Hans Krabbendam's new book on Dutch American immigration rests on one basic premise—that while religion serves as one of the significant motivators in human history, it does not act in a vacuum. Faith operates in symbiosis with families, economics, history, and geography. Together these factors form a complex Venn diagram in which motives overlap and then separate and recombine in kaleidoscopic configurations. Delineating the patterns and motives is the historian's task. Freedom on the Horizon describes these patterns in the specific context of Dutch immigration to the United States. Although the majority of Dutch immigrants did not affiliate with the two major Dutch Calvinist denominations in the United States, that minority dominated the historical landscape. Faith gave them cohesion and visibility the majority could not match, scattered as they quickly became in America.
Krabbendam begins with the statement that the Dutch were seen as “good immigrants,” people who were welcomed for their skills, attitudes, and likelihood to assimilate (xxii). Dutch American immigration followed the familiar nineteenth-century pattern in which religious dissenters were more likely to move than people from the religious establishment. In America, the once despised minorities could form communities of the like-minded, in colonies that provided security and endurance. While religious Dutch immigrants were a minority, they were extra-cohesive, given their faith reasons for remaining together. “If a group was successful in satisfying the needs of its members within the boundaries of its own community with the help of economic and social institutions, then it strengthened its continuity considerably” (xxiii). For the Dutch, the community rules were formed and enforced by the combined efforts of churches, families, and neighbors.
During the century the book covers, Dutch Americans experienced a cultural reversal, according to Krabbendam. The immigrants who arrived in 1847 were often religious dissenters, intent on exchanging a corrupted Netherlands for a religiously free America. Their leaders, in a remarkably radical way, embraced this new culture and encouraged assimilation through the existing Reformed Church in America. When some of the early arrivers objected to Americanizing rapidly, the community experienced a religious schism that gave birth to the Christian Reformed Church. By the time the story ends with World War II, Dutch Calvinists of a socially and religiously progressive bent had turned to the Netherlands for inspiration, while being American provided inspiration for those satisfied with the status quo.
Krabbendam assembles an extensive arsenal of materials to tell the story. He is deeply indebted to the magisterial works of Jacob Van Hinte and Henry S. Lucas. To them he adds the insights of more recent scholars, particularly Robert Swierenga's pioneer statistical work, Jan Lucassen's work on European migration patterns, James Bratt's work on the development of Dutch Calvinism in the United States, and Suzanne Sinke's work on gender roles in Dutch American society. His guides to the history of religion and immigration in the United States include, Rudolph Vecoli, Mark Noll, and Jon Gjerde. What really sets the present work apart is Krabbendam's extensive use of both Dutch scholarship and Dutch American ecclesiastical periodicals.
All of this material is framed in a roughly chronological package of eleven chapters. The first three chronicle the formation of the Dutch immigration tradition in the nineteenth century. The next three detail the roles churches, families, and economics played in creating Dutch American communities. The next three chapters tell the tale of ongoing communication networks both within the United States and back to the Netherlands. This is concluded with a discussion of the political maturing of the Dutch Americans, as informed by their American experiences and their Dutch theological traditions. The final chapter and the conclusion summarize Krabbendam's case for both Dutch American uniqueness and ubiquity in the immigration story. The work includes two useful appendices on the number of Dutch immigrants and the historiography of their story.
While the book opens with the promise to consider the totality of Dutch immigration, the sources dictated the preponderance of the religious types. They maintained the networks that produced the letters and the periodicals designed to keep them together, at least in print. As for those who left (or never belonged to) the fold, we are left largely with inferences about their fate. They melted into the pot faster, or more completely, than their Protestant brethren. Much of this is affirmed in the conclusion that highlights the changes in the pattern that came after World War II. The ease of transportation, the growing role of governmental agencies in both countries, and the growing levels of economic well-being in the Netherlands ultimately blunted the newcomers' needs for the old largely church-based networks that had marked the channels since 1847.
As with any summary work, there are some generalizations that need nuance and scrutiny. At the beginning we read that the Dutch were not persecuted (xxii), but in the end we hear that there were problems for some of them during World War I, most notably in Iowa and Minnesota (335). The Dutch were in fact targeted during the labor disputes that periodically befell the textile mills around Paterson, New Jersey. But such oversights reflect the silences of the sources that form this book's foundations. At times the copy editing could be sharpened to eliminate mistakes, Sioux Center and Sioux City are two different places (75), or inconsistent spellings, Wyckhoff and Wyckoff (34–35) for the same surname. Also, the translators, Gerrit Scheeres and Harry Boonstra, deserve prominent recognition in the bibliographical information.
In the end Krabbendam has given us a most readable reminder that religious bodies were (and are) very important organizations in the formation of immigrant communities. The faith the Dutch used to understand their new surroundings was, in turn, remolded by their new surroundings. The old story so ably told here has a distinctly contemporary sound, and relevance.
