PART THREE OF “VAN NUYS — A VIEWING”

DUTCH STUDIES DEPT.

“We can go to a pub or we can take a beer, and we can come up with many ideas. But: to take an idea; to take the consequences of the idea…to take all the ins and outs, and fill in…and make it work, all the whole, the whole…story….now that is quite a thing. That really becomes something.”

— The opening quote of “Dutchness,” interviewing Dutch designers on their national style. Link below!

The Dutch Republic coalesced in 1581 among the combined Frisians, Groningers, Hollanders, and Utrechters, and most Flemings. The Calvinist Protestant northern states bloodily and relentlessly staved off (literally) re-conquest by their Catholic Spanish overlords in the 80 Years’ War. Out of that harrowing struggle for identity was born “Dutchness:” Which is the title of a delightful documentary that interViews Dutch designers on their stijl: https://youtu.be/opzKlkJVm-c

Nuis is the smallest, least significant dorp in the modern province of Groningen, named for the central city, which was once Groeningen, ‘Greeneries.’ This bit of fertile coastal upland is where Anglo-Saxons had previously farmed and intermarried with the Frisians. A thousand years later, when it was the County of East Friesland, this is where the ancestors of Isaac Van Nuys came from, to America. Het Nij Huis could mean the “New House” or the “Near House.” But when Nijhuis was Nieuw Huis, two or three generations before Aucke Jansen left it to “Build the Wall” on Holland’s American border, it was the newest, but still the smallest, least significant dorp in a vast vanished lordship called Ommelanden. Princes come, princes go, ditto several different Reformations, frequent invasions from Louis 14th to Napoleon to Adolph Hitler, and finally 70 years of Post-War economic miracle in the Netherlands — and little Nuis is … little Nuis.

By 1651, when Aucke Jansen was hired as a carpenter by the West India Company, the United Provinces were the richest nation on the globe, backed by their astonishing sea-and-don’t-forget-river-power. And — this is the embarrassment of riches — simply greedy for more.

We’ll look back later on the rise of the merchants of Amsterdam; but their creation, the WIC, was a corporate trading monopoloy for the “whole Western Hemisphere” set up by the Estates General of the Netherlands, a complement to the fearsome East India Company. [Combine two Hemispheres, and you get the punctuation mark atop Amsterdam’s Stadhuis:]

Van Nuys was a cognomen before it was the family surname. There were so many “Jansens” in the colony, even several other carpenters’ families, that Company recorods had to distinguish them by where they were born. The Company recruited so many carpenters in 1651 because before that, by mismanagement, by double-dealing from their executives (like Peter Minuit, whom I nominate for the honor, “Father of the Non-Compete Clause”), and most alarmingly, by the recurring incidents of rash, drunken shoot-ups of friendly Indians, the trading post at New Amsterdam, and its outlying farms, now faced concerted Indian counter-attack.

The Company was losing money, despite the fortunes in beaver pelts being made by individuals in the market. After 35 years in business, the Company was several hundred thousand guilders in the red on the New Netherland account. A change in board membership, and the appointment of Peter Stuyvesant as governor in 1647, signaled a new effort to ship over actual Dutch farmers capable of growing food and families on small plots. And by preference, the ideal farmer colonist would be also either a professional artisan with an existing family, or a professional soldier without one. Thus, immigrants who would be capable of building an actual Dutch colony. [The previous colonists were too often either jobbing traders, in and out with the tides and uncommitted to the place; or wild-cat fortune hunters who ran off into the woods to sell brandy and firearms to the Indians in exchange for contraband beaver pelts, which they smuggled through the woods to the English at New Haven. [The Co. had accused Peter Minuit of doing just this, and they recalled him as Governor in 1627. Back in Europe, Minuit got revenge by selling his knowledge of the country to the Swedes, who launched him right back to America to build their “New Christiania,” to compete with New Netherland. This was a terrible shonde, for the board back in Mokum.]

[For more background on conditions in New Amsterdam and Brooklyn just before Aucke Jansen’s family arrived, leaf through a few paragraphs from Stiles’s 1867 History of Brooklyn; or link to the whole https://archive.org/details/historyofcityofb01stil?view=theater#page/n9/mode/2u]

To foreshadow the later events of Aucke Jansen’s story a bit, get acquainted with the Flatbush Reformed Church, which is the Mother Church of the Dutch Reformed faith in America. The famous old relic we may visit today is in fact the fourth church building on the site. The first Flatbush church, the original pioneer construction of planks and shingles, as well as its parsonage, were framed, according to Stuyvesant’s measurements and design, by Aucke Jansen van Nuys between 1654-1660. We will revisit this episode in detail. For now, it is enough to say, that Aucke played a central role in the implantation of the Dutch Church in New Netherland, and that this Church itself played a central role in the survival and florescence of Dutchness in America’s history.

https://haitiantimes.com/2021/06/18/calls-grow-for-flatbush-burial-ground-memorial-ahead-of-juneteenth/

I have not found any evidence that the Van Nuyses owned slaves; they certainly did not in Aucke’s or his children’s generation. But a significant percent of the colonists did own one or two, and throughout its history the whole colony benefitted from the labor of the Company’s slaves. An often overlooked part of African-American history is the importation of slaves to the colonies on Dutch ships; on arrival they were auctioned and re-traded among individual wealthy merchants, who would then re-sell and re-ship their human cargo to the Chesapeake English. But in New Netherland itself, most of the slaves were New World-born, arriving with their owners from the WIC’s colonies in Brazil or the Caribbean. They had been already thoroughly acculturated, and at the corporate level, slaves were often given their own house lots, and given trusted posts, or were highly trained in specialty occupations like cuisine, ceremonial trumpeting, and were precision drummers for the militia or merchant marine.

At the small householder level, New Netherland and later New York slavery tended to take the form of a single personal, permanent, “family farmhand.” These hands were supposed, by community morals, to live and work out in the fields. Stuyvesant (who had plenty of slaves or his own, up to 70 persons) discouraged his middle-class farmers from taking house-servants for moral reasons; the nuclear family was a holy space. Dutchness on the whole discouraged slavery, and kept it modest by New World standards. But Calvinism ha a wide latitude for the institution of bondage; and since there were so many small family farms, that meant there were correspondingly, many more slaves than any place in the North. Of the Northern States before the Civil War, the place with the highest percentage of families owning slaves was Kings County, NY with 30%. It partly explains the otherwise inexplicable fact that the Democratic Party of southern slaveholders has always been run and led by New Yorkers (see, e.g. Martin van Buren).

Aucke thrived working under the disastrously hot-headed Peter Stuyvesant; he got land and kept his land by loyally saluting the colors of York when the English drumrolls started — saluting right beside the humiliated Stuyvesant. Aucke made himself useful under the hated English Catholic martinet, Gov. Edmond Andros, installed by the despised Catholic Duke of York, brother of King Charles II. Aucke played it the Company Way — whoever the Company fired, Aucke still was there.

Aucke had three wives, all Dutch. His and Magalene’s Nuis-born children, and his American-born children by his later marriages, all grew up and got married in Brooklyn as Dutch-speaking English subjects. From the original Downtown lot granted him by the Company in 1651, Aucke started early trading land, buying and selling farms all over the Dutch areas of Brooklyn, settling his children, serving a year as Schepen, building infrastructure, and investing in improvements including Brooklyn Ferry.

AMSTERDAM, OUD en NIEUW

In 1585 the Siege and Capture of Antwerp by the Spanish had cut the glittering head off Dutch Civilization at the line that became Belgium. All the wealthy and sophisticated Protestant Walloons and Sephardic Jews of Flanders, not eager to face the Inquisition, kept their heads and left. They took all the glitter and spice and “relationships, bubbeleh!” of Antwerp up to the Protestant province of North Holland. They moved en masse into a cheap, reedy mud-flat port on the south side of the frigid Zuider Zee, where peasants had dammed the Amstel at the Ij, to get some land for a wijk. Amsterdam swelled to accommodate the refugees. No it didn’t swell — it unfolded, built modern infrastructure, and developed. It evolved, grew wealthy and wise and beautiful. It was, and is, the sublime organic expression of a Dutch civilization.

This phenomenal growth explains why the WIC had to go all the way to Nuis to find a carpenter willing to go to America. All the really good guild carpenters were building the Stadhuis! Remember the quote at the top —- watch with wonder, the brief animated Growth of Amsterdam:

THE MAGIC OF 1609
In 1609, the City Council of Amsterdam had chartered the Bank of Amsterdam as a public utility, to deal with the ridiculous international coinage problem. The Bank made sure that the coins that came to Amsterdam, were re-coined there in Amsterdam at a premium. It was immediately accepted as the strongest, most sensible, most stable standard in all Europe. The B of A was a wisselbank — an exchange bank — no loans, no credit, no hanky-panky! — and it worked as planned. Merchants flocked there to dump chewed-up shillings and florins for paper certificates. Ah, clever, clever. Currency, good everywhere on Earth, but mostly spent in and around downtown Amsterdam, where you could buy anything. The Bank gradually separated all the gold from the silver in Europe, and arbitraged the silver in Batavia by slipping it to the East India traders. DThe Chinese traders who met them in Batavia, would take nothing else, not even gold! China used silver coins as its own money system, so demanded silver over gold. This worked out fine for Amsterdam, where gold was higher than silver. In 1609 also, the States of Holland (same folks) sent Henry Hudson off on a slow boat to China, where he found the Hudson River. The Amsterdam traders who quickly chartered ships to follow him there, found Leni-Lenape dripping with beaver furs, who had no use at all for, scoffed at and spat at, both their gold AND their silver. Show me the wampum, said the Canarsee. Until they figured out what that meant, the Dutch embarrassed themselves that day at the Battery, offering Venetian glass beads. The Indians were simply too polite to say Feh!

Peter Minuit was not the first Dutchman to grasp how quicksilver “money” is — while it can be a storehouse of value, it is primarily, and most valuably, a simple medium of exchange. This was the secret of the Bank of Amsterdam — one only needs the tokens. The legendary 24 dollars worth of trinkets and beads he traded for Manhattan was not quite a swindle, as often depicted; nor does anybody today believe there was any binding real-estate deal taking place. What it was, was a barely successful guess at what the Indians seemed to want as a medium of exchange. and how they practiced making bargains for land deals and beaver pelts. Very quickly the Dutch realized that, though they had bought themselves a few months to build a town, the beads were a poor substitute for the big-medicine wampum belts which were so apparently prized by all the Indians all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Just as quickly, the Nieuw Amsterdam merchants realized all this magic wampum was made locally, ONLY from the distinctive shells of particular quahogs and whelks off Long Island, right here! Thus, by St Nick! the Old Amsterdam traders sitting on the money supply of Europe, suddenly found themselves as New Amsterdam traders sitting on the money supply of North America! Double-Dutch! They immediately set up a sweatshop of overworked Canarsee girls digging clams, for a few clams a day, chopping and polishing the shells into beads, stringing them into belts and strips and straps. They then flooded the market with wampum in large denominations and small change. The Indians knew the Dutch didn’t quite understand what wampum belts meant to them — but in war and peace, the beads did their work. The beavers didn’t stand a chance.

Smug classical economists use Dutch wampum as a laugh-line, a counter-example when teaching that the most prudent fisc and the stablest currency is always the tightest. They say that the Dutch inflated the wampum economy, that they ballooned wampum until it was “practically worthless,” and that obviously Nieuw Amsterdam should have kept their wampum hard and tight with high interest rates. My stars, folks, we’re talking about quahog shells. Economists can easily find a way to make anything scarce, hard, unfair. [Good luck with their digital currency! Show me the wampum.]

From the other side, Native scholars have illuminated for us how the Dutch completely misunderstood the spiritual and social traditions surrounding wampum. Those belts, they show, the real ones, not the Dutch knock-offs, were Big Medicine: messages, symbols, carefully-worked remembrances of truces and alliances, wars, and great leaders. As a European Duke would treasure a medal from this monarch, so a local chief would proudly display the wampum of friendship from his sachem or the Dutch governor. But then the Dutch cheapened wampum by turning it into loose cash that eventually just ended up impoverishing and dispossessing the Indians — who certainly didn’t think they were agreeing to trade their land and living, but to share it. Note the recurring imagery of two rivers, or two men clasping hands in friendship:

Both criticisms reveal, from different sides, how difficult it is to make a money — any money — or a land deal — any land deal — that seems both humane, and fair. But wampum didn’t die because of “inflation” — it died because the Indians had pretty much trapped out all the beaver and sold out or their haunts in the Hudson Valley, out of New York, out of New Jersey, out of “Nieuw Netherland.” Wampum was “near worthless” because it had fulfilled its purpose as trade coin — there was nothing else to buy. The customer had been completely dispossessed, and Aucke’s grandkids already needed new land.

The story of the growing pains of New Amsterdam during that turbulent time just as Aucke and his family were getting off the boat, is most delightfully told in the brilliant Broadway musical satire Knickerbocker Holiday, by Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill. I’ve put up the recording, in four files, of the full 1944 radio broadcast with most of the original Broadway cast, including the inspired Walter Huston as the peg-leg tyrant of the Bowery. Click and be drawn…

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/17ry0eqFM2QtkUdQ3B-D5NaOifBSyorCA