Van Loon: Popular Historian, Journalist, and FDR Confidant

357 Pages·2005·1.93 MB·English

by  Cornelis A. van Minnen (auth.)

Van Loon
The World of the Roosevelts
Published in Cooperation with the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute
Hyde Park, New York
General Editors: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., William vanden Heuvel, and Douglas Brinkley
FDR AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES ADENAUER AND KENNEDY
Foreign Perceptions of A Study in German-American Relations
an American President Frank A. Mayer
Edited by Cornelis A. van Minnen and
John F. Sears THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND
THE BRITISH EMPIRE
NATO: THE FOUNDING OF THE ATLANTIC A Study in Presidential Statecraft
ALLIANCE AND THE INTEGRATION William N. Tilchin
OF EUROPE
Edited by Francis H. Heller and TARIFFS, TRADE AND EUROPEAN
John R. Gillingham INTEGRATION, 1947–1957
From Study Group to Common Market
AMERICA UNBOUND Wendy Asbeek Brusse
World War II and the Making
of a Superpower SUMNER WELLES
Edited by Warren F. Kimball FDR’s Global Strategist
A Biography by Benjamin Welles
THE ORIGINS OF U.S. NUCLEAR
STRATEGY, 1945–1953 THE NEW DEAL AND PUBLIC POLICY
Samuel R. Williamson, Jr. and Steven L. Rearden Edited by Byron W. Daynes, William D. Pederson,
and Michael P. Riccards
AMERICAN DIPLOMATS IN
THE NETHERLANDS, 1815–50 WORLD WAR II IN EUROPE
Cornelis A. van Minnen Edited by Charles F. Brower
EISENHOWER, KENNEDY,
FDR AND THE U.S. NAVY
AND THE UNITED STATES
Edward J. Marolda
OF EUROPE
Pascaline Winand
THE SECOND QUEBEC
CONFERENCE REVISITED
ALLIES AT WAR
Edited by David B. Woolner
The Soviet, American,
and British Experience, 1939–1945
THEODORE ROOSEVELT, THE U.S. NAVY,
Edited by David Reynolds,
AND THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR
Warren F. Kimball, and A. O. Chubarian
Edited by Edward J. Marolda
THE ATLANTIC CHARTER
FDR, THE VATICAN, AND THE ROMAN
Edited by Douglas Brinkley and
CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA,
David R. Facey-Crowther
1933–1945
PEARL HARBOR REVISITED Edited by David B. Woolner and
Edited by Robert W. Love, Jr. Richard G. Kurial
FDR AND THE HOLOCAUST FDR AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Edited by Verne W. Newton Edited by Henry L. Henderson and
David B. Woolner
THE UNITED STATES AND
THE INTEGRATION OF EUROPE VAN LOON
Legacies of the Postwar Era Popular Historian, Journalist, and
Edited by Francis H. Heller and FDR Confidant
John R. Gillingham Cornelis A. van Minnen
V L
AN OON
P H , J ,
OPULAR ISTORIAN OURNALIST AND
FDR C
ONFIDANT
C A. M
ORNELIS VAN INNEN
VANLOON
©Cornelis A. van Minnen, 2005.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2005 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-53213-1 ISBN 978-1-4039-7714-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781403977144
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the
Library of Congress.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: October 2005
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To William J. vanden Heuvel,
Founding Father of
the Roosevelt Study Center
and Generous Friend
All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history,
only biography.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “History,” in Essays: First Series(1841), reprinted in
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of
America, 1983), 240.
The biographer is sentenced to labor under the brutal certainty that he can at
best construct only a rough approximation of the life that was actually lived,
of the personality that actually existed, and changed, from this year to that;
and that most of the important knowledge he needs is never to be had....By
shrewd inferences from the extant data, and by an equally careful process of
selection and arrangement, it may be possible to recreate a man and his life,
if not in their full literal truth, then in their essence. Such is the hope that has
always sustained biographers as they have gone about their impossible task.
Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in
England and America(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 303.
Contents
Illustrations ix
Foreword by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Prologue 1
Part I The Formative Years 5
1. A Troubled Youth in Holland (1882–1902) 7
2. Cornell–Harvard–Cornell (1902–1905) 17
3. Associated Press Journalist in Russia and
Poland (1905–1907) 25
4. Historical Training in Munich (1907–1911) 33
Part II In Search of a Place 39
5. Washington Years of Trial and Error (1912–1914) 41
6. The Great War (1914–1918) 47
7. Life in the Village (1918–1920) 59
Part III The Jazz Age 71
8. The Breakthrough (1921–1922) 73
9. The Prince of Popularizers (1922–1928) 83
10. The Veere Paradise (1928–1931) 109
Part IV The 1930s 137
11. The Educator (1931–1935) 139
viii Contents
12. For Roosevelt and the Arts (1936–1937) 161
13. The Prophet of the Coming Wrath (1938–1940) 175
Part V The Great Fight For Freedom 197
14. The One-Man Army Division (1940–1941) 199
15. The Reincarnation of Erasmus (1942) 219
16. Living on Borrowed Time (1943–1944) 243
Epilogue 261
Notes 269
Bibliography 331
Index 344
Illustrations
1.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon, aged 6, 1888 9
1.2 Hendrik Willem van Loon aboard the Holland–America
Liner S.S. Potsdamen route to New York, July 1902 15
2.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon in his study at Cornell University,
September 1902 19
10.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon with “Miss America” in Zeeland
costume and the mayor of Veere, August 1929 119
10.2 Hendrik Willem and Jimmie van Loon photographed by
Ilse Bing in Veere, 1931 133
11.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon with Noodle at his New York
Washington Square apartment with a copy of Van Loon’s
Geographyon the table, 1932 144
12.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon with Eleanor Roosevelt, probably
at Hyde Park, 1936 162
12.2 Hendrik Willem van Loon photographed by Ilse Bing, 1936 165
12.3 Cover image of The Arts, 1937 171
13.1 Professor Albert Einstein, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and noted author
Thomas Mann (left to right) are pictured as they attended the
preview of Hendrik Willem van Loon’s first motion picture,
The Fight for Peace, May 1938 178
13.2 Hendrik Willem van Loon at the Greenwich Timeeditorial
offices typing his column “Deliberate Reflections,”
November 1938 183
14.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon in front of WRUL microphone
broadcasting as “Uncle Hank” to the Netherlands during
the war years 207
15.1 Hands of Hendrik Willem van Loon which were similar,
van Loon thought, to the hands of his alter ego, Erasmus of
Rotterdam 222
15.2 Hendrik Willem van Loon’s drawing of Erasmus in Veere, in
Van Loon’s Lives, 1942 223