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Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden. Deel 97 (1982)

Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden. Deel 97

(1982)– [tijdschrift] Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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Dutch Travelers in the United States
A Tale of Energy and Ambivalence


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J.W. Schulte Nordholt

The title of this paper indicates, more accurately than I had initially expected, what it really is about. It is about travelers that we are talking, not about tourists. Let me try to define the difference between the two. The purpose of the tourist is to escape from reality, to find peace in some dreamlike landscape, some Shangri-La. The traveler, on the other hand, is on a voyage of discovery; it is not a dream he is looking for, but a new reality. The tourist wants to comprehend his world, encompass it, store it somewhere, preferably in his camera. The traveler is overwhelmed; he sees only a part, his quest never ends. The tourist wants to recognize, the traveler to discover. The tourist sails on a lake, the traveler on the ocean. The tourist looks for the past, the traveler for the future.

Forgive me for starting with such bold generalizations. The tentative conclusion that I want to draw from them, with excuses to my dear friend Professor Herbert Rowen, is that American travelers in Holland were mostly tourists, but that Dutch tourists in the United States were travelers. In America there was something to be discovered. It was a country with an aureole of mystery, a mythological margin. A country without limits and without history, a gigantic shape in time and space. It had something unreal, and it was at the same time of current interest. It might be far away beyond the horizon, yet it was, in the belief of most visitors, the land of the future. What happened in America was bound to happen later on in Europe, in Holland.

That is why travelers were more involved in America than in any



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A Pioneer Cabin




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The St. Nicholas Hotel in New York - from W.T. Gevers Deynoot, Aanteekeningen op eene reis door de Vereenigde Staten van Noord Amerika en Canada (Notes made on a journey through the United States of North America and Canada) (The Hague, 1860)


other country. But it also meant that they had a certain awkwardness toward it. For the judgment about a country so limitless fell always short of reality, certainly when made by people coming from a small, well-organized, and conveniently arranged country like Holland.

The realization of that shortcoming was often present. Several travelers confessed it. One of the most perceptive, the Amsterdam editor Charles Boissevain, wrote in 1882: ‘From a trim, neat and tidy, immaculately clean, well-polished little country... where everything dovetails into everything, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle... we find ourselves transported to a country where people think in terms of miles rather than inches.’ A professor of theology, H. Bouwman, warned: ‘It is so easy to be superficial, biased or unfair when you have to pass judgment on a country so vast as America. The United States is not a country like Western European countries, but a continent almost as big as Europe.’ America, adds a modern observer, is the name of a country, or better of fifty countries, together the United States of America... America is an immoderately huge chunk of land.’1

But this feeling of impotence toward the colossus of the New World never prevented the visitors from writing a book about their experiences and passing many judgments. In the nineteenth and till far into the twentieth century there was hardly a Dutch visitor to the United States who did not, when he returned, publish a travel book on the true America, and to that happy arrogance we owe great gratitude. For it enables us to understand a bit more of what our ancestors felt toward the United States.

There were, of course, several approaches possible. Besides the travelers there were the diplomats who sent their reports to The Hague. They would be worth studying, but their interests in America were in general much more limited to their diplomatic business and to the narrow world of the capital in which they lived.2 There were also the many, many immigrants, whose letters home are of the greatest interest, but whose concern for America was very different from that of the travelers, since they were more involved and had less distance from what they saw.3 Here, in this paper, I must limit myself to the travelers. There were many of them and they have never been studied. While there are many good books on French and British visitors, nothing has as yet been done on the Dutch, who, after all, wrote in their own peculiar language.4

It is true that the Dutch came a bit late. There are very few Dutch travelers before the Civil War, and among these few there are only two of real significance, one at the very beginning, who was probably the most perceptive of all, Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, whom I am inclined to call the Dutch Tocqueville.5 And one at the very end of

this period, the interesting Willem Theodoor Gevers Deynoot, who came to America in 1859 and saw slavery still in action.6 But the great stream started only after 1865, when the Netherlands experienced a kind of economic renaissance and became interested in the rest of the world again. Many now came, from all fields of life, among them some of the best and most important men and women of Holland. There were authors and journalists like Charles Boissevain, C.J. Wynaendts Francken, and R.P.J. Tutein Nolthenius, statesmen like Abraham Kuyper, theologians like Martinus Cohen Stuart, Petrus Hermannus Hugenholtz, and Hendrik Bouwman, artists like George Hendrik Breitner and Willem Witsen, poets like Albert Verwey and Frederik van Eeden, a great architect like Hendrik Pieter Berlage, a great feminist like Aletta Jacobs, and a great historian like Johan Huizinga.

They really deserve a book. In this essay I can hardly give them what they are entitled to. I have to limit myself, in two ways. First of all, in terms of time. The best travel books were written in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, when people evidently still had the time to write well and to read well. That coincidentally is also the period when America, to use a common expression, was coming of age, when it broke through its isolation and became a world power, of interest to the Europeans. So I have decided to set my boundaries there, roughly between the Civil War and World War I. In a way this period may stand as a pars pro toto, an exemplary part of an eternal occupation: watching America. It shows an America in full growth, already plagued by many problems which are still around, a different country, yet in essence similar to the United States of today.

I also have to limit myself in terms of materials. I shall use only the books written and published by Dutch travelers. A more complete study would require utilizing other sources, such as letters and newspaper articles, but this is an essay, not a book.

The Dutch travelers were not tourists, as I have said. But of course they did some sightseeing. There were certain tourist attractions which were not to be missed. In the late nineteenth century three of them were really obligatory: Niagara Falls, the slaughterhouses of Chicago, and the polygamous Mormons. There are some chapters on these subjects in almost every travel book. But there was more to America.

To begin with the land itself, almost all the travelers were overwhelmed by the grandeur and beauty of nature in America. Many of them wrote hymns of praise about the prairies and the mountains. But already here the ambivalance so typical of all European judgments on the New World becomes evident; that almost compulsive need to simultaneously say yes and no to the phenomenon of America. Nature might be magnificent, but the way in which the pioneers dealt with it was terrible to behold. It was used and exploited without any respect:

Niagara Falls was completely spoiled by advertising, the magnificent woods were cut down, the animals killed without any compassion. ‘I always speak with respect for the glorious energy, the optimistic courage, the indomitable willpower of the Americans, but I lose part of my respect for them when I see with what wanton fury and reckless barbarism they ravage and destroy what never can be restored,’ writes Boissevain in 1880. And Tutein Nolthenius repeats that complaint in 1900: ‘What a pity that the energy flowing from their industry murders nature so recklessly.’7

These complaints were made in the years when the Americans themselves began to realize what had happened. The books of George Perkins Marsh had already been published and the first National Park founded. Yet the struggle to save nature had only begun, what the Dutch travelers saw at the end of the century was still common reality. The struggle has never ended.

The deeper question was why. What exactly was the cause of so much recklessness? The travelers were not sociologists, the explanations they gave were not theoretical arguments. Key words were used and continually repeated. There is no word that one encounters so often in the reports as the word ‘energy.’ The Dutch, careful, cautious observers, coming from a country where everything was done with much deliberation - how John Adams could complain about that Dutch quality! - were deeply impressed by the pace, the mobility, the agitation of American life. They looked at it with a mixture of praise and criticism, ambivalent as ever. Energy meant wealth and progress, but also destruction and brutality and ugliness. Nature was destroyed and with what was it replaced?

Nowhere was energy so frightfully visible as in the great cities. To arrive in New York was already an overwhelming experience. In the Dutch travel reports of around 1900, one can follow the growth of the skyscrapers almost step by step: ten stories, twenty, thirty! There seemed to be no limit to American enterprise. But New York was not the city which became to the Dutch visitors the symbol of American energy. They felt that New York was not America, as Paris is not France, nor Amsterdam, Holland. The heart of the New World was beating, as many travelers testified, in Chicago. The same city which played such a dominant role in the consciousness of the Americans themselves, the ‘alabaster city... undimmed by human tears’ of 1893, made a deep impression on the visitors from Holland. ‘The man who has not visited Chicago has not seen America,’ Cohen Stuart wrote. In Chicago everything was bigger and faster and dirtier and uglier than in any other place in America. Chicago, as another observer, also a theologian, remarked, embodied the grandeur and the misery of the New World. It was marvelous and terrible. In 1926 Johan

Huizinga experienced the same ambivalance; writing one day in his diary: ‘Now I see that Chicago is an impossible city and a disgrace to humanity. I am almost ashamed to sit here in this good hotel.’ But some days later: ‘Even detested Chicago has its magnificent aspects and above all... magnificent possibilities for the future.’8

What was so impressive, so awful about the ‘Queen of the West’ was its undiluted, unashamed dedication to material things, its passionate materialism. It was a kind of materialism that the Dutch visitors did not recognize. They certainly were materialists themselves, but in a different way. Chicago's, America's materialism was careless, reckless even. Americans had a passion to make money, but they did not save it. ‘One thing I do not understand,’ wrote the priest van den Elsen, ‘is that while money has such power here, it is squandered as though it has no value at all.’ Making money, as another Dutchman observed, seemed to be a kind of game, a sport, a foolish passion, like collecting stamps.9

Money made all the difference in society. But everything was changing so fast that the Dutch visitors could not use their traditional distinctions of rank and station. And so we come to another essential question that was put by all travelers: was there more real equality in America than in Holland? Van Hogendorp had been struggling with that problem, he had seen a certain distinction between what he described as ‘gentlemen’ and ‘persons in lower life,’ but he had also noticed that in daily intercourse there was much more equality than in Holland. And the cause of this was, he believed, to be found in the character of a country which had no historical tradition.10

A hundred years later, in a very different America, the same observations were still made. Of course, one must realize that at that time the Dutch still came from a society with a traditional class structure, recognizable even in dress and behavior. In America they saw how fashionable people and workingmen mixed easily on buses and trains, and did not really differ very much in accent and manners. Both were disliked. The American accent was considered very ugly, as compared with real English. Manners in America were a theme in themselves, not often omitted from the reports. Equality, as the Dutch saw it, meant vulgarity. The society was marked by a complete lack of good manners. Shouting, chewing tobacco, spitting, sitting with legs on the table, were common everywhere. ‘The Americans I have met till now,’ wrote Gevers Deynoot in 1859, ‘I found in general rather rude, uncouth, and not very polite in their manners.’ That complaint was repeated endlessly, the pioneer spirit evidently had great disadvantages.11

But that was only true for men. American equality had given women a much better position than was enjoyed by their sisters in the Old World. All travelers agreed on this point. Some found the Ameri-

can ladies ‘healthy, supple, well-built, less scrawny than the daughters of Albion, less corpulent than the German women,’ but others thought them too lean and lank, too loud-voiced.12 But all admired the role of the American woman in society. Men might be behind, but women were ahead! In society and also at home! Of course, much depended on the point of view of the visitor. The Calvinist Kuyper praised the American housewife. The feminist Aletta Jacobs was impressed by the social status and political activities of women; she made many friends among them, like Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt.13

Women were a minority which hardly could be called that. But other minorities were not so lucky. To begin with the most important, the poor, what was their fate in the land of equality? They certainly were a minority, living in the darkness, as Bertolt Brecht has called it, and hence not even seen by most travelers. But a few were not put off by American friends and did penetrate into the slums of the great cities. They were bewildered by the existence of so much misery in a country so prosperous. A Dutch navy officer noted in 1883: ‘Wealth and luxury of unbelievable proportions are to be seen here, but also poverty and misery beyond our imagination.’ The Reverend Cohen Stuart, who visited the slums of New York ten years earlier, was extremely upset by what he saw, but he still wanted to believe that the malady of poverty was acute, not chronic. A quarter of a century later Tutein Nolthenius observed how chronic misery still was, and he had an excellent guide, ‘a Dane,’ he wrote, ‘who has long since been established in New York and works as a journalist, dedicating himself to the amelioration of public housing.’ That must have been Jacob Riis, who knew like no other ‘how the other half lives.’14

Just as chronic and miserable seemed the situation of another minority, the blacks. That was a problem which Dutch travelers did not have at home, and hence did not know how to judge. On the one hand they were inclined to moral indignation, but on the other hand they shared, especially in the late nineteenth century, all the prejudices of their age. The result was that they were easily influenced by their white American acquaintances. Such was the case with van Hogendorp, whose fascinating remarks on slavery were mostly derived from his long conversations with Thomas Jefferson. But not completely; he also developed his own vision, prophesying that one day the Negroes would be educated and then would participate in American society.15

In general, the opinions of the Dutch travelers on the blacks are nothing but an echo of what they had heard in America. So their judgment was rather mild and optimistic during the Reconstruction period, but in later years it developed into the racism current in the late nineteenth century. A very perceptive witness of the situation of the freedmen in the South is again Cohen Stuart. On his travels in



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A Mississippi Steamboat




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A Steam Fire Engine in Cincinnati - from W.T. Gevers Deynoot, Aanteekeningen op eene reis door de Vereenigde Staten van Noord Amerika en Canada (Notes made on a journey through the United States of North America and Canda) (The Hague, 1860)


1874 he made a special trip to see for himself how the blacks were involved in the operation of democracy. He was bitterly disappointed. When attending a session of the South Carolina legislature he saw the tumult and turbulence in full force. He almost refused to believe what he saw, but he had to, and later on, as he mentions in a footnote, his sad experience was confirmed when he read James Pike's The Prostrate State. Nonetheless, he still clung to the belief that all this misery was only the result of the oppression of centuries and not an innate deficiency of the black race.16

Ten, twenty years later most authors accepted such a deficiency as a matter of course and believed everything that was told them by American friends. Perhaps someday the blacks could be raised from their backwardness, but that had to be done gradually, it would take many, many years to uplift them. Total equality was a chimera. The writer Henriette S.S. Kuyper, who in 1905 followed in the steps of her father, made a trip to the United States, and wrote a book about it, tells the story of her encounter with Booker T. Washington. With her hostess she attended a meeting in New York where both Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington gave a lecture. She was very impressed by the strong personality of the founder of Tuskegee, but on the way home her white friend explained to her that such a man was, of course, a rare and exceptional case. In all blacks, she asserted, there was something of the animal, and it would take at least a hundred years to civilize them.17

Observations on other minorities are of the same kind. Those who visited California found the Chinese lazy and unreliable. The Indians were ‘a vanishing race.’ White American civilization placed its stamp on the visitors. A society of such energy could not allow atavisms, weaknesses, remainders of the past. It was, or at least it considered itself, a superior society. All visitors were confronted with the bragging and the chauvinism of the Americans. But the perceptive observer sometimes noticed that there was much insecurity behind the loudness, as if people were overstraining their voices. Gevers Deynoot remarked: ‘They mostly consider America the first country of the world, in liberty, in progress, and even in knowledge, and yet they cannot get rid of a certain feeling of respect for Europe.’ Others confirmed this, the ‘ridiculous chauvinism’ was probably an expression of doubt. Yet many visitors were irritated by it: ‘There is here a spirit of conceit that fancies to be able to do everything, to be far above other nations, and to acknowledge no limits to the realization of the wildest fantasies,’ Kuyper wrote. That was, he believed, especially the case in the great cities, where American jingoism (Kuyper came in 1898!) was rampant.18

In connection with the loudness and gaudiness of American so-

ciety, we come to another eternal question, posed by all travelers. America might be the country of progress and technical wonders, but did it have any real culture? Where was the art of America, where was that finer civilization that was so characteristic of the Old World? Van Mourik Broekman, a liberal theologian who for a few years (1910-13) worked in the library at Berkeley, showed all the typical European condescension when he wrote: ‘If I begin to speak of civilization and go on to speak of American civilization, I believe that those acquainted with American life will hardly be able to suppress a smile.... For those two words in conjunction grate on each other and give forth a jarring sound. American civilization! The greater the civilization, the less American it will be!’19

So much for European conceit! America might be ahead in practical matters, it was still far behind in the essentials of life. It was too energetic to reflect on real values, too much involved in material things to have higher aspirations. It had only a future, no past, and there could be no culture without tradition. Considerations like these were of course very common in nineteenth-century Europe, perhaps they still are. In the famous adage of Louis Agassíz: ‘Europe thinks, America acts.’ We cannot repeat here those fascinating but rather theoretical discussions. But we find them reflected often in the books of the travelers.

They were, in general, very much interested in culture. And culture meant for them, as for most people, first of all what was recognizable. So they admired the neo-Gothic and neo-Baroque, St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue and the City Hall of Philadelphia, and many other churches and buildings. But at the end of the century some of them were impressed by new developments. Richardson's Trinity Church was esteemed, but most travelers shrank back from more advanced architecture.20 The skyscrapers were recognized as an expression of energy, not of beauty. It required a connoisseur, the great Dutch architect Hendrik Pieter Berlage, to give a proper evaluation of the work of architects like Louis Sullivan and Walter B. Griffin, both of whom he met personally, and of Frank Lloyd Wright, whom he admired greatly. Even his standards were European, the skyline of New York reminded him of the towers of San Gimignano in Tuscany. But America's architecture was good because it was rooted in everyday life and no longer determined by religious and aesthetic traditions.21

In other forms of art we see the same approach. Most travelers like what is traditional and recognizable, but some appreciate what is new. In literature Longfellow was considered the great giant, and also a kind of tourist attraction. Several travelers visited him in his stately house in Cambridge.22 Yet even before 1900 some Dutchmen

got a taste for Walt Whitman. The first translation of his Leaves of Grass appeared in 1891. Whitman expressed what to the Dutch was the most striking aspect of America: its energy. It is fascinating to see how well he was understood and esteemed by a typical European spirit such as Huizinga, who admired him as the mythical representative of the true America.23

One of the most curious phenomena of American society was, to the Dutch travelers, the religion that was so ubiquitous. Curious, because it was so different from what they were accustomed to in their own very religious country. Many of the Dutch visitors were clergymen who came to visit their coreligionists in Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Their books are an interesting source on American religious conditions. They contain reports on services and social activities; sometimes they copy almost complete sermons by popular preachers like Henry Ward Beecher, Thomas de Witt Talmage, Robert Collyer, and the like. It depended, of course, on the personal background of the reporter how positive or negative his judgment was. In general, there was praise for the common sense and straightforwardness of the American religious approach. Dutch travelers were amazed that the preachers did not have a special pulpit voice or language, but talked as they did in daily life. But there was much criticism of the shallowness and superficiality of religious life, the lack of dogmatic depth. Religion, as one observer had it, was not a belief but an act, not a principle but an effect. Sermons, another added, were like butterflies.24

Here again there is the typical ambivalance: admiration mixed with mistrust, the new balanced against the old and found wanting.

 

There is in every traveler to the New World something of the ambivalence so tersely expressed in a line by the Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff about a man who sees that, in spite of what he fears, it happens as he wants. But what exactly it is that he fears and wants he does not know. That is the problem of all travel books. America is too big to comprehend, and the result is that yes and no always go together. The traveler always looks for a standard of comparison, always tries to find something recognizable. For the Dutch, who had their share in the making of America, this meant in the first place that they were on a quest for historical relationships. The chauvinists among them were rewarded. More than any other nation, Kuyper wrote, the Dutch have contributed to the American society and constitution. The American, Tutein Nolthenius asserted, resembles the Dutch more than anybody else; both nations are democratic melting pots. The Dutch, Knobel believed, are the brothers of the Americans, the British are only their cousins. The stamp of the Netherlands was deeply imprinted in the American character. That was told to Kuyper's

daughter by all the friends of Holland she met in the States: William Elliot Griffis, Caroline Atwater Mason, Edward Bok, and especially Hendrik Willem van Loon.25

Travelers always found what they were looking for. That is a general truth about America. What Friedrich Schlegel remarked about the longing to visit Greece - namely, that everybody found there what he was looking for, especially himself - is just as true about America. As E.M. Forster wrote: America is like life itself, ‘you can usually find in it what you look for.’26 Dutch travelers experienced the same. The liberal politician Charles Boissevain applauded the liberal character of America (angrily excluding the tariffs); the Christian Kuyper had great praise for the Christian character of American public life.27

But essentially such recognition could not do justice to the complicated reality of America. The United States was neither the liberal nation of Boissevain nor Kuyper's Christian state, but a new, a different reality. And happily the Dutch travelers did not in general remain stuck with their domestic recognitions. Happily there was in them still much of the old spirit of openness and curiosity which had distinguished the discoverers of past centuries. Happily they did not degenerate into tourists.

But all the stronger was their ambivalence toward the New World. The old discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of the past, about the contrast between old and new, experience and innocence, corruption and naïveté, was eagerly carried on in the travel books. America had the future and hence it excelled in everything practical, it was full of energy and force. But because of that it lacked depth, spiritual wealth. The whole country, even the landscape, had, according to Huizinga, ‘something artless, without consequence, without depth, as if it had one dimension less.’28 The Americans were too mobile to mature. In short, they were children. That was the eternal epithet used by all Europeans. Its roots may go back, I would suggest, to the quasi-scientific theories of Buffon. Since the late eighteenth century it was used by most travelers, from van Hogendorp on.29

America was reviled and extolled, in endless ambiguity. It was the country where civilization would be completed. Several travelers repeated the famous myth, classically formulated by Bishop Berkeley, about the westward course of empire. At the same time America was the country that was never finished, a world in being.30

It was too big to comprehend with whatever generalization. The final metaphor on America sometimes encountered is that it was like life itself. Everybody could recognize part of it, nobody the whole. It was too vital, too overwhelming.

The Dutch, coming, as was said before, from their small, overorganized country, were perhaps in the best position to recognize that

element of vitality in American society. It permeated all their writings. It still does. The interesting fact is that whatever may have changed in our relations with the New World in the past hundred years, that energy is still to us the most essential quality of the United States, for better and for worse. The excellent travel books of the past have now, alas, been replaced by hasty journalistic reports, by telegrams and television reels. But from time to time some perceptive things are still written about America, and they still contain the same bewildered No and the same emphatic Yes. The same ambivalence is expressed in a very recent interview with the author Inez van Dullemen, who has written some excellent books on her travels in the United States. Allow me to conclude with some of her remarks; they are a condensation of everything I have been trying to say on the subject. The interviewer asked her whether she still had sympathy for America, after all that had happened: Vietnam, Watergate, etc. And then it continues: ‘She is familiar with this question, and she answers with a kind of apology: “I am still fond of America.... I still want to break a lance for America. There are always counter-movements, counter-currents there.... It is a jungle full of dangers, but also full of flowers, with magnificent highlights. Very foolish things can happen - but when I compare the Netherlands to it! Why, it is like a little park, trim and neat, and well cared for, more friendly, and so much more dead.”’31


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