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Chapter 4 - The Vanishing Dutchman: Ethnicity in Irving’s A History of New York
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4 The Vanishing Dutchman Ethnicity in Irving’s A History of New York Given the fact that John Lothrop Motley required three large volumes to describe only the first thirty years of the Dutch Republic, one of his reviewers wondered “how many more will be required to recount the definite establishment of the Republic, its foreign and domestic wars, its internal discords, its revolutions, its conquests, its colonies, . . . its ascendancy, its wane, and its decay?”1 Motley died before he could finish even the story of how the Dutch became fully independent, that is, “its ascendancy.”2 However, Washington Irving, from a very different perspective , covered some of the later material that Motley’s Dutch histories left untouched . Irving published A History of New York in 1809, almost a half century before Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, but I have chosen to discuss him after Motley, because Irving treats a later period in the history of the Netherlands, one thatcenteredaround“itscolonies,”“itswane,anditsdecay.”ConsideringMotley’s and Irving’s texts in this order reveals the cyclical pattern in which the Netherlands was caught up, along with every other important early modern empire, according to nineteenth-century historical philosophy: it rose to a position of great global power and then inevitably fell from that eminent position. The Dutch “golden age,” as seventeenth- century Dutch history is sometimes called, did not last long. The independence movement from Spain inaugurated a period of great prosperity and power in the Netherlands. It achieved significant global economic clout and initiated colonizing efforts through out the world, in clud ing in the Americas, where it established the New Netherland colony in the early seventeenth century. It lost this territory to the British in the mid-to late seventeenthcentury.Irving’sHistoryof NewYorkrepresentsthe1664Britishtakeover of New Amsterdam, the capital of the New Netherland colony, as the eclipse of the Dutch by the English, another manifestation of the domino pattern that consistently structures nineteenth- century U.S. representations of early modern history. AHistoryof NewYork,fromtheBeginningof theWorldtotheEndof theDutchDy nasty chronicles the fate of New Amsterdam from the beginning of the universe— Ethnicity in Irving’s A History of New York / 97 in typical Irving style—to its conquest by the British. Irving’s text is sometimes called Knickerbocker’s History in honor of its narrator, Diedrich Knickerbocker, a Dutch Ameri can historian interested in familiarizing the pub lic with the glories oftheDutchcolonialperiodinNewYork.(IrvingreprisestheKnickerbockerper sona in, among other pieces, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ,” both included in the wildly popu lar 1819–20 The Sketch Book.) Although New Netherland became the colony of New York after the British conquest, and later became the U.S. state of New York, A History of New York presents New Netherland not merely as one installment in the prehistory of the United States but rather as a kind of foreign land. The New Netherland period functions in the book mostly as international history, not proto-national history. Irving’s text (like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, which also challenges the assimilation of the history it tells directly into U.S. history as a proto-national period) can therefore productively be interpreted in light of the argumentmadebymanymodernscholarsagainstsuperimposingtheboundariesand frameworksthatorganizetheUnitedStatesanachronisticallybackontoacolonial period in which very different geographical and cultural logics structured North America. If we read New Netherland as simply early New York, then we can miss the ways in which A History of New York signals that the Dutch who controlled New Netherland were a people alien to Anglo- Ameri can culture. We can therefore also miss a central aspect of the critique that Irving levels at the nineteenth- century Dutch, stubbornly striving to maintain an ethnic identity distinct from, even alien to, the Anglo- Ameri can culture in which they were living. In order to get at this dynamic, I will first examine the rhetoric used by Irving’s narrator,DiedrichKnickerbocker,onitsownterms;Iwillthendiscussthepolitics of an Anglo-American author like Washington Irving putting such rhetoric into the mouth of a Dutch Ameri can speaker. Knickerbocker presents the history of New Netherland as the rise and fall of an empire, conforming to the standard cyclical pattern. He stresses the “extinction” of the Dutch era in 1664. He therefore depicts the condition of the ethnic Dutch in the early nineteenth century as one of cultural obsolescence, in which Dutch ways are being abandoned and people who identify with their Dutch heritage feel like foreigners in their own...