Earlier this month, over at the Washington Post, Kristin Hoganson wrote an excellent piece challenging five key myths about the Midwest, including the commonly held perception that the rural Midwest was an isolated place, cut off from broader global contexts. She notes, “A dense web of threads have felted the Midwest into the global fabric since the early years of colonial contact.”[1] If you have read many of my posts over the past several months, you know that I strongly agree with Hoganson, and in fact, in many ways, I push the chronology she examines in her recent book back even further and extend it specifically into the realms of religion and imperialism.
In light of Hoganson’s work and other developing conversations about the global consciousness of the rural Midwest, this summer I want to spend time here at the blog analyzing the internationalism of these rural communities. More broadly, through careful analysis of rural internationalism, I want to pose larger questions of how the international visions of communities in the nineteenth century challenge not only our understandings of the rural Midwest, but also of American and European imperialism, settler colonialism, and worldwide missionary efforts.
Using rural Dutch immigrant communities in the Midwest as a prism through which to understand rural global consciousness, each post in this series will consider how men and women who were often perceived to be uninterested in European and American imperial projects or isolated from national or global affairs actually embraced their connection to other parts of the globe. Messages from their pulpits, articles in their newspapers, and letters from relatives teemed with information about China, the Middle East, the Netherlands, and South Africa. They were informed global citizens.
These posts argue that local, regional, or even national thinking isn’t broad enough to contextualize fully the ideas that shaped these communities. Concerns about the spiritual state of the state church in the Netherlands, the building of a hospital in Taiwan (referred to as Formosa in the nineteenth century), or the success of the South African Boers in their war against the British indicate a clear global understanding and suggest a belief that these communities could enact change from their outposts in the rural Midwest. More than markets and commodities connected nineteenth century Midwesterners to the international community. Their religious, imperial, and colonial ambitions also played a significant part.
Rural Immigrant Conceptions of the United States
To begin this series, we actually start on the other side of the Atlantic, looking at how many of the men and women who eventually made their way to the rural United States perceived their new home. Being well acquainted with the narrative of immigration to the United States in the nineteenth century, to many of us, the United States may seem like a natural site for new settlers. But for the Dutch, it wasn’t as simple. With all of the colonial holdings throughout the sprawling Dutch Empire, why did immigrants choose the United States?
In short, these immigrants chose to leave the Dutch Empire for the United States because of the vision of the United States that they formed before they left the former homes in the Netherlands. This is to say that these men and women who came to the United States already nurtured a global vision. In fact, leaders of the movement even felt the need to justify their choice in a pamphlet “Immigration or why we promote the relocation of people to North America and not to Java.”[2] This pamphlet reveals that even before the first Dutch immigrants departed for the rural Midwest in the 1840s, they had a clear vision of the United States and what it offered.
So, how did they envision the United States?
The U.S. had opportunity.
Most Dutch immigrants departed for the U.S. to pursue economic opportunity. Importantly, they did not migrate because the conditions they faced in the Netherlands were so dire that they had to leave to survive. They came because they saw the opportunity to secure a more promising financial future for their children. Writing back to the Netherlands from Holland, Michigan, in 1866, B.W.A.E. Baron Sloet tot Oldhuis told family and friends in the Netherlands that in the United States there is a “help yourself” attitude.[3] Communication like this helped prospective immigrants to the U.S. who stilled lived in the Netherlands develop a vision of the United States as a place with abundant opportunities for hardworking men and women to seize economic stability and make their way in the world.
The U.S. had land
Closely linked to their perception of the United States as a nation with opportunity were Dutch citizens’ perceptions of the United States as a country with vast expanses of land available for settlement. Early leaders discussed their desire to settle on one of the nation’s “uninhabited regions” and frequent letters home mentioned the opportunity to claim large homesteads on fertile land—an opportunity well beyond the reach of most Dutch farmers in the densely populated Netherlands.[4] From Europe, prospective emigrants looked at the United States as a sprawling frontier awaiting settlement. Wide open spaces made the opportunities in the United States all the more enticing.
America had religious freedom
Dutch citizens also saw the United States as a nation that promised religious freedom. Sick of being under the thumb of the state church in the Netherlands, religious dissenters looked forward to having the freedom to establish their own churches free from persecution and to educate their children in schools staffed and managed by members of their own churches. They did not see the United States as a Christian nation—in fact, some immigrants even cast themselves as missionaries to the United States—but they did see the United States as a country where they could practice their particular brand of Christianity more freely. In the eyes of many immigrants unlike the Netherlands, which claimed to be a Protestant nation but had atrophied under monarchical bureaucracy, the United States had no set religious identity yet offered the freedom for religious dissenters to establish their own religious communities.
Even before the first Dutch immigrants stepped on a ship destined for the United States, they nurtured a vision of their new home. They had an international vision and believed that it could inform them well enough to direct them to specific sites ripe for settlement in the United States. When they arrived, they found their vision of the U.S. as an opportunity-rich land with robust religious freedom both confirmed and challenged. With little government interference, they largely set up their own churches, schools, and towns but at times they squabbled with Yankee neighbors over land claims, suffered from the frontier’s abysmal infrastructure, and often lamented the government’s lack of aid to local projects—an ironic reversal given their fierce distain for Dutch governmental interference.
The global vision developed by Dutch immigrants did not exactly match the reality they encountered in the United States; however, the understanding of the United States that they possessed before they left their homes offers just the first example of the global consciousness of these rural Midwestern immigrant communities.
Throughout the summer, we will follow this constellation of hundreds of rural Dutch communities and their broader visions of global affairs in the nineteenth century. These men and women did not stop thinking globally when they finally put down roots in the rural Midwest. Instead, they continued to think internationally throughout the century as they engaged in global affairs in Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America.
[1]Kristin Hoganson, “Five Myths about the Midwest,” The Washington Post, May 10, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths-about-the-midwest/2019/05/10/b7fffa90-7264-11e9-9eb4-0828f5389013_story.html?utm_campaign=ad517a7082-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_10_22_06_14_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_source=American%20Historical%20Association&utm_term=.fe26b83eb458
[2]In the original Dutch, Landverhuizing, of waarom bevorderen wij de Volksverhuizing en wel naar Noord-Amerika en niet naar Java
[3]B.W.A.E. Baron Sloet tot Oldhuis, “The Cause of Dutch Emigration to America: An 1866 Account, Part 1,” Robert P. Swierenga, ed., Dirk Hoogeveen, trans. Michigana 24 (1979): 60.
[4]Antonie Brummelkamp and Albertus C. van Raatle, “Appeal to the Faithful in the United States of America,” May 25, 1846, in Dutch Immigrant Memoirs and Related Writings, Henry S. Lucas, ed., Thomas De Witt, trans. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 17.
0