American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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The view of his parents and of the broader Dutch culture was that one had to be contented with one’s station in life because it had been assigned by God. The ‘‘dominant pattern,’’ Muste recalled, was ‘‘acquiescence in the will of God rather than rebellion against it.’’8 Muste’s parents were members of the Dutch Reformed Church (Nederlands Hervormde Kerk), which was established as the state church after the country won its independence from Spain in 1648. John Calvin, of course, was Martin Luther’s successor in the Protestant Reformation. Born in France in 1509, Calvin shared Luther’s core beliefs but took them even further than the reformer. From Luther’s emphasis on God’s saving grace alone, Calvin elaborated the doctrine of predestination, which emphasized the utter estrangement of human beings from God and their powerlessness to affect their salvation.9
Controversies within the Hervormde Kerk would spill over into the Dutch immigrant communities in the United States. In 1834, there was the first of several major secessionist movements. The separatists opposed the state’s recent assertion of supremacy over religious matters, which they viewed as a sign that the church was succumbing to the theological liberalism of the Enlightenment. The Seceder movement grew rapidly in the rural parts of the Netherlands, including Zeeland. State and ecclesiastical authorities viewed the Seceders as a threat and heavily persecuted them. This repression, along with agricultural crises and economic depression, encouraged Seceders to immigrate to the United States, giving them a greater influence in the new country than they had in the old. Although repression waned over the course of the nineteenth century, there was a second secession (known as the Doleantie) in 1886, under the leadership of Abraham Kuyper, and their influence grew tremendously when he was elected prime minister in 1901.10
In contrast to Max Weber’s thesis that Calvinism constituted the cultural arm of capitalist modernization, Seceders tended to be hostile to liberal ideas, while the most economically prosperous and more liberal tended to be members of the Hervormde Kerk or smaller, more liberal Protestant denominations.11 Indeed, the Secession was a counterrevolutionary movement in opposition to the trends unleashed by the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. According to Kuyper, the intellectual leader of the Doleantie, the Enlightenment had made three fundamental errors: ‘‘ ‘Humanism,’ making man the center and measure of reality; ‘Pantheism,’ identifying man and nature with God; ‘Materialism,’ denying the reality of the spiritual and non-empirical.’’ Only ‘‘a restored spiritual ethos’’ would provide ‘‘ties that could harmonize individuals and groups without enslaving them. Only divine authority could check human power; only the transcendent realm gave hope to the oppressed, sound standards of value for public conduct, and dignity to human life.’’ Kuyper was thus both a conservative and a reformer, calling for a return to an organic, patriarchal order that would have little room for plurality and difference, while at the same time recognizing the oppressive tendencies of the modern state and industrial order.12
Calvinism appears severe to modern eyes. Yet it is important to recognize that Calvin did not view predestination as an expression of despair in humanity. Rather, the ‘‘sweet and pleasant doctrine of damnation,’’ as Calvin put it, spoke to the utter majesty of God.13 Certainly Muste did not experience Calvinism or the cultural life of the Reformed Church as stern or dreary. Sunday was for Muste ‘‘the high day of the week—a day of ‘rest and gladness,’ of ‘joy and light.’ ’’14 His family, while reserved, was warm and loving, and found amusement in activities that fell within the moral strictures of the church. Indeed, although he would later reject Calvinistic theological doctrines like predestination, his religious heritage shaped his life and politics long after he left the Reformed Church. In particular, he retained ‘‘a strong conviction about human frailty and corruption’’ and the belief that one’s life must conform to the ‘‘imperious demand’’ of the gospel. Later, in the 1930s and 1940s, when he developed a critique of Marxism and the Enlightenment tradition more broadly, he seemed to echo Kuyper in his insistence that belief in God was ultimately the only way to save humankind from destroying itself. His more skeptical relationship to liberalism and more pessimistic view of human nature differentiated him from his fellow Social Gospel clergy. It would also make him the most thoughtful and insightful pacifist critic of neo-orthodoxy, a theological movement that began after World War I as a reaction to nineteenth-century liberal theology and a positive reevaluation of the Reformed tradition.15
The overwhelming preponderance of Seceders and lower-class members of the Hervormde Kerk in Dutch migration encouraged an earlier generation of historians to emphasize religious over economic factors in influencing Dutch migration. Yet recent scholarship has established the centrality of structural causes.16 Certainly economic considerations influenced the Muste family’s decision to move to the United States. In the 1880s, Holland experienced an agricultural crisis that accelerated the mechanization and consolidation of commercial agriculture in the sea-clay-soil regions. Zeeland was hit especially hard, and during the years 1880 through 1893, it contributed a larger proportion of emigrants than any other province.17
Included among the second wave of Dutch immigration in the 1880s were four of Muste’s maternal uncles, poorly paid agricultural laborers eager to improve their livelihood. The Jonker brothers settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan, home to a substantial Dutch community, where they managed to establish small businesses in groceries, drugs, and scrap metal. ‘‘Having achieved a measure of security for themselves,’’ Muste recalled, ‘‘they considered the plight of their youngest and favorite sister, my mother, and one of them paid us a visit and proposed that our family emigrate.’’18
The journey, which occurred in late January and early February 1891, was long and arduous. Like most immigrants, the family, which included six-year-old Muste and three younger siblings, traveled in steerage, where conditions were cramped and food was scarce. Part of the voyage was stormy; Adriana became sick and had to be taken out of steerage into the ship’s hospital. Still, the experience was a thrilling one; Muste recalled the ‘‘awe’’ of viewing the ‘‘tremendous expanse’’ of the ocean and the excitement of disembarking at New York City’s Castle Garden (the immigration depot that preceded Ellis Island), bustling with people and boats. The family remained at Castle Garden for a month while Adriana recovered in the hospital. Although concerned about his mother’s health, Muste had ‘‘only the happiest of recollections’’ of Castle Garden; the children had the run of the hospital’s corridors, the food was better than they were accustomed to, and, most crucially, the ‘‘atmosphere was a friendly one.’’19
The Muste family’s positive experience at Castle Garden was not unusual. The port was ‘‘so commodious, well-run, and protective of the new arrivals that its fame spread throughout Europe.’’20 But their warm welcome also reflected the fact that the Dutch were considered especially desirable immigrants, in contrast to southern and eastern European immigrants who would succeed them. As Muste drolly recalled, ‘‘there was no barrier of culture as there was to be later with immigrants from Eastern Europe, and no barrier of color as with Negroes or Asians. . . . Almost without exception [the Dutch] were sober and industrious. . . . They were allergic to unions or ‘agitators’ of any kind.’’21
It was at Castle Garden that Muste had his first initiation into late nineteenth-century American nationalism. When one of the attendants learned that Muste’s name was Abraham, he began calling the Dutch boy ‘‘Abraham Lincoln,’’ naming him, as it were, as an American. Even though Muste had no idea who Abraham Lincoln was, when he finally arrived in Grand Rapids, one of his first projects ‘‘was to find out what this Abraham Lincoln meant.’’ The result was a strong identification with the Great Emancipator, an identification no doubt encouraged by the fact that the midwestern city, so close to Illinois, was Lincoln country. ‘‘My education . . . of this country,’’ Muste mused, ‘‘was the picture of the trip down the Mississippi and seeing the slave sold on the block in New Orleans and saying, ‘If I ever have a chance to hit that thing, I’ll hit it hard!’ ’’ By the time he was nine years old, he had memorized the entire Gettysburg Address.22
In later years, Muste would reflect that his largely positive experience of emigration and immigration