Go Dutch, Young Man: A Post for Dutch-American Friendship Day

I head this post with Rembrandt’s 1662 painting The Syndics of the Drapers Guild naturally because since 1911 the image has been used to represent Dutch Masters cigars, famously associated with the great Ernie Kovacs — a Hungarian who only smoked Cubans!

There were a few different actors and suchlike I might have written about today but I found myself more jazzed about the fact that April 19 is Dutch-American Friendship Day. And as you no doubt anticipate, we never stray very far from pop culture anyway. The Dutch founded New York City, after all. Their influence on America and the world at large has been immense if somewhat subtle, nearly invisible, and surely widely unacknowledged. Like Portugal it is a tiny country that (like England and Spain) benefitted from its Atlantic frontage in order to achieve a global empire. Unlike Portugal, its global influence remained major and long-lasting. In size, the Netherlands is slightly larger than the U.S. State of Maryland. At various times in its history it has been linked to other nations in larger confederations, notably neighboring Belgium and Luxembourg, still associated as Benelux. For a time it was ruled by the Habsburgs from Spain. For a stretch the Dutch Prince William of Orange ruled England, Scotland and Ireland jointly with Queen Mary II, niece of King Charles II.

Culturally and geographically the Dutch live smack dab between the English and the Germans. If you are from a culture that’s distant from Europe you could absolutely be forgiven for asking “what’s the diff?” between these peoples. They are all Germanic speaking nations descended from related neighboring tribes. Though the modern English, Dutch and German languages are not nowadays mutually intelligible, they were much closer back in the day. The German dialect of Frisian is very much related to Dutch. In the U.S. well into the 20th century, there was such confusion about the difference between the Germans and the Dutch, that is was common to refer to BOTH groups as Dutch, i.e. Deutsch. (As though the English were, like, wildly different ethnic group! In the scheme of things, they are not.) The Angles and Saxons who settled England and laid the foundations of Old English are from the same part of Northwest Europe as the Netherlands and Frisia, just across the water. (Later, invading Scandinavians and Normans altered English considerably, especially the latter, displacing the majority of its vocab with French loanwords. But the basic structure of the language and it’s most basic vocabulary remain Germanic).

Erasmus was an early Dutch free-thinker who paved the way for the intellectual exploration that would categorize the later Enlightenment. The Dutch Reformed Church was founded in 1571, following Henry VIII’s lead in establishing a national Protestant church separate from the authority of Rome. More tolerant than the English church, the Netherlands became a haven for the English dissident group known as the Pilgrims from 1608 to 1620, prior to their formation of the Colony at Plymouth. Thus some of my ancestors lived in the country for a time prior to immigrating to the U.S. — one of my reasons for an increased interest in this history, among others.

Another reason? Is that it is OBJECTIVELY important. At one time, half of Europe’s shipping was Dutch. The Dutch gave the world its first publicly traded company, its first stock exchange, its first multinational corporation, its first central bank. At its height, the Dutch Empire comprised the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), South Africa (where the Dutch dialect Afrikaans is still spoken), as well as other parts of Africa, India, South America, and the Caribbean. And most importantly (to us), North America. Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage of exploration of what is now New York was on behalf of the Dutch East India Company (a Dutch West India Company was later founded). After Hudson disappeared in 1611, the area was explored by Adrian Block (for whom Block island in my native Rhode Island was named). In time the city of New Amsterdam was founded at the base of Manhattan, becoming the capitol of New Netherland, which stretched in several directions, up the Hudson Valley, down to what is now New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania, and East into Long Island and Connecticut.

As I wrote in my Pilgrim’s Progress piece a few years ago, New Netherland is birthplace of one of America’s founding myths, the purported sale of Manhattan by the native Lenape to Dutch governor Peter Minuit for a handful of trinkets. The scene was re-enacted by Groucho Marx in the film The Story of Mankind in 1959!

From Ripley’s Believe it Or Not I learned about one of my ancestors, the Dutch-American Quaker matriarch Penelope Van Princis Kent who in 1643 was attacked by local Lenape, severely wounded, was left for dead, but survived inside a hollow tree, made her way to New Amsterdam, re-married a man named Stout, raised a family in what is now Coney Island, and then moved to New Jersey, where she lived to be…110 years old. Dubious? Well, that’s why they call it Believe It or Not.

The Dutch ruled what is now New York for decades, best evidenced by place names Brooklyn, the Bronx, Harlem, the Bowery. Staten Island is named for the Staten-Generaal (“States General”) of the Dutch Republic. Old Dutch families who retained their wealth, power and influence long after the fall of New Netherland include the Schuylers (later married into by the Livingstons, and more famously at the moment, Alexander Hamilton), the Vanderbilts, the de Peysters, the Van Rensselaers, and the Schermerhorns (Alison Brie’s mother was one!) When I worked at the New-York Historical Society, our board included a Frelinghuysen and a Beekman (and man did I freak when I noticed a family resemblance between Mr. Beekman and a 300 year old portrait of one of his ancestors. ) (For a fun window at a Hollywood portrait of life among wealthy landowning Dutch New Yorkers in the mid 19th century check out the 1946 picture Dragonwyck, with Vincent Price and Gene Tierney).

The English seized New Netherland by force in 1664 (the 300 anniversary of which event was the ostensible occasion for the 1964 New York Worlds Fair I’m celebrating in a program next weekend). This seems very early, making it unlikely that any footprint would be left here. Yet, you can argue, and many have, that the culture of New York is more Dutch than English. By comparison, New England was theocratic, and the Southern English colonies were a planter aristocracy. New York has always been straight up mercantile. It’s the home of the New York Stock Exchange. The wall for which Wall Street is named was built by the Dutch. New York is all about money! The culture of the English Aristocracy would deny up and down that the same is true of them (whatever you believe the truth to be). I just heard Fareed Zakaria proclaim himself a fan of the Dutch the other day. The context was the expected one, the idea that free enterprise is the fuel of liberal democracy. Young people, heed this warning! You abandon this principle at your peril. It’s sounds all sexy to hate on bankers and CEOS, but ain’t nothin’ less sexy than being shot for cracking a joke about the Party Chairman and General Secretary!

Like the close siblings that they are, England and the Netherlands have fought a LOT. Three Anglo-Dutch Wars were fought 1652-1674, a third was fought around the end of the American Revolution. There is some subtle evidence of our past antipathy toward the Dutch preserved in English idiom. For example, to be “in Dutch” is to be in trouble. To “go Dutch” is to allow one companions to be left to their own devices when it comes to settling up a bill, essentially a version of the philosophy of “every man for himself. This is also known as “Dutch treat”. “Dutch courage” is the foolish bravery caused by drinking alcohol. A “Dutch agreement” or “Dutch bargain” is a contract that was settled upon when the parties were drunk. “Double Dutch” is doubletalk, nonsense, gibberish. “I’m a Dutchman” is a remark similar to “I’m a Monkey’s Uncle”…it’s a jokey remark used to indicate incredulity, e.g., “If THAT’s true, I’m a Dutchman” (i.e., “…and of course I’m nothing so lowly as a Dutchman so it can’t be true”). There are and were many dozens more likes these, but most have fallen into relative disuse.

On the topic of language: Herman Melville was part Dutch (his mother was a Gansevoort), as was Walt Whitman (mother a Van Velsor). Both New York writers, you’ll note. That other major New York author Washington Irving was not Dutch, but he went further than nearly everyone else in amplifying the memory of New York’s Old Dutch culture. Rip Van Winkle is a Dutch character, and for that matter, so is the version of Santa Claus that Irving did so much to champion. And there is his 1809: A History of New York: From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, written pseudonymously as Diedrich Knickerbocker, whose name became slang for all New Yorkers.

Perhaps the most famous and influential Dutch-Americans have been Presidents: Martin Van Buren, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin andEleanor Roosevelt.

Dutch American movie people have included Humphrey Bogart (original name was Bogaert), Hobart Bosworth (his mother was a Van Zandt), Lou Tellegen, Lee Van Cleef, W.S. Van Dyke, Dick Van Dyke, Jerry Van Dyke,Dick Van Patten and various other Van Pattens; Brandon de Wilde,Gus Van Sant, Gretchen Mol, and Kristen Schaal. Musicians include Bruce Springsteen (but surprisingly not Steve Van Zandt), Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet), and Eddie Van Halen. Elvis’s manager Colonel Tom Parker was secretly Dutch, although no one knew it at the time!

Ladies Home Journal founder Edward Bokwas Dutch, as were the Van Doren family of authors and scholars. Charles Fort, a less reputable man of letters, was of Dutch stock, as was the Manson family’s Leslie Van Houten. Just to keep everyone humble.