire the situation in Europe might have been in the 1830s, still had the freedom of choice to come to America. While a parallel can be fruitfully observed in the

26 S. Allen Counter and David L. Evans, I sought my brother: An Afro-American Reunion (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: MIT Press, 1981). 27 When I presented a paper at a conference at the University of Suriname in Paramaribo in spring of 2004, I found that still to be true in the Maroon communities of the forest interior. A dugout canoe was still a familiar sight on the Suriname River where I photographed it in that year, and at the cultural celebration to which we were all invited as part of the conference, one of the performances featured traditional African dance. 28 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2. My thanks to Suzanne Sinke for suggesting this valuable reference.

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relatively static character of the visual culture in even such disparate transmigrated communities as these, this difference must not be trivialized.29 Given the present scholarly climate of growing interest in diaspora studies, one might be tempted to conceive of the communities in Pella and Orange City as “Dutch diaspora,” accessing the rich ferment of diaspora theory to frame whatever structural similarities one might discover in the role of visual culture in any transplanted population, but the “cultural moment” proposition stands only with this disclaimer. One corollary of the “cultural moment” hypothesis is the indisputable commercial advantage to which such a culture industry clearly plays—certainly in the cases of the Iowa Dutch, like the Amana Germans (and also, I might add, like the Dutch in Holland, Michigan, descended from Van Raalte’s branch of that nineteenth-century migration, whose web advertisement marketing Dutch Delftware on sale in their “Dutch Village” is ample proof.) In fact, even if this was not originally a factor in the survival of the traditional arts of the African diaspora in Suriname (or at least not yet, when they were rst visited by Counter and Evans), today one buys indigenous carvings in the “Disney store” in Paramaribo. The bow and arrows for sale there appear far too imsy to function as ostensibly intended—raising the spectre of tourist arts that could properly be grouped under the rubric of their own sort of “invented tradition.”30 Clearly all this raises far more questions than can be addressed here, but one of my objectives is to do just that.31

29 On recent evolutions of this concept, see James Clifford, “Diasporas,” in Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology, ed. Ackbar Abbas and John Nguyet Erni (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005), 524–626. My thinking about both the history of diaspora theory and current trends in the scholarship initially beneted much from discussions with Jerry Wever; Michaeline Crichlow and the Caribbean Diaspora Association at the University of Iowa also helped to broaden my horizons on this important and highly fertile theoretical front. 30 For an entre to the growing literature on tourist art, see Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, ed. Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1999). 31 There is undoubtedly a regional variable within this hypothesis as well. The survival and/or preservation of traditional Dutch culture and visual culture in Iowa offers an interesting parallel with Hans Krabbendam’s nding (see essay in this volume) that among Dutch immigrants, isolated areas stuck to Dutch language longest: likewise, these towns in the relatively “remote” small-town Midwest (relative only to particular models of center-periphery of course!) seem generally to have clung longer to traditional Dutch visual language as well than, say, the now more cosmopolitan areas of original Dutch settlement on the East Coast—just as (on a vastly different

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The question I would like to see pursued further is this: in hand with these symbolic visual expressions, to what extent are their identications (with Dutch-ness, German-ness, African-ness), frozen in time as well? Or, to return to our focus, do these populations in Pella and Orange City continue to relate to the ongoing life of the Netherlands today, as a member of the new European Union, with its own changing challenges of the twenty-rst century? For historian James van der Zee writing in 1912, “Despite national decay every intelligent Hollander, whether he is thrown among strangers or remains at home, retains a strong feeling of national pride.” But beyond this, Van der Zee’s appendix on “The Attitude of the Hollanders of Iowa During the Boer War” documents at that point a erce identication still with Dutch politics of the day: “During the closing months of the nineteenth century England had no enemies ercer than the Hollanders of Iowa. They manifested a vital concern in the outcome of differences between Boers and Britons and contemplated every event in South Africa with feelings of intensest partisanship”—so much so that Pella sent soldiers to ght alongside the Boers, inltrating enemy lines to get there.”32 The methodical assessment of such feelings of national connectedness today is a problem for social scientists to tackle; lacking statistical data, my random sampling of Iowans who grew up in and around Pella, and interviews with some half-dozen attendees at the 2005 Orange City Festival, suggested generally no such deep personal identication with Dutch current events.33 Thorough scrutiny of both volumes of Murt Kooi’s collected articles from the Pella Chronicle between 1847 and 1999 yielded exactly one reference to a current event in the Netherlands: the mention in 1949 that Queen Juliana had promised freedom to Indonesia.34

scale) the geographical remoteness of Suriname must no doubt have contributed to the extraordinary survival of seventeenth-century visual culture there. 32 Van der Zee, 349. 33 The one exception I encountered was Wijnant Hegemann, the enthusiastic tour guide at the Diamond Vogel windmill, who is also the deputy sheriff of Orange City. Recently immigrated from Bussum, he maintains active contact with his relatives in the Netherlands and closely follows Dutch current events. On the other hand, Annie Le Smit, also of Orange City but descended from original immigrants, reported no present-day contact with relatives in the Netherlands, nor with current events there particularly. My thanks to them both for delightful and generous in-depth interviews. 34 Murt Kooi, “Pella Happenings: 1949,” in Days of Pella Past: Articles written or compiled by Murt Kooi as they appeared in The Pella Chronicle 1998 and 1999 (hereafter Kooi 1999), 73. In the academic world, Krabbendam (in conversation) reported closer links with

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Fig. 6 Holly Streekstra, Diasporic Travel Kit, 2004, mixed media, 18 u12 u 12 in., property of the artist, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Photo courtesy of the artist.

The same seems to hold true for the visual culture of Pella and Orange City. In all their promotional material I have yet to nd reference to any other than traditional Dutch arts: no invocation of world-class contemporary Dutch design in which they might rightly take vicarious pride, no mention of cause celebre Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas—though Orange City’s festival does feature also the regional ne-art show “Artburst.” Contemporary American artist Holly Streekstra commemorates her own Dutch ancestry by furnishing a piece she entitles Diasporic Travel Kit with inherited silver and tulip bulbs (Fig. 6); her installation called Interment employs similarly familiar icons of an earlier era (the wooden shoes return), invoking again the culture of the period of transmigration, now quite literally frozen in time. Streekstra’s own comments on her Dutch heritage are revealing in this context: My entire life I have been told that I am Dutch, that being Dutch is special, that being of full Dutch heritage is especially important. In my families’ homes I have been surrounded by Dutch kitsch: wooden shoes, fake tulips, kissing gures, windmill imagery, tourist Delftware, royal peppermints. All of these objects, coupled with an ongoing dialogue about being Dutch, who in the village is Dutch, how I should date only men of Dutch heritage, creates a mythic sense of cultural identity. My living

the contemporary Netherlands in Holland, Michigan (at Hope and Calvin Colleges) than in Orange City (Northwestern College) or Pella (Central College).

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relatives have a strong sense of pride in being Dutch and a seemingly desperate desire to propagate themselves, but none of them have ever been to the Netherlands, and none of them have any desire to go. I get the feeling that they think it would betray their love for being American.35

Dutch Americans may not look to The Netherlands of today for the heritage they still celebrate so proudly. Yet surely if the early immigrants could see the way the Dutch culture of their time is still preserved in the Dutch communities of Iowa and elsewhere in the Midwest at the turn of the twenty-rst century, they would be too proud for words. And no matter—one picture is worth a thousand of them.

Visuality and the Invention of Tradition On the surface, the Tulip Festivals of Pella and Orange City seem to t Eric Hobsbawm’s denition of “invented tradition” to a tee: “‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past.”36 Both repetition and the striving for continuity with a suitable historic past are dening attributes of Tulip Time, whether in Pella, Orange City, or Holland Michigan, whose ofcial festival preceded both the Iowa institutions.37

35 Quoted from Holly Streekstra, “Essay on European Travel as Thesis Research.” My thanks to Streekstra for correspondence regarding her art, in which she also provided me with this unpublished manuscript. She herself hails from Wisconsin and schooled in Minnesota; see http://www.mnartists.org | Holly Streekstra, for details of the Diasporic Travel Kit, Interment, and other recent work. 36 Hobsbawm, p. 1. Willem Frijhoff is right to relate this concept to the extensive work on musealisering in Dutch scholarship (see Frijhoff, “Dutchness in Fact and Fiction,” in this volume). On musealisering, see Adam de Jong, De dirigenten van de herinnering: musealisering en nationalisering van de volkscultuur in Nederland 1815–1940 (Nijmegen: Uitgeverij SUN, 2001). 37 Michigan’s festival was instituted in 1929, six years before Pella’s; Orange City’s followed the year after Pella’s. On Holland’s festival, see See Suzanne Sinke, “Tulips are Blooming in Holland, Michigan: Analysis of a Dutch-American Festival,” in Immigration and Ethnicity: American Society—“Melting Pot” or “Salad Bowl”?, ed. Michael D’Innocenzo and Josef P. Sirefman, Contributions in Sociology, Number 97 (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1992), 3–14. I am grateful to Sinke also for bringing her research to my attention.

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Yet tradition, Hobsbawm claries, “must be distinguished clearly from ‘custom’ which dominates so-called ‘traditional’ societies. The object and characteristic of ‘traditions’, including invented ones, is invariance.”38 Among the events advertised on Pella’s website, the annual antique car show “Resurrected Tin” is obviously relatively novel; yet “Kermis,” “Sinterklaas Day,” and even the spring “Tulip Time” actually do have some claim to the more authentic status Hobsbawm grants to continuously surviving custom. While it is sometimes alleged that Tulip Time was instituted largely for economic motives, the evidence supports positioning these celebrations somewhere between Hobsbawm’s genuinely surviving, continuous “custom,” and the “invented traditions” which are the object of his study. Above we have noted some of the earliest pioneer celebrations that pregured the tulip festivals, albeit in distant form. Muriel Kooi has detailed other instances of these living customs that foreshadowed—or evolved into—Pella’s festival of today. “To say that the celebration of Dutch heritage began in 1935 with the rst informal Tulip Time is true,” she writes, “but some other facts must be recognized. The people in Pella have celebrated their Dutch Heritage long before 1935. One of my elderly friends, now deceased, always lamented the fact that newspapers didn’t recognize the efforts of some who had been very active in this endeavor as early as 1897.”39 In a publication commemorating the ftieth year of Tulip Time, Kooi compiled a series of references to earlier family and regional picnics and other events that provided the “festive preliminaries” to Tulip Time.40 This description of an 1897 celebration is striking: “A yellowed, brittle local newspaper, The Pella Blade, dated September 7, 1897 tells of a semicentennial celebration featuring horse-drawn oats with a variety of themes, one being young ladies representing different provinces in the Netherlands. Cox’s Band provided music and electric lights put up in profusion lighted the park. Curios and antiques were displayed in store windows and thousands of people trekked to Pella.”41 The oats (albeit horse-powered rather than motorized), the young ladies representing various Dutch provinces, the band, the lights, the curios, even the crowds—this sounds like the very blueprint for the (invented?)

38 39 40 41

Hobsbawm, 2. Kooi 1999, 83. See Kooi, Festival, 1985. Kooi 1999, 83.

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traditions enacted today. Along similar lines, Kooi records Frisian picnics at Vermeer’s pond east of Pella “under the Frisian ag, ying with the American banner,” singing songs and playing Frisian ballgames; the 1934 Friske Volksdie was attended by well over a thousand American Frieslanders.42 Likewise, on a hill south of town, Herwijnse picnics drew large crowds of persons of that background. Kooi’s research corroborates that celebrations of Dutch heritage had been going on throughout the years since the settlement of the colony. The ofcial launching of Pella’s Tulip Time she recounts as follows: When the operetta “Tulip Time in Pella” was given in 1935, the idea of a festival came to the minds of civic leaders who were ever alert to promoting the town. Plans were hastily made in April for holding a oneday festival three weeks later. Although tulips had ofcially been brought to Pella in 1903, there were no tulip beds in the town’s business district. To remedy this situation, a local cabinetmaker, George Herren, in four days made 125 four-foot wooden tulips which were placed in the ag-display holes on the square. These wooden tulips, with potted plants, sufced in 1935 but a resolution was made to have thousands of tulips for the next festival. John Res, a Dutch bulb grower came to Pella to advise local planters [. . .] Some pessimists said, “It will never last.” They were the minority. The rst event sealed the aesthetic impetus needed for a permanent Tulip Time in Pella.43

It is precisely this permanence and regularity of Tulip Time as it is now celebrated which does ultimately meet Hobsbawm’s designation for invented traditions: “Inventing traditions, it is assumed here, is essentially a process of formalization and ritualization, characterized by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition.”44 Even though the acts and tokens of celebration (be they ags and parades, music and dancing, crafts and costumes, food, or owers) may be genuine continuations in some form or other from the shared ethnic past being remembered, it is more particularly through formalizing and ritualizing and repeating—in other words, not just remembering, but memorializing—that they qualify as invented tradition in Hobsbawm’s sense. In fact, so formalized and ritualized are the festivals today that Suzanne Sinke’s description of the regularized features of Michigan’s parade applies equally well to those in Pella and Orange City:

42 43 44

Ibid. Ibid. Hobsbawm, 4.

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julie berger hochstrasser By 1941 the form of the opening ceremony was well established, with the burgemeester (mayor) appearing in costume to pronounce the streets dirty. The Hollanders then appeared, clad in the nineteenth-century garb of several Dutch provinces, to scrub the streets. The men carried water while the women and children acted out the stereotype of the Dutch huisvrouw, who cleaned not only the steps in front of her home but also the bricks of the adjacent street. After the scrubbers came the klompen dancers [. . .] in Dutch costume. Next came other members of the local population, displaying old farm machinery such as milk carts and cheese carriers.45

Both Iowa towns open their parades too with the burgemeester’s inspection (upon which he always declares the streets in need of a scrubbing!), followed by the splash of buckets of water—particularly raucous on the part of the younger boys (Fig. 7)—and in turn by female sweepers of all ages (Fig. 8). Both sport the dancers, the costumes, and even the entourage of old farm machinery—including, these days, quite an impressive array of tractors—though not neglecting the more antique carts and carriers. We shall return shortly to the issue of stereotyping which Sinke emphasizes in her account. But with regard to Hobsbawm’s analysis, our focus here is the high degree of ritualization and repetition not only within the individual tulip festivals but also between festivals. Whatever elements of the celebration might have had their origins in indigenous and even continuously indigenous practices, today’s American “Tulip Time” has indeed become formulaic. For the purposes of our investigation, however, Kooi’s choice of words in characterizing the impetus that drives Pella’s celebration is signicant in another way: she identies it specically as “aesthetic.” As claried at the outset, the object of this study is not so much the institution of the festivals themselves, but rather the place of visual culture within the activities so instituted. If we wish to assess the role of vision in this enactment of social memory, perhaps we must begin by asking: how far back might we trace this “aesthetic impetus” in the history of the settlements themselves? Scouring through pioneer accounts of the founding years of these communities reveals that in the early days, when survival was still a struggle, art was a luxury. Karel Blom, a dealer in general merchandise in Pella, born October 18, 1812 in the Netherlands, emigrated to America independently, arriving in 1846 and traveling on to St. Louis. In a letter to his beloved friends and parents in the Netherlands, he 45

Sinke, 5.

Fig. 7

Boys Dousing the Streets (and each other!) before the Orange City Tulip Festival Parade. Photo: Julie Hochstrasser.

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Fig. 8

Ceremonial Scrubbing of the Streets, Tulip Festival, Orange City, Iowa. Photo: Julie Hochstrasser.

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observed that “architecture is neglected,” and later (the letter goes on for twenty-one pages) that “all artistic things are high priced.”46 Similarly, even amid the exuberant visual expressions of the joyous relief of the rst pioneers described earlier, with ags and green twigs and owers, one might note the conspicuous absence of paintings—conspicuous especially for the Dutch, whose visual culture in Europe had been so profusely and eloquently pictorial. In all of James van der Zee’s 450-page history of the Hollanders in Iowa, the only mention of paintings—or architecture by style, per se—is actually by a Dutchman visiting from Europe. In late November 1873 “a famous visitor from Holland” (who remains nameless) is enchanted by a quiet Sunday in a church that is admittedly “something quite different from a stately gothic cathedral or the beautiful marble church edices of New York, but it appeals no less to the emotions . . .” The scene reminds him of a painting he knows, and he wishes a painter were there to record it: “. . . would that he were here for a short quarter of an hour to catch the ray of light which the pale winter’s sun causes to play through the little open side-window against the dark wainscot and upon so many quiet and pious upturned faces . . .”47 Still, even in the earliest years of settlement, when most human energy was tapped into sheer survival, there were the occasional signs that when aesthetic quality could be had, it was desirable. Siebertje

46 Kooi 1999, 35–43; 39 and 41. The letter was translated by Attorney Dick Van Zante, a descendant of Blom, and was loaned to Kooi by Mr. and Mrs. Tom De Vries. 47 Quoted in Van der Zee, 300–301. Of course this kind of pragmatic bent is widely noted among colonial societies where of necessity, art must take a back seat to survival in the early period of settlement. In his editorial for the opening of his newspaper the “Pella Gazette” on February the 1st, 1855, Scholte voices his more pressing concerns—although several of his tenets are not without their aesthetic dimension: But we hope that the renowned industry, order, honesty and piety of the Holland character will show for all ages their marks, in the increasing neatness of town and country, in the goodness of the roads and highways, in the most scientic cultivation of the soil, in the scarcity of lawyers and lawsuits, in the increase of schools and other institutions of learning, and in the multiplication of houses of religious worship. (Van der Zee, 245–6). This even from the man who began his own studies at the Athenaeum Illustre (Academy of Arts) at Amsterdam, a promising student who won many honors for his superior work and aspired to devote his life to painting—until the deaths of his father, and then his mother and brother, left him disturbed by the “frivolity and selshness of the people with whom he came in contact,” prompting his move to studies of theology, philosophy, and politics at the University of Leyden. (Scholte, 9–10). But with or without paintings, visual culture, as we have seen, would not long lie idle within the life of even this hard-pressed society.

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Viersen (1830–1910), an immigrant to Pella, recalled in a speech to the Holland Literary Society how, when she had rst arrived in America in 1847, she was so unhappy that she wanted only to save money toward returning to Friesland. Her rst opportunity to do so presented itself when a pump peddler staying at her house for a couple of days offered to buy some embroidery she was working on. Three weeks later, he came back and bought four yards at a dollar a yard. “He was lately married and wanted to make his wife a present of it, and this was the rst money for my journey back (to Friesland).”48 As it turned out, the peddler’s investment in nery was the start of something big: Viersen amassed a respectable personal fortune, some of which she bestowed generously as benefactress of Pella’s Carnegie-Viersen Library; she never did go back to Friesland. But the tale reveals an appetite for beauty even under duress, at this early point in Pella’s history. Material culture and visual culture conate somewhat here, but on both counts, ne things also offered one means of remembering one’s life back in the home country. The example of Scholte’s own wife Mareah must be considered exceptional—they enjoyed the most fortuitous combination of wealth and prestige of anyone in the colony—yet in the indulgences she enjoyed, or had hoped to enjoy, one readily recognizes the power of objects of aesthetic quality to recall the culture of home. Consider her tears over her precious Delftware broken in transit—so bitter that her daughter paved for her a garden path with the fragments. Likewise, while the ne house and extensive garden which the Dominie provided her offered obvious creature comforts, there was also a sheerly aesthetic component to their capacity to lift her spirits on the bleak prairie. Like their stately home, their gardens were described (not surprisingly) in explicitly aesthetic terms, as “a beautiful place in which Mareah could nd pleasure and rest.”49 Moreover, Muriel Kooi is not the rst to stress that, even though Hollanders in the Netherlands dubbed them “English gardens” (the Scholtes called theirs an “English garden” too), the garden held a long-standing ethnic claim to Dutchness as an inherent dimension of its meaning: “Dutch gardeners have

48

Kooi 1999, 14. “150 years of admirers of the Scholte Gardens,” in A Collection of Historical Articles, researched, compiled, and written by Muriel Kooi during Pella’s Sesquicentennial 1847–1997 as they appeared in The Pella Chronicle. Second edition, September 2002, p. 18. 49

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set standards for beautiful gardens for centuries. Sailors brought back numerous species and varieties from exotic lands they visited in their business of trading. Horticulture began with Dutch trading in the East and West Indies and in time, Dutch botanical institutes of study at the University of Leyden.”50 Hence Tulip Time, of course—and the reason Princess Margriet’s visit to Pella on Wednesday, October 1, 1997, was celebrated with a program in the Scholte Gardens with “the planting of tulips with those cute little youngsters getting a lesson in tulip bulb planting.”51 Thus visual referents of many kinds operate as powerful prompts for remembrance and commemoration. For another more contemporary example, to further celebrate Princess Margriet’s visit, it was suggested by various committee members that “wearing one’s Dutch costume would be of interest to the princess . . . Orange shirts or blouses are also great to see as we celebrate the House of Orange family visiting our town.”52 Two bronze statues by sculptor Nick Klepinger were installed in the Gardens for the occasion ( just in time, on September 10, 1997) as more enduring visual monuments.53 Similarly, Ed Crelin had produced a bronze bust of Scholte some years earlier, because he “felt that the town and the college had neglected to honor Scholte in the way a founder of a town should be honored.”54 So too the attempts to preserve historic buildings that pepper the pages of the Pella Chronicle over the years.55 And the small windmill donated to Pella’s Central Park by pulley factory Van Gorp Manufacturing in 1973 was hailed specically as “a very visible and useful landmark [. . .]” (emphasis mine).56 Even these more durable objects, such as sculpture and architecture, may be considered in light of Hobsbawm’s concept of “invented tradition”—though more ephemeral phenomena such as celebrations and festivals might be the more obvious instances. And what is the deeper function of all such “traditions”? Hobsbawm identies three overlapping 50 Kooi 2002, 18. She goes on to reminisce about her own favorite formal gardens in the Netherlands: those surrounding the palace at Het Loo in Apeldoorn, proudly recounting (p. 19) King Willem’s competition with Louis XIV of France in which Het Loo’s gardens were said too have won out as surpassing those of Versailles. 51 “Remember the visit of Princess Margriet by watching it on video,” in Kooi 2002, 56. 52 “A look at the life of Princess Margriet,” in Kooi 2002, 53. 53 “Scholte Gardens gains statues,” in Kooi 2002, 54. 54 “Central grad gains artistic inspiration through Scholte,” in Kooi 1999, 47. 55 See for example “The Nollen House is still standing,” in Kooi 1999, 61. 56 “Celebrate Pella’s history with a walk in Central Park,” in Kooi 2002, 44.

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types among invented traditions since the industrial revolution: “a) those establishing or symbolizing social cohesion or the membership of groups, real or articial communities, b) those establishing or legitimizing institutions, status or relations of authority, and c) those whose main purpose was socialization, the inculcation of beliefs, value systems and conventions of behavior.”57 While the more permanent tributes of sculpture and architecture speak importantly to Hobsbawm’s second type, the tulip festivals of Iowa’s Dutch communities—to whatever extent we must agree that they are indeed “invented”—clearly engage the rst. Pella and Orange City are both real Dutch communities (for the most part that is; there are of course non-Dutch inhabitants as well, whose contributions to the Festivals are duly and graciously acknowledged),58 and “imagined communities” (the term is Benedict Anderson’s), identied by a felt social cohesion rooted, in this case, in their common ethnicity.59 Yet the festivals also evince characteristics of Hobsbawm’s third type: a concern with the inculcation of beliefs and value systems is implicit throughout the administration of the festivals. Susan Sinke noted the irony of Michigan’s festival banning liquor dealers from the main parade to prevent them from taking advantage of the “captive audience,” even as a right-to-life oat was permitted. Right-to-life oats and booths were to be found in both Pella and Orange City in 2005—although Orange City’s parade offered an interesting twist on the conservative crowd with the participation of the Christian Motorcyclists Association, “Riding For the Son.” In all three aspects—symbolizing social cohesion, establishing status, and inculcating values—the mechanism of visuality is central to the workings of these monuments and celebrations. Its crucial role within the whole festival phenomenon is amply witnessed, for example, in the sheer number of times throughout Sinke’s analysis of Michigan’s Tulip Time that she employs visual metaphors. Dening ethnicity as “a form of collective consciousness,” part of an identity forged through mediation between tradition and change, she goes on to observe: “This process comes into public view in the ethnic festival (my italics).”60 Precisely so: in fact I would emphasize that the festival’s visibility is

57

Hobsbawm, 9. Pella, see article about the non-Dutch. 59 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Editions and NLB, 1983). 60 Sinke, 4. 58

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fundamental to the group dynamic it fosters. She continues: “For the descendants of a particular background, a festival serves as . . . a bulwark against homogenization and against a loss of ethical vision that could maintain unity (emphasis mine again).”61 Whether or not we may be taking her language more literally than it was intended, still I would underscore the persistent metaphor: one’s personal “ethical vision” is reinforced by bringing this ethnicity into “public view.” And in the very next paragraph thereafter (again, italics are my addition): “Ethical vision functions both within the ethnic group and in relation to other cultural groups. Though an ethnic festival may be an embodiment of this vision, other types of images are more likely to be on display and to play a role in creating identity. A festival relies on cultural stereotypes, sometimes turning them inside out by acclaiming items that outsiders view negatively.”62 Thus sight takes its conspicuous place among the other senses, most notably hearing (national anthems, other beloved Dutch songs, the playing of the band, sermons and prayers), and even taste and smell (need we mention the ubiquitously central role of traditional foods in all such celebrations?)—the whole gamut of sensual experience takes one back to “old times” or even to “the old country.” But what distinguishes vision in this process? What exactly is the role of visuality here? I contend that it is no accident that visual metaphors permeate Sinke’s discussion, because it is in fact precisely through vision that the mediation between the private and public spheres is so powerfully and profoundly accomplished. Sinke’s examination of the tulip as “key symbol” demonstrates the kind of nexus of meaning that can be borne by visual imagery, which lies at the heart of my argument: “For the promoters of the festival, the process of creating a cultural image is most ostensible because their vision of ethnicity (at least on one level) is on display: dutchness is the motif.”63 Not only does the language of visuality permeate her account; this visual mode is essential to the workings of the whole enterprise. Nor is her discussion the only one to invoke sight as the pertinent sense in this context. As another commentator put it regarding Michigan’s event (italics again mine): “The entire effort to reproduce the atmosphere

61 62 63

Sinke, 4. Sinke, 4. Sinke, 9.

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of the fatherland both in the Tulip Time festival and in the exhibits is motivated . . . (by) a genuine desire on the part of the citizens to preserve the traditions and customs of their forefathers for the interest and cultural enjoyment of all to behold.”64 Beholding is indeed the very mechanism that sets the whole process in motion; yet why “to behold,” rather than “to hear,” “to taste,” or even “to feel?” The link between actual physiological vision and the more conceptual notion of “view” as opinion, or “image” as thought—here as the very concept (e.g. of unity)—governs all these visual turns of phrase.65 Yet there is also the communal nature of vision that lends itself so very well to the kind of group experience desired—what in contemporary parlance might be termed “team-building.” In order for individuals to join together to collectively seek to memorialize anyone or anything, there must be some way to bridge from the private internal space of memory to the collective social one. Here is where visual means are particularly effective. Like sound, sight can be apprehended simultaneously by multiple perceivers, thus reinforcing the cohesion of a group.66 Even though ultimately sights and sounds are still privately processed through the lters of individual imaginations and intellects, there is the collective aspect of watching a parade as a crowd all together, singing in unison, or perceiving in common a shared symbol, which engenders the sense of unity of which Hobsbawm writes. Hence also the invocation of stereotypes—what one might dene as symbols whose meaning has become so clear as to be almost overdetermined. Tulips, windmills, wooden shoes, are those kinds of symbols which hold genuine meaning and yet have been so played out as to border at worst on the stereotypical (Fig. 9). Sinke alleges that the choices of imagery and symbolism for Michigan’s Tulip Festival “relied primarily on adaptation of American stereotypes of the Dutch,”67 rather than other aspects of the ethnic heritage. On this argument, would one have to counter that the Dutch themselves do too? The same “stereotypical” tulips, windmills, and wooden shoes are rampant

64 C. Greeves-Carpenter, “Tulip Time Comes to Michigan,” Catholic World, 153 (May 1941): 185, quoted in Sinke, 9 and 24 n. 46. 65 See Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1969; and reprint anniversary edition, 2004). 66 Taste, smell, and touch, while by their nature apprehended more internally and therefore individually, are not excluded however—consider for instance the ritual of “taking communion.” 67 Sinke, 9.

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Fig. 9

The Klompen Maker, Tulip Festival, Orange City, Iowa. Photo: Julie Hochstrasser.

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in the most touristic venues throughout the Netherlands—one need only glance at the shop windows that line the Damrak leading up to Amsterdam’s Centraal Station. Where exactly does “genuine” culture end and stereotype begin?68 One apparent means for distinguishing between the genuine and the stereotypical is the criterion of accuracy. Sinke’s account of the origins of Michigan’s festival discounts the costumes for the rst performers as only stereotypes, citing a report that the original “Dutch” costumes of Delft blue and white were actually dictated by the selection of patterns by the local Home Economics department.69 Yet in subsequent years, the trend has moved in the direction of increasing concern with historical accuracy—certainly, at least, in Orange City, where costumes are paraded with signs designating which province and town each comes from, and narrators describe the various features of each in detail—from the owered chintz wentke (a long overdress) and helmet-shaped casque headgear of Hindeloopen in Friesland to the colorfully embroidered vests of Marken in Noord Holland—distinguishing between everyday wear and Sunday best and specifying periods sometimes to the decade. With similar interest in correctness, each year the klederdracht of a different province is featured for the costumes of the “Tulip Queen” and her court. While many of the costumes worn in both Pella and Orange City today show the signs of having been “cranked out” en masse (literally hundreds are needed) many more of the individuals whom I interviewed at both festivals proudly reported that the clothing they wore either constituted heirlooms inherited from

68

One corroboration for Sinke’s assertion was proferred to me by Dutch historian Hans Krabbendam, who protested that folk dances were not as authentically Dutch an activity to feature in American Tulip Times as compared, say, with the ancient Dutch games of “ring-rijen,” in which riders compete to spear rings as they pass on horseback, with each successive elimination round challenged by smaller rings until a winner triumphed–since this has been practiced continuously from the Middle Ages until today in parts of the Netherlands. (In conversation, March 26, 2005.) Still, there is ample evidence for the genuine Dutchness of folk dancing too—as still practiced in the Netherlands by such groups as Ôns Boeregoed in Zeeland. This account related by Myrtle Kooi tags dancing as surely more “authentically” Dutch than American: at the popular Herwijnse picnics in early Pella, “many attending wished they could dance the folk dances of the old country but the piety of the community ruled in the negative and it was not done.” They had to settle instead for tug-of-war contests! “Celebrating our Dutch heritage prior to 1935,” in Kooi 1999, 83. 69 Sinke, 5 and 13 n. 20, citing Esther R. Veen Huis, “Historic Dutch Provincial Costume Adapted to Klompen Dancers of the Tulip Festival in Holland Michigan,” (Home Economics thesis, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, 1953), 33.

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Dutch forebears, or had been acquired in the appropriate province or town in the Netherlands with the express desire to precisely represent their personal heritage. Still, to whatever extent these are indeed stereotypes to which the Dutch visual culture in Iowa appeals, the invocation of stereotypes per se works as a bid for unity and security in the midst of change. Homi Bhabha’s discussion of the stereotype denes its operant concept as xity—on his account, as a coping mechanism against the anxiety of change.70 While his provocative discussion addresses a colonial context of a quite different nature, the principle of xity, of continuity against change, is equally relevant here. And this is the junction where our “cultural moment hypothesis” ts squarely back into the discourse about “invented traditions,” which emphasize, as Hobsbawm points out, their “eternal and unchanging character.”71 As a non-Hollander observed about Michigan’s festivities: “The fascination of Tulip Time is that it is the color and quaintness of old Holland transplanted to America, and all America loves it.”72 It is old Holland, eternal, unchanging, which is memorialized—the Holland of the “cultural moment” of the immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century, whence the dances, the costumes (wooden shoes), and even the technology (windmills!); only the tulips themselves, ever renewed and ever ephemeral, escape becoming dated as things of the past. Other contemporary ethnic populations—native Americans, for example—often resist the nostalgia for a static and now antiquated identity.73 Yet the Dutch in America positively invite nostalgia with these powerful visual cues. Hobsbawm asserts that the study of invented traditions “cannot adequately be pursued” without the collaboration of many human sciences.74 The signicance of visual force in the workings of tradition

70 Homi Bhabha. “The Other Question: Homi K. Bhabha reconsiders the stereotype and colonial discourse.” Screen, 24, 6 (1983): 18–36. 71 Hobsbawm, 10. 72 Marvin Lindeman, “A Non-Hollander Looks at Holland,” Michigan History, 31 December 1947, p. 412; cited in Sinke, 9–10. 73 Compare Native American artist James Luna’s performance piece, “Artifact,” in which he lies down in a glass case in a museum as a wry commentary on this larger problem. 74 In response to his own rhetorical questions as to what use can be derived from studying the invention of tradition, Hobsbawm also observes that such cultural phenomena are potential indicators of problems that might otherwise go unrecognized—at worst, as in a case as sinister as the rise of German National Socialism—and that they illuminate the human relation to the past, so often used “as a legitimator of action

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(whether “invented” or not) testies to the inherent interdisciplinarity he attributes to it. It is in that light that I submit this contribution, exploring the visual dimension of the Dutch presence in America through one case study of the vital, thriving, and densely symbolic visual culture of two Dutch communities in Iowa. Hobsbawm concludes his anthology with the exhortation that it is the historian’s business to discover “invented traditions” retrospectively, “but also to try to understand why, in terms of changing societies in changing historical situations, such needs came to be felt.”75 If so, what is the art historian’s share in this endeavor? My business here has been to investigate and articulate the signicant role of visuality within these migrations and exchanges of culture around the world—of which the story of the Dutch in Iowa constitutes so colorful a chapter.

and cement of group cohesion,” and as such highly relevant to considerations of nationalism. Hobsbawm, 13–14. 75 Hobsbawm, 307.

PART IV

DUTCH ART AND AMERICAN COLLECTORS

CHAPTER EIGHT

GREAT EXPECTATIONS: THE GOLDEN AGE REDEEMS THE GILDED ERA Nancy T. Minty

It is no mere accident of collecting history that American museums are replete with exceptional examples of Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century paintings as, for example, Jan Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance, ca. 1663–64 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) and Antony van Dyck’s, Lucas van Uffel, ca. 1622 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).1 For over two centuries American amateurs and later, collector/philanthropists have demonstrated an aesthetic and even a moral afnity for these northern schools which fullled their perceptions of the honorable and resolute people who created the works and their expectations that these works might, in turn, endow their proprietors and viewers with a corresponding ethos.2 The perceived Protestantism of ‘Dutch’ painting, in contrast to other European and more overtly religious, i.e. Catholic schools, exemplifying the virtues of honesty, diligence and cleanliness sounded the most familiar note to the emerging collecting class of the American East coast steeped in the mores

1

The Vermeer was acquired by Philadelphia’s P. A. B. Widener in 1911 from the Paris collection of the Comtesse de Ségur-Pérrier through the dealers P. & D. Colnaghi and M. Knoedler. The van Dyck painting, purchased by the New York merchant Benjamin Altman from the collection of the Duke of Sutherland, came to America in 1908. 2 On the history of the American taste for Dutch and Flemish paintings, see the exhibition catalogue by Ben Broos, Great Dutch Paintings from America (The Hague/San Francisco, Zwolle: Waanders Press, 1990–1991) (in particular the introductory essay by W. Liedtke, “Dutch Paintings in America, The Collectors and their Ideals”), Peter Sutton, A Guide to Dutch Art in America (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, c. 1986), and Guy Bauman and Walter Liedtke, Flemish Paintings in America (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1992), as well as Nancy Minty, Dutch and Flemish Seventeenth-Century Art in America, 1800 –1940: Collections, Connoisseurship and Perceptions (dissertation, New York University/ Ann Arbor: UMI, 2003). The following sources pioneered the study of American taste: René Brimo, L’Évolution du Goût aux États-Unis (Paris: J. Fortune,1938), Aline Saarinen, The Proud Possessors (New York: Random House Press, 1958) and William Constable, Art Collecting in the United States. An Outline of a History (New York: Nelson, 1964). Further, there are many studies of individual collectors.

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of Puritanism. The phenomenon of the development of this taste for ‘Dutch’ painting will be the subject of the present inquiry, particularly as it ourished under our Gilded Era super collectors whose conicting drive both to monumentalize and redeem themselves informed their actions.3 For the purposes of this study I will abide by the anachronistic moniker ‘Dutch’ which stood for both the Dutch and Flemish schools well into the twentieth century.4 Whether conscious or not, the motive of redemption surely gured in the thoughts and actions of the generation of collectors—Frick, Widener, Altman et al.—largely self-made, whose fortunes were founded on the laboring class. The most extreme manifestation of exploitation is exemplied by Frick, whose union-breaking and ultimately lethal orders as manager of Andrew Carnegie’s steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, resulted in the deaths of several men and the ruination of countless others—actions which resulted in a treacherous albeit unsuccessful attempt on his life.5 The theme of the civilizing potential of art—coined the ‘Ministry of Art to Society’6—runs through American philanthropy with early and persistent ties to the Christian concept of redemption as it was manifested through the appreciation and acquisition of European paintings and their ultimate bequest to the ‘people.’ An anonymous reviewer of the mid nineteenth-century New York exhibition of the collection of 3 The promise of respectability conferred by the ownership of ‘Dutch’ art is understood here as a ‘subliminal seduction,’ with virtues associated by inference. I am not suggesting that any given collector purchased a particular painting with a message in mind. 4 Late into the nineteenth century and even into the twentieth Dutch and Flemish paintings were generally grouped together under the label ‘Dutch.’ In Henry James’ review of the ‘1871 Purchase’ (inaugural purchase of the Metropolitan Museum of Art numbering about 175 European paintings) he was one of the rst Americans to recognize and separate the Flemish school. On this, see Walter Liedtke, “Flemish Paintings in America: An Historical Sketch,” in Bauman and Liedtke, 21–22. 5 On the Homestead Strike, see Leon Wolff, Lockout, The Story of the Homestead Strike of 1892: A Study of Violence, Unionism and the Carnegie Steel Empire (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). Alexander Berkman attempted to assassinate Frick, rst shooting and then stabbing him, in the summer of 1892. All of the collectors discussed here were self-made men with the exception of Andrew Mellon who was born to wealth, which he transformed to an unprecedented fortune. Even Mellon had his shame to bear in the form of a tax evasion trial, which he ultimately won yet nonetheless clouded his nal years. On this and other aspects of Mellon’s heretofore-unpublished life, see David Cannadine, Mellon (New York: Knopf, 2006). 6 Quoted from an article on the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Monster Museum of New York,” New York Daily Tribune, 11 February 1871.

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old masters belonging to Gideon Nye applauded the edifying effect of aesthetic delectation: [G]reat works of Art . . . rene and spiritualize thousands, dead to all other softening inuences . . . [ We should] endeavor to provide from motives of sympathy and safety such amusements for our laboring population as will draw them away from gross and corrupting habits and inspire them with pure and elevating aspirations.7

The quest for redemption of our earliest collectors of old masters was presciently foretold in an anonymous American article of 1805 which upheld eighteenth-century ‘Hollanders’ as models both in their economic prosperity and their resulting of art: The Hollanders, who are an industrious, intelligent, and saving people . . . contrived to make the productions of the ne arts subservient to commerce. They justly observed, that fortunes acquired by trade and navigation soon give birth to a taste for, and love of, the ne arts: indeed almost a necessary consequence attached to the inheritance of wealth.8

Such avowed admiration for, and identication with the Dutch—rst as an industrious people and following that as spiritually and aesthetically exemplary in their pursuit of culture, namely paintings—shaped much of the American commentary on the Netherlands during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our earliest collector of the old masters was generally a man of leisure, born into wealth whose highest aspiration was the cultivation and dissemination of the gentlemanly attribute of taste.9 Thomas Jefferson Bryan (1810–1870) of New York was the rst such collector—with a noted preference for northern pictures—who would actually fulll his philanthropic goal by bequeathing his entire collection to the New-York Historical Society on his death in 1870. More than one third of Bryan’s nearly 400 paintings were Dutch and Flemish. In 1867, Henry Tuckerman, chronicler of the American art scene, described Bryan in terms betting the type of painting that

7 Anonymous, Democratic Revue, August 1848, excerpted in the Nye exhibition catalogue of 1858, Catalogue of the pictures forming the collection of the works of the old masters with a list of the engravings now on exhibition . . ., (New York: Old Art-Union, 1858). 8 “On collections of Paintings,” The Literary Magazine, and American Register, III (May 1805): 374. 9 With all due respect to Isabella Stewart Gardner, Arabella Huntington, Louisine Havemeyer and other formidable female collectors, our most persistent and acquisitive consumers of the northern old masters were men rather than women.

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appealed to the collector such as his ‘Rembrandt’ Portrait of a Man, as well as the mindset that equated Dutch respectability with Dutch painting.10 In Tuckerman’s wistful impression of Bryan’s ‘Gallery of Christian Art’ he mused: We remember when Mr. Bryan rst brought his pictures to New York, and a call upon him was like visiting a venerable burgomaster of Holland . . . [ H ]e seemed to belong to another sphere, and we to have wandered from Babel to Elysium in thus entering his gallery from bustling and garish Broadway.11

Here Tuckerman conates the identity of the collector with the paintings, particularly Dutch portraits, and the culture that spawned them. This tendency marked the following generation as well, most notably in the case of Henry Clay Frick and Rembrandt, as will be shown below. Bryan’s contemporary portrait by the American painter William O. Stone, 1867, featuring clear-cut features and a sanguine complexion amid snowy hair and beard, and painted precisely at the moment of Tuckerman’s reverent description, fullls the writer’s promise of dignied respectability. Finally, in a posthumous tribute to Bryan, he and his ilk are upheld as the guardians of high culture: “To a few was given an insight into the beautiful, and they, with the vigilance of vestals, keep the small spark alive.”12 Following on British and French—notably Fromentin’s—critical thought, the American attraction to ‘Dutch’ art was anchored in two unshakeable beliefs, the foundation being that the school of painting, like the people, was straightforward and sincere and that realism was the abiding aesthetic.13 A headline from Alfred Trumble’s New York journal 10 I have not been able to locate the above painting, which was de-accessioned by the New-York Historical Society in 1971 and sold as ‘School of Rembrandt.’ It was certainly a respectable ‘Rembrandt’ by nineteenth-century standards, exhibited as such at the Hudson-Fulton exhibition of 1909, Metropolitan Museum of Art, no. 84. 11 Henry Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, American Artist Life, comprising biographical and critical sketches of American artists, (New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1867), 13. 12 John Stilwell, “Thomas J. Bryan—The rst art collector in New York City,” The New-York Historical Society Quarterly I ( January 1918): 103. 13 The criticism and scholarship of ‘Dutch’ painting, both European and American, have been characterized by the conation of a perceived national character and the traits of the school. For a collection of essays on this topic, see Frans Grijzenhout and Henk van Veen, eds., The Golden Age of Dutch Painting in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 142–143, where, for example, De Jongh states: “If we ask ourselves what has been regarded as typical of seventeenth-century Dutch art in the historiography of the past century, we nd a number of contrasts. Realism,

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The Collector epitomizes the rst rule: “Serious, solid, sincere—Dutch national characteristics—the characteristics of Dutch art.”14 The tenet of realism, which logically ows from this, is reiterated in the accounts of American collectors traveling in the Netherlands who realize for the rst time and to their great comfort and relief that for the Dutch art did indeed imitate life. They noted repeatedly how the actual landscape exactly replicated the pictures they had known, as for example when the pioneering Baltimore collector Robert Gilmor, Jr. (1774–1848) wrote to his brother from Amsterdam in 1800 “. . . of Hobbema whose charming works seem ten times more pleasing to me since I have taken this ride.”15 That Gilmor was predisposed to favor a northern landscape aesthetic may be gleaned from his own extant prole views of New York City and Charleston, Mass., which feature church spires dominating a at, serene expanse of town and water, uncannily resembling the sketches of Jan van Goyen, Jacob van Ruysdael and the like.16 The cleverly mimetic trick of ‘Dutch’ painting is summed up by the Scottish painter David Wilkie, as quoted in an American journal in 1856: “What struck me most in my journey in Holland was the perfect resemblance everything bore to what I have seen in the Dutch pictures.”17 For Wilkie and the delighted Americans who rst glimpsed the Netherlands through paintings and only later traveled the actual landscape, the images and their faithfulness seemed more lasting and impressive than reality itself. By reason of its apparent realism and naturalism the landscape genre gured prominently in early inventories, with examples such as Thomas Jefferson Bryan’s ‘Salomon van Ruysdael’ view, ca. 1625–35 (now attributed to Hercules Segers, Fundación Colección Thyssen-

honesty, simplicity, domesticity, bourgeois values, and a love of liberty are traits of the arts as well as the national character . . .” 14 The Collector IX (1 April 1899): 1. 15 The excerpt is taken from Gilmor’s letter of July 12, 1800, quoted in Lance Humphries, “Robert Gilmor, Jr. (1774–1848): Baltimore Collector and American Art Patron” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1998) vol. I, 60. 16 Both Gilmor drawings are dated 1797 and held in the collection of the Boston Public Library, as part of a journal that the collector kept in that year, Robert Gilmor, Jr. “Memorandums made in a tour to the Eastern United States in the year 1797 . . .,” MS. Boston Public Library, published in Bulletins of the Boston Public Library (April, 1892): 72–92. 17 The Crayon ( January 1856): 9.

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Bornemisza, Madrid, formerly New-York Historical Society),18 as well as his exemplary Winter Scene by Jan Beerstraten, ca. 1660 (New-York Historical Society).19 Of the collector’s 140-odd Dutch and Flemish paintings, nearly half were landscapes. Likewise, the inventory of his predecessor, Robert Gilmor, Jr. was dominated by northern views, particularly small, polished cabinet paintings, reecting his own admonition to the American landscapist Tomas Cole: “Nature, nature, after all is the great Master in landscape painting.”20 Nature’s purity and solace as proffered in the landscapes of the Dutch masters earned them the respect and affection of the American public and amateur much as the French Barbizon and American Tonalists would later take on a similar role. C. L. Beaumont, whose father’s gallery presented such pictures to mid-nineteenth-century New Yorkers, recalled them with a special emphasis on their sensory appeal: “. . . I was a witness . . . of the realistic Dutch pictures, in which sight, sound and smell were represented; of misty, breezy landscapes, and those breezy, very wet sea pieces; cows that chewed the cud and might give milk had anyone tried.”21 For Beaumont and his countrymen, it was the virtue of realism that endowed the Dutch landscape school with visual and moral conviction. In 1871, just one year after Tomas Jefferson Bryan had died, leaving his collection to the New-York Historical Society, the Metropolitan Museum made its inaugural purchase, 174 old masters, 116 of which were Dutch and Flemish, with, characteristically, portraiture and landscape as the leading genres. The opening of the museum was heralded in the press as the birth of the “royal infant.”22 Henry James stands out among the many reviewers, notably in his comparison of the Quay at 18 When Bryan purchased the painting Segers was unknown. It was de-accessioned by the New-York Historical Society in 1971 under the label ‘School of Ruysdael.’ For a full attributional history of the painting, see Ivan Gaskell, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish Painting (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet Publications, 1990), no. 81, where the author notes that Haverkamp-Begemann, following on the suggestion of Stechow, rst published the painting as Segers’ in 1968. 19 The Beerstraten is one of the few Bryan paintings, which have remained in the permanent collection of the New-York Historical Society. The majority of the 380-odd paintings that Bryan left to the Society were de-accessioned in sales in 1971, 1980 and 1995. 20 The above is excerpted from a letter dated December 13, 1826, as quoted in Anna Wells Rutledge, “Robert Gilmor, Jr. Baltimore Collector,” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 12 (1949): 31. 21 “The Picture Sales in New York—A Retrospective History,” The New York Times, 11 December 1897, 10. 22 New York Evening Mail, 18 February 1872.

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Leyden, then attributed to Jan van der Heyden and a Veduta, attributed to Francesco Guardi.23 James’ impressions reveal the American faith in Dutch conscience and realism: A comparison of his [Guardi’s] cold, colourless, sceptical reections of Venetian splendour with the glowing delity and sincerity of the . . . ‘Quay’ . . . is really a theme for the philosopher . . . The Italian, born amid lovely circumstance, and debauched, as it were, by the very grace of his daily visions, dispenses with effort and insight . . . The Dutchman, familiar with a meaner and duskier range of effect, feels that, unless he is faithful, he is nothing . . . and his little picture, therefore lives and speaks and tells of perfection; while those of Guardi are as torpid and silent as decay.24

With dramatic and poetic ourish, James appropriates the language and imagery of moral debate to describe northern and southern schools of painting within the stereotypes of national character. In this he preceded Fromentin’s inuential Les Maîtres d’autrefois, rst published in 1876 (translated and reprinted in New York the same year and several times thereafter), which codied the integrity of the Dutch school: It has for law, sincerity; and obligation, truth. Its rst condition is to be familiar, natural and characteristic, whence results a whole or moral quality, innocent simplicity, patient will and directness. It might be called the translation of domestic virtues from private life into the practice of art serving equally well for good conduct and good painting.25

The New-York based journalist and critic Charles Cafn popularized the separation and distinction of schools of painting in a series of books, the second of which was entitled The Story of Dutch Painting. Here the equation of national virtue and painting style, familiar from James and Fromentin, is the cornerstone: With morality such as this conspicuously abroad in the community, it would have been strange if her [ Holland’s] artists had not reproduced it in their own special eld; if to directness and sanity of vision they had not brought a scrupulous artistic conscience, that resulted in integrity and thoroughness of craftsmanship.26

23

Neither painting remains in the Museum’s collection. James’ review was rst published anonymously in The Atlantic Monthly ( June 1872). Walter Liedtke has noted key passages from the above quote in his essay “Dutch Paintings in America, The Collectors and their Ideals” in Broos, 18, 33–34. 25 Eugène Fromentin, Old Masters of Belgium and Holland, introduction by Meyer Schapiro (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), 131. 26 Charles Cafn, The Story of Dutch Painting (New York: The Century Co., 1909), 28. The date of publication coincided with the ambitious Hudson-Fulton exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum half of which was devoted to Dutch art. 24

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The Dutch and Flemish choices from the Metropolitan’s 1871 purchase reect the tastes of Bryan and our edgling collectors who favored highly nished and modest cabinet pictures. Within the following decades such works would give way to the vaunted masterpiece. While the moral imperative of redemption through philanthropy remained in tact, the scale of ambitions and acquisitions grew with the potential of unprecedented wealth and the virulent and aggressive zeal brought to collecting by the super collectors of the next generation. Americans would spend on a scale never seen before, building ‘palaces’ and yachts, raising and racing thoroughbreds and cultivating the arts with boundless bank accounts. Joseph Choate, a founding trustee of the Metropolitan issued the call to the up and coming generation of megacollectors, urging them to spin cultural gold from worldly wealth: Think of it, ye millionaires of many markets—what glory must be yours if only you listen to our advice, to convert pork to porcelain, grain and produce into priceless pottery . . . things which perish without the using, and which in the next nancial panic shall surely shrivel like parched scrolls, into the gloried canvas of the world’s masters . . .27

The transition to the masterpiece mindset begins with Henry Gurdon Marquand’s (1819–1902) gift to the Metropolitan Museum in the late 1880’s—50–odd paintings including van Dyck’s James Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, ca. 1634–35, and Vermeer’s, Girl with a Water Pitcher, ca. 1662 (both Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).28 This watershed is also marked by Henry Havemeyer’s acquisition of Rembrandt’s Portrait of Herman Doomer, 1640 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), then known as The Gilder, when the collector paid the unprecedented price of about $80,000 in 1889.29 The transition from little master to masterpiece and amateur to acquisitor is sounded in the press: “[O]ur millionaires are careful now to acquire only undoubted

27 Choate’s speech was made in the mid to late 1870s, a few years after the founding of the Metropolitan Museum, as quoted in Arthur Schultz, In Praise of America’s Collectors, (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1997), 14–15. 28 On Marquand’s collection and his mansion, see Danielle Kisluk-Grosheide, “The Marquand Mansion,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 29 (1994): 151–181. 29 For the complete history of the painting as well as other Rembrandts, which made their way to America from continental collections, see. Esmee Quodbach, “Rembrandt’s ‘Gilder’ is here”: how America got its rst Rembrandt and France lost many of its old masters,” Simiolus, vol. 31 (2004–2005): 90–107. On the signicance of this acquisition as a gauge of quality in American collections of old masters, see Minty, 113–115.

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masterpieces with pedigrees as irreproachable as those of the thoroughbred horses in their stables.”30 With J. P. Morgan (1837–1913), the “American Medici,”31 the dull roar of the American dollar grew to a deafening and threatening din. He kicked off the new century with his record-breaking purchase of Raphael’s Colonna Altarpiece, ca. 1504 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) in 1901 for $400,000,32 following up with lesser extravagances such as Vermeer’s Lady Writing, ca. 1665 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) acquired for $100,000 in 1907.33 Because of the unmatched and highly publicized prices Morgan paid and the enormous volume of his purchases he loomed large in the American imagination (and abroad) as the specter of excess. In the words of John Graver Johnson (1841–1917) of Philadelphia, a zealous collecting successor, but never a nancial rival: “Mr. Morgan still seems to be going on his devouring way. Gluttony even in the arts is a sin . . .”34 It is in the evolution of the Philadelphian Peter A. B. Widener’s (1834–1915) collection, through its inheritance and honing by his son Joseph (1871–1953), that the swelling ambitions of the American amateur of northern painting are perfectly viewed. While the moral authority of the ‘Dutch’ school prevails, the exclusive quest for masterworks crowded out the humbler exemplars like Teniers and Wouwermans admitting only the giants, chiey Rembrandt, Vermeer, and van Dyck, with the added weight of noble provenance. From the plethora of several hundred pictures amassed by Peter, about one third of which were Dutch and Flemish, Joseph culled 101 gems, with 39 northern examples, for the 1942 Widener gift to the National Gallery of Art.35

30

Art Amateur, vol. 20 (1889): 98. An article on the collector in Putnam’s Magazine VII (November 1909) granted him the title. 32 During the summer of 2006, the altarpiece was the subject of a focused exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. For the catalogue, see Linda Wolk-Simon, Raphael at the Metropolitan: The Colonna Altarpiece, (New Haven, New York: Yale University Press, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006). 33 Morgan’s collection was vast, eclectic and truly representative, with no particular emphasis on Dutch and Flemish painting but ne examples from both schools. On his business, personal and collecting activities, see Jean Strouse, Morgan, American Financier (New York: Random House, 1999), which is the source for the prices quoted above. 34 From a letter written to Bernard Berenson, December 29, 1909, Aline B. Saarinen Papers, Archives of American Art. 35 On the Widener collection, see Minty, 172–194, as well as Esmee Quodbach, “ ‘The last of the American Versailles’: The Widener Collection at Lynnewood Hall,” Simiolus, vol. 29 (2002) no. 1/2, 42–96. 31

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While the father clearly developed an eye and taste for important works such as the Saskia, ca. 1634/35 to 1638/40 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) his rst Rembrandt, purchased in 1894, it was Joseph who captured the coveted prizes of Europe’s prestigious collections, such as the Mill, 1645/1648 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)—then deemed the highest expression of Rembrandt’s enigmatic genius and acquired from Lord Lansdowne’s collection in 1911 for $500,000.36 The juxtaposition of Rembrandt’s Saskia, a small, nished work to the larger and looser Mill is emblematic of the evolution of American taste for the painter. While our pioneering collectors preferred the more rened brushwork of the young master, their successors targeted the rougher surfaces and larger handling of his later work, which they deemed ‘impressionistic.’ Widener Senior was determined to remake himself through his collection of old masters and the elaborate trappings of wealth that he cultivated, thereby effacing humble and rough beginnings: he had made his rst fortune during the Civil War selling mutton to the Philadelphia troops, a fact the press would not relinquish. After he and his fellow super collectors had ‘arrived’ critics were quick to castigate the ‘Ugly American,’ consuming everything in his path with the New York Times publishing an account headlined “Meat Packers and Art,” and a description of paintings “dangling . . . before covetous meat-packing eyes,”—certainly a reference to Widener.37 It wasn’t until 1943 when Peter’s son Joseph—raised in the resplendent aura of his father’s millions—was dashingly eulogized in the same paper as “turfman [ horseman], nancier and art collector” that the memory of simple origins was publicly erased.38 In the late 1890s, just as Widener Senior was setting his sights on Rembrandt et al., he built the new family seat at Lynnewood Hall. Designed by Horace Trumbauer, the 110-room house cost a staggering $8,000,000.39 By way of comparison, the grand and enormous Forty-

36

The attribution to Rembrandt was rst questioned by Bredius in 1935. Scholarly opinion remains divided on the authorship of the painting. For a summary of the debate, see Arthur Wheelock, Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth-Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue (Washington/New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 231 ff., where the painting is published as Rembrandt. 37 Anonymous, May 20, 1909, p. 8. 38 October 27, 1943, p. 23. 39 The gure is quoted in The Washington Post, Home Section (5 August 1993): 14. For a description, photographs and plans of the house see, Michael Kathrens, Richard

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Second Street branch of New York Public Library was completed in 1911 for $9,000,000.40 Lynnewood Hall included a ninety-foot gallery to house the growing collection. Soon after its construction Joseph gilded the lily, building a new wing, which included a shrine for Bellini’s Feast of the Gods and a van Dyck room, situated above the swimming pool and squash courts. Here he hung three Van Dycks that they had wrested from the Cattaneo collection, including the imposing Marchesa Elena Grimaldi, 1623, purchased for approximately $500,000, and the smaller portraits of her two children Clelia and Filippo, both 1623 (all National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). The controversial Cattaneo deal of 1907 marked the beginning of the furor for the artist’s portraits in this country.41 Frick would ultimately acquire eight van Dycks including one of the Cattaneo paintings and the shimmering Paola Adorno, 1622–27 (Frick Collection, New York).42 In Europe and England where Widener and Frick’s Cattaneo coup was viewed as the usurpation of old world culture, the press railed against the almighty power of the American dollar, with the rare exception of the Englishman C. J. Holmes. In his defense of the American purchases he conjured the specter of new money trumping old and he conated the identities of the Chicago collector Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837–1905)43 and P. A. B. ‘meatpacker’ Widener, caricaturing the American acquisitor: “Portraits of Italian noblemen and historical personages may, or may not, be out of place in the private residence of a Chicago pork-butcher, but they are at all events properly cared for . . .”44 In spite of Holmes’ endorsement of the American custodianship of Italian cultural property his circumspect verdict on whether Europe’s ancestral portraits belonged in the lustrous new palaces of American collectors

Marchand, and Eleanor Weller, American Splendor: The Residential Architecture of Horace Trumbauer (New York: Acanthus Press, 2002). 40 New York Public Library Website, “History,” http://www.nypl.org/pr/history.cfm. 41 On van Dyck in America, see Walter Liedtke, “Flemish Painting in America: An Historical Sketch,” in Liedtke and Bauman, 21–22. 42 Frick’s Cattaneo purchase was the Marchesa Giovanna Cattaneo (Frick Collection, New York). 43 Yerkes was in banking and transportation, native to Chicago and later a New Yorker. He built a collection of about 150 paintings, with approximately sixty Dutch and Flemish works, including Rembrandt’s Joris de Caulerij (The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) and Hals’ Portrait of a Woman (Frick Collection, New York). 44 “The Cattaneo Van Dycks,” Connoisseur (May–August 1907): 44–45. Holmes was also one of the few trans-Atlantic defenders of J. P. Morgan who was frequently accused of cultural pilfering.

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was precisely what would have irked them most. Further, it was the very attitude they hoped to dispel by emulating the great residences of England and the continent, in creating their own portrait halls. In a widely read guide to the nascent and growing private collections in America also published in 1907, the English critic Sir Martin Conway called everyone’s bluff, trumping all, when he suggested that even van Dyck’s sitters were ‘nouveau’ in their own day: “English courtiers of his [van Dyck’s] day were few generations removed from mere rustic swashbucklers, yet we know how he made them appear, and by so doing, to some extent taught them how to look.”45 While Gilded Era collectors could never have been transformed by van Dyck, as he had his own sitters, the elegant radiance of his likenesses certainly cast a attering and aggrandizing light on them. During the 1880s, as the new world was discovering van Dyck and as Marquand was acquiring the James Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, ca. 1634–35 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) one of his rst major portraits to come to America, the Rutgers clergyman and a pioneering American art historian, John C. van Dyke presciently captured the appeal that his namesake’s monumental likenesses would hold for his countrymen: “The portraits have an air of sublimated elegance that made nobility more noble than reality . . . The posing was Olympian, the garmenting magnicent, the color splendid, not to say blazing.”46 In acquiring such fantastic icons of aristocratic authority mightn’t Widener, Frick et al. have ennobled themselves by association, or at least hoped to do so? Quite possibly. In fact the Wideners chose to hang John Singer Sargent’s 1902 portrait of the ‘meat-packer’ Peter in the van Dyck room at Lynnewood Hall, above the mantle, surrounded by the Genoese nobility of the seventeenth-century.47

45 Sir Martin Conway in John La Farge and August Jaccaci, Noteworthy Paintings in American Private Collections (New York: A. F. Jaccaci Co., 1907), vol. I, 487. 46 The description registers van Dyke’s rst impression of the Brignole Palace, as quoted in Peter Wild, ed., The Autobiography of John C. van Dyke (Salt Lake: University of Utah Press, 1993) 52. 47 The Sargent portrait of P. A. B. Widener and all of the van Dycks, which hung in the room, are now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The source for the hanging of the room is E. Standen, “Essay about the Widener Collection,” notes dated 1966, Archives, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Standen papers, Rare MSS 7, Box 4, p. 7. While Edith Standen bore the title “secretary,” in effect she was the curator of the Widener collection for many years. Her knowledge and her records were extensive.

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Further, when Peter died, he was enshrined on a bier beneath Sargent’s portrait amidst the Cattaneos, echoing the mocking albeit trenchant words of an American satirist describing a collector who “began life as a cab driver [substitute meat packer] . . . developed social aspirations” . . . and whose “portraits, once hung, [became] those of his own ancestors.”48 The mania for northern portraits was most fully expressed in the pursuit of Rembrandt, as shown at the Metropolitan Museum’s Hudson-Fulton exhibition of 1909 where close to forty ‘Rembrandts’ hung, virtually all portraits, the most celebrated being the Ilchester Self-Portrait, 1658 (Frick Collection, New York) which Frick purchased in 1906 for the princely sum of $225,000.49 In a letter to Frick, exhorting him to make the purchase, Charles Carstairs of Knoedler’s equated the supremacy of the work with the collector himself: “If you could only see the picture over your mantle dominating the entire gallery just as you dominate those you come into contact with.”50 While Frick is reputed to have preferred Rembrandt over all other painters and to have wished he had been born with his genius,51 one easily grasps how the Ilchester SelfPortrait, the image of gravitas itself, would have enthralled the collector. Bode’s entry on the painting for a catalogue of 1908 targets the very qualities that Frick personally cultivated or that he might have valued in a business partner: The attitude and expression . . . are so imposing, so full of distinction and calm, that we might rather suppose the work to represent some commercial magnate of Amsterdam, such as the President of the East India Co., than one of the poorest artists of the city.52

The stature and prestige of Rembrandt, especially as represented in his mature self-portraits captivated all of Frick’s cohorts, as exemplied by Widener’s Rothschild Self-Portrait, 1650 (National Gallery of Art,

48

Anonymous, New York Times, 14 October 1899, Saturday Supplement, 704. On the Hudson-Fulton exhibition see Dennis Weller, “Old Masters in the New World: The Hudson-Fulton Exhibition of 1909 and its Legacy,” in the present anthology. That chapter includes an appendix, which features a full catalogue of the exhibition stating the current whereabouts of the paintings. 50 The letter, dated November 23, 1906 is at the Frick Art Reference Library, Record Group: H. C. Frick, Series: art work 1904–c. 1920. 51 According to Frick’s daughter Helen, as reported in Sir Osbert Sitwell’s introduction to The Frick Collection: An Illustrated Catalogue of the Works of Art in the Collection of Henry Clay Frick. Volume I. Paintings (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1949). 52 Catalogue of the Henry C. Frick Collection (New York: [s.n.] 1908). 49

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Washington, D.C., now attributed to workshop), Altman’s specimen from the Ashburton collection, 1660 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and Mellon’s Buccleuch painting, 1659 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). As with van Dyck’s majestic sitters, only now with a focus on the penetrating and mysterious persona of Rembrandt can we not ask whether, by association at least, the collector might not have wished to accrue the eminence of such likenesses? In a contemporary article on American taste in paintings, a critic declared “[t]he popular personication of painting is Rembrandt.”53 Apart from the Wideners who acquired fourteen ‘Rembrandts,’ his most adamant American champion was Benjamin Altman, with a total of thirteen putative works by the master. When Altman had amassed his dozen, the Philadelphia collector John Graver Johnson with characteristic and caustic bite and, no doubt a little envy, commented: “How pleased the old man [ Rembrandt] would be if he could come back to earth and see how he is adored . . . by the wealthy trader.”54 The majority of Altman’s Rembrandts t the soulful genius prole that Americans coveted as in the Man with the Magnifying Glass and its companion Woman with a Pink, ca. 1662 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), acquired from the celebrated collection of Maurice Kann in 1909.55 In 1913, Altman made the surprising and nal acquisition of Rembrandt’s, Toilet of Bathsheba, 1643 (Fig. 1) from the Steengracht collection. In the same year, through Altman’s bequest of his collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art it became the rst autograph Rembrandt nude to enter an American museum collection.56 Ironically, Altman’s

53

D. Lloyd, “Changing Tastes in Picture Collecting,” International Studio (March 1926): 54. For a discussion on the Rembrandt phenomenon in America, see Minty, 146–152, as well as the upcoming dissertation by Esmee Quodbach, Rembrandt in America: The Politics of Taste in Old Master Collecting from 1880 to the Present (Utrecht University). See also the exhibition catalogue by Stephanie Dickey, Carolyn Logan, Nadine Orenstein, Walter Liedtke and Hubert von Sonnenburg, Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1995). For a comprehensive look at the historiography of Rembrandt for the years 1870–1935, see Catherine Scallen, Rembrandt, Reputation and the Practice of Connoisseurship (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004). 54 Excerpted from a letter to Bernard Berenson, August 21, 19[10?], Aline Saarinen Papers, Archives of American Art. 55 Altman also purchased ‘Rembrandt’s’ Auctioneer from the M. Kann collection, a painting that has lost its autograph status. 56 To this day, with the possible exception of The Finding of Moses, mentioned above, it remains the only autograph Rembrandt nude (painting) in an American public collection.

Fig. 1

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, The Toilet of Bathsheba, 1643, oil on wood, 22 ½ u 30 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913, 14.40.651.

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nemesis and detractor Johnson was the only other American who possessed such a work, The Finding of Moses (Fig. 2) that was a very credible Rembrandt when it came to America in 1906, and was exhibited as such at the Hudson-Fulton exhibition of 1909.57 The Bathsheba and the Finding of Moses were among a mere smattering of nudes among the hundreds of Dutch and Flemish paintings acquired by our super collectors: an examination of their inventories would suggest that the nude did not exist in ‘Dutch’ art. In the Annual Report of the Metropolitan Museum, celebrating the Altman gift, the word nude does not even appear in reference to the Bathsheba, rather the painting is carefully described as being “of a type which is as yet rare in America.”58 This oversight in American collections echoes a moral and aesthetic repugnance as expressed in the words of Shearjashub Spooner, a New York dentist who published several artists’ dictionaries beginning around 1855: “[ H ]is [ Rembrandt’s] gures entirely destitute of proportion . . . excit[e] disgust in every beholder of taste.”59 While Spooner’s publications are idiosyncratic and unsystematic at best, his protestations about Rembrandt’s gures mirror American mid nineteenth-century taste. Even the relatively sophisticated New York print dealer Frederick Keppel decried Rembrandt’s attempts at anatomy declaring that he “despised grace and beauty of form . . . His gures are uncouth and clumsy.”60 Both detractors follow a long tradition of European criticism, which dates back to the late seventeenth century. A similar queasiness accounts for the ambivalence American collectors showed for Rubens.61 While the combined inventories of the Wideners, Johnson, Altman, Frick and Mellon yield nearly sixty Rembrandts and thirty van Dycks, a mere twenty Rubens may be counted, many spurious. With the exception of some oil sketches, mostly from the Johnson collection, virtually every one is a portrait. Rubens’ narrative pictures featuring an abundance of esh are conspicuously absent. 57 The Rembrandt attribution, which held until 1969, is still under consideration. See, for example, the entry on the painting in the catalogue by Albert Blankert et al. Rembrandt: A Genius and his Impact (Zwolle: Wanders Publishers, 1992), no. 29, where the work is labeled “Rembrandt?” 58 Annual Report of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1913): 20. 59 A Biographical History of the Fine Arts: or, Memoirs of the lives and works of eminent painters, engravers, sculptors, and architects (New York: J. W. Bouton 1865). 60 Frederick Keppel, The Golden Age of Engraving: A Specialist’s Story about Fine Prints (New York: Baker & Taylor Company, 1910) 288. 61 On the latent taste for Rubens in America, see Walter Liedtke, “Flemish Painting in America: An Historical Sketch,” in Bauman and Liedtke, 22–28.

Fig. 2

Workshop of Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, The Finding of Moses, seventeenth-century, oil on canvas, 19 1/8 u 23 11/16 in., Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917.

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Henry James reected a distaste for the voluptuous and unnatural bent of Rubens’ brush in a description from Florence’s Pitti Palace where he viewed the epic Consequences of War, 1629 (Palazzo Pitti, Florence), among other masterworks: Was Rubens lawfully married to Nature, or did he merely keep up the most unregulated of irtations? Three or four of his great carnal cataracts adorn the walls of the Pitti . . . He is a strangely irresponsible jumble of the true and the false. He paints a full esh surface that radiates and palpitates with illusion and into the midst of it he thrusts a mouth, a nose, an eye.62

Even the unconventional Johnson took exception to Rubens in Berlin where he criticized pictures such as the St. Sebastian, ca. 1618, and the Andromeda, ca. 1638 (both Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin): Rubens shows his men of muscle Titanic and his huge women, with red cheeks and translucent esh. . . . We must see his noble “Descent from the Cross” at Antwerp before we bow the knee in worship of Rubens.63

While, Frick, Widener and even Mellon indulged a taste for the nude in selected and enticing choices from the French and Italian schools—as, for example, Boucher’s Summer, 1755 (Frick Collection, New York) and Titian’s Venus and Adonis, ca. 1560 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., formerly Widener Collection)—such carnal pleasures were neither expected nor were they accepted from the ‘Dutch.’ From the overwrought response to Rubens, we turn nally with relief to the beatic reception of Vermeer, where the notion of a ‘Dutch’ morality of technique prevails. In 1909 the American critic Charles Cafn published a paean to Vermeer’s Girl with a Water Jug, ca. 1662 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) describing the “extraordinary propriety with which every detail of the composition [was] introduced,” the placement of objects “with the choicest discretion,” and the “integrity of a scrupulously exacting conscience.”64 The terminology—propriety, discretion, integrity—is betting of a description

62 Henry James, “Florentine Notes,” rst published in The Independent (21 May 1874), and reprinted in John Sweeney, ed., The Painters Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts by Henry James (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 20. 63 John Graver Johnson, A Sightseer in Berlin and Holland Among Pictures (Philadelphia, 1892), rst published in The Philadelphia Press, 18. 64 Cafn, 140.

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of moral character and interchangeable with the American conception of ‘Dutch’ virtue. The ascription of technical scrupulousness to a higher morality saw its full expression in the equation of artistic conscience and religious faith. An anonymous reviewer of the inaugural exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum praised the Dutch school for its “honest and conscientious thoroughness” surmising that “with faith in religion came faith in art.”65 On a similar note, John C. van Dyke, Rutgers professor and cleric, pushed a God-is-in-the-details view to its logical and winsome extreme in praise of Dutch livestock painters: “[ T ]hey paint the hair on a cow’s back with the same reverence that Fra Angelico painted the owers of paradise.”66 The quest for Vermeer’s immaculate vision resulted in a run on his paintings—Frick led with three, the crowning acquisition of his collection being the Mistress and Maid, ca. 1667 (Frick Collection, New York), purchased in 1919 for about $260,000. American collectors admitted one ‘bad boy’ to the proper pantheon of northern artists, namely Frans Hals whose street worthy sobriquet ‘Frank’ in the American press corroborates his rough and ready image in contrast to the raried Vermeer. Hals’ alleged Malle Babbe (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), actually a copy of the autograph version in Munich, was exhibited at the 1872 inaugural exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum and hailed as a masterwork, eliciting a response from Henry James, which casts the painter as the enfant terrible of Dutch art. She is described as “a broadly grinning street-wench dashed upon the canvas . . . instinct with energy and a certain gross truth . . . [a] miracle of ugliness.”67 Hals’ dash and bravado were perhaps what appealed to Altman when he added the raucous Merrymakers at Shrovetide, ca. 1615 and his Yonker Ramp, 1623 (both Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) to an otherwise sober collection. Of course, it was not the wilder side of Hals, rather the distinguished portraitist represented by formidable likenesses such the Mevrouw Bodolphe, 1643 (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven) once owned by J. P. Morgan, who dominated the homes of Gilded era collectors. Though Hals never reached the stature of

65

New York Daily Tribune, 29 February 1872, 5. Old Dutch and Flemish Masters (New York: Century Co., 1895) 39. 67 “The Metropolitan Museum’s ‘1871 Purchase,’ ” Atlantic Monthly ( June 1872) reprinted in Sweeney, ed., 52. 66

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Fig. 3 Sir Thomas Lawrence, Julia, Lady Peel, 1827, oil on canvas, 35 ¾ u 27 7/8 in., Henry Clay Frick Bequest 1904.1.83, Copyright The Frick Collection, New York.

Fig. 4 Anthony van Dyck, Margareta Snyders, c. 1620, oil on canvas, 51 ½ u 39 1/8 in., Henry Clay Frick Bequest 1909.1.42, Copyright The Frick Collection, New York.

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Rembrandt in America, he was not far behind. To Rembrandt’s fortyodd putative works at the Hudson-Fulton exhibition, Hals compared with twenty and in Valentiner’s respective compilations of each artist’s paintings in this country, Rembrandt led with 175 and Hals totaled 100, optimistic attributions notwithstanding.68 When Morgan and his successors died their old masters bespoke their cultivated tastes, sophisticated connoisseurship and extreme wealth, however it was their ‘Dutch’ pictures, not the French, Italian, Spanish or even English paintings that would save their souls. Consider, for example, the unorthodox juxtapositions of the Wideners’ Murillo, Women at a Window, ca. 1655–60, with their Saskia, ca. 1634/35 to 1638/40, by Rembrandt. Likewise Mellon’s Titian, Venus with a Mirror, ca. 1555, with his Lucretia, 1664, by Rembrandt (all National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), or nally Frick’s Lady Peel, 1827, by Lawrence with his Margareta Snyders, ca. 1620, by van Dyck (Figs. 3 and 4). After Frick’s demise the media pitched his unprecedented gift of house and collection to New York as a miracle of alchemy, obliterating the glaring sins of his business life: “The coal and coke of Pennsylvania is converted into beautiful canvases, contact with which will enlarge the souls of coming generations . . . so wealth from the people will nd its way back to the people . . .”69 Surely his northern pictures, such as his distinguished Margareta Snyders, invested with righteousness, effected this conversion.

68 Rudolph Valentiner, Rembrandt Paintings in America (New York: S. W. Frankel, 1931) and his Frans Hals Paintings in America (Westport: F. F. Sherman, 1936). On the taste for Hals in this country, see Frances Jowell, “The Rediscovery of Frans Hals,” in Seymour Slive et al., Frans Hals (Munich: Prestel, 1989) as well as Christopher Atkins, “The Master’s Touch: Frans Hals’s Rough Manner” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 2006). 69 “The Frick Monument,” New York Tribune, 4 December 1919, 10.

CHAPTER NINE

OLD MASTERS IN THE NEW WORLD: THE HUDSON-FULTON EXHIBITION OF 1909 AND ITS LEGACY Dennis P. Weller

As the essays in this volume make clear, Nederlanders have profoundly inuenced the American experience over the last four centuries. In addition to the contributions made by Dutch people, this phenomenon owes a great deal to the many Dutch products that for generations have arrived on the shores of North America. Among them, one could make a strong argument that old master paintings represent the greatest Dutch import. Today, outstanding collections of Dutch paintings dot the landscape, both in public institutions and in private hands.1 A mainstay in American museums for more than a century, exhibitions of these masterpieces can be counted upon to attract large and enthusiastic crowds. Anyone skeptical of such claims needs only to have waited in sub-zero temperatures outside Washington’s National Gallery of Art to gain entry to the Vermeer show in early 1996.2 The year 2009 will mark the centenary of the rst great Dutch ‘Golden Age’ painting exhibition in America, The Hudson-Fulton Celebration: Loan Exhibition of Paintings by Old Dutch Masters, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.3 “Commemorative of the tercentenary of the discovery of the Hudson River by Henry Hudson” and “the centenary of the rst use of steam in the navigation of said river by Robert Fulton,” the Celebration encompassed a series of events and exhibitions throughout

1

For an overview of the Dutch paintings found in American museums, see; Peter C. Sutton, A Guide to Dutch Art in America (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publ. Co. and Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1986). 2 In many ways, the Johannes Vermeer exhibition shown in Washington from 12 November 1995 to 11 February 1996 represented a ‘perfect storm’ of events that added to its popularity. Fueling the demand for tickets was a government shutdown that temporarily closed the National Gallery of Art until a private donor came forward to keep the doors open, a crippling snowstorm, and plunging temperatures. 3 The show ran from 20 September and closed on 30 November.

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New York City.4 In addition to the Dutch painting show, the Metropolitan Museum also hosted the exhibition American Paintings, Furniture, Silver, and Other Objects of Art. In spite of many questionable attributions, the loan exhibition of Dutch paintings remains one of the greatest assemblages of Dutch masterpieces ever shown in America. Attendance was reported as 288,103, and the exhibition drew viewers from throughout the northeast and beyond. As the New York Times noted, “It would be difcult to conceive an experience more stimulating to lovers of art than that which is offered by the Metropolitan Museum to the Hudson Fulton Celebration.”5 In addition to the positive response from American writers, even foreign reviewers could not help but marvel at the recent accumulation of Dutch pictures by some of this country’s wealthiest collectors.6 More importantly, the show had an impact on the reception and understanding of Dutch old master paintings in America for nearly a half century. Its curator, William Valentiner (Fig. 1), played a pivotal role in this regard. His vast knowledge of old master paintings, ties to the museum world, and associations with important dealers and collectors, became legendary. Over the decades, Valentiner helped to inuence the ow of Dutch pictures entering America, using as his bully pulpit successive directorships at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and at the time of his death in 1958, the North Carolina Museum of Art.7 In reviewing his contributions, one discovers that he clearly reafrmed the pecking order of the artists he had studied in Germany and Holland at the turn

4

The quotes come from the ofcial description given to the celebration in 1909. For a listing of all the events that took place, see The Hudson-Fulton Celebration (New York: Hudson-Fulton Celebration Commission, 1909) pp. a–e. 5 “Some Famous Dutch Paintings Now on Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” New York Times, 19 September 1909, section seven, p. 3. 6 Among the foreign reviewers were Max J. Friedländer, E. Waldmann, J. Breck, and Kenyon Cox. Full citations of their reviews appear in Catherine B. Scallen, Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 360–61, endnotes 54, 56, 59 and 60. It should also be noted that for many visitors, the collectors themselves were part of the appeal of the exhibition. 7 Valentiner’s tenure in New York was comparatively short, between 1908 and the outbreak of World War I. In 1924 he assumed the directorship of the Detroit Institute of Arts, where he would remain until 1945. The next year he became the director at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Retiring from this institution in 1953, he briey directed the J. Paul Getty Museum in Santa Monica between 1954 and 1955. Finally, he served as the director of the newly founded North Carolina Museum of Art from 1955 to 1958.

Fig. 1 William (Wilhelm) Valentiner (far left) with museum visitors, circa 1956. Photo courtesy of North Carolina Division of Archives and History and The News and Observer, Raleigh, NC.

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of the century, led by Rembrandt.8 In doing so, Valentiner, perhaps unknowingly, created certain expectations among museum directors, curators, and collectors that remained valid in some circles for more than a half century. Before examining the Hudson-Fulton exhibition and its legacy, it is important to rst consider the history of Dutch paintings in America leading up to this event.9 For many of the same reasons we admire these paintings today—their simple, unpretentious subject matter, overall high quality, and perceived ability to voice concerns and aspirations common to both the Dutch Republic and the one that had taken root in America—edgling collectors along the eastern seaboard were already drawn to Dutch “Golden Age” pictures before the middle of the nineteenth century. Acting alone or with the help of acknowledged art experts, these early collectors were among a growing group of Americans with the inclination and income to acquire luxury items such as paintings. Admittedly, the results of their efforts were mixed at best, as generous attributions and likely condition problems plagued their selections. As Walter Liedtke notes, only a “very few good Dutch paintings crossed the Atlantic before the end of the Civil War (1865).”10 Among those art lovers who accumulated pictures, a few stand out. They include the Boston businessmen Richard Codman and his nephew Charles Russell Codman (d. 1852), Robert Gilmor (1774–1848), a shipper from Baltimore, and especially New Yorker Thomas Jefferson Bryan (d. 1870). The Codmans claimed to possess pictures by a number of better-known Dutch painters, among them Nicolaes Berchem, Jan Both, Aelbert Cuyp, Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Willem van Mieris, Aert van der Neer, Adriaen van Ostade, Cornelis Poelenburch, Jacob van Ruisdael, Godfried Schalcken, Willem van de Velde, and Philips Wouwerman. Gilmor collected on an even larger scale, with approximately 150 Dutch and Flemish paintings coming into his possession.

8 See Nancy Minty’s chapter in this volume, “Great Expectations: The Golden Age Redeems the Gilded Era,” where she addresses the canon of Dutch painters in the decades prior to the Hudson-Fulton exhibition. 9 Important sources for this material include an informative essay by Walter Liedtke, “Dutch Paintings in America, The Collectors and Their Ideals,” in Great Dutch Paintings from America (The Hague and San Francisco: Mauritshuis Museum and The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1990), 14–59; and Nancy Minty, “Dutch and Flemish Seventeenth-Century Art in America, 1800–1940: Collections, Connoisseurship and Perceptions” (PhD diss., New York University, 2003). 10 Liedtke, 16.

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Today, the whereabouts of most of these paintings remains a mystery, although one of Gilmor’s best acquisitions was Hendrick van Vliet’s Interior of the Old Church in Delft (Fig. 2) now in Baltimore. By contrast, the collection formed by Bryan remained together for more than a century. Following his death in 1870, his Dutch paintings came to the New-York Historical Society. This collection, along with a group of old master paintings given by Louis Durr in 1882, were eventually deaccessioned in a series of auctions in 1971, 1980, and 1995.11 Their recent dispersal casts light on these collections, and for our purposes, illuminates the character of Dutch paintings collected in America in the era prior to the “Gilded Age.” Many of the artists identied in the auction catalogues remain virtually unknown, even to specialists. They include such “masters” as Barent Cornelisz, Andries van Eertvelt, Nicolaes van Gelder, Jacob van Spreeuwen, and Joost van Geel, as well as countless questionable attributions to better-known painters. Only the Posthumous Portrait of Moses Terborch (Fig. 3) stands out from the rest of the Dutch material. Although the pictures Bryan accumulated are generally considered minor by today’s standards, his gift to the New-York Historical Society was not without long-lasting consequences. By donating his paintings to a public institution, Bryan set an important precedent among those collectors of Dutch paintings who followed.12 Compare, for example, the owners of paintings loaned to the Hudson-Fulton exhibition (see appendix) with the present owners of those same paintings. Clearly, many of the “Gilded Age” collectors were motivated by large egos. Their generosity to this country’s museums was extraordinary, and with few exceptions, largely unmatched in the decades since.13 The bulk of the Dutch pictures brought to America by Bryan and his contemporaries would have created little excitement among the wealthy captains of industry who followed them in this pursuit after the Civil War. The rules of the game now changed, as the rich and powerful, including Henry Clay Frick, J. Pierpont Morgan, Peter Widener, Charles

11 The nal auction took place at Sotheby’s, New York on 12 January 1995. A series of short essays in the auction catalogue provides a good overview of this material. 12 Scott Schaefer’s essay in the above mentioned auction catalogue, “Private Collecting and the Public Good,” (unpaginated) addresses this topic. 13 Among the exceptions are gifts given by the Mellon Family and Foundation to the National Gallery of Art, the Kress Foundation to museums across America, and institutions named for the collectors who founded them, e.g. the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Norton Simon Museum.

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Fig. 2 Hendrick van Vliet, Interior of the Old Church in Delft, 1656, oil on canvas, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Bequest of Ellen Howard Bayard (BMA 1939.185).

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Fig. 3 Gerard Terborch and Gesina Terborch, Posthumous Portrait of Moses Terborch, circa 1668, oil on canvas, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-4908).

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T. Yerkes, and likeminded collectors, competed for the best objects they, or their agents, could locate and purchase. The ability or even the desire to quietly contemplate their selections based on years of experience and a deep knowledge of the art was no longer a prerequisite for the hunt. For most of these masterpiece collectors, art expertise, like paintings, was something easily bought. Collectors interested in Dutch painting were fortunate, as important trophies were waiting to be acquired due to a reversal of fortunes by many Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unable or uninterested in competing with the American dollar for these masterpieces, Europeans sadly watched their Dutch treasures steaming for America.14 Unquestionably, the rst and greatest reection of the collecting prowess of the rich and powerful was the assemblage of the important Dutch paintings exhibited in 1909 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its scope can be gleaned from the introduction to its catalogue written by Valentiner. So representative a collection of Holland’s achievements in the art of painting during the Seventeenth Century as the present exhibition affords is proof of the fortunate acquisitions made in this direction by American collectors in recent years. Some little astonishment will no doubt be felt in European art circles that it was possible to assemble in New York one hundred and forty-nine paintings of rst importance, among them thirty-four Rembrandts, twenty Frans Hals, and ve Vermeers. Even so the supply of Dutch masters in private collections is far from exhausted. Two large private collections have made no contribution to the exhibition, and from others only a part of their wealth of examples could be chosen. Only about half, therefore, of the seventy Rembrandts now in America are exhibited, with perhaps two thirds of the works by Frans Hals, Hobbema and Cuyp. Of the seven Vermeers in this country, however, we have been so fortunate as to secure six, and the work of Pieter de Hooch is with two exceptions almost completely illustrated, so far as his best period is concerned.15

A photograph of one of the galleries in the exhibition (Fig. 4) seems strangely familiar in spite of being nearly a century old. It documents

14 This topic was explored by Edwin Buijsen, “The Battle against the Dollar, The Dutch Reaction to American Collecting in the Period from 1900 to 1914,” in Great Dutch Paintings from America, 60–78. 15 William Valentiner, Catalogue of A Collection of Paintings by Dutch Masters of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1909), ix.

Fig. 4 View of Galleries in the Loan Exhibition of Paintings by Old Dutch Masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1909, image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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the manner in which works were displayed at the time and one can easily identify a number of the individual paintings. Among the pictures shown are two examples on the left wall by Frans Hals, Portraits of a Seventy-Three-Year-Old Man and His Seventy-Two-Year-Old Wife (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven), both owned by J. Pierpont Morgan in 1909; Rembrandt’s Portrait of Saskia (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC) from the collection of Peter Widener, to the right of the doorway on the bottom; View of Rhenen by Jan van Goyen (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC) on the right, and part of the William Clark Collection; and Dirck Hals’ Children Playing Cards (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown), also owned by J. Pierpont Morgan in 1909 and shown opposite the Rembrandt to the left of the doorway. Many of the paintings shown in the Hudson-Fulton exhibition, including those cited above, now serve as cornerstones for the Dutch collections in a number of America’s greatest museums. In addition to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery, other museums include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Toledo Art Museum. It needs to be emphasized, however, that in 1909 the vast majority of the exhibited pictures were still in the hands of wealthy collectors. One indication of the grandeur and scope of these private collections can still be seen at The Frick Collection in New York. Before looking at the exhibition in more detail, a word is in order about the mechanisms and motivations of the collectors whose treasures guaranteed the success of the show, and the curator who organized it. Shortly after Bryan and Durr made their gifts to the New-York Historical Society, the market for Dutch art in America dramatically shifted. Grand collectors “who were inclined (and encouraged by dealers) to concentrate on the big names, included among them Hobbema, Ruisdael, Wouwermans, Cuyp, and Vermeer as well as Hals and Rembrandt,” began to dominate the art market on both sides of the Atlantic.16 The relationship between dealers and collectors was paramount, and unfortunately, often abused.17 16

Liedtke, 16–17. Among the handful of dealers who catered to the demands of their powerful clients, but who were not immune from misleading them, was Joseph Duveen. While his story is fascinating, his motivations were often questionable. For information on life 17

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In addition, one needs to account for a small number of curators and museum professionals who exerted some degree of inuence. At the center of this activity in America was the young scholar William Valentiner, whose exceedingly liberal attributions to Hals and Rembrandt have long been criticized. The question needs to be asked whether or not the pictures selected for the New York exhibition were really consistent with, or to use Valentiner’s word, “representative,” of commonly held views about the nature of Dutch art expressed in other exhibitions, collections, and scholarship at the time?18 Or, were his choices merely a reection of his research interests and the dictates of powerful collectors and dealers? The Hudson-Fulton exhibition and its catalogue may provide clues to answering many of these questions. In fact, there were three catalogues for the exhibition. One served as a general catalogue with a listing of the works shown in both the American art and Dutch painting exhibitions. Another was an illustrated guide to the Dutch paintings, including an essay by Valentiner, and the third represented a large, deluxe folio produced in small numbers.19 By emphasizing landscape painters, a small group of genre artists, and a disproportionately large number of thirty-six so-called Rembrandts and twenty-one works attributed to Frans Hals, Valentiner, by his own admission, paid little attention to signicant contributions made by many other Dutch Golden Age painters. Notably absent, for example, were architectural subjects, the then virtually unknown Caravaggisti, the jnschilders, the Italianates, and the Dutch mannerists. In all, the exhibition contained one hundred fty-ve Dutch paintings, the slightly higher number reecting the late additions to the show provided by New York businessman Benjamin Altman. Altman’s pictures only served to reinforce the highly selective nature of the exhibition, as he lent one Frans Hals, three Rembrandts, a Vermeer (Fig. 5), and a Jacob van Ruisdael. Of the one hundred fty-ve pictures in the show, thirty-two Dutch “Golden Age” painters were represented. Works were labeled as by as an art dealer, see: S. N. Behrman, Duveen (New York: Random House, 1952, rev. ed. 1972); Meryle Secrest, Duveen: A Life in Art (New York: Knopf, 2004); and Colin Simpson, The Artful Partners: Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen (New York: MacMillan, 1986). 18 Representative was the word used by Valentiner in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue. 19 I know of no other exhibition where three separate catalogues were produced, other than foreign language translations.

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Fig. 5 Johannes Vermeer, Girl Asleep at a Table (A Maid Asleep), 1656–57, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Benjamin Altman 1913 (14.40.611), image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Nicolaes Berchem, Abraham van Beyeren, Ferdinand Bol, Jan van de Capelle, Aelbert Cuyp, Jan van Goyen, Dirck Hals, Frans Hals, Bartholomeus van der Helst, Jan van der Heyden, Meindert Hobbema, Pieter de Hooch, William Kalf, Philips Koninck, Judith Leyster, Nicolaes Maes, Gabriel Metsu, Aert van der Neer, Adriaen van Ostade, Isack van Ostade, Paulus Potter, Rembrandt, Jacob van Ruisdael, Solomon van Ruysdael, Jan Steen, Gerard Terborch, Adriaen van de Velde, Willem van de Velde, Johannes Vermeer, Jan Cornelisz. Versponck, Simon de Vlieger, and Philips Wouwerman. More enlightening, however, were the numbers of the works selected for each of the individual artists. Ignoring the issue of attribution, it is interesting that nearly two-thirds of the artists in the show were represented by just one or two pictures. By contrast, there were, as noted, dozens of paintings by Rembrandt and Hals. The middle ground was held by the landscape painters Cuyp, Hobbema, and Ruisdael, and the genre painters De Hooch, Steen, and Vermeer. All but eighteen works came from private collections, with sixteen of the public collection examples from the Metropolitan Museum where Valentiner was then employed as curator of decorative arts.20 The Met provided two Rembrandts, three by Frans Hals, and a Vermeer, as well as one picture each by Van Goyen, Van der Helst, Metsu, Aert van der Neer, Adriaen van Ostade, Jacob van Ruisdael, Steen, and De Vlieger, and two attributed to Solomon van Ruysdael. Collectively, these works did little to expand Valentiner’s narrow focus within the exhibition. Viewed against the entire inventory of the Metropolitan Museum’s early holdings of Dutch pictures, it becomes clear that Valentiner clearly favored certain artists and subjects over others. In addition to those sixteen paintings cited, another three dozen works were available to him. He chose not to include, for example, pictures by Pieter Molijn, Dirck Santwoort, Hendrick Sorgh, Quiringh van Brekelenkam, Cornelis van Poelenburgh, Adriaen van Werff, Rachael Ruysch, and Jan Weenix. While these names do not carry the same impact as Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, or Ruisdael, they nevertheless should be seen as part of a more

20 The other two pictures coming from public collections were A Portrait of a Girl (Hendrickje Stoffel?) by Rembrandt from the Chicago Art Institute; and Portrait of a Man, also by Rembrandt, from the New York Historical Society. Both pictures have since been removed from Rembrandt’s oeuvre. The Chicago painting, given to the museum by Martin A. Ryerson, remains a treasure of the museum. Most scholars now see it as a work by Rembrandt pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten.

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representative snapshot of Dutch seventeenth-century painting, and of early collecting of this art in the United States before 1909.21 Did Valentiner’s selections represent the most diverse and highest quality of examples available to him, or did museum ofcials, board members, collectors, or even dealers exert undue inuence on him as he made his choices? By Valentiner’s own count, he considered there to be approximately 350 or so “good” Dutch pictures in America in 1909.22 Unfortunately, we can only speculate on how he judged good from bad.23 Were decisions based solely on the name attached to a particular work, or were aesthetic or condition issues carefully considered as they would be today? If, in fact, faulty connoisseurship served as his barometer, then the unevenness of his attributions is noteworthy, particularly as applied to examples by Rembrandt and Hals.24 Wilhelm (William) Valentiner was born in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1880. After rst studying in Leipzig, he did his graduate work at the University of Heidelberg. There he received an art history doctorate in 1904 writing a dissertation on Rembrandt.25 By then his abilities as a writer and art historian had brought him to the attention of Rembrandt scholars Cornelis Hofstede de Groot in The Hague, and later Wilhelm von Bode, director of Berlin’s Kaiser Friedrich Museum. Becoming the personal assistant of Bode in 1906, he learned much about museum

21 For illustrations of these early acquisitions, see Katharine Baetjer, European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by artists born before 1865, A Summary Catalogue (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995). 22 Cited in Scallen, 196, and ftnt 52, p. 360. Her source was a review of the HudsonFulton exhibition written by Valentiner for a German publication. 23 It is not surprising that Valentiner modeled his connoisseurship after that practiced by his mentors Wilhelm Bode and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot. Scallen provides an excellent overview of this issue. With regard to his selections for the 1909 Dutch exhibition, Scallen analyzed a review of the show by Max J. Friedländer. “Friedländer also noted that Valentiner’s choices for the exhibition revealed the dominance of Bode and Hofstede de Groot’s connoisseurship in America, as well as Valentiner’s role as a student of these two established scholars,” Scallen, 197. 24 The topic of Valentiner’s questionable attributions is discussed in more detail below. His most egregious mistakes, however, can be found in the monographs he prepared for the publisher Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, on Rembrandt (Rembrandt. Des Meisters Gemälde, Klassiker der Kunst XI, Stuttgart and Berlin, 1909), Frans Hals (Hals. Des Meisters Gemälde, Klassiker der Kunst XXVIII, Stuttgart, Berlin, and Leipzig, 1923), Pieter de Hooch (Pieter de Hooch. Des Meisters Gemälde . . ., Klassiker der Kunst XXXV, Stuttgart, Berlin, and Leipzig, 1929), and Nicolaes Maes (Nicolaes Maes, Stuttgart, Berlin and Leipzig, 1924). 25 His thesis was entitled Rembrandt und seine Umgebung (Rembrandt and his Environment). According to Valentiner, this topic allowed him to work from reproductions (Scallen, 194). Regrettably, this practice did not always serve him well as his career progressed.

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administration and curatorial affairs. The experience served him well during his long career in America. In 1908, J. P. Morgan, in his role as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, asked the Berlin director to recommend a young scholar to assume the position as curator of decorative arts at the New York museum. Without hesitation, Bode recommended Valentiner. Soon, the young art historian was perfecting his English and packing his bags for America. Morgan, however, seems to have had plans for Valentiner’s expertise in Dutch old master painting. Within a year of his arrival in New York, Valentiner was immersed in plans for the Dutch component of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. According to Valentiner, it was probably Morgan who came up with the idea for the show: In the year after I joined the museum (1909) it became apparent that every effort should be made to contribute to the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. To do this, a two-part exhibition was proposed: one to be the best Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century, the epoch of Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer; the other of American handicrafts and decorative arts from the time of Hudson to that of Fulton. I do not know who decided that I should organize and catalogue the loan exhibition of old masters, but I think it was Morgan.26

We do know that Valentiner had originally intended to exhibit only pictures by Hals and Rembrandt, but he soon realized that such a show would be too heavy in portraiture. The young curator also concluded that the success of the exhibition depended on loans from private collectors, many of whom he already knew professionally. His description of Morgan, for example, suggests he was well aware of this group of collectors and the works of art they possessed. Over the years he would author catalogues for a number of their Dutch paintings’ collections.27 The most important art collector I have known was Pierpont Morgan. Since Morgan belonged to the elite society, his urge to collect was not the result of a lack of social position, as was the case with Frick. Rather, came from a real interest in all aspects of art, an interest which he pursued in studies at the university. Most art collectors have limited interests—I

26 Taken from Margaret Sterne, The Passionate Eye: The Life of William R. Valentiner (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1980), 97. 27 Beginning in 1911, while still working at the Metropolitan, Valentiner catalogued all or part of the collections of the following individuals: M. C. M. Borden, John G. Johnson, and Rita Lydig.

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dennis p. weller shall have more to say about these specialists. But Morgan delighted in all kinds of art, especially those not readily accessible to the general public, such as early manuscripts, medieval jewelry, enamels, Chinese porcelains, etc.28

Valentiner’s relationship with Morgan was probably not much different from his dealings with others, particularly those individuals in the market for perceived masterpieces by Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer and a small number of other painters who carried the required cachet of genius. With the assistance of accommodating dealers such as Joseph Duveen, the exhibition thus reected the aspirations of America’s millionaire collectors. While they did not always get value for their dollar, the fact still remains that some of the greatest masterpieces ever to cross the Atlantic came in the decades around the turn of the century, and many of these paintings made their way into the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. Who, then, were these collectors, and what pictures were they able to amass in the years prior to their appearance in the New York exhibition? Some of the names remain familiar with museum audiences today—Benjamin Altman, William Clark, Henry Frick, Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, Mrs. C. P. Huntington, Edward Drummond Libbey, W. K. Vanderbilt, and P. A. B. Widener—while others, including M. C. D. Borden, Theodore Davis, Thatcher Bushnell, Robert D. de Forest, George J. Gould, Mrs. Morris K. Jesup, and Mrs. John W. Simpson, have passed more quietly into our collective history. The names of a few other collectors are clearly missing, notably Isabella Stewart Gardner and Charles Yerkes. In surveying the collectors and their treasures, one nds among them varying degrees of commitment to Dutch old master paintings. Morgan, as we have seen, supplied the exhibition no less than fteen paintings. Among them were outstanding pictures by Frans Hals, Hobbema, Rembrandt, Ruisdael, and Vermeer. Nevertheless, his Dutch paintings represented only a small percentage of his vast holdings in other areas of the ne and decorative arts. At the other end of the scale was John G. Johnson, the Philadelphia corporate lawyer who counted Morgan as his most important client. His interests were almost exclusively focused on old master paintings, including a large and diverse collection of Dutch pictures. Upon his death in 1917, a bequest of 1,279 paintings was made to the city

28

Sterne, 90.

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of Philadelphia. The collection has been housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1933. Of this number, 431 were listed as Dutch and Flemish in the outdated catalogue of the collection published in 1962.29 To his credit, Johnson amassed a more balanced and thoughtful collection of Dutch pictures than any of his counterparts. His contributions to the Hudson-Fulton exhibition, however, do not fully reect the diversity of his collection. In the end, Valentiner requested from him works attributed to Aelbert Cuyp, Willem Kalf, Judith Leyster, Nicolaes Maes, Rembrandt, Ruisdael, Jan Steen, Gerard Terborch, Adriaen van de Velde, and Vermeer.30 By contrast, Henry Clay Frick had an extremely narrow focus when it came to Dutch paintings. Always a masterpiece collector, he committed his resources to about ten Dutch artists, with Rembrandt topping the list. The others examples from his collection selected for the exhibition were by Cuyp, Frans Hals, Hobbema, Ruisdael, Terborch and Vermeer.31 Pieter A. B. Widener perhaps best represented a collector whose ambitions sometimes overruled his reason. Living at his Lynnewood estate outside Philadelphia, he generally bought pictures from either Duveen or Knoedler, two of the era’s most powerful art dealers. To assist him in making his selections, he employed the services of Valentiner, Bernard Berenson, and Hofstede de Groot as advisers. Unfortunately, many undistinguished pictures entered his collection, including three dreadful attributions to Vermeer. Still, he contributed thirteen of his better pictures to the exhibition. Following Widener’s death, his son Joseph wisely pruned the collection from ve hundred to one hundred works, and later gifted them to the National Gallery of Art.32

29 Barbara Sweeny, John G. Johnson Collection: Catalogue of Flemish and Dutch Paintings (Philadelphia: Buchanan, 1972). 30 The Vermeer, Lady with Guitar ( Johnson no. 497), is now listed as a copy of a near identical version of the composition found at The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood, London. Of the two Rembrandts, the Slaughtered Ox ( Johnson no. 475) is now catalogued as a copy after Rembrandt, while The Finding of Moses ( Johnson no. 474) is likely a workshop picture. 31 The exhibited Vermeer, The Music Lesson (now Girl Interrupted at Her Music) represents one of three works by the artist now housed at the Frick Collection. The other two are the Ofcer and Laughing Girl and the Mistress and Maid. 32 Not all of Widener’s best pictures remained in the family until they were given to the National Gallery of Art. For example, Jan Steen’s The Merrymakers (now titled Merry Company on a Terrace) returned to the Netherlands via the art market, only to be acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1958.

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The other lenders to the exhibition generally fall within the parameters set by those individuals cited above, although with fewer examples. Rather than surveying the entire list of lenders (see appendix), sufce it to say that many of them eventually donated their pictures to museums. Among those individuals whose generosity can be seen in our public institutions today are William Clark (Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC), Robert Altman and Mrs. H. O. Havermeyer (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Mrs. William L. Elkins (Philadelphia Museum of Art), and Edward Drummond Libby (Toledo Museum of Art). A more circuitous route was taken by some of the pictures, for they traveled far and wide before nding permanent homes in American art museums. Among the most interesting from this group is Rembrandt’s Lucretia (Fig. 6), now in Washington. The journey began with M. C. D. Borden who owned the painting at the time it was seen in the HudsonFulton exhibition. Parts of the Borden collection, including the Lucretia, were then sold at auction in 1913. The picture turned up the same year in a Dutch collection, only to nd its way to a Copenhagen collector by 1918. The painting then reappeared on the art market, passing through dealers until Andrew W. Mellon purchased it in November 1921. Lucretia nally entered the National Gallery of Art through the generosity of the Pittsburgh based Andrew W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust.33 Based on the choices made by Valentiner, the Hudson-Fulton exhibition had the effect of placing a stamp of approval on the artists and artworks he deemed most representative and important to an understanding of painting in the Dutch Golden Age. Was his point of view consistent with the scholarship of the day, and did his selections fall in line with the ones appearing in other Dutch exhibitions from the era? For the most part, answers to both questions are in the afrmative. For example, the same year as the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, Charles H. Cafn’s book entitled The Story of Dutch Painting was published in New York.34 It is probably no coincidence that the chapters include discussions

33 For full provenance of the painting see Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century, systematic catalogue (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1995), 280. Interestingly, the attribution of Lucretia to Rembrandt has recently been questioned by Ernst van der Wetering in a lecture given at the National Gallery of Art in February, 2005. 34 Charles H. Cafn, The Story of Dutch Painting (New York: Century Co., 1909).

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Fig. 6 Rembrandt van Rijn, Lucretia, 1664, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Andrew W. Mellon Collection (1937.1.76), image © 2006 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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on Frans Hals; Rembrandt; Dutch genre; Terborch, Vermeer and Steen; Landscape; Van Goyen and Hobbema; and Jacob van Ruisdael. Exhibitions held in England, the country whose collecting patterns closely align themselves with those in America, can be used to gauge sentiment about the relative importance of specic Dutch painters. Interestingly, both the Manchester exhibition of 1857—it included 28 Rembrandts among 250 Dutch paintings—and a 1929 London exhibition, showcased works by many of the same group of painters that were shown to New York crowds in 1909.35 While Vermeer is missing, and Hals underrepresented in the Manchester exhibition, this is easily explained by the fact that these painters had yet to be fully rediscovered and rehabilitated by collectors and scholars in 1857. By contrast, the 1929 exhibition Dutch Art at the Royal Academy in London provided a larger overview of Dutch art from the fteenth to nineteenth century, including drawings and decorative arts. Still, the focus remained on seventeenth-century Dutch painting. In spite of a larger pool from which to draw works for the exhibition, the lineup of artists was little changed, led by Rembrandt. One nds just a few new names, among them the architectural painter Emmanuel de Witte and Rembrandt pupil Carel Fabritius. As the exhibitions and scholarship on Dutch art, including Valentiner’s awed monographs on Rembrandt, Hals, and De Hooch, suggest, a very specic hierarchy among artists and subjects remained largely unchallenged in the decades after the Hudson-Fulton exhibition. This trend can be seen as culminating with the opening of the National Gallery of Art on the eve of World War II. Thanks largely to the Mellon and Widener gifts, pictures by Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer, De Hooch, Cuyp, Ruisdael, and Hobbema have long served as the foundation for its outstanding collection of Dutch paintings.36 One consequence of World War II was its impact on the art world, including the market for Dutch old master paintings. Suddenly, the collecting preferences (and prejudices) in place since the turn of the century were beginning to crumble. This situation was especially noticeable in the new collections that were being developed. Among the factors leading to change were the inuence of younger scholars, 35 See the catalogues for Art Treasures of the United Kingdom, Museum of Oriental Art, Manchester, 1857; and Exhibition of Dutch Art, 1450 –1900, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1929. 36 See Wheelock for a discussion of these paintings and the growth of the Dutch collection at the National Gallery of Art.

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greater diversity in the pictures available on the art market, and budgetary limitations. At the same time, the legacy of the Hudson-Fulton exhibition was passing from memory, and with it the role of Valentiner. Nevertheless, there still remained one last opportunity for Valentiner to exert his authority. Lured out of retirement to become the rst director of the North Carolina Museum of Art in 1955, he again sought out many of the same Dutch masters he had championed since arriving in America. As the country’s rst state art museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art received the then princely sum of one million dollars appropriated by the legislature to buy a collection for the state in 1947.37 Without going into detail regarding the political wrangling that allowed this extraordinary event to happen, it is sufcient to say that Valentiner entered the equation at the time when a sizeable number of potential acquisitions, mostly European paintings, were placed on reserve for the new museum.38 One of his rst tasks was in vetting selections destined for Raleigh, North Carolina. As might be expected, many of the Dutch paintings reected Valentiner’s long history as a connoisseur, curator, and director.39 The North Carolina Museum of Art opened its doors to great acclaim in April of 1956.40 With Valentiner in place as director, and its galleries lled with old master paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts, the press was singularly enthusiastic in its praise. Among the most notable Dutch pictures showcased were a Rembrandt, a Frans Hals, two Aelbert Cuyps, two Pieter de Hoochs, a number of examples by Rembrandt pupils including Gerrit Dou, Govaert Flinck, and Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, and paintings by Steen and Ruisdael.41 Valentiner was particularly proud of the acquisition of The Feast of Esther (Fig. 7), a

37 The background information surrounding this remarkable undertaking is found in Peggy Jo B. Kirby, The North Carolina Museum of Art, The First Fifty Years 1947–1997 (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 1997), 26–45. 38 Valentiner’s association with the North Carolina Museum of art is discussed in endnote 7 above, and by Sterne, 334–356. 39 It was also in Raleigh in 1956 that Valentiner mounted his last exhibition. Rembrandt and His Pupils continued to express his lifelong interest in Rembrandt. Not surprisingly, it included a handful of paintings shown in New York in 1909, and many others whose attribution to Rembrandt can no long be maintained. 40 For example, the April, 1956 Art News (vol 55, no. 2) was a special issue devoted entirely to the opening of the North Carolina Museum of Art. 41 An illustrated catalogue of the collection was produced for the opening of the museum; William R. Valentiner, Catalogue of Paintings including three Sets of Tapestries (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 1956).

Fig. 7 Jan Lievens, The Feast of Esther, Raleigh, ca. 1625–26, oil on canvas, North Carolina Museum of Art (inv. 52.9.55), Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina.

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painting that had only come to light in 1936.42 For him, it represented a major Rembrandt acquisition for the museum. Sadly, many of the lofty attributions supported by Valentiner when the Raleigh museum opened are no longer viable. The Feast of Esther is a case in point. Most scholars now regard the work as an early masterpiece by Jan Lievens, but certainly not by Rembrandt.43 Many other paintings in Raleigh have suffered a similar fate. The Frans Hals Portrait of a Gentleman is actually a work by his son Jan; one of the two Pieter de Hoochs can convincingly be attributed to Ludolf de Jongh; the Gerrit Dou is most likely a Willem de Poorter; and both Aelbert Cuyps have been removed from the oeuvre of this Dordrecht painter. By a twist of fate, one of the Cuyps in Raleigh, Landscape with Figures and Cattle, had been shown in the Hudson-Fulton exhibition. At the time, the picture was in the collection of J. P. Morgan. An excellent barometer of the changing face of Dutch old master paintings on this side of the Atlantic can be seen in the exhibition Great Dutch Paintings from America cited earlier, and shown in The Hague and San Francisco in 1990–91.44 Replacing the narrow focus documented in the hundred fty-ve pictures chosen for the Hudson-Fulton exhibition, this show featured less than half the number of paintings (seventythree), but nearly double the number of artists (fty-eight). The math speaks for itself, as a more diverse and arguably more interesting exhibition resulted.45 The role of private collectors in the equation had also changed. Previously, both the collector and the dealer inated their egos by attaching themselves to the few artists they considered geniuses. Today’s collectors think differently, as they demonstrate a genuine afnity for the art

42 Weller discussed the attribution history of The Feast of Esther in the exhibition catalogue for Sinners & Saints, Darkness and Light: Caravaggio and His Dutch and Flemish Followers, no. 29 (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 1998), 164–66. 43 Along similar lines, it has since been determined that no more than twelve of the thirty-seven paintings catalogued as Rembrandts in the Hudson-Fulton exhibition would be accepted as autograph works by him today. 44 See note 9 above. 45 The diversity found in The Hague and San Francisco exhibition cannot be entirely excluded from the period in which it was organized. Much had changed in the intervening decades. Exhibitions and the curators organizing them were no longer slaves to the status of a handful of painters, the egos of collectors, and pressure exerted by dealers. By 1990, however, nancial pressures increasingly dictated the nal character of exhibitions. Fortunately, Great Dutch Paintings in America achieved its stated goals without having to compromise because of the nancial bottom line.

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they acquire. No longer willing, or in some cases even able, to pay a king’s ransom for a Rembrandt, Vermeer, or Hals, the new collector is cognizant of more stringent attribution standards and conversant with ongoing scholarship devoted to this material. It is not surprising that among the ten pictures in the Great Dutch Paintings from private collections were works by Dirck de Bray, Jan van der Heyden, Bartholomeus Breenbergh, Aert van der Neer, Simon de Vlieger, and other of the so-called minor masters.46 Today, nearly a century after the opening of the Paintings by Dutch Masters exhibition at the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, many notable and still growing collections of Dutch paintings conrm that the blinders have been removed from unquestionably one of the greatest and most creative periods in western painting. Now as then, paintings from the Dutch ‘Golden Age’ continue to serve as one of Holland’s greatest exports to America.

46 A number of these paintings have already found homes in American museums, including the Breenbergh at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the De Bray and the De Vlieger in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as gifts of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Carter.

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APPENDIX

(Checklist of the Paintings by Dutch Masters shown at the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, with the present location. The listing does not incorporate current attributions or titles.) Artist/Title in 1909 Nicolaes Berchem The Ford Abraham van Beyeren Still Life Ferdinand Bol Portrait of a Lady Jan van de Capelle Winter Scene Marine Aelbert Cuyp Village in the Dunes Piping Shepherds The Maas Near Dordrecht River View Milking Time Milking Time Landscape with Figures and Cattle Landscape with Bridge Man Eating Mussels Cock and Hens Peaches Jan van Goyen View of Rhenen View of Rhenen View of Dordrecht Dirck Hals Children Playing with Cards Girls with a Cat Frans Hals The Smoker Singing Boys Boy Playing a Lute

Owner in 1909

Current Location

Charles E. Bushnell

Unknown

Mrs. William L. Elkins

Philadelphia Art Mus.

Theodore Davis

MMA, New York

P. A. B. Widener John G. Johnson

Private Collection Philadelphia Art Mus.

William A. Clark Mrs. Collis P. Huntington Henry C. Frick

Corcoran Gallery Art MMA, New York Frick Collection, NY

Sir William van Horne W. B. Dickerman George J. Gould J. P. Morgan

Private Collection Brooklyn Museum Unknown NC Museum of Art

Mrs. John W. Simpson M. C. M. Borden John G. Johnson John G. Johnson

Unknown Art Market 1990 Philadelphia Art Mus. Philadelphia Art Mus.

MMA, New York William A. Clark William A. Clark

MMA, New York Corcoran Gallery Art Corcoran Gallery Art

J. P. Morgan

Clark Art Institute

J. P. Morgan

Clark Art Institute

MMA, New York Charles Stewart Smith E. D. Libbey

MMA, New York Taft Museum Toledo Art Museum

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(cont.)

Artist/Title in 1909 Samuel Ampzing Wilhelm van Heythuysen Portrait of a Man Portrait of an Artist Caspar Sibelius Michiel de Wael(?) Portrait of a Lady Portrait of a Man Heer Bodolphe Vrouw Bodlphe Portrait of a Man Dorothea Berck Balthasar Coymans Isabella Coymans Portrait of a Man Portrait of a Lady Portrait of a Man The Merry Company Bartholomeus vd Helst Portrait of a Man Portrait of a Lady Jan van der Heyden Street in Delft Bull in the Street Meindert Hobbema The Pool Castle Kostverloren Holford Landscape Cottage Among Trees Wooded Road Water-Mill Road in the Woods Pieter de Hooch The Visit Woman and Child in Courtyard The Bedroom

Owner in 1909

Current Location

Sir William van Horn Charles L. Hutchinson Morris K. Jesup Henry C. Frick M. C. D. Bordon J. P. Morgan J. P. Morgan P. A. B. Widener J. P. Morgan J. P. Morgan Mrs. Collis P. Huntington Mrs. Collis P. Huntington Mrs. Collis P. Huntington P. A. B. Widener Charles M. Schwab MMA, New York MMA, New York Benjamin Altman

Private Collection Private Collection GB Unknown Frick Collection, NY Destroyed in 1956 Sau Paolo Museum Sau Paolo Museum National Gallery Art Yale Art Gallery Yate Art Gallery MMA, New York

Private Collection Art Gallery of Ontario MMA, New York MMA, New York MMA, New York

MMA, New York Robert W. de Forest

MMA, New York Unknown

Theodore M. Davis Wm. T. Blodgett

MMA, New York Detroit Art Institute

Wm. T. Blodgett M. C. D. Borden J. P. Morgan Henry C. Frick Mrs. William L. Elkins J. P. Morgen George J. Gould

Unknown Unknown National Gallery Art Frick Collection, NY Philadelphia Mus. Art Indianapolis Mus. Art Unknown

Mrs. Henry O. Havemeyer P. A. B. Widener

MMA, New York

P. A. B. Widener

National Gallery Art

Baltimore Museum Art National Gallery Art

National Gallery Art

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(cont.)

Artist/Title in 1909

Owner in 1909

Current Location

Cavaliers and Ladies The Music Party Willem Kalf Still Life Philips Koninck The Dunes Judith Leyster The Gay Cavaliers Nicolaes Maes Portrait of a Man Old Woman Gabriel Metsu A Music Party Visit to the Nursery Aert van der Neer Sunset Moonlight The Farrier Adriaen van Ostade The Old Fiddler The Cottage Dooryard Isack van Ostade The Halt Cottage Scene Paulus Potter Barnyard Scene Cattle in Pasture Rembrandt van Rijn Portrait of Himself Portrait of Himself Portrait of Himself Nicolaes Ruts Portrait of a Man The Noble Slav St. John the Baptist Saskia Portrait of a Young Man Portrait of a Young Woman Portrait of a Man

Wm. T. Blodgett M. C. D. Borden

Unknown Unknown

John G. Johnson

Philadelphia Mus. Art

Sir William van Horne Unknown John G. Johnson

Philadelphia Mus. Art

Thatcher M. Adams John G. Johnson

Unknown Philadelphia Mus. Art

MMA, New York J. P. Morgan

MMA, New York MMA, New York

Theodore M. Davis Ferdinand Hermann MMA, New York

Unknown Unknown MMA, New York

MMA, New York P. A. B. Widener

MMA, New York National Gallery Art

P. A. B. Widener Wm. T. Blodgett

National Gallery Art Unknown

Mrs. William L. Elkins Mr. Leon Hirsch

Philadelphia Mus. Art Unknown

J. P. Morgan E. D. Libbey Frank G. Logan J. P. Morgan Anonymous W. K. Vanderbilt Charles Stewart Smith P. A. B. Widener Morris K. Jesup Morris K. Jesup

MMA, New York Toledo Art Museum San Diego Mus. Art Frick Collection, NY MMA, New York MMA, New York LA County Mus. Art National Gallery Art MMA, New York MMA, New York

New-York Historical Society

Unknown

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dennis p. weller

(cont.)

Artist/Title in 1909

Owner in 1909

Current Location

The Marquis d’Andelot The Finding of Moses Slaughtered Ox The Gilder Herman Doomer Portrait of an Old Woman Portrait of Himself Portrait of a Girl (H. Stoffels?) Portrait of a Young Man A Young Painter ( Jan vd Capelle?) Portrait of Himself Study of an Old Man The Philosopher The Savant The Standard Bearer Portrait of a Man Portrait of an Old Man The Sibyl Portrait of Himself Hendrickje Stoffels The Accountant Lucretia Portrait of a Man Portrait of a Man Portrait of a Young Man Titus the Son of Rembrandt Jacob van Ruisdael Cottage under Trees The Sluice Dunes Near Haarlem Winter Landscape Stormy Sea Woods The Forest Stream The Gnarled Oak The Cascade A Waterfall The Mountain Torrent Cornelds

Richard Mortimer John G. Johnson John G. Johnson Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer

Unknown Philadelphia Mus. Art Philadelphia Mus. Art MMA, New York

Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer MMA, New York Herbert S. Terrell Chicago Art Institute

MFA, Boston Chicago Art Institute

Henry C. Frick J. P. Morgan

Frick Collection, NY Wadsworth Atheneum

P. A. B. Widener George J. Gould P. A. B. Widener Collis P. Huntington George J. Gould James Ross W. A. Slater Theodore M. Davis Henry C. Frick Colllis P. Huntington Charles M. Schwab M. C. D. Borden MMA, New York MMA, New York Benjamin Altman Benjamin Altman

National Gallery Art Baltimore Mus. Art National Gallery Art MMA, New York MMA, New York MFA, Boston (loan) Unknown MMA, New York Frick Collection, NY MMA, New York Boijmans Museum National Gallery Art MMA, New York MMA, New York MMA, New York MMA, New York

J. P. Morgan John W. Simpson W. A. Slater John G. Johnson James Ross William A. Clark MMA, New York Robert W. de Forest M. C. D. Borden Henry C. Frick Collis P. Huntington Benjamin Altman

Ex-British Rail Fund J. Paul Getty Museum Thyssen Museum Philadelphia Mus. Art NG, Ireland Corcoran Gallery Art MMA, New York UC, Santa Barbara Indianapolis Art Mus. Private Collection MMA, New York MMA, New York

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265

(cont.)

Artist/Title in 1909

Owner in 1909

Salomon van Ruisdael Canal Scene Morris K. Jessup A Country Road MMA, New York Winter Scene MMA, New York Winter near Haarlem P. A. B. Widener Jan Steen Kermesse MMA, New York Grace Before Meal John G. Johnson The Dancing Couple P. A. B. Widener The Drained Cask Charles M. Schwab The Merrymakers P. A. B. Widener Gerard Terborch The Guardroom John G. Johnson Lady Pouring Wine M. C. D. Borden Portrait Young Man William A. Clark Portrait of a Lady Henry C. Frick Adriaen van de Velde Landscape with Cattle John G. Johnson Willem van de Velde Calm Sea William T. Blodgett Calm Sea M. C. D. Borden Johannes Vermeer Lady with Lute C. P. Huntington Lady Writing J. P. Morgan Girl with Water-Jug MMA, New York The Music Lesson Henry C. Frick Lady with Guitar John G. Johnson Girl Sleeping Benjamin Altman Jan Cornelisz. Verspronck Portrait of a Man Wilhelm Funk Simon de Vlieger Calm Sea MMA, New York Philips Wouwerman Frozen Canal W. A. Clark Horse Fair Mrs. E. C. Hobson

Current Location Unknown MMA, New York MMA, New York Unknown MMA, New York Philadelphia Art Mus. National Gallery Art Unknown MMA, New York Philadelphia Art Mus. Brooklyn Museum Corcoran Gallery Art Frick Collection, NY Philadelphia Art Mus. Cincinnati Art Mus. Dutch Private Coll. MMA, New York National Gallery Art MMA, New York Frick Collection, NY Philadelphia Art Mus. MMA, New York MMA, New York MMA, New York Unknown Unknown

PART V

DUTCH CULTURAL INFLUENCES IN MODERN AMERICA

CHAPTER TEN

CROSSING THE FRONTIERS OF THE UNKNOWN: FRED L. POLAK’S ROAD TO PIONEER OF FUTURES STUDIES IN THE UNITED STATES Tity de Vries

Starting in the United States in the late 1950s, “a growing school of social critics, scientists, philosophers, planners, and others who concern themselves with the alternatives facing man as the human race collides with an onrushing future” engaged themselves in the new academic eld of Futures Studies.1 Futures Studies is usually dened as developing new insights into the future, without claiming to be able to predict the future. One of the pioneers of the American Futures Studies movement was the Dutch sociologist Fred L. Polak (1907–1985), who acquired this status with his book, The Image of the Future (1961). Famous futurist Alvin Tofer named Polak ‘the cultural historian of the futurist movement,’ other prominent futurists like Kenneth Boulding and Wendell Bell paid their respect to him by taking his work as one of the starting points of their futures research, and peace researcher Elise Boulding considered him as one of the great inspirers for her work on developing strategies for a more peaceful world.2 Polak was not the rst Dutch scholar with an impact on the American academic discourse. He can be positioned into a more than a century old tradition of Dutch scientists whose work has been acknowledged by American academics as break-throughs in their elds. Take for example the economist Jan Tinbergen, whose pioneering work on business cycle theories in the 1930’s, in particular his Business Cycles in the United States of America, 1919 –1932, resulted in recognition and admiration (as well as criticism) not just from his American colleagues but from all over the world. Tinbergen was one of the pioneers of the new discipline of econometrics, which in particular has been ourishing 1 Alvin Tofer, “Introduction: Probing Tomorrow,” in The Futurists, ed. A. Tofer (New York: Random House, 1972), 3. 2 Tofer, 6.

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in the United States. Examples of other Dutch scholars in this respect, who are named in American textbooks as major contributors to the development of their disciplines are physicists such as Hendrik Lorentz and Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, astronomists J. C. Kapteyn and H. C. van de Hulst, but also physician W. J. Kolff who invented the articial kidney and the articial heart, botanist Hugo de Vries who participated in the American debate on evolution, and anthropologist Herman ten Kate and his studies of almost extinct Native-American tribes. Most of them spent time in the United States doing research, visiting conferences, teaching or lecturing and sometimes just travelling to see the New World. Dutch scholars in particular made a difference in the realm of the natural sciences, while in the social sciences, humanities or arts Dutch scholarship seems to be less known among American academics, at least during the rst three quarters of the twentieth century. The main reason for this was the language issue; until the 1980s it was not as common for a Dutch scholar to write in English as it is nowadays. Therefore in ‘textual’ disciplines like sociology or history it was much harder to gain recognition in the United States than in sciences which work with numbers, graphics and formulas, which can be internationally understood right away without the need for translation. This makes Polak’s position as a Dutch social scientist within American Futures Studies even more interesting. Polak’s contribution to the early stages of Futures Studies can be best described as providing a justication for the new discipline by showing convincingly that studying the future could be very valuable for the present. In particular during the beginnings of Futures Studies his perception of the relation between conceived images of the future and the dynamics of culture, which he presented in The Image of the Future (1961), was received enthusiastically among American colleagues. His second English publication Prognostics (1971) contributed to the theory of Futures Studies and is still one of the very rare purely theoretical works for Futures Studies, whereas most current publications are basically methodological or applied futures studies.3 With these two works Fred L. Polak is considered to be one of the original thinkers who shaped Futures Studies. Since The Image of the Future was most inuential among American futurists, this book and its impact, within the

3 Ruud van der Helm, “The Future According to Frederik Lodewijk Polak: Finding the Roots of Contemporary Futures Studies,” Futures 37 (August 2005): 514.

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context of Polak’s Dutch background and the American political and cultural climate of opinion, will be the main focus of this contribution. I will argue that in the process of Polak becoming a pioneer of the American Futures Studies movement ‘Dutch’ as well as ‘American’ elements played an equal role. In particular a combination of a deep concern for humanity, ‘Dutch’ ethics, and a certain ‘Americanism’ in his positive and pragmatic approach to the social sciences made his work so attractive for American scholars of the future.

Polak’s Early Career In the early 1950s Polak was considered to be one of the most brilliant and promising ‘coming men’ of the emerging Dutch social sciences.4 He had studied law and economics in Amsterdam, graduated in 1929 and rapidly made a career in nancial management. In 1936 he became the chief executive of one of the largest Dutch department stores, De Bijenkorf. Being Jewish by birth, he had to go into hiding during the German occupation of The Netherlands from 1940–1945. After the Second World War he was employed by economist Jan Tinbergen at the Central Planning Bureau, while at the same time he worked on his dissertation on subjectivity in the social sciences, a much disputed attack on a value-free economic discipline. Polak succeeded in nishing this Kennen en keuren in de sociale wetenschappen (Knowledge and values in the social sciences) in 1948, and almost immediately he became a full professor in sociology at the Netherlands School of Economics in Rotterdam, now Erasmus University. Very soon, within the fast developing Dutch social sciences, Polak became one of its prominent scholars, not just because of his intellectual capabilities and expertise, but also because of his personal style; he had an ambitious attitude, expressed strong opinions and liked to be provocative and against the grain. Moreover he was very self-conscious of his qualities, liked to be in the centre of attention, and didn’t hesitate to participate in public forums and debates. This public role resulted from his conviction that scientists and scholars had to be more involved in society—they had

4 I wrote on Polak’s Dutch career in T. de Vries, Complexe Consensus. Amerikaanse en Nederlandse Intellectuelen in Debat over Politiek en Cultuur, 1945–1960 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1996), 149–167.

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to leave their ivory tower in order to apply the results of their research to improve the human condition. Polak was a key participator in the ongoing public debate in The Netherlands on the so-called crisis in Western civilization which had evolved in all of Western Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. The issue at stake in this debate was that Western civilization was suffering from processes of dehumanization and moral decay, which posed a threat to the existing social order and organization. In particular social-democratic intellectuals (one of them Polak) feared that the individual human being, as a result of the increasing impact of technology and rationalization on all segments of modern life, had lost control of his/her own life and social environment. Spiritual emptiness and loss of moral standards had been the result, replacing individual freedom and responsibility. In fact, according to these leading intellectuals and politicians the future of Western civilization was in severe danger because of these processes.5

From the Crisis of Western Civilization to a ‘Valued’ Future Polak took a prominent but also somewhat ambivalent position in this debate. At rst, in 1946 Polak proposed planning, based on technology as a solution for these contemporary problems; just like his mentor Jan Tinbergen he considered planning almost a magic concept, which should be applied in economics, but also in the cultural policy of a state. In 1946 he even introduced a ‘cultural welfare plan’ in which he proposed an active and democratic planning of culture as a solution to the crisis in Western civilization.6 Early in 1949 he visited the United States for six months. During his stay he was shocked by the cultural and social consequences of mechanization and technology. Before he had acknowledged technological progress as a blessing for the future of mankind, but his American experience made him realize that the ‘second industrial revolution’

5 This perceived crisis of civilization can be considered as the Dutch version of the pessimistic outlook of intellectuals like Ortega Y Gasset, Oscar Spengler and Georges Duhamel. 6 Fred L. Polak, “Sociale en Cultureele Aspecten van een Centraal Welvaartsplan,” De Nieuwe Stem 1 (1946): 710–723; Fred L. Polak, “Sociale en Cultureele Aspecten van een Centraal Welvaartsplan,” De Nieuwe Stem 2 (1947): 111–126.

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could be a curse at the same time, resulting in a highly rationalized society in which human values were lost. As one of the rst to do so he proposed that technological innovation should be counterbalanced by the social sciences; social scientists were to develop effective instruments which could bring the supposed crisis of Western civilization to a halt. When they would fail to do so, the results would be dehumanisation, disintegration, chaos and possibly even destruction of the Western social order.7 In fact, he wanted the social sciences not just to solve isolated problems, but also to change the direction of Western civilization. With the help of the social sciences, hopes for a bright future of the Western world could be restored. Polak’s perception of technological progress as both a blessing and a curse was the central theme of his work during the next years; increasing mechanization and rationalization, he warned, combined with a lagging behind of the social sciences, would result in an over-mechanization of society and therefore in a deterioration of the crisis of civilization. In order to prevent a doom scenario of people becoming machines to come true, he considered the capacity of human nature to destine its own future as the best strategy. His remedy was that the employment of technology and planning could only result in human progress when this was attended with an inspiring, almost utopian vision of the future. In this way he tried to restore trust in man. According to Polak, development of such futurist visions was indispensable to the restoration of human dignity, and subsequently it was a condition for the restoration of Western civilization.8 Polak elaborated this thesis in his masterpiece, De toekomst is verleden tijd (literally translated: The Future is from the Past, published in English in 1961 titled The Image of the Future), which was published in two volumes of three-hundred-fty pages each in 1955.9 The main narrative of this book is an extensive description and analysis of the impact of visions of the future on societies during the last three thousand years.

7

Fred L. Polak, De Wentelgang der Wetenschap en de Maatschappij van Morgen (Leiden: Stenfert Kroeze, 1949), 20, 18; Fred L. Polak, Om het Behoud van Ons Bestaan. Cultuursociologische Voorstudies (Leiden: Stenfert Kroeze, 1951), 35–50. 8 Fred L. Polak, “Crisis der Cultuur,” in Crisis der Cultuur. Uitdaging en Antwoord, eds. F. L. Polak, I. A. Diepenhorst en J. Derks (Den Haag: Nederlands Cultureel Contact, 1951), 39. 9 The book was awarded the Europe Prize of the Council of Europe a year later. Polak himself considered this book as his life work, according to an interview with him in the Dutch newspaper NRC/Handelsblad on October 11, 1980.

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Not very surprisingly Polak concluded that positive images of the future were at work in every instance of the owering of a culture, while weakened images of the future had been primary factors in the decay of civilizations. The intensity of futurist images could also serve as a barometer indicating the potential rise or fall of a culture. In the rst volume of this book he developed this dynamics of culture; during all stages of human history the present had been destined by current existing visions of the future within society. According to Polak, positive or negative images of the future always had been the main movers of cultural change in the past. In the second volume, he concluded that the main cause of the deterioration of Western civilization was the loss of hopeful and inspiring images of the future in recent times. Therefore, in order to prevent Western civilization from falling apart, and in order to give direction to progress, mankind’s only hope was to develop positive images of the future, which could serve as starting points for policies. In this way envisioned futures would generate strategies for change in the present. Polak emphasized the essential role of values in this process of cultural change. He noticed that the driving forces behind images of the future were only partly rational and intellectual. Emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual forces had been much more important in creating them, just as primary forces in history were not propelled by a system of production, or by industrial or military power, but rather by underlying ideas, ideals, values, and norms which managed to achieve mass appeal.10 Therefore: “Awareness of ideal values is the rst step in the conscious creation of images of the future and therefore in the conscious creation of culture, for a value is by denition that which guides toward a ‘valued’ future. The image of the future reects and reinforces these values. The relationship between conceptions of the time-dimension, the future, and the idealistic ethical objectives of mankind for that future has been a neglected one and offers a fruitful eld for research.”11 According to Polak, ethical values should constitute the basis of policies for the future and they would be revealed in the images of the future. Which values he preferred, he never made explicit—supposedly he

10 Fred L. Polak, The Image of the Future: Enlightening the Past, Orientating the Present, Forecasting the Future (Leyden: A. W. Sythoff, New York: Oceana Publications, 1961), 1:42. 11 Ibid., 37.

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considered the determination of ethics the domain of politicians, not of social scientists. Preventing the Western civilization from falling apart was not Polak’s only justication for studying the dominant images of the future: “The image of the future as such may [. . .] be an important tool for an interdisciplinary social science. The possibility that science may be able to predict and control social processes through analysis of existing images of the future, both private and public, and direct a change of these images, is a thought-provoking one.”12 In fact, Polak offered the social sciences a new dimension to their elds of studies; the study of images of the future would result in an improved grip of the social sciences on the transformation of social processes and this prospect corresponded very well with the state of affairs in the social sciences in the early 1950s. Immediately after the publication of The Image of the Future in The Netherlands Polak came into contact with American social scientists who had similar notions on the role of the social sciences.

Polak in Palo Alto In September 1954 Polak and his wife left for Palo Alto, California, to spend a year at the Center for the Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), which was located close to the campus of Stanford University.13 For nine months he and thirty-ve other fellows were the rst international group of scholars to enjoy the luxury to spend almost a year of undisturbed devotion to their research while being in the company of ‘the best and the brightest’ of their elds. Together they were initially expected to develop theories and methods for the promising new branch of the social sciences, behavioral science which was characterized by a much more empirical and analytical approach than the pre-war social sciences which had a notion of vagueness and reformism.14 Polak’s academic prole made him an excellent candidate for being part of this rst group of fellows of the CASBS.15 12

Ibid., 44. Tinbergen probably recommended him with the Ford Foundation for a Fellowship at the CASBS. 14 G. M. Lyons, The Uneasy Partnership: Social Science and the Federal Government in the Twentieth Century (New York, Russell Sage Foundation: 1969), 279. 15 See for the history of the establishment of the CASBS: T. de Vries, “A Year at the Center: Experiences and Effects of the First International Group of Fellows at the 13

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The Center and its fellows were funded by the Ford Foundation, which in 1951 had started a new and successful research program: ‘Program V,’ or the Division of Behavioral Sciences, in operation from 1951 to 1957. With ‘Program V’ behavioral science studies became a spearhead in the Foundation’s policy, focussing on contributions to basic theory, methodology and interdisciplinary ties. With its focus on behavioral science the Ford Foundation connected with the American pragmatic creed in using the results of scientic research to solve national and social problems. American scholars believed in the perfectibility of human existence and were convinced of the usefulness of knowledge and technology in their endeavour to improve human life.16 Besides, ‘Program V’ also participated in the contribution of the Ford Foundation to the American Cold War strategy to counterbalance communist accomplishments in science with American studies which were to improve the human condition.17 During its six years of existence, the Behavioral Science Division provided millions of dollars for the advancement of behavioral research. In fact, the Ford Foundation and behavioral science research were so much connected to each other, that economist Kenneth Boulding once suggested that a good operational denition of a ‘behavioral science’ was ‘one that gets money from the Ford Foundation’.18 With his perceptions on the role of the social sciences in preventing Western civilization from falling apart, Polak tted very well into the aims of the Ford Foundation. Moreover Polak was Dutch and him being a foreigner corresponded with the Ford Foundation’s emphasis on the need for internationalization of research. This was partly for ideological reasons (‘Luring European intellectuals away from Communism’) and partly for idealistic reasons: increasing international communication should result in advancing international understanding and peace.19 In short, Polak was a perfect candidate for a CASBS fellowship. Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, Ca 1954–1955,” in Scholarly Environments, eds. A. A. MacDonald and A. H. Huussen (Leuven, Paris, Dudley, Ma: Peeters, 2004), 169–179. 16 Francis X. Sutton, “American Foundations and the Social Sciences,” Items 39, no.4 (1985): 58. 17 Kathleen D. McCarthy, “From Cold War to Cultural Development: the International Cultural Activities of the Ford Foundation 1950–1980,” Daedalus 116 (1987): 93–117. 18 Cited in: Debora Hammond, “Perspectives from the Boulding Files,” Systems Research 12, no. 4 (1995): 281. 19 McCarthy, 94.

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In light of Polak’s American ‘career’ this year in Palo Alto was a crucial experience for him.20 Not that he was a very dynamic fellow—he gave the required lecture, sometimes he attended a workshop, but most of the time he stayed to himself, and read science ction novels for his next research project.21 However, his meeting and subsequent friendship with co-fellow Kenneth E. Boulding, the well known economist, and later futurist and general systems theorist, and his wife, sociologist and later peace researcher Elise Boulding proved to be very fruitful. At the Center, Polak’s and Boulding’s ofces were located next to each other, and in downtown Palo Alto, Polak and his wife lived in a little house at the back of the garden of the Bouldings’ house. Supposedly the Polak couple participated very cheerfully in the life of the Bouldings and their four young children.22 Later Kenneth Boulding wrote about this Palo Alto experience: “Many exciting things came out of that year at Stanford, such as the Society for General Systems Research and the Journal of Conict Resolution. But looking back on the experience after nearly twenty years, I think the most important impact on the thought of both Elise Boulding and myself were the many conversations that we had with the Polaks around the dining table and in the garden. In my own case, many aspects of my subsequent work, including The Image, which was written at the Center that year, owe a great deal to Polak’s ideas. Polak, indeed, was a pioneer in what has come to be called “futurology,” an ugly word, which, however, represents an important movement in human thought. One is tempted to say, indeed, that we are all futurologists, and in this respect the impact of Fred Polak’s thoughts is much greater than is usually recognized.”23 Boulding referred to his 1956 publication The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, his rst contribution to Futures Studies.24 In this book, which was rooted in the tradition of the sociology of knowledge, Boulding developed a ‘theory of image’ which

20 In The Netherlands, his rising star among American social scientists was hardly noticed. 21 De Vries, “A Year at the Center,” 178. 22 Kenneth E. Boulding, foreword to The Image of the Future by Fred L. Polak (Amsterdam: Elsevier Scientic Publishing Company, 1973), v. 23 Ibid., v. 24 Other Kenneth E. Boulding publications in Futures Studies: The Meaning of the Twentieth Century (1964), Ecodynamics (1978) and The Structure of a Modern Economy (posthumously, 1993). Elise Boulding compiled a volume of his and her futures articles in 1995: The Future: Images and Processes (Thousand Oaks/London: Sage Publications, 1995).

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was based on the proposition that human behaviour depends on the image (or subjective knowledge) that people have of the world around them. Changes or reorganization of this image will cause a change in behaviour, and are mainly caused by the value scales of individuals or organization. Boulding considered The Image as the start of a new direction in his academic work for which Polak had been one of the main inspirators: “This extraordinary work [Polak’s The Image of the Future] had a profound inuence on my own thinking long before I read it, through my acquaintance with the author at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 1954–55.”25 In fact, both Bouldings were highly inspired by Polak’s theory on the importance of images of the future.26 Elise Boulding even learned Dutch and translated De toekomst is verleden tijd in English. In her later peace research she frequently used the basic principle of Polak’s imagined futures.27 She explored the dynamics of imaging futures rst from a theoretical/historical perspective, and next developed together with Warren Ziegler a series of experimental workshops in which imaging a peaceful world in the future was practiced.28 In these workshops Polak’s theories were combined with a practical problem solving technique developed by Ziegler.29 Even in her last book, Cultures of Peace. The Hidden Side of History (2000) she recognizes Polak’s impact on her approach of ‘peace cultures’: “Peace cultures thrive on and are nourished by visions of how things might be, in a world where sharing and caring are part of the accepted lifeways for everyone. The very ability to imagine something different and better than what currently exists is critical for the possibility of social change. The historian Fred Polak has documented

25 Kenneth E. Boulding, review of The Image of the Future by Fred L. Polak, Journal of Political Economy 70, no. 2 (1962): 192. 26 Elise Boulding, “Image and Action in Peace Building (1988),” in The Future. Images and Processes, Elise Boulding and Kenneth E. Boulding (Thousand Oaks/London: Sage Publications, 1995), 96. 27 Elise Boulding was Norwegian by birth. According to herself, this translation was the start of her post-child-rearing career. Elise Boulding, The Future: Images and Processes, xi. 28 Elise Boulding, “The Dynamics of Imaging Futures,” World Future Society Bulletin, XII, no. 5 (1978); Elise Boulding, “Futuristics and the Imaging Capacity of the West,” in Cultures of the Future, ed. M. Maruyama (The Hague: Mouton 1978), 7–31. 29 She describes these workshops and their outcomes extensively in: E. Boulding, “Image and Action in Peace Building,” Journal of Social Issues 44, no. 2 (1988): 17–37.

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how societies’ images of the future have empowered their action in the present. People can’t work for what they can’t imagine.”30 More than ten years after the publication of The Image of the Future she succeeded in condensing this two-volume seven-hundred-page text into a one-volume three-hundred-page book, which was published in 1973.

A Book of Poetry and Prophesy In American academic journals The Image of the Future received quite some attention, although most reviews in periodicals like The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, The American Historical Review, The Journal of Political Economy, and The American Sociological Review were rather ambivalent. Kenneth Boulding, not surprisingly, wrote a jubilant review with a slightly critical undertone: “This is, perhaps, a work of poetry rather than of science: it is, however, the kind of poetry that is the food of science and without which it cannot be nourished. There are some books, every page of which may be open to severe criticism, but after which the world is never quite the same again. The Image of the Future falls, I think, into this select category.”31 Boulding valued the book in particular because of Polak’s analysis of the current threat to Western civilization: “Because there is no glory in the future there is no life in the present; because of this, the Communist world, with its false and ill-founded but nevertheless glorious image of the future, presents the West with a grave challenge indeed.”32 Nevertheless he had his doubts about Polak’s thesis, due to his own progressive insights in general systems theories during the past ve years. According to him Polak had ignored the mechanical aspects in the development of a culture which went their way more or less independent of any images, like population growth, capital accumulation and the spread of knowledge and technology: “The dynamics of society, that is to say, is a mixture of latent mechanics and manifest images; neither the latent nor the manifest alone will explain it.”33

30 Elise Boulding, Cultures of Peace: the Hidden Side of History (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 29. 31 Kenneth E. Boulding, review of The Image of the Future by Fred L. Polak, Journal of Political Economy 70, no. 2 (1962): 193. 32 Ibid., 193. 33 Ibid., 193.

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Werner Stark (University of Manchester) in the American Sociological Review agreed with Boulding in one sense: “It must be said at once that this is a book of prophecy rather than a work of scholarship.”34 Stark seemed to have been somewhat at a loss with the main thesis of the book since he hardly pays attention to it. He acknowledged Polak’s idealism to change the state of hopelessness of the West by calling for new utopian visions of the future, but he doesn’t reect on it. Instead in the rest of his review Stark focused on the “many and serious shortcomings”; the book didn’t focus on its subject, it was too diffuse, and Polak’s style was too overdone: “[. . .] I nd it impossible not to express keen regret that the author, whose idealism should be freely acknowledged, has not seen t to check his intuitions by those sober scholarly techniques without which even the best endeavor is unlikely to succeed.”35 Oliver L. Reiser (University of Pittsburgh) in his review showed appreciation of Polak’s “penetrating analyses” of the dominant images of the future in history. Reiser emphasized Polak’s optimism as different from for example Oscar Spengler in demonstrating that man’s capacity to create and follow visions has not been lost. He criticized Polak mainly for his strictly Western orientation; Polak should realize that it was no longer possible for any nation or people to project an image of the future which was not a one-world synoptic vision, that is, an East-West complementarity.36 In short, for most reviewers this work could not stand the test of thorough scholarship but they admired the idealistic approach of the book and Polak’s call for a new hopeful Utopia, which could serve as a counterpart to communist utopianism. Moreover, Polak’s positive approach to the future corresponded very well with the American academic tradition, in particular of the social sciences.

34 Werner Stark, review of The Image of the Future by Fred L. Polak, American Sociological Review 27, no. 1 (1962): 129. 35 Ibid., 130. These faults were, by the way, almost identical to the ones which Dutch reviewers had noticed when the Dutch edition had been published in 1954. 36 Oliver L.Reiser, review of The Image of the Future by Fred L. Polak, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (March 1962): 182.

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A Classic for Futurologists With the next, abridged 1973 edition of The Image of the Future Polak seemed to have moved denitely into the realm of Futures Studies. In her preface Elise Boulding referred to the “sudden proliferation of theories, books, societies, and institutions all dedicated to the study of the future” during the last ten years: “Very few people are aware of the intellectual debt that this future-oriented scholarship and activity owes to Fred Polak, who was the rst in the post-World War II period to undertake the difcult conceptual work of clarifying the role of the image of the future in the social process at the societal level. Much of the recent work is of a strictly empirical nature, which Polak himself welcomes, but to focus on these empirical studies without knowledge of the broad sweep of the underlying historical processes involved is to sell mankind short at a very crucial time in history.”37 Reviewer Joseph Martino in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change applauded this abridged edition, and focused mainly on Polak’s optimistic perception that sooner or later a new image, which would inspire near-universal acceptance, would arise and revive Western culture.38 Paula Jean Miller in the American Journal of Sociology, was one of the rst to name the book a classic for futurologists because of the impact of Polak’s ideas on the founding fathers of futurology Wendell Bell and his associates. Bell and James A. Mau had edited the volume The Sociology of the Future just three years earlier in 1971, in which they had positioned Polak as one of the main theorists of the role of imagery in Future Studies. Miller also valued Polak’s work highly because it offered a new direction for sociology; sociologists had generally ignored imagery and its role in shaping human action and The Image of the Future bridged this gap. However she concluded that Elise Boulding had taken too many liberties in her abridgement (like crucial omissions in Polak’s argumentation), making it difcult at times to separate her ideas from Polak’s.39 Therefore Miller advised her readers to read the original

37 Elise Boulding, translator’s preface to The Image of the Future by Fred Polak (Amsterdam/London: Elsevier Scientic Publishing Company: 1973), vii–viii. The rst, unabridged translation had no translator’s preface. 38 Joseph P. Martino, review of The Image of the Future by Fred Polak, Technological Forecasting and Social Change 6 (1974): 223–224. 39 Paula Jean Miller, review of The Image of the Future by Fred Polak, American Journal of Sociology 80, no. 2 (1974): 583.

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two volumes, seven-hundred pages of text instead, even though Polak presented his ideas there in a “rambling manner”. Obviously by 1973 Polak’s work had achieved a good and wide reputation in circles of American social scientists who were engaged in Futures Studies. Almost twenty years had passed since the rst publication in Dutch of The Image of the Future and Polak’s stay at the CASBS in Palo Alto. During this time Polak did not publish any articles in American scholarly journals, nor did he return to the United States for lecture tours or research. In fact, in 1961 he had left his position at the Rotterdam School of Economics for a management job with a private corporation, and was hardly involved in academics anymore. Except for the publication of Prognostics in 1971 and a couple of articles in volumes of the international future research organization Mankind 2000, he mainly (and extensively) published in Dutch. Therefore his status among American futurists has to be attributed mainly to his The Image of the Future. In the early 1960s The Image of the Future seemed to have answered to the need for new hope and a positive future of the West as a counterforce to the fear of a declining West and to the utopianism of the communist world. The early 1970s academic interest in the book can be explained because it was published in the United States at a very decisive moment in the development of Futures Studies. It needs a closer look at the early stage of this new interdisciplinary eld of study in order to assess Polak’s role in it.

The Rise of Futures Studies in the United States Up until the early 1960s studying the future had been limited to individual scientists and science ction writers, but then spread rapidly to a larger and partly academic scale. This occurred at rst mainly in the United States, but very soon all over the world.40 Manifestations of this development were the establishment of a considerable number of associations of futurists (like the American-based World Future Society in 1966), of futures research departments with corporations, and of futures think tanks and periodicals (12 in 1965, 122 in 1978). Conferences and courses and educational programs in Futures Stud-

40 Outside the United States, in particular Australian/New Zealand universities and universities in Asia have departments of Futures Studies.

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ies at American universities and colleges emerged all over the United States. The Futures Studies movement tted very well in the political and cultural climate of opinion of the 1960s and early 1970s. On the one hand these were years of high hopes and optimism, of great expectations, of a strong belief that scientic research was instrumental in processes of progress. On the other hand fear and insecurity of the future were wide spread due to the nuclear arms race, the ongoing Cold War, armed conicts, poverty, environmental pollution, and processes of rationalization and automation causing estrangement and isolation with the individual. As a result these decades were, in short, a period of ‘futures vogue’ and futures research in the United States was booming.41 Publications like Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener’s The Year 2000 (1967), Alvin Tofer’s Future Shock (1970), the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth (1972) and Daniel Bell’s The Post-Industrial Society (1973) marked a turning point in the perception of human problems. In particular Limits is considered to have been a decisive publication for Futures Studies, because it strongly advanced the development of futures thinking.42 Futures scholars like Tofer, James A. Dator, and Wendell Bell introduced futures courses at their institutions, followed by others. In 1973 between three-hundred-fty and four-hundred courses on the future were being taught at colleges and universities in the United States and Canada alone. Some universities, like the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Minnesota, Portland State University, and the University of Houston, Texas offered degree programs in Futures Studies: two in 1969, forty-ve in 1978.43 As Tofer mentioned in 1972: “It is becoming acceptable, in academic circles, to talk about the future. (Before now it seemed unscholarly, unscientic, even “unserious”.)”44 The fact that Polak’s Image of the Future was published during this pioneering stage of Futures Studies certainly did contribute to its success. His new, refreshing approach of cultural change together with the role attributed to social scientists in this process was very appealing to these early futurists, who were “exasperated with the close-minded,

41 Wendell Bell, Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 62. 42 Wendell Bell, “Futures Studies Comes of Age: Twenty-ve Years after The Limits to Growth,” Futures 33 (2001): 64. 43 Bell, Foundations, 63. 44 Tofer, 4.

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conventional thinking within the mainstream disciplines, the reluctance of many professors and university administrators to accept a new idea and facing pressures to conform intellectually within [their] disciplines.”45 His perception on the role of images of the future in processes of cultural change became one of the key approaches within futures studies.46 Very soon, he was acknowledged as one of the theoretical founders of futurology and his The Image of the Future became a classic of the new discipline.

The Social Scientist as Creator and Disseminator of Images An excellent example of the impact of Polak’s Image can be found in the 1971 volume The Sociology of the Future, edited by Wendell Bell and James Mau. The purpose of this collection of essays was to initiate a new direction in American sociology; in the editor’s opinion American sociology had become overly concerned with reliability, method, and social order and statistics, while in their perception “Today, social change is commanding attention; planned social change is the challenge; and social relevance is the demand, both from within and without the profession.”47 Bell and Mau called for a shift in the orientation of sociology, which might even result in the creation of a new sub discipline of futuristics. In their introductory article ‘Images of the Future: Theory and Research Strategies’ they presented “the image of the future” as the explanatory concept which served as a key variable in their theory of social change. Elements like dynamism and change, causal interaction of ideas—beliefs and values—and social structure, decisions, and deliberate efforts of man to shape society were stressed in this theory. In introducing this concept to their audience, they referred extensively to Polak’s work (and that of political scientist Harold D. Lasswell) and acknowledged the value of Polak’s 1961 The Image of the Future as the foundation for their new theory of social change based on images of the future.48 They emphasized Polak’s dedication to positive idealism, 45

Bell, “Futures Studies Comes of Age,” 66. Wendell Bell and James A. Mau, “Images of the Future: Theory and Research Strategies,” in The Sociology of the Future: Theory, Cases, and Annotated Bibliography, eds. Wendell Bell and James A. Mau (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1971), 12–13. 47 Bell and Mau, 3. 48 Ibid., 13. 46

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constructive images, and his belief in man’s potential to intervene for the better. Moreover they agreed with Polak’s perception on the role of the social scientist; not just an objective researcher but also a creator and disseminator of images of the future: “The social scientist is answerable for the future, in that he is both the carrier and the creator of an image of the future, consciously or unconsciously.”49 Polak’s dedication to positive idealism, constructive images and optimism and his redenition of the social scientist as a creator and disseminator of images of the future corresponded very well with a new direction within American social sciences. More than other sciences, social and behavioral sciences aimed at improving the quality of the human condition, operating from the paradigm that human progress could be planned because science offered the tools for developing theories and models which guaranteed this improvement. However, this traditional scientic methodology was strictly rational, based on mathematics and statistics, on verifying and control, and ignoring the non-rational dimensions of human and social life like values, beliefs, ideals, and creativity. Polak came from a different, European sociological tradition, in which sociology belonged as much to the humanities as to the sciences. Coming from this tradition he was less focused on developing systems and models. Instead he was more aware of the humanities side of sociology like the history of every phenomenon and event, the complexity of changes in society, the role of religions, and ideas and ideals in initiating cultural change. He acknowledged the importance of values, living in Dutch society where during the 1940s and 50s religion, strict morals and ethics still had been an essential part of Dutch private and public life. In his 1948 dissertation on subjectivity in the social sciences he had already successfully defended the need for recognition of the importance of the non-rational; in The Image of the Future he had applied this starting point in a convincing way in studying the role of images of the future in initiating cultural change. In doing so, he had offered his American colleagues a way to incorporate a more ‘valued’ or humanities perspective into their own research for future progress.

49

Ibid., 14–15.

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A year after the publication of The Sociology of the Future, Alvin Tofer published his anthology The Futurists (1972). In this overview of leading futurists he positioned Polak into the group of ‘Philosophers and Planners’ together with scholars like Kenneth E. Boulding, Daniel Bell, and Bertrand de Jouvenel. He named Polak ‘the cultural historian of the futurist movement.’50 For this anthology Tofer chose a ‘poetic’ passage “Crossing the Frontiers of the Unknown” from Polak’s ‘masterful’ The Image of the Future, which he introduced as “[. . .] what people think will happen has a denite impact on what does happen.”51 Tofer’s choice for this section (from Chapter 1 of the book) is not very surprising; with broad statements in his rather pompous language Polak sketches the drive behind human progress: “Crossing frontiers is both man’s heritage and man’s task. The image of the future is his propelling power.”52 Considering the explicit as well as symbolic, even mythical importance of the concept of ‘frontier’ in American history and in the American ideology of progress, Polak’s contribution might be interpreted as an explanation and justication of America’s success without actually saying so. Envisioning a better future and human progress has always been part of the American creed, being a driving force behind major developments in American history as well as individual accomplishments. In connecting ‘crossing frontiers’ to a central element in the dynamics of cultural change, which was having a positive image of the future, Polak seemed to link the American experience of less than two hundred years to a world-wide, more than three thousand years old history of great civilizations. American readers might consider this as a conrmation that the American way of ‘crossing frontiers’ with an image of progress in mind was a guarantee for a better future to come true and an example for other nations.

50

Tofer, 6. In fact Tofer took two passages from The Image of the Future: “Crossing the Frontiers of the Unknown,” 1:26–29, to which he added “Developing Ways and Means of Visualizing the Future,” 1:36–37. 52 Fred L. Polak, “Crossing the Frontiers of the Unknown,” in The Futurists, ed. A. Tofer (New York: Random House, 1972), 287. 51

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Conclusion Future Studies never became a ourishing academic discipline in Polak’s home country The Netherlands and this was one of the reasons why Polak himself and his work on the future became increasingly controversial there from the 1960s on. In fact, at the same time that Polak’s star was rising among American futurists, most of his former Dutch academic colleagues considered him a charlatan and a stain on the academic coat of arms. The often sloppiness of his research and his pompous style of writing, together with a non conformist attitude verging on arrogance and a wide range of non-academic activities (he was also engaged in management and politics) contributed to this image whereas he considered himself a prophet crying in the wilderness. In fact, his opus magnum The Image of the Future received far more acknowledgement in the United States than in The Netherlands. In this, Polak differed from most of the other Dutch scholars who acquired recognition and fame among American academics. Tinbergen, Kapteyn, De Vries, Lorentz, and Kolff were all prominent scientists with impressive states of duty in The Netherlands before their work crossed the Atlantic, whereas Polak was considered ‘a coming man’ when he arrived in Palo Alto in 1954, but never proved to come up to expectations. As we have seen, Polak’s Dutch cultural background as shown in his work was one of the reasons why he succeeded in becoming a pioneer in American Futures Studies. Manifestations of this ‘Dutchness’ in The Image of the Future were his concern for humanity and his focus on the importance of idealism, ethical values and positive images of the future for creating successful civilizations—these proved to be very attractive for American social scientists working in Futures Studies. Their appreciation of The Image of the Future also resulted from its humanities approach which originated in the European-Dutch tradition of sociology: with his cultural history of the dynamics of culture he offered his American colleagues a revealingly new perspective. Next to these ‘Dutch’ elements Polak’s success among American social scientists and futurists was also related to an ideological dimension, the American political and cultural climate of opinion in the 1950s and 1960s. The Image of the Future supported the efforts of the social sciences to counterforce the fear of a decline of Western civilization and simultaneously the threat of the attractiveness of communism with supplying a new hope for the West. Polak’s Image sustained these efforts

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in offering an historical analysis of the rise and fall of great civilizations which implied that the American past of ‘crossing frontiers’ had been a condition for America’s current power and success. As such the book was a (small) contribution to the so-called cultural Cold War. Moreover, Polak was convinced that social scientists had to play a central role in the solution of contemporary problems. In this he corresponded with the American creed of progress and pragmatism; application of results of (social) science research was the best guarantee of human progress. Finally, and importantly, his success was also the result of his more or less accidental meeting with the Bouldings in Palo Alto. One might even wonder if The Image of the Future ever would have been published in the United States if the Bouldings and Polak hadn’t become such good friends. The role of Elise Boulding has been crucial in this—she was fascinated with Polak’s ideas (and probably his personality) and found the time and energy to learn the Dutch language in order to translate the book into English. She kept her loyalty towards Polak during her whole career and succeeded in transforming the essentials of his image theory into strategies for the peace research movement. Kenneth Boulding’s acknowledgement of the meaning of The Image of the Future for his own turn towards Futures Studies, together with his respectable reputation within the American academic world paved the way to recognition from other futurists. He can be considered as the key to Polak’s eventual status of pioneer of Futures Studies in the United States.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

FROM BAUHAUS TO OUR HOUSE TO KOOLHAAS: THE OFFICE FOR METROPOLITAN ARCHITECTURE (OMA) AND MODERN AMERICAN CULTURE Christopher Pierce *

Mies had to ‘become’ an American to realize his European self. Without the combined intelligence of the two cultures, the Seagram Building could not have been.1

Preface Nearly thirty years ago in Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1978) an unknown Dutchman, to quote Paul Goldberger, “rejoiced that the ‘hyperbolic’ architecture of New York was irrational—that fantasy was more important to the designers of New York’s great early skyscrapers than any sort of principles of structural honesty or form following function.”2 At the centre of Rem Koolhaas’s thesis was a form/function versus capital/commercial opposition. As one of a handful of contemporary international ‘star-chitects,’ Koolhaas’s recent work in the United States builds on this uniquely Dutch viewpoint.3 According to Koolhaas’s late Seventies manifesto, the ‘hysterical narcissism’ of early twentieth-century New York—wrapped up in the

* I would like to thank Benjamin Schmidt for his comments on my original paper and on the text during its development. My gratitude for their valuable criticism also goes to David Dunster, Tony Roberts, and Tom Weaver. Stephan Petermann and Isabel Pagel at OMA, Alexandra Pander at Inside/Outside, and the entire staff at the British Library provided excellent research assistance. I am also very grateful to Iwan Baan, Timothy Greeneld-Sanders, Philippe Ruault, and Wolfgang Tillmans for generously permitting the use of their images. 1 Koolhaas, Rem and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, Inc., 1995), p. 363. 2 Paul Goldberger, “He’ll Take Manhattan,” in The New York Review of Books, vol. 26, no. 10 (14 June 1979), pp. 15–17. 3 Daniel Zalewski, “Proles: Intelligent Design—Can Rem Koolhaas Kill the Skyscraper?” in The New Yorker (14 March 2005), p. 112, pp. 110–125.

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‘architectural mutations,’ ‘utopian fragments,’ and ‘irrational phenomena’ of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Downtown Athletic Club, and Rockefeller Center—succumbed in the 1950s to the forces of rationalism reected in the mimetic nature of American architecture in the second half of the twentieth century. Given that context, Koolhaas turned to the Modern European émigré architects in the United States, in particular three ‘messiahs of the Bauhaus’—Walter Gropius (1883–1969), Marcel Breuer (1902–1981), and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969)—to ll the vacant antihero role. By proclaiming the difference of Mies’s architecture in his controversial essay “Miestakes” (2000), what he terms its “essence of formlessness, amorphousness, nothingness, perversion, and anxiety,” and citing the ‘rebellious attitude’ of Breuer’s ‘isolated’ Whitney Museum of American Art, Koolhaas rewrites the narrative of Modern American architectural history around colonialism’s ‘Otherness’ for a second time.4 The rst time, in Delirious New York, it was as an unknown novelist. The second time, in “Miestakes,” it was as a celebrated architect with a stful of American commissions to ll. Koolhaas portrays his émigré predecessors as hedonists not antagonists in the canon of American architectural Modernism. This is the foundation for his recent work in the United States and gets us to the view, borrowing from Harry Harootunian’s incisive summary of the French traveller, author, and naval doctor Victor Segalen’s (1878–1919) thesis, “that exoticism is the candidate best suited to protect contemporary life from the relentless banality wrought by the transformation of capitalism into mass-society imperialism and colonialism.”5 Exoticism is the touchstone of Koolhaas’s persona and practice. It is never more effective than when practiced in the United States. Rem Koolhaas, as Luis Fernández-Galiano writes, “has long been considered the best representative of ‘Americanism,’ the fascination of the European avant-garde for the carefree audacity of American construction, of which the skyscraper is the paradigm.”6 This essay focuses on a particular aspect of Koolhaas’s production, namely his American/Dutch-ness and the context of his formal innovation. It 4 Rem Koolhaas, “Miestakes,” in Phyllis Lambert, ed., Mies in America (New York: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Whitney Museum of American Art, 2001), p. 733, pp. 716–743. 5 Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity, tr. and ed. Yaël Rachel Schlick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 6 Luis Fernández-Galiano, “Asia on One Hand, Europe on the Other,” in Arquitectura Viva 105–106 (April 2004), pp. 224–227.

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has two principal objectives: to describe the advances of his Rotterdam-based architectural practice, Ofce for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), on the European legacy in American Modernist architecture, and, perhaps more challengingly, to stake a claim for the socio-political Dutchness of Koolhaas’s two most recent buildings in the United States—the McCormick-Tribune Campus Center at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago (2003) and the Seattle Central Library (2004). These two aims attach a cultural specicity to contemporary architectural production and its producers. In the process the essay describes another unique aspect of the Dutch experience in America and the mutually benecial effect it has had on creativity/form.

I In the June 2001 edition of Vanity Fair, sandwiched between a glossy photo spread of Jennifer Lopez and a Technicolor exposé of another Bill Clinton ex, is a photograph titled ‘The Philip Johnson Group’ (Fig. 1).7 It pictures a club of fty-something plus multinational architects in the company of twentieth-century architecture’s master media mogul, Philip Johnson (1906–2005), on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday at the Four Seasons in New York. As it has been said, “Johnson stands for the contemporary paradigm of the power of branding.”8 Around him are his most successful protégés. As it has also been said: “no doubt the conversation sparkled, but it is a pity about the architecture.”9 That may be true, except on one front. Last on the credit list is the sixtythree year old Dutchman Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944), pictured tie-less on the far right, below Frank Gehry and above Kevin Roche. Koolhaas, like Johnson and Roche, and Richard Meier, Frank Gehry, and Zaha Hadid also pictured, is the recipient of the American Institute of Architects highest accolade, the Pritzker Prize (2000). In the United States his name must be the most recognizable of any living Dutchman. A sixteen-page ‘Prole’ in The New Yorker and frequent proles in magazines as diverse as BusinessWeek and Cosmopolitan is indicative

7

“Spotlight: Building the Century,” in Vanity Fair ( June 2001), p. 116–117. David Dunster, “Some Thoughts on Fame and the Institution of Architecture,” in Architectural Design 154, Fame and Architecture, ed. Julia Chance and Torsten Schmiedeknecht (2002), p. 10, pp. 8–11. 9 Dunster, “Some Thoughts on Fame and the Institution of Architecture,” p. 10. 8

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Fig. 1 Timothy Greeneld-Sanders, Portrait of Philip Johnson Group, 1996, Courtesy of Timothy Greeneld-Sanders, all rights reserved.

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of his broad popular appeal. In American eyes Koolhaas is what his frequently mispronounced name says—cool. Not since the one-legged talismanic gure of Pieter Stuyvesant (1592–1672), Director-General of New Amsterdam (1647–1664), arrived in 1647 has such a charismatic Dutchman sailed into Manhattan. In the 1930s and 40s European architects came to the United States bearing steamer trunks of rhetoric. American opportunity turned their principles to practice, and ultimately into some pretty good, if not uncommon aesthetics. In other words, in what the English poet, critic, and essayist Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968) describes as their ‘inevitable America,’ Gropius, Breuer, and Mies made groundbreaking buildings by dispensing with Old World social and political principles.10 Koolhaas rst arrived on American shores in the early Seventies packing the same trunk. Endowed with a Harkness Fellowship at Cornell University, and then as Visiting Fellow at Peter Eisenman’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, Koolhaas’s rst mark on America was the bestseller Delirious New York. It is arguably the best book on architecture, written by an architect, since Le Corbusier (1887–1965) published his Modernist ‘scripture’ Vers une Architecture (1923) (Towards a New Architecture). Ultimately, the test of any Koolhaas building is set up to be the painting by his wife, Madelon Vriesendorp, on the book’s original cover, Flagrant délit (‘caught in the act’)—showing the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building caught in bed together by Rockefeller Center (Fig. 2). Its ‘utopian nostalgia’ is the foundation for Koolhaas’s architecture. From the outset Koolhaas shows himself to be interested in lineage and his place in the twentieth-century canon, especially the American one that he was writing and in effect positioning himself into. As with critics before him, Hal Foster notes: Long ago Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and other young Europeans had adopted overlooked structures like American grain elevators as emblems of a functionalist Modernism to come. In Delirious New York Koolhaas claimed another sort of American primitive as a prototype for a renewed Modernism—the pragmatic architects of skyscraper Manhattan such

10 On Gropius’s, Breuer’s, and Mies’s ‘Americanism’, see Barry Bergdoll, “Encountering America: Marcel Breuer and the Discourses of the Vernacular from Budapest to Boston,” in Vitra Design Museum, Marcel Breuer: Design and Architecture (Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Stiftung, 2003), pp. 260–307; Lambert, ed., Mies in America; and Detlef Mertens, ed., The Presence of Mies (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994).

Fig. 2

Madelon Vriesendorp, Flagrant Délit, painting.

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as Raymond Hood and Wallace Harrison, the chief designers of the Rockefeller Center among other projects.11

Today Koolhaas is closer than ever to getting a building in the picture with these American icons. That is the canon he elected to be involved with and in that context the Gropius, Breuer, and Mies connection is vital. Koolhaas’s recent buildings in Chicago and Seattle are the result of his unique historical synthesis. Both buildings, in form and material, acknowledge Gropius’s and other early European Modernists’ admiration for the brave new world of American industrialization. More signicantly though, they underline Koolhaas’s afnity for contemporary science and technology, especially Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and the United States Air Force’s F-117A Nighthawk stealth ghter aircraft. They emphatically advance American architecture’s only notable twentieth-century manifesto, Robert Venturi’s, Denise Scott Brown’s, and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (1972).12 The crux of their polemic—that “urged architects not to reject but to ‘learn from’ the architecture of the commercial strip, and, . . . turn the strip’s wasteful land-use patterns, glaring signage, and loony classicism into works of architectural art”—was not ‘forgotten.’13 It was a distillation of Gropius’s, Breuer’s, and Mies’s twentieth-century architectural response to the Modern American landscape, what Barry Bergdoll termed Breuer’s ‘native Modernism.’ It has been asked whether a “Koolhaasian amplication of infrastructural and industrial typologies will be any more effective, as antidote to junkspace, than Venturi’s have proven to be, or that the early modernists hoped to achieve in their attack on bourgeois sensibilities”?14 What Michael Benedikt’s question on the fate of the American built environment overlooks is the progressivism of Koolhaas’s avant-garde position and that his more recent writings, including “Junkspace” (2000)— unlike Venturi, Scott-Brown, and Izenour, even Le Corbusier—do not describe a design methodology, but empirical circumstances that contextualize a disassociated design process. Koolhaas’s two most recent and

11 Hal Foster, “Bigness,” in London Review of Books, vol. 23, no. 23 (29 November 2001), p. 13, pp. 13–16. 12 See “Re-learning from Las Vegas,” in Rem Koolhaas, Content (Köln: Taschen, 2004), pp. 150–157. 13 Michael Benedikt, “Environmental Stoicsm and Place Machismo: A Polemic,” in Harvard Design Magazine (Winter/Spring 2002). 14 See Benedikt, “Environmental Stoicsm and Place Machismo: A Polemic.”

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individually very different buildings in the United States are products of an accumulation of twentieth-century American exotica more than they are simply ‘an amplication of infrastructural and industrial typologies.’ They have been regularly criticized for their progressive approach and capitalizing on the ‘visual language of millennial capitalism’—“what is seen as a witty response will in a couple of years seem so 2001;”15 “whether this is just an arresting techno-gimmick with momentary appeal or something with a longer life span is hard to tell.”16 In Delirious New York and subsequent texts Koolhaas proclaims his relation to these other Modernists who took supercially similar, yet plainly different paths to their American architectural statements. Koolhaas’s residence in the United States is not the uninterrupted one of his European predecessors. In 1978 he returned to Rotterdam for seventeen years.17 In this time his only United States commission was the unrealized competition proposal for the Metro Dade Center for the Arts, Miami (1994). His ‘second-coming’ came in 1995 when he accepted a position at Harvard as Professor in Practice in the Department of Architecture, Johnson’s Alma Mater and Gropius’s and Breuer’s American sponsor. Like his Modernist predecessors, the ground was laid for his début with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)—the institution that Tom Wolfe famously termed the “colonial complex inated to prodigious dimensions.”18 Koolhaas’s reception in America and his relation to other émigré Modernists is entwined with Philip Johnson. Koolhaas was a devotee of Johnson’s since the Seventies and they are both intimately associated with that effective breed of the European émigré architect in the United States that Johnson rst propagandized in his and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s ground-breaking show, ‘Modern Architecture: International Exhibition,’ at MoMA in

15 See Peter Hall, “Wrestling with the Legacy,” in Metropolis Magazine (August/ September 2001). 16 Benjamin Forgey, “What the El?! Koolhaas Design is a Roaring Success,” in The Washington Post (November 2, 2003). 17 Hal Foster looks at Koolhaas’s return to Europe propitiously: “Koolhaas took this pragmatic example home to Europe in the late 1970s, and it allowed him to split the difference between the [ Rob/Leon] Krier and [ Robert] Venturi/ [Denise] Scott Brown positions, and to gear OMA towards polemical demonstrations that aspects of Modernism, both American and European, can be made to co-exist with the historical core, and that only a new urbanism that abandons pretensions of harmony and overall coherence can turn the tensions and contradictions that tear the historical city apart into a new quality.” See Foster, “Bigness,” pp. 13–14. 18 Wolfe, Tom, From Bauhaus to Our House (New York: Bantam Books, 1999), p. 32.

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1932.19 Johnson’s concern for aesthetics over polemics had its effects on the buildings of the émigré proponents of Modernism in the United States in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Just as Johnson’s and Hitchcock’s exhibition had done for Gropius, Breuer, and Mies, Koolhaas’s retrospective, ‘OMA at MoMA: Rem Koolhaas and the Place of Public Architecture’ (1995), cultivated his ‘exoticism.’20 The only American reference was Koolhaas’s recently republished ‘retroactive’ manifesto on New York. In name alone that did more to associate him with the culture of early twentieth-century Europe than anything happening in the mid-Nineties in the United States. Writing a manifesto and showing at MoMA pronounced Koolhaas the heir apparent, not only of Johnson but also of Gropius. His re-arrival coincided with the publication of his magnum opus S,M,L,XL, and the opening of an OMA ofce in New York—the ‘capital of Capital’—making the symbolic move that among his European mentors only Breuer ever managed. Mark Leonard, former Director of the Foreign Policy Centre in London, recently wrote in the Financial Times that Koolhaas is the “chief architect of political power of the 21st [century].”21 That could explain his newfound favour and fortune with the American cognoscenti. In his career Koolhaas has designed around twenty projects in the United States. Five of these have been built in the last six years—Prada Epicenter New York (2001), Hermitage Guggenheim Las Vegas (2001), McCormick-Tribune Campus Center, Chicago, Prada Epicenter Beverly Hills (2004), and the Seattle Central Library. He may be described as having a “moral rejection of the US,” but that is more success than Koolhaas has had in any other country.22 So the hook is simple. Koolhaas’s recent projects in the United States—the product of a second-generation European, more specically a Dutch import—can be seen to be an emerging part of the distinct genealogy of architectural Modernism that formed in the United States in the Thirties and 19 See Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995). 20 Koolhaas has regularly featured at MoMA. He was included in MoMA’s 1988 ‘Deconstructivist Architecture’ survey, and ‘CCTVTVCC by OMA / Ole Scheeren and Rem Koolhaas’ opened at MoMA in autumn 2006. He was also one of ten architects invited to compete for MoMA’s extension in 1997. 21 Mark Leonard, “Power Housing,” in Financial Times (6 March 2004). 22 In the same period OMA has also had four other major commissions cancelled: Universal Studios in Los Angeles; a Manhattan hotel designed in collaboration with Herzog & de Meuron; Los Angeles County Museum of Art extension; and the enlargement of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

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Forties and culminated at the end of the Sixties. Among the rst wave of European Modernists in the United States, Gropius and his acolyte Breuer went to Boston, to Harvard, in 1937; and in 1938 Mies went to Chicago, to the Armour Institute, later renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology.23 The legacy of these three World War II émigrés as the inuence for the bulk of Modern American architectural culture is unassailable. Architectural education would be unrecognizable without Gropius (or Mies for that matter), Modern furniture without Breuer, and the American cityscape without Mies. Koolhaas’s connection to these three is polemical, but it is also prosaic. Koolhaas has followed in the footsteps of Gropius and Breuer with a Professorship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design; the McCormick-Tribune Campus Center is sited on Mies’s campus at IIT and attached to his Commons Building; and Breuer’s Whitney Museum of American Art was the subject of two unrealized extension proposals by OMA. The way this argument is headed I want to downplay Gropius. History has proven that his most productive period of practice was behind him by the time he got to Boston in his mid-fties.24 Whereas Breuer and Mies are largely dened by their American work. Koolhaas has proclaimed his affection for Mies on many occasions: “I do not respect Mies, I love Mies,” he writes in “Miestakes.”25 His admiration for Breuer is unrecorded. None of the rst wave of European émigré architects was Dutch. The surviving giants of early Dutch Modernism proved to be homebodies. Its most imaginative architectural exponents, J. J. P. Oud (1890–1963) and Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964), vainly waited out the Second World War in the Netherlands. If we can agree that Koolhaas’s general bona des as an admired architect are by now a given, and that Modernism, progressivism, and Euro-American architectural narratives are an integral aspect of his and his Modernist predecessors engagement with the material culture of the United States, what is less established

23

On the subject of Mies’s entry to the United States see Cammie McAtee’s excellent essay, “Alien #5044325: Mies’s First Trip to America,” in Mies in America, pp. 132–185. 24 Gropius formed The Architects Collaborative (TAC) in Boston in 1945 with seven other partners. See Walter Gropius [and others], ed., The Architects Collaborative, 1945–1965 (New York: Architectural Book Pub. Co., 1966). 25 Koolhaas, “Miestakes,” p. 720. Koolhaas sounds more like Mies all the time. In a recent edition of New Yorker he is quoted as saying: “I really dislike the word ‘interesting.’ ” As Mies famously put it: “I don’t want to be interesting, I want to be good.”

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is where he is coming from—Holland. Filling this intellectual space is the essay’s second main objective. How Dutch is Rem Koolhaas and how does this relate to his American works and reception? In Timothy Greeneld-Sanders’s photograph, ‘The Philip Johnson Group,’ Koolhaas is a shadow of the individualist that Johnson admired. In this conception and composition he is nearer to one of the many anonymous Arminian regent of seventeenth-century group portraiture fame, what Alois Riegl (1858–1905) aptly labels ‘corporate portraiture.’26 Koolhaas could hardly be accused of personifying the “caricature of cosmopolitan hubris” as Ian Buruma labels him in The New York Review of Books,27 or of “think[ing] of [him]self as being global” as he describes himself in S,M,L,XL, or of eschewing the authorship of the ‘building blocks’ of “the dreams of ‘cyberpunk’ ction”28 as Aaron Betsky characterises OMA’s output in What is OMA (2004). Like his personication in Greeneld-Sanders’s photograph, Koolhaas’s recent work in the United States is also socially and temperamentally Dutch. Nevertheless, the complicit gure pictured has exercised great inuence both on American architecture and the eventual shape of its Modernism. Paul Goldberger’s late Seventies article “He’ll Take Manhattan” accurately predicted that Johnson’s heir as “ringmaster of Manhattan and patron of the controllable avant-garde” was not the dapper silver haired American architect sitting cross-legged in the foreground named Peter Eisenman.29 Johnson’s mantle landed in Koolhaas’s lap because he has what Johnson valued above all else—‘exoticism.’ Neither is it astonishing that German fashionista photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, the man who snaps Kate Moss’s crotch, also tracks down a late middle-aged Dutch architect (Fig. 3). However, to a seasoned observer of the seventeenth-century Rotterdamer Pieter de Hooch’s (1629–1684) paintings, the stereotypical black-and-white marble oor tiles in Tillmans’s portrait are a giveaway of Koolhaas’s homeland.

26

See Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, intro. Wolfgang Kemp, tr. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999). 27 Ian Buruma, “The Sky’s the Limit,” in The New York Review of Books, vol. 43, no. 19 (28 November 1996), p. 42, pp. 42–47. 28 Aaron Betsky, “Rem Koolhaas: The Fire of Manhattanism Inside the Iceberg of Modernism,” in Véronique Patteeuw, ed., What is OMA: Considering Rem Koolhaas and the Ofce for Metropolitan Architecture (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2003), p. 35, pp. 25–39. 29 Goldberger, “He’ll Take Manhattan.”

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Wolfgang Tillmans, Rem Koolhaas, Sitting, 2000, c-type photographic print, Courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

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Both portraits—Greeneld-Sanders’s and Tillmans’s—affect a subtle balance between the idiosyncratic reputation of Koolhaas and his distinct cultural association, whether in the genre of group or individual portraiture. Koolhaas’s early twentieth-century predecessors in Holland, household names in the Modern European architectural canon ranging from Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856–1934) to Oud, and including Michel De Klerk (1884–1923), Rietveld, Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931), and Cornelis van Eesteren (1897–1988) make it clear that Koolhaas’s Dutchness is not derived from architecture. In that company Koolhaas is very un-Dutch. They did not travel and the transition from Europe to America and the New World’s material effect on the architecture of European Modernism, and specically the ideals of its most famous exponents—Gropius, Breuer, and Mies—did more to challenge the Modern idiom than the secondary accomplishments of local heroes. In the bigger picture, it is not the paradigm of the motorcar, ship, or any other generic icon of the Modern Movement, but the socio-cultural paradigm of economics and commerce that ties Koolhaas’s progressive Modernism to the Dutch. His Dutchness in relation to his American work is based on the society’s material history—trading practices, publishing, and cartography—not its general cultural and social stereotypes. For many other authors the Dutchness of Koolhaas’s architecture is a social construction. Aaron Betsky writes: “He also assimilated a Dutch tradition in which the architect is a collector and manipulator of social and economic data;”30 Ian Buruma comments that “his low-income housing project in the north of Amsterdam . . . is a model of Dutch sobriety;”31 and Arthur Lubow states that “Koolhaas’s ostentatious frugality is very Dutch. Similarly, his transparent glass boxes recall the Dutch habit of leaving living rooms undraped—not, as in a Mies glass house, so that the inhabitants can look out but so that passers-by may look in.”32 Mark Leonard notes: “The foreign ministry had asked for an expression of ‘Dutch openness’—and Koolhaas’s building delivers it with a very modern twist;”33 and in The New York Times: “Mr. Koolhaas

30 Betsky, “Rem Koolhaas: The Fire of Manhattanism Inside the Iceberg of Modernism,” p. 32. 31 Buruma, “The Sky’s the Limit,” p. 43. 32 Arthur Lubow, “Rem Koolhaas Builds,” in The New York Times Magazine (9 July 2000), pp. 30–37, 42, 62–63. 33 Leonard, “Power Housing.”

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also notes the Dutch pride in the national trait of economy and thrift. He actually likes the integration of the notion of cheapness to create sublime conditions.”34 OMA/AMO promotes itself as a global trading company in the Dutch globalizing tradition.35 The Dutch culture from which Koolhaas sprung is the epitome and originator of capitalism. Its world-trade hegemony for a century and a half, from the end of the sixteenth down to the early eighteenth century, is undisputed by contemporary historians.36 In this context the general mission of OMA/AMO is not considerably different to the VOC/WIC.37 The rst dozen pages of S,M,L,XL are given over to a series of charts plotting OMA’s workforce, income and expenditure, turnover, and travel behavior. The rm’s global currency is calculated and presented using an economist’s equation. Subsequent publications, including Mutations (2001) and Great Leap Forward (2002) (both part of Koolhaas’s Harvard Design School Project on the City), cover countless pages calculating and presenting international economic phenomenon and its intricacies with a zeal typically reserved to the World Bank. More remarkably, this is at a time when America’s economic supremacy is indisputable and the global nancial clout of its corporate architectural practices—e.g. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), and Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum (HOK)—is at its zenith. That has two manifestations reected in OMA’s ethos and the practice’s methodology. As Robert Zimmer, Project Director with LMN Architects in Seattle, relates: “Where most architects in the United States, including Seattle, will study on average three different 34 “Rem Koolhaas, Post-Nationalist Architect,” in The New York Times (11 September 1994). 35 AMO—OMA’s sister company—was devised in the late Nineties. As Koolhaas puts it: AMO is a “research studio and think thank that operates in areas beyond the boundaries of architecture and urbanism—including sociology, technology, media and politics . . . AMO’s work is to develop new models of thinking about systems and to create clearly considered blueprints for change.” Their most notable project to date has been a bar code ag for the European Commission. 36 In particular, see Israel, Jonathan I., Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); De Vries, Jan, and Ad Van Der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500 –1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Johannes Postma and Victor Enthoven, Riches from Atlantic Commerce: Dutch Transatlantic Trade and Shipping, 1585–1817 (Leiden: Brill, 2003); and Aymard, Maurice, Dutch Capitalism and World Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 37 Note: Dutch East India Company/Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) founded in 1602 and the Dutch West India Company/West-Indische Compagnie (WIC) founded in 1621.

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options for various parts of a project, architects at OMA will study 10 or more.”38 While contemporary American ofces sell architecture on an ideological and moral platform, Koolhaas deals in its economic reality. This schematic amalgam not only distinguishes Koolhaas from his American competitors, but it is also what differentiates seventeenthcentury Dutch commercial and especially colonial practices from their evangelical English and Spanish counterparts. As it has been said: Perhaps as a Dutchman, imprinted with his country’s role as an international trading center, he has fewer problems with global change than might someone of another nationality. The Dutch, a nation of traders, have not surprisingly spawned an architect whose work responds to the silent, nanosecond transnational ows of money and ideas.39

Money is historically anathema in Modern architecture and kudos typically comes via an academic-type of deportment. Koolhaas has reversed the culture and cashed-in. It is poignant how Koolhaas denes Dutchness in S,M,L,XL: “To its rst generation of patriotic eulogists, Dutchness was often equated with the transformation, under divine guidance, of catastrophe into good fortune, inrmity into strength, water into dry land, mud into gold.”40 He attributes an equally as hyperbolic conversion factor to his buildings in Seattle and Chicago. The library: a ‘moralistic and defensive’ . . . ‘fortress’ is “redene(d) . . . as an information store where all potent forms of media—new and old—are presented equally and legibly.”41 At IIT a ‘graphic diagram of disengagement’ is resolved with a ‘at Pompeian carpet of program.’42 Koolhaas’s recent United States projects testify to the ‘empire builder’s perennial fear’ of ‘going native’ in relation to practicing in any foreign territory, but more historically to colonizing the New World. Tom Wolfe succinctly describes the twentieth-century Northern European ‘re-conquest’ of the United States: “The most fabled creatures . . . those dazzling European artists . . . they were . . . here! . . . in the land of the colonial

38

Quoted in John Marshall, “The Architects, Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Ramus,” in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (20 May 2004). 39 “Rem Koolhaas, Post-Nationalist Architect,” in The New York Times (11 September 1994). 40 Koolhaas and Mau, S,M,L,XL, p. 312. 41 “Seattle Central Library,” GA Document 80 (Tokyo: A.D.A. EDITA Tokyo Co. Ltd., 2004), p. 14. 42 “McCormick Tribune Campus Center,” GA Document 76 (Tokyo: A.D.A. EDITA Tokyo Co. Ltd., 2003), p. 14.

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complex . . . to govern, in person, their big little Nigeria of the Arts.”43 What this meant for Gropius, Breuer, and Mies was an incorporation into the ‘vernacular’ reality of America, what Barry Bergdoll cites in an essay on Breuer as “a subtle negotiation between Breuer’s ideas of the vernacular and the American audience’s concept of vernacularism, embodied in the perennial appeal of the American colonial revival in the twentieth century as well as the strong regionalist tastes and discourses already at play in American culture in the 1930s.”44 What this meant in material terms was that socio-political, uniform industrial designs like Gropius’s Torten-Siedlung (Housing Estate) in Dessau (1926–28), Breuer’s Harnischmacher House I in Wiesbaden (1932); and Mies’s Lemke House in Berlin (1932–33) were countered, in the rst instance, by small-scale local material and spatial explorations that preserved a rusticity, what Colin Rowe called an ‘increased taste for the rustic,’ or what K. Michael Hays said represented the effect of an ‘anthropological shock.’45 What resulted for Gropius and Breuer in the Gropius House, Lincoln, Massachusetts (1937–38) and Breuer House, Lincoln, Massachusetts (1939), and for Mies in the Resor House, Jackson Hole, Wyoming (1937–38) is an aestheticized, or one might say fetishized Modernism that culminated years later in the distinctive forms of the Whitney Museum of American Art (1964–66) and the Seagram Building in New York (1954–58). As it has been written: By the mid-1960s, so successful were Gropius, Breuer, and Mies van der Rohe in creating a new American vernacular in every landscape from the suburban house to the ofce that Breuer’s great space truss timber house in New Canaan, draped with an American ag, along with Philip Johnson’s nearby Glass House, had both made their way into the Annual of the New Canaan Historical Society.46

In the bigger picture, where Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968) conventionally talks about the moral inuence of Mies’s strict discipline on subsequent American architecture,47 Koolhaas emphasizes his architecture’s

43

Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House, p. 38. Bergdoll, “Encountering America: Marcel Breuer and the Discourses of the Vernacular from Budapest to Boston,” p. 264. 45 On Mies’s early work in Europe, see Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll, eds., Mies in Berlin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001). 46 Bergdoll, “Encountering America: Marcel Breuer and the Discourses of the Vernacular from Budapest to Boston,” p. 306. 47 See Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 5th revised and enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 44

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“essence of formlessness, amorphousness, nothingness, perversion, and anxiety.”48 This is typical of how American and US-based commentators attempt to naturalize the American work of these three architects while foreign commentators, including Koolhaas, tend to emphasize their exotic nature. Order and disorder, goodness and perversion, and form and formlessness are categories of discourse most frequently associated with the colonial project. Of these oppositions form/formlessness is the most obviously spatial. As Mark Dorrian writes: “Form bears the mark of intellect and is conventionally correlated with the rational, the logical, and the subject; conversely matter bears no intellectual trace and is correlated with the irrational, the alogical, and the object.”49 What Koolhaas is up to, amidst such provocative and potentially divisive rhetoric, is establishing the difference of Mies’s work following the European ‘reconquest’ of the United States. If the émigrés experienced the tug of the alterity of the ‘Other’ in drawing on local resources then Koolhaas, who has long been the maverick de rigeur, can be seen as continuing to oppose the resonances of the divine, metaphysical, and rightness and morality that are carried by the ‘formed,’ preferring instead to emphasize that lapsarian version of formlessness, the deformed, that carries with it a propensity to self-assessment. Dramatizing the results of the émigré’s residency in the United States facilitates Koolhaas’s critique of American culture and his ultimate bid to re-orientate the colonised subject. Koolhaas’s comment on Mies is also important for understanding how he interprets American architectural and cultural history. In Delirious New York, when discussing the Dutch West India Company’s original entry into North America, Koolhaas highlights the little known historian E. Porter Belden’s remark: “North American barbarism was to give place to European renement.” What Koolhaas takes to mean: “Manhattan is a theater of progress . . . Its plot is: barbarism giving way to renement.”50 And on the result of Dutch colonisation in North America he writes: Only once more does the Dutch instinct for order assert itself: when they carve, out of the bedrock, a canal that runs to the center of the city. On

48

Koolhaas, “Miestakes,” p. 733. See Mark Dorrian, “On Some Spatial Aspects of the Colonial Discourse on Ireland,” in The Journal of Architecture, vol. 6, no. 1 (Spring 2001), p. 29, pp. 27–51. 50 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994), p. 13. 49

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christopher pierce either side is a collection of traditional Dutch houses with gable roofs that maintain the illusion that the transplantation of Amsterdam into the New World has been a success.51

By writing that this colonial example was the nal time that “the Dutch instinct for order” was evident in the US, Koolhaas describes a straightforward, though uncommon history of American architecture. By his account America has mistaken the contribution of his twentieth-century European predecessors. It is not their former rationalism but their US-bred exoticism that should have been purloined by mid twentieth-century American architects. If his recent buildings are the epitome of a ‘native’ Modernist legacy that project the power and ideology of twentieth century’s most inuential society, Koolhaas’s books are the dening experiment in postmodern publishing—capturing the essence of a network of interdependent phenomenon without a single political centre. Notwithstanding all their global engagement they are dependent on the paradigm of Modern American culture and its more idiosyncratic aspects—shopping and travelling—and subjects—Atlanta and Houston. His latest offering on the publishing front, Content (2004), directly appealed to his Wal-Mart fan base; its predecessor S,M,L,XL (1995) to Manhattan’s Upper East Side set. There is also Mutations, Projects for Prada: Pt. 1 (2001), The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2002), and a few less notable publications since the millennium. The socio-political associations of Koolhaas’s publishing range are a reminder of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Dutch adeptness in this arena. His ancestors led the early Modern European market in the production and dissemination of both mass market and spectacular ‘coffeetable’ books, as Benjamin Schmidt calls them, of their overseas observations and conquests.52 These books were an inuential aspect of a particularly economic phenomenon. Caspar van Baerle (1584–1648), Joost Schouten, Johannes Nieuhof (1618–1672), and Arnoldus Montanus (1625–1683) (signicant for his North American interests) among many other prolic authors from publishers including Jacob van Meurs, Cornelis Jansz, Joan Blaeu, 51

Koolhaas, Delirious New York, p. 17. On the ‘coffeetable’ books, see Benjamin Schmidt, “Inventing Exoticism: The Project of Dutch Geography and the Marketing of the World, circa 1700,” in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Paula Findlen and Pamela H. Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 347–370; and “ ‘Imperfect Chaos’: Tropical Medicine and Exotic Natural History Circa 1700,” in Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 145–173. 52

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and Johannes van Keulen supplied the Dutch Republic, in fact all of Europe, with a cornucopia of exotic material. These works, similar to Koolhaas’s ongoing voluminous Harvard ‘research project’ that already counts ve books, combine a dizzying array of facts with elaborate gures in an equally wild variety of formats that proved highly saleable to a diverse audience. It could be said that Koolhaas has reinvented the uniquely Dutch seventeenth-century ‘cosmographies’ to no less inuential or authoritative effect. In the process he found ‘The New Rome’ in Atlanta. It is another example of how Koolhaas assimilates Dutch and American models and it leads neatly to his so-called ‘cathedral to literacy’ in Seattle.

II The Office for Metropolitan Architecture—founded by Koolhaas, Vriesendorp, and their Architectural Association compatriots Elia and Zoe Zenghelis in 1975—has designed and built many good projects, only almost all of them, until recently, have been in Europe.53 It is the rm’s buildings that his commentators fail to consider to any reasonable, or informed extent. When it comes to Rem Koolhaas any so-called normal historical presentation of the architect and his works is conspicuously absent. This essay is a speculation on Koolhaas revolving around two recent buildings and their role in the narrative of Modernism in America and Europe/Holland’s contribution. The rst, his McCormick-Tribune Campus Center at IIT, is the result of a 1997 design competition victory over fellow ‘Johnsonians’ Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid (Fig. 4). The entire campus is the work of the greatest twentieth-century émigré architect to settle in the US, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Koolhaas’s building neatly xes itself to Mies’s renowned but isolated Commons Building of 1952–53 (Fig. 5). The second, Koolhaas’s absolutely exhilarating Seattle Central Library (2004), is another competition success and chosen by Time magazine as the ‘Best Architecture for 2004’ (Fig. 6). The veteran critic Herbert Muschamp declared in The New York Times:

53 For an overview of OMA’s work beyond their own publications, see Jacques Lucan, OMA/Rem Koolhaas (Princeton University Press, 1991); “Urbanism vs. Architecture: The Bigness of Rem Koolhaas,” ANY Magazine 9 (1994); OMA Rem Koolhaas 1987–1998, El Croquis, no. 53+79 (1999); Nobuyuki Yoshida, ed., OMA@work, a+u: Architecture and Urbanism (May 2000) Special Issue; and Pro-jekte und Pro-jektionen—OMA/AMO, Archplus, no. 174/175 (2005).

Fig. 4

McCormick-Tribune Campus Center, Courtesy of Philippe Ruault.

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Fig. 5

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McCormick-Tribune Campus Center and Commons Building, Courtesy of Iwan Baan.

Fig. 6

Seattle Central Library, Courtesy of Philippe Ruault.

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“In more than 30 years of writing about architecture, this is the most exciting new building it has been my honor to review.”54 The Seattle Central Library conrmed Koolhaas’s status as one of the reigning global ‘star-chitects.’ The two buildings are markedly different. In Seattle—a city that, as Luis Fernández-Galiano observes, “many associate only with the technological futurism of Boeing and Microsoft, but which has also incubated commercial revolutions like Amazon and Starbucks”—Koolhaas’s response is uniquely contextual, although the building has been linked with everything from “the luminous expressionism of the Alpine architecture of Bruno Taut and the early Bauhaus” to “the shimmering decoration of casinos and nightclubs of the fties.”55 In Chicago—a city dominated by the remnants of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American industrialization and the legacy of the Chicago School—Koolhaas’s two main subjects, Mies and Marshall Field’s, are more polarized. Both buildings share characteristics common to the émigrés architecture in the United States. David Dunster highlighted the fact that with both Breuer and Mies ‘form’—a vexing subject in Modernism—neither came from the past, nor was it any personal expression. Where Dunster sensibly suggests that for Breuer and Mies ‘form’ comes from one primary source—geometry—and one secondary source—how that form was constructed—this essay considers how these two sources of ‘form’ are a distinct part of the American imprint on Modernism and illustrates that they are exaggerated in Koolhaas’s hands.56 Aside from ‘form’ this essay addresses three other particularly architectural concepts in relation to the two buildings: ‘surface,’ ‘circulation,’ and ‘type.’ The Modern Movement unequivocally redened a building’s ‘surface;’ ‘circulation’ is arguably the nal frontier for the architect in a capitalist society; and ‘type’ is Modernism’s great gain. Koolhaas’s Campus Center at IIT is dened by Marcel Breuer’s typologized ‘v’ or ‘y’-section—a frequent characteristic of the binuclear house type (Fig. 7).57 Breuer and many less able architects and builders

54 Herbert Muschamp, “The Library That Puts on Fishnets and Hits the Disco,” in The New York Times (16 May 2004). 55 Luis Fernández-Galiano, “Stealth Aesthetic,” in Arquitectura Viva 111–112 (April 2005), pp. 226–229. 56 David Dunster, untitled and unpublished manuscript from a lecture on Marcel Breuer at the Twentieth-Century Society in London (2002). 57 On the binuclear house type, see Joachim Driller, Breuer Houses, tr. Mark Cole and Jeremy Verrinder (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2000).

Fig. 7

South Elevation: McCormick-Tribune Campus Center, Drawing by OMA.

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drew this ‘buttery’ prole all over America in the Forties and Fifties. It was a reaction to the traditional American pitched-roof and the International Style’s iconic at roof. You also might recognize it as the shape of the house that is home to The Incredibles. Breuer popularized the ‘form’ itself, and the form of a less predictable, less Wrightian inuenced American residential Modernism in his Exhibition House (1948–49) in the garden of MoMA.58 The Campus Center’s unrelenting horizontality—mimicking Mies’s nal IIT campus master plan (1939–41) and Breuer’s generic housing prototype—is dictated by its continuous concrete slab roof. Koolhaas’s stated intention is “to (re)urbanize the largest possible area with the least amount of (built) substance.”59 As a consequence the exaggerated scale of the building’s prole makes it instantly recognizable and comprehensible in the Modern American landscape. The gleaming corrugated stainless steel elliptical tube set astride the prole’s valley and that contains the ‘Elevated’ metro amplies the project’s variation on the theme of the Modern American suburban house. The typically annexed carport ‘shed’ is stacked in a new vertical organization.60 The contemporary effects and forces of capital dictate the building’s layout. This involves a signicant shift in planning methods, or at least in the culture of acknowledging them. Where Breuer’s orthogonal domestic plan, e.g. Exhibition House and Robinson House (1947–48), institutes the private/public spatial division that became the hallmark of middle-class Modern American living and Mies’s campus buildings are organized by a generic geometric system that radicalized public space, Koolhaas’s oor plan is simply formed by tracing the lines connecting destinations on campus (Fig. 8). By constructing a plan for maximum ‘contextual’ commercial exposure and impact Koolhaas formulates a contemporary capitalist diagram for public architecture. He even draws it like one. The ‘programmatic particles,’ as Koolhaas calls the building’s different functions—i.e. university club, convenience store, bookstore, conference room, etc.—are distributed within this ready-made organization. Koolhaas schematizes the building’s ground 58 See “House in the Museum Garden,” in Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. 16, no. 1 (1949); and “House for the Growing Family,” in Architectural Forum, vol. 90 (May 1949), pp. 96–101. 59 “McCormick Tribune Campus Center,” GA Document 76, p. 14. 60 Koolhaas employs the same horizontal to vertical exchange of building functions in the design for the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre in Dallas, Texas (2004–). See GA Document 85 (2005).

Fig. 8

Floor Plan: McCormick-Tribune Campus Center, Drawing by OMA.

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plan similar to how cartographers in the Golden Age plotted everything from the globe to local landholdings as linear routes to largely economic recourse. The Campus Center’s diagonal routes could be seen as mimicking the paths that governed Dutch trading with the Native Americans on Manhattan Island and that resulted in America’s most famous diagonal, Broadway. But neither cartographers nor colonists had architecture’s interior/exterior dilemma to deal with. Likening students to traders Koolhaas takes a revisionist attitude towards the American architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham’s (1846–1912) alleged comment that “only a noble diagram can capture men’s minds,” while recognizing that the diagram, as part of the design process that describes the route as an organizing principle, is inherent to Modernism.61 However, Koolhaas refuses the diagram almost any external apprehension. The two chief regulating principles of the Commons Building—Mies’s campus-wide 24-foot grid and tripartite vertical organization of the exterior elevation—are manipulated into two-dimensional asymmetric graphic compositions that act as a “sign of something different, something that is in fact an abstract plane rather than the result of construction as the clear glass and brick panels in the original buildings are.”62 As a non-representative shell the building’s external envelope bears relation to Breuer’s image-rich domestic prototypes, e.g. Breuer House II (1947–48). In ‘form’ and ‘surface’ the Campus Center functions as a cultural and historical icon. It announces Koolhaas’s complex treatment of Mies’s American legacy—one that vacillates between ‘inside-the-beltway’ irony and canonical stratagems. Crucially, Koolhaas’s Campus Center plan is governed by economics, as opposed to the social and geometric-inspired diagrams of his predecessors. That distinction has two immediate consequences. It helps to contextualize all of the mid twentieth-century émigré historian Colin Rowe’s analysis of Mies’s and Breuer’s plans in relation to the classicists and early Modernists, and it should rmly situate Koolhaas not as the architect of the American dream, but as its most polemical interpreter.63 “Architecture is here materialized . . . as the articulation of 61 David Dunster, “Charting the Role of the Diagram in Architects’ Work,” in The Architectural Review ( January 2006), pp. 28–31. 62 Aaron Betsky, “The Architecture of Value Engineering,” in A+T: Arquitectura + Technología 23, “New Materiality I” (Spring 2004), p. 63, pp. 56–65. 63 See “Neo-‘Classicism’ and Modern Architecture I” and “Neo-‘Classicism’ and Modern Architecture II,” in Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982).

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movement through space” producing leftover areas that Chicagoans—as opposed to New Yorkers—were historically led to believe could never be afforded.64 Koolhaas’s capitalist diagram is a “Miesian ‘universal space’ densely packed with a universe of contrasting images.” It is the beneciary of the form/function versus capital/commercial opposition that originally fascinated Koolhaas in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and Downtown Athletic Club in New York.65 Is it as perverse a view of programming and space planning as has been suggested? It is not the only time that Koolhaas has used a housing prototype as the basis for a public building. The source for his more recently completed Casa da Música (2005) in Porto was the plan for a house that his ofce was designing in suburban Rotterdam.66 The inuence of the diagram neatly ties Koolhaas’s Campus Center to the Seattle Central Library, where it is organized vertically and the rationale is programmatic, not economic (Fig. 9). Two of Breuer’s best buildings in the United States, the Whitney Museum of American Art67 and the Atlanta Central Public Library68 (1977–80), indicate his skill at developing a diagram. At the Whitney it is both a pragmatic and tongue-in-cheek solution to meeting the need to increase the building’s square-footage on a tight Manhattan site. In both cases Breuer unusually employs a terrace-prole. It is evidence, as Dunster writes, “that as a realist and sympathetic more to objectivity than to functionalism, Breuer developed, used, and reused formal types . . . [and that] these were only partly to do with function.”69 The striking folded ‘form’ of Koolhaas’s Seattle Central Library is an elaboration of Breuer’s

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Betsky, “The Architecture of Value Engineering,” p. 63. Herbert Muschamp, “A Building With a Song in Its Heart,” in The New York Times (2 October 2003). 66 See Rem Koolhaas, “Transformations,” in Yoshida, ed., OMA@work, pp. 106–114. 67 See “Upside-down Museum in Manhattan,” in Architectural Forum, vol. 120 ( January 1964), pp. 90–93; “Whitney Opens,” in Progressive Architecture, vol. 47 (October 1966), pp. 238–241; “The Whitney: Big for Its Size,” in Architectural Forum, vol. 125, no. 2 (September 1966), pp. 80–85; and “The New Whitney,” in Art in America, vol. 54, no. 5 (September–October 1966), pp. 24–47. 68 See “Marcel Breuer and Hamilton Smith’s Library for Atlanta: A Strong New Urban Presence,” in Architectural Record, vol. 169, no. 4 (March 1981), pp. 83–87; “Burly Presence on a Signicant Site: Atlanta Central Library; Architects: Marcel Breuer and Hamilton Smith, with Stevens and Wilkinson,” in AIA Journal, vol. 70, no. 6 (Mid-May 1981), pp. 192–197. 69 Dunster, untitled and unpublished manuscript from a lecture on Marcel Breuer at the Twentieth-Century Society in London (2002). 65

Fig. 9

Legibility Section: Seattle Central Library, Drawing by OMA.

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stepped prole. Where Breuer established four zones in New York and Atlanta, Koolhaas’s library comprises ve specic superposed and shifted ‘platforms’—book stacks, administrative ofces, staff work areas, meeting rooms, and below ground parking—with three large public zones—Mixing Chamber,70 Living Room, and Reading Room—above and below them. It is as if Koolhaas subjects Breuer’s two buildings to a seismic wave in order to further disassociate the ‘form’ from its European antecedents. The eight-zone system of organization, what Koolhaas terms ‘programmatic clusters’ as opposed to IIT’s ‘programmatic particles,’ results from an empirical analysis of the library’s programme (Fig. 10). The complex polygonal form materializes simply from connecting the diagram’s perimeter edges. It is radically determined by function, which is another way of saying, to quote Koolhaas’s collaborating partner Joshua Ramus, that “a truly rational building will not look rational.” Paul Goldberger is right to note that “turning a diagram into an actual architectural form seems like something of a parlor trick, not to mention being crudely indifferent to aesthetics.”71 However, such hedonism is implicit to the European inuence in American Modernism. Where it has been written that the Seattle Central Library “reconciles Venturi and Eisenman in combining an indifferent mesh of structural rhombi that almost look like textiles with a multi-faceted composition that evokes the Max Reinhardt House,” the building more signicantly summarizes the development of the exterior ‘surface’ by Europeans in Modern American architecture.72 From New York via Atlanta to Seattle the building’s ‘surface’ evolves from description, to disguise, to invisibility.73 In other words, Koolhaas’s self-proclaimed ‘Stealth aesthetic’—which on the one hand describes the ‘invisible’ and ‘spectacular’ effect of the Seattle Central Library’s glass and steel polyhedron, and on the other attests to form’s role as a signier that becomes ‘opaque and impossibly fecund’—is an innovation on Breuer’s ‘formless’ orthogonal concrete

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The ‘mixing chamber’ was rst used by Koolhaas in the Metro Dade Center for the Arts, Miami, Florida (1994). 71 Paul Goldberger, “High-Tech Bibliophilia,” in The New Yorker (24 May 2004), p. 92, pp. 90–92. 72 Galiano, “Stealth Aesthetic.” 73 As Claude Parent commented on the Seattle Central Library: “I nd extraordinary the materialisations that disappear; the envelope lets the eyes look through—we see everything!” See “Visual Language: A Conversation,” in AMO/Rem Koolhaas, ‘Contents/Post-Occupancy’, Domus D’Autore (April 2006).

Fig. 10

Program Diagram: Seattle Central Library, Drawing by OMA.

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mask in Atlanta and ‘Cyclopean’ granite clad composition in New York, which divorced form from function. As Goldberger put it: “The building manages the neat trick of seeming exotic but not bizarre;”74 and Nicholai Ouroussoff writes: “Its contorted cage-like exterior is a powerful commentary on the colliding forces—economic, political and otherwise that shape contemporary society.”75 It also reinterprets traditional monumentality that engrossed both Breuer and Mies. The essence of Breuer’s American monumentality is in asserting the building’s mass, whereas Mies achieved an unequalled level of visual and structural renement at the Seagram Building and an unparalleled level of graphic reticulation in the unrealized Chicago Convention Hall (1952–54) by selecting the building’s ‘surface’ to articulate his stance on ‘structure.’ Dunster reminds us that when Mies says ‘structure’ it had a letter ‘k’ in it, with “Struktur in German meaning fabric, texture, pattern, or makeup as well as structural design.” In Koolhaas’s Seattle Central Library the building’s ‘surface’ doubles as ‘structure.’ Mies’s fetishized steel—the dening material of American Modernism—is turned inside-out and expressed internally with a three-dimensional omnipresence clearly indebted to the broader Germanic denition of the term. The Seattle Central Library can be described—technologically and diagrammatically—as a rened variation of Koolhaas’s daring but unrealised Whitney Museum Extension (NeWhitney: Scheme A, 2001–03) that compounds its analogous nature to Breuer.76 It is signicantly different from OMA’s two famously unrealized Parisian library projects—the National Library of France (1989) and the Jussieu University Library (1992). As with Breuer and Mies before him Koolhaas’s approach to architecture is not so much determined by the building’s ‘type’ as by its private or public status. Neither the form nor content are unique to Koolhaas. The Seattle Central Library builds on a particular public tradition. It was commented on Breuer’s Atlanta Central Public Library that it “is designed for the kind of ‘supermarket appeal’ . . . that now marks all good library design.”77 It was hailed then, as Koolhaas’s building is now, as “an excellent model of the modern 74

Goldberger, “High-Tech Bibliophilia,” p. 92. Nicholai Ouroussoff, “Shimmering Break from Conformity in Seattle’s Library,” in The Los Angeles Times (21 May 2004). 76 See Nobuyuki Yoshida, ed., “OMA/Experience,” A+U 398 (Tokyo: A+U Publishing, 2003). 77 “Marcel Breuer and Hamilton Smith’s Library for Atlanta: A Strong New Urban Presence,” p. 84. 75

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urban library.”78 However, the allegiance to ‘type’ that marks OMA’s description of the library also signals the curiously underplayed role of the building’s shop, both spatially and architecturally. Its incongruity is compounded by the commercial practices that dominate this public building, and that provoked one commentator to describe the building as a “Barnes & Noble on steroids.” Koolhaas utilizes the full range of circulation types and they reinforce his attitude to the saleability of contemporary American public space—what Breuer’s commentators claimed for him as a ‘supermarket effectiveness’—be it a Prada shop, museum, campus center, or library. This ‘supermarket appeal’ helps to understand the crucial role of ‘circulation’ and ‘surface’ in American Modernism. It pays to look back at Breuer’s Whitney where his supersized passenger elevator was painted bright ‘Breuer blue,’ and the Atlanta Central Library that boasts a soaring Modernist version of Michelangelo’s infamous Laurentian Library staircase in unnished concrete, but probably even more appropriately to the magisterial escalator he installed at De Bijenkorf in Rotterdam (1955–57). Whether it is the ve-storey Dewey-decimal Wrightian spiral of books, the luminous chartreuse coloured lifts and escalators, or the Philippe Starck inspired polycarbonate red staircase, Koolhaas appropriates techniques to public space that have been employed for a century without comment in commercial space. Koolhaas would seem to recognize that color is a dening aspect of Modernism in America. Both buildings are designed as objects competing with “the articial intensities that we encounter in the virtual world.” To that extent Koolhaas’s aim to revolutionize the nature of color into “something that genuinely alters perception” is a real advance on the psycho-social material palette of Mies.79 Take for example the luminous three-layer Dutch orange-toned Panelite translucent wall panels at IIT and the enveloping light blue ‘seismic skin’ at Seattle. The Living Room reinvents the great urban public space that Edward Durrell Stone (1902–1978) and other ‘Expressionist Modernists’ were ridiculed for fty years ago. Equally, it makes an unexpected contribution to America’s absorbing nineteenth and twentieth-century debate on the relationship of technology and culture—

78 “Marcel Breuer and Hamilton Smith’s Library for Atlanta: A Strong New Urban Presence,” p. 84. 79 Rem Koolhaas, “The Future of Colours is Looking Bright,” in Rem Koolhaas/ OMA, Norman Foster, and Alessandro Mendini, Colours (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001), pp. 10–12.

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what Leo Marx famously termed the ‘Machine in the Garden.’80 Koolhaas replants nature sui generis in the middle of the machine and stretches the marketplace rhetoric. Vertiginous perspectives, luminous drops, and diagonal foreshortenings, nished with Petra Blaisse’s giant articially-toned green, mauve, and red topiary oor patterns and white and green nned PVC imprinted ‘bearskin’ curtain, and Tony Oursler’s talking heads underline the library’s exoticism and “emphasize the extent to which OMA buildings are active generators in the process of turning things public” (Fig. 11).81 Koolhaas’s project has all the ‘hysterical narcissism’ of his beloved Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, while avoiding any association with another ‘Johnsonians’ heralded garden edice—Kevin Roche’s Ford Foundation Building in New York (1963–68). A ‘supermarket appeal’ is prevalent at IIT’s Campus Center where Koolhaas polishes the oors, walls, and in certain cases even the ceilings more than Mies. And Mies’s fetish for nishes was unprecedented. His Commons Building’s infamous black I-beams and uorescent lights have a whole new appeal and lustre (and ultimately interpretation) juxtaposed to the Campus Center’s reective surfaces and contemporary color palette. Koolhaas’s exuberant realism is as dened in the building’s ‘materiality of shopping’ as in its commercial planning. New York graphic design rm 2x4’s simulated wood veneer roong paper fascia, uorescent ‘chandelier,’ fritted glass portraits of the Institute’s founders, and Mies portrait door, Petra Blaisse’s darkening curtains imprinted with white ‘owers’ on the west façade, and Koolhaas’s shimmering metal encasing of the elevated train make it clear that OMA reserves a different place for timber and Teon® in the American psyche (Figs. 12, 13). This is in contrast to the traditional pre-Revolutionary, vernacular associations of clapboard siding and the studded balloon frame that followed Gropius and Breuer around New England. In the context of Koolhaas’s wider work the IIT design substitutes the surrealist-tinged commentary on Modern architectural history, including Mies, which he built at the Kunsthal (1992) in Rotterdam with a practical display of capitalism’s avarice.

80 See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 81 Quotation of Hans Ulrich Obrist in “Visual Language: A Conversation,” in AMO/Rem Koolhaas, “Contents/Post-Occupancy,” Domus D’Autore (April 2006).

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Fig. 11

Interior: Seattle Central Library, Courtesy of Iwan Baan.

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Fig. 12

Mies Entrance: McCormick-Tribune Campus Center, Courtesy of Iwan Baan.

Fig. 13

Exterior: McCormick-Tribune Campus Center, Courtesy of Iwan Baan.

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Even without any pretense to Dutch economic expertise it is plain to see that OMA’s commercial enterprise harbors an important ontological dimension with certain historical and cultural parallels. It also materializes in very specic forms of practice, both in building and publishing. Thirty years later OMA’s American work stands up to the challenges of the inuential Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri’s (1935–1994) infamously pessimistic Marxist critique of architecture in capitalist society.82 It would be heresy to write on Modern architecture, capitalism, and the United States without referencing Tafuri, especially considering his overhanging effect in the US.83 In his seminal work Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (1976) Tafuri claims that architecture, with its overriding concern for form and symbolism, is no longer in touch with the reality of social change. In that context even if Philip Johnson had been an intellectual he still would have dismissed Peter Eisenman because Eisenman busies himself in theoretical, or what he likes to see as ‘critical’ dogma resistant to consumer society. This is obvious in his rejected proposal for the campus center at IIT.84 The effect of this ‘Eisenmanian hegemony’ is the insularity of American architectural discourse and its disproportionate domestic inuence. It is similar to what Koolhaas’s predecessors faced in the Thirties. However, it is plain to see in Koolhaas’s buildings in Chicago and Seattle that Tafuri’s dystopian predictions and Eisenman’s estranged constructions can be combated by a professional architectural efcacy that following Gropius, Breuer, and Mies establishes a strongly pragmatic, even antitheoretical stance. This makes it necessary to reconsider Tafuri’s and his followers’ identication of Mies’s Seagram Building as the exemplar of negation in late Modernism. Ultimately, as Fredric Jameson identied in Koolhaas’s work almost a decade ago:

82 See Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, tr. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1976). 83 One reason for this is his summary dismissal of the twentieth-century American architectural avant-garde as ‘Architecture in the Boudoir.’ See Manfredo Tafuri, “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language,” in Oppositions 3 (1974), pp. 37–62. 84 For Eisenman’s proposal, see Nicholas Adams, “Eisenman, Hadid, Jahn, Koolhaas, Sejima: Progetti per il campus IIT a Chicago,” in Casabella, vol. 63, no. 664 (February 1999), pp. 16–23.

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The crucial operation is the establishment of a mediation capable of translation in either direction: able to function as a characterization of the economic determinants of this construction with the city fully as much as it can offer directions for aesthetic analysis and cultural interpretation.85

OMA’s recent work in Chicago and Seattle demonstrate two distinct architectural responses to late twentieth and early twenty-rst century American culture. The individual nature of these two projects, empowered by the transformative power of ‘Dutchness,’ reect the success, innovation, and adaptability that accompanied the Dutch Republic’s ascendancy as a global market force in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. It is not, as critics including Bart Lootsma claim, a ‘highly contradictory’ position. The dynamic nature of OMA and the absorption and application of global lessons to their work makes Koolhaas the inheritor of a uniquely Dutch episteme and one nally seen to be reaching its full potential in North America. This essay’s main objectives have been to describe the advances of OMA on the European émigrés legacy in American Modern architecture, and to stake a claim for the socio-political Dutchness of Koolhaas’s two recent buildings in the United States—the McCormick-Tribune Campus Center and Seattle Central Library. In these two distinctive projects Koolhaas can be seen inverting American values and embracing Dutch ones. His European predecessors have been credited with awakening Modernism’s cultural porosity and material and spatial economic possibilities based on the cultural commodity of America. On Koolhaas’s watch this hyperbolic condition has been galvanized into a material and economic frenzy demonstrating capitalism’s wonderful hedonism. Koolhaas’s architectural efcacy pays a much-needed revisit to Tafuri’s sober Seventies thesis. Moreover, in both epistemological and practical terms OMA/AMO build on the economic reality of the Dutch globalizing tradition—one that reached its Early Modern zenith by prioritizing innovation over ideological and moral positions. In a lot of eyes, in Koolhaas’s hands capitalism’s architectural zeitgeist is an ominous portent. Ironically, Koolhaas is the product of that tradition, if only his critics were not so morally and ideologically preoccupied. His recent buildings in the United States—truly a part of his ‘City of the

85 Fredric Jameson, “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation,” in ANY Magazine 22 (1998), pp. 50–51.

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Captive Globe’—are steeped in advancing the debate and vocabulary of Modern American architecture—namely ‘form,’ ‘type,’ ‘surface’ and ‘circulation.’ The holy grail of architectural immortality will be decided by the only way open to architects and that is the historical continuum and that is exactly what Koolhaas is defending.

EPILOGUE

DUTCHNESS IN FACT AND FICTION Willem Frijhoff

There are two ways of looking at ‘Dutchness’. The easiest one is to see it as a purely American matter. The other way, more difcult but in the end much more rewarding, is to treat Dutchness as a general epistemological issue of which the Dutch and the American modalities are two different forms of contextualisation. In the end, the question inevitably arises whether Dutch and American Dutchness have something in common, and until what point. I shall take this second position and speak rst about Dutch Dutchness, then continue with American Dutchness, and summarize at the end.

The Dutch after 2000: A Crisis of Identity Seen from within, and perhaps also from outside, the kingdom of the Netherlands is unmistakably involved in a crisis of identity. Two political murders, the rst since the lynching of grand pensionary Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis at The Hague in 1672, have shocked and confused the country and profoundly affected its own intimate conviction of being the most pacic, consensual and tolerant society of the West. Since the murder of the popular politician Pim Fortuyn by a Dutch opponent on May 6, 2002, and on November 2, 2004, the execution by the young Muslim Mohammed B., on a busy street of Amsterdam, of the controversial lm maker Theo van Gogh, a relative of the famous painter Vincent van Gogh, public discourse is mainly about crisis, danger and terrorism, about the fear of disintegration and the impossibility of shaping a peaceful multicultural, multiethnic or multi-religious society.1 All of a sudden, the Netherlands has discovered 1 The dramatic effect of the murder of Van Gogh was enhanced by the fact that at the time of his death he had nished a movie on the death of Fortuyn. The title of the movie 06/05 referred obviously to 09/11. On the meaning of Fortuyn’s spectacular

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that its public image of toleration, integration, consensus policy (the so-called poldermodel ), social participation, and multiculturalism does not correspond any more to the reality of relations within the global society, between the social, cultural and religious groups, and even on the individual level.2 Its self-proclaimed position as gidsland—the moral guiding nation of Western Europe—is shattered.3 The political response has been immediate and clear: Dutch society has to strengthen its inner cohesion and to revitalize its norms and values, as a truly ‘Dutch’ nation. The ‘Dutch’ character of the nation, understood as more genuine than immigrant cultures, has to warrant its authenticity and strength. The measure of this new challenge is the past performance of the country, which had resulted in the successful creation of a national community with a truly national spirit and strong social cohesion. In other words, back to the moral values and the customary traditions of the Dutch themselves, back to the culture shaped and transmitted by the national community itself as the core of the citizenship of the Netherlands, back to ‘Dutchness’. Dutchness is, of course, not a Dutch word in itself, but it is largely understood in the Netherlands and it distils well the way Dutch people interpret their way of life and their cultural horizon. I use it here as a general concept encompassing all those aspects of Dutch life and culture that were considered, at a particular moment and in a specic context, as characteristic and distinctive of the Dutch.4 In fact, Dutch social histo-

political success, see Hans Wansink, De erfenis van Fortuyn. De Nederlandse democratie na de opstand van de kiezers (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 2004). An interesting pallet of opinions on the consequences of Van Gogh’s death is displayed in: Hoe nu verder? 42 visies op de toekomst van Nederland na de moord op Theo van Gogh (Utrecht: Het Spectrum, 2005). For the general background of Dutch post-war cultural evolutions: James Kennedy, Nieuw Babylon in aanbouw: Nederland in de jaren zestig (Amsterdam: Boom, 1995; 3d ed. 1999). For Dutch politics in general the excellent introduction by Rudy B. Andeweg & Galen W. Irwin, Governance and Politics in the Netherlands (2d ed.; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 2 On Dutch consensualism in the European context: W. A. Arts, L. C. J. M. Halman, & J. A. P. Hagenaars (eds.), The Cultural Diversity of European Unity: Findings, Explanations and Reections from the European Values Study [European Values Studies, 6] (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 255–274; F. Hendriks & T. A. J. Toonen (eds.), Polder Politics: The Re-invention of Consensus Democracy in the Netherlands (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). 3 For this notion, see James Kennedy, “The myth of Dutch progressiveness. The Netherlands as guide land,” The Low Countries, 7 (1999): 220–224. 4 For a couple of decades, the concept of Dutchness has served as an analytical tool in the history of art and architecture. It has recently been used in a rather matter-offact way by Christopher Brown, The Dutchness of Dutch Art [First Golden Age Lecture, 26 September 2002] (Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2002).

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rians and anthropologists have already used it as an analytical tool to describe forms of national consciousness, cultural identity or cultural nationalism in the pre-war and post-war Netherlands.5 It serves in the history of art and architecture. And it is in common use in other sectors of everyday life, like tourism and Holland promotion. Somewhat paradoxically, however, a national crisis may not be the most appropriate occasion to discover what a nation stands for, or what it is. Feelings of crisis provoke a compression around national emblems, national heroes, and national myths. Making abstraction of shades and gradations, and barring momentarily competitions and antagonisms, they unite people around a common sense of duty and a broadly shared imagery of unity that ultimately is pure ction. Indeed, such unity is a political aim and a social objective that has to be won time and again, against the factual evidence that people are different, have different positions and opportunities in society, think and act differently, have different qualities, tastes and goals in life. Fictions of unity can be false and utterly dangerous, as history tells us from the medieval myth of Christianity, with its Crusades against the Islamic peoples outside and the heretics within, through the Reformation with its forced outward conversions counterbalanced by inner withdrawals, to the fascist states of the twentieth century, the Third Reich of the Nazis and the Communist empire of the Soviet Union, which have all proved to be creations of ctional unity, fragile empires on feet of clay, and have consequently collapsed. Others will follow. As such, however, such forms of ctional unity pertain to historical reality because they are embodied, appropriated and re-enacted by the historical agents, i.e. ourselves. Fiction is a fact, and has to be taken into account whenever history is written by a responsible and critical historian who takes his profession seriously. Ultimately, historians have therefore to cope with the difcult task of disentangling analytically fact and ction, and recreating at the same time a plausible image of history that as such will be a new form of ction, or, better, of ‘faction’, if I may suggest a new meaning of the word, that is ctionalised facts or fact-made ctions, an image that takes

5 Annemieke Galema, Barbara Henkes & Henk te Velde (eds.), Different Meanings of Dutchness (Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1993); Rob van Ginkel, “Discourses on Dutchness,” The Low Countries, 9 (2001): 116–123; Rob van Ginkel, “Re-creating ‘Dutchness’: Cultural colonisation in post-war Holland,” Nations and Nationalism, 10:4 (October 2004): 421–438.

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into account the complex interplay between facts and ctions, between data and meanings, between context and memory or experience. Since the political authorities of the Netherlands need a usable past to reinforce the nation’s integrity, quite naturally history, especially national history in the patriotic vein (the former vaderlandse geschiedenis), has made a huge comeback as ‘Dutch history’ (Nederlandse geschiedenis). The need for an established canon of national history and national literature “as an expression of our cultural identity”, to quote a recent report of the National Council of Education, has immediately been put on top of the political agenda.6 Immigrants will soon be supposed to know by heart basic facts of Dutch history before getting their Dutch green card. National history, long since virtually banned from Dutch schools in favour of a mainly thematic treatment of historical phenomena in a supranational setting, is rapidly regaining its place in the school programs prescribed by the ministry of Education. The annual Week of the Book in March has been placed in 2005 under the sign of national history, and accessibly written history books, in particular historical novels, historicising travelogues, popular narratives of past events or collections of historical records written by gifted journalists like Geert Mak or literary writers like Arthur Japin, Nelleke Noordervliet, Thomas Rosenboom, or René van Stipriaan have suddenly become bestsellers, sold in tens of thousands of copies. When popular history recovers its past glory, Dutchness is the factual form it takes. Simultaneously, the Dutch have discovered that their vision of the world, however open to otherness it claims to be, was profoundly occidental. Having managed to keep slavery at a far distance from home, the Dutch do not understand the mixed cultural universe of

6 Thus a pressing advice of the Onderwijsraad (National Council of Education), in its report De stand van educatief Nederland (The Hague: Onderwijsraad, January 2005), 119–121; also on www.onderwijsraad.nl. For a more balanced vision, including the input of other cultures and a European perspective, see: Willem Frijhoff, “Cultural heritage in the making: Europe’s past and its future identity,” in The Humanities in the European Research Area. International Conference, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2 September 2004, ed. Johannes van der Vos (The Hague: NWO, 2005), 17–29. In October 2006, the committee appointed by the Minister of Education, Science and Culture has published a ‘canon’ of Dutch history consisting of fty ‘windows’ on seminal historical gures, events, or developments. See: entoen.nu. De canon van Nederland. Rapport van de Commissie ontwikkeling Nederlandse canon, 2 vols. (The Hague: Ministerie van OCW, 2006); also on www.entoen.nu/lijst.aspx (with an English version on the site). For a critical assessment, cf. Maria Grever, Ed Jonker, Kees Ribbens & Siep Stuurman, Controverses rond de canon (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2006), with an extensive bibliography.

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their former colonies in Central America, i.e. the Caribbean Islands and Surinam, that during the last decades has been transferred to the home of the former European colonizers by hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Moreover, having been in charge, during more than three centuries, of what was all that time the biggest Islamic country of the world, Indonesia, the Dutch discover now with some bitterness that their profoundly ethnocentric way of looking at the world has prevented them from seeing the evidence of cultural diversity around them and from learning to cope with it in their own country. In spite of centuries of physical contact and social proximity, Islam has remained a foreign country for the Dutch until the recent mass immigrations from really exotic nations in the Mediterranean fringe.7 Mentally, Indonesia is far away for Dutch youth, and for many elderly people in the Netherlands it is at most a world of nostalgia, a world we have lost, tempo dulu in the Malaysian language of Indonesia, a world best described perhaps in the novels of one of the major Dutch writers, Hella Haasse, who was born and educated in Batavia, present-day Jakarta. In fact, Dutchness reveals itself here as a nationalist stance, far away from the paradigm of multiculturalism or the melting-pot ideology that was fashionable before the patriotic upsurge of recent years.

Nation, State, Society, and Culture Apart from the fact that this new emphasis upon the moral nation as a closed, historically determined community of values is somehow at odds with the reshufing of European regions within a broader community with shifting borders and moving identities, this feverish return to a politically meaningful interplay of history and Dutchness indisputably interrogates the Dutch historian, as it may astonish the foreign observer. Indeed, there is no reason to think that this is the only possible political choice, let alone the best and the wisest. On the contrary, a careful scrutiny of Dutch social and cultural history might as well justify the hypothesis that Dutch unity—that is the shaping of the Dutch nation

7 There were of course exceptions, the most notable being the Leiden Orientalist Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936), whose intimate knowledge of Islam made him play a major role in the Dutch colonial policy in the Indonesian archipelago in the 1880s and 90s. This is the only Dutch work discussed by Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 255–257.

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in its successive historical manifestations—has been time and again most successful in a spirit of openness for foreign input, jointly with the ability to integrate within a single national narrative competing social, ideological or political groups, the state acting mainly as the great process facilitator instead of adopting the role of keeper of the moral conscience of the nation as it pretends to do nowadays. That was, for instance, the case in the early modern Netherlands.8 In the Dutch Republic, several great narratives managed in turn, and sometimes simultaneously, to incorporate into a coherent cultural community the centrifugal political, social and religious forces that favoured increasing group autonomy and a growing political instability: the myth of the Batavian Antiquity, that is the moral, if not the physical continuity between the valiant tribe of the Batavians and their battle for freedom against the Romans on the one side, and the Dutch as involved in a ght against Spain on the other;9 the myth of the Dutch Israel or Dutch Canaan, i.e. the Dutch Reformed community as the people of God’s election;10 the ideology of the True Freedom, that is the republican ideology of the States faction, legitimized by historical discourse;11 the national destiny of the House of Orange, being the ideological message of their opponents.12 It was precisely in moments of failing interaction between such narratives and their adherents, such as the Disaster Year 1672 or the Patriot and Batavian Revolutions of the 1780s and 90s 8 For the political and social background: Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); for a broad analysis more focused on culture, religion and ideology: Willem Frijhoff & Marijke Spies, 1650: Hard-won Unity (Assen: Van Gorcum / Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004). 9 Ivo Schöffer, “The Batavian Myth during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Britain and the Netherlands, eds. J. S. Bromley & E. H. Kossmann, Vol. 5: Some Political Mythologies (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), 78–101; H.C. Teitler, De Opstand der ‘Batavieren’ (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998); Louis Swinkels, ed., De Bataven: Verhalen van een verdwenen volk (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw / Nijmegen: Het Valkhof, 2004). 10 Cornelis Huisman, Neerlands Israël. Het natiebesef der traditioneel-gereformeerden in de achttiende eeuw (Dordrecht: Van den Tol, 1983); Roelof Bisschop, Sions vorst en volk: Het tweede-Israëlidee als theocratisch concept in de Gereformeerde kerk van de Republiek tussen ca. 1650 en ca. 1750 (Veenendaal: Kool, 1993). 11 Herbert H. Rowen, John de Witt, Statesman of the ‘True Freedom’ (Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1986); E. H. Kossmann, “Het probleem van de vrijheid in de zeventiende-eeuwse Nederlandse Republiek,” in Vergankelijkheid en continuïteit: Opstellen over geschiedenis (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1995), 63–86; E. H. Kossmann, Political Thought in the Dutch Republic: Three Studies (Amsterdam: KNAW, 2000); Wiep van Bunge, From Stevin to Spinoza: An Essay on Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (Leiden, Boston & Cologne: Brill, 2001). 12 Joris van Eijnatten, ‘God, Nederland en Oranje’: Dutch Calvinism and the Search for the Social Centre (Kampen: H. J. Kok, 1993).

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that the social cohesion and the cultural identity of the Dutch really were at stake. That was also the case in the second half of the nineteenth and the rst half of the twentieth centuries with the so-called ‘pillarization’ of the Dutch national community, i.e. its splitting up into a series of autonomously organized religious and ideological segments (‘pillars’) of the global society, under the neutral supervision of a morally reluctant state on top of the nation’s building.13 Instead of a narrative of national greatness in the present, the state and the intellectual community promoted the common glory of the past, but in a petried past, the Golden Age of the seventeenth century, reinterpreted as the zenith of cultural performance of the national community as a whole and the best example of the creative potentialities of a self-condent nation.14 Indeed, in spite of the pre-eminent place of the stadholders and the privileged, public position of the Reformed church, the national community had never been united under one single prince, political maxim or religion. Historical memory was therefore bound to nd other assets for the moral unication of the nation: that was found in the Golden Age, in culture, painting, science, and more generally in the image of a generous and prosperous Dutch way of life, the image of an embarrassment of riches that Simon Schama has used for his metaphorical analysis of seventeenth-century Dutchness.15 Every national history is, of course, the result of a plurality of perceptions and choices on all levels of society, dominated by a major focal point. Yet Dutch national history is perhaps more than many others, at least in Europe, the outcome of a profoundly uncertain agency. Contrary to the teleological vision of the state as the central unifying

13 On this model, close to a polyarchy, see the classic study by Arend Lijphart, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968); Harry Post, Pillarization: An Analysis of Dutch and Belgian Society (Aldershot etc.: Avebury, 1986); R. Koole & H. Daalder, “The consociational democracy model and the Netherlands: ambivalent allies?” in Acta Politica, 37 (2002): 23–43. The hypothesis of a pillarization starting as early as the seventeenth century has been formulated by Simon Groenveld, Huisgenoten des geloofs: Was de samenleving in de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden verzuild? (Hilversum: Verloren, 1995), but few historians agree. 14 Frans Grijzenhout & Henk van Veen, eds., De Gouden Eeuw in perspectief: Het beeld van de Nederlandse zeventiende-eeuwse schilderkunst in later tijd (Nijmegen: SUN / Heerlen: Open Universiteit, 1992). 15 Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).

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agent at the roots of national history, embracing every time more domains of public and private life and imposing its norms and values upon the national community, Dutch history presents itself in my vision above all as the repeated readjustment of changing congurations of historical agents and moral aims, held together much more by shared practices and values than by one or more historical political models. Until less than a century ago, the central Dutch state institutions were rather weak, and the forces pushing outward, towards the old Dutch habit of social, cultural, regional, religious or political ‘particularism’ were strong.16 That does not mean, though, that the old Dutch state was weak in itself. In fact, weak central institutions and strong particular habits had achieved a strongly interwoven web of ‘best practices’ between the federal institutions, the provincial sovereignties and the cities that in fact functioned unexpectedly well. It has been remarked that the early modern Dutch Republic, whose constitutional formula seemed outdated since the start, has during two full centuries, from its constitution at the Union of Utrecht on January 29, 1579, to its takeover by the Batavian Republic in January 1795, proved to be much more viable than many modern centralized and absolutist monarchies. But this Republic was not the motor of the community of the Dutch, only its recipient, almost void of ideological sense. The only meaning attached to the Republic was its ability to unite by common interest the frères ennemis that were the seven provinces, under the pressure from outside. More than elsewhere, therefore, the Republic’s device had to be understood as a political programme: ‘Concordia res parvae crescunt’, Union makes strength, or, as in present-day America: United we stand—but the kind of union involved was not the same. Since national history was subdivided into several great narratives corresponding with the different segments of society and therefore unable to embrace the whole national community, history as such was pushed aside. Instead of history, feelings of togetherness were favoured as the cement of the nation and indeed of national identity. Until the present day, national unity in the Netherlands lies not so much in the structure of the state or in the political community itself, as in its symbols, gures and emblems, in short, in the proper experience of the national community taken in its broadest sense, that is: including

16 J. L. Price, Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century: The Politics of Particularism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

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all the inhabitants, either native-born or immigrants. Let me use for more clarity a perhaps too easy contrast. Most European nations are nation states (natiestaat), which means that the state is coextensive with the national community. But whereas many of them identify themselves above all as political nations (staatsnatie), the state being the main incentive and the very heart of nationality, the Netherlands function much more as a cultural nation (cultuurnatie), where not the state but culture is the engine of national sentiment.17 The British nation, for example, unies itself chiey around the crown and the French around the state that warrants access to culture and equality for all. To justify national sentiment, they privilege the time factor, the vertical line: history. Britishness and Frenchness nd their legitimacy in the historical achievements of the national community, such as the Empire or the Revolution.18 The Dutch, on the contrary, look for their unifying principles much more horizontally, in the cultural performances of the actual community itself: i.e. its emblems, like the House of Orange (which is not at all the same as the crown) or the big Dutch multinational rms like Royal Dutch Shell or Philips, its symbols (like the national anthem, the capital city Amsterdam—which is not the seat of the government—or the major football teams), its shared social practices (like Saint Nicholas’ Eve, the elaborate birthday festivals, coffee meetings with neighbours, and a host of other everyday gestures that identify a Dutch citizen), its heroes (like founding father William of Orange, humanist critic Desiderius Erasmus, admiral De Ruyter, philosopher Spinoza, the painters Rembrandt and

17 Willem Frijhoff, “Eigenzinnig Nederland: Europa en de toekomst van een cultuurnatie,” in De nationale staat, onhoudbaar maar onmisbaar? Het perspectief van Europese integratie en mondialisering, ed. A. van Staden (Assen: van Gorcum / Den Haag: Clingendael, 1996), 125–143; Piet de Rooij, Republiek van rivaliteiten: Nederland sinds 1813 (Amsterdam: Mets & Schilt, 2002); N. C. F. van Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland: Van oude orde naar moderniteit, 1750 –1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004). 18 See for Britishness: L. Colley, “Britishness and otherness: an argument,” Journal of British Studies, 31 (1992): 309–329, and the literature listed in Laurence Brockliss & David Eastwood, eds., The British Isles, c. 1750 –c.1850: A Union of Multiple Identities (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1997). For France: Pierre Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire, 7 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992). For Swedishness: Orvar Löfgren, “Deconstructing Swedishness,” in Anthropology at Home, ed. A. Jackson (London: Tavistock, 1987), 74–94. For Germany: Étienne François & Hagen Schulze, eds., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 2001). The Museum of Europe in Brussels (presently under construction) will similarly focus on notions of shared cultural heritage of the inhabitants of Europe. On European identity, cf. Bo Stråth, ed., Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other (Brussels etc.: Peter Lang, 2000). For Dutch lieux de mémoire: H. L. Wesseling, ed., Plaatsen van herinnering, 4 vols. (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2005–2007).

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Van Gogh, or football player Johan Cruyff ),19 and above all its perceived or imagined values, such as the claim to be a really democratic, tolerant, consensual, open, and utterly peaceful society. It is true that many of these symbols, emblems, heroes or practices are profoundly rooted in historical practice. Yet it is not the historical narrative that makes them meaningful but the contribution they make to the actual experience of Dutchness. The House of Orange, for instance, though one of the main elements of continuity throughout the history of the Dutch state, is much less appreciated as a constitutional element of the historical nation (this quality is, in fact, repeatedly questioned throughout time) than for the way its members behave in present-day Dutch society, as typical exponents of Dutchness ( gewone Nederlanders). In this sense, Dutch society certainly is a prototype of the nation as “an imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson has so happily called it.20 The quality of Dutchness, either real or virtual, is rst of all the outcome of the national imagination of the inhabitants of the Netherlands. That makes Dutchness utterly elusive: there is no other real standard for Dutchness than the consensus obtained ad hoc in the permanently changing interplay of the formative factors of Dutch society, under the inuence of barely visible power politics by the Dutch themselves and their political and cultural representatives. It makes Dutchness at the same time rather easy to transfer elsewhere, far from the historical contingencies in the European homeland. Actually, many Dutch historians remain reluctant to adopt the newly acclaimed canon of Dutch national history, of which they apparently should be the privileged authors, transmitters and educators. Most likely it is above all the unsubtle claim to a universally shared notion of Dutchness that motivates their reserved attitude. Dutch politicians

19 The 2004 television series “The greatest Netherlander ever”, for instance, had an immense success. Although the murdered politician Pim Fortuyn won the race as a result of a technical failure in the transmission of the results, the real winner appeared to be William of Orange. Cf. Gert Jan Pos, ed., De grootste Nederlander (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 2004). Johan Cruyff, the former football player and trainer of Barcelona, is also celebrated as the greatest contemporary icon of Catalonia in the documentary lm En un momento dado (2004). 20 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Editions, 1983). Anthropological essays on Dutch national identity include: Rob van Ginkel, Notities over Nederlanders. Antropologische reecties (Amsterdam & Meppel: Boom, 1997), with very useful, extensive bibliographies, pp. 199–223, 253–263; and Rob van Ginkel, Op zoek naar eigenheid (The Hague: Sdu, 1999). See also Han van der Horst, The Low Sky: Understanding the Dutch (Amsterdam: Scriptum/Nufc, 1994).

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and government members have expressed opinions and made gestures that point to a substantial lack of understanding not only of immigrant cultures but of cultural dynamics itself. In fact, for most Dutch historians historical analysis does not justify the present-day return toward an inward-looking national community, precisely because Dutchness is in their eyes not rooted in some inevitable historical reality of teleological character. On the contrary, Dutchness may as well be qualied as the outcome of a quite different cultural procedure, i.e. the attribution by immigrants and outsiders, and by foreign visitors or observers, of externally perceived values, vices and qualities, which correspond only in a limited way to the cultural practices of the Dutch themselves. In order to grasp this difference of perception, one should realize to what kind of concepts the notions of Dutch and Dutchness pertain.

The Dutch and Their Social Identity Dutchness refers above all to identity, in particular social identity. It identies a person, a commodity or a value as belonging to a specic community, the community of the ‘Dutch’. This denition may seem self-evident, but we should take into account two major provisos. First, the term Dutch is unclear in itself. Second, identity is a disputed concept. Let us start by asking what exactly social identity is.21 There are two opposing visions: the rst looks for signs of identity within the group itself and focuses on the achievements of the nation; the second considers identity as the result of a process of ascription from outside. In the rst interpretation, Dutch identity is anchored in the qualities that from of old constitute the way Dutch society works, and wants to see and shape itself: that is, as consensual and prizing to individual merit, more horizontally organized than vertically, without great distinctions

21 Among the host of titles about social identity I will mention an anthropological study on identity and ethnicity: Albert F. Reiterer, Soziale Identität. Ethnizität und sozialer Wandel: Zur Entwicklung einer anthropologischer Struktur (Frankfurt etc.: Peter Lang, 1998). See also Charles Tilly, ed., Citizenship, Identity and Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Joel S. Migdal, Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices (Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Finally, I may refer to my methodological reection as an historian: “Identiteit en identiteitsbesef: De historicus en de spanning tussen verbeelding, benoeming en herkenning,” Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 107: 4 (1992): 614–634.

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of social status, gifted with some basic virtues like sobriety, industriousness, hard-headedness, self-restraint, commercial acumen, a marked directness in social relations, a distaste for hypocrisy, a certain aloofness, democratic feelings, tolerance, an aversion toward public violence, and a missionary sense of duty with respect to human rights.22 In the second interpretation, which works with a more dynamic and process-based notion of culture, Dutchness is much more the outcome of the vision of others, stressing qualities and vices that may remain unseen from inside but reveal themselves in comparison to the neighbours or to alien cultures. Whereas the rst interpretation tends to take an essentialist stance, and occasionally, in times of crisis, may even display some fundamentalist features, the second one is mainly a matter of perception, located in time and space. Perceived identity is the result of an externalist form of rhetorical construction, although such constructed images may, of course, subsequently be internalized by the core group.23 The rst vision reveals innate qualities that surge up within the community and are transmitted through birth, education and mutual cooperation, whereas the second vision explains how identity is constructed time and again through perceptions of quality and agency made by outsiders, by reference to other identities. In both cases, identity may be seen as a mix of fact and ction, but the two mixtures are rather different in nature. In the rst interpretation, ctional qualities, perceived as achieved properties of the community, are taken as a starting point for social education towards real values. The urge for tolerance, for example, considered as an achieved quality of the Dutch as early as the seventeenth century, tends to enforce in Dutch society an educational program, rooted in its political acceptance, toward the actual toleration of deviance in whatever domain may seem socially eligible for that virtue, be it drug addiction, euthanasia, gay equality (including gay marriage), social dysfunction, or ideological

22 On the Dutch practice of toleration in history and its meaning: C. BerkvensStevelinck, J. Israel, & G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, eds., The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic (Leiden, New York & Cologne: Brill, 1997); R. Po-chia Hsia & Henk van Nierop, eds., Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 23 The constructivist vision is well represented, among others, by Daniel K. Richter, “Brothers, Scoundrels, Metal Makers: Dutch Constructions of Native American Constructions of the Dutch,” De Halve Maen, LXXI:3 (Fall 1998), 59–64. Imagology has inspired the approach of Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570 –1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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extremism.24 Freedom understood as social and cultural toleration is the ultimate Dutch virtue, and as such it is virtually never questioned, as the national debate following the murder of Theo van Gogh has profusely shown. In the second interpretation, however, the perceived qualities and vices of the group refer above all to those of others. They start from the premise that the ascribed characteristics are rooted in factual observation and reect therefore a certain reality outside the Dutch themselves. Yet, while equally based on perception, they remain also prone to ction, to the imagination of the outsiders and observers, sometimes amplied by the use made of them in return by the Dutch themselves, a mechanism that was illustrated by the famous ‘Hollanditis’ or ‘Dutch disease’ (the peace virus) of the 1970s and 80s.25 Another curious example of this mechanism is the perceived lack of linguistic pride of the Dutch. In fact, Dutch people do easily drop the use of the Dutch language in front of others—the fact was discernible already in the seventeenth century, when Dutch people in foreign countries quickly assimilated to the local language and at home were quite prone to use the language of their foreign interlocutors, or used to switch among themselves from one language to another, according to the subject or the setting. This perception from outside may be correct in itself, but its interpretation is quite relative, since it is closely related to the lack of linguistic adaptability by others. Actually, the Dutch language has an extremely strong position as cement of the national community. Though the use of other languages by ethnic minorities is socially tolerated, the real measure of social integration in the national community is the ability to speak Dutch, independently of its actual practice in everyday life, which may be marked by English, a regional dialect, or some immigrant language.26 The Dutch language remains,

24 The Dutch euthanasia debate has been analysed by James Kennedy, Een weloverwogen dood: De opkomst van euthanasie in Nederland (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2002). For the general background see the essays in Hans Krabbendam & Hans Martien ten Napel, eds., Regulating Morality: A Comparison of the Role of the State in Mastering the Mores in the Netherlands and the United States (Antwerp & Apeldoorn: Maklu, 2000). 25 Walter Laqueur, “Hollanditis: A New Stage in European Neutralism,” Commentary, 72:2 (August 1981): 19–26; Rudy Andeweg, “From Dutch disease to Dutch model? Consensus government in practice,” Parliamentary Affairs, 53 (2000): 697–709; Remco van Diepen, Hollanditis. Nederland en het kernwapendebat, 1977–1987 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2004). 26 This is apparently one of the major Dutch social taboos. Very little has been written on the lack of linguistic pride among the Dutch. See however the introduction to Nicoline van der Sijs, ed., Taaltrots (Amsterdam: Contact. 1999), and the report

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in fact, one of the last strongholds of Dutch identity, as is shown by the history of the immigrant communities in America or Canada, not to forget South Africa with its Afrikaans. We must now go back to our rst point, the meaning of ‘Dutch’. This will bring us back to America. Does the key term ‘Dutch’ pertain to the realm of fact or to that of ction? Indeed, what is Dutch? What does it mean? We must reect here critically on the meaning of Dutch and its broader conceptual eld, Dutchness, in order to make us conscious of the potentialities and the pitfalls of the use of such a concept in the national and the international setting. Is there really something like Dutchness? Let us recall rst of all that ‘Dutch’ is an un-Dutch word.27 We know that it derives from duitsch or diets, two words that refer to parts of the German-speaking world. As such, it was however never really in use by the Dutch, who identied themselves either as people from the Netherlands (Nederland, Nederlanders), or as Low Germans (Nederduitsch, so until the early nineteenth century in the Nederduitsch-Gereformeerde Kerk, the Nederduitsche taal, or the Nederduitsche school ), or, inside their country, continued to consider themselves as inhabitants of one of the sovereign provinces and adjacent regions, starting with the most prominent and urbanized province, Holland, and nishing with the poorest and most rural region, Drenthe. After the Revolution the term ‘Nederland’ or its metonym ‘Holland’ became dominant. In fact, ‘Dutch’ suffers from the same lack of precision as ‘Hollands’: it may indifferently apply to the Netherlands as a whole, to the province of Holland, or to any other part of the country. ‘Dutch’ is therefore an externalist term. It corresponds to an outward vision of the Netherlands. It embraces people who do not necessarily recognise their political brotherhood. On the other hand, it reects well the cultural practice of the early modern Dutch whose ideas of citizenship and nationhood were different from ours. In the early modern Dutch Republic, citizenship ( poorterschap) could be acquired either by birth or by purchase, and incidentally by gift or adoption.28 Purchasing

of the Committee-Frijhoff of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences: Nederlands, tenzij . . . Tweetaligheid in de geestes- en de gedrags- en maatschappijwetenschappen. Rapport van de Commissie Nederlands als wetenschapstaal (Amsterdam: KNAW, 2003). 27 The uses and meanings of the English/American word ‘Dutch’ and its combinations are listed in: Ton Spruijt, Total Dutch: Een Engels-woordboek (Amsterdam: Contact, 1999). 28 Joost Kloek & Karin Tilmans, eds., Burger. Een geschiedenis van het begrip ‘burger’ in de Nederlanden van de Middeleeuwen tot de 21ste eeuw (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), in particular: Maarten Prak & Erica Kuijpers, “Burger, ingezetene, vreem-

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the poorterschap of a town or city was not limited by nationality, but on the other hand, not all the native-born citizens were full-edged poorters. Inhabitants we would call ‘nationals’ could therefore be endowed with a lower degree of citizen rights than people having come from outside. On the other hand, citizens from a neighbouring town (let alone another province) were considered foreigners and the right to actively participate in town politics and to exercise political functions was denied to them outside their town of poorterschap.

Dutchness in Early Modern Colonial America In the perception of early modern citizenship, the quality of Dutchness was therefore not forcibly linked with birth or nationality. It was much more a matter of adoption, by kinship, by law or by social acceptance, into a shared community. Having the history of New Netherland in mind, many things may now become more apparent.29 When Director Kieft spoke in 1643 with the refugee French Jesuit Isaac Jogues, and boasted of the diversity of New Amsterdam’s population, he did not point to the number of nationalities present in his territory, but to the eighteen languages that apparently were spoken in the small town of New Amsterdam, and of which several may have been what we would call regional languages or dialects, like the Frisian language, the Flemish idiom, or the Lower Saxon dialects from the Eastern provinces. The notion of nationality did not make sense in the Dutch conception of citizenship, but language was indeed a token of difference, either physical, by family extraction, or cultural, by education. We know that Kieft himself was uent in Dutch, French and Latin, and that in his contacts with others he used the three languages in turn.30

deling: Burgerschap in Amsterdam in de 17e en 18e eeuw,” 113–132; Maarten Prak, “Burghers, Citizens, and Popular Politics in the Dutch Republic,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30:4 (1997): 443–448. 29 For a general reassessment of the cultural impact of New Netherland and its historiography, with full references, I refer to the synthetic article by Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History,” New York History: Quarterly Journal of New York State Historical Association, 80 (1999): 5–28; for a synthesis of New Netherland history itself, see Jaap Jacobs, New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2005). 30 See Willem Frijhoff, “Neglected networks: Director Willem Kieft (1602–1647) and his Dutch relatives,” in Revisiting New Netherland: Perspectives on Early Dutch America, ed. Joyce D. Goodfriend (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 147–204.

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In this perspective a question like the one asked by David Cohen in his well-known article ‘How Dutch were the Dutch of New Netherland?’ does not really make sense, or better: it may make some sense in a social or a cultural perspective, as far as the particular cultural input from particular areas of Europe is concerned, but not in the political realm.31 In fact, the whole literature written since the nineteenth century on the national origins of the people of New Netherland reects much more the concerns of nationalism after the revolutionary era than historical awareness. In the eyes of an early modern administrator, or any ordinary man or woman of that time, the battles for credit for the foundation of New Netherland or the town of New Amsterdam, fought in the memorial years of the twentieth century between the Netherlands, Belgium (the Walloons as the rst group of settlers, with their own monument in Battery Park), France (the Huguenots, not to forget that part of the Walloon area that was annexed by France in the late seventeenth century, providing France with unexpected ‘French’ colonists in New Netherland) and Germany (Peter Minuit was born at Wesel on the Rhine, where he has a monument) would barely matter. Similarly, efforts made by historians of a nationalist stance towards a precise attribution of nationality to the immigrants in New Netherland are virtually meaningless. From the outset there were in New Netherland many Scandinavians and Germans, due to the fact that Scandinavians and Germans served in huge numbers in the East and West India Companies and the Dutch army and eet.32 The Norwegian and Danish immigrants must have spoken Scandinavian languages and were of the Lutheran confession, just as many Germans must have been. Yet, with the exception of the private estate of a literate

31 D. S. Cohen, “How Dutch were the Dutch of New Netherland?” New York History: Quarterly Journal of New York State Historical Association, 62 (1981): 43–60; see also Simon Middleton, “The idea of ‘Amsterdam’ in New Amsterdam and early New York,” in Amsterdam-New York: Transatlantic Relations and Urban Identities since 1653, eds. George Harinck & Hans Krabbendam (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 2005), 45–54. 32 For this immigration, see Ad Knotter & J. L. van Zanden, “Immigratie en arbeidsmarkt in Amsterdam in de 17e eeuw,” Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 13 (1987): 403–431; Ad Knotter & J. L. van Zanden, “Vreemdelingen in Amsterdam in de 17e eeuw: groepsvorming, arbeid en ondernemerschap,” Holland, 27 (1995): 219–235; Jan Lucassen, Newcomers: Immigrants and Their Descendants in the Netherlands 1550 –1995 (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1997); Jan Lucassen, “A multinational and its labor force: The Dutch East India Company 1595–1795,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 66 (2004): 12–39.

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Lutheran immigrant like the Danish captain Jonas Bronck (who gave his name to the Bronx), there is barely a trace of such languages or of Lutheran books or services before the second half of the seventeenth century.33 They must have adapted themselves to the common language and the public Reformed confession, as did Anneke Jans, the famous wife of the second Reformed minister of Manhattan, Holland-born Reverend Everardus Bogardus, since she was originally a Norwegian woman of Lutheran confession, speaking a Scandinavian language, and, during her troubled life in Amsterdam, New Amsterdam and Beverwijck, dealt with many other Scandinavian immigrants and had German and Dutch sons-in-law. Yet, her descendants preserve a picture that represents her as a Dutch burgher woman of the 1620s or 1630s in all her Dutchness.34 Given this variety of origins and languages, we may wonder whether the notion of ‘melting pot’ would be applicable to the early modern colonial society of the Dutch. A melting pot supposes perceived differences in national origin and cultural traditions; it refers to notions such as ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’. In spite of the many countries of origin of the settlers, the cultural life of early New Netherland appears at rst sight as a rather traditional repertoire of Dutch customs among which heavily drinking and smoking, festivals like Carnival or Pinxter, specic ways of thinking, attitudes and gestures, mixed up with some adaptations to the new American and colonial context, exactly in the way the Dutch themselves behaved by importing and assimilating whatever was brought by people from outside to the cultural market-place of the Netherlands.35 In this elementary vision, Holland would simply have been transferred to the New World, or imitated in an American setting,

33 See for his books and their identication: Willem Frijhoff, Wegen van Evert Willemsz. Een Hollands weeskind op zoek naar zichzelf 1607–1647 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1995), 596–597. Shortened English translation of this biography: Fullling God’s Mission. The Two Worlds of Dominie Everardus Bogardus 1607–1647 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2007), 360. 34 Frijhoff, Wegen, 812–814. Other portraits of early New Netherland individuals (including that of Adriaen van der Donck, recently published) deserve the same caution. 35 Of course, this argument may go the other way: men with a traditionally bad press in America, like Director Willem Kieft, may obtain some rehabilitation in the light of a reassessment of their administration measured by Dutch civic standards of that time. See, for instance, Christopher Pierce, “Resuscitating Willem Kieft: Utopian Alternatives to Dystopian Traditions,” in Dreams of Paradise, Visions of Apocalypse: Utopia and Dystopia in American Culture, ed. Jaap Verheul (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2004), 111–121.

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and the Dutch would have interpreted their new country through the prism of their Dutchness.36 On second thought, however, Dutch cultural identity in New Netherland appears as a more complex notion. This is for two reasons, the rst of a factual nature, the other methodological. First, Dutch culture was not homogenous in the homeland itself: the Dutch Republic included great numbers of people, changing over time, from different geographical origins and different social strata, living in autonomous provinces and competing towns with different traditions, laws and diverging functions and local histories. It is true that Holland played an increasingly important role in the cultural self-denition of the Dutch, but precisely in the period of New Netherland, Holland’s cultural preeminence was not yet established in everyday life. The interpretation of the Dutchness of the Golden Age as the culture of the province of Holland, understood as monocultural and uniform throughout the province and the population, is most probably a nineteenth-century nationalist interpretation. Secondly, though the West India Company ofcials and the colonists brought their political and social institutions and their own cultural baggage with them, including the interpretation schemes for their new homeland, culture can never be understood as a simple one-to-on transfer from site A to site B. In every new context traditional and accepted cultural forms have to be appropriated anew by their bearers or by the target group, taking into account their contextualisation through the mediations that interfere during the transfer, and the new associations, oppositions or resistances that the physical world and the people around them may provide. Therefore, Dutch culture in the mid-Atlantic can never be a faithful copy of Dutch culture in the Netherlands, and we may add that in the Netherlands similar mechanisms prevent culture from the province of Holland from being copied identically or taken over in, say, Gelderland, Drenthe or Friesland, or vice versa. In such a context, the nineteenth-century notion of ‘Dutch’ is not a good tool for dening qualities and differences. The real distinction may rather have been social in nature, not national: administrators or intellectuals like Director Willem Kieft, Doctor La Montagne, Dominie 36 This is basically the argument of the interesting study by Donna Merwick, Possessing Albany, 1630 –1710, The Dutch and the English Experiences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), whose great merit has been to radically change the angle of perception of the former colony in New York state historiography.

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Megapolensis, jonker Van der Donck or Director Pieter Stuyvesant stand out as cultivated spokesmen able to articulate particular concerns and feelings in near-national concepts, the ‘nation’ being still of another nature than today, smaller, more marked by law and politics than by culture and feelings of togetherness. It is only in the confrontation with the Native Americans that a real sense of togetherness does emerge from the feeling that the Europeans as a group pertain to another cultural universe.37 Dramatically, this is shown in the famous petition sent by the commonalty, i.e. the chosen representatives of the inhabitants of New Netherland, to the States General during the Indian War in October 1644: “We are living here among thousands of savage and barbarous people”, they write, “we have left our beloved fatherland, and if God were not our comfort, we would perish in misery. [. . .] The savages are embittered against the Netherlandic nation. [. . .] Every man among us may cause a rebellion [. . .] but God alone is capable of bringing us to concord”.38 This quotation shows quite well the state of mind of the inhabitants of early New Amsterdam. There are three key notions in this quotation: fatherland, nation, and concord (or union). The European Netherlands are still considered as the ‘fatherland’ by all the petitioners, from whatever country of origin they may have immigrated, but unlike the Dutch in Europe, they do not identify any more with the single provinces of the Netherlands but consider the Dutch federation as their lawful homeland, under the rule not of the sovereign provincial States but of their common delegates, the States General. At the same time, the colonists dene themselves as the “Netherlandic nation”. We should not take this in an ethnic sense, as the nation of all the people of Netherlandic origin, but exactly as it was taken at home in the Netherlands: as the community of all those, Dutchmen and foreigners alike, who lived in the Northern half of the Low Countries, in the commonwealth constituted under the rule of the Dutch Republic, or Belgium Foederatum as, surprisingly for us, it was called in Latin. Though united by several kinds of bonds, their supreme virtue as a social group had to be concordia, ‘concord’,

37 Some of the paragraphs and conclusions that follow draw upon my essay “Reinventing an old fatherland: The management of Dutch identity in early modern America,” in Managing ethnicity: Perspectives from folklore studies, history and anthropology, eds. Regina Bendix & Herman Roodenburg (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2000), 121–141. 38 My own translation after the copy in Nationaal Archief (The Hague), Staten Generaal, no. 12564.25.

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the highest civic value inscribed in the device of the Netherlandic state itself. Concordia may better be translated by ‘union’, in the active sense of the need to unite over and over again, than in the passive sense of an achieved ‘unity’. It stood for the public order of a well-ordered society consisting of free, autonomous citizens, sustaining each other, able to deliver mutual help in adversity, and conforming themselves to the general good, in spite of the diversities between individuals, groups, parties or factions.39

Dutchness as the Construction of an Ethnic Community Things changed dramatically after the rendition of New Netherland to the English on September 8, 1664. The introduction of a new political authority started a polarization between the two communities, which expressed itself in the process of ethnic identication of the former Dutch colonists as ‘the Dutch’.40 In the long run it would radically change the meaning of Dutchness. At rst, two communities continued to live in juxtaposition: whereas the Dutch, that is the community of the former colonists of whatever origin, except English, maintained for the time being their legal system and their customs, the English population were constituted and regrouped into a new parallel community under English law and English rule. For the Dutch community, the process of Anglicization was however only provisionally suspended, its position in the colonies under the English crown being gradually transformed. From a semi-public body belonging to a commercial company with basically mercantile goals and a delegated authority, former New Netherland became now a full-edged colony submitted to public administration in its own right; government was Anglicized; in public life the Anglican Church took over the privileged place of the Reformed congregation; English law was introduced; social conditions—including slavery and relations with the natives—henceforth followed English patterns; in the various sectors of social life the Dutch language was sooner or 39 Cf. Frijhoff & Spies, 1650: Hard-won Unity, subject index, s.v. “concordia” and “unity”. 40 For the context, see Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Cf. also the stimulating essay by Hans Krabbendam, Dutch-American Identity Politics: The Use of History by Dutch Immigrants (inaugural lecture of the Visiting Research Fellows Program, Van Raalte Institute, Hope College, 18 September 2003).

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later replaced by the English idiom as the privileged, later the unique instrument of public expression. The Anglicization of the colony did not prevent the descendants of the inhabitants under former Dutch rule from cultivating the memory of their roots and celebrating customary Dutch rituals. On the contrary, the evidence points towards the revival of a ‘national’ awareness of the former population, expressed in a process of ongoing ethnicization. The former Dutch colonists, including their slaves, constructed—or invented, in the sense of the ‘invention of tradition’ analysed in their famous book by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger41—their proper group culture under the common denominator of Dutchness. In fact, the Dutch community continued to maintain strong bonds with the homeland in Europe, and there is reason to believe that within that group the reference to Europe became more and more exclusively Dutch. Dutch was the language of the Reformed congregations; Dutch colonists continued to arrive every now and then, and reinforced the national character of the group; and economic relations with the trading rms of the Netherlands remained intensive. Once the Amsterdam monopoly was broken, they could even develop on a new basis, as did the tobacco trade with Rotterdam. The turning point came in 1689–1691, after the Glorious Revolution that put the Calvinist William of Orange on the English throne. The so-called Leisler’s rebellion of those years was an uprising against English absolutism, the Episcopalian tendencies of Anglicanism, and the menace of a Catholic restoration. It involved that part of the petty town bourgeoisie of New York and Albany that identied itself with democratic government and a Calvinistic outlook. It was, in other words, the starting point of a social and cultural consciousness that gathered the sympathizers under the ethnic banner of Dutch religion and Dutch culture. Ever since then, Calvinism and democracy have become the distinctive marks of the Dutch communities in the mid-Atlantic region. The execution of Jacob Leisler on May 16, 1691, gave the movement its hero and its ideological legitimacy. People related that Jacob Leisler and his son-in-law Jacob Milborne had died like Calvinist martyrs making moving speeches in their own behalf and reportedly singing

41 Eric J. Hobsbawm & Terence O. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; new ed. 1992).

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the 79th Psalm, chanted under similar circumstances by Huguenot martyrs in Europe.42 The interesting point is that Leisler (who really was a Germanyborn minister’s son) and his fellow rebels were by no means exclusively recruited within the Dutch community. They represented much more a political faction in the customary way of Dutch town politics than a closed national community. But obviously Leisler’s rebellion was rooted in Dutch urban traditions. It followed closely Netherlandic patterns of burgher revolt, used the same action repertoires, and fought for social and political values characteristic of the society in the Dutch homeland, to which it formally referred. It could therefore be used as a memorial milestone in the construction of Dutchness by a social group that identied with the descendants of the former rulers. In actuality, the memory of Leisler’s rebellion has been one of the historical ways to create Dutch ethnicity in a divided community and it prepared the choice made by the majority of the Dutch community members during the American Revolution. Henceforth, cultural group differences were increasingly interpreted in ethnic terms, using the concept of ‘Dutch’ as an identier, independent of the cultural evolution in the former European homeland. The competing community itself appropriated the term ‘Dutch’ as its hallmark and its outward common identity. While deprived of its political power as an autonomous group, the Dutch community on the East coast tended henceforth to safeguard its identity by taking refuge in culture, including religion. We may assert that social memory was then the main instrument of Dutchness, in a threefold way: rstly the historical memory of the former Dutch colony as it continued to be transmitted through its descendants, in family tradition, material culture, and through heritage; secondly the memory of its laws, customs, values, and traditions as they continued to be cultivated in the community of those confessing themselves as Dutch; thirdly the memory of the heroic deeds and other exploits by which this new ‘Dutch’ community after the rendition to the English crown constituted its own history and its raison d’être. It goes without saying that the mixture, the intensity and the rhythm of evolution of these three forms of memorial activity could be rather different in the cities and in the countryside. In the upstate New York villages, for instance, life probably went on in the customary Dutch way much longer than

42 Alice F. Kenney, Stubborn for Liberty: The Dutch in New York (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1975), 65.

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in New York City, or even in towns like Albany or Kingston, where faced with the weight of the English power in public life Dutchness underwent a process of memorial construction. Yet even there, ‘Dutchness’ must have been increasingly different from the way of life in the Dutch Republic itself. Its formal elements developed in a new, changing context, got new institutional forms, and received new, American-Dutch meanings. American Dutchness became therefore a culture of its own, in interaction with the English Americans, with other European settlers, with the Natives, with the Africans. All in all, the Dutch community developed a keen consciousness of its specic characteristics as a Calvinist, Dutch-speaking nation of democratic feelings without regard for the initial ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity of its members. This is the more remarkable since democracy had not really been the political hallmark of the West India Company. To be sure, New Netherland had known some forms of political representation, the rst being the constitution of a council of twelve inhabitants in August 1641, the other being the incorporation of the town of New Amsterdam on February 2, 1653.43 But the two last Directors of the colony, Willem Kieft and Pieter Stuyvesant, though of rather different social extraction, both embodied the image of the typical Dutch regent, marked by the aristocratic form of authority that had been promoted by Simon Stevin, Hugo Grotius and other ideologists of the early Dutch commonwealth and its political regime, and that was the core of the republican ideology of the period of the True Freedom, in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, under grand pensionary Johan de Witt and his soul mate, the entrepreneur and political analyst Pieter de la Court. It is true that both Kieft and Stuyvesant had been forced to cooperate with and occasionally to rely upon the more representative body of the citizens that was called the commonalty and that may be considered as the institutional basis for the development of a democratic ideology. Yet the political status of that body remains unclear: was it a reection of the sworn council that in the towns of the Eastern provinces of the Netherlands constituted the critical burgher counterpart of the patrician regents? Or was it an American invention in its own right, which however could benet from 43 Jaap Jacobs, “ ‘To favour this new and growing city of New Amsterdam with a court of justice’. The relations between rulers and ruled in New Amsterdam,” in Harinck & Krabbendam, Amsterdam-New York, 17–29; Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America (New York etc.: Doubleday, 2004), 257–283.

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the Dutch tendency to commit concerned citizens to public affairs in a spirit of debating for the general good?44 Whatever the reason may have been, democracy in the eighteenth-century sense did not mean social equality but was more or less a form of bottom-up contribution, more formal than real, to decision-making by more or less broad political elites. Yet it has been crucial for the ction of American Dutchness on the East coast, and hence perhaps in other communities spread over the country.

Dutchness as a Memorial Imagery Dutchness as an ethnic memory, with the imagery of a memorial identity, exploded in the nineteenth century. Two distinct moments are relevant for our purpose. The rst moment is the publication of Washington Irving’s famous book A History of New York, By Diedrich Knickerbocker in 1809. As Elisabeth Paling Funk has shown, Irving was a much better historian than was thought formerly, and he was above all a superb proto-folklorist.45 For his mock-heroic town history he captured the forms of popular culture and the living traditions of the Dutch community, essentially those of the Dutch peasants (boers) in the countryside in upstate New York, in order to create a satirical image of the Dutch as a cultural group. Whatever the historian’s opinion on Irving’s book may be, in the light of this reection on Dutchness it certainly is a masterpiece, since it has created a henceforth inescapable image of the Dutch, and of their character and culture, in its own right. For the rst time, the Dutch appear in Irving’s book as an autonomous group with their own cultural universe, really an early perception of Dutchness. Knickerbocker style became synonymous with a certain image of Dutchness with a rather negative connotation: inert and stolid, self-satised, excessively prone to good living, inward-looking and closed into one’s own group.46

44 For what we have called the ‘discussion culture’ of the seventeenth-century Netherlands, see Frijhoff & Spies, 1650: Hard-won Unity, 220–225, 596–599. 45 Elisabeth Paling Funk, “Knickerbocker’s New Netherland: Washington Irving’s representation of Dutch life on the Hudson,” in Harinck & Krabbendam, AmsterdamNew York, 135–147. 46 For the application of this concept of Dutchness to art history, see the review article by Neil Duff Kamil, “Of American Kasten and the Mythology of ‘Pure Dutchness’ ” http://www.chipstone.org/publications/1993/Bookreviews93/bookreview4.html.

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Irving’s inuence on the reputation of the Dutch, their moral position in the global community, and the image of their culture has been considerable. Due to the ethnic competition of the English and the Dutch, the satirical tone of Irving’s story has largely superseded his early anthropology of Dutch life and manners. Ever since Irving’s History, the image of lazy, fat, drunken or smoking good-for-nothings has pervaded nineteenth-century American imagery of Dutchness. Yet it must be recognized that Irving also greatly contributed to the revitalisation of the founding myths of New York, and more generally of early colonial America. It is precisely because the Knickerbocker imagery covered all the qualities of the Dutch that in the course of time it could be reversed and could receive new, positive meanings. Indeed, this negative image is the perfect counterpart of positive initiatives meant to shape new memorial forms of Dutch culture, such as the creation of the Saint Nicholas Society at Albany in the 1820s and the promotion of such major Dutch traditions as Saint Nicholas’ Eve as an expression of common ethnic consciousness, referring to the cultural traditions of the homeland overseas. Or consider the story by Mary Mapes Dodge, Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates (rst published in 1865), which perhaps more than any other book has anchored in the minds of hundreds of thousands of Americans and Europeans a precise, though ctional, image of Dutchness, in total contrast to Irving’s: the young Hans Brinker, who saved his village and its inhabitants by sticking his nger in a leaking dike and staying there until he was freed by help from outside, is the icon of real courage (not of Dutch courage . . .!), of cooperation and attention to the public cause, of independence and trustworthiness. This new awareness of American Dutchness, rooted in a new cultural memory, and shaped in more or less isolated ethnic Dutch enclaves through tales, novels, poems, songs, meetings and traditions, more often invented than not, was the necessary prelude to a more historical memory of the Dutch community later in the nineteenth century.47 Back to basics and to the perceived origins of Dutchness in its initial purity. This new openness allowed the appropriation of alien manners, forms and traditions as authentically ‘Dutch,’ provided they were not

47 For the religious dimension of this evolution towards Dutchness as a historical memory, see Firth Haring Fabend, Zion on the Hudson: Dutch New York and New Jersey in the Age of Revivals (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000).

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in contradiction with the basic qualities of this ethnically constructed Dutchness. A period of massive ascription to Dutchness followed, including the recovery of the Dutch history of early New York. This ‘Holland revival’ resulted in what Annette Stott in a remarkably rich book has called the Holland mania of the decades around 1900.48 But as a form of ascription, it corresponded probably more to American standards than to the Dutch reality of those decades. In a moment of uncertainty about America’s past and future, before the Great War that would denitely place the United States in the rst ranks of world history and discard its hesitations, Dutchness apparently played a particular role in the recovery of the self-consciousness of, at any rate, the Dutch part of the American nation. Early twentiethcentury Dutchness was in America essentially a work of rhetoric and visual ction: the Dutch were reinvented as idealized counterparts of the Americans, and they often wore more American traits than European marks. Yet the ction was double. For it played at the same time with ctional images of the Dutch themselves, for instance the renewed interest in the self-portraits, the group portraits or the genre paintings of the Golden Age, considered as true representations of real Dutch life, people and culture and therefore as quintessentially Dutch, as paragons of ‘Dutchness’; or the folkloric representations of Dutch towns and villages such as Volendam, Katwijk, Egmond, or Laren (three of the four being, by the way, not at all Calvinist but Catholic by tradition) promoted by the Dutch themselves in the international exhibitions of the second half of the nineteenth century; or the stereotyped visions of the Dutch countryside, limited in fact to the coastal provinces, and more precisely Holland, with peasants wearing a traditional dress, and with shing ports, windmills, farms and cattle, perfect icons of the tranquil prosperity of a consummate culture. That was Dutchness at its richest, but slowly drifting away from any real consequence for American culture or identity. Since then, the interest in Dutch culture and history as a constituent part of America’s identity obviously has faded in the United States, in spite of the repeated efforts of historians, individual Americans, or institutions like the Holland Society or the New Netherland Project

48 Annette Stott, Holland Mania. The Unknown Dutch Period in American Art and Culture (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1998).

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to promote the acknowledgement of the Dutch as founders of New York, or as the inventors of toleration, democracy, or representative government. From Rembrandt, Frans Hals and Jan Steen to Van Gogh and Mondrian, not to speak of Willem de Kooning, Dutch painters remain a sure value on the art market, but outside a small circle of connoisseurs their production appears by now as totally detached from the American need for Dutchness itself. There are of course reasons enough to regret this forgetfulness, but we should bear in mind that the notions of Dutch and Dutchness are inscribed on an American historical trajectory that has its own rules. They are subject to particular mixtures of fact and ction that conform to the images, visions and representations of particular groups at precise moments.

Dutch Americans and American Dutchness: Where Do They Meet? One of the elements of this historical trajectory has not yet been touched on in this analysis. That is religion, and in particular the Dutch immigration to the mid-West as a consequence of religious dissent in the Netherlands. So far I have chosen to highlight the story of the East coast. But there is a second track of Dutchness in American history, perhaps more vivid than the New York story, and able to revive its reference to Dutchness whenever old Netherlands itself feels the need to review its identity in this sense. New Netherland was not founded for religious motives. On the contrary, religious orthodoxy was initially at odds with the public spirit in the colony. Religious Dutchness really starts with forms of utopian dissent in the second half of the seventeenth century. It was followed by the Great Awakening of Pietism, continued in the Dutch communities of the mid-Atlantic colonies, and resumed in the creation, since the 1840s, of neo-Calvinist, Catholic, Evangelical, or other religiously inspired communities founded elsewhere in the United States, especially in Iowa and Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by successive waves of immigrants from the Netherlands. In these new establishments, the image of the Dutch was revitalised with new stereotypes coming directly from the homeland that beneted from new, nationalist visions of the Netherlands as a truly national community with an established national culture, of which they bear evident marks. These communities formed a new stream alongside the old, New Netherland-cradled images of Dutchness. By that time, both relied heavily

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upon religion: religion in its culturally dominant form was the last nineteenth-century refuge of East coast Dutchness; and religion—mostly religious dissent in its militant expression—was the very motive for immigration for the mid-Western immigrants. Religion must therefore be a key factor in the search for what may link the two streams together culturally. In the long run, however, even in the mid-West the religious aspect of the Dutch cultural heritage had to become a purely inner-directed group characteristic, distinctive only in the eld of the denominational identity that had motivated the very creation of these immigrant communities. Actually, it was in due course detached from the everyday life of the immigrant communities, which were marked by a high degree of linguistic, civic, and social assimilation.49 What remains—Dutch food, wooden shoes, windmills, Dutch gables, St. Nicholas’ Eve—is a partly residual, partly reinvented set of symbols, practices, and rhetorical forms of Dutchness, as seen through the prism of (as Adriaan de Jong has called it in his important PhD dissertation) a ‘musealized folk culture’, as in Pella or Orange City.50 Such cultural practices are important symbolic signiers of group identity, but the question remains whether, and how exactly, they are still linked to the three main traditions of American Dutchness: the cultural memory of Dutch experience and Dutch identity of the group itself; the inux of new traditions or new memory from the homeland, transmitted through a multitude of channels, some broad, others tiny: correspondence, newspapers or newspaper clippings from home, tales or memories of newly arrived group members, learned literature from the pulpit; and the pervasive image of Dutchness in the all-American context, more

49 Cf. Robert P. Swierenga, ed., The Dutch in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985); Henry S. Lucas, Netherlanders in America: Dutch Immigration to the United States and Canada, 1789 –1950 (1955; reprint Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1989); Rob Kroes & Henk Otto Neuschäfer, eds., The Dutch in North-America: Their Immigration and Cultural Continuity (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1991); Robert P. Swierenga, The Forerunners: Dutch Jewry in the North American Diaspora (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994); Robert P. Swierenga, Faith and Family: Dutch Immigration and Settlement in the United States, 1820 –1920 (New York & London: Holmes & Meier, 2000); Hans Krabbendam & Larry J. Wagenaar, eds., The Dutch-American Experience: Essays in Honor of Robert P. Swierenga (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 2000); Robert P. Swierenga, Dutch Chicago: A History of the Hollanders in the Windy City (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003); Suzanne M. Sinke, Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States 1880 –1920 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005). 50 Adriaan de Jong, De dirigenten der herinnering. Musealisering en nationalisering van de volkscultuur in Nederland 1815–1940 (Nijmegen: SUN, 2001). German translation: Adriaan de Jong, Die Dirigenten der Erinnerung. Musealisierung und Nationalisierung der Volkskultuur in den Niederlanden 1815 –1940 (Münster etc. Waxmann, 2007).

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precisely the elements of religious continuity, the moral imperatives, the messages of the Dutch revival. As a cultural historian, I would be very careful not to conclude too quickly in these matters, and not to be over-rationalistic. Something not shown may well exist, especially in the area of culture and mentality. Experience, knowledge and memories may work underground, on a subconscious level, and surface only every now and then as historical evidence, in the particular circumstances t for historical documentation. Historical analysis often shows that even remote, isolated communities benet from a remarkably complete knowledge of the surrounding world, although this knowledge is rarely used or activated, since in isolation there is not real need to do so. Besides, communications and the spread of knowledge and imagery changed dramatically after the 1850s, when a new threshold in communication techniques was reached, the diffusion of images was multiplied, and literacy expanded quickly. We must therefore always distinguish between available images of Dutchness, ready to be received, appropriated and activated in a given context, and observable only at a specic moment by the historian, on the one hand, and the deliberate promotion or steering of ideology or imagery from within or from without, on the other. The ultimate focus of our theme, and the question that should be asked next, is, I think, not the issue of American Dutchness itself. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that the Dutch in America behaved differently from the Dutch in Canada, Australia or South Africa, or than other migrants in similar situations. As a group, immigrants assert everywhere an ever more selective memorial imagery of their homeland in order to afrm an ethnically distinct identity, gradually losing different elements of their original culture and social institutions, and stressing or inventing such traditions and rituals as may best symbolize their changing self-consciousness. What really may distinguish the Dutch in America is not the general model of change but the two particular forms it takes in the American context. This refers rst of all to the specic connections of the American Dutch with the changing image of the European Dutch. Consider, for instance, the persistent need for the English, during some centuries, to deprecate the Dutch, as their political, social and cultural rivals on both sides of the ocean; or the positive imagery of the Holland revival with its exaltation of European Dutchness; or the negative reputation of the European Dutch as a consequence of the ‘Hollanditis’ crisis. Local experiences of Dutchness react upon such pervasive imagery either by playing with it or by opposing it, or even ignoring it deliberately.

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The second form is much more exciting and demanding for future research. This is the question when and at what point the American Dutchness of the former colonies on the East coast begins to interact with the Dutchness of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrants, and how exactly these two forms of Dutchness, each moulded by its own historical trajectory, become intertwined and change the all-American image of Dutchness. There are certainly interlocking themes and images vital in both areas and communities, such as the sharp awareness of particular moral virtues and civic values identied as ‘Dutch’ and linked with some idea of religion in society or of responsible citizenship; or the folklorization of American Dutch and Dutch American everyday life, as shown during the Knickerbocker period and the Holland mania, and again in the present-day migrant communities. This brings us to the nal question: how is American Dutchness connected at present with what happens in the Dutch homeland? Will the current crisis of Dutch cultural identity exert any inuence on, for instance, the image of the Dutch as paragons of democracy, which Russell Shorto has recently tried to portray as the legacy of New Netherland, apparently with some success? And how about the unmistakable return to history and to the patriotic folklorization of Dutch identity in Europe? Will it change the Dutch attitude towards America or, conversely, alter the image of Dutchness on the American side of the ocean? There is no ready answer to these questions, but I believe that we, as historians, art historians and social anthropologists, must remain utterly sensitive to such interrogations, in order not to lose the lived experience of Dutchness somewhere in the middle of the academic production of historical Dutchness.

Conclusion Dutch and Dutchness are tricky words. Almost anything may be put into them, since they are social constructions working with memory, experience and ideology, with perception, mediation and appropriation, with stereotyping, representation and identication. However, constructions are real, perhaps not in the metaphysical but certainly in the historical and social sense of the word. They are agents of change, and whenever change occurs, distance is created from the original values. Dutchness in America is necessarily different from Dutchness in the Netherlands,

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from the very beginning of the settlement in New Netherland to the contemporary migrations to the mid-West. That should not be a problem for historical analysis and political action, provided we remain able and ready to consider the notion of Dutchness in the context of its genesis, and to refer its meaning to the context of its use. Dutchness may return to its supposed roots every now and then, since there is no linear progress towards some idealistic form of cultural identity. Even in present-day America, Dutchness may adopt various forms, depending on history, context, and tradition, forms of mediation, change, or resistance to change. Initially, during the New Netherland period, ‘Dutch’ is essentially a socio-cultural notion referring not so much to a population having a common origin, speaking the same language and eventually professing the same religion, or to a single narrative stating these qualities, but rather to people of different origins sharing the same social system with the same norms and values, and who at least had agreed to adopt together and to assimilate as their own the cultural rules that had been dened and were operative in the homeland of the colony, the Netherlands. Yet, even this process of cultural transfer was embedded in a dynamic appropriation of new cultural forms, new institutions and new meanings; in what contemporary social anthropology calls a process of ‘creolization’.51 In fact, as long as Dutch culture was a conquering culture, it did not experience the need to dene its identity by looking for its ‘genuine’ roots and the construction of an ethnic narrative. In New Netherland, it was capable of absorbing, and to a certain extent of transforming, the input from the different cultures of its European immigrants, not to mention, in some respects, those of the native Americans of the country and the African inhabitants of the colony. It was the confrontation of Dutch culture, having become a minority, with other, alien cultures forced upon it from the outside, especially by the English authorities, that made the Dutch react and in the long run dene themselves ethnically as ‘Dutch’ in a narrower sense of the word, as decidedly opposed to other European cultures. On the East coast 51 See my critical analysis of the concept of ‘appropriation’ as an analytical tool in historical anthropology: Willem Frijhoff, “Toeëigening: van bezitsdrang naar betekenisgeving,” Trajecta: Tijdschrift voor de geschiedenis van het katholiek leven in de Nederlanden, 6:2 (1997): 99–118; and “Toe-eigening als vorm van culturele dynamiek,” Volkskunde, 104:1 (2003): 3–17; and its assessment by Marian Füssel, “Die Kunst der Schwachen: Zum Begriff der ‘Aneignung’ in der Geschichtswissenschaft,” Sozial. Geschichte. Zeitschrift für historische Analyse des 20. und 21. Jahrhundert, 21:3 (2006): 7–28.

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as well as in the mid-West, the quality of ‘Dutch’ has been opposed ever since to that of various competing cultural groups. It became the marker of a certain way of life related to the perceived image of the Netherlands, in particular the province of Holland, together with a number of specic values and ideals, and a special form of family life, religious practice and feelings, social intercourse, community building and political representation which many times, we may suspect, must have been closer to dreams about one’s own identity and future than to historical facts. But admittedly, the very rst dreams were those of the ‘Dutch’ colonists themselves, who dreamed of creating a new homeland, economically or religiously more promising and yet culturally profoundly similar to the world they had left behind.52 Finally, Dutchness entered the American imaginary through the facts of the country’s origins, and the ctions of its people’s memory. If there is one lesson to learn from this story, it certainly is that facts never go without ction, and that we are well advised to remain cautious towards any form of unconditional assimilation of history and culture.

52 See more generally: J. W. Schulte Nordholt, The Myth of the West: America as the Last Empire, transl. by Herbert H. Rowen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995; orig. Dutch ed. 1992). By contrast, it would certainly be most interesting for the analysis of Dutchness to confront such early modern dreams and aspirations with those of the present. See Jan Donkers, The American Dream in the Netherlands 1944–1969 (Nijmegen: SUN Publishers/Arnhem: National Heritage Museum, 2000).

INDEX

Abbott, Arthur 102, 103 n. 39 Adams, John 3, 113 Adriaensen, Vincent 28 Albany Institute of History and Art 42 n. 33, 48 n. 49, 53 nn. 66 68 Albany, New York. See also Beverwijk 39, 42, 70, 79, 141, 347, 349 Altman, Benjamin 215 n. 1, 216, 228, 228 n. 55, 230, 233, 247, 252 Altman, Robert 254 Amsterdam, Montana 141 Amsterdam, the Netherlands 330 n. 6 Anderson, Benedict 117 n. 24, 206, 206 n. 59, 336, 336 n. 20 Anglo-Dutch Wars 111 Architecture Barns 78, 157, 177 Churches 4, 8, 20, 55, 71, 72, 75, 78, 98, 139, 141–144, 147, 152, 157–158, 161, 163, 173–177, 185 Dutch Colonial 3, 7, 18, 59, 87–88, 101, 331 n. 7 Dutch Storefront Program 183 Farm Houses 93 Federal 69, 71, 115, 122, 125 Georgian 18, 59, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 75, 78 Gothic 17, 67–70, 73, 75, 80, 203 Porch (stoop) 77, 77 n. 21, 82–83 See also Breuer, Gropius, Koolhaas, Mies van der Rohe, Ofce of Metropolitan Architecture, Sunnyside 290, 293, 295, 297, 304, 324 Armour Institute, Chicago 298 Arnhem 160 Art history 7, 8, 14, 45, 250, 350 n. 46 Atlanta Central Public Library 315, 319–320 Baerle, Caspar van 306 Barns, Dutch. See Architecture, Barns Batavian Republic 334 Batavian Revolution 332 Bauhaus 289–290, 310 Bayard, Lazare 29

Beaumont, C. L. 220 Beckett, G. 42, 42 n. 35 Bedford Courtship, A 100, 101, 102, 105–106, 107 Beekman, Gerardus 50 Beekman Limner 46, 50 Belcher, Jonathan 112, 112 n. 10, 113, 113 n. 11 Belden, E. Porter 305 Belknap, Jeremy 115, 115 n. 20 Belknap, Waldron Phoenix 37, 37 n. 26, 45 Bell, Daniel 283, 286 Bell, Wendell 269, 281, 283, 283 nn. 41–42, 284, 284 n. 46 Benedikt, Michael 295, 295 nn. 13–14 Berchem, Nicolaes 240, 249 Berenson, Bernard 223 n. 34, 228 n. 54, 253 Bergdoll, Barry 293 n. 10, 295, 304, 304 nn. 45–47 Berlage, Hendrik Petrus 301 Betsky, Aaron 299, 299 n. 28, 301, 301 n. 31, 314 n. 63, 315 n. 65 Beverwijck. See also Albany 343 Beyeren, Abraham van 249 Bible, Dutch 48, 55, 150 Bijenkorf, De 271, 320 Birket, James 67, 67 n. 10 Black, Mary 42 nn. 31–34, 46, 46 n. 42, 48, 48 nn. 46, 48–49, 50 nn. 52, 54, 51 n. 56, 52, 52 n. 62, 53 nn. 63, 66, 68, 55 n. 69 Blaisse, Petra 321 Blom, Karel 200, 203 n. 46 Bode, Cornelius 160, 161–163 Boer War 195 Bogardus, Everardus 343 Bol, Ferdinand 44, 249 Bones, Brom 92, 93 Borden, M. C. D. 251 n. 27, 252, 254 Boston, Massachusetts 112 n. 10 Boulding, Elise 269, 277, 277 n. 24, 278, 278 nn. 26–28, 279 n. 30, 281, 281 n. 37, 288 Boulding, Kenneth 269, 276–277, 279, 288

360

index

Bracebridge Hall 89 Breuer, Marcel 290, 293 n. 10, 304 nn. 45, 47, 310, 310 n. 57, 315, 315 nn. 69–70, 319, 319 n. 78, 320 n. 79 Breuer House, Lincoln, Massachusetts 304 Brick, glazed 61, 64–65 Bronck, Jonas 343 Bryan, Thomas Jefferson 217–220, 220 nn. 18–19, 222, 240–241, 246 Buikhaut, Kaen 79 Bullivant, Benjamin 61, 64 Burnham, Daniel 314 Buruma, Ian 299, 299 n. 27, 301, 301 n. 32 Cafn, Charles 221, 221 n. 26, 232, 232 n. 64, 254, 254 n. 34 Calvinism 15, 72, 161, 169, 178, 347 Campbell, Douglass 110 n. 1, 130–131 Capelle, Jan van de 249 Caravaggisti 247 Carnegie, Andrew 216 Carstairs, Charles 227 Casa da Música, Porto 315 Catholicism 4, 121, 136, 140, 143, 146, 148–149, 151, 161, 177, 215, 347, 352–353 Center for the Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California 275 Central College 147, 186, 196 n. 34 Chandler, Samuel 65, 65 n. 7, 66 Chicago, Illinois 291, 298 Child, Lydia Maria 95, 95 n. 11 Choate, Joseph 222, 222 n. 27 Christian Reformed Church 9, 142, 142 n. 10, 143, 147, 153, 157–160, 170, 173–174, 174 n. 42, 175, 176 nn. 46–47, 178, 186 n. 9 Chrysler Building 293 Church Buildings, Dutch. See Architecture, Churches Civil War 16, 19, 119, 122, 126, 129–131, 140–142, 150–151, 224, 240–241 Clara City, Minnesota 166, 175 n. 45, 176 Clark, William 246, 252, 254 Club of Rome 283 Clymer, New York 172 Codman, Charles Russell 240 Codman, Richard 240 Coeymans, Ariaantje 42, 44

Cold War 276, 283, 288 Cole, Thomas 220 Corbusier, Le (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) 293, 295 Cornell University 293 Couturier, Henri 33–34, 34 n. 20 Crane, Ichabod 91 Crelin, Ed 205 Cruyff, Johan 336, 336 n. 19 Cuyp, Aelbert 240, 244, 246, 249, 253, 256–257, 259 Dator, James A. 283 De Jong, Gerald 6 n. 3, 10, 10 nn. 16–17 De Peyster Limner 46, 50 De Peyster, Abraham 37, 39 De Peyster, Johannes III 39, 42 n. 32, 44, 50 De Peyster, Katrina 37 De Peyster, Pierre 37 Delftware 181, 187–188, 194, 196, 204 Denton, Daniel 61, 61 n. 4 Denver, Colorado 141 DePere, Wisconsin 149 Detroit, Michigan 142, 150, 238, 238 n. 7 DeWint House 81 Disaster Year (“Rampjaar” of 1672) 126, 332 Dodge, Mary Mapes 14, 351 Doesburg, Theo van 301 Donck, Gerard 29, 29 n. 8 Doomer, Portrait of Herman 222 Dorrian, Mark 305, 305 n. 50 Dou, Gerrit 33, 257, 259 Douw, Magdalena 53, 55 n. 69 Drenthe 340, 344 Dunster, David 289 n. 1, 291 nn. 8–9, 310, 310 n. 57, 314 n. 62, 315, 315 n. 70, 319 Durr, Louis 241, 246 Dutch Cottage on Beaver Street, New York from 1679 32 Dutch East India Company (VOC) 1, 88, 302 n. 38, 342 n. 32 Dutch language 339–343, 346–347 Newspapers 148, 149, 151, 160, 173, 198, 354 Dutch Reformed Church. See also Christian Reformed Church and Calvinism 9, 20, 31, 48, 52, 55 136–137, 142–143, 147, 153, 157, 159, 173, 176 n. 46, 183, 185, 185 n. 6, 333, 346–348, 353–354

index Dutch West India Company (WIC) 6, 31 n. 11, 110, 130, 302 n. 38, 305 Dutchness 2, 4–5, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 23, 73, 87 n. 1, 88, 94, 95, 98, 104–106, 142, 161, 178, 182–183, 197 n. 36, 204, 207, 210 n. 68, 287, 291, 301, 303, 325, 327–328, 328 n. 4, 330–331, 333, 336–338, 340–341, 343–344, 346–350, 350 n. 46, 351, 351 n. 47, 352–358, 358 n. 52 Duveen, Joseph 246, 252–253 Duyckinck, Evert III 34, 48, 50, 51 nn. 55–56 Duyckinck, Gerardus I 48, 48 n. 48–49, 50 nn. 50–52 Duyckinck, Gerardus II 32 Duyckinck, Gerrit 39 nn. 28, 30, 46, 46 n. 44 Dyck, Anthony van 27, 44, 215, 215 n. 1, 222–223, 225, 225 n. 41, 226, 226 n. 47, 228, 230, 235 Dyke, John C. van 226, 226 n. 46, 233 Dwight, Timothy 70, 70 n. 16, 71 Edmonds, Francis William 11 Eeckhout, Gerbrand van den 257 Eesteren, Cornelis van 301 Eights, James 70 Eisenman, Peter 293, 299, 307, 324, 324 nn. 85–86 Elkins, Mrs. William L. 254 Empire State Building 293 Erasmus, Desiderius 335 Erasmus University 271 Families 27, 33, 34, 39, 75, 78, 88, 99, 101 n. 33, 116, 144–145, 158, 160, 169, 196 Farm Houses. See Architecture, Farm Houses Feast of Esther 257, 259, 259 n. 42 Fernández-Galiano, Luis 290, 290 n. 6, 310, 310 n. 56, 317 n. 73 Feyma, Klaas Gerben 171, 171 n. 37, 172, 172 n. 39, 173–174 Finding of Moses 228 n. 56, 230, 253 n. 30 Fireplace, jambless 60 Fishkill, New York 72, 97 Fiske, John 114 n. 14, 131 Flagrant Délit 293 Flink, Govaert 257 Ford Foundation 275 n. 13, 276, 321

361

Fortuyn, Pim 327, 336 n. 19 Foster, Hal 293, 295 n. 11, 296 n. 17 Frank, Anne 4 Franks, Jacob 50 Franklin, Benjamin 3 Frederiksen, Nils C. 164, 166 n. 22, 168 n. 30, 170 Frick Collection, New York 225, 227, 232, 233, 246, 253 n. 31 Frick, Henry Clay 218, 241, 253 Friesland, Minnesota 158, 163, 173 Friesland, The Netherlands 158, 167, 171 Frijhoff, Willem 4, 7 n. 6, 23, 181 n. 1, 197 n. 36, 327, 330 n. 6, 332 n. 8, 335 n. 17, 341 n. 30, 343 n. 33, 357 n. 51 Froude, James Anthony 128 Funk, Elisabeth Paling 87 n. 2, 350, 350 n. 45 Future Studies 22, 281, 287 Gansevoort, Harme 53 Gansevoort, Pau 54 Gardner, Isabella Stewart 217 n. 9, 252 Genre Painting 352 Gehry, Frank 291 Gelderland 169, 171, 344 Ghosts. See Haunts Giedion, Sigfried 304, 304 n. 48 Gilmor, Robert, Jr. 219, 219 nn. 15–16, 220 Girl Asleep at a Table 248 Girl with a Water Jug 232 Gogh, Theo van 327, 328 n. 1, 336, 339 Gogh, Vincent van 327 Goldberger, Paul 289, 289 n. 2, 299, 299 n. 29, 317, 317 n. 72, 319, 319 n. 75 Goodfriend, Joyce 1, 5 n. 2, 6 n. 4, 7 n. 5, 45, 45 n. 39, 60 n. 1, 88 n. 5, 95 n. 10, 107 n. 52, 181 n. 1, 341 nn. 29–30, 346 n. 40 Goosen, Jan van 33 Gordon, Lord Adam 68, 68 n. 13 Goyen, Jan van 219, 246, 249, 256 Grand Rapids, Michigan 145 Grant, Anne MacVicar 75, 75 n. 21, 77 n. 21 Grant, Ulysses S. 126–127, 129 Greeneld-Sanders, Timothy 289 n. 1, 299, 301

362

index

Greenleafton, Minnesota 170 Grifs, William Elliot 110 n. 1, 130 Groot, Cornelis Hofstede de 250, 250 n. 23, 253 Gropius, Walter 290, 293, 293 n. 10, 295–297, 298, 298 n. 24, 301, 304, 321, 324 Gropius House, Lincoln, Massachusetts 304 Grotius, Hugo 349 Haasse, Hella 331 Hadid, Zaha 291, 307 Hals, Dirck 246, 249 Hals, Frans 233, 235, 235 n. 68, 244, 246, 247, 249, 250 n. 24, 252, 253, 256, 257, 259, 353 Half Moon (Halve Maen) 94, 98 Hamilton, Alexander 71, 71 n. 17, 79, 79 n. 23, 80, 80 n. 25 Hans Brinker 14, 351 Harkness Fellowship 293 Harootunian, Harry 290 Harrison, Wallace 295 Harvey, George 83 Hasbrouck House 81 Haunts, Haunting, Hauntedness 18, 87, 87 n. 1, 88–94, 97–107, 112 Havemeyer, Henry O. 222, 252 Hays, K. Michael 304 Headless Horseman 92 Heaton, John 51 n. 56 Heem, Jan Davidsz. de 240 Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum (HOK) 302 Helst, Bartholomeus van de 249 Hermitage Guggenheim, Las Vegas 297 Heyden, Jan van der 221, 249, 260 Hine, C.G. 97 n. 17, 98 n. 24, 99, 99 n. 25, 106 n. 49 Hinte, Jacob van 135, 135 n. 1, 157 n. 1, 164 n. 18 Historiography Of the Dutch in America 1–2, 4–5, 5 n. 2, 15–16, 19, 60 n. 3, 107, 135, 155, 211, 355 Of the Dutch in the Netherlands 177 By New England historians 3, 6, 109, 113–115 History of New York . . . by Diedrich Knickerbocker 2, 83, 89, 350 History of the United Netherlands 3 n. 1, 119 n. 34, 123, 123 n. 50, 125, 129

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 296–297, 297 n. 19 Hobbema, Meindert 249 Hobsbawm, Eric 193, 193 n. 28, 197, 197 n. 36, 198, 198, n. 38, 199, 199 n. 44, 200, 205–206, 206 n. 57, 208, 211, 211 nn. 71, 74, 212, 212 nn. 74–75, 347, 347 n. 41 Hochstrasser, Julie Berger 20, 28 n. 3, 179 Holland Mania 13, 17, 34, 81, 103, 352, 356 Holland, Michigan 147, 149, 152, 158, 183, 194, 196 n. 34, 197 n. 37 Hollanditis 339, 355 Holmes, C. J. 225, 225 n. 44 Honthorst, Gerrit van 34 Hooch, Pieter de 244, 249, 250 n. 24, 256–257, 259, 299 Hood, Raymond 295 Hope College 147, 152 House of Orange. See Orange Hudson, Henry 1, 21, 88, 97, 130, 237 Hudson-Fulton Celebration 237, 238 n. 4, 251, 252, 254, 260, 261 Hudson Valley 2, 7, 17–18, 27–28, 39, 45–46, 55–56, 59–60, 66–67, 69–70, 72, 73 n. 20, 75, 78–80, 80 n. 24, 83, 87–88, 88 nn. 2–3, 89, 94, 96–99, 101 n. 33, 102, 104–107, 110 Huguenots 104, 342 Hulst, H. C. van de 270 Hutchinson, Thomas 115, 115 n. 18 Immigration, Netherlands to United States 9, 179, 353–355 Indians. See Native Americans Indonesia 195, 331 Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York 293 Interior of the Old Church in Delft 241 Inventories 28–29, 32, 55–56, 219, 230, 342–343 Investments, Dutch in America 145 Irving, Washington 2, 14, 14 n. 27, 18, 82, 83 n. 28, 88–89, 89 n. 6, 91 n. 7, 94 n. 9, 350, 350 n. 45 Izenour, Steven 295 Jakarta 331 James, Henry n. 62, 233

216 n. 4, 220, 232, 232

index

363

Jameson, Fredric 325, 325 n. 87 Jameson, J. Franklin 130, 130 n. 71 Jans, Anneke 343 Japin, Arthur 330 John of Barneveldt. See Oldenbarnevelt Johnson, John Graver 223, 228, 232 n. 63 Johnson, Philip 291, 296, 297 n. 19, 299, 304, 324 Johnson, Warren 68, 81 Jong, Adriaan de 354, 354 n. 50 Jouvenel, Bertrand de 286 Julia, Lady Peel 234

n. 30, 301–302, 302 n. 36, 303, 303 nn. 40–41, 304–305, 305 nn. 49, 51, 306, 306 n. 52, 307, 307 n. 54, 310, 312, 312 n. 61, 314–315, 315 n. 67, 317, 317 nn. 71, 74, 319–320, 320 n. 80, 321, 321 n. 82, 324, 324 nn. 85–86, 325–326 Krabbendam, Hans 9 n. 12, 19–20, 136 n. 2, 139 n. 6, 143 n. 10, 161 n. 9, 181 n. 1, 194 n. 31, 195 n. 34, 210 n. 68, 339 n. 24, 342 n. 31, 346 n. 40, 349 n. 43, 350 n. 45, 354 n. 49 Kuner, Colorado 141

Kahn, Herman 283 Kalf, Willem 253 Kalm, Peter 55, 56 n. 74, 66–67, 80, 80 n. 29 Kammen, Michael 96, 96 n. 13 Kapteyn, J. C. 270, 287 Kate, Herman ten 270 Keppel, Frederick 230, 230 n. 60 Kermis 4, 143, 198 Kieft, Willem 100, 341, 341 n. 30, 343 n. 35, 344, 349 Kingston, New York 31, 48, 52, 98, 349 Kip, Hendrick 28 Klederdracht 181, 192 n. 24, 210 Kleinhuizen, Albert Klaas 169–170, 170 n. 33, 173 Klepinger, Nick 205 Klerk, Michel de 301 Kneller, Sir Godfrey 27, 39 n. 29, 42, 42 n. 35, 44, 50, 50 n. 51, 51, 51 n. 58 Knickerbocker 2–3, 14, 18, 90–91, 96, 96 n. 14, 97 n. 16, 350–351, 356 Knight, Sarah Kemble 64–65, 65 n. 6 Knoedlers 215 n. 1, 227, 253 Koch, Theodore F. 158 n. 2, 159–160, 160 n. 6, 161–163, 163 n. 14, 164, 164 nn. 16–17, 19, 166, 166 nn. 22–23, 26, 167, 167 n. 27, 168, 168 n. 30, 170–171, 171 n. 35, 172, 172 n. 39, 173, 176–178 Kolff, W. J. 270, 287 Koninck, Philips 249, 263 Kooi, Murt 195, 195 n. 34 Koolhaas, Rem 4, 17, 22, 196, 289, 289 nn. 1, 3, 290, 290 n. 4, 291, 293, 295, 295 n. 12, 296, 296 n. 17, 297, 297 n. 20, 298, 298 n. 25, 299, 299

Lady Bucknell, Portrait of 42, 42 n. 35 Landscape Painting 11, 220 Lange, Jacob de 28 Lasswell, Harold D. 284 Lawrence, Sir Thomas 235 Legend of Sleepy Hollow 82, 89, 91, 93–94 Leiden 33, 109, 331 n. 7 Leisler, Jacob 347–348 Leisler’s rebellion 347–348 Lely, Sir Peter 27, 44 Levy, Moses 50 Leyster, Judith 249, 253 Libbey, Edward Drummond 252 Liedke, Walter 12 Lievens, Jan 259 Lootsma, Bart 325 Lord Buckhurst and Lady Mary Sackville 50, 50 n. 51 Lorentz, Hendrik 270, 287 Lubow, Arthur 301, 301 n. 33 Lucas, Henry S. 10 n. 15, 135, 135 n. 1, 157 n. 1, 354 n. 49 Lucas van Uffel 215 Lucretia 235, 254, 254 n. 33 Luctor, Kansas 141 Lynden, Washington 141 Maes, Nicolaes 249, 250 n. 24, 253 Mak, Geert 330 Manca, Joseph 60 n. 1, 61 n. 3 Margriet, Princess 205, 205 nn. 51–52 Marine Painting 11 Marquand, Henry Gurdon 222, 222 n. 28, 226 Marriage 131, 143–145, 152, 169, 338 Martino, Joseph 281, 281 n. 38 Marx, Leo 321, 321 n. 81 Massachusetts Bay Company 109, 111, 111 n. 5

364

index

Mather, Cotton 92, 114, 114 n. 15, 115, 117 Mau, James A. 281, 284, 284 nn. 46–47, 303 n. 41 Maurice of Nassau 123, 127, 129 Maxwell, New Mexico 141 McCormick-Tribune Campus Center, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago 291, 297–298, 307, 325 Megapolensis, Dominie Johannes 345 Mellon, Andrew W. 21, 216 n. 5, 228, 230, 232, 235, 241 n. 13, 254, 256 Merwick, Donna 7 nn. 6–7, 88, 88 n. 4, 344 n. 36 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 35 n. 24, 215, 216 nn. 4, 6, 218 n. 10, 220, 221 n. 26, 222, 222 n. 27, 223, 223 n. 32, 226, 228, 232–233, 237, 238 n. 5, 244, 244 n. 15, 246, 250 n. 21, 251, 253 n. 32, 254, 260 n. 46 Metsu, Gabriel 249 Meulen, Cornelius van der 138–139 Mierevelt, Michiel van 29, 31, 31 n. 9, 34–35, 37 Mieris, Frans van 37, 240 Mies van de Rohe, Ludwig 290, 304, 307 Migration, East Coast to Midwest 142–143, 147, 194 n. 31, 215, 348, 350, 353–354, 356–357 Miller, Paula Jean 281, 281 n. 39 Minty, Nancy T. 20–21, 215 n. 2, 222 n. 29, 223 n. 35, 228 n. 53, 240 nn. 8–9 Minuit, Peter 342 Mistress and Maid 233, 253 n. 31 Mondriaan, Piet 4 Montanus, Arnoldus 306 Morgan, John Pierpont 21, 223, 223 n. 33, 225 n. 44, 233, 235, 241, 246, 251–252, 259 Morse, Jedidiah 69, 69 n. 14 Motley, John Lothrop 3, 3 n. 1, 18–19, 109, 113, 116, 118–119, 119 nn. 31–32, 34, 120, 120 nn. 35, 38, 121, 121 nn. 40–42, 122, 122 nn. 43–46, 123, 123 nn. 49–50, 124, 124 nn. 52, 125, 125 nn. 55–56, 126, 126 n. 59, 127, 127 nn. 61–62, 128, 128 nn. 63–64, 129, 129 n. 68, 130–131 Mulder, Arnold 10, 10 n. 17 Muschamp, Herbert 307, 310 n. 55, 315 n. 66

Museum of Modern Art, New York 296, 304 n. 46 Museum of the City of New York 31 n. 9, 39 n. 28, 50, 50 n. 50 Musscher, Michiel van 35, 37 n. 26, 39, 45 Naiveu, Mathijs 31, 31 n. 10 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 34 n. 23, 35 n. 24, 215, 223–225, 226 n. 47, 227–228, 232, 235, 237, 237 n. 2, 241 n. 13, 246, 253, 253 n. 32, 254, 254 n. 33, 256, 256 n. 36 National Society of Colonial Dames in the State of New York 37 n. 26 Native Americans 7, 18, 91, 99–100, 106, 110, 211, 211 n. 73, 270, 314, 338 n. 23, 345, 357 Neer, Aert van der 240, 249, 260 Netherlands School of Economics, Rotterdam 271 New Amsterdam 27–29, 31, 33–35, 110, 110 n. 3, 112, 153, 172, 185, 293, 341–342, 342 n. 31, 343, 345, 349, 349 n. 43 New Amsterdam, Wisconsin 172 New England 2–3, 42, 71, 78, 81, 87 n. 1, 88, 107, 109–113, 113 n. 13, 114–115, 117, 117 n. 24, 118–120, 124, 129–131, 321 New Jersey 5–6, 9, 10 n. 16, 66–67, 68 n. 11, 72, 113, 149–150 New Netherland 1–3, 5–10, 14–15, 18, 59, 61, 88–89, 100, 111–112, 130, 153, 173, 341, 341 n. 29, 342–343, 343 n. 34, 344–346, 349, 352–353, 356–357 New Rochelle, New York 96, 103–104, 104 n. 45 New-York Historical Society 29, 29 n. 7, 31 n. 10, 33, 33 n. 19, 34, 39 nn. 28–29, 46, 46 n. 44, 48 n. 48, 50, 50 nn. 51–52, 51, 51 nn. 55–56, 58, 217, 218 n. 10, 220, 220 nn. 18–19, 241, 246, 249 n. 20 Nieuhof, Johannes 306 Noordervliet, Nelleke 330 North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh 238, 238 n. 7, 257, 257 nn. 38, 40 Ofce for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) 22, 289 n. 1, 291, 296

index n. 17, 297, 297 nn. 20, 22, 298, 302–303, 307, 307 n. 54, 320 n. 80, 321, 325 Oldenbarnevelt, Johan van 123 Onnes, Heike Kamerlingh 270 Oostburg, Wisconsin 170 Orange, House of 165 n. 21, 170, 205, 332, 335–336 Orange City, Iowa 20, 147, 149, 163 n. 14, 179, 179 n. 1, 183, 188, 188 n. 17, 190, 194–195, 195 n. 33, 196, 196 n. 34, 197, 197 n. 37, 199, 206, 210, 354 Ostade, Adriaen van 240, 249 Oud, J. J. P. 298, 301 Ouroussoff, Nicholai 319, 319 n. 76 Oursler, Tony 321 Palo Alto, California 275, 276 n. 15, 277, 282, 287–288 Partridge, Nehemiah 39 n. 29, 42, 42 n. 33, 52, 56 Paterson, New Jersey 142, 149–150 Patriot Revolution 332 Patroon Painters 17, 27, 39, 45–46, 52 Pella, Iowa 20, 137, 140, 147, 158, 179, 179 n. 1, 181, 183, 185, 186–187, 187 n. 15, 190, 190 n. 23, 192, 194–196, 196 n. 34, 197–200, 204–206, 206 n. 58, 210, 210 n. 68, 354 Perceval, Sir John 39 n. 29, 41, 42 Peterson, Mark A. 19, 110 n. 3, 111 n. 7 Philips. See Royal Philips Electronics Philip II, king of Spain 121 Philipse Manor Hall 75–76 Philipse, Frederick II 34, 72, 75 Pierce, Christopher 22, 343 n. 35 Pilgrims 81, 109 Piwonka, Ruth 8, 8 n. 10, 32 n. 14, 42 nn. 31, 35, 48 n. 47, 55, 55 nn. 69, 71, 60 n. 1 Platte, South Dakota 148 Polak, Fred 4, 22, 269–271, 271 n. 4, 272, 272 n. 6, 273, 273 nn. 7–9, 274, 274 n. 10, 275–277, 277 n. 22, 278, 278 n. 25, 279, 279 n. 31, 280, 280 nn. 34, 36, 281, 281 nn. 37–39, 282, 285–286, 286 n. 52, 287–288 Poldermodel 328 Portrait Paintings 7 Posthumous Portrait of Moses Terborch 241 Potter, Paulus 249 Poughkeepsie, New York 72

365

Pownall, Thomas 60, 60 n. 2 Prada Epicenter, Beverly Hills 297 Prada Epicenter, New York 297 Prescott, William H. 114, 119, 119 n. 33, 129 Prince, Thomas 115, 115 n. 17 Prins, Martin W., Jr. 160, 164, 164 n. 18, 166 n. 22, 168 n. 30, 170 Prinsburg, Minnesota 158, 160–163, 165, 165 n. 21, 166, 166 n. 24, 167–168, 170–171, 173, 175–176, 176 n. 47, 177, 177 n. 48, 178 Pritzker Prize 291 Provoost, Mrs. David 46 Pryer, Charles 96, 96 n. 14, 97 n. 15, 100–101, 101 nn. 32–34, 102, 102 n. 36, 103, 103 n. 41, 104, 104 n. 45, 105, 105 n. 46, 106, 106 n. 47, 107 Puritans 71 Railroad(s) 140–141, 145, 160–164, 164 n. 18, 165, 167, 168 n. 29, 172, 172 n. 39, 175–176 Ramus, Joshua 303 n. 39, 317 Ranger, Terence 193 n. 28, 347 n. 41 Read, Sir Herbert 293 Redlands, California 141 Reformed Church. See Dutch Reformed Church Reiser, Oliver L. 280, 280 n. 36 Rembrandt van Rijn 31, 263 Resor House, Jackson Hole, Wyoming 304 Revolutionary War 7, 113 Richardson, Judith 2, 18–19, 87, 87 n. 1, 95 n. 10, 112 n. 9 Riegl, Alois 299, 299 n. 26 Rietveld, Gerrit 298, 301 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 243 Rip van Winkle 2, 89, 94, 104 Rise of the Dutch Republic 120, 121, 121 nn. 40–42, 122, 122 nn. 43, 44, 46, 123–124 Ritzema, Wilhelmina 50 Roche, Kevin 291 Rockefeller Center 290, 293, 295 Rosenboom, Thomas 330 Rotterdam, The Netherlands 22, 164, 271, 282, 291, 296, 315, 320–321, 347 Rowe, Colin 304, 314 n. 64 Royal Dutch Shell 335 Royal Philips Electronics 335 Rubens, Peter Paul 230, 230 n. 61, 232

366

index

Ruby, Louisa Wood 17 Ruysch, Rachael 249 Ruysdael, Jacob van 31, 219 Ruysdael, Salomon van 219, 249 Saint Nicholas’ Eve. See Sinterklaas Day Saint Nicholas Society 351 Saskia 224, 235 Schama, Simon 113 n. 10, 333, 333 n. 15 Schmidt, Benjamin 6 n. 4, 7 n. 7, 181 n. 1, 289 n. 1, 306, 306 n. 53, 338 n. 23 Scholte, Hendrik Pieter 179, 185–186, 186 nn. 9–10, 13, 187, 187 n. 14 Scholte, Mareah 187, 187 n. 15, 188, 193, 203 n. 47, 204–205, 205 n. 53 Schools 17, 27, 93, 145–147, 152, 170–171, 173, 176, 186, 203, 215, 218, 218 n. 13, 220–221, 223 n. 33, 269, 330 Schoone-Jongen, Robert 20 Schouten, Joost 306 Schuyler, Elsie Rutgers 49 Schuyler, Pieter 42, 44 Scott Brown, Denise 295, 296 n. 17 Seagram Building, New York 304, 319, 324 Seascapes. See Marine Painting Seattle Central Library 291, 297, 303 n. 42, 307, 310, 315, 317, 317 n. 74, 319, 325 Seceders 136, 138, 142, 154, 158, 169 Segalen, Victor 290, 290 n. 5 Sheboygan, Wisconsin 158 Shell Oil. See Royal Dutch Shell Simitiére, Pierre Eugene 29 Sinke, Suzanne 9 n. 13, 144 n. 15, 145 n. 16, 181 n. 1, 193 n. 28, 197 n. 37, 200, 200 n. 45, 206, 206 n. 60, 207 nn. 61–63, 208, 208 nn. 64, 67, 210 n. 69, 211 n. 72, 354 n. 49 Sinterklaas Day 198, 335, 351 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) 302 Skinner, Charles M. 97, 97 nn. 16, 17, 98, 98 nn. 20–21, 100, 100 n. 29, 101, 101 n. 35 Skyscraper 289–290, 293 Sleepy Hollow, New York 72, 73 n. 20 Snyders, Margareta 235 Sociology 270–271, 277, 281, 284–285, 287, 302 n. 36

Sollors, Werner 102, 102 n. 37, 104, 104 n. 44 Spengler, Oscar 272 n. 5, 280 Spinoza, Baruch de 335 Spooner, Shearjashub 230 Stark, Werner 280, 280 n. 34 Stealth Aesthetic 310 n. 56, 317, 317 n. 73 Steen, Jan 249, 253, 256–257, 353 Steenwyck, Cornelis 28, 33–34 Still Life 11, 29, 32 n. 13, 33, 33 n. 18, 56 Stipriaan, René van 330 Stott, Annette 13, 13 nn. 24, 26, 34, 34 n. 22, 82 n. 27, 95, 95 n. 10, 96 n. 12, 103, 104 n. 42, 110 n. 1, 130 n. 70, 131 n. 72, 181 n. 1, 352, 352 n. 48 Streekstra, Holly 196, 197 n. 35 Street Cleaning 64–66, 183, 200 Strickland, Wiliam 70, 70 n. 15, 72, 72 n. 19, 80, 80 n. 24, 81 n. 26 Strycker, Jacob Gerritsen 35 Stuyvesant, Anna 29 Stuyvesant, Peter 29, 34, 293 Sunnyside 83, 83 n. 29, 84 Surinam 331 Swierenga, Robert 8, 8 n. 11, 9 n. 12, 10 n. 17, 135, 135 n. 1, 136 n. 2, 142 n. 10, 144 nn. 12–13, 146 n. 18, 151 n. 25, 157 n. 1, 159 n. 3, 169 n. 32, 170 n. 33, 354 n. 49 Synod of Dordt 185 Tafuri, Manfredo 324, 324 nn. 83–84 Tappan Zee, New York 91 Tarrytown, New York 75, 91 Terborch, Gerard 37, 249, 253 Terborch, Gesina 243 Thacher, James 67, 68 n. 11 Tiles 61, 65–66, 178, 299 Tillmans, Wolfgang 289 n. 1, 299, 299 n. 30, 301 Tinbergen, Jan 269, 271–272, 275 n. 13, 287 Tofer, Alvin 22, 269, 269 nn. 1–2, 283, 286 Toilet of Bathsheba 228 Trade with the Netherlands 110 Tuckerman, Henry 217–218, 218 n. 11 Tulip Festivals 20, 135, 179, 181–183, 190, 197–198, 200, 206, 208, 210 n. 69

367

index Uiterwijk, Henry 152, 152 n. 26 Union of Utrecht 122, 334 Usselincx, Willem 130 Valentiner, William (Wilhelm) 238, 244 n. 15, 247, 250, 250 n. 23 Van Cortlandt, Augustus 32 Van Cortlandt, Oloff Stevense 31, 34–35 Van Cortlandt, Pierre 33 Van Gorp Manufacturing 205 Van Raalte, Albertus 185–186, 194 Van Rensselaer, Elizabeth 48 Van Rensselaer, Kiliaen 31, 31 n. 11, 51–52 Van Rensselaer Limner 51 Vanderbilt, William K. 252 Vanderlyn, Pieter 48, 52–53, 53 nn. 63, 65–66, 56 Vas, Gertrude 52 Vas, Mrs. Petrus 48, 52 Velde, Adriaen van de 249, 253 Velde, Willem van de 240, 249 Venturi, Robert 295, 296 n. 17, 317 Vermeer, Johannes 237 n. 2, 249 Verspronck, Jan Cornelisz 265 Viersen, Siebertje 204 Vlieger, Simon de 249, 260, 260 n. 46 Vliet, Hendrick van 241 Vogel, Andrew 188 Von Bode, Wilhelm 250 Vries, Hugo de 270 Vries, Tity de 22 Vriesendorp, Madelon 293 Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York 290, 315, 321 Wandelaer, Pau de 53 Warren, Mercy Otis 115, 115 n. 19 Washburn, William D. 163–164, 164 n. 16

Washington, George 81, 115, 122, 122 n. 45 Watson, John 51, 51 n. 58, 52, 56 Weeckstein, Johannes 31 Weenix, Jan 249 Weld, Isaac 70, 70 n. 15 Weller, Dennis P. 20–22, 227 n. 49, 259 n. 42 Wendell, Abraham 53 White, Whiteness 4, 15, 34, 37, 64, 67, 73, 98, 105, 152, 210, 321 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 290, 290 n. 4, 297 n. 22, 298, 304, 315 Widener, Joseph 223 Widener, Peter A. B. 215 n. 1, 223, 226 n. 47, 241, 246, 252–253, 256 Wiener, Anthony J. 283 William of Orange (William the Silent) 112, 121–123, 123 n. 49, 126, 154 n. 32, 335, 336 n. 19 Windmills 4, 20, 179, 181, 190, 208, 211, 352, 354 Witt, Johan de 327, 349 Wolfe, Tom 296, 296 n. 18, 303, 304 n. 44 Woman Holding a Balance 215 Women 5, 9, 9 n. 13, 131, 136, 144–145, 200, 217 n. 9, 232 Wooden shoes 20, 179–183, 190, 196, 208, 211, 354 Wouwerman, Philips 223, 240, 246, 249 Yerkes, Charles Tyson 244, 252

225, 225 n. 43,

Zandt, Catherine van 51–52 Zeeland 139–140, 154 n. 32, 210 n. 68 Zenghelis, Elia and Zoe 307 Ziegler, Warren 278 Zimmer, Robert 302