Ginny, The argument that New York City is essentially Dutch is wrong and right in the same way that the argument that the US is essentially English is wrong and right. Selected elements of Dutch (or English) culture were transferred to the new land and became the basic rules for all later activity. Cultural geographers call this the Doctrine of First Effective Settlement. The idea, which originated with Wilbur Zelinsky, is an important part of Samuel Huntington’s new book, Who are We? (I didn’t notice the writer explaining why New York is the last great redoubt of American Marxism and socialism.) The notion that there’s something fundamentally French about New Orleans should be left to the tourist trade. What France could we be talking about? The France of Rationalism, Revolution, and the Enlightenment? Or the villanimous, sensual, and corrupt France that figures so large in the contemporary American imagination? I’m glad you liked Rybczynski’s book. You and the chicagoboyz crowd might also like another by him called City Life.

Nor was the Dutch influence limited to the British Isles as a driver of British expansion. Long before the English had begun to settle along the Hudson River Valley, the Dutch had colonized Nieuw Amsterdam. Lexington Green of the Chicago Boyz posts a…

Phil, you point to yet another possibly fruitful approach. Histories of Jazz would only touch on this type of thing only indirectly. David Hackett Fischer does not focus on music, as I recall, though he could have done so. I think he did not do so because he is going to write a book about slavery and the African American experience, and it is pointless to write about American music without Black people at the center of the discussion.

1. As Niall Ferguson points out, the British government’s involvement in imperialism became intense largely after the infusion of Dutch banking techniques after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

2. It was in Amsterdam that John Adams was able to secure the first foreign loans to the United States.

There’s a third point, though it doesn’t necessarily involve Amsterdam or New York: Recall that the Pilgrims that landed at Plymouth Rock were religious refugees who had fled to Leyden, a Dutch city.

By the way, I’m quite intrigued by the reference to Chicago as a colony city of New York. This is not really unusual in the history of civilization. Recall that several Spanish and French cities were originally colonies of Athens. Carthage begat Carthagenia (Carthago Nova, in its Latin form), and was itself begat by Phoenicians. And Venice was a place of refuge for many Roman aristocrats feeling the increasing rate of incursions from the German and Central Asian “barbarians”.

Great post!

Perry Miller’s “The Raven and the Whale” shows how the rivalry between New York and Boston is represented, indirectly and allegorically, in Melville’s “Moby-Dick”–especially in the battle over New England versus Manhattan recipes for clam chowder. Miller chronicles a lively literary scene in Manhattan that was completely obliterated by derivatives of Puritanism centered in Boston and propagated through generations of New England schoolmasters and professors (the Ichabod Cranes Irving detested). But Melville, for all his connection with Hawthorne, is a New Yorker–perhaps not least in sticking to a rather grim Calvinism that didn’t pass through the Unitarianism of William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Edith Wharton is absolutely germane. “The Age of Innocence” is a careful portrait of a Dutch-derived upper class. She is as much the chronicler of a distinctive New York culture as William Dean Howells is of a Boston culture–but note that Howells eventually moved to New York.

I wonder if these NY/Philly cultures explain the difference in cultures between Wilkes-Barre, Pa., which drew its establishment families from Philadelphia, and nearby Scranton, Pa., which drew its founding entrepreneurs from NYC.

Re. Franklin. It is actually the other way around: he was born in Boston, then apprenticed to his brother who published a rabble-rousing newspaper. BF got irritated – thinking (knowing) he was smarter than his brother. Not wanting to work out the rest of his poorly paid apprenticeship, he took off for Philadelphia and stayed there the rest of his life (well, except for representing America in France and leaving for other duties). He always saw leaving as an “errata” – ethical failing.

The question, I suspect, is: did he find Philadelphia attractive because that was the kind of person he was or did Philadelphia – where he essentially came of age and grew up – mold him. And if so, how much of that molding or that culture was itself defined by the German pietists, the Dutch, etc.? And what relation is there between that Philadelphian vision and that of the Dutch New Yorkers?

Re. German/Dutch: Irving’s characterization did not seem to me so untrue of the contrast between the German & Anglo settlers in my village. The point may be that I have, in my mind, mixed the Dutch and the Germans (& where I come from the Roosians), when they need to be separated out. The Missouri Synod Lutheran church on a Sunday had more in its pews than in the other four combined; the group that came up during reconstruction and settled the small commuity of Shiloh were different. In the early generations, far more of the latter went to college and they were the core of the village symphony orchestra; in later generations, the former were the more progressive and successful farmers – less often buying on credit, more often sinking money into buying more land.

Well, I certainly didn’t mean to suggest you shouldn’t put such assertions out, especially on your own blog. Reading them is why I visit. It is a very stimulating post. I don’t mind that we don’t agree on everything. That would be odd.

I have not read Irving and cannot speculate about the content or accuracy of his depiction of the rural Dutch. I think Shorto says he had a stereotyped depiction, but I don’t recall the details.

Fischer does talk about the Plymouth pilgrims, who had stayed for a time in Leyden, who were a different group from the Boston Bay colony. The Boston group were the founding group for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and who engulfed the Plymouth community in terms of numbers and influence early on.

It is OK to wish I had written a different post.

This heritage seems complex and I’m curious about the way you see this play out.

Benjamin Franklin, although a Bostonian and from a family of dissenters, is representative of a hustling, entrepreneurial, communal, secular, pragmatic character. This vision isn’t speculative: philosophically, spiritually, or artistically. Irving, describing the Dutch, echoes some characteristics Fischer finds in that middle region. They are also, as Irving notes, more interested in comfort than style. The New Yorkers who bought their dresses at Worth’s but didn’t wear them until they were a year old reflect the conservatism of that “style.”

Franklin, as he expresses repeatedly in his autobiography, aims at the good life in this world – felicity. He contrasts sharply with Jonathan Edwards, his almost exact contemporary.

This vision is what Irving found attractive and Wharton found comforting but also constraining.

Do you see this as having any relation to your observations? And, how close is the Dutch influence to the German? And to the stay in Leyden of Bradford’s group? (Who feared losing their way in the pleasures of the secular Dutch world but also felt that they were never going to succeed in a merchant system with narrow access.)

I hope this doesn’t imply that I wish you’d written a different post – I’m just relatively narrow and seeing your perspective helps broaden my understanding. I just need some help with working with the ideas in the language of characterization that I understand better than the broad sweep.

We will have to agree to disagree, since, as I said, I am basing this on impressionistic data gathered unsystematically over many years. But, if you can’t put such assertions on a blog, where the Hell can you put them?

Meanwhile, I’d like to see what H.L. Mencken, in his American Language books, has to say about Dutch words in English, or any other source to track down better the history of the word Dutch word “baas”, which became “boss” in American English.