Dutch-Americans

According to the 2000 United States Census, more than 4.5 million Americans claim total or partial Dutch heritage.

Immigration

The Dutch first came to America in 1609 and explored the Hudson River on the ship De Halve Maen. They came looking for a way to Asia, but found many furs and good farm land. In 1614 Fort Nassau was built where present day Albany, New York is. In 1624, Fort Nassau was replaced with Fort Orange, the first permanent settlement in the New Netherlands. One year later, Fort Amsterdam was built on Manhattan Island. The next year, the Dutch purchased the island from the local Indians for the equivalent of $24. By this time there were about 1500 Dutch settlers in America. By 1664, the New Netherlands' population was over 6000. Although the New Netherlands was Dutch, only about half the settlers were ethnic Dutch and Manhattan grew increasingly multicultural. The rural areas however remained overwhelmingly Dutch for two centuries. In 1664, the English seized the colony and it became New York.

The beginnings of the Reformed Church in America date to 1628. By 1740, it had 65 congregations in New York and New Jersey, served by ministers trained in Europe. Schools were few but to obtain their own ministers they formed "Queens College" (now Rutgers University) in 1766. In 1771, there were 34 ministers for over 100 churches. Until 1764, in at least three Dutch churches in New York City, all sermons were in Dutch; Theodore Roosevelt reports his grandfather's church used Dutch as late as 1810. Up and down the Hudson River were Dutch settlements. A Hessian in 1777 wrote: "The inhabited parts . . . are built up with the most beautiful houses, situated on the most agreeable sites. Their furniture would satisfy the finest tastes, and is of a quality that we cannot boast of at home. At the same time, everything is so clean and shining that I can hardly describe it." The Dutch introduced their own folklore, most famously Sinterklaas ("Santa Claus") and created their own as in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. 2001

A bitter theological split in the Dutch Reform church in the 1770s affected New Jersey and New York. A dissident minority of ministers calling itself the "conferentie" set up separate churches. They were traditionalists who looked to the old country as a model and strongly opposed the recently introduced revivals and prayer meetings. Domine John Henry Goetschius, a highly influential pastor and teacher, and his mentor, Theodorus J. Frelinghuysen of New Brunswick, were the organizers of the Great Awakening, which won the support of the majority of the ministers (and people). They supported revivals, wanted to break ties with Holland, and fought the conferentie. They came to be known as the "coetus" party. When war came in 1775, most of the conferentie party, in the Hackensack valley of New Jersey at least, became Tories; the coetus party mostly Whigs. (Leiby) Members of the coetus party, playing important roles in the founding of Dutch Reform seminaries, employed faculty and student fraternities to safeguard information and secrets they collected throughout their decades of existence in colonial America. The proetection of said secrets constitute the basis for societies at both Columbia and Rutgers Colleges. (Goetschius, 'American Coetus History')

The land tenure of the Hudson River region was based on vast estates controlled by patroons and worked by tenant farmers. Stephen Van Rensselaer III (1764-1839) was the largest landholder in America, with 3000 tenants on 7.7 million acres (31,000 km²) of rich farmland. In 1824 he founded Rensselaer School (now known as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or RPI.) Political power was in the hands of the landed aristocracy until well after the Revolution. Van Rensselaer, Abraham Van Vechten, Johan Jost Dietz, Dirck Ten Broeck, Hermanns Bleecker, James Van Schoonhoven, and others were all Federalists who collaborated with New York merchants. Rents on the large estates were often paid in products, and in other respects as well, a quasi-feudal relationship prevailed. Anti-Rent Wars and near rebellion led to the collapse of the estates, which were purchased by the tenants in the 1840s.

19th century immigration

After 1700 there were few immigrants until the 19th century, when large numbers of Dutch farmers, forced by high taxes and low wages, started immigrating to America. They went to the Midwest, especially Michigan, Illinois and Iowa. In the 1840s came immigrants fleeing religious persecution of their minority version of Calvinism. There was a denominational split in 1857 of the Reformed Church of America. Led by Gijsbert Haan, the Christian Reformed Church broke off from the RCA, attracting more conservative recent immigrants. Large numbers of Catholics also immigrated; some forming communities in Wisconsin.

By 1900, the number of U.S. residents born in the Netherlands exceeded 105,000. Of these, over 50,000 were in Michigan, about 22,000 in Illinois, and 10,000 in Iowa. In the next decade, all these settlements grew, thanks to the arrival of another 30,000 immigrants, and, of course, the growing numbers of American-born children and grandchildren.

The Dutch villages of Michigan, Illinois and Iowa rested on a stern Calvinistic foundation, and the Christian Reformed Church remained strongly conservative. Dancing, cards, whiskey and the theater were anathema to the early settlers; religion and the Bible were their major concern. They set up their own parochial schools, which still exist. The Holland Academy in Holland, Michigan, was founded as a preparatory school for boys planning to become ministers. In the 1860s, it became Hope College; by 1920, its 900 alumni included 300 ministers. A number of other Historically Dutch-American colleges were also founded. After 1917, the forces of Americanization proved irresistible, as the youth spoke English, but relished their Edam cheese, banket, rusks, rye bread, and currant bread, washed down with cold water. Even today, the Dutch language can occasionally be heard and several Dutch-founded communities still hold heritage events, such as Tulip Festivals.

Numbers

Between 1820 and 1900, 340,000 Dutch immigrated from the Netherlands to the United States of America. In the aftermath of World War II, several tens of thousands of Dutch immigrants joined them, mainly moving to California and Washington state. In several counties in Michigan and Iowa, Dutch-Americans remain the largest ethnic group. Nowadays, most Dutch-Americans (27%) live in California, followed by New York, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Not included among Dutch Americans are the Pennsylvania Dutch, a group of German Americans who settled in Pennsylvania in the colonial era (and whose name is a corruption of the word Deutsch, meaning "German").

Famous Dutch-Americans

References

Bratt, James H. Dutch Calvinism in Modern America: A History of a Conservative Subculture. Eerdmans, 1984.
Corwin, S. T. History of the Dutch Reformed Church in the United States (1895).
De Gerald, F. Jong The Dutch in America, 1609-1974. Twayne, 1975.
Doezema, Linda Pegman. Dutch Americans: A Guide to Information Sources. Gale Research, 1979.
Ganzevoort, Herman, and Mark Boekelman, eds. Dutch Immigration to North America. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1983.
Kim, Sung Bok. Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664-1775 (1987)
Kirk, Gordon W. The Promise of American Life: Social Mobility in a Ninetenth-Century Immigrant Community, Holland, Michigan, 1847-1894. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978.
Kroes, Rob. The Persistence of Ethnicity: Dutch Calvinist Pioneers in Amsterdam, Montana. University of Illinois Press, 1992.
Kroes, Rob, and Henk-Otto Neuschafer, eds. The Dutch in North America: Their Immigration and Cultural Continuity. Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1991.
Kromminga, John. The Christian Reformed Church: A Study in Orthodoxy. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1949.
Adrian C. Leiby; The Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley: The Jersey Dutch and the Neutral Ground, 1775-1783 Rutgers University Press. 1962.
Lucas, Henry. Netherlanders in America: Dutch Immigration to the United States and Canada, 1789-1950. University of Michigan Press, 1955.
Nissenson, S. G. The Patroon's Domain 1937
Schreuder, Yda. Dutch Catholic Immigrant Settlement in Wisconsin, 1850-1905. New York: Garland, 1989.
Swierenga, Robert P. The Forerunners: Dutch Jewry in the North American Diaspora. Wayne State University Press, 1994.
Swierenga, Robert P. ed. The Dutch in America: Immigration, Settlement, and Cultural Change. Rutgers University Press, 1985.
Taylor, Lawrence J. Dutchmen on the Bay: The Ethnohistory of a Contractual Community. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.
Thernstrom, Stephen, ed. Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. Harvard University Press, 1980.
Van Jacob Hinte. Netherlanders in America: A Study of Emigration and Settlement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries of the of America. Ed. Robert P. Swierenga . Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1985. translation of a 1928 Dutch-language book
Thomas S. Wermuth. Rip Van Winkle's Neighbors: The Transformation of Rural Society in the Hudson River Valley (2001)

by Thomas S. Wermuth

Carl Wittke, We Who Built America: The Saga of the Immigrant (1939), ch 2, 11

Primary sources

Herbert J. Brinks, Dutch American Voices: Letters from the United States, 1850-1930 (1995)
Lucas, Henry, ed. Dutch Immigrant Memoirs and Related Writings. 2 vols. Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1955.