From the very start, Dutch colonial culture and social habits were important ingredients in the cultural potpourri of the "American melting pot".
"When shortly before the Revolution, St. Jan de
Cevecoeur, a Frenchman, asked his then startling
and now famous question, 'What is an American?',
he recognized honestly with Gallic respect for
things as they are, that Dutch culture formed an
important element in the makeup of the American
character of the Race that had developed this con-
tinent."
De Cevecoer was of the opinion that Ductch
settlers of New Amsterdam did not possess the
"excessive piety" evident among the English in
New England but were "wholesomely secular".
Calvinism was clearly not an enemy of innocent
amusement as was often the attitude held by
English puritans. Among the New Netherlanders,
for example, "pagan" maypole activities didn't
encounter the suspicions and occasional sup-
pression as seen at Merrymount in the Massachu-
setts Bay colony.In many ways, it is unfortunate that the United States obsorbed
its major social elements from English, French and German colo-
nial societies rather than the Dutch. A little less extremist "pur-
itanism" and a little more Dutch practical morality might have led
America on another path, away from the atmosphere of moral in-
tolerance and hyperbole that has long dominated American society.
Three hundred and fifty years ago, one could see different social
characters underlying the various European settlements in America
and reasonably anticipate the future problems of each. To German,
French, English and Spanish societies, the primary goal in the family
structure was to ensure the continuation of the family name and prop-
erty. To the Dutch, however, the health of the family rested not so much
on the preservation of property and appearances as on the strengthening
of each of its members.
To a degree greater than any other European national group in
the New World, Dutch community lawand courts saw women as individuals with rights, not as the chattel of their husbands. Despite their strong support of what we today call the"nuclear family", the colonial Dutch also recognized that that ideal is sometimes shattered. They knew that it is not always correct to blindly allow "relatives" to have permanent and complete custody of orphaned children. Consequently, the colonial Dutch created the municipal position of "orphanmaster" to provide those children with much needed legal protections and official support. To the system of primogeniture (primary inheritance by the eldest son) favored by the English, Germans, French and Spanish, the colonial Dutch applied one of their most stringent terms of denunciation, "frivolous". Dutch culture favored the division of property more or less equally among all children.
New York City probably owes its later position as America's gateway to new immigrants to the fact that it grew up in the atmosphere of Dutch social tolerance. While the dominant cultural force in New Amsterdam (especially just prior to it being renamed in honor of its "conqueror") was of course Dutch, the city's cultural activity revolved around as many as 18 languages and nearly as many cultural traditions. In 1759, an English observer remarked that in New York, where about about "half the inhabitants seemed Dutch", the population as a whole was "of different nations, different languages and different religions, it is impossible to give them any precise and definite character."
