Dutch-Americans a coherent demographic

Thande

Donor
Just a random musing. We all know about the Irish-Americans (and "Irish"-Americans, if you catch my drift) and their effect on American foreign policy in the 19th and 20th centuries. Less prominent but important in the World Wars were German-Americans, though events have obviously led to that being squashed.

I got thinking about Dutch-Americans. They've been around since New Amsterdam became New York, and they have their own early President - Martin Van Buren, whose first language was Dutch. While I realise that Irish and to a lesser extent German immigrants to the USA had more of a reason to preserve and cling to their culture (or a half-remembered version of it) thanks to the idea of fleeing starvation or oppression, I wonder if the Dutch-Americans could have become a similarly coherent group.

Basically to summarise what I mean, imagine a world where the Roosevelt dynasty acts towards the Netherlands the way the Kennedies acted towards Ireland in OTL, a world where the Nazis hesitate about invading the Netherlands because they know several US Congressmen will start urging the State Department to condemn it lest they lose their seats.
 
I think you'd have to do something about their numbers and their social status.

IIRC weren't Dutch Americans a pretty small group overall- the Dutch were pretty laissez faire about religion so there wasn't a real impetus for emigration and in any case the Dutch colonial companies didn't tend to encourage settlers since they weren't particularly useful for profits. AFAIK they tended to be the burghers of Nieuw Amsterdam and a scattering of rural communities. This doesn't really bode well for community identity since there's little incentive for the burghers to view the farmers with much fellow feeling. Also, the burghers being a generally wealthy mercantile community would have a lot of incentive to assimilate and adapt to the new ruling power (as they did IOTL) while the farmers would be swamped by other groups of immigrants. You need a larger Dutch population in Dutch America from the outset, I think.

Perhaps one idea would be to directly encourage the emigration of Huguenot refugees as was done with South Africa- IOTL a decent number of Huguenots did emigrate to North America but a lot of them tended to sail from England to the more settler-friendly British colonies.
 
Yeah the problem with Dutch emmigration is that they have both highly productive farmland (that they can make more of!) and well developed Urban centres really close - unlike the Irish and the Germans (and the English earlier on) there isn't huge pressure for the rural peasents to leave, and the Rich Dutch traders always came back to Amsterdam to spend their wealth.

Its also a pretty small country back in the day (due to its wealth and urbanisation), it had less people than Ireland all throughout the 19th century up to 1890 - its current 15 million is more the result of 20th century policy. Less than 0.75 million Dutch went to America in total went to America pre-1900, their influence is due to being there at the start.

One way to do it would be a Napoleonic Empire that is rather less pleasent to the Dutch and/or demolishes their Urban centres (or have a counter from reactionary Europe do the same), then you might have the numbers kicked up a bunch and a much stronger and coherent community, but even if the entire population moved it'd less than the Irish immigrants (if you include the Flemish it'd be more).

If they do move I can see them heading to upstate New York and Michigan being their main centres, like Boston for the Irish.
 

Thande

Donor
I don't think they necessarily need to be a LARGE demographic, just a coherent one and in the right place at the right time. To use an example that will doubtless backfire and make me sound like David Irving, look at the formerly Eastern European Jews - there were never THAT many of them in the USA, but that hasn't stopped them exerting a disproportionate cultural and political influence.
 
I don't think they necessarily need to be a LARGE demographic, just a coherent one and in the right place at the right time. To use an example that will doubtless backfire and make me sound like David Irving, look at the formerly Eastern European Jews - there were never THAT many of them in the USA, but that hasn't stopped them exerting a disproportionate cultural and political influence.

Ah, but that's a totally different situation. There are two differences. Firstly, for most of their time in the US they weren't really able to assimilate to the extent that Western European Protestant populations were. Certainly there was little to no active persecution beyond the "No Jews" rules at private clubs and such but they were still a somewhat visible minority. It was only after sufficient numbers of Jews made it to a middle or upper middle class level of prosperity that they started moving more into the mainstream and even then latent prejudice and community identity tended to mean that they often maintained parallel social institutions (like the Borsch Belt resorts catering to Jews who weren't welcome at White resorts up to the late 50s).

Secondly, most of them started out as a poor immigrant underclass, which meant that WASP society was automatically the Other. They had an incentive to hang together (hence the formation of Jewish gangs and so forth) and this only changed once they started becoming upwardly mobile. Just as with the Italian Americans I think you could confidently state that it's only after WW2 that they really became assimilated as part of mainstream American society.

None of this is true for the Dutch- if you're a small urban mercantile group with a vaguely similar religious and ethnic background to the new rulers then you don't have an incentive to set yourself apart from them, especially since they're not hostile to you. Meneer van der Poort buys a copy of "Speaking English for Dummies", introduces himself to the new administrators as "Mr Vanderport" and has them over for a drink. As for the farmers they're in relative isolation and will soon be outnumbered, as said earlier.
 
Its also a pretty small country back in the day (due to its wealth and urbanisation), it had less people than Ireland all throughout the 19th century up to 1890 - its current 15 million is more the result of 20th century policy. Less than 0.75 million Dutch went to America in total went to America pre-1900, their influence is due to being there at the start.

One way to do it would be a Napoleonic Empire that is rather less pleasent to the Dutch and/or demolishes their Urban centres (or have a counter from reactionary Europe do the same), then you might have the numbers kicked up a bunch and a much stronger and coherent community, but even if the entire population moved it'd less than the Irish immigrants (if you include the Flemish it'd be more)..

Perhaps the French would oppress and encourage them to leave, becease they weren't in any way French and more likely to rise up then other annexed peoples. This would boost emmigration.
By the way the current population of the Netherlands is 16.5 million (15 years ago it was 15 million:p)
 
Perhaps the French would oppress and encourage them to leave, becease they weren't in any way French and more likely to rise up then other annexed peoples. This would boost emmigration.
By the way the current population of the Netherlands is 16.5 million (15 years ago it was 15 million:p)

Yes but the 1800 population was ~2 million, and the 1900 one was on ~5 million, and thats what's important here.
 
As a Dutch Canadian, I might point out a few things about how the Dutch behave when they imigrate. First off, more imigrate then you might release, but the reason you don't realize it, is because B. Dutch people assimilate very fast and become culturally indistinguishable from their neighbours. Its very rare for Diasporan Dutch to form small or large ethnic communities where they stick out from the rest of the population, especially when you're dealing with an English speaking background culture. And, to paraphrase wikipedia (which mirrors my own experiences with family newly arrived from the Netherlands), its very easy to switch between the Dutch and English because they are very similar (Old English and Modern Frisian are similar enough that if you speak one, you can basically figure out the other without any formal language lessons). And thirdly the Netherlands is a fairly small country, which doesn't have a colonizing tradition or a lot of tyrants driving us overseas. The only thing that drives the emigration is economic pressure (or war, a lot of Dutch people emigrated to North America in the wake of WW2, which is how my family and relatives came to North America.)

So in light of those facts, if you want to make the Dutch lobby have a bigger effect on American foreign policy, give Dutch people more reason to stick out more and stick together more in a way that would drive their mutual interests more. There are more then enough prominent Americans of Dutch descent (David Petraeus, The Bushes are of Dutch Descent, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Thomas Edison, the Roosevelt clan, Walter Cronkite) that influence will flow naturally if you give them a reason to get together to use it. But in order for that to happen you're going to have to put some major butterflies in American culture, for example restricting immigration to only people of British descent, having a massive streak of isolation and xenophobia settle in reaaaalllly early in American culture (make the English/Dutch trade wars waaaaaay more vicious).
 
As a Dutch Canadian, I might point out a few things about how the Dutch behave when they imigrate. First off, more imigrate then you might release, but the reason you don't realize it, is because B. Dutch people assimilate very fast and become culturally indistinguishable from their neighbours. Its very rare for Diasporan Dutch to form small or large ethnic communities where they stick out from the rest of the population, especially when you're dealing with an English speaking background culture.
You're probably right, but there is at least one exception - Afrikaners. They didn't assimilate, even despite being swamped with the British for last 190 years (and encouraged to assimilate for hundred years, before 1920-ies). They stuck out throughout their history and continue to do so nowadays. Is there a way to get 'Amerikaners' to be as stubborn and rebellion-prone as Afrikaners were?
 
Afrikaners are considered to be cousins to Dutch people, but its more of a separate culture derived from the Dutch. To explain the distinction, I have second cousins in South Africa that are dutch and speak dutch (I don't for the record. I'm waaay to assimilated, despite growing up in a recognizably Dutch Canadian culture community) but they aren't considered to be Afrikaans. It's sort of like the difference between American and British culture, same base culture, with a lot of similar traditions but both cultures accept the differences. They grew a part reaaaally fast, partially due to the fact that the Dutch element in the original culture is actually pretty small. Afrikaaners are maybe a third Dutch, with a lot of Hugenout and Calvinist German mixing.

But using that as a model, maybe there could be more Dutch settlement in the New Netherlands before the British take over (maybe more of the hard liner calvinists, so many so that religously New England and New Netherlands are indistinguishable) and make the English religious establishment more intolerant forcing an Afrikaaner style migration over the Appalachians?
 
a number of Families kept a dutch Identity in some ways, one such family was the Roosevelts, the family in America dates to 1649.
 
You're probably right, but there is at least one exception - Afrikaners. They didn't assimilate, even despite being swamped with the British for last 190 years (and encouraged to assimilate for hundred years, before 1920-ies). They stuck out throughout their history and continue to do so nowadays. Is there a way to get 'Amerikaners' to be as stubborn and rebellion-prone as Afrikaners were?

The Afrikaners had a general tradition of going against established authority right from the start. Remember, they got their start as farmers who were trying to push out beyond Cape Town to get away from the restrictions of the VOC's rule. Later on when the British took over this pretty much just meant swapping one ruling class for another. Also for much of their history they did consider themselves Dutch- the real split came when the Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands began to liberalise in the early 20th C while the sister denominations in S. Africa remained much more hardline Calvinist.

The baseline is that the Dutch population in New Amsterdam and it's environs simply wasn't from the same class as the Afrikaners were- settled villagers and urban merchants have a very different outlook on the world than the Afrikaners who were for the most part illiterate frontiersmen. That was the source of the very distinctive Afrikaner separatism- they were a tight-knit group suspicious of all external authority. I agree with your conclusion that what's needed is for there to be more emigration to the New Netherlands. Perhaps we could butterfly away Dutch settlement at the Cape so that New Amsterdam becomes the primary Dutch/Huguenot settler colony?
 
a number of Families kept a dutch Identity in some ways, one such family was the Roosevelts, the family in America dates to 1649.

Umm...in what way did they keep a Dutch identity? By the 19th C the Roosevelts were pretty much indistinguishable from any rich WASP dynasty. The name was Dutch and that was about all. Same goes for the Vanderbilts and so forth. They all spoke English and went to Harvard or Yale and married their daughters off to Yankee millionaires or English noblemen just like any Gilded Age Boston Brahmin families.
 
Umm...in what way did they keep a Dutch identity? By the 19th C the Roosevelts were pretty much indistinguishable from any rich WASP dynasty. The name was Dutch and that was about all. Same goes for the Vanderbilts and so forth. They all spoke English and went to Harvard or Yale and married their daughters off to Yankee millionaires or English noblemen just like any Gilded Age Boston Brahmin families.

they all stayed Dutch Reformed, still lived in New York, sounds about as Dutch as the Kennedys were Irish. I mean if the goal is to have Dutch (or something like Dutch) speaking group in the USA well thats not going to happen, if the goal is an ethnic group bunched together in one area that has a group pride in its heritage and tends to vote as a block, that you can do.

also I'm some what wrong, there are Dutch speakers in the US, they're called the Amish.
 
they all stayed Dutch Reformed, still lived in New York, sounds about as Dutch as the Kennedys were Irish. I mean if the goal is to have Dutch (or something like Dutch) speaking group in the USA well thats not going to happen, if the goal is an ethnic group bunched together in one area that has a group pride in its heritage and tends to vote as a block, that you can do.

also I'm some what wrong, there are Dutch speakers in the US, they're called the Amish.

Uhh for the record Dutch and Deutsch (which is what the Amish and Mennonites in Pennsylvania speak) are different languages, part of the same family, but different speakers. The Amish and Mennonites in Pennsylvania are from Germany (Deutschland).
 
they all stayed Dutch Reformed, still lived in New York, sounds about as Dutch as the Kennedys were Irish. I mean if the goal is to have Dutch (or something like Dutch) speaking group in the USA well thats not going to happen, if the goal is an ethnic group bunched together in one area that has a group pride in its heritage and tends to vote as a block, that you can do.

also I'm some what wrong, there are Dutch speakers in the US, they're called the Amish.

I thought that the Amish spoke a German dialect.

A lot of the New York Dutch spoke Dutch as a second language well into the 19th century. They retained a separate cultural identity for almost 200 years after New York became an English colony.
 
I thought that the Amish spoke a German dialect.

A lot of the New York Dutch spoke Dutch as a second language well into the 19th century. They retained a separate cultural identity for almost 200 years after New York became an English colony.

Pennsylvania Dutch is more properly a Low German variety, but of course so is actual Dutch, if you go far back enough. Dutch applied to all Germans in the US at some point, IIRC (from Deutsch)
 
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Here in West Michigan we don't have anything like the political theater of St Patrick's Day parades but when congressman Pete Hoekstra left to run for governor, the three main candidates to replace him bore the last names of Huizenga, Kuipers and Riemersma. While not overt, ethnicity clearly plays a role.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
Here in West Michigan we don't have anything like the political theater of St Patrick's Day parades but when congressman Pete Hoekstra left to run for governor, the three main candidates to replace him bore the last names of Huizenga, Kuipers and Riemersma. While not overt, ethnicity clearly plays a role.
Doesn't Holland, Michigan have a "Tulip Time" festival replete with klompen dancing? That strikes me as a bit like St. Patrick's Day. Plus, that region is the heartland of both the Reform Church in America and the Christian Reformed Church.
 
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