America: A Dutch Historian's Vision, From Afar And Near

351 Pages·1972·5.815 MB·English

by  Johan H. Huizinga

AMERICA
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Johan Huizinga
AMERICA
A DUTCH HISTORIAN’S VISION,
FROM AFAR AND NEAR
Translated, with an Introduction and Notes,
by Herbert H. Rowen
HARPER ▼ TORCHBOOKS
Harper & Row, Publishers
New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London
AMERICA.
Copyright © by Johan Huizinga.
Translation copyright © 1972 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of
this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written
permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
articles and reviews. For informaton address Harper & Row, Publishers,
Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously
in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto.
First harper torchbook editon published 1972.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 72-77539
STANDARD BOOK NUMBER: 06-1316806
Designed by Yvette A. Vogel
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction by Herbert H. Rönnen vii
PART I.
MAN AND THE MASSES IN AMERICA 1
I: Individualism and Association 6
II: The Mechanization of Community Life 61
III: The Sense of the State and the Business Spirit 119
IV: Tame and Wild America 172
.PART II.
LIFE AND THOUGHT IN AMERICA 227
I: Society 231
II: Thought 266
Index 327

INTRODUCTION
By Herbert H. Rowen
In these two books on America in the past and America in his
own times, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga has an unusual
angle of vision. He is an outside observer with a difference.
When a foreign historian undertakes the study of the history
of another country, he characteristically seeks to combine the
native’s familiarity with the outsider’s freshness of approach. It
is seldom that he can achieve the insider’s full sureness of
touch, but he can come close to it by dint of sustained study.
His new thoughts may on occasion betray not novelty but
naïveté, yet at his best he sees clearly and sharply things that
the native in his very familiarity with the material takes for
granted. His special advantage lies in writing for an outside
audience, for he is less likely to attribute to it a knowledge of
fact or interpretation that it does not possess. But these are
precisely the qualities that Huizinga does not and cannot dis­
play in these essays, especially when, as in this translation, they
will be read chiefly not by Dutchmen but by Americans.
Huizinga was not a specialist in American history, and his
viii INTRODUCTION
essays, written for Dutch readers, will on occasion strike an
American as stating the elementary and the obvious. Yet the
value of these essays lies in Huizinga’s unusual questions and the
often unexpected answers they give rise to. These are to only
a limited extent what one would expect of almost any European
historian looking at America with his own national and con­
tinental assumptions and predilections. Much more are they
the product of a highly individual historical mind.
Although with his younger contemporary Pieter Geyl
he was undoubtedly the outstanding Dutch historian of the
twentieth century, Huizinga was not a historian by training.
Born on December 7, 1872, in the northern Dutch city of
Groningen, he was the son of a professor of physiology at the
university there; but his father had turned to a scientific career
only after completing training in theology, ending the line of
Mennonite preachers in the Huizinga family which was almost
unbroken since the sixteenth century. Johan followed neither
his father nor his earlier forebears in his educational pattern.
His university training at Groningen was in literature, and his
special subject was old Hindu literature. However, after receiv­
ing his doctorate in 1897, his first teaching appointment was in
history at the secondary school in Haarlem, where he remained
until 1905. Although he became an instructor in Hindu studies
at Amsterdam university in 1903, he was called to the chair of
Dutch history at Groningen two years later, thanks to the
powerful support of his former teacher, P. J. Blok, who had
already persuaded him to undertake studies in the medieval
origins of Haarlem. In 1915, Huizinga was called to Leiden to
take over Blok’s own chair, and there he remained until Leiden
university was closed by the German occupation authorities
in 1940. During these years he rose to a position of eminence
among historians not only of his own country but of the whole
world. His most famous book was The Waning of the Middle
Introduction ix
Ages (1919), a study of the cultural life of the Low Countries
and northern France in the Burgundian period. His biography
of Erasmus (1924) was also widely read. Huizinga’s other
writings were mainly in the field of Low Countries history,
including the recently translated Dutch Civilization in the
Seventeenth Century (original edition in German, 1933; ex­
panded Dutch version, 1941). He also wrote several books on
contemporary civilization, in which he was, as Geyl put it in a
commemorative address, “the accuser of his own times.” The
two works translated in this volume are anticipations of the
mood and thought of these later, larger.works. Arrested by the
Germans and sent to a concentration camp in 1941, Huizinga
was released for reasons of ill health but sent into quasi-exile
in De Steeg, a little town near Arnhem, where he died on
February 1, 1945.
The first of these books on American history resulted
from the task accepted by Huizinga during World War I of
presenting a coursé in American history at Leiden university.
It was based on printed materials only, for he had not yet
visited the United States. The second book is fundamentally
his travel notes from a trip to America in 1926, during which
he journeyed in the Northeast, the Midwest and Far West, and
the South. The specialist in American history will be able to
judge for himself how far these two works illuminate the past
and present of American civilization; but it would be well for
him to do so with understanding of the shape of Huizinga’s
mind, which was European in its general cast and “cultural” in
the broadest possible sense in its individual characteristics. It is
difficult to imagine any fuller revelation of the individual spirit
of a historian than is given in these pages.
Although influenced by the school of German historians
and historical thinkers around Wilhelm Dilthey, Huizinga
developed a quite individual approach to the content and
X INTRODUCTION
form of history. From the very beginning of his career as a
professor, he put stress upon the esthetic component of his­
tory. By this he meant not the literary qualities of historical
writing (although he gave much attention to them, as we shall
see), but the grasping of the past as “form,” in a pictorial or
even musical sense. When he spoke of the creation and con­
templation of a “historical picture,” he was not using the
phrase in a more or less metaphorical way for an essentially
philosophical idea, like the Diltheyans; rather he intended it
quite literally, as the past seen and felt. He rejected the model
of the physical sciences for history because he did not think
in terms of theories, hypotheses, and proofs. For him, historical
scholarship was the careful discovery of the past from the
sources, illuminated by the historian’s vision and sensibility, a
truth of fact and a truth of feeling. For he also rejected the
fanciful and irresponsible treatment of the past in the writings
of the popular biographers of the twenties and thirties. He saw
anachronism as the historian’s cardinal sin, which violated not
only the rule of literal accuracy but also that of rightness of
mood.
Huizinga’s subject, after his first (and only archivally
based) work on Haarlem, was the history of culture, the forms
in which society gives expression to its spiritual life and in
which it takes account of itself. He was therefore deeply con­
cerned with the moral and esthetic dimensions of the past, both
for themselves and as essential aspects of the totality of human
life. He looked at politics as a kind of applied morality and
even, as in the studies of America, a kind of applied esthetics
of the masses, much more than as the working out of social
forces’ and purposes through the instrumentality of power. His
ethical standards were complex. From his Mennonite back­
ground he inherited and preserved the principle of a forthright
yet modest morality, which the individual sets for himself more