American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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a ‘‘happy ending.’’ This taught him that ‘‘the peril is not to move when the new situation develops, the new insight dawns, the new experiment becomes possible.’’ Just as the biblical Abraham went out to find ‘‘a city which existed—and yet had to be brought into existence,’’ divinity was to be found in the history of human work and creation. History was, moreover, a ‘‘movement toward a goal.’’23 As Muste’s references to Abraham suggest, this philosophy of history as a joint project of human beings and God toward the city-which-is-to-be is deeply rooted in both Judaism and Christianity and helped to shape the progressive view of history that has characterized Western political thought since the Enlightenment. Certainly it encouraged Muste, along with others of his generation, to view political activism as a religious imperative.
As Muste’s rapid assimilation into the drama of the Lincoln republic reveals, many Hollanders quickly identified with the new nation. For them, Muste recalled, the United States was ‘‘a land of opportunity and freedom, the land to which God had led the Pilgrim fathers, a land where youth was not conscripted, and a Christian land, though unfortunately not entirely peopled by orthodox Calvinists.’’24 Yet Muste’s caveat is an important one, and it helps to explain why the Dutch retained a distinct ethnic identity even as they outwardly blended with other northern and western European immigrants. As the rich historiography of religion in nineteenth-century America has shown, the Second Great Awakening in the 1830s spread the idea that individuals had the right of private judgment in spiritual matters and the possibility of salvation through faith and good works. The culture of American Protestantism was, in other words, an evangelical one, imbued with an antinomianism that was anathema to pietistic Dutch Calvinists.25
The Dutch Americans’ relationship to the new country, and their politics, reflected their differences with mainline Protestantism. On the one hand, they praised the United States, became staunch allies of the conservative wing of the Republican Party and the business community, and, with the exception of temperance, did not participate in the reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the other hand, they often expressed deep ambivalence about American culture; it seemed too individualistic, superficial, materialistic, and Methodist, and appeared to threaten ‘‘the very core of the community’s existence.’’ The problem, they concluded, was theological: ‘‘the substitution of individualistic for covenantal (i.e. corporate) theology.’’ This corporatism encouraged them to sympathize with labor and support pro-labor legislation, even as they opposed unions as anti-Christian institutions.26
As the Dutch struggled to define themselves in a new land, their ethnicity and Calvinist heritage became deeply intertwined, giving them a cultural persistence that defies the paradigm of western and northern European assimilation.27 They did not rapidly assimilate and intermarry with the broader society. Although they integrated into American economic and political life, their cultural life remained largely separate. In church, school, marriage, and recreation, ‘‘the Calvinists built an institutional fortress and demonstrated their religious solidarity.’’28
Grand Rapids offers a case study in Dutch cultural persistence. In the 1890s, when the Mustes immigrated to the United States, Grand Rapids was a classic midsized, nineteenth-century midwestern city, with a rapidly growing population of just over sixty thousand residents. A frontier outpost for much of the antebellum period, it had been transformed by the transportation and communications revolution that integrated the nation over the course of the nineteenth century. By the time of the American Civil War, railroad and telegraph lines linked the city with distant urban markets. Soon, Grand Rapids became a manufacturing center, its famous river lined with furniture factories and working-class neighborhoods, peopled by immigrants from the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Canada.29
The Dutch composed the largest of Grand Rapids’ immigrant groups; in 1900, 40 percent of the city’s population was of Dutch birth or ancestry.30 Dutch immigrants first began streaming into Michigan in the late 1840s, when the Reverend Albertus C. Van Raalte led a group of Dutch Seceders to western Michigan, where they established Holland, the first of several Dutch kolonies. Gradually, many of these rural pioneers trickled into the village of Grand Rapids, where they were joined by succeeding waves of their compatriots.31 As the Dutch presence in the city grew, the number of Reformed churches multiplied, along with Christian schools, which maintained instruction in the Dutch language and educated immigrant children in Reformed doctrine.32
Within the Reformed Church, doctrinal and cultural questions became inseparable, as quarrels over theology intersected with the thorny issue of Americanization. Despite Van Raalte’s reputation as a zealous reformer, he had affiliated and built close ties with the Reformed Church in America (RCA), which had deep roots in North America. Strict on doctrine and religious piety, Van Raalte also stressed the importance of learning the English language and encouraged rapid naturalization. Opposition to Van Raalte’s concept of Americanization soon emerged, as dissenters questioned affiliation with the American church, which they charged with insufficient orthodoxy. In 1857, the separatists founded the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), which had ‘‘a more gloomy view of the new country,’’ represented by its decision to hold services in the Dutch language into the twentieth century.33 Nevertheless, whether CRC or RCA, wherever orthodox Reformed pietism was preached, its themes were ‘‘human sin and the need for salvation, human dependence and God’s mercy, the inevitability of suffering and tribulation and the need for penitence.’’34
The proliferation of Reformed churches and doctrinal disputes between them speak to the vibrancy of the Dutch community that greeted the Muste family when they finally arrived in Grand Rapids.35 The Mustes settled into a house a block away from the Quimby furniture factory, where the Jonker brothers had obtained a job for Muste’s father. Six out of ten families who lived on Quimby Street were Dutch, and approximately 60 percent of the Dutch who lived in the neighborhood were unskilled laborers who hailed from Zeeland. There were also Dutch grocers and butchers and shoe stores and clothing stores. The church the Mustes attended held services in Dutch, and Muste attended a Dutch parochial school.36
It would be a mistake, however, to characterize the Dutch American community and particularly the Mustes as thoroughly isolated and remote from the dominant culture. Soon after they arrived, Adriana and Martin decided to join the RCA and not the CRC, despite the fact that several of the Jonker brothers held prominent positions within the latter church. While it is difficult to know the precise reasons for the Mustes’ decision, the implications cannot be exaggerated; even though the RCA was theologically orthodox, it was more open to the dominant culture and affiliated with the established and substantial Reformed community on the East Coast, where Muste would later attend seminary and ultimately break with Calvinism. After Muste had attended two years of parochial school, Adriana and Martin also decided to send him and his siblings to public school. Moreover, the neighborhood in which the Mustes lived was more heterogeneous than other Dutch neighborhoods. ‘‘We had . . . the impression that these Americans were likely not as orthodox as [us] and that some of their behavior was questionable behavior,’’ Muste recalled, but ultimately the walls between them were ‘‘very thin.’’37
Martin Muste’s work also brought him in contact with Americans and other nationalities. The furniture industry dominated the city’s manufacturing sector and the working-class neighborhood in which the Mustes lived. Down the street and across the railroad tracks were a slew of furniture factories that provided work for an estimated one-third of the city’s laborers. Native-born workers provided the skilled labor, while Dutch immigrants, along with a growing number of Poles, provided the semiskilled and unskilled labor. Working conditions were dangerous, hours were long, and child labor was not uncommon.38 Still, ‘‘impersonality’’ had not yet appeared; Muste recalled of his summers working as a teenager that ‘‘the speed up . . . is much greater now than it was then. The factories I worked in were always comparatively small ones. Everybody knew everybody else. They were neighbors and it was pleasant to spend the time with them.’’39
The class culture of the furniture industry was a paternalistic one. Management was vociferously antiunion; it formed an employers’ association with