How Dutch Americans Stayed Dutch: An Historical Perspective on Ethnic Studies by Michael J. Douma (review)

“Who am I?” is a perennial question with many perplexing answers. Kinship and ethnicity appear in many of those responses. Those people who abandon their birthplaces for new surroundings often include hyphens in their answers. Hence, Dutch-American. While in nature hybrids are sterile, hyphenated groups have been known to perpetuate themselves for generations. Michael J. Douma’s new book, How Dutch Americans Stayed Dutch: An Historical Perspective on Ethnic Identities examines one ethnic group and concludes religion largely accounts for its enduring identity. He examines the Dutch through the prism shaped by the work of Marcus Lee Hansen and polished over the years by the likes of Jon Gjerde. Douma makes a persuasive case for the crucial role Calvinism played in the formation and endurance of Dutch American identity since the 1840s.

How Dutch Americans Stayed Dutch spotlights the largest Dutch concentration in the United States, West Michigan, and variously stares or glances beyond it to highlight similar developments in notable Dutch enclaves in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, as well as more modest concentrations in Detroit, Cleveland, Upstate New York, and the West Coast. In each case, it was religion that kept the Dutch Dutch for so long. Douma builds his case through topical chapters arranged in roughly chronological order. He sets the stage with a chapter that places Dutch American religious development in the context of a schism in the Dutch state church in the 1830s. Officially sanctioned persecution inspired the religiously devout to leave for the United States beginning in 1846. Ministers were their leaders, and Calvinist churches the first institutions they organized upon arrival in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa.

These Old World tensions produced schism in the New World. At first the newcomers affiliated with the venerable Dutch Reformed Church (rca) rooted in the Hudson Valley. But, in 1857, a disgruntled minority organized the Christian Reformed Church (crc), anchored in West Michigan. In time the crc’s membership surpassed that of its colonial mother. The two denominations reflected degrees of comfort with Americanization, with the rca housing those more amenable to change, the crc harboring the reluctant ones. Enduring Dutch American communities invariably contained both denominations, their competition actually reinforcing a faith-based sense of ethnic uniqueness.

Douma assembles this story from an extensive array of sources. There are the usual historical suspects (ethnic newspapers, letters, church records, and secondary sources) used for ethnic histories. But he plows new furrows through his mining of the hitherto neglected Dutch consular records housed at the national archive in the Hague, his analysis of the once acclaimed novels Arnold Mulder set among the West Michigan Dutch, and a delightful sketch of the Dutch speaking Siras Sill, Holland, Michigan’s long time, lone African American resident. These new sources provide an insider-outsider version of the Dutch experience as seen particularly through the unsympathetic eyes of Dutch businessmen who served as consuls.

As long as Dutch and Calvinist remained synonymous, Dutch American communities, whether located in rural environments or urban neighborhoods, maintained their fierce cohesion. When economic depression, military service, and increased mobility intervened, the old glue began losing its adhesion. Douma points out that this original recipe excluded more than half of America’s Dutch immigrants from membership in “Dutch” communities—non-religious Dutch, Dutch Catholics, and Dutch Jews were not regarded as compatriots in the Calvinist colonies of the upper Midwest. For that matter, the old Dutch families of New York and New Jersey, deemed the religiously zealous newcomers not authentically Dutch either.

Douma sees the invention of Holland, Michigan’s, Tulip Time during the 1930s as a pivotal phase in the rebranding of Dutch American identity. Largely the brainchild of that city’s non-Dutch chamber of commerce boosters, the annual celebration offered windmills, tulips, clogs, costumes, and street dancers as the embodiment of Dutchness. This attractive formula spawned similar events in Dutch enclaves in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota...