Tulip Time and the Invention of a New Dutch American Ethnic Identity

In the 1930s, the Dutch American immigrant community of Holland, Michigan, underwent a cultural reawakening through its Dutch heritage Tulip Time festival. Tulip Time began in 1929 as a city beautification project. It was essentially a horticultural festival featuring 100,000 tulips imported from the Netherlands. Each year it added new cultural features such as a Dutch market, Dutch-language church services, Dutch cultural parades, and regular performances by klompen (wooden shoe) dancers traditionally dressed in the most colorful Dutch costumes, so that it continued to grow in popularity. By the mid-1930s, over a half million visitors per year came to see the tulips and partake in the traditions of old Holland.¹ But while the festival and the new generations of Dutch Americans that organized it attempted to recreate and promote authentic Dutch culture, the portrayals of the Dutch, like the braided blonde-haired klompen dancers pushing brooms to scrub the streets, engendered stereotypes and caricatures that hardly represented the Dutch Americans of the past. The festival’s “Dutchness,” wrote Dutch American author Arnold Mulder, “was less a matter of nationality and blood than of an American flair for effective community publicity.”² According to historian Suzanne Sinke, Tulip Time in later years was neither completely Dutch, nor wholly American, but rather was a peculiar hybrid, born and continuing to be reinterpreted in a dialectical process between cultures and shaped by an all too apparent subservience to the demands of commercialism and consumerism.³

Tulip Time was one of many ethnic movements originating in early twentieth-century America that were led by descendants of immigrants who sought to reconnect with their European heritage. In 1937, speaking to a Swedish American historical society, historian Marcus Lee Hansen explained that there was an “almost universal” phenomenon among immigrant groups in the United States, in which the third generation seeks to remember what the second forgot. The alienated second generation, he argued, feels caught between cultures and has little patience for its parents’ ways and little interest in telling their stories. But third-generation immigrants speak fluent vernacular, feel at home in the land of their birth, and consider recent immigrants to be of the inassimilable hordes. To explain and justify their own group’s rise from poor immigrants to respectable citizens, third-generation immigrants research history and genealogy and study language, and through it all, develop pride in their heritage. Like the progressive Chicago School, epitomized in Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1996), Hansen proposed inevitability in history. “Hansen’s Law,” this broad and Hegelian account of generational change as the engine of ethnic development, became a popular tool for explaining the past.⁴ In Holland’s Tulip Time, Hansen would have noticed the telltale signs of a third generation’s interest taken to an extreme.

But many historians have found Hansen’s explanation of ethnic change too simple, and they generally reject such malleable definitions as his formulation of an acting generation.⁵ Stronger explanations of the changing identities of ethnic groups in America consider the role of individuals within a national or transnational context. Studies of ethnic tourism in the United States, for example, show how immigrants at various stages of assimilation expressed publicly their ethnicity and thereby refashioned new American forms of identities. Most of these studies, however, cover only the post–World War II years.⁶ Standard works such as Dinnerstein and Reimer’s Ethnic American: A History of Immigration (2009) reinforce our knowledge that the ethnic revival of the 1970s led to a proliferation of ethnic parades and heritage festivals.⁷ But ethnic pageantry already had widespread social and economic consequences in the early twentieth century. Minor ethnic ceremonies and commemorations became major parades and festivals with the arrival of car culture. Indeed, the increased mobility of the automobile age led to greater interaction between ethnic groups and “outsiders,” and it fueled the search for uniqueness and authenticity in a growing mass society. An ethnic tourism industry sprouted to meet the new demand.

In the 1930s, Holland, Michigan’s, Tulip Time...