Van Loon: Popular Historian, Journalist, and FDR Confidant (The World of the Roosevelts)

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 Foreign Perceptions of an American President Edited by Cornelis A. van Minnen and John F. Sears NATO: THE FOUNDING OF THE ATLANTIC ALLIANCE AND THE INTEGRATION OF EUROPE Edited by Francis H. Heller and John R. Gillingham AMERICA UNBOUND World War II and the Making of a Superpower Edited by Warren F. Kimball THE ORIGINS OF U.S. NUCLEAR STRATEGY, 1945–1953 Samuel R. Williamson, Jr. and Steven L. Rearden AMERICAN DIPLOMATS IN THE NETHERLANDS, 1815–50 Cornelis A. van Minnen EISENHOWER, KENNEDY, AND THE UNITED STATES OF EUROPE Pascaline Winand ALLIES AT WAR The Soviet, American, and British Experience, 1939–1945 Edited by David Reynolds, Warren F. Kimball, and A. O. Chubarian THE ATLANTIC CHARTER Edited by Douglas Brinkley and David R. Facey-Crowther PEARL HARBOR REVISITED Edited by Robert W. Love, Jr.

ADENAUER AND KENNEDY A Study in German-American Relations Frank A. Mayer THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE A Study in Presidential Statecraft William N. Tilchin TARIFFS, TRADE AND EUROPEAN INTEGRATION, 1947–1957 From Study Group to Common Market Wendy Asbeek Brusse SUMNER WELLES FDR’s Global Strategist A Biography by Benjamin Welles THE NEW DEAL AND PUBLIC POLICY Edited by Byron W. Daynes, William D. Pederson, and Michael P. Riccards WORLD WAR II IN EUROPE Edited by Charles F. Brower FDR AND THE U.S. NAVY Edward J. Marolda THE SECOND QUEBEC CONFERENCE REVISITED Edited by David B. Woolner THEODORE ROOSEVELT, THE U.S. NAVY, AND THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR Edited by Edward J. Marolda FDR, THE VATICAN, AND THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA, 1933–1945 Edited by David B. Woolner and Richard G. Kurial

FDR AND THE HOLOCAUST Edited by Verne W. Newton

FDR AND THE ENVIRONMENT Edited by Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner

THE UNITED STATES AND THE INTEGRATION OF EUROPE Legacies of the Postwar Era Edited by Francis H. Heller and John R. Gillingham

VAN LOON Popular Historian, Journalist, and FDR Confidant Cornelis A. van Minnen

VAN LOON POPULAR HISTORIAN, JOURNALIST, FDR CONFIDANT

CORNELIS A.

VAN

MINNEN

AND

VAN LOON

© 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 PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–7049–1 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 Printed in the United States of America.

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)

2.

Cornell–Harvard–Cornell (1902–1905)

17

3.

Associated Press Journalist in Russia and Poland (1905–1907)

25

Historical Training in Munich (1907–1911)

33

4.

Part II

In Search of a Place

7

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)

Part IV 11.

The Educator (1931–1935)

The 1930s

109

137 139

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12.

Contents

For Roosevelt and the Arts (1936–1937)

13. The Prophet of the Coming Wrath (1938–1940)

Part V

The Great Fight For Freedom

161 175

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. Potsdam en 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 Geography on 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 Time editorial 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

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Foreword Over forty years ago, this author reflected that in an age when knowledge grows increasingly specialized, the capacity to write about serious subjects in a lucid and arresting way becomes a necessity of civilized society. This was a gift, which the Dutch-American author Hendrik Willem van Loon possessed to a high and abundant degree. In this arresting biography, Cornelis A. van Minnen reminds us of why van Loon was such a popular “popularizer.” He had a fair amount of academic training; he took his Ph.D. at the University of Munich and lectured European history at Cornell and Antioch. Yet, while he thus served his professional apprenticeship, he never let the inhibitions of the historian’s guild restrain his own exuberance. This exuberance had its origins in his own massive and extravagant personality. He seems to have done everything on a large scale. He was six feet three inches tall; he weighed nearly three hundred pounds; he wrote over forty books; he illustrated many of them himself; he had a vast appetite for freedom, courage, friendship, and debate. He was, above all, perhaps, a man of gusto. Nearly everything interested or excited or charmed or appalled him; and this overflowing vitality accounts for the gaiety and excitement he brought to his retelling of history. As van Minnen shows, van Loon sometimes got his facts wrong— an attribute that his critics were always quick to point out. But such reproaches never unduly shook van Loon. He would denounce “pedagogical persecution” and say with appropriate bellicosity that, if he himself believed a thing long enough, it must be true. Yet the occasional exaggeration or error is less important than the essential spirit of his work. Van Loon cared deeply about history, especially American history. He had a quick and penetrating sympathy for the American experience. He remained faithful to the deeper character of American life. And for him, America was a moral and intellectual adventure. He hated the identification of America with material success; “The domination of Things,” he wrote, “militates against the free and the healthy development of ideas.” He detested the displacement of the old American rule, “Be true to your own

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Foreword

personality and you will be happy,” by the latter-day doctrine, “Forget that you have any personality of your own and you will be rich.” The Second World War was a year away from its conclusion when van Loon died. There was no doubt about the immediate outcome; but van Loon, as usual, had larger ends in view. He felt that America’s greatest opportunity would come once the war was over and the scourge of Nazism had been stamped out like other “hideous epidemics of loathsome diseases” in the past. Then, he believed, America would have the opportunity to show the rest of the world the road to a new and happier form of civilization. Sixty years after his death, van Loon’s appeal to history as a means to inspire America to use its overflowing abundance with generosity and wisdom becomes all the more urgent. He brought the past to life for thousands upon thousands of readers. Cornelis van Minnen has done well to bring the life of this extraordinary Dutch-American back into the public’s eye. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Acknowledgments It was during one of my visits to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, in the late 1980s—at that time I was still working on my first book, American Diplomats in the Netherlands—that by sheer coincidence I came across the very Dutch sounding name Hendrik Willem van Loon in the library’s card catalogue. Curious to see who this van Loon was, I browsed in some of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s correspondence files and soon found out that this Dutch-American immigrant writer whose letterhead carried the silhouette of Veere—the picturesque little town near Middelburg, the Netherlands, where I live myself—had played a prominent role in America’s cultural life in the 1920s through 1940s. When I also learned about his unique position vis-à-vis his native and adopted countries, I decided then and there to write a biography about this all but forgotten man. And so in the years that followed, I tried to collect materials from many archives and libraries in the United States and the Netherlands in order to reconstruct his life and work. No matter that my daily work as executive director of the Roosevelt Study Center only allowed me to work irregularly on this project, as a consequence of which the completion of this biography took much longer than I anticipated, the writing of this book has been a labor of love. I am indebted to the staffs of the libraries and archives listed in the bibliography. I want to single out the most helpful staff of the Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University’s Carl A. Kroch Library where I have spent a lot of my research time, studying the voluminous Hendrik Willem van Loon papers and other collections. I also have fond recollections of working in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library where I “discovered” van Loon first. I have spent countless hours and was helped efficiently in the Manuscript Division and Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the research on this project in mid-Manhattan’s New York Public Library has always been a great pleasure to me. In October 1993 Mr. Addison B.C. Whipple, a former executive director of Time-Life Books and owner at that time of van Loon’s house Nieuw Veere, not only showed me the house from basement to attic but also van Loon’s

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Acknowledgments

grave at the local cemetery. Thanks are due to him for a most memorable visit to Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where I came to appreciate more fully van Loon’s observation that the view from his house facing Long Island Sound had a striking resemblance to Veere’s surrounding sky and water and that it offered, as van Loon once wrote, “the loveliest view this side of Paradise and no Saints to bother you with questions.” Another charming host was Ms. Lorraine Allen, president of the All Souls Historical Society in New York. She not only provided me with photo copies of documents pertaining to van Loon in the Unitarian Church of All Souls Archives, but in May 1997 also gave me a wonderful tour of the church where van Loon once delivered a sermon on “History and Leadership.” Tasting the couleur locale is both a must and a delight to any biographer. For my research in my home country I am indebted to the late Princess Juliana of the Netherlands who graciously gave me permission to study the Hendrik Willem van Loon correspondence in the Koninklijk Huisarchief (Royal House Archives), which is not open to the public. The Nederlands Letterkundig Museum en Documentatiecentrum in The Hague allowed me to study the collections of Hendrik Willem van Loon, Adriaan J. Barnouw, Adriaan van der Veen and Maurits Dekker, and the late Piet van der Veen in Oostkapelle generously gave me photo copies of his privately owned van Loon letters. Peter Blom, the archivist of the Veere Municipal Archives, which later merged into the Zeeuws Archief, was very helpful in loaning me the archival materials I needed for my research. Thanks are due to my staff at the Roosevelt Study Center, especially Hans Krabbendam, assistant director, and Leontien Joosse, my most efficient secretary. In the last phase of preparing my manuscript for publication I was also helped by research assistant Ruben Vroegop. Over the years my staff members have loyally supported this book project and I am afraid I have probably told them more about van Loon than they ever cared to know. During the process of research and writing this volume, I was encouraged by a number of people who time and again expressed their interest in the subject and who were eager to see the result of my labor in print. I want to express my special gratitude to Dirk van Loon, Hendrik Willem van Loon’s grandson, who allowed me to see and use some of the family correspondence. In 1994 he interviewed his father on my behalf just some months before Hank van Loon died at age eighty-seven, and in the fall of 1996, while working on the van Loon papers at Cornell, I had the pleasure of showing Dirk van Loon letters, books, water colors, photos, and other memorabilia in his grandfather’s collection. Permanent encouragement also came from my Dutch-American friends Marsha Cohen and Dominique Boer. In the course of our conversations on my research topic, the latter even became an ardent van Loon fan and

Acknowledgments

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collector of his books and other publications. My talented artist friend Nancy Ostrovsky listened with great interest to my van Loon stories in the past decade during our regular and most pleasant lunch meetings in my favorite Bryant Park restaurant, located just behind the New York Public Library, and in return she provided me with a fresh look on jazz painting. I am proud to have some of her contemporary art work in my seventeenth-century house. Also the late John A. Gable, executive director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association in Oyster Bay, New York, a dear friend and colleague who died in February this year, has always stimulated me throughout the research and writing process. His death is a great loss. My friends David and Manuela Roosevelt have supported my van Loon project in the last four years and have counseled and encouraged me in moments that publication seemed out of reach. I owe many thanks to Douglas Brinkley, a prolific writer and professor of American history at Tulane University in New Orleans, and to David Woolner, executive director of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute at Hyde Park, New York. They were instrumental in getting this biography published in Palgrave Macmillan’s series The World of the Roosevelts. My debt to Doug and David—first-rate colleagues who have become close friends—is large. The original book manuscript was twice as long as it is now. Trent Duffy, a first-class editor, condensed and edited my manuscript to a size that was acceptable to the publisher. Thanks are due to him, as well as to Jayashree Aradhyam, my copy editor, and to Erin Ivy, production manager at Palgrave Macmillan, who skillfully guided the manuscript through the publication process. Life is meaningless without interesting friends, and I am blessed with a number of them in the Netherlands who deserve special attention: Henri Looymans (whose friendship I cherish since our student days in the mid1970s), Matthijs Breel, Lex de Looff, Hans de Graaf, and Peter van de Steenoven. The table conversations over excellent dinners we have had over the years as members of the Club Fermé both diverted me from my work and gave me new energy. Another way of reaching the same result was provided to me the last few years rather unexpectedly and opened a new horizon: due to my friend Annemiek van den Berg I discovered the beauty and joy of dancing the tango—an exercise, that’s for sure, Hendrik Willem van Loon never experienced. And last but certainly not least, I want to express my sincere thanks to Diana de Kroon, whose love has enriched my life. My work in the last two decades for the Roosevelt Study Center would not have been possible without the constant inspiration provided by the Center’s American Founding Fathers: Ambassador William J. vanden Heuvel and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Himself of Dutch-Flemish stock, in his capacity as president and currently as cochair of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute

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in New York, Ambassador vanden Heuvel, like Hendrik Willem van Loon, has served and still serves with great distinction as a bridge between the United States and the Netherlands and is a formidable force in keeping alive the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. It is with gratitude and great admiration that I dedicate this book to the Honorable William J. vanden Heuvel. Cornelis Abraham van Minnen De Kleine Gouden Poorte Middelburg, 14 May 2005

Prologue It was a bright and sunny spring day, that Tuesday 14 March 1944, when the little town of Old Greenwich, Connecticut, suddenly awoke from its winter sleep when a few hundred people, most of them from New York City, invaded the community. These visitors were on their way to the funeral of Hendrik Willem van Loon, the popular historian, journalist, artist, and radio commentator. The New Haven Railroad had added extra cars to one train, which made an unscheduled stop in Old Greenwich and from the railway station private cars provided a shuttle service to the First Congregational Church. White-gloved policemen shouting “This way for the van Loon funeral!” directed the traffic. Almost four hundred people filled the church. According to one eyewitness there were at least a dozen photographers and “flashlights were popping like opening night at the Met” and the atmosphere was almost merry as people were telling each other van Loon anecdotes. She thought that instead of a funeral service for van Loon in this tiny church, “the Colosseum would have been a more appropriate place.” Those gathered to pay their last respects—a cross section of government officials, artists, elderly admirers, and even some teenagers—included New York City Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, radio commentator H.V. Kaltenborn, and publisher Richard L. Simon of Simon and Schuster. There were many representatives of the Dutch community in the United States, most notably Ambassador Alexander Loudon. Of course, van Loon’s relatives, friends, and neighbors were there, as were some of the women who had played a prominent role in his life: Eliza Bowditch, Ruby Fuhr, and Josa Morgan. His widow, Helen Criswell van Loon, was wearing “a black seal coat and a black velvet beret and [looked] just as white as snow.” She was so drunk that van Loon’s elder son, Henry, and his wife had to support her throughout the funeral. Prominent in front of the coffin was a standing wreath of calla and Madonna lilies with a simple white card reading “From a sad and grateful Holland,” sent by the Netherlands government. The twenty-five minute funeral service was officiated by Reverend Laurance I. Neale of New York City’s Unitarian Church of All Souls. Grace Castagnetta, pianist and van Loon’s

2

VAN LOON

collaborator on a series of songbooks, played three of van Loon’s favorite melodies on the piano: Bellman’s “The Butterflies at Haga,” Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” and Valerius’s “Prayer of Thanksgiving.” After the invocation and scripture readings, Rev. Neale cited eleven passages that he said were “those prophetic voices out of the ages to which Hendrik van Loon was forever listening and which were his life’s blood.” These readings included selections from Plato, Milton, the Declaration of Independence, and Emerson. Neale ended with a passage from Luigi Lucatelli: “Farewell, good Sirs, I am leaving for the future. I will wait for Humanity at the crossroads.” The coffin was then borne to the adjoining cemetery where after a brief service at the grave van Loon was buried. (Some time later his widow had the coffin disinterred and moved to a more prominent spot. A simple marble headstone engraved with van Loon’s name, the years 1882 and 1944, as well as the van Loon coat of arms, marks the last resting-place of Hendrik Willem van Loon.)1 The New York Times and New York Herald Tribune had both printed long obituaries after van Loon died on 11 March, following them up with respectful encomiums. Van Loon was described as “a man of inexhaustible talent for popularizing the obscurities of the universe in which he lived,” “a human machine of compelling energy” with an “evangelist’s zeal for sharing his findings,” and “a kind of tidal force that continued to sweep new readers into his people’s university.” As the author of the Herald Tribune editorial observed, hundreds of thousands of people were indebted to van Loon for much, if not all, of their knowledge of history, arts, geography, and other matters. This sometimes sketchy and superficial knowledge, unavoidable when covering such vast topics, was better than no knowledge at all, he thought. The Times editorial noted that although van Loon had arrived in New York several centuries after the early Dutch settlers, he had “in some ways [come] to possess the city as fully as they did.” And it praised van Loon for having been “a liberal to the core of his soul and a fearless voice against tyranny.”2 In the fortnightly bulletin Netherlands News Digest, L.A. Ries, deputy director of the Netherlands Information Bureau in New York, wrote that van Loon’s death was “an irreparable loss” for the cause of the Netherlands. Ries characterized van Loon as the “God-given interpreter of Holland [for] America” and vice versa, a man who “indicated to us the spiritual meaning of the vast expanses and the great masses” of the “immensity” of the United States. Especially Dutch in van Loon was his Erasmian spirit, Ries thought. Like Erasmus, van Loon had spent most years of his life outside the Netherlands and both men “felt the urge to interpret in unusual ways the historical and cultural problems of [their] times.”3 Other eulogists picked up the theme of van Loon’s having one foot in each culture. Dutch literary critic and journalist Jan Greshoff observed in the

PROLOGUE

3

Knickerbocker Weekly, a Dutch-American magazine, “He was no Americanized Dutchman, nor a Dutch-American. He could be both Dutch and American, because first and foremost he was van Loon.” In his “Monthly Letter” for the Netherland–America Foundation, Columbia University Professor Adriaan Barnouw said the essence of van Loon was his “wholehearted surrender to his adopted country and undying affection for the scenes of his childhood.” It was clear to Barnouw that “Holland had in him her most eloquent spokesman in America after she herself had been gagged by Nazi tyranny. . . . Holland may well be proud of having inspired such tenacity of love in one who had so completely identified himself with America.”4 Although Hendrik Willem van Loon is barely remembered today, he was a celebrity from the 1920s until his death. He contributed significantly to America’s cultural life in his role as educator to a large audience and served as a unique bridge between the Netherlands and the United States during the dark days of World War II. Indeed, as the London Times obituary noted, van Loon “was one of the most engaging products of the marriage between Holland and the United States.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt called him “my true and trusted friend.”5 This book aims to reintroduce the life and work of Hendrik Willem van Loon to an American audience. It is the story of a successful immigrant who made his mark on his adopted country while maintaining a love–hate relationship with his native country. It is also the account of an exuberant personality, a baroque mind in an American gothic world, who was rich in talents and rich in flaws. It is, in short, a captivating story that, six decades after the protagonist died, deserves to be told and rescued from oblivion.

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Part I

The Formative Years

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Chapter 1

A Troubled Youth in Holland (1882–1902) “[F]rom my tenth year on (or even earlier) i wanted more than anything else to be a very famous historian,” Hendrik Willem van Loon reflected years later. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he considered himself to be on “pleasantly intimate terms with the Almighty” who existed in Hendrik Willem’s consciousness “in a late medieval form—a kind and very wise old gentleman, a sort of beneficent grandfather with whom I occasionally hold conversation and discuss my own little problems.” Often Hendrik Willem had asked God to give him an understanding of the great and mighty historical figures in the dim past. But here his “intimate terms with the Almighty” were apparently of little help, since he was pleasantly told to use his own will and brains to “find these things out” for himself. “If you knew all the answers [so God told him], I myself should become superfluous, and I have no intention whatsoever of resigning, at least not for a good many eternities to come.” And so van Loon tried to understand the past in his own way and a number of times in his life—so he regularly confessed in his correspondence—he found it hard not “to play Jehovah.”1 Shortly after three o’clock in the morning of 14 January 1882 Elisabeth Johanna (called Betsie) van Loon-Hanken gave birth to her second child. The physician commented afterward, “Well, he seems all safe and sound, but God save me from another night like this, for the brat must weigh at least nine pounds.” The baby boy was named after his father, continuing a family tradition that had started several generations ago when the van Loons had settled in the center of the maritime city of Rotterdam and established a jewelry business. Also welcoming the infant was his older sister, Suzanne (called

8

Van Loon

Suus) who had been born the year after Hendrik Willem Sr. and Betsie had married in 1873. Hendrik Willem Jr. later wrote that during his infancy his sister, eight years his senior, served “as the natural buffer between myself and the less pleasant aspects of life.”2 The family lived on a corner of Gedempte Botersloot (or “Filled-in Butter Canal”) with the family business next door. The neighborhood, although rebuilt several times since it started as a Dominican monastery, retained its late-Medieval atmosphere—“a cloister surrounded by all kinds of buildings devoted to charitable purposes, and not constructed according to a preconceived plan.” Also Hendrik Willem’s house “was a crazy quilt of rooms and staircases. No two rooms were on the same floor. Short and long staircases ran every which way.” His own little room “seemed to hang suspended mid-air, for the space below it belonged to another house.” It comes as no surprise, then, that a place like this often frightened the little child when he was told to go up to his room alone. This became only worse when a servant taking Hendrik Willem to bed told him that the terrible-looking goblin in Hendrik’s new picture book would jump out of it and bite him just at the moment the clock would strike when Hendrik passed the large mirror opposite his hidden bedroom. Many years later Hendrik Willem would still vividly recall that night after night, “my heart beating violently with fear, I would creep past that mirror, hoping that perchance the clock would not strike at that precise moment and let the goblin get me.”3 As a child (figure 1.1) Hendrik Willem often suffered from recurrent nightmares. One of these was about the Spaniards subjecting Rotterdam to a massacre after a sixteenth-century rebellion. In his dream Hendrik Willem “was listening to the shrieks of horror that accompanied the pillaging and murdering that were going on outside.” But soon he heard “a heavy iron-clad footstep on the stairs, a man with a long beak of a nose and black, piercing eyes, a dagger shining in the moonlight, a feeble shriek, and my small corpse would be thrown out of the window, to be loaded on a cart and dumped into the river.” The roots of this nightmare came from the daily walks he took with his mother. They often passed a carefully preserved building, the House of a Thousand Fears, where the Spanish rulers of Holland had slaughtered the residents, and “a large picture in the front wall (done in colored tiles) explained everything that had happened there in full detail and in a most realistic fashion.”4 Fortunately, Rotterdam also had its pleasant side for a child. To begin with, there was the big harbor with its cosmopolitan atmosphere. One of his uncles, a Royal Dutch Navy officer, frequently took him there. Hendrik Willem taught himself to draw ships and his interest in geography and maps was instilled. In the 1880s, a great many of the ships were still sailing vessels, Hendrik Willem later recalled, “and flying flags of every nation under the

9

Figure 1.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon, aged 6, 1888 (Hendrik Willem van Loon Papers, 1884–1972. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library).

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Van Loon

sun, the moon and the stars of heaven. And from these ships there issued forth strangely garbed creatures in turbans and fezzes and wearing burnooses and long, flowing robes.” Another happy memory was the climbing of the tower of the St. Lawrence Church with another uncle and looking at the city and its surrounding flat landscape. It was inside this same church where he first heard the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, who “has been a true and faithful friend ever since” and about whom he later would write a biography.5 Another person to whom Hendrik Willem felt attracted was Rotterdam’s most famous son: Desiderius Erasmus. As a child he passed Erasmus’s statue daily and—as he wrote in The Story of Mankind—“for some unknown reason this great exponent of tolerance took hold of my intolerant self.” Later in life van Loon would identify himself more and more with his fellow Rotterdammer who not only was his hero, but even became his alter ego. In his posthumously published autobiography Report to Saint Peter, Hendrik Willem wrote that the people of Rotterdam “were never given to any exuberant love of the arts” and had “systematically neglected the few literary men born in their city.” That Erasmus had his statue was “more the result of outside pressure than of local enthusiasm.” He doubted, therefore, whether Rotterdam would ever decide to place a memorial tablet on the house in which he—Hendrik Willem—was born. This was, however, just a theoretical question, since in May 1940 Hitler’s Luftwaffe had completely destroyed the center of Rotterdam, including the house were van Loon spent the first eight years of his life.6 Of Rotterdam’s museums, the Museum of the Knowledge of This Earth and Its People, Combined with Maritime Affairs was Hendrik Willem’s favorite. Its collection contained an endless variety of objets de voyage, both treasures and terrible monstrosities, taken home by sailors from all over the world. A dark-skinned and stuffed Laplander, hitching a full-sized reindeer to a sleigh on which sat his wife and child, gave the Dutch boy his “first desire to explore the whole of the world.” One day, in a corner of a remote room, he discovered the grinning skull of a prehistoric man who, according to the label, had probably lived some thirty thousand years ago. The skull was on Hendrik Willem’s mind for quite some time until he suddenly asked himself, “What if it had been the head of one of my own ancestors? . . . [I]t made life so much more interesting to imagine your ancestors fighting mastodons and tigers instead of going to dull offices. . . . [A] caveman ancestor was therefore a most welcome addition to that dreamlike existence in which I spent so much of my time.”7 An important place in Hendrik Willem’s “dreamlike existence” was taken by a hero in a serial. The arrival every month of a new issue of his beloved magazine meant “a day of joy and surreptitious reading late into the night.”

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The hero of the story was a thirteenth-century minstrel who served his master, Count Willem II of Holland, with all his heart and soul. Going from town to town and from castle to castle as a simple minstrel, the hero was really acting as a spy for the young count, whose ambition it was to be elected as head of the Holy Roman Empire. To this end the minstrel plotted and schemed and none of his enemies was ever able to master him. He was “a most marvelous athlete, to whom it meant nothing to outrun a horse, while sleep and rest were little items he could disregard with supreme disdain.” But he distinguished himself most in the field of music, “as a trouvère, a fiddler, and a harpist he stood supreme.” Although the boy realized that his hero was “an entirely preposterous figure” and that he was clumsily drawn, he would not have missed him for anything in this world, for he gave him “a purpose in life” and took him “into that realm of the imagination where I have lived ever since.”8 The minstrel also influenced van Loon’s image of and attitude toward women. Through the minstrel’s adventures, “I never quite got over the feeling that all women lived on a sort of pedestal . . . and longed to be the heroines of one of those romantic episodes which were common incidents in the lives of the medieval troubadours.” Only much later, at emotional and financial cost, he wrote in his autobiography, did he learn “that the troubadour business had indeed gone out . . . and that all efforts made since then to revive the era of the chivalresque approach had been lamentable failures.” His “many unhappy personal experiences” notwithstanding, van Loon would “still cling to the ideals of the thirteenth century” as expressed by his youthful hero. This romantic troubadour with his wistful expression, an unmistakable selfportrait, would become one of the recurrent figures in Hendrik Willem’s own drawings.9 In the van Loon family the Bible did not play any role (nor for that matter did the works of Shakespeare). Both Suus and Hendrik Willem were christened in the Lutheran Church, but this was more a consequence of the friendship that existed between their parents and a prominent local Lutheran minister than that their father and mother wanted to protect their children “against the fires of hell.” In fact, all van Loon’s relatives had long since completely broken ties with every form of established religion. Hendrik Willem recalled that until his twelfth or fourteenth year, he “never met a single person who ever went to church, who had been confirmed, or who had been married or intended to be buried by a minister of the official church.” This is quite remarkable as the Calvinistic influence on late nineteenth-century Dutch society could hardly be ignored. What he knew about Christianity were the allusions to the Bible in the vernacular and the remnants of the Catholic faith he saw around him: the ancient churches, street names, and

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feast days and public holidays. Although in later years Hendrik Willem did not consider himself “a very good Christian in the accepted sense of the word,” he did join the Unitarian Church, even if he never became a regular churchgoer, and one of his books was The Story of the Bible.10 In retrospect van Loon realized that economics were also completely left out of his bringing up. “My father—if not rich in the American sense of the word—was a member of the class of the ‘haves.’ . . . Having been brought up in this atmosphere of complete economic assurance, I never became aware of real economic problems.” Especially during the Depression, he noticed the severe financial difficulties of so many fellow Americans but, as a well-paid author, economic problems, he wrote in 1939, were “not really part of my own flesh and blood. I have learned about them—as a trained seal learns about blowing a trumpet.”11 As a child Hendrik Willem had two reasons for admiring his father. Hendrik Willem Sr. served with distinction as an officer in a volunteer fire company and he was a member of the local auxiliary police force. The first position had provided van Loon Sr. with a green and white sash—the colors of Rotterdam’s coat of arms and a long stick to be used to smash the windowpanes of the houses on fire, and the other made him the owner of a derringer “to protect life and limb.” In young Hendrik Willem’s eyes the very possession of the weapon and the firemaster’s regalia made his father a hero.12 Hendrik Willem’s grandfather does not seem to have been a particularly pleasant person. Soon after his wife died, in 1890, he married his longtime mistress, a salesgirl in his jewelry store. This angered Hendrik Willem Sr. so much that he sold out his interest in the business for a tidy sum, completely broke off relations with his father, and moved his family to The Hague. But once the van Loons were settled in a quiet residential district, Hendrik Willem Sr.’s own behavior soon proved obnoxious. He had always been strict, but now that he was a gentleman of leisure, his mania for faultfinding grew. He constantly humiliated his wife and his children, even smashing some of their toys. When Betsie made flower decorations, he would tear the finished product to pieces and throw them into the fire. For Hendrik Willem Jr. his father became “the walking incarnation of the spiritual spoilsport” and in his opinion his father came to hate the world, “because he so thoroughly hated himself.” Betsie, who suffered considerably from her husband’s maltreatment, tried to compensate for her unhappy marriage by giving excessive affection and attention to her children. She succeeded in closing her children’s ranks about her and her husband became more and more “an outsider, a pariah in his own home.”13 In his autobiography van Loon acknowledged that although as a young child he tried to separate himself from his father, he looked like

A Troubled Youth in Holland

13

Hendrik Willem Sr. and “could never get rid of the imprint he had left upon my eyes and nose and the shape of my mouth.” For that very reason Hendrik Willem never liked his face. After he had become famous and admirers of his books asked him to send a photograph, he never sent one of his face, but of his hands, which resembled the hands of his mother—and of Erasmus.14 One good thing about the move was that it brought Betsie closer to her brother, Dr. Jan Hanken, a prominent physician. He took a great interest in his nephew’s education and the year after the van Loons arrived in The Hague he persuaded his brother-in-law to send the nine-year-old to a boarding school in nearby Voorburg. After that, the boy went on to a gymnasium in Gouda where, just like young Erasmus, van Loon later wrote, he spent “most miserable years” at school. Hendrik Willem also hated the prevailing odor of cheese in Gouda and crossed that famous Dutch dairy product off his menu for life. On his weekends home, he spent as much time as possible at the house of his uncle Jan whom he later described as “a perfect type of the almost extinct Homo Renascencius.” Uncle Jan’s wife, Aunt Sally, was a music teacher, so Hendrik Willem often met seasoned musicians there and was stimulated to learn to play the violin.15 During his years at school, Betsie often wrote anxious letters full of concern for his health, telling him that she frequently suffered from insomnia and headaches and felt very weak. As a side effect of his mother’s constant warnings, Hendrik Willem shunned competitive sports. Among the boys of his own age he had the reputation of an oddball: he kept to himself and was bored by the curriculum. That he came home with disappointing report cards, with As for history and language and the lowest grades for everything else, Hendrik Willem blamed on the influence of his hero, the minstrel. But he also admitted many years later, that “Being blessed with all the obstinacy and plain ordinary cussedness of the race inhabiting the Low Countries . . . , I was a difficult pupil. Hence six years of profound misery during which my teachers tried to push me one way while I, in all my youthful arrogance, pulled in the opposite direction.”16 During summer vacations Hendrik Willem was frequently sent to another uncle, Henri Hanken, the manager of a four-thousand-acre farm in the southwestern province of Zeeland. There Hendrik Willem was stuffed with food and got plenty of fresh air on his bicycle trips. It was on one of these trips that he discovered the beauties of the towns of Middelburg and Veere, located on the peninsula of Walcheren, which were to play such an important role in his later years. Despite Uncle Henri’s efforts to contribute to Hendrik Willem’s health, the now seventeen-year-old “outgrew his strength.” He had endless colds, a persistent cough, and was not putting on

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any weight. Therefore, in 1899, his parents took him to Switzerland for the summer.17 In the fall of that year Hendrik Willem entered Noorthey, an institution that he would describe as “a school for little snobs.” As a jeweler’s grandson he felt being looked down upon by the scions of the Dutch upper classes, with their family crests discretely embroidered on their shirts. He nevertheless was able to outpace his classmates in Latin and Greek and with a quick riposte or little sketch he could make them sound and look like fools. Of great influence was his English teacher, a twenty-seven-year-old Irish woman named Esther BellRobinson. They shared an interest in music and it was she who considerably improved Hendrik Willem’s knowledge of English, making him read William Makepeace Thackeray’s Henry Esmond. This novel, van Loon declared in his Report to Saint Peter, fascinated him so much that it made him learn English fluently. Without it, he said, “I might have written Dutch for the rest of my life.” One day, Miss Bell-Robinson was asked by a London newspaper to write a story about a dock strike in Rotterdam. Unable to travel because of a bad cold, she asked Hendrik Willem to go to the city and, as an exercise in English, write a report. Hendrik Willem not only wrote an article, but also took pictures and the London newspaper subsequently let Miss Bell-Robinson know how pleased they were with “her” article. This success made Hendrik Willem begin to think of journalism as a career.18 Very unexpectedly Hendrik Willem’s mother became gravely ill and died at the age of forty-seven on 2 May 1900. This, of course, was a shock for Hendrik Willem and his sister, Suus. Now Hendrik Willem felt guilty for not answering so many of his mother’s letters. It was also thought that by going to Switzerland the previous summer, Betsie had sacrificed her health for that of her son. The next year, copying his own father’s example, Hendrik Willem Sr. remarried. Hendrik Willem saw his new stepmother taking over the house, wearing his mother’s jewelry, and willfully widening the gulf between father and son. His sister, who in 1897 had married Willem van der Hilst, quickly decided never to speak to her father again. Because Hendrik Willem had inherited a considerable sum of money—about thirty thousand dollars—from his mother, he was free to get away from his father too.19 He did not want to spend another two years at Noorthey, but without a diploma would probably not be allowed to enter a European university. Hendrik Willem began to think of going to the United States. Uncle Jan’s wife, Sally, was an American by birth and their home was always full of visitors to The Hague from the other side of the Atlantic. Now she wrote a former guest, George Lincoln Burr, professor of ancient and medieval history and curator of the White Library of rare books at Cornell University, requesting information about the possibility of Hendrik Willem’s admittance to

15

Figure 1.2 Hendrik Willem van Loon aboard the Holland–America Liner S.S. Potsdam en route to New York, July 1902 (Hendrik Willem van Loon Papers, 1884–1972. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library).

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Cornell. Burr responded warmly in January 1902. His memories of his stay in The Hague and of all her kindness were “still very vivid and very sunny.” He would therefore welcome with pleasure Dr. Hanken’s nephew to Cornell and enclosed a copy of the university register with the admission requirements. He added that since “The reputation of the Dutch schools is so high for both scope and thoroughness, [Hendrik Willem could] count on all possible generosity of credit for his work there.”20 In his own reply, Hendrik Willem thanked Professor Burr for the information. In a self-assured way, he went on to write of his intention “to prepare myself for a journalistic career by an all-round education at one of the Universities in the States for which purpose the Law School at Cornell has struck me as peculiarly adapted.” He enclosed a full list of what he had hitherto studied in the Netherlands, including the classics, algebra, history, and modern European languages.21 Hendrik Willem was soon admitted as a sophomore to Cornell Law School (then open to undergraduates). Having already planned a visit to New York, Aunt Sally and Uncle Jan Hanken accompanied their nephew to America, sailing on 24 July 1902. When the Dutch shore disappeared from sight, Hendrik Willem van Loon, age twenty, left his troubled youth behind to prepare himself for journalism in the New World. While on his way in pursuit of his American dream, a snapshot taken aboard the ship shows him wearing a dark pinstripe suit, white shirt and ditto tie, as well as a cap, looking with a confident smile into the camera (figure 1.2).22

Chapter 2

Cornell–Harvard– Cornell (1902–1905) After an uneventful Atlantic crossing, Hendrik Willem van Loon arrived in New York where he stayed a few days with friends of his aunt’s. Uncle Jan and Aunt Sally accompanied him to Cornell. The train ride to the university, in upstate Ithaca, was a disappointment. “Not that I had exactly expected to see real Injuns chase our train. But I was not prepared for quite so much drabness, for quite so much that was utterly commonplace, for so much natural beauty ruthlessly spoiled by carelessness and greed,” he wrote many years later. “[N]othing to indicate that this was that New World where all men were supposed to have been born free and to enjoy an equal chance at life and happiness. Indeed, it was all very different from what good James Bryce and his American Commonwealth (duly learned by heart) had led me to expect.”1 That he eventually came to understand what “America” meant, Hendrik Willem attributed to the little man who on that hot August afternoon met his train at “that dreadful railroad station” in Ithaca and who welcomed him with “grace and stateliness.” Professor George Lincoln Burr who from that moment on became Hendrik Willem’s mentor, had a reputation of giving more of his time and energy to the student body than to himself. Hendrik Willem adored, yes even canonized this man “who had been preaching the gospel of a greater humanity to the students,” even comparing him with a saint.2 That first night, with a myriad of stars above him, Hendrik Willem was taken to the top of a steep hill for an overall view of Cornell, which sits on its own hill above the town of Ithaca. He also saw the library, which was still open, offering “an intimate picture of pleasant and gay and well-mannered

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people who apparently had gathered upon this spot to study and make life more agreeable for each other amid surroundings of very great charm and beauty.” This positive impression was strengthened the next day when the newly arrived student had a short visit to the treasures of the library and was taken to Cayuga Lake for another view of Cornell from a distance.3 In a letter to his Noorthey teacher Esther Bell-Robinson, Hendrik Willem reported his first impressions a week after his arrival at Cornell. When his uncle and aunt had left after two days, for the first two hours he had had a strange feeling, since “the last tie with Holland was broken and I stood alone.” The fall term was then a month away, so he had had “some very dull days reading in the library and writing letters . . . with ten words of conversation during a whole day.” But he knew that better times would come. He had found a pleasant room in a house on top of the hill and took his meals in the girls college. This was “so quite different from Holland where a student nearly never gets the occasion to see a nice girl.” Although he met very nice people, he did not feel happy “in the ordinary society of young men and girls.” As far as music was concerned, Hendrik Willem had discovered that there was an orchestra he wanted to join, and the chapel on campus had a very good organ and offered a service in which music played an important part. “So perhaps it will happen that they see me in church of my own will,” he wrote. In this letter Hendrik Willem expressed how glad he was to have left Holland behind him, but at the same time he felt “very proud to be a Dutchman and I don’t think I will turn out an American very soon, as most people told me I would do.” These contrasting feelings toward his native land and his balancing between his Dutchness and Americanness would be a leitmotiv for the rest of his life.4 In a photo (figure 2.1) taken that September, we see Hendrik Willem reading a book at his desk, wearing boots and the same pinstripe suit he wore aboard the ship that brought him to New York. On the desk there sits a portrait of his mother and on the wall behind there are more than a dozen pictures, including reproductions of Rembrandt paintings (among others The Nightwatch), a portrait of the famous seventeenth-century Dutch admiral Michiel de Ruyter, and a picture of the Ridderzaal (the medieval hall used for official occasions by the Dutch government) in The Hague. He had, indeed, surrounded himself with mementos from Holland and there was no doubt that this room was rented by “a proud Dutchman.”5 In his next letter to Miss Bell-Robinson, Hendrik Willem felt very confident about the future. “I feel myself as a man at this moment and am able to do something. I see much and by coming in contact with persons of every part of this vast country I learn many things.” His main objective was very clear to him and so was his conviction that he had the talents to achieve his goal of a career in journalism. Studying law was “a means of getting

19

Figure 2.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon in his study at Cornell University, September 1902 (Hendrik Willem van Loon Papers, 1884–1972. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library).

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a broader view.” The journalism for which the ambitious young man felt himself capable, he wrote unashamedly, was “the great journalism of the world. Not the journalism of a little country where they fight over some candidate for the place of mayor.” And he bluntly asserted, “the world in which by education and aspiration I feel myself at home is the world of the great events. I believe that there I can succeed.”6 A classmate who had a room across the hall in the same house remembered Hendrik Willem’s playing the violin both at home and in the Cornell orchestra, his joy when tobogganing on the steep side down to and across Beebe Lake, his talent for humorous sketching, and their frequent chats in his room “when his big, ponderous body would make itself comfortable” on his couch or armchair. And even though van Loon occasionally had some problems with word usage and pronunciation of English (“the” was still “zee”), his “strong personality” was impressive. He dealt with his instructors “on very equal terms in discussions of matters of history and current world events.”7 A coed expressed a more reserved opinion. She recalled, “van Loon was all wrong. His hat, a soft velour, was two sizes too small. His overcoat was green. . . . He carried an encased fiddle in one hand. In the other he gripped a small bouquet, an offering to his hostess at some party to which we were both going. The boy was six feet tall or more and weighed . . . at least 185 pounds. He was not fat but evenly larded all over, like a sleek, active seal. As a matter of fact, at this party he was pretty impressive for the first hour. Glib, though his English sounded like Dutch, perfectly at ease in meeting new people, bowing from the waist, he was never at a loss for a word or a topic. But after more people arrived and things got more general, van Loon ceased to be the center of attention and was sort of shunted off to his own devices. At that point he got out his fiddle, sat off in a corner with his back to the crowd, and softly played chords and snatches of tunes to himself.”8 For the summer of 1903, after his first year at Cornell, Hendrik Willem was invited to the homes of several fellow students, traveling among other places to Pittsburgh as well as Niagara Falls and East Aurora in New York State. To Professor Burr he reported that he had enjoyed himself so much, “that I can stand Ithaca again for a long time” and that he was “not despaired anymore about being alone.” But he told his mentor, too, that he had recently become interested in something that had come over him “as sudden as Christianism came over Paulus,” and that he would discuss that matter with Professor Burr later. Most likely it was his sudden decision to spend his second year in the United States not in Ithaca, but at Harvard and to return to Cornell afterward for his third and final year as an undergraduate.

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By September he departed for Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was admitted at Harvard College.9 Life in Cambridge proved to be more expensive than in Ithaca. Since Harvard wanted a certificate from each student guaranteeing that he would not leave without having paid his landlady, Hendrik Willem asked Professor Burr to be one of his bondsmen. At Thanksgiving he went home with a classmate to Brooklyn, New York, where he not only was welcomed by a very pleasant family but found it remarkable that “they did not talk athletics”—a big relief since at Harvard people talked more athletics than at Cornell. When he passed the midyear exams in Spanish history, Russian, Italian, and international law, he thought he could have done better. In the spring semester, his new courses included Economics of Corporations and International Trade. Although he was “not much in love with College yet,” he wrote Burr, he could not complain about his life. He had met some very pleasant families, was usually invited somewhere on Sundays, and enjoyed playing his violin.10 Near the end of his stint at Harvard, in May 1904, van Loon wrote to Professor Burr that it had been a pleasant year in which he had learned many things. He was, however, very much looking forward to returning to Cornell in late September, when the beauty of the Indian summer made it a most attractive location. He even felt homesick for Ithaca, a feeling he never had felt for any other place, not even for his Holland. Before he sailed the next month for his first trip home, Hendrik Willem expressed his gratitude to his Cornell mentor: “I have to thank you for so many things. Those two years in your good country have been by far the happiest years I had in my twentytwo years and for nearly all the good things I enjoyed here, you are more or less responsible.”11 Returning in September on the Potsdam from Rotterdam to New York, Hendrik Willem was introduced to a fellow first-class passenger, Eliza Ingersoll Bowditch—known as Lily—who was two years his senior. Being one of identical twins, she was the daughter of Dr. Henry Pickering Bowditch, a professor at Harvard Medical School and its onetime dean. The Bowditches were a prominent family in Boston who had settled in Jamaica Plain—then a village west of Boston—in their spacious house, Sunnyside. While Professor Bowditch reserved his attention for their two sons, his temperamental German-born wife, Selma, focused more on their five daughters and was successful in playing one daughter off against the other. Having lived with her mother’s family in Dresden, Germany, for two years in the late 1880s, Eliza Bowditch had a strong affinity with Germany and Europe in general. When she was denied a college education by her mother and with

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several of her sisters recently married, Eliza was more than ready to escape from her dominant mother and from Boston as far as possible.12 In the summer of 1904 Eliza, her two brothers, and her parents not only visited their relatives in Germany, but also an Amsterdam banker whose son, Herman Roelvink, had just finished his studies at Harvard and who had frequently visited the Sunday teas at the Bowditch house. Herman Roelvink told the Bowditches that another Dutch student at Harvard would be sailing on the same ship to New York, so Eliza made one of her brothers look for and introduce her to this “other Dutchman.” Their subsequent conversations aboard the ship made it clear that Hendrik Willem and Eliza had mutual interests: music, languages, travel, history, art, and books. What they also had in common was a grievance against one of their parents, and—as Gerard Willem van Loon observed in his father’s biography—an “ignorance regarding financial matters and sex.” By the time they arrived in New York, Hendrik Willem and Eliza had fallen in love.13 Back in Ithaca, Hendrik Willem found a pleasant and comfortable room in a dormitory. He wrote Professor Burr, who was on sabbatical in Europe, that he took classes in Spanish, French Revolution, colonies, socialism, labor unions, and chapel orchestra. In the chapel he played the first violin. There were so many things going on, that “there is no occasion to sit down, think and get blue.” And, he told his mentor, “I am saving money to hire the Ithaca band when you return.”14 Classmates and faculty alike had welcomed van Loon back. Although during the winter and summer the weather could be harsh “on the hill,” Hendrik Willem considered this as a “mere climatological detail” compared to the attractions Cornell offered: the long fall season was “of wondrous beauty” and in the spring, “the most lowly of towngirls assumes the estate of Heloise or Beatrice. But, best of all, there is at all times the feeling of complete and untrammeled freedom” that was due to “the spirit of that great old man, Ezra Cornell [who] gathered around him a group of scholars whose very names became synonymous with freedom of intellectual action.”15 While diligently studying, Hendrik Willem had to think of making a living after this third academic year and a career in journalism was still what he wanted. He became acquainted with Dr. Andrew Dickson White, Cornell University’s first president who had recently returned to Ithaca after having served for six years as U.S. ambassador to Berlin, and to whose cosmopolitan background Hendrik Willem felt very much attracted. Meeting the venerable scholar and diplomat would prove to be of great importance. In a 1914 résumé Hendrik Willem would refer to White as “that most kind old Gentleman” who, ever since he met him, had been “a Guide and Friend and at times a wise Philosopher.”16

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In the summer of 1903 Hendrik Willem had published an article on Holland in the Ithaca News and he had submitted some stories and sketches to university publications. When he heard that one of the faculty members, Professor Charles H. Hull, had a friend on the editorial staff of the New York Sun, Hendrik Willem brazenly inquired for a foreign correspondent position. He was turned down flat out, since he had no experience. The newspaperman told his friend Hull that a foreign correspondent “job requires vastly more than knowing foreign languages and having travelled. One has to know the newspaper business first and know it from top to bottom. Only trained journalists ever get that far. . . . So, I can not write a word of encouragement for the young man. He is flying too high. He will have to come down to earth and with a thud, if he wishes to break into newspaper work.”17 Undaunted by this reply, high-flying Hendrik Willem asked Dr. White to introduce him to a friend at the Associated Press. “As I should like to look around for some position as soon as possible, I take the liberty to send you a list of my work now. Most of it has been in Political Economy and History, especially Holland, France, and the countries in the Balkan. I studied International Law in Harvard. As for languages—I had some 7 years Latin and Greek, have some knowledge of Russian, read Italian and know fluently English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch.” This time Hendrik Willem had more luck. Dr. White contacted his friend Melville Stone, who in April interviewed the young man. When he graduated from Cornell, there would be a job waiting for him at the New York City cable desk of the Associated Press.18

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Chapter 3

Associated Press Journalist in Russia and Poland (1905–1907) Immediately after his graduation on 22 June 1905, Hendrik Willem left Ithaca to start working for the Associated Press in New York. Two days later, as he put it in a 1914 résumé, “I sat in the backroom of the fifth floor of the Western Union Building and cut good paper into small strips and pasted the whole mess in a big book.” In his first week on the job, he was told that he would soon be transferred to Washington, D.C.1 Before going to the nation’s capital, however, he had to take care of a private matter. Despite a steady correspondence with Eliza Bowditch over the past year, her parents still regarded him warily. On 1 July Hendrik Willem went to Jamaica Plain hoping to reach an understanding with them, which proved to be a far from easy mission. As soon as he arrived, he reported to Professor Burr, “The mother caught me on the stoop and I was at once dragged before Loyola and the Inquisition did its work. It was not a very pleasant interview.” Henry Bowditch “talked quite a good deal about position and cash-books and it would have been very pleasant to me if he had been more curious about character than about the former two things.” Hendrik Willem felt the Bowditches had not received him “with any show of pleasure” and “seemed to be opposed” to him.2 Several days after the inquisition at Sunnyside, Dr. Bowditch wrote Professor Burr, asking him about “the boy’s family and social environment as well as his intelligence, industry, morals and habits of life.” In a very long letter, Burr described how from the very start when he arrived in Ithaca in the summer of 1902 he had liked Hendrik Willem. He depicted him as “of

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unblemished purity, both in conduct and in conversation, and has no patience with impurity in any form. He is by instinct and habit thoroughly a gentleman.” In his eyes Hendrik Willem was “a man of broad culture for his years, a lover of art and music, an accomplished linguist . . . , and fond of society [who had planned] for a career of active usefulness, and has with much intelligence, judgement, and persistence shaped his studies to that end.” After “a night’s reflection” he added that in Hendrik Willem’s work as a student he regretted “a certain lack of system and thoroughness; but it is precisely his wide and desultory interests which have made him love the work of the journalist” and would, Burr expected, make him successful in this profession.3 Lily’s father seemed satisfied with Burr’s report, but Selma Bowditch kept up the attack. In September Hendrik Willem complained to his mentor that the Bowditches had “poisoned a whole year” and “treated him badly, without any reason.” And a month later he referred to “the Hundred Years War in Massachusetts” where “The definite battle of Jamaica Plain has not yet been fought and the family ignores my existence in great style.” But he did not mind to bide his time patiently, “For every week I wait I get better entrenched here and feel more sure of my position.”4 To the man who had been instrumental in getting him the Associated Press job, Dr. Andrew D. White, Hendrik Willem reported that he liked his newspaper work very much and that Washington offered him the possibility to learn a lot and “to look a bit behind the scenes of history.” He noticed, however, his colleagues considered Europe “a funny old place where foolish emperors and haughty aristocrats order a poor, suppressed people around, [whereas] the U.S. with all its noble, just and great institutions, [had] been created for the sole purpose of putting things right in this world and they do not doubt but Mr. [Theodore] Roosevelt will make short work of it.” Though his daily work was interesting it often left him exhausted. In the evening he would read history or play the violin a little, but he could hardly keep awake.5 In November Hendrik Willem wrote Burr with good news on both the professional and private level. A few days before he had had a scoop, “which has given me some name and done me a lot of good. It was on the decision of the engineers about the Panama Canal. We had the story and beat the other associations so badly that they hardly made the story the next day. . . . For the moment let me only say that [the story] was made in a perfectly clean and honest way and only a result of three months continual and hard work.” He had also received a letter from Selma Bowditch in which Eliza’s parents at last assented to his request for her hand. Hendrik Willem was summoned to Boston for the announcement on Thanksgiving and an engagement party the next week. Henry Bowditch wrote Professor Burr afterward that “you will be glad to hear that Hendrik made the best possible impression on all the

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family and friends.” One of those friends, Hermann Hagedorn, recalled that he was “attracted by [Hendrik Willem’s] genial personality [which was] given flavor by his Dutch background and a cultivation that went much deeper than the cultivation of any of the other young men [he] knew in Cambridge.”6 Hendrik Willem was very happy with his fiancé and the kind way he’d been treated at the party. Although Eliza had expressed her desire “to live abroad for always,” Hendrik Willem was not too eager to leave the United States. But he began to have some doubts about his prospects in journalism. To Lily’s sister Fanny he remarked that the profession of a journalist, though very interesting, combined “a maximum of work with a minimum of pay,” and he was worried about that “minimum and our good lady’s appetite.” What he wanted was a modestly paying regular position, he told George Burr, “perhaps not as exciting as journalism but more safe and bringing us in a different world from the one we are in now. Of my colleagues there are not five I could introduce to Lily.”7 The change Eliza wanted came soon after. The revolutionary events in Russia in 1905—the January massacre of peaceful demonstrating workingmen before the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, followed by a wave of political strikes and riots all over Russia that year that were suppressed by the military— had made the country more newsworthy. Melville Stone decided in 1906 to send van Loon to the Associated Press bureau in St. Petersburg, then Russia’s capital. Hendrik Willem’s student dream of becoming a foreign correspondent was now about to come true. On 18 June 1906 Hendrik Willem and Eliza had a quiet Unitarian wedding at Sunnyside, two days later Mr. and Mrs. van Loon boarded the Potsdam and sailed to Rotterdam.8 Eliza reported to her parents that they had a pleasant ocean trip due to the “delightful airy and roomy cabin on the saloon deck” and the attentive steward and stewardess who treated them “like princes.” As first-class passengers they sat at the captain’s table at dinner. Of course she heard a lot of Dutch spoken aboard the ship, which was still difficult for her to understand, “for they talk faster than any people I ever heard.” In a letter to his father-in-law and typed on “a seasick typewriter” Hendrik Willem revealed himself not free from anti-Semitic feelings. He was somewhat annoyed at the large number of Jewish fellow passengers aboard the ship, which almost gave him the impression they were crossing the Red Sea instead of the Atlantic Ocean. He admitted to Eliza’s father that “in my noble country we have a most pronounced dislike for the Judaeus Teutonicus and especially for the young of that race.” During the trip he therefore had only been in touch “with about five or six people who belong to our own tribe.”9 The newlyweds spent the first two weeks of July in the Netherlands. They were greeted warmly everywhere, except at Hendrik Willem’s father’s house,

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where the icy and hostile attitude of his stepmother made the young couple feel very unwelcome. They enjoyed a three-day stopover in Berlin before boarding a train for Russia.10 The van Loons were in St. Petersburg only two days before the head of the Associated Press’s Russian bureau, Howard N. Thompson, dispatched Hendrik Willem to Moscow where he had to await his permanent assignment: Odessa, Warsaw, or Moscow itself. Several months later it turned out that Thompson did not like van Loon and hoped he would “drown there (figuratively for the Moskva is not deep enough for me),” van Loon wrote to Eliza’s father. He thought that Thompson’s dislike “was the ordinary sort of an uneducated man for one who has had the benefit of more education.” By 22 July the young couple was at Moscow’s Hotel National. Although Hendrik Willem had been instructed to report on the situation in Moscow, there was “absolutely nothing going on,” Eliza wrote to her father. The rumors about officials “being blown to the skies every little while” were never substantiated. Eliza was told by “sober-minded people” both in St. Petersburg and Moscow that “if the revolution comes at all, it may not be for ten years,” which turned out to be correct.11 After a visit to the Kremlin, Hendrik Willem wrote to Professor Burr that Moscow’s most famous building had “never done any good or seen any good done by any of its occupants. Everything connected with it is murder and oppression. . . . It is populated with barracks, useless palaces (occupied one night in ten years), more than useless monks, and—worst of all—churches. A few weeks in Russia are quite sufficient to make one see what influence the church has. Like some sort of corpse, it lies all over Russia, and the skull grins at you everywhere. . . . The Russian clergy keeps the people stupid, says prayers for a stomach-ache, takes half of the coat of the poor man, drinks the rich man’s Benedictine, and seems chiefly occupied in growing a wonderful hair and beard. But the people are so pleased with their corpse that if one tries to take it away from them, they object vehemently. And Kremlin and church, neither of which has ever done anything for them, receive deep homage and off their hat and down they go and kiss the ground.”12 Although Hendrik Willem and Eliza were expecting to spend the winter in Moscow, they stayed barely a month. When riots broke out in Warsaw Hendrik Willem was directed to set up shop there. On 26 August 1906, after a thirty-hour journey, they arrived in the Russian-occupied Polish capital.13 Soon after their arrival in Warsaw, in one of her weekly letters home, Eliza reported that attacks on government officials, army officers, and policemen as well as robberies for money and blank passports were the order of the day. And this despite the fact that some 80,000 soldiers patrolled the streets of the city constantly and guarded the telegraph office and the banks “at almost

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every window and door.” The authorities accused the Jews to be behind all the revolutionary activities and, because of the strongly anti-Semitic feelings in Poland, pogroms took place regularly.14 One such pogrom was going on in Siedlce, a town east of Warsaw. The first time Hendrik Willem went there, he could not get into the town since it was “in a state of siege.” Accompanied by an interpreter on a return trip, he was able to see the damage done by drunken soldiers; they smashed everything they could, demolished the streets by battery-fire, and surrounded the houses of Jews with their guns ready to shoot. The night before the pogrom began, Christians had hung saints’ pictures in front of their houses in order to escape the damage destined for Jewish houses. On both trips, the train back to Warsaw, Eliza reported, “was crowded with scared Jews, and [Hendrik Willem] got a good many interesting stories out of them.”15 The capital city continued to be very tense, with assassinations of army officers, threats from revolutionaries against the foreign community, and rumors of a pogrom in Warsaw itself. Outside the boarding house where the van Loons had rented two rooms, pistol shots could be heard regularly. Hendrik Willem and Eliza still managed to establish a “very homelike” life, getting to know their neighbors. Because the conversations in the house were in French, they were called “les mignons enfants.” Among the regular guests at the dinner table was Roman Dmowski, a biologist who was the leader of the Polish National Party. Dmowski talked with the van Loons on Russian politics and the Poles’ desire “to throw off the Russian yoke,” giving Hendrik Willem insightful information on the Russo-Polish political situation.16 Meanwhile in St. Petersburg, Bureau Chief Thompson was transferred and succeeded by Mr. S.B. Conger. Hendrik Willem felt the difference immediately. Conger’s instructions were much clearer on what kind of news he wanted from Warsaw. He also kept Hendrik Willem well informed about the events in the Russian capital; an assistant now forwarded copies of all the telegrams sent out from the St. Petersburg office. These daily bulletins from the Associated Press were very welcome since in Warsaw only Polish newspapers were available. Eliza assured her father that everything in the American newspapers about Warsaw came from her husband. His telegrams about the pogrom in Siedlce “were printed in full” and she regretted that the Associated Press did not let its correspondents sign their telegrams. To be kept informed about developments in the United States, she asked her parents to send them any newspaper or magazine through the U.S. consulate to avoid the censor.17 Hendrik Willem felt sympathetic toward the revolutionary activities in Russia. The murdering of governors and generals, he wrote his father-in-law, was of course cruel, but these authorities deserved that fate since they had blood on their own hands. “To talk in Russia about achieving aims by peaceful

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and legal ends is an impossibility,” he asserted. “Those who have tried to do it have always ended in Siberia or on the gallows.” The autocratic regime in Russia had proven to be deaf and dumb to the warnings and therefore he considered the shooting and fighting by the people who had been driven to the extreme as “a case of self-defense.”18 About the Poles, van Loon wrote rather negatively in his letters to his mentors Burr and White at Cornell and his father-in-law in Boston. What struck him most was the Polish patriotism, which in his view bordered on fanaticism and a perversion of history, as well as their vehement antiSemitism. The Poles considered themselves to be the victims of their neighbors who had “all the vices of Christianity and Heathendom together” and of the Jews, whose entrenched presence as merchants and other middle-class occupations, prevented the Poles from creating their own bourgeoisie. In January 1907 he penned about the Poles, “I came here with great sympathy for the poor persecuted race but after four months the sympathy has gone and there only remains impatience with a race which has ruined itself through its own stupidity, and which clings to all its many old vices and has no use for new virtues. . . . The Poles have learned nothing [and] are as much divided as ever. . . . [The Poles] have an awful lot of vague ideas but lack all force to put an idea into shape and make it a reality. . . . Whatever they do is half-done. They have no idea of duty and less of unselfishness.”19 When Hendrik Willem tried to give Andrew White an impression of the situation in the Russian empire, he wrote that “the country is still very much of a mystery to me.” He could describe Russia in no better way than by calling it “one very sad story” where no person or party seemed capable of anything but destruction or suppression. Wherever he went he saw “misery, ignorance, stupidity and a hopeless government.” When Americans in their enthusiasm talked about “the Russian Revolution and the Dawn of Russian Freedom,” Hendrik Willem thought this was as beautiful as it was untrue. Of course there had been some revolution, but the movement lacked organization. “Years and years of suppression have brought those people to such a state of hatred and despair, that they will do anything, merely for the pleasure of revenging themselves.”20 Van Loon wrote a six-page letter to his father-in-law about the situation of the Jews in Russia and Poland. In his opinion the Jewish question in both countries had common characteristics with “the Negro question” in the American South: The problem was “practically unsolvable” and “outsiders are sure not to understand it.” Reflecting the prejudices of the time, he wrote that “The great difference [between both questions] is that the negro is below the average intelligence of the white man, while the Jew is his superior in respect to cleverness, sobriety and thrift.” Because of their poor living conditions, Russian Jews were “easily driven into the ranks of the revolutionists and

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contrary to their real nature, they develop into the boldest members of the terrorist organizations.” As for Poland, the majority of Jews there was equally “miserably poor and accordingly educated,” but worst of all, he thought, most of them were never polonized: they hardly ever used the Polish language and did not feel to be a Pole. This attitude was used successfully by the Russian “masters” to keep the Jews apart from the Poles. Polish national feelings being more awake than ever before, the Poles found themselves “in company with 5,500,000 strangers who live with them and on them and who have no intention to act in unison with them.” More than anything else, Hendrik Willem saw the Jewish attitude of “I belong to the chosen people and I am a different creature from you” as the source of feelings of hatred toward the Jews in Poland.21 To the ornithologist and artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes, a friend from Cornell, van Loon sent some more observations. He considered Russia “the damnedest country the devil ever invented” and if he had not had the company of his wife, he thought he would “have died a hundred deaths.” The Russian people in his view were “stupid, lazy, full of false pride” and he thought they were very fatalistic: “You can punch them and beat them and sit down on them, and they will all take it in a meek way.” Although van Loon thought the Poles were “capable of more than the Russians,” he assessed them as “bigoted Catholics, full of pride for what once was and never seeing what now is, lazy and terribly unreliable.” Because the Slavic countries in his opinion were “splendid at destroying,” he thought that “Europe should build a high wall and leave them with peace.” In a few centuries, he predicted, “they would have all killed each other.” Obviously, the van Loons would be glad to leave the Russian empire.22 Hendrik Willem grew increasingly dissatisfied with journalism in general, telling Burr that he wanted to “give my time and capacities . . . to our good history,” and with the American version in particular. Or, as he phrased it in the same letter, “Madame Clio [the Muse of History] always has a string around my leg and pulls me toward her on all occasions.” He was not impressed by the majority of the Associated Press correspondents he’d met in Europe, most of whom looked at everything with the perception of a smalltown American newspaperman, and he felt Dutch and other European newspapers produced far more informative coverage of foreign affairs.23 One bright spot in Warsaw was that Eliza was pregnant. Her mother, Selma, arrived in May to help prepare for the new arrival. On 22 June 1907, a son, Henry Bowditch was born; he would be known as Hansel or Hansje as a child and later as Hank. In a few weeks, Hendrik Willem was ordered to St. Petersburg, leaving his wife, newborn son, and mother-in-law behind in Poland. However, there was little of importance to report from Peter the Great’s canal-filled capital that summer, which fueled his unhappiness with

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his career. To his father-in-law, he explained that he had been suffering the last few months from “nervous headaches” and had been advised by a medical specialist to lead a quieter life. He furthermore believed he was able to do something better than his present work, which could be done by “almost any high school graduate or less. . . . Education does not pay in journalism. Cheek and nerve bring you a good deal further than knowledge.”24 A few weeks later, Hendrik Willem resigned from the Associated Press. He planned to obtain a Ph.D. degree in history at a German university. Once he had achieved that goal, he would like to return to the United States to get a teaching position at a history department of an American university. He also wanted to become a U.S. citizen. Eliza was delighted that they were to change from the “uncivilized” and “frightfully primitive” Poland to the “well-ordered” Germany, where she was familiar with the people’s language and culture. There, she assured her father, they would be able to live “comfortably though of course quietly” on both their incomes, which amounted to some 5,000 marks.25 Informing Andrew White of this decision, he summed up the political situation in Russia, which was characterized by an indifference of the people toward the tsar and the Duma. Considering the strength of the armed forces, there would not be a general revolution, but the masses were only biding their time until the revolutionaries, over a long time, had done “the dirty work” for them. The tsar, van Loon wrote, was either despised as a coward or described as a murderer. “The whole country is more deeply revolutionary than ever before. Only it is a sort of revolutionism which will not show itself in bombs. . . . Really this whole Russia looks like an enormous fools Paradise. Trade goes badly, there is starvation, half the intelligent people in prison, everybody discontented.” About the situation in Poland not many positive things could be mentioned either. “Three hangings a day is the rate, I believe. The worst is that you see all those things and can do nothing.”26 Van Loon would always have a negative view of Russia. In his 1932 book Geography he called it a country “which was prevented by its geographical location from ever finding out whether it was part of Europe or of Asia. . . . Karl Marx and Genghis Khan have joined forces to bring about the Millennium and what will come of this extraordinary experiment I do not know.” He warned that “the rest of the world would do well to take notice, for Bolshevism may be only a dream, but Russia is a fact.” And in a 1943 newspaper column, referring to the “little love” he felt for Joseph Stalin and the way he made history, he added, “I have never had much love for the way Russia made history, regardless of in whose name it was being made. After all, I am only a middle-class little Dutch boy and the Russian approach towards life has always been very different from that as practiced among the Calvinistic burghers of my native land.”27

Chapter 4

Historical Training in Munich (1907–1911) In choosing to go to Germany for his doctorate, Hendrik Willem was following a long-standing American tradition. Throughout the nineteenth century, a year or more at a German university like Leipzig, Halle, Göttingen, or Heidelberg was a sine qua non for any college graduate aspiring to obtain a first-rate professional training in the more specialized scholarly and scientific disciplines. What especially appealed American students to German universities was their specialized scholarship and the prevailing sense of academic freedom.1 After their gloomy year in Slavic Europe, the van Loons embraced life in Munich. They lived first in a congenial boarding house near the university and then in an apartment they were able to furnish with their own furniture and table silver. Hendrik Willem and Eliza especially enjoyed the cultural life of Bavaria’s capital. Hendrik Willem proudly reported to his father-in-law how pretty Eliza looked at a performance of Aida in her black dress and necklaces—“like a Russian Grand Duchess”—and how easily she made contact with all the Bavarian “Best Families.” In his opinion she represented her country much better on that occasion than the U.S. consul, who “seemed more the Representative of the Bowery than of any other part of the United States.”2 The U.S. consulate was one of the three American circles in Munich. Another one was the American Church of the Ascension whose rector, the Reverend Dr. Henry R. Wadleigh, and his wife Julia became close friends of the van Loons. They frequently listened to Dr. Wadleigh’s sermons and Hendrik Willem even became a vestryman in this Episcopal church. The most prestigious American circle revolved around the family of Edgar

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Hanfstaengl who owned a world-famous art reproducing firm and whose wife was American. Their second son, Ernst Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, known as Putzi, was then at Harvard and was to become an acquaintance of Hendrik Willem.3 The main reason for being in Munich was, of course, not society life but Hendrik Willem’s desire to obtain a German Ph.D. in history. A diary with intermittent entries from 30 November 1907 through 1 April 1909 as well as his letters to his father-in-law and Professor Burr, shed some light on Hendrik Willem’s experience at Munich University’s history department. It is not a very comforting picture we get from these sources. To be sure, Hendrik Willem was full of praise about the library, the Staatsbibliothek, which had a wonderful collection of books and greatly facilitated his work. The history department, however, he described in terms of “less wonderful” to “a mess.” One of the chief professors was in his perception so ardent a Catholic “that he is of no use to study with. . . . The other History Professors are good but not very inspiring.” He soon gave up going to lectures as he found them too uninteresting. Nor was he impressed with his fellow students. “Among the forty Seminar members nobody seems to know anything besides German and Latin. That is all they think they need. With these two languages they construct a dredging machine, settle down in some muddy archive and using paleography to make the engine run they go to work. Then they go on dredging for years. . . . The results of these years of dredging are put away in a book, locked up in a library and allowed to return to mud—via dust and the ashbarrel of the year 2000.” It did not take long for Hendrik Willem to conclude that “a course here makes one appreciate our American Universities in many respects” and that “I will have to work out my own salvation.”4 From December 1907 through the spring his diary entries show that Hendrik Willem frequently suffered from headaches and pain of the nerves. On New Year’s Eve he wished that 1908 would bring him better health but in January he complained that because of the pain and the physical lack of power he had hardly been able to accomplish anything. He also confessed to his diary that “the thing I want most of all is someone with whom I can talk. Either I am too broad or too narrow or they are too broad and too narrow, but excepting a few people who were much older than I was myself, I have found but very few people with whom I could get some sort of intellectual contact which satisfies me.” Since his physician in Munich was apparently of not much help, Hendrik Willem decided to consult his uncle Jan Hanken in The Hague. To his relief, so he reported at Easter to Professor Burr, “a very simple cure of much enforced rest” completely restored his health and allowed him to do the work he wanted to. On that trip to the Netherlands he met with the Dutch historian Professor P.J. Blok and found him “a most

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agreeable old gentleman.” After the van Loons had moved to their new apartment in the Kaulbachstrasse, Hendrik Willem worked hard on his dissertation, which was to cover a topic from Russia’s history. But in the evening he usually tore up the pieces he had written during the day, so he changed to a more familiar topic: a history of his native country in the eighteenth century. In June he underwent a long-overdue tonsillectomy and was happy to be able to write in his diary that he felt much better than ever before.5 That summer the van Loons made a short trip to Venice, after which Eliza and Hansje stayed south of Munich on Lake Starnberg with Hendrik Willem commuting there in the weekends. Among the relatives who visited them there was Eliza’s sister Fanny, who reported about the frail health of father Bowditch and advised her sister to go home for a visit. Eliza agreed and left with Hansje in October for the United States. Meanwhile, Hendrik Willem made a tour of Belgium with his uncle Jan Hanken and conducted his Ph.D. research at the Royal Library in The Hague. On 28 November he boarded a Holland–America liner for New York, where on 8 December the family was reunited. Soon thereafter they visited Ithaca and Eliza met Professor Burr and Hendrik Willem’s other friends from his Cornell days. Christmas was spent at Sunnyside visiting with his ailing father-in-law. While in Boston Hendrik Willem was invited by Putzi Hanfstaengl and Hans von Kaltenborn to speak about his Russian experiences at the recently founded Harvard Cosmopolitan Club. By mid-February the van Loons were back in Munich where the annual Fasching or Carnival season was in full swing, much to Eliza’s delight, though not to her husband’s. Hendrik Willem felt far from comfortable in Munich’s bohemian crowd, which set the tone at Fasching. He also disliked any gathering where large quantities of alcohol were consumed, since he himself could not drink. To Eliza’s father he remarked, “Ordinarily I hate beer. A quart glass makes me mix up our two key holes—after half a glass I insist upon entering the house by the windows.”6 In February 1909 Hendrik Willem penned in his diary that life was so uneventful and calm that there was hardly anything worthwhile to write about. The next few entries mention that at age twenty-seven he already weighed 219 pounds; that a Holland Club had been founded in Munich for which Hendrik Willem served as secretary (he was very skeptical about its chance of success); and—the last entry of this diary, on 1 April—that the first Zeppelin on its maiden flight had visited Munich, an event that the Associated Press had asked Hendrik Willem to cover. Although he had agreed to do this, it reminded him “a bit unpleasantly that I do not seem to be made for that sort of work.” That spring there was also a feeling of imminent war in the air. In a letter to Dr. Bowditch, Hendrik Willem reported on war preparations throughout Europe.7

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In July, Hendrik Willem successfully presented a paper on the Dutch revolution at his historical seminar. The professor praised his work and his fellow students expressed their admiration for the quality of the paper and his command over the German language. This pleasant end to his second academic year in Munich was followed by a trip to Halle for a gathering of Eliza’s German relatives. The van Loons also visited Wittenberg, the home of Martin Luther. The remaining months of 1909 were uneventful, with Hendrik Willem mainly focusing attention on his Ph.D. work.8 In January 1910 Hendrik Willem wrote Eliza’s father that there was “an awful lot of work to be done,” which left hardly any time for letter writing. He had just had his last language lessons; completing his dissertation was now his main occupation. He hoped to be able to write “a readable dissertation,” which in his opinion was hardly ever the case with most German theses (after having served their purpose, they “disappear in the waste-basket”). It was not without risk when one made a thesis interesting, Hendrik Willem wrote, because “the German Gelehrten-welt looks with suspicion on most things which are not covered with a certain dry dust.” This was simply a given of the German university system, but Hendrik Willem noticed there was an increasing minority opposing it. Seven months later, he notified his father-in-law that the last page of the dissertation had just been written. Since he had done this draft in Dutch, he was now revising it and would then translate it into German. Once that was accomplished, he intended to translate the German version into English and rework it into a book. Hendrik Willem wrote that he was very pleased with the last year. He was on good terms with his professors and he had been able to collect a lot of materials he could use in the future as a lecturer.9 In that same August letter to Henry Bowditch, Hendrik Willem reported that he had resigned as a vestryman “and everything connecting me with the Church of the American colony” in Munich. He was very disappointed that the work he and other “heathen” had done for the Episcopal church was supported so little by the members of the church itself, with Reverend Wadleigh doing least of all. Of course, he was well aware that he “should not judge the whole church by one individual minister or vestry but it all fitted in so beautifully with my former experiences and observations, that I have given up all hope of ever having the slightest sympathy for either the church or the doctrines it preaches.” The experience only confirmed his distaste for organized religion.10 There may have been another reason for his decision to quit the Episcopal church and his criticism of Reverend Wadleigh. To the Wadleighs, who were New Englanders, as well as to others in the American circles in Munich aware of Eliza’s prominent Boston family, her marriage to Hendrik Willem seemed “unsuited.” No doubt Hendrik Willem’s hypersensitive antennae must have

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picked up the signal that the Wadleighs and others were thinking that he had overstepped himself socially, which brought back unhappy memories of his days at Noorthey where so many boys had looked down upon him because his grandfather had been “just a jeweler.” To secure more social prestige, in 1909 Hendrik Willem engaged the services of a Dutch genealogist to find him a van Loon coat of arms, since the Bowditches also had one. The coat of arms of one Adrianus van Loon, an eighteenth-century resident of Oosterhout, was located. Although the genealogist’s research proved that there was not even a remote connection between the Oosterhout van Loons and the Rotterdam branch of the family, Hendrik Willem could not care less. He was so anxious to have a coat of arms that he appropriated it. A Munich jeweler carved the dubious emblem into seal rings for Eliza and himself and in later years Hendrik Willem gave similar seal rings to his other wives and mistresses. “His” coat of arms decorates van Loon’s headstone at the Old Greenwich cemetery.11 During the Munich years cracks began to appear in the relationship between Hendrik Willem and Eliza. On the intimate aspects of their relationship in this period one finds next to nothing in the van Loon correspondence, and the details given by their youngest son, Gerard Willem, in his biography of his father are far from objective. Both Hendrik Willem and Eliza were raised in the Victorian era and were not—as Hendrik Willem put it in his Report to Saint Peter—“submitted to any kind of sexual enlightenment.” To Dr. Wadleigh he admitted “that he had entered marriage as much a virgin as his wife,” which in those days was by no means unique. To her daughter-in-law, Eliza would later confide, “an egotist truly reveals himself in bed,” and “a woman’s physical enjoyment of sex is a masculine myth.” According to Gerard Willem van Loon this did not mean that she rejected sex. On the contrary, her passionate nature overwhelmed her husband with affection and he was not able to reciprocate. In her own words, he “was the sort of man who always had to be wooed.” In his son’s view, Hendrik Willem considered the sexual act as a “manly duty” and was sexually fixated on women’s feet and shoes, but above all, he wanted to be mothered. There were other aggravating factors that got on Eliza’s nerves, such as Hendrik Willem’s disregard for personal cleanliness, his disregard for her privacy—he hated locked bathroom doors—and his total lack of respect for “mine and thine.” He acquired the things he wanted to have and as easily disposed of things, even when they were not his but his wife’s possessions. Still, the couple often tried to mask these negative experiences in their marriage with well-meant small gifts to each other and a display of romanticism.12 Eliza thought that a daughter named after Hendrik Willem’s mother would hold the marriage together. In the spring of 1910 she became pregnant

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and in both her and her husband’s mind the baby, due in January, could be nothing else but a girl, they referred to it as Betsy. On 16 January 1911, two days after Hendrik Willem’s twenty-ninth birthday, the baby was born. It was a boy! Since the parents had lived for nine months with the name Betsy in mind, it took some time before a proper name was found; finally they settled on Gerard Willem, although the first name was rarely used.13 With the end of his studies approaching, Hendrik Willem focused his attention on finding a job at an American university. Unfortunately, his father-in-law, whose influential contacts in the East Coast academic world would have been very helpful, died that March. He applied to Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, whom he had met in 1909. There was no teaching position available in Cambridge, but Lowell suggested van Loon apply to a vacant position at Colorado College. This was certainly not what Hendrik Willem had in mind. Although he realized that as a “beginner” he should not ask too much, he thought that Colorado Springs was too far away. He wanted a job on the East Coast, preferably in or near a city. Anything in a small town in other parts of the country would seem like cultural exile. Columbia, Amherst, or Princeton would be ideal. Friends warned him that junior professors at American colleges worked long hours for a low salary, but this is what he wanted.14 Meanwhile, Hendrik Willem studied for his doctoral exam, which covered all kinds of topics that in his opinion would never be “of the slightest value to you or anybody else. From time to time, in order to escape absolute lunacy, I amuse myself by cutting little paper figures.” On 19 July Hendrik Willem passed the exam magna cum laude and the ordeal was over. Eliza told her sister Fanny she was glad “that he didn’t get ‘summa’ or he would have had to live up to it all his life.” Herr Doktor van Loon was an impressive figure whom one could not overlook. Referring to his unusual length and weight, some people even thought he was working in a circus.15 The next month the van Loons left Munich for a long holiday in the Netherlands. In late October the family sailed on Holland–America Line’s Noordam to the United States, where the pater familias still hoped to secure a teaching position in Clio’s garden.16

Part II

In Search of a Place

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Chapter 5

Washington Years of Trial and Error (1912–1914) After they had spent Christmas 1911 at Sunnyside, Hendrik Willem and Eliza van Loon decided to settle in Washington, D.C. They rented a big house on Twenty-first Street and hired two servants, thereby overstretching their finances. Through Eliza’s cousin Fanny Bowditch Dixwell, who was married to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the doors of the capital’s elite were opened to the van Loons, including invitations from President and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson in the White House. Hendrik Willem’s diary also records a private dinner with British Ambassador James Bryce, author of The American Commonwealth. About this visit to Lord Bryce, who served in Washington from 1907 to 1913, he wrote, “He seems to have known everybody everywhere. I do not see how he keeps his information straight—if his mind is made like his library. Such a disorder. I never saw invitations of all sorts—cards of all sorts—despatches of all sorts— everywhere. When a match was needed he rolled a piece of paper—fashion A.D. 1500—lit the cigaret and then to extinguish the paper beat it against the stones of the mantelpiece. Of course, sparks and pieces of charred paper, flew all over. But it was all very pleasant.”1 As a consequence of these valuable contacts, van Loon became a member of the prestigious Cosmos Club. Meanwhile, he reworked his dissertation into a manuscript called The Fall of the Dutch Republic (echoing the title of John Lothrop Motley’s famous The Rise of the Dutch Republic), prepared lectures, offered his services to some Ivy League universities, and made himself the Washington correspondent of the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad. None of these activities brought in the necessary cash to pay the bills. Hendrik Willem’s inheritance having been spent in Munich, the van

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Loons were now living on Eliza’s decreasing capital and after some time moved to a more modest home nearby.2 In the fall of 1912 the publisher Houghton Mifflin in Boston offered Hendrik Willem a contract for The Fall of the Dutch Republic. His editor Ferris Greenslet provided an introduction to Oswald Garrison Villard, publisher of The Nation, and Hendrik Willem began writing book reviews and articles for that periodical. He also met Benjamin W. Huebsch, another book publisher. The contacts with these men gave Hendrik Willem an entrance in the East Coast literary set.3 When The Fall of the Dutch Republic, which Hendrik Willem dedicated to the memory of his mother, came out in March, doubts about his own work came to the surface. To Professor Burr he wrote that the book had become “less of a History than a Sermon—a sermon against our terrible Dutch habit of self[-]satisfaction—a habit which as you know has cost us much misery.” Burr, however, a few days after having received a copy of the book waved away all doubts about the quality and was full of praise. “It is fascinating reading,” he wrote his protégé. “With all my heart I congratulate you on your masterly control of the English idiom and on the vim and pungency of your style.” That same day Burr also sent a most laudatory letter about the book to Houghton Mifflin, which the publisher reprinted shortly thereafter in The Nation as an ad.4 Despite his mentor’s effusive compliments, van Loon remained haunted by self-doubts. Hendrik Willem asked Houghton Mifflin to send copies of the book to a number of people in the Netherlands, including Queen Wilhelmina and Professor P.J. Blok of Leiden University. Further copies went out to the White House, the French, Dutch, and British ambassadors in Washington, old friends Melville Stone and Andrew White, and many others.5 Professor Blok—who in Hendrik Willem’s eyes was “so very archivy”— had a positive reaction. Of course, van Loon admitted to Burr, The Fall of the Dutch Republic “is a book ‘of views’ and not ‘of research’ (which no doubt grieveth [Blok] a little bit) but then they like that sort of thing in America.” The other Dutch reactions were similarly positive. The Dutch historian Nicolas Japikse who reviewed the book in a scholarly journal, was not too pleased with van Loon’s ironic style but considered the volume a generally reliable though somewhat unbalanced short history of the Dutch Republic in the eighteenth century, based on modern historiography and written for an American public. The Dutch appreciation for his book led to van Loon’s appointment, in January 1914, as member of the Utrecht Historical Society.6 American reviews of The Fall of the Dutch Republic were also favorable, including those in the New York Times and the Yale Review. By far the most enthusiastic review was in the Chicago Record. The anonymous critic of this

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newspaper called van Loon’s book “a shocking example of history made racy” and asked, “Who is this bold breaker of all the canons of historical art, this iconoclast who dares to write history as if he enjoyed it? At this rate history books will soon be listed among ‘the best sellers.’ [A prophesy indeed for a number of van Loon’s books, though not ‘soon’ to be realized.] If the supremacy of the novelist is to be maintained this van Loon, whoever he is, must be suppressed.” Having voluntarily sat up till 1:30 A.M. to finish “a Dutch history of all things,” the reviewer warned the reader “not to dip into this bewitching book unless he wishes to be held tightly in its clutches until he has finished it.” Van Loon had been able to make a dull and uninteresting period of Dutch history come alive with “humor and literary skill.” The Fall of the Dutch Republic in this critic’s view not only bore “the marks of careful study and wide culture,” he also considered it “a contribution to the history of human institutions, for it shows the inevitable consequences of ‘private initiative’ in ‘business’—of the worship of the golden calf of commercial success which dominated the narrow-minded plutocracy that ruled the Netherlands during the period of its decay.”7 The favorable reviews notwithstanding, The Fall of the Dutch Republic sold fewer than seven hundred copies, many of which bought by the author himself. Van Loon’s editor Ferris Greenslet observed, “I suppose the streetcar service would pay better than writing history.” And it was cash that Hendrik Willem needed badly. In his diary he wrote that the lack of money and the failure of his book made him feel physically miserable and he wondered whether success would ever come his way. He desperately turned to his mentor, asking Professor Burr whether there was a place for him at Cornell “as kitchen-boy or bell-ringer of the Historical Department.” Because of an “anxious time of annual deficit,” Burr replied, there was no possibility at all, but in case the situation improved Cornell would bear him in mind.8 To see to it that his alma mater would not forget him, van Loon offered Cornell a series of lantern-slides lectures on Dutch history free of charge. His proposal was accepted and in August 1913 in an all-or-nothing gamble he presented himself in action to the faculty. Despite his accent, he was a natural on the platform. Evaluating his first lecture, on social life in the seventeenth century, Hendrik Willem wrote in his diary that working with slides was something new that he had to learn. In general he thought his first performance had gone well but he decided henceforth to reduce the erudition in his lectures. He had given 70 percent whereas for most people 10 percent would do, he thought. Although he was touched by the kindness of Cornell’s faculty, he despaired at the apparent practical uselessness of devoting a career to history. “It seems,” he wrote Burr, “that to stick to such a thing as History for a living, means very little support from the powers that hold the cords of the purse.” He would, however, not yet give up since “this is the work for which

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evidently I have been sent to this curious planet.” Other letters to Burr and White that summer were optimistic about his prospects, but in his diary he wrote that his scholarly pursuits had made him a beggar who had lost the respect of the outside world. He assumed he himself was to blame for this situation, even if he could find fault with himself only in the inadequate ability to advertise himself.9 That fall van Loon started to work feverishly on a new book, The Rise of the Dutch Kingdom. After a week of fourteen-to-sixteen-hour days, he had written the introduction and 200 pages. “After many years of preparation the entire book was ready in my mind,” he explained to Andrew White. In December the manuscript was finished. Although Houghton Mifflin offered to publish it, Hendrik Willem thought they had not done enough to promote his first book and placed the new manuscript with Doubleday, Page and Company.10 In the meantime van Loon worried about the future of his children— should he make them Dutch or American?—and his own future—would his chances for work be better in his native country or in the United States? Another letter to Professor Burr was the means of working out the answers for himself. America offered him and his children more than Holland, “where behind green and stagnant waters, all problems take the shape of deliberately grazing cows.” The thing he resented most in the United States were his Boston relatives with whom, he felt, he could not talk. They all knew he was financially dependent on his wife and consequently showed their disapproval. His future, therefore, should be outside of the Boston area. He contemplated leaving journalism and that “superficial and intellectually dreadfully monotonous, empty and hollow city” of Washington, working out his salvation by devoting himself “exclusively to History.” Although the outcome was unknown, he had “that vague and undefinable feeling that at last our worst time is over—that the first signs of a prospective breeze are beginning to fill our outspread sails—that we are getting near some sort of terra firma.”11 Early in 1914 Hendrik Willem commenced working on a history of Russia. There was no American publisher, however, who thought this would sell—unless there was another revolution. Other book proposals of his that were turned down were biographies of Hugo Grotius and John de Witt. None of this discouraged him; on the contrary, the struggle with the publishers—ironically called by van Loon “these pillars of culture [who] deal in books the way the grocer deals in pickled herring”—gave him “intense pleasure” and sharpened his “dull wit a bit.” Following Burr’s advice after the Cornell lectures, Hendrik Willem took lessons in public speaking and was carefully going over his lectures with a good instructor, he reported to his mentor. Yet, he never lost his accent nor did he seriously attempt to get rid of

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it. In February he presented an illustrated lecture on “The Social Life of the Dutch Republic in the Period of the Great Painters” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, at Yale University, and elsewhere. The lecture tour garnered praise as “witty and informing” with van Loon commended for his ability to “make the past live in terms of the present.”12 After this successful lecture tour van Loon prepared a series of twelve lectures on Dutch and Slavic history and designed a brochure to market them. This illustrated circular told the reader that lectures could be booked on such topics as “The Flemish School” (1400–1500), “The Navigators of Holland” (1580–1680), “Rembrandt” (1607–1669), or “The Fall of the Dutch Republic” (1700–1795). His efforts that spring to advertise himself, not only in this circular but also by sending out drawings and articles, did not meet with a positive response. In his diary he recorded “endless miserable days” and concluded that he apparently was “a totally useless commodity in this world.”13 Unexpectedly however, through a friend of Eliza’s, Bayard Quincy Morgan who taught German at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Hendrik Willem in late April was offered the possibility of giving a summer course in art history there. He offered to deliver his lecture on “The Social Life in the Dutch Republic of the Seventeenth Century” during the spring semester so the college could first see him in action. The letter and résumé Morgan suggested van Loon send to the dean apparently were persuasive enough, since the records do not mention any audition lecture. Indeed, the six-week course proved to be a great success. A letter of recommendation by the University of Wisconsin stated that “Dr. Van Loon has an unusually strong personality and breadth of experience and training. . . . He presents with force and clearness the history of art, the economic reasons and background for the development of the various national schools, and the conditions which made their work possible. . . . His lectures are exceedingly interesting and stimulating and offer a very wholesome change of diet from the customary lectures on the appreciation of artistic technique as illustrated by individual pictures.”14 Many years later, Bayard Quincy Morgan, by then teaching at Stanford University, recalled that van Loon was “the most impressive man I ever met.” Morgan thought Hendrik Willem was “a supremely brilliant man . . . [whose] lectures were often unsurpassable.” However, it had not escaped Morgan’s perception that van Loon was “too much of an individualist, too undisciplined—which also means lacking in exact scholarship—to feel at ease in an academic environment or to satisfy academic requirements.”15 That summer of 1914, fatal shots from an assassin’s weapon killed Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, during his visit

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to the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. A chain reaction of declarations of war followed as a consequence of the European alliance system and set the old continent on fire. The Great War began. Although in accordance with its established policy of remaining aloof from European power politics Holland declared its neutrality in the conflict, Hendrik Willem immediately volunteered his services to the Netherlands consul in New York. The consul replied that his official instructions told him that no volunteers were taken, but privately he thought that there were certainly things to do for anyone who wanted to help. And that was the answer van Loon had hoped for. To Professor Burr he reported that he was abandoning his history of Russia and was preparing to sail in late August to Rotterdam, where he would “volunteer for whatever there is to do.”16 There was also a business side to his trip. Van Loon had agreed with Douglas Doty, editor of The Century Magazine, that he would give this periodical “the first chance at any literary material which [would] grow out of [his] experience in the Lowlands during the next few months.” This not only meant three or four illustrated articles at $200 each, but also that The Century Magazine offered him a book contract based upon his war experiences. Hendrik Willem also told Melville Stone about his plans and the Associated Press chief assured him that he would welcome any of van Loon’s reports. Having taken care of these matters, Hendrik Willem agreed with Eliza that she and the children would spend the winter in New York while the house in Washington was sublet. Now everything was ready for his passage on the Nieuw Amsterdam, a return to his jeopardized native country that Gerard Willem van Loon in the biography of his father sourly termed “a flight.”17

Chapter 6

The Great War (1914–1918) Even before the Nieuw Amsterdam had reached Rotterdam, Hendrik Willem felt the shadow of the war. In an act of piracy the ship was captured by the French cruiser Savoie in the Channel and taken to Brest. There, as van Loon cabled the Associated Press, the ocean liner was “deprived [of ] all foodstuffs [and a] million [and a] half silver bars for [the] Dutch government while eighthundred German [and] Austrian subjects [both] reservists and private citizens until sixty years [of ] age [were] confined [to] Devils Island on French coast.” Hendrik Willem, who served as interpreter for the captain, was allowed to get ashore and quickly sent a telegram to the London bureau of the Associated Press. As the ship had been incommunicado, van Loon’s cable made headlines; one of the detained passengers was the wife of the first secretary of the U.S. embassy in Berlin, so the American government officially protested to Paris. Finally, the Nieuw Amsterdam, including the German women, was allowed to continue its trip, arriving in Rotterdam six days late.1 Melville Stone was delighted about van Loon’s scoop and asked him to go at once to Antwerp. This Belgian port city with its strategic position on the river Scheldt was under German siege. Hendrik Willem reported on the human misery he encountered there and almost became a war victim himself. To Katy Codman, Eliza’s cousin, he wrote, “Deduct 60% of all you read about German atrocities, deduct another 20% on account of war excitement. The remaining 20% shows such a vile picture of drunken pillaging— burning—hanging and murdering that all the German professors of ethics can not talk it into decent shape if they tried for twenty years.” In a letter the same day to The Century Magazine’s Douglas Doty, van Loon added, “Steady streams of wounded pour into the city [of Antwerp]. Long, almost endless rows of refugees, the very poorest people, fill the streets with the noise of hurried wooden shoes. Children are everywhere and the puttee-puttee of their

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tired little feet produces a weird music which I hope to compose with a dedication to our friends across the Rhine.”2 On 7 October, a few days before Antwerp was taken by the Germans, the Amsterdam newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad published van Loon’s detailed report on an adventurous tour he had made through the countryside south of Antwerp. During this trip van Loon and an American journalist saw the grim face of war—streams of refugees fleeing north, deserted and ruined villages and death, wounded and exhausted Belgian soldiers. Suddenly they got in the middle of artillery fighting between Belgian and German troops near the small town of Waerloos. Both men barely escaped being killed by German shells and were led to safety by five Belgian soldiers. The editor of the Algemeen Handelsblad introduced and praised this “very important” and “somewhat passionate” front-page story as “a sincere expression of disgust of the war.”3 Back in The Hague, where he had set up the Associated Press’s Holland bureau at the Hotel de Zalm, van Loon reported to Professor Burr that as a correspondent at the front line he had “lived right in the middle of all the misery, went through all the stages of battle, retreat, bombardment, debacle, völkerwanderung, death, endless wounded, hunger, refugees with children of three days.” The New York office was full of praise for van Loon’s reports from the war zone, saying that the stories about the Belgian situation were met in the United States with a “splendid response . . . to those suffering people.” Van Loon dedicated “this little success” to his Cornell mentor.4 In early December, van Loon sent a telegram to Douglas Doty to let him know that he expected to return to America sometime in January; it would then take him a month to finish a book about his war experiences for he was “overflowing with the stuff.” After the Belgian campaign, however, he had become “very ill” and had “to stick to a terribly strict diet” but expected “to pull through allright.” Doty pencilled on the telegram: “Promising? Dr. Van Loon is both an historian and a clever writer to come.”5 Meanwhile, an editorial in Algemeen Handelsblad in mid-November gained wide circulation in Europe and North America. It suggested that the Netherlands and the United States should offer to mediate in war-torn Europe in an attempt to end the unnecessary suffering of hundreds of thousands of people. “In God’s holy name,” the editorial ended, “let something be done again to bring peace on earth. It is unbearable longer to look on inactive at the massacre of the flower of Europe’s young manhood, of the hope of the future.” The Washington correspondent of the London Times wrote his own dispatch on the piece, which implied “the existence of peaceintriguers [. . . and] various hints from German intriguers, not altogether idle in neutral European countries.” In response, van Loon sent a letter from

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The Hague to the editor of The Nation, which was published in the 21 January 1915 issue as “Tricks of Newspaper Correspondents.” Van Loon “most emphatically” stated that the author of the editorial in the Amsterdam newspaper was “not a German intriguer.” On the contrary, having seen the war at first hand, he had thought that any attempt at trying to end this war “would be welcomed by decent-thinking people.” Van Loon commented that the Dutch editorialist wanted to make “this statement for the benefit of the American public,” and not for the Times correspondent in Washington: “To show one of Lord Northcliffe’s employees the difference between the truth and the other would be as ungrateful a task as an attempt to explain the beauties of the rainbow to a deaf man who was color-blind.”6 Van Loon got into another Anglo-Dutch dustup in February, when he was back in Washington. Novelist H.G. Wells suggested in the New York Times that the Dutch, “for the cause of justice,” should help the British troops to strike at Germany from Dutch territory for which they would eventually receive “territorial compensation.” The Times invited van Loon to reply. In his piece, van Loon emphasized the fact that Holland was a neutral country; unless attacked directly, it would not take part in the war. In his view the direct issue was between England and Germany who were “fighting for the supremacy of commerce.” Holland performed “a very difficult act of balancing.” Germany, he stated, in the past had never done any damage to the Dutch. “We may not like her, but she has in a very careful way avoided all friction and has treated us with great consideration.” This was very much in contrast with England, which in the past three centuries had “constantly” harmed the Netherlands and van Loon gave some examples. Though there was no Dutch hostility toward England, there was clearly no reason either, he wrote, “why Holland should make the sacrifice of her own existence for the benefit of England.” Van Loon compared the Dutch situation with “the position of a dog that has often been beaten innocently and that is now smiled upon and asked to be good and attack another person who has never done him any harm.”7 His New York Times article had made a good stir, Hendrik Willem wrote Katy Codman. In his opinion both Germans and Allies were to blame, “the brutality of the German military has only been equalled by the lying of the Allied press and . . . the great question for us is not ‘how to get ourselves into wild anger against 66 million people’ but try and understand what can be done to prevent a recurrence of this idiotic process of waste.” Van Loon was supported in his views by Andrew White. The former Cornell president and diplomat, who usually had “much greater love for and sympathy with the Germans than with the English,” but in this war sympathized with the Allies, was pleased by van Loon’s article. “Great Britain,” he wrote, “expects sympathy from countries like yours and mine when she has never shown the slightest

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sympathy with either of us in our greatest troubles and distresses but has always chosen just those times to insult, ‘bully’ and injure us.”8 In early April the New York Times printed a letter by van Loon in which he made an analogy between war and earthquakes, comparing the layers in the composition of human society—both within a country and in the relationship between countries—to the layers in the earth’s composition that occasionally and inevitably would result in earthquakes (wars). To remedy this situation, he argued, the ruling classes in the several nations should be “reshaped . . . in such a fashion that they will most closely be at the same level. For as long as every little part of the world through its government is in a different historical layer, we shall have war. On the other hand, when the governing strata in the bigger nations shall most nearly correspond we shall have less friction.”9 The war remained pressing, but van Loon also had his career to worry about. To Katy Codman he wrote that “lectures are unproductive of cash and the only alternative, ‘advertisement,’ is not forthcoming either.” And to Burr he confessed that he was haunted by doubts. He had successfully lectured “in all sorts of places” and written more in the months since he was back in Washington than ever before, and yet he had the feeling of life as “an utter failure.” His was “a career of great outward success with almost unbearable personal unhappiness,” a complaint he would often repeat in the years ahead.10 When his second book, The Rise of the Dutch Kingdom came out in the spring of 1915, it merely “was smiled upon,” as he told Burr. This was probably his “last attempt at decent and scientific history. The children grow too hungry.” Fortunately, The Rise of the Dutch Kingdom, which covered the years 1795–1813, was received positively in the New York Times. The reviewer thought van Loon had made the best of his material, which covered a somewhat dour period, describing his style as standing “somewhere between the explosive familiarity of Carlyle and the ‘snappiness’ of the average newspaper reporter. It is frankly impressionistic, but it makes a chronicle of vacillation bearable; it arouses interest even in perpetual indecisions and inexpressible stupidity.”11 In May van Loon was offered a position as lecturer in modern European history at Cornell for the next academic year. He was thrilled to accept, but first he would go back to Holland for the summer to file more Associated Press stories. To get everything organized for his trip to Holland he was now, he wrote his mentor, “in a Rooseveltian hustle.” Just before he left, van Loon received letters of recommendation from Cornell University’s President Jacob Gould Schurman and from U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan.

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He sent an article to the New York Times about the principle of the freedom of the seas, which was so heavily jeopardized by the war situation and as a consequence of which, according to van Loon, the small neutral countries suffered most.12 While he was away, The Century Magazine published two articles van Loon had written that spring. One was on the German war strategy and the other a fiction story on a Belgian civilian turned soldier who died in action and was reported missing. The July issue also featured an introduction by van Loon to someone else’s article on Holland’s neutrality. In this introduction van Loon tried to explain the difficult position of the Dutch as a neutral country whose economy and foreign trade were “hampered upon all sides.” Holland “has been abused by her neighbors for her lukewarmness in what they consider a holy cause, she has lost all chances of future political reward by her abstention from the conflict; yet future generations will recognize that during those very difficult days little Holland calmly maintained a just neutrality” even while taking care of 300,000 Belgian refugees. These articles probably made up for the book van Loon had promised Doty to write on his war experiences, but had been unable to produce.13 Van Loon continued to advocate his native country’s neutral position and to monitor how it was perceived in the United States. He was upset by an attack, published on 6 June in the Sunday Magazine of the New York Times by one John Martin American. Van Loon trashed the article, “Will Holland Be Swept Into the War?” in a letter pointing out its many factual errors. In many other letters to the editor and articles in leading American periodicals over the next three years, van Loon kept explaining the historical and cultural background to the neutrality of countries like Sweden, Denmark, and Holland. He tried to make Americans understand the difficulties small neutral countries in Europe faced as a consequence of the war, situated as they were “between the aquatic and terrestrial devils.” In a 1916 letter to the liberal-intellectual magazine The New Republic he stated that the Allies had not made it clear that they were “not fighting for their own pocketbooks.” The neutral nations had no reason to trust the Allies more than the Germans and the other Central Powers. Van Loon maintained that position until the United States joined the war in April 1917 and President Wilson gave the Allies “the rallying faith of a new and equitable society of nations,” which would lead to “the emancipation of the human race and the substitution of law and justice for the brute argument of the sword.”14 In February 1916 his prescient analysis “The World After the War” appeared in The Century. In this article van Loon claimed that history is an art based upon science, but the course of history could be changed at any moment by a combination of unexpected circumstances and personalities; this made worthwhile “historical prophecies . . . impossible.” Nevertheless,

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he was prepared to offer some, the first being that since the war had made the working classes in Europe aware of their power, the years after the war would see “a most severe social revolution” and “the outbreak of labor troubles everywhere,” even in the United States. Specifically he predicted a Socialist government in Germany, revolution in Russia with a better chance for victory than in 1905—and continued unrest in England and France. He acknowledged the tremendous effects of the war on men, but argued its impact was even greater on women, who with their men gone during the war had “for the first time in their dreary lives tasted liberty [and] in many instances discovered that they could handle affairs much better than their men.” Van Loon’s conclusion that the old order of things would vanish is borne out by the success of the women’s suffrage movement, as well as by the verdicts of respected historians like Barbara Tuchman. In her The Proud Tower, Tuchman said the ancien régime of 1890–1914 ended abruptly because of World War I, which “lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours.”15 By October 1915 van Loon was back at Cornell. His unorthodox way of teaching modern European history quickly made him a well-known and popular professor. As one of his students remembered, “I started in his first course on Modern European History in a small room seating about thirty-five. Before that term was up, his lectures had been transferred to one of the largest rooms in Goldwin Smith [Hall], with a rule that an enrolled student who was not in his seat five minutes before the start of class could lose his seat to any visitor.” The student recalled van Loon—often wearing a bright tie (yellow and pink were favorites)—using crayons as he lectured to rapidly sketch “a person, a place or an event on large sheets of brown paper. . . . In his brilliant, amusing and stimulating lectures, he often would say in his Shakespearian tones and mode of speech: ‘I make you see and know Napoleon or the English Industrial Revolution or the geography of Europe and its effect on history (or whatever), but if you want exact facts go to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.’ ”16 Cornell historian Morris Bishop wrote that the “gigantic, brilliant, unorthodox Netherlander . . . enthralled” his audiences. Several of his colleagues, however, were not amused, since they saw their classes shrink as van Loon’s grew in popularity. Furthermore, they “heard tales of monstrous historical errors” and alleged that van Loon’s way of teaching did not provide the students with sufficient knowledge, and what little they had, was incorrect. The jealous rivals allegedly asked, “Is this history or vaudeville?” Fuming at this criticism, van Loon gave his class a pop quiz; to his chagrin, it showed the students lacked knowledge of the facts. Bishop explained this as “the old conflict of inspiration, though inaccurate, with scholarship, though dull.” In a way, his critics were not completely wrong: van Loon confessed much later that following his return to the United States in 1911, he spent time in

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vaudeville theaters studying how monologists there held the attention of an audience. Despite the sniping, van Loon’s contract as a lecturer in modern European history was extended by Cornell’s President Schurman in May 1916 for another academic year. Meanwhile, he retained a lecture agent to arrange speaking engagements and continued reaching out to the general public by sending letters and articles to the New York Times.17 In the summer of 1916 van Loon planned to return to Europe to collect documents relating to the war in England and France for Cornell’s University Library, his own lectures, and his articles. To that end, as a “declarant” of U.S. citizenship, he asked the State Department to issue him an American passport. Although van Loon’s request was supported by growing letters of recommendation, Secretary of State Robert Lansing turned him down since a law forbade him to issue a passport to declarants who intended to visit belligerent countries such as Britain and France. Instead, he gave van Loon a letter of introduction to U.S. diplomatic and consular officers in Europe, just as Bryan had done the year before.18 Then, unexpectedly, the British ambassador to Washington declared van Loon a persona non grata in England as a consequence of his New York Times articles on Dutch neutrality—especially his February 1915 reaction to Wells’s article—which were considered anti-British. In a letter to Andrew White, van Loon said the ambassador had turned him “into some sort of Eminence Grise, a cunning spy of high repute.” Van Loon considered the situation “very silly and very absurd” and therefore decided to limit his European trip to studying the situation in the three neutral Scandinavian countries. “My Erasmian spirit,” he wrote, “does not contemplate the future with any great pleasure. The anger on all sides is so great and so unreasonable that we shall come upon an era of grave injustice towards the small nations. The temper of the big states will be that of an angry man who beats his dog to relieve his own mind.”19 As it happened, van Loon’s summer trip was complicated by the difficulties of war time: travel blockades, mines and submarines, and the British demand that captains of neutral ships sailing the northern part of the North Sea report at Kirkwall on the Orkney Islands to have their ships inspected from top to bottom by British authorities looking for contraband and stowaways. When his ocean liner was in the North Sea, he reported, the German Zeppelin L-30 “came down to within about 600 feet of the ship and circled round her three times, so that the passengers could see the crew looking out of their car. Then the machine rose up to an altitude of 3,000 feet or more, and winged her way toward the English coast.”20 After van Loon returned from Scandinavia for his second year at Cornell, a full-time position in the history department came open. Andrew White and

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others pushed for the appointment of the popular lecturer. But several factors decreased van Loon’s prospects. His students may have loved his idiosyncratic, amusing approach, but they performed poorly on tests required by the history department. And George Burr, who had done so much to help his Dutch protégé, had reservations about hiring van Loon. Burr was proud to have seen van Loon mature as a lecturer and teacher but, as he told White, Hendrik Willem still lacked “a sound and thorough knowledge of history” and “a scholar’s grounding in the elements of his subject.” From the time Burr first took van Loon under his wing, the young man “seemed destined for the career of a mere journalist.” Having observed him long enough now, Burr was more and more convinced that van Loon’s best chances for a successful career were “with more popular audiences than ours—as a general lecturer before mixed audiences.”21 The vacant chair was offered to someone else but when Hendrik Willem van Loon bade farewell to the university in June 1917, he had no hard feelings. Cornell President Schurman expressed his sincere appreciation for van Loon’s “stimulating work” as a lecturer on modern European history in the past two years and added, “We are going to miss very much a man of your variety of interests, independence of thought, and gift of lively and entertaining conversation.” In retrospect, Morris Bishop agreed with Andrew White that it was a pity that Cornell was not “large enough to contain a man with van Loon’s rare virtues and common faults.”22 During his last year at Cornell, van Loon had published two more books. The first one, The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators, was illustrated with seventy reproductions of old prints. In the introduction of the book van Loon argued that the significance of the frontier for American society (“the conquest of the West”) is comparable to the importance of “the conquest of the sea” for Dutch society. In both cases it offered a “wonderful chance to escape” and created a “veritable atmosphere of liberty, . . . not only the liberty of political activity, but freedom of thought and independence.” In January 1917, van Loon gave a talk on his book at the annual meeting of The Netherlands Society of Philadelphia. The basis of success of Holland’s navigators and the subsequent Dutch colonial empire was the maintenance of Grotius’s idea of the open sea. That same spirit was still very much alive, he said, but in the present war a small country like Holland was now having “an extremely hard time in keeping that narrow path between the Channel and the North Sea upon which it [had] been forced for such a very long time.”23 A Short History of Discovery was a children’s book that, in simple understandable language, aimed to tell the story of discovery “from the earliest times to the founding of colonies on the American continent.” In the

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foreword van Loon criticized the many historians who had turned “history into a sacred substance administered to the masses in large but indigestible doses.” In his opinion they were “like cooks who recite chapters from a cook book rather than boil us a palatable pudding.”24 Despite the fact that Hendrik Willem had dedicated A Short History of Discovery to his wife and children, his domestic life was far from flourishing. They may no longer have been living off Eliza’s income, but the situation between husband and wife did not improve once the family moved to Ithaca and Hendrik Willem was bringing in his own income. Things came to a head in December 1916, when Hendrik Willem was in New York for business. Eliza opened a letter addressed to her husband bearing no return address. It was a love letter, written in a feminine hand and signed “C,” and to make things worse, this correspondent discussed Hendrik’s and Eliza’s married life. When she furiously confronted Hendrik Willem upon his return to Ithaca, he counter attacked that she had no right to open his mail and denied there had been anything between him and this woman. (In fact, he had met Coba de Bergh, a Dutch piano teacher while on a visit to England, and they exchanged some heated letters before it fizzled out.) After having delivered his final lectures at Cornell, Hendrik Willem left for a while to live at the Netherlands Club in New York’s Gramercy Park, and Eliza moved with the boys into a smaller house in Ithaca; she also asked her lawyer and brother-in-law, Eliot Jones, to look into the possibility of a divorce.25 President Woodrow Wilson had tried to keep his country out of the war as long as possible, but when faced with German unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917 and American ships torpedoed the following month, with heavy losses, he had no alternative but to ask Congress to declare war. On 7 April, the day after both Houses adopted the war resolution, the New York Tribune headlined “America in Armageddon.” After almost three years of neutrality the American people were spiritually not ready for the war and probably most opposed it. To persuade the American public of the need for war Wilson set up a Committee on Public Information. It was chaired by George Creel, a man who shared Wilson’s messianic ideals, calling the war “a Crusade not merely to re-win the tomb of Christ, but to bring back to earth the rule of right, the peace, goodwill to men and gentleness he taught.” To “sell” the war to the people, Creel’s committee flooded the United States with anti-German propaganda. The militant campaign in 1917 and 1918 against everything German grew to ridiculous proportions. Symphony orchestras no longer dared to play their German repertoires, German language and German philosophy disappeared from the curriculum of a number of colleges and words like German measles and sauerkraut became “liberty measles” and

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“liberty cabbage.” Nor were the neutral Dutch exempt; they were depicted as pro-German war profiteers.26 As van Loon’s time at Cornell drew to a close, he made plans to once again return to the Netherlands. He booked passage on the Holland–America Line’s Noordam, but the steamer was delayed because of the war. While awaiting the ship’s arrival in New York, van Loon met Theodore Roosevelt at the Harvard Club and discussed Dutch neutrality. Once on board the Noordam, van Loon followed up with a letter to the former president. Though his native country had followed the example of the United States when it was still neutral, in the American press, van Loon stated, the Dutch were “made out to be a minor species of human being because we do not join in a war which must mean complete destruction to us.” Holland suffered severely from the war, with every man doing his duty to maintain independence and by taking care of the many Belgian refugees. He thought it very unfair that the Dutch were now exposed to “a Northcliffian attack in the New York papers.”27 Van Loon had typed this letter to Roosevelt on stationery of “The Vigilantes, A Non-Partisan Organization of Authors, Artists and Others for Patriotic Purposes,” of which one of the four purposes mentioned on the letterhead was “To work with especial vigor for Universal Military Training and Service under exclusive Federal control, as a basic principle of American democracy.” Both van Loon and Roosevelt were listed as contributing members of this organization, obviously an offspring of the Committee on Public Information, together with more than three hundred others who formed a cross section of the American intelligentsia. A prominent exception was the essayist Randolph Bourne, the keenest critic of the war. In his principal forum, the new magazine The Seven Arts, Bourne charged that his fellow intellectuals “seem to have forgotten that the real enemy is War rather than imperial Germany.”28 Van Loon published a short article on the war in the same magazine’s August issue. Although the U.S. government had materially made preparations for the war, van Loon argued, it had not provided a clear-cut goal, only a “recruiting poster.” He asserted that, instead of fighting for national doctrines, democracy and all kinds of rights and other “worn-out ideals,” he himself was prepared to “fight for only one good and holy cause: To make the world safe for my children.” The kind of world he imagined, he wrote, was not based on “paper Leagues of armed Peace and societies of enthusiasts, [as he did not want] this war to be the vindication of one set of bad principles over another.” Thus, van Loon took an ambivalent position: on the one hand he apparently was active in a Creel committee, “The Vigilantes,” and yet in

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his article for The Seven Arts he criticized the U.S. government for not adequately having “mobilized the spirit.”29 On the afternoon of 3 August, the day before the Noordam was due to arrive in Holland, the 550-feet-long ship struck a chain connecting two freefloating British mines off the coast of the Dutch island of Texel. There were two explosions, but no one was hurt. Nevertheless, the steamer was evacuated and each man was assigned an oar on the lifeboats. Hendrik Willem was quoted in the front-page New York Times article: “The tugboat Thames picked up all the survivors in the course of about three hours. Heavy seas and squalls threatened the destruction of the overloaded craft, and floating mines added to the horror of the eighteen hours’ trip to land.” By the next morning, all the passengers were safely ashore at the nearby port of Den Helder. The accident, which van Loon described to Andrew White as a “tragic and ridiculous affair,” proved to be a traumatic experience for him: his bout of rowing in the lifeboat caused a hernia. An Amsterdam surgeon patched up his hernia and removed his appendix—the latter an unnecessary act as his appendix appeared to be still quite healthy.30 Just before leaving New York, van Loon had told Eliza’s cousin Katy Codman somewhat mysteriously that a principal reason for his trip was that he was “in the center of a combination of people who vaguely see Peace.” While he was in Holland during the fall of 1917, van Loon served as an intermediary between a group of moderate progressive and liberal Germans and John W. Garrett, President Wilson’s envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary in The Hague. The Germans, whom van Loon described as the “Young-German Party” as opposed to the “Old-German Party” of Prussian Junkers, bureaucrats, and industrialists who were willing to fight until the end, had asked him to act as a go-between since there could be no official negotiations at that moment. In his position as intermediary van Loon reported the German and American views from the one to the other and sent copies of his confidential memoranda to the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, John Loudon. However, the American minister, Garrett, did not have much confidence in the leader of the German group, R. Baron von Kühlmann, whose position in the German Foreign Office was unclear to him, and indeed feared a trap. Besides, Garrett in van Loon’s view was so sure of an Allied victory that he already considered the Germans as beaten enemies. Ultimately these unofficial talks went nowhere, perhaps because, as van Loon suggested to Loudon, the Germans considered the issue as a business matter whereas the Americans, in their Wilsonian idealism, considered the war emotionally.31 It is somewhat an enigma how van Loon made ends meet during this extended stay in his native country. Most likely, as he had done during

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preceding trips to Europe, he wrote articles for the Associated Press. But his son Gerard Willem suggests he did not and claims that the articles his father had contracted to write for “The Vigilantes”—for which he had received an advance of $500 and was to receive $150 a week—were never written. In February 1918, the last year of the Great War, van Loon returned to the United States, where he settled in New York, hoping in vain that his marriage could be saved. But a reconciliation with Hendrik Willem was not what Eliza wanted.32

Chapter 7

Life in the Village (1918–1920) “Greenwich Village is a state of mind rather than a state of streets,” Ladies’ Home Journal informed its readers in 1920. The literary critic Malcolm Cowley reflecting on his own years there thought that it “was not only a place, a mood, a way of life: like all Bohemias, it was also a doctrine,” which propagated the ideas of liberty, self-expression, female equality, free love, and the intense enjoyment of life for the moment. This area of Manhattan has been called “the home of half the talent and half the eccentricity in the country,” and “the place where everything happens first.” As one Villager put it, “everything started in the Village except Prohibition.” For a good part of the twentieth century, nearly every major American writer and artist lived in the Village at one time or another. The Village, Cowley wrote, was a cheap place to live in the city where young writers hoped to be published. For those belonging to “the proletariat of the arts,” Greenwich Village was not only a cheap place to live but also the incubator for American culture and art.1 It was the bohemian side of the Village, the “long-haired men and shorthaired women, artists and pseudos, speakeasies, night clubs, and haunts that the tabloid press liked to describe,” that gave it its wide reputation as New York’s Latin Quarter. Among those haunts was The Mad Hatter, a tea room located in a basement on West Fourth Street. Painted backward above the entrance were the words “Down the Rabbit Hole.” In the candle-lit dark front room above a fireplace, the Alice in Wonderland theme continued with the text “We’re all mad here . . . I’m mad, you’re mad, you must be or you wouldn’t have come here.” This tea room and especially its owner were to play an important role in Hendrik Willem van Loon’s life. Once he settled in nearby sections of Manhattan, he too was drawn to the neighborhood where aspiring young artists, writers, and political radicals were creating the

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Greenwich Village that has become a mythic place in the American imagination.2 In early 1918, van Loon rented a room at the Netherlands Club on Gramercy Park, where he tried to come to terms with his private life. At first he thought Eliza’s rejection of him was just temporary; after all, a Bowditch did not divorce. But when in early March Eliza’s mother died and Hendrik Willem went to Boston for the funeral, relatives told him to stay away from Eliza and he felt being dismissed “like an unsatisfactory cook.” Back from this trip in New York he found to his great delight a “little letter” from his youngest son Willem, asking him, “When is Father coming?” He admitted to Katy Codman that “To be at such a distance of Hansje and Willem is Hell, plain and simple and without further phrases.”3 Hendrik Willem wrote Eliza several letters over the next few months about the unfortunate turn their relationship had taken and for which he took the blame. He nevertheless made her feel guilty, too, when in May he sourly observed, “I do not think that it makes very much difference to you whether you have a husband or not. Of course you like your home and the children but I never felt that I was an integral part of your life’s happiness.” He accused Eliza of depriving him of the “daily scribblings” of the boys. That, he was convinced, “really shows your desire to break with me entirely and absolutely more clearly than anything else.” But in complaining that he didn’t see or hear from his sons, he forgot that he had been away from home so often in the last four years that the boys had taken it for granted that their father was often away. Since their question “When are you coming home?” was unanswered so often, writing to their father after some time had lost its attraction. Van Loon promised Eliza to send her “whatever money I make” but that was hardly anything. He hoped it would be a consolation for her to know that he was writing “for cash and not for glory.”4 To provide for her and the children he had sent out a dozen articles and stories to several publishers. But no matter his efforts, they were refused. As he explained to Katy Codman, they were “not up to the ideals of the moment. No hate. No patriotism. None of the food which our editors throw to the hungry mob.” With a name that appeared Germanic to Americans unused to the nuances of European languages, van Loon was viewed suspiciously in the new politically oppressive climate in the United States, where even “the better class papers” were afraid that their business would suffer from the new espionage acts. Oddly enough, notwithstanding such criticism of American “democratic autocracy,” at that time he worked temporarily for the Committee on Public Information, helping to create it.5 That summer van Loon turned to fiction in an effort to make money. He told Professor Burr that he had finished a historical novel and planned to

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quickly write two more. The first novel, about “a poor Jewboy, born in the steerage, doomed to pass through life doing good, shot against the walls of Warsaw’s citadel for the pains he had taken on behalf of the oppressed and the suffering,” was turned down by eight publishers by the end of the year. One of the others, centered on Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age, would not be written for more than a decade.6 Needing to cut his expenses, van Loon moved to a studio apartment on West Sixteenth Street that September. Fortunately, at this time two small sources of income came his way. He wrote publicity material for an import–export firm in the Financial District. It was just a “minor job,” he told Eliza, for which he considered himself “totally unfit” but that would, “unless the contract is broken (and why not in this land of strange bargains),” enable him to send her twelve hundred dollars over the course of a year. The other was a job at the editorial department of The Nation, a position that brought him into contact with writers of subsequent importance in his life, such as Carl and Irita Van Doren, H.L. Mencken, and Heywood Broun.7 Meanwhile, Eliza’s new divorce lawyer Charles H. Blood of Ithaca asked Hendrik Willem his view on the breakdown of his marriage. In a long letter just a week before the Great War ended with the signing of the armistice on 11 November in a railroad car in Compiègne Forest, he wrote: My married life has been unhappy. No doubt most of it was my fault. Or rather it was the fault of two philosophies-of-life, so utterly different that no common basis could be found. . . . But while I can feel no blame for anything my wife ever did, I must confess to extremely bitter sentiments when it comes to the town of Boston which forever loomed big in the background of our life. I had to fight to make my wife Mrs. Van Loon. I failed and she remained Miss Bowditch. . . . Let me confess at once my complete failure as a financial agent. I have written a number of books and I have taught in several universities. I have never made a penny. . . . Last August I went abroad. When the war is over I shall be able to tell you the purpose of the trip. That too was disastrous. I was forced to stay on the other side much longer than I had intended. It was made a casus belli. Again I had failed to support my wife and family etc. etc. The work I was doing was so infinitely more important than my wife and children could be that it is quite impossible for me to understand this point. . . . I was able to do certain things that are beginning to materialize now and as it would have been very easy for many people here to help my wife through the difficulties, caused by my enforced absence, I did not worry. I know that this sounds like blasphemy to good New England ears. I have been told over and over again since that time that my “first duty was towards my wife and children.” Well, perhaps it was. But I have seen other people’s wives and children die and die in vast quantities. And if in even the humblest fashion I could prevent the continuation of this horror it would have been criminal if I had neglected the opportunity. . . .

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I have just passed through a summer of such extreme bitterness and loneliness—so much undeserved innuendo, that I shall do my best to forget these last seven months. . . . Nothing was omitted to make the thing as unpleasant and nasty as could be. . . . If I had been given a chance to make my wife REALLY my wife, everything would have been well. I had no chance. I was the foreigner (and a queer foreigner at that with no sense of money values). I was always treated as such. . . . You may object that this sounds bitter. It does not sound half as bitter as I feel. . . . I honestly do not feel that I deserved what came to me after I returned this winter. That time has been a horrible nightmare.8

Two days later, he added in another letter to Blood, “I am very sorry but a reconciliation seems impossible. I cannot make my wife over and I cannot make myself over. I would never continue our married life upon the old basis. . . . I have been treated by her and her family as an inefficient and discarded servant, a failure, a sort of clown addicted to cheap historical hokum and useless fiddling. I accept the role. The separation was not of my making. It was bestowed upon me as a free and voluntary gift.”9 Several decades later, Eliza’s old friend Hermann Hagedorn thought that the failure of the marriage was due to the “basically antagonistic” personalities of the couple. Whereas Eliza in his view was “a New England puritan, self-disciplined [and] moralistic; who would have come to full flower in some high cause asking everything of her, even to life itself,” Hendrik Willem was “a bohemian, a hedonist, an artist . . . easy-going [and] impatient of the social code.”10 In June 1918 Hendrik Willem wrote Eliza that although he met “whole regiments of women these days,” he was not interested in those “members of your excellent sex” after his “deplorable failure.” This indifference on his part quickly changed, however, when in September at the Brevoort Hotel, a Greenwich Village for such writers as John Dos Passos and Edna St. Vincent Millay, he met Lorena Gibbs, known as Rene. An Ithaca native, she had tried to catch his eyes while a secretary at Cornell’s College of Architecture. Now, working at the New York Evening World, this brown-haired, charming woman with a beautifully modulated voice attracted van Loon’s attention. He was flattered when it appeared that she knew what books he had written. Updating her on his marital status, he described himself as “the Flying Dutchman, cursed to sail through life alone until redeemed by a woman’s love.” Rene was quick to assume that role and before their first weekend in his apartment was over, Hendrik Willem proposed to her and shortly thereafter gave her a signet ring engraved with the van Loon family crest. In the months that followed Rene not only was captivated by his boyish wistfulness, but also had to cope with his fluctuating state of health and “nerves.”11 On 14 January 1919, his thirty-seventh birthday, Hendrik Willem received the papers that proved he was “a duly sworn U.S. citizen.” Although, as he

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wrote Eliza, he did “not take much stock in nationality anyway,” he thought it both better for himself and for the children to be American citizens as it was very unlikely they would ever go to Holland to live there. “At the present moment, when liberalism is fighting for its life and needs all the people it can get,” he thought he could “do more” in his new capacity as U.S. citizen than before.12 Nevertheless, van Loon did not forget his country of origin and the negative press it had in the United States. In the last year of the war, relations between the Netherlands and the United States reached an absolute low. In March, by order of President Wilson, the United States requisitioned ninety Dutch ships in American ports, which was followed the next day by the requisition of forty-five Dutch ships in British harbors. Historian Thomas Bailey described the annexation of the Dutch fleet as “the most spectacular single act of force employed by the United States” against a neutral country during the war. This action led to anti-American feelings among the Dutch population and, to show her anger at this “ship robbery,” Queen Wilhelmina kept the Dutch diplomatic post in Washington vacant; in response, the United States recalled its envoy, John Garrett, from Holland “for consultations.”13 In June van Loon wrote to Jacob Theodoor Cremer, a member of the Dutch Senate and former colonial minister, with suggestions on how to improve the negative perception of the Dutch in the United States. Van Loon stressed that the British press campaigns in the United States against Holland were successful because the Dutch remained passive and did not counterattack the falsely created image that their country was a kind of appendix to Germany. His own articles, he told Cremer, had been in vain and even led to the accusation by the British ambassador in Washington of his being a “hired agent of the Dutch government.” He pleaded that the Netherlands send the best possible man to fill the vacant diplomatic post, since “personal tact and initiative” would be crucial in repairing relations. He also suggested that his native country establish a Holland Institute in New York, a center for art and commercial activities along the lines of the Spanish Institute, to promote Dutch interests and to regain the goodwill of the American people, which had been lost “through our own neglect and stupidity.”14 Cremer presented van Loon’s suggestions to a meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Netherlands Oversea Trust Company on 12 September, just a few days after a new cabinet had been sworn in. There was a consensus that the first priority was the appointment of a Dutch envoy who should be supported by a well-qualified staff. A committee would explore how to set up the kind of institute van Loon had recommended. Meanwhile, Foreign Minister H.A. van Karnebeek proposed that Cremer himself be the new Dutch envoy to the United States. Once Washington accepted the appointment in October with “very great pleasure” and Cremer set sail to assume the post, the

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diplomatic crisis between the two countries was smoothed over. By the new year, President Wilson and Queen Wilhelmina were exchanging cordial greetings.15 In January 1920 with the help of Dutch businesses, Jacob Cremer did establish the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce in New York. Its main objective was the promotion of the economic and cultural relations between the Netherlands and the United States. But progress was very slow. Van Loon continued to lament the persistence of anti-Dutch feelings, especially outside New York.16 Besides his public relations work for the import–export company, which he hated, van Loon was also writing articles for The Nation and book reviews for The Dial. In The Bookman he discussed the development of juvenile literature in Holland, and he also contributed pieces to The Century Magazine, Everybody’s Magazine, and the New York Tribune.17 Financially more important, however, was the book contract he was offered in June 1919 by Boni and Liveright to write an illustrated children’s history called Ancient Man, which was to be followed by similar booklets. The firm’s publisher, Horace Brisbin Liveright, was always interested in new ideas and had a penchant for gambling on unknown writers whose works— often critical of American society—he promoted through aggressive publicity. The list of authors he published between 1917 and 1930 include many of the great names of modern American literature: Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner (whose novels van Loon loathed intensely), Ernest Hemingway, E.E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Eugene O’Neill. As Liveright’s biographer observed, he had a “remarkable gift for finding writers and encouraging them with both personal enthusiasm and money.” Van Loon badly needed the advance one hundred dollars, and told his Cornell friend Louis A. Fuertes that this “good contract” promised him “a stuffed ostrich” if the series was successful.18 There were more surprises that month. The U.S. Secret Service entered his apartment and went through his papers, looking for evidence of his political leanings. The so-called Red Scare, a wave of anti-Communist hysteria that swept across America, had begun after the Third International met in Moscow in March 1919. As historian William E. Leuchtenburg observed, it produced “a bitter heritage of suspicion of aliens, distrust of organized labor, hostility to reformers, and insistence on political conformity that served to smother reform efforts in the 1920s [and] would cast a long shadow over the politics of [the] 1930s.” The Nation’s continued criticism of the Creel committee caused the authorities to temporarily shut down the magazine and investigate all its contributors. Not only was van Loon understandably upset by the violation of his privacy, but he soon discovered that a State

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Department report said he was dismissed from Cornell “for pro-German sentiments and inclinations.” He indignantly wrote his mentor Burr, “[T]o find that this silly story has been spread among official circles at a time when the whole country went into an orgy of anti-Germanism was a most unpleasant surprise. Those of us suspected of liberalism (I am not mentioning radicalism but plain old-fashioned liberalism) have a hard enough time as it is.”19 Reflecting on the incident years later in his book Van Loon’s Lives, van Loon mentioned other factors, besides his work for The Nation and other liberal periodicals, that made him an object of suspicion. The secret agents who broke into his studio had discovered a Russian dictionary on his bookshelves (from a course in the language he’d taken at Harvard) and had drawn the conclusion that he must at least be a sympathizer of Bolshevism. Furthermore, someone had written the Department of Justice that van Loon was clicking his heels while bowing to a lady. Asked why he did this, he had replied that he was unconscious of the act as he had spent some years in Germany while working on his Ph.D. This, van Loon explained, had made him suspicious and as a result he “was for quite a long while hunted like a dangerous criminal, though few people surely had been so consistent in their dislike of the unholy Teuton as I.”20 It was also in June 1919 that Hendrik Willem van Loon for the first time visited The Mad Hatter. Even before his first visit to the Greenwich Village tea room, the owner, Eliza Helen Criswell, had seen him a number of times at the French Pastry Shop on Sixth Avenue where she went every morning to have breakfast. She had asked someone who “the tall, good-looking” guy was and was told that this van Loon “was always trying to write something or other.” Her diary records his initial appearance at her tea shop on 11 June; in the next day’s entry, Eliza not only notes that van Loon stopped by again but that she went to a bookstore to buy a Dutch dictionary.21 Born on 8 May 1882 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Eliza Helen Criswell was the only child of a widowed doctor and his second wife. To the disapproval and envy of the mother, a close relationship developed between father and daughter. After Dr. Criswell’s death in 1890, young Eliza Helen idolized her father’s memory, developed a withering contempt for religious females and had a hard time accepting her female sex. In 1900 she enrolled at Bryn Mawr where she established herself as captain of the basketball team, made herself known as Jimmie, James, or Jim, and began her lifelong habit of furtively taking a drink before a game or any other confrontation. Though she was good at mathematics, history, and sports, she chose to learn languages for which she had no flair. Nevertheless, by grinding her way through, she became proficient in Latin and relatively fluent in German and French. After her graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1904, Jimmie began a career of teaching

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foreign languages, first at private schools in the Pacific Northwest and then at Bryant High School in Long Island City. Once she was settled in New York, she was able to take two trips to Europe in the years before the outbreak of war and she also discovered the attractions of Greenwich Village where she soon took a part-time job at the popular Mad Hatter. After having met a woman, Mathilda Spence, with whom she decided to share a room in the Village, Jimmie transformed her appearance. She cut her hair into a boyish bob and henceforth wore smocks instead of dresses, sandals instead of shoes, and for special occasions preferred tailored suits with shirt and tie and black or white slouch hats. In July 1916 Jimmie and Mathilda bought The Mad Hatter. When Mathilda decided to go overseas, Jimmie quit her teaching position and from then on worked full-time at her tea room. Over the years her customers included artists and writers like Dwight Franklin, Lewis Mumford, and Sinclair Lewis.22 Although she ran the tea room with a firm, businesslike hand, Jimmie enjoyed the work and her customers. For a time she even published an in-house satirical journal called “Mad Hatter Mutterings,” which in addition to poems, short stories, and drawings included “news, notes and gossip.” In the December 1920 issue she announced that “The Management of the Mad Hatter is, and cheerfully, cook, cashier, waiter, bouncer, bus boy, check room boy, official chaperone, arbiter, elegantiarum, chess scorer, peace maker, drainage system, book keeper, cat nurse, censor, and goat of said coffee house.” She made appeals for contributions in that issue and the next month’s: “If, as the slummers fondly suppose, we are a brilliant collection of artists and writers, we implore the writers to write and the artists to art a little for our publication. Otherwise, we shall have nothing further to publish.” Apparently these were successful as the following issues of “Mad Hatter Mutterings” varied between twenty and twenty-five pages.23 Jimmie’s mannish appearance was quite a contrast with that of Hendrik Willem’s fiancé, Rene Gibbs. What, then, made Jimmie attractive to van Loon? Rene’s job at the New York Evening World was more and more time-consuming while Jimmie was always available. As he quickly discovered, she wanted to be needed—she could type fast and well for him, sew his buttons, tidy up his room, and bring him food—and she liked his courteous manners toward her. Before long Hendrik Willem proposed to Jimmie, as he had done to Rene. Since the two women lived in separate worlds, they were not aware of each other. Naturally, van Loon found it very convenient to keep the two worlds separated and showered both women with ardent attentions such as specialdelivery letters and telegrams while writing and drawing his Ancient Man.24 As was mentioned earlier, throughout his life Hendrik Willem van Loon had a special attention for women’s feet. This feeling was clearly expressed in the romantic letters he sent Jimmie in the fall of 1919. “Jim darling, I kiss

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your feet. They are lovely things. If never I had seen thee—but had seen thy feet—I’d love thee. They are sort-of-like-yourself. They are sensibly big enough to carry thee with grace. They are slender and speak all the fine things those brown eyes tell with even greater firmness. . . . Oh woman of pure delight.”25 For a month in the fall of 1919 van Loon served as the secretary of the Dutch delegation at an international labor conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the League of Nations. Van Loon, who found it “mighty interesting to sit amidst the mighty in a front row and keep a translation of the darn thing,” had the feeling that he was “learning more than ever Henry Adams learned.” Overall, what he saw was disappointing. The new international organization seemed unable to bridge either the differences between employers and labor representatives or those between northern European countries, which had already enacted some labor laws, and Asian countries, which hadn’t.26 It was Jacob Cremer who recruited van Loon for the Dutch delegation, but in the months after the conference he was criticized for doing so. A Dutchman in New York by the name of Arnold van Couthen Piccardt Huizinga wrote Cremer that van Loon was under surveillance of the Department of Justice after he had been removed from the Committee on Public Information, was regularly in the company of the “bolshevist agitator Miss Helen Criswell,” and could be arrested any moment as bolshevist because the American government had placed him in the “dangerous class.” In another letter, to the secretary of the Netherlands Overseas Association, Huizinga added his opinion that had van Loon not already become a U.S. citizen, he probably would have been deported. An official at the Dutch legation in Washington had to present a report in response to Foreign Minister van Karnebeek and sketched a more positive picture of van Loon. It was true, he admitted, that van Loon’s house was searched by detectives, but that was nothing special to a person of foreign birth who had just returned from Europe where during the war he had mediated between Germans and Allies for the sake of peace. Although van Loon was clearly exculpated, in her diaries Jimmie noted with disgust that several times in 1920 and 1921 detectives kept an eye on her and her husband.27 While in Washington, Hendrik Willem wrote Jimmie a letter full of doubts. “I really don’t belong here. Unless you see this great and glorious country in the light of an unreasoning enthusiasm, you are lost. . . . Europe is so much easier because it is so much more honest.” Van Loon not only felt uncertain about the United States, he had reservations about his relationship with Jimmie. “[A]re you quite sure you want this foreign complexity?” He was scared by the failure of his first marriage too. “If we are to wander together,

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it is for keeps and not for a few years and unless we really share each other’s feelings and ideas and sentiments, it will not be a happy walk. Unless it be a perfect companionship, it will pull and drag and make us both very uncomfortable. . . . But it is an uncertain affair and American life demands but one single thing—certainty.”28 Van Loon checked into the hospital in early December to have the inadequate surgery of the hernia he had had in Amsterdam right after his shipwreck in 1917 taken care of. He was very weak after this operation, and as Gerard Willem van Loon put it in his father’s biography, Jimmie became the “self-supporting companion-nurse-stenographer on twenty-four-hour call” for almost two months. Hendrik Willem’s dependence on Jimmie made him overlook her drinking—which he loathed—and her ingrained denial of femininity. Unlike the feminine but always busy Rene Gibbs, she was there and available for him.29 Van Loon was realizing that he had many reasons to be grateful to Jimmie. She had helped him break free from “barbed wire defences” and stop hiding his feelings. While he was recuperating in the hospital, he wrote her, “Do you know what has made this whole business so perfect? Our play acting. I behave as if I were a terrible brute, a great big strong he-man. I am nothing of the sort. Your character is much stronger than mine but it is fit for the man to play the commanding cave brute and therefore I command. And you obey. Not because you have to. God knows it would be better all around if you did the ordering. But you obey and we both know that we are pretending and we go on pretending and we love it.” In a letter the next month, he observed, “All that you have given me has been beautiful beyond words. We are no children. We are rarely sentimental. Sometimes I think that we are strange lovers. It has all been so much finer than a love affair such as the world seems to know and understand. . . . You have pulled me through the dreariest days and your wonderful eyes have been lights that did not fail.” In a 1947 radio interview, however, Jimmie described how she had won van Loon’s heart in less romantic terms: “Hendrik Willem loved ice cream, and you know what they say about the way to a man’s heart. I knew he didn’t have much money, but I fed him so much ice cream.”30 In the first part of 1920, in addition to his writing ads for a silk importer, van Loon was working on Ancient Man and planning the first of the follow-up volumes that Liveright wanted him to do. In this series van Loon hoped to follow “a somewhat new direction. No politics more than is strictly necessary and the full light thrown upon spiritual and scientific development.” Whereas he had given up the “hopeless” task of trying to give the older generation at the universities other historical ideas, van Loon wrote Dutch diplomat John Loudon, he now had decided to start “a kind of Erasmian

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attack on the child’s heart with the spirit of Busken Huet’s Land van Rembrandt as its guiding principle.”31 When he finished the manuscript of Ancient Man in May, van Loon dedicated the book and the eight volumes that were to follow to his sons, Hansje and Willem, “and to the boys and girls who shall keep you company on the voyage through life.” As the author explained, this book was not a textbook, a picture book, or even a regular history book. He just wanted to take his boys by the hand “and together we shall wander forth to explore the intricate wilderness of the bygone ages. I shall show you mysterious rivers which seem to come from nowhere and which are doomed to reach no ultimate destination. I shall bring you close to dangerous abysses, hidden carefully beneath a thick overgrowth of pleasant but deceiving romance. Here and there we shall leave the beaten track to scale a solitary and lonely peak, towering high above the surrounding country. Unless we are very lucky we shall some times lose ourselves in a sudden and dense fog of ignorance. Wherever we go we must carry our warm cloak of human sympathy and understanding for vast tracks of land will prove to be a sterile desert—swept by icy storms of popular prejudice and personal greed and unless we come well prepared we shall forsake our faith in humanity and that, dear boys, would be the worst thing that could happen to any of us.” Featuring forty illustrations and maps, Ancient Man was well received when it came out that November and Liveright soon was receiving strong advance orders for the entire series.32 Meanwhile, Eliza Bowditch van Loon was granted a divorce in Reno, Nevada, in June 1920; during the following two months Hansje and Willem stayed with their father. While Rene went to Maine for a brief vacation, Hendrik Willem made up his mind and decided in favor of Jimmie. On 3 August he and Jimmie went to New York’s Municipal Building to get married. One of the witnesses was the artist Dwight Franklin. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon with Hansje and Willem in an artists’ colony near Lee, Maine, and when that proved to be unsatisfactory to Hendrik Willem in a nearby boarding house where he earned a part of the expenses “by sketching india-ink frescoes on the dining-room walls.” On their way to Maine they spent a night in Boston where Eliza joined them for dinner at their hotel. On that occasion both former and present wife addressed each other as “Mrs. van Loon.” The next day at the Boston North Station the van Loons ran into Rene who was on her way back to New York and was totally unaware of Hendrik Willem’s recent wedding. When she saw Jimmie’s wedding ring and Hendrik Willem redundantly confirmed that they had been married, she replied, “Hendrik, you didn’t have to do that,” and walked away. Aboard the train she threw Hendrik Willem’s signet ring with the van Loon family crest out of the

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window. Sometime later she quit her newspaper job and started to rent rooms in her newly acquired Park Avenue apartment. In January 1921 Rene married one of her roomers, the British-born Bill Scudamore who had been recently divorced and turned out to be a heavy drinker. The next five years would be hell for her.33 After their vacation in Maine, van Loon’s children returned to their mother in Ithaca and Hendrik Willem and Jimmie moved into an apartment on Barrow Street. Hendrik Willem earned $75 a week writing a daily column for Woman’s Wear on style and fabrics. This paid the rent while Jimmie, by running The Mad Hatter, brought in enough to buy the food.34 Barely settled in his new apartment, van Loon was eager to report the recent changes in his life in “a lengthy siege of words” to his old mentor, Professor Burr. He wrote about the divorce, his marriage to Jimmie, and his career prospects. Making a living in New York meant “selling” things—even brains—but he was prepared to make the sacrifice of having to write ads as long as he was able to write his books. He was very pleased to tell he had “a new home or rather I have a home for it is the first time in my life that I have had the rest and happiness of a place which was my own rather than a museum of unseen but much-noticed Salem ancestors.” Van Loon described Jimmie’s tea room as “a sort of international sight-of-the-town . . . where the intelligentsia of a large city gathereth together to partake of tea and chess and occasional conversation.” And, “best of all,” he found that his children had accepted his new wife as “a very pleasant new friend” and therefore he was no longer afraid “that they would entirely drift away from me.” Even if they were with Eliza most of the time, the children now had a place, certainly when they grew older, where they could “come and go as they please.” Due to “a new house and a new life and a fair prospect of a great deal of work during the next few years,” Hendrik Willem was in high spirits now. Two and a half years after he had settled in New York because of his matrimonial problems with Eliza, it sure looked that brighter days were ahead.35

Part III

The Jazz Age

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Chapter 8

The Breakthrough (1921–1922) At the beginning of 1921, Jimmie reported in her diary that Hendrik Willem—whom she called Han—was “feeling quite rotten,” or even was “feeling like hell” and suffered from “ragged nerves” and pain in his chest. By the end of January, she was able to pen that her husband was much better now and “dressed all day,” but her diary entries in March attest to an attack of the blues. About the only bright spot was a burgeoning friendship with Sinclair Lewis, whose novel Main Street had just been published to great acclaim. That winter Sinclair Lewis and his wife, Grace Hegger Lewis, who were celebrities now, visited the van Loons a number of times. According to one of Lewis’s biographers van Loon supposedly put up a sign in his house that read, “It is forbidden to gossip over three minutes about Grace.” Lewis also introduced van Loon to his editor, Alfred Harcourt, who in 1919 had started his own publishing house. Harcourt became a lifelong friend of Hendrik Willem’s and in later years published four of his books.1 By late March, three encouraging developments enabled van Loon to write his elder son that “there are a few trees appearing upon the desert through which we have been travelling for so long a time. At the end of this year we may be in more fertile country.” The first one was that the Christy Walsh Syndicate, “one of the largest New York newspaper syndicates,” had signed him up to do a daily picture and a historical children’s story of about three hundred words. Then, at a lunch meeting in New York two members of the board of trustees of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, offered him a position teaching history and running the Social Sciences Department. This prospect was very attractive to van Loon, not only because of the regular and “exceedingly good salary” ($4,000 a year) but also because Antioch was setting up a school for the children of the faculty members. This made it possible for van Loon to propose his former wife that their elder son come

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and live with him there. In early May Antioch President Arthur E. Morgan confirmed the appointment for the next academic year. Van Loon immediately traveled to Ohio to see the place, which in a letter to Burr he described as “A sort of run-down Harvard College, neglected and decaying amidst the woods of Yellow Springs. But a place of almost medieval charm.”2 The third good omen for van Loon’s career that March began with a book review he wrote for the literary monthly The Dial. Although he expressed reservations about it in a letter to Hansel, van Loon praised H.G. Wells’s twovolume The Outline of History for its liberating popular version of history, which was of “true and lasting value.” Van Loon’s own Ancient Man had been a success for Boni and Liveright, so Horace Liveright saw an opportunity. He proposed that instead of the projected children’s history series that was supposed to follow Ancient Man, van Loon produce a one-volume complete and self-illustrated children’s history of the world in a format that was unprecedented in the juvenile market of those days: it was planned to have “300 pages text, 100 black and white pictures, 20 colored ones and 20 animated maps.” (As it turned out, the finished book would have 479 pages and more than 150 illustrations.) Assisted by Jimmie, who copied his writings, Hendrik Willem completed the first draft in two months and delivered the final manuscript to Liveright in late June.3 While he was still sweating on his drawings in sultry New York, van Loon wrote some of his Dutch friends in jest that unlike Thucydides and Ranke, who like “amateurs” had “just” written their histories, he had both written and drawn a history of the world; to Eliza that summer he confided the hope that the book would have as a result that “no professor doctor hereafter, can write quite the same sort of dull history that has been forced upon children thus far.” Meanwhile, anticipating renewed interest in his earlier books, van Loon suggested to Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin that they advertise The Fall of the Dutch Republic as he wanted that book “to get beyond the thousand-line.” In the foreword of The Story of Mankind, like he had done in Ancient Man, van Loon addressed his sons, Hansje and Willem, and told them that as a young boy he once was taken to the top of Rotterdam’s St. Lawrence tower. After having reached that top, he had his “first glimpse of the big world [and a] wide view of the glorious past.” As he told his sons, “History is the mighty Tower of Experience, which Time has built amidst the endless fields of bygone ages. It is no easy task to reach the top of this ancient structure and get the benefit of the full view. There is no elevator, but young feet are strong and it can be done. Here I give you the key that will open the door. When you return, you too will understand the reason for my enthusiasm.”4 In the July issue of “Mad Hatter Mutterings” Jimmie announced that beginning the next month the tea room would be managed by Helen Ryan of whom it

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was said “that she has something of my technique in the art of being unpleasant when necessary.” She requested her customers to assist the new manager in keeping the current pleasant atmosphere and since The Mad Hatter was “the only Village shop with a paper” she also asked for a volunteer to edit it and keep it going. In the next issue, Jimmie wrote her farewell editorial “to the family” in which she made “her little bow and retires from the stage where for five happy years she has played to the best of her small ability the pleasantest role which the gods have ever given her. Her mistakes have been many, her judgements often wrong, but the play has gone on, the longest run of any show in the Village.” She thanked her friends for their faithful support over the years and for having given her “the happiest years of her life.”5 As the van Loons were packing, Hendrik Willem had mixed feelings about what to expect in Yellow Springs. He was looking forward to returning to academia and he would not miss the five flights of stairs to their Barrow Street apartment. But he wondered what awaited them at Antioch, which was emerging from a period of decay under its new president. Arthur Morgan, a civil engineer by training, was tailoring an experimental educational program to the requirements of industry. When the van Loons arrived on 1 September they found the college was undergoing more than a change in curriculum. The campus was full of trenches and incoming freshmen were expected to help lay pipes.6 Hendrik Willem and Jimmie moved into a cottage just off campus, he gave his first lecture on 8 September, and he also did “more physical labor” than he usually “did in a year in the city.” This dose of pioneering conditions was “more than enough” and henceforth he wanted to read about it only in books. Whereas the old pioneering gold diggers at least dug gold, he could only report to have dug mud. There was “no entertainment of any sort” and soon Jimmie recorded that her days at Antioch were “all alike” and she often wondered “what the hell to do with herself,” especially on evenings when her husband was away for a faculty meeting and she realized that she “had an unbroken record of six years without a single evening at home alone.” As a time killer she started to study Danish and fortunately some New York friends, like Sinclair and Grace Lewis, Morris Bishop, and Van Wyck Brooks, soon came to visit them.7 Despite the physical rigors of life at Antioch that semester, van Loon cut a distinctive figure on campus. Anthony Veiller, a freshman that year who later became a top screenwriter in Hollywood, recalled the “sophisticated” history professor striding along the paths of a “campus, more dangerous to cross than a minefield, . . . with great trenches. . . . And quite a sight he was in that background. I can still see this huge Dutchman standing in front of his class, wearing a smock (the first ever seen in Ohio), a monocle (most certainly the first ever seen), white cotton gardener’s gloves, a box of crayons in his left

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hand while, with his right, he illustrated on an enormous pad the subject of his lecture. And this was not wisdom tossed on the empty air. No student ever cut one of his classes voluntarily.”8 In December the van Loons’ living conditions improved somewhat when they moved into a new house, but “the eternal dampness and wetness” of the Ohio climate caused Hendrik Willem to develop an ear infection, which temporarily affected his hearing. But what bothered him most was the big cultural difference between New York and his present situation. The “midwestern self-made man,” he observed, “never lets a chance go by without telling the young feller that manners are a superficial adornment and quite unnecessary for success in real he-man red-blooded life.” Of course, he admitted to Morris Bishop who had just started teaching at Cornell, that Cornell was also “far from the world and small-townish and everything, but [at least there] you can take a brother-of-the-soul under the arm and take a walk and talk of God and Woman and many other things.” This was hardly possible at Yellow Springs, since “The shores of Ohio Nyanza are too muddy for walks. And God hereabouts is a presbyterian.”9 Fortunately, there was encouraging news from his publishers. Liveright told him that The New Republic was “going to use The Story of Mankind for this year’s premium,” and a reissue of his 1917 book A Short History of Discovery promised to bring in a little money. But, as van Loon told Burr, “the more I shall have, the more will drop into the bottomless barrel of alimony. The lawyers sit and wait eagerly and the more I shall write and draw, the more they shall expect!”10 Eliza’s lawyers complained throughout 1921 that Hendrik Willem was not living up to his financial obligations, even though they acknowledged that his income fluctuated. Meanwhile, Eliza agreed to send fourteen-year-old Hansel, who was restless and rebellious in Ithaca, to Antioch, where the pioneering educational experiment might do him some good. Not long after Hansje had joined Hendrik Willem and Jimmie, his father reported to Eliza that their elder son was happy and doing well at school. He was behaving as “a lovable child and the matter-of-factness of Jim makes up for his Pa’s temperament. We feed him well and give him a comfortable roost and leave him alone when he wants to work out his own little plans. I think that you will agree that it is the best way.”11 In the third week of November Jimmie noted in her diary, “First copies of Story of Mankind arrived. It’s a great book.” Van Loon, however, had no idea whether it would sell and therefore made himself available “for any gathering of more than six people in the hope that one of the group would buy a book.” As Anthony Veiller recorded, “In the next month or so he went to more dreadful dinners . . . than any man should have to endure in one lifetime.” Despite early positive reactions to his book, including praise from Carl Van Doren and H.L. Mencken (with whom Hendrik Willem had begun a correspondence), van Loon still remained skeptical. He wondered whether

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“the thing [is] going to succeed at last” and whether the unexpected “avalanche of approval” would really “MEAN anything.” If success did come, he asked Eliza rhetorically in a letter, what awaited him? “More books, more dreadful work and in the end . . . Yellow Springs, Greene County, Ohio?”12 The “avalanche of approval” for The Story of Mankind was evidently shown in the reviews that appeared in many influential newspapers and periodicals starting in November 1921. There were raves from The Literary Review, the New York Tribune, the New York Herald, the Boston Transcript, the Boston Herald, and even the Cornell Alumni News. In the New York Times reviewer Austin Hay said it was a better book than Wells’s Outline of History, predicting that grown-ups would respond as enthusiastically as children. He praised van Loon as “a ripe scholar with a sensitive mind” who “painted a brilliant picture of man’s tortuous journey through the turmoil of the ages with the mastery of the true artist.” In The Bookman the curator of the Children’s Book Division of the New York Public Library, Anne Carroll Moore, extolled The Story of Mankind as “The most invigorating, and I venture to predict, the most influential children’s book for many years to come, [and a book] that bids fair to revolutionize the writing and illustrating of history and biography for the fortunate youth of this generation and the next.”13 The reception from traditional historians was also positive. New York University Professor J. Salwyn Schapiro in The Nation proclaimed The Story of Mankind “one of the most extraordinary books to see the light in many a day” and could only describe the author’s “originality, his subtle wisdom, his love and understanding of children, his reduction of complex material to lucid and dramatic simplicity, [as] genius.” In Schapiro’s opinion van Loon had “taken the hardest not the easiest way to his goal, for he deals primarily with movements and ideas, not with heroes and picturesque incidents. Nevertheless, the book reads like a fascinating story, told by a master storyteller.” He continued, noting “a rich vein of delightful humor and irony which helps not a little to explain man and his institutions. . . . The text and the illustrations are one and inseparable; they illuminate each other and likewise reveal the author’s original and almost fantastic personality.”14 The most gratifying praise of all came from historian Charles A. Beard. In The New Republic he compared The Story of Mankind with The Outline of History and for him it was crystal clear that van Loon was “a far safer guide than the English novelist” since he “knows a thousand times more history and writes with as much taste and more humor.” Although van Loon had primarily written his book for children, Beard maintained, “there is a rich background to all his chapters, a background that can be seen by those that have eyes to see.” Beard had no doubts that “for grasp on historic fact, for style, and for insight,” he preferred van Loon to Wells. In The Freeman Lewis

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Mumford shared Beard’s preference for van Loon whose “gargantuan work” he characterized as “about half as long and twice as readable” as Wells’s Outline. Though Mumford considered van Loon’s concentration on Europe “not so much a defect as a limitation,” he commended his “power of brisk and picturesque summarizing” and likened the sections in The Story on the medieval city, the Renaissance, the foundation of universities, and the chapter on art to “rockets thrown over a black landscape: their memorable flashes leave a clearer vision on the retina than most of the familiar commonplaces of the daylight.”15 In a letter to his Cornell friend Morris Bishop a couple of days before Christmas 1921, van Loon said that at Yellow Springs he was being treated “like a conquering hero” and that the Chicago Daily News the next day would give a “large literary luncheon [with] all the great ones of Chicago” in his honor. It was a complete new experience to him “to have to play the great man [and he wondered] How do you do it? I wrote that book because I thought all the time that it was going to be my last one and I wanted to get straight with the boys who had been removed by fearsome Boston lest they become the same goodfornothing their Pa was.” The favorable reviews and commercial success of The Story of Mankind made van Loon feel more restless at Antioch, where he considered himself “entirely overworked [and] camping with the wrong crowd.” In his view, as he explained to Lewis Mumford, the people at Antioch College were no educators but reformers. Although they did their best to achieve some sort of culture, it was all “quite hopeless,” as it was “the sort of kultur one would do without most gratefully. It means slow death. . . . Just the small college stuff.” He felt it almost impossible to do his routine job there, not because of the regular hours of teaching and “all sorts of tasks which belong to the curriculum of a well-appointed nurse,” but because of “the uselessness of it all.”16 How pleased he was, then, that right at that time the Baltimore Sun offered him a job as columnist. In January 1922, van Loon hastened to Baltimore to sign a contract, even though the job wouldn’t start until the summer; as he told Mumford, it would give him “time to write and time to see decent people” again. He also obtained a commission to write an article on Cornell for The Smart Set, the magazine of which H.L. Mencken at that time was coeditor. From Baltimore van Loon dashed off to New York for a week of triumphal meetings. “Everybody seemed so happy about the success of the book,” he reported to his younger son Willem, “and I never was so busy in all my life for everybody wanted to see me suddenly and it was difficult to know just what to do and what to say. Sixteen thousand copies of the book have been sold and the fourth edition is rapidly being printed.”17 At the end of the month van Loon was in Chicago again, this time to deliver two lectures. As Chicago Daily News literary editor Harry Hansen in his column

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“A Page about Books and the People Who Write Them” observed about the author he described as “one of those fine spirits that one meets rarely,” the sudden fame had disconcerted van Loon: “he finds the big white searchlight seeking him out and he knows not whither to flee.” After his visit to the Windy City van Loon hurried back to Antioch from where he wrote his friend Louis Fuertes, “I am no longer my own sweet self. Of course I shall continue to be the same lovable, simple-minded, straightforward cuss I used to be before prosperity came to me.” He also reported that movie people were pursuing the dramatic rights, but expressed doubts about how it could be adapted. As the winter continued, The Story of Mankind had cumulative sales of 50,000.18 Although van Loon kept no financial records, Gerard Willem van Loon estimated that his father received more than half a million dollars in royalties for his best seller over the years. Horace Liveright’s willingness to gamble on the relatively unknown writer van Loon and the ability of his advertising department paid off spectacularly: The Story of Mankind was the second highestselling work of nonfiction in 1922 and remained in the top ten the next year as well. Liveright enthusiastically called it a “stunt book [which appealed to] the cry of these days: something new, something new.” During the 1920s van Loon’s book went through thirty American editions and was translated into a dozen languages. But despite the considerable income for the author, as his younger son observed, the money that flowed into van Loon’s pocket also flowed through it, as that pocket “had a very large hole.” In any case, van Loon’s lean years had come to an end, no matter that he publicly declared: “This fame is hard to stand. I am supposed to be endlessly rich and endlessly patient—and I am neither.”19 In the next few weeks van Loon made many quick trips to New York. One morning in March his Antioch students found, as Anthony Veiller reported, “instead of their be-smocked, be-monocled Professor, a note on the bulletin-board which read, ‘I do not believe in long good-byes when good friends part. We have, I hope, each learned a good deal from the other during the time we have spent together. And now it is time for me to say farewell.’ . . . That day the entire student body went on strike in protest at [the] departure” of this “Renaissance Man.”20 At Christmas 1921, in a letter to his bachelor friend Morris Bishop, van Loon had explained the advantages of “short-haired” wives like Jimmie: “They are the easiest to have around the house. In the morning they growl a couple of times but when they are once up all they need to do is shake themselves a couple of times and they are ready to be let out.” And so he advised his friend, “Get a short-haired one—fast on its legs. It makes it easier catching a bus.” By the spring of 1922, the situation had changed. Being a celebrity, Hendrik Willem thought he was now entitled to have a wife who, as his younger son put it, was “more spiritually and physically equipped to share the spotlight” than Jimmie. Hendrik Willem criticized Jimmie’s choice of clothes as he

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pursued a young blonde he had met in a New York bookstore. He even went so far as to send Jimmie to Reno to get a divorce. However, once the blonde declined his overtures to become the next Mrs. van Loon, he asked Jimmie to return to Antioch to close out the house and to rejoin him in Baltimore; meanwhile, Hansje returned to his mother.21 Hearing of these developments, Eliza Bowditch sympathized with Jimmie and offered her the hospitality of the Ithaca house. From Baltimore, Jimmie replied to Hendrik Willem’s first wife that the temporary problems she and her husband recently had were “probably caused by sitting all winter in the mud, rain and solitude of Yellow Springs. However, all is again serene. Anyone with Han’s mental make-up is subject to such upheavals, and while they are damnably upsetting at the time, they do seem to pass over. This being the first one, I took it very seriously, but the next time, I shall know better what to do. You can’t have a man with both the temperament of an artist, and the placid stability of a banker, and [in her opinion] the former quality is more amusing than the latter, although one may have bad quarters-of-an-hour at times.”22 Frustrated that her ex-husband was finally enjoying monetary success, Eliza also hoped to grab a bigger share of his considerably improved situation. Van Loon made it clear that he would live up to his promise to take care of his two sons and make payments for their education, and he had voluntarily doubled her alimony payment, to $200 monthly but he refused to do anything more. He wrote Eliza, “You can hire all the lawyers in Kingdom Come and they will all tell you what mine told me, that you voluntarily divorced me and got rid of me as a bad investment [and] that you can not repent of investments if after selling them they show an upward trend.”23 The Story of Mankind reached another plateau of success when in June 1922 the American Library Association awarded it the John Newbery Medal for “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children” written in 1921. The brand-new honor, named after the eighteenth-century London bookseller John Newbery (who was credited for having been the first to give special attention to a literature specially for children), remains the highest accolade in American children’s literature. Staff correspondent G. Ellis Porter of the Baltimore Evening Sun enthusiastically commented that van Loon was “once again on top of a tower. Not the same tower from which he viewed the world” when he wrote his prize-winning volume, but “a very considerable and substantial one at that. Moreover, [the journalist claimed,] he stands there today in solitary grandeur. . . .” To emphasize that unique position of Baltimore’s new literary lion, the Evening Sun carried a big picture of van Loon and his medal with the article.24 The publication and subsequent immense popularity of H.G. Wells’s Outline of History and van Loon’s Story of Mankind set the tone for what one cultural

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historian has called “the ‘outline’ craze of the 1920s and 1930s.” The massive technological changes of the early twentieth century, epitomized by the automobile and the motion picture, had resulted in a society with an increasing professional specialization of knowledge. To make sense of this new world, many Americans turned to books to catch up culturally, regain a unified perspective, and provide themselves with an adequate level of “civilization.” This democratization of knowledge acquisition in a consumer society, aimed at a wide public of “average intelligent readers,” became known as middlebrow culture. The new genre of outline books for this market emphasized the unity of knowledge, rejected specialization, and combined authority and intimacy. The authors of these books—for instance, Lewis Mumford in The Story of Utopias (1922), Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy (1926), and Charles and Mary Beard, in The Rise of American Civilization (1927)—were generalists who had much confidence in their readers’ ability to understand what they had to say, as well as in the audience’s “improvability.” These popularizers wrote in a style that was factual, uncomplicated, unambiguous, and devoid of bare generalizations. Their vocabulary, as James Steel Smith observed, “was remarkably uncolorful; like plain window glass, it was meant to be seen through” (van Loon’s occasional flights into eccentricity and dramatic pose were an exception).25 Probably the most successful outline writer was Will Durant. Although his high-minded approach was markedly different from van Loon’s occasional informalities, both men ultimately shared a common goal of satisfying a thirst for knowledge of many millions of Americans, especially those who had not had the chance to go to college. Durant saw the outline writers as “merchants of light.” About van Loon and his Story of Mankind he remarked in retrospect that the Dutch-American historian had written his book “with a pen in one hand, a pencil in the other, and a twinkle in his eye.” Not caring for dignity, van Loon had gone “laughing down the centuries.” And, as a consequence of the adults’ surreptitiously reading the book they had bought for their children, Durant argued, “The world was becoming scandalously informed about history.”26 As van Loon reflected in the mid-1930s on Durant’s and his own success, “We realized that we lived in a world which had completely changed its masters. In order to save civilization from chaos, it was necessary that the new masters should know certain things which until then had been the privileged possession of the few. . . . We carried this necessary information to this new public and in such a form and shape that it could understand this new knowledge and enjoy it. Neither of us, I am quite sure, ever expected that we would set all the hearth-fires burning brightly, but hundreds of thousands of little lamps were lighted where only darkness had been before and in all sorts of unexpected places.” In his foreword to The Story of Mankind van Loon had

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written that “there is no elevator to reach the top of the mighty Tower of Experience—History—and get the benefit of the full view.” But Columbia University scholar John Erskine was of the opinion that the outlines of the 1920s did indeed serve as elevators, giving its readers that full view.27 At age forty and twenty years after his arrival in the United States, van Loon had made a name in his adopted country as one of the “merchants of light” and secured a position as columnist at a prestigious newspaper. Van Loon optimistically faced the future and he made plans to show off his Newbery Medal in his native country and be honored there as well. But that expectation would prove to be a bridge too far.

Chapter 9

The Prince of Popularizers (1922–1928) During the 1920s the reputation of the iconoclastic journalist H.L. Mencken reached its pinnacle. Perhaps for the first time in American cultural life, a critic, rather than a novelist or a poet, was the most influential American writer. Called by Walter Lippmann in 1926 “the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people,” another journalist dubbed the self-taught linguist “the nearest thing to Voltaire that America has ever produced.” Of course, there were negative opinions too. Some considered him to be “the most universally hated man in the United States” or “the Genghis Khan of the Campus.” As contemporary author Louis Kronenberger put it, “Mencken came in like a lion. [He] liked the noise and fun of battle [and] launched a massive attack on everything this country held inviolate, on most of what it held self-evident.” In any case, Mencken was a phenomenon. A recent biographer has even called him “our nay-saying Whitman” and compared Mencken’s writing in the early 1920s to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”1 Even before Hendrik Willem van Loon joined Mencken on the staff of the Baltimore Sun, they were regularly exchanging letters on topics ranging from postwar international politics to the problems of a writer working in a nonnative tongue. Van Loon asked Mencken, “Can one ever learn a foreign language well enough to turn it into a subconscious part of one’s own conscious self?” (In a letter to a British friend, after having read a book by Rudyard Kipling, Hendrik Willem despaired that he could ever write as well, “for my brain is still full of Dutch and it hangs like spiderwebs from the high dome of my head and however much I try to clean it, not even twenty maids with twenty mops could do it.”) Mencken, in his posthumously published

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memoir My Life as Author and Editor, observed that van Loon’s writing seemed to him “to be a bit strained and stilted,” and Mencken doubted that “he ever really became at home in the English language.” In Mencken’s view van Loon became more fluent in English when he got older, “but he never quite mastered it.”2 Mencken’s reservations about van Loon put the Dutchman in distinguished company, as Mencken was also harsh about such contemporary authors as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Although Mencken considered van Loon to be “a man of considerable information and decided intelligence,” he also thought that “there was nevertheless something cheap about him” and he especially disliked van Loon’s “habit of barging into my room without notice” when both were at the Algonquin Hotel in New York; this, according to Mencken, had led to sometimes embarrassing situations. For that reason he “held aloof from him.”3 Hendrik Willem van Loon’s debut in the Baltimore Sun on 10 May 1922 was front-page news and during the first ten days the column’s heading “H.v.L.” was followed by the explanation “Being a column of personal opinion written and drawn especially for The Sun by the man who looked at the world from the top of the tower and then wrote The Story of Mankind.” Van Loon introduced his first column with Horatius’s motto “Why should one not tell the truth with a smile?” In addition, he confessed to his readers that he did not claim to know everything—in fact he knew “darned little”—and that he would be grateful to “those of our readers who set us straight.” On 21 May, a day that the column did not appear, the newspaper featured a poetic tribute by Max Martindale called “HvL”:

All hail to the glory of Nietzsche Who sang of the new Superman! For Him, the baboon frisked away from its dune And became just a poor Also-ran, For Him, the birth-pangs out of chaos, Creation of Sun and of Moon— All humankind verges, alone He emerges! Sing HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON! He was born in the lowlands of Holland Four decades ago. Yaw, Mijnheer, He lifted his head, in his small trundlebed, And he called for a sandwich and beer. The food of the great did sustain him, And Seven League Boots were his shoon. The crash of the spheres soothed his infantile ears! Sing HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON!

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Wouldst bathe in the waters of Eden? Wouldst see what old Caesar has seen? Wouldst cry “Atta-boy” while young Helen of Troy Eats an apple, and turns Paris green? Then hark! The Pied Piper of History Will make them all dance to his tune! He lights n’ Pomona and smites his Corona— Sing HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON! He sits in the Top of the Tower, While mankind slinks nervously by, He peers far and wide through the gay countryside, Seeing all with his Periscope Eye, Hearing all with his Radio Ear From morning till late afternoon— Behold! He has won his place in the Sun! What more can be done, H. van Loon?

Over the next year, “The Pied Piper of History” covered a wide range of topics in his column. Often van Loon dealt with topics from daily life but he also discussed domestic and international politics and such matters as the cultural dominance of New York over other big cities in the United States, and the American educational system. In an open letter to the president he once argued in favor of the release of political prisoners who had been a victim of the war hysteria. He used the column to express his criticisms of Prohibition, intolerance toward dissenting views of society and prejudices against race, as well as of the epitome of 1920s’ American industrialism, Henry Ford. As he explained to his readers, “Henry and I don’t get along well. Ever since he called my particular job ‘bunk’ I have felt that we never could be good friends again.” Van Loon described Ford’s newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, as “a stupid sheet, badly printed and miserably edited.”4 On 3 June he wrote about the subject of American culture and its lack of confidence vis-a-vis European culture. “The superficial European observer who regards America merely as a polyglot boarding house where people scramble furiously after material gain is wrong, dead wrong. Our civilization may at first have a certain resemblance to the whirlpool of the Niagara river. But that whirlpool is going somewhere and it is going rapidly in a certain very definite direction. So are we as a nation. . . . But in most forms of art and letters and philosophy we seem to be unable to get rid of our European complex. We still have a devout admiration for the language which our English neighbors call the ‘Mother Tongue.’ When Mencken preaches emancipation and tells us that we possess a mighty treasure in our own American language we regard him with suspicion. . . . When other iconoclasts . . . boldly come forward and state that we are a new race with entirely new problems and an

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entirely new set of civic and personal ideals, we feel that such sentiments are not quite right. . . . It is a curious thing, but in this vague but unmistakable movement of and for a more national expression of our own national consciousness the people who were born in foreign lands may yet become the leaders. The reason, it seems to us, is simple. They see things a bit more clearly. They are forever comparing. Underneath this turbulent flow of new life across the mighty plains of the North American continent they notice certain things which their tired eyes failed to discover in the stagnant waters of the older European civilization.” In his attitude toward immigrants, van Loon showed some ambivalence. In one column he wrote compassionately that “the average immigrant is neither a saint nor a devil. He is very tired. He is pathetically thankful for the smallest evidence of personal kindness. Above all, he is hopelessly bewildered [at] a strange and incomprehensible America which fills [his] trembling heart with awe and fear and with a great deal of doubt.” Yet in another column, only two months later, he fulminated against “the horde of new arrivals” who in his view abused the American language and he accused his fellow Americans of a passive attitude toward this development as they left their own language “to the mercy of the barbarian illiterates.” The whole matter, he wrote, was left to the schoolteacher. “When she tells the bright little boys what fine things words are the answer is: ‘Forget it. My father don’t speak no English. He makes twice as much as you do.’ And so nothing will be done.”5 In two other columns van Loon contemplated the results of the war and expressed his pessimism about the European situation after Versailles and especially the situation in Germany. “The war has not brought about that Paradise on Earth that was to be so firmly founded upon the fourteen Pillars of Wilsonian Faith. It has brought hunger and pestilence and assassination. It has brought the curse of International Conferences, which no one takes seriously any longer, and while it has destroyed the old dispensation it has failed to bring us the new religion of the Brotherhood of Man. . . . The masses are adrift, and if we are not careful they will follow the lead of some very dangerous pilots. . . . They feel that they did not get what they were promised. They were told that they were to live in a new and better world. They find themselves in a worse one.” “In due time something new will be erected amidst the ruins of the old order. But the next few years will see political conditions compared to which the architectural chaos of the builders of Babel was mere child’s play.”6 On 8 August van Loon wrote that he was glad to have become an American citizen: “I have lived just one-half of my life in Europe and one-half in America. The conversion in my particular case was very slow. I had to become a good American in spite of the professional Americanizers. . . . When I think of our vast continent and the bungling stupidity of the third-rate minds that have hoisted themselves into the seats of the rich and the mighty,

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and when I think that within these borders there live more intelligent and delightful and courageous and charming men and women than I have ever found anywhere else . . . , I am grateful that I too belong to a commonwealth where a century of ‘grab as grab can’ has not been able to destroy a generosity of hearts and mind which stands unparallelled in the records of time. . . . [With] all our flag-waving and all our gaseous oratory about our biweekly heroes we still retain a kindly feeling toward our neighbors. We steal each other’s dollars and when our pockets are filled we turn them inside out for the benefit of the starving Roossian or Eytalian or Austrian and we laugh rather shyly and we are a bit ashamed of ourselves, but in one way or another the starving Roossian or Eytalian or Austrian gets fed and he shall probably continue to be fed as long as he has a tummy-ache and hollers loud enough to let us hear that he is in distress.” Baltimore’s summer heat made van Loon long for a change of climate and on 12 August he announced that he would temporarily cease his column to travel. From 16 September to 15 November the Sun printed van Loon’s illustrated reports on his tour of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark in which he wrote about the history, geography, and culture of these northern European countries. After his travels through Scandinavia, van Loon spent some time in Germany and in four Sun articles he reported about the political, social, and economic misery he encountered there. In his last report from Europe, written in Amsterdam on 1 November and published in the Sun two weeks later, van Loon stated “as emphatically as possible” that Germany depressed him “more thoroughly than anything I have ever experienced or ever hope to experience. . . . A heavy curtain of gloom hangs across the country.”7 While in the Netherlands, Hendrik Willem—who shortly afterward wrote to a Dutch friend that there was no excuse in the world for not being happy with Jimmie as she was the most sensible and friendly woman he had ever met—introduced his wife to his relatives. They were far from enthusiastic, especially disliking her boyish bob and the fact that she smoked cigarettes “all day long.” But what disappointed van Loon most was the lack of recognition accorded him in his native country—it reminded him of his father, the kill-joy of his youth who had died that March. The Dutch were unaware of his success in the United States and had certainly not heard of his Newbery Medal. He was glad, therefore, that on 4 November he could sail back to New York. To ease Hendrik Willem’s disappointment, before the ship sailed Jimmie typed a three-word letter, “YOU ARE FAMOUS,” and put it in an envelope addressed to “Hendrik Willem van Loon—America.” The letter was punctually delivered at their Baltimore home, showing clearly that, unlike in the Netherlands, in the United States van Loon indeed was a celebrity.8

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One wonders how comfortable van Loon’s bed was on board the new ocean liner Volendam, since this had been the subject of one of the tall columnist’s funniest pieces. For most of mankind the problem of retiring is a very simple one. . . . But to those of us who exceed the human timberline the process is intricate and demands a thorough knowledge of higher mathematics, calculus and trigonometry, not to mention a profound understanding of the principles which underlie non-Euclidian geometry. The average bed in this world is 5 feet by 1.5. I need at least 7 feet by 4 to be entirely comfortable. When I ask for something like that hotel porters wax very funny and suggest I hire a hall or a coalyard, and as I am not enough of a horse to sleep standing on all fours, I must take whatever I am offered. . . . Once I leave dry land and intrust my soul to the waves, the problem of the body begins in all seriousness. The little hammock in the Pullman berth is a palace compared to the average bunk of the average cabin. If I could sleep in installments, it would be all right. Just now the United States lines are making herculean efforts to get passengers. They show large pictures of Niagara, depicting tons and tons and tons of water being forced through a narrow gorge, and invite the natives of Europe to go and experience the thing for themselves in “das Freie Amerika.” Their advertisement does not interest me. The moment they shall say “We offer all passengers a decent bed and we have done away with the old sardine box” they can count upon one faithful patron.

In another column he again referred to the difficulties he encountered as a consequence of his massive physique. This time, he told his readers that visiting a theater was far from a pleasant experience for him as “Most seats in most theaters were built for children. Once in, we never know how to get out without the help of a derrick. We like to give pleasure to our neighbors, but it is unfair that we should compete with the regular show. As a rule we wait until all the other spectators are gone and then, with the kind assistance of a few stage hands, we return to a standing posture.”9 Back in New York van Loon made some very bold statements about the European situation in a lecture at Town Hall. In his view Europe was “like a lunatic asylum” or “an exceedingly bad-bred dog kennel.” He had found out that “the average European mind [was] in a state of absolute and dumb despair. . . . These four horrible years of peace are in many ways worse than the horrible years of war. . . . A terrible apathy has overtaken the Old World.” In short, van Loon said that the “European civilization [was] going rapidly and entirely to pieces.” Van Loon blamed the historians for their overemphasis on nationalism which, in his view, was the main source of Europe’s misery. Their “mischievous insistence upon what they call ‘the correct scientific attitude’

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had been taken far too seriously.” It were therefore “the historians who should be shot, not the monarchs,” he declared. In the dark and turbulent European situation he saw England as “the only ray of light.” He thought that not much could be done about the present situation but to have patience. He warned his audience that “The trouble with America is that it is always looking for solutions.” A few months later in his Sun column he argued in favor of a U.S. foreign policy of aloofness: “In international matters we are not our brother’s keeper. We are helpless before the suicidal mania of the continental powers. Before we intend to put in the sprinkling system of a new and workable League of Nations we intend to wait until the ruins of old Europe shall have grown cold. . . . Why not declare that we shall allow our neighbors to find salvation after their own sweet fashion and that their domestic affairs are none of our concern?”10 In New York van Loon stayed at the Algonquin, the home of the famous literary Round Table. Sinclair Lewis’s wife Grace wrote in her memoir that van Loon, with his indifference for drinking, was “an anomaly among the writers of his time” and therefore never “one of the boys.” Though not belonging to the Round Table, van Loon frequented the Algonquin whenever he was in New York. In one of his Sun columns he praised the Algonquin’s owner, Frank Case, for having turned the dining room of his hotel into a literary “salon” and in another column he referred to the Algonquin restaurant as the place where “within a single hour . . . more little ideas” are being peddled than anywhere else in the United States.11 Van Loon resumed his “H.v.L.” column on 25 November. On 4 December he told his readers that he always had a “sincere admiration for the man who can ‘cuss’ better than we” and as the London New Statesman made “a specialty of that particular form of literary expression,” van Loon quoted extensively from a review in that weekly of the English edition of his Story of Mankind. The British reviewer tore the book completely to pieces and concluded that for him it was “impossible to imagine a more ghastly tribute to the intellectual delinquencies of a nation” than the success of this book in America. Van Loon carried “the scalp . . . triumphantly home as a warning to others.” This devastating review did not express the general opinion on the book in Britain, however; the reception was overwhelmingly positive.12 In his 26 July 1922 column van Loon explained to his readers Charles Darwin’s evolution theory and argued that the criticism of William Jennings Bryan and many fundamentalists of that theory was “pathetic” and a “storm in the theological teapot.” The following 26 March, van Loon confronted criticism from a group of Minnesota fundamentalists on his Story of Mankind. In a resolution they had not only strongly rejected the theory of evolution, but called the works of van Loon and H.G. Wells “unworthy of a place in a university class room and unfit for our public schools.” Hendrik

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Willem’s response was to express “a spark of gratitude” to these “Baptist Babbitts” for paying him a great compliment. “They have named me together with H.G. Wells, for whom I retain that admiration which borders very closely upon veneration. From a mere obscure newspaperman (with an humble interest in history) they have elevated me to the rank of a little martyr.” Van Loon continued, speaking of himself in the third person as someone worthy of association with other wise men whom conservatives had once attacked (like Galileo and Newton): “Now he has been turned into a firm oak that must weather the storms of popular criticism. Overnight he has gained great glory. He has been publicly denounced.” Nevertheless, he was doing his best to hold on to his modesty; he had already informed his readers that he was writing a new book, The Story of the Bible, “A strange job which asks for a great deal of humility.”13 In his posthumously published memoir Report to Saint Peter, van Loon recorded that his allusions to the evolutionary theory in The Story of Mankind kept the book off school library shelves in more than a dozen states, including the Baltimore public library (according to his son, the book was forbidden in the public libraries of twenty-four states), and that even more than twenty years after the book had come out hardly a week went by without his receiving letters blaming him for his “loose Darwinian morals.” As van Loon wrote in his Sun column, “Everywhere it is the same dispute, based firmly upon ignorance and prejudice. . . . A hundred years from now Bill Bryan and his followers will be a minor exhibit in some handbook on Ancestral Idiocies. Meanwhile we have to tolerate them as best we can. They are really very nice people. They are just dumb.”14 The antievolution movement came to a climax in the July 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee. Local biology teacher John T. Scopes had deliberately lectured on evolution to challenge a recently adopted Tennessee law that forbade “any teacher in any of the universities, normal, and all other public schools of the state, to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” The trial brought Chicago agnostic Clarence Darrow, America’s most famous defense lawyer, and William Jennings Bryan to face off, as one historian put it, “against one another in one of the most dramatic confrontations of the twentieth century in a suffocatingly hot courtroom.” Mencken, himself anti-fundamentalist par excellence, covered the event with great excitement for the Baltimore Evening Sun. Earlier he had given the American language the term “Bible Belt” and on this particular occasion he coined the label “Monkey trial.” Although the trial ended in a hollow victory for the fundamentalists, the movement quickly subsided after Bryan died a couple of days later. As historian William Leuchtenburg observed, the movement was in fact “a war of country and small town against

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the city, a war largely centered in the South” and the antievolutionists “were defeated, overwhelmed by the tide of cosmopolitanism.”15 In his 16 April 1923 column van Loon returned to a favorite theme when he asked, “Is there another nation in this world which prides itself upon the fact that it is composed of lowbrows?” Looking at newspaper ads and reading stories about what politicians said about themselves—hiding the fact that they had had a good college education—made it very plain to van Loon that “The hero of these millions is a simple person without any advantage.” He could somehow understand “this simulation of plain virtues” by politicians running for public office and needing the votes of their constituents, and maybe the embittered Midwestern editor who had told him recently that “In our part of the Republic thinking is considered un-American” was right. Yet, he wondered, “Why this insistence upon something which is a direct insult to the divine intelligence which created Man after its own Image?” Van Loon had studied the lowbrow very carefully and found him “always arrogant. He is intolerant and cruel in his hatred of those who possess certain qualities from which he himself is forever excluded. Undoubtedly he has been a victim of his own inferior consciousness since the beginning of time. But in the olden days he used to hide his shame. . . . Some queer turn of the wheel has brought him to the foreground. He organizes parades and hires brass bands and bribes Bill Bryan to lecture to him upon the perfections of Homo Insapiens.” When one of his readers sent him a letter asking him to write “an article on the [Baltimore] mayoralty campaign if you are such a good historian [and] beat Mencken to it,” van Loon had replied that such a thing could not be done. “In the first place we do not intend or hope or expect to ‘beat Mencken at it’ for the eminently good reason that the learned Doctor is a much better hand at that sort of thing than we can ever aspire to be. . . . For the moment we are perfectly contented to keep our little reportorial job and spend our spare moments studying the methods of our Beelzebub of the Babbitts.” As for the mayoralty campaign, there again “Dom Henrico Luis” would have a great advantage over him being born and raised in “the Respublica Baltimorensis” and knowing much better than he could ever hope to the history and political culture of Baltimore and feeling instinctively “the hidden meaning of the slightest gesture made by the honorary Pallbearers Guild.” Therefore, van Loon argued, “it would be folly for me to attempt to say anything about local politics.”16 Apparently van Loon was not that “perfectly contented to keep [his] little reportorial job” as he had written on 23 April, because the last “H.v.L.” column was printed only four days later. Without any announcement by the columnist himself or the editors, van Loon disappeared from the Sun. According to Mencken van Loon’s column “made very little impression in Baltimore” and

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he thought van Loon was not giving that job the attention it needed. Because of the success of The Story of Mankind van Loon, in Mencken’s view, spent not much time in Baltimore. Yet he recalled that van Loon several times played the violin at Mencken’s Saturday Night Club and thought that van Loon “was not a violinist of much skill but he did well enough.” Van Loon’s younger son confirmed Mencken’s view on van Loon’s being often on the road. He wrote that his father, “more restless than ever” and making not much progress with his Story of the Bible, was “quickly disgusted with Baltimore [and] accepted any and all lecture engagements.”17

On 28 April, the day after his last column appeared, Hendrik Willem and Jimmie van Loon sailed for England. The British authorities had granted him a visa for the first time since his wartime articles made him persona non grata in the United Kingdom. In May and June van Loon and his wife stayed in Cambridge and London, where he completed the first draft of The Story of the Bible and met a number of British publishers. From the Hotel Metropole in London, van Loon in a letter to Mencken reported on Jimmie’s drinking habit. For him as a nondrinker, it was becoming a source of constant irritation and worry. “Jimmie keeps a bottle of gin on tap. But what can I do? That woman is the only living being who can read my corrected manuscript. As long as I write she has her job and she buys so much gin that I must write to make money for the distillers.”18 By late June the van Loons traveled across the Channel to the Netherlands where they settled in the Abdij Hotel in Middelburg. Hendrik Willem recalled the peaceful atmosphere of Zeeland’s capital city from his bicycle trips when he spent summer vacations in that province at his uncle Henri Hanken’s farm. Of course, Hendrik Willem and Jimmie paid a visit to Henri Hanken and in following weeks they frequently visited nearby Veere, a painters’ paradise. Like so many people before and after them, the van Loons fell in love with Veere and resolved that they would return. A prosperous port in the late Middle Ages, Veere had shrunk to a sleepy village with fewer than a thousand people by the 1920s and had the reputation of a dead town.19 Though Veere was regularly visited by a number of seasonal artists, only a few of them lived there year-round. One of them was Lucy van Dam van Isselt and it was with her that the van Loons became fast friends. The only other guest in their hotel that summer also became part of the van Loon entourage in Veere over the years. Frits Philips was the nephew of Anton Philips, the founder of the world-famous electronics company. Middelburg physician Dr. Charles Koch, who a week after van Loon’s arrival treated him for a kidney stone, also became a close friend. The van Loons very much enjoyed spending

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the rest of the summer in Middelburg and surroundings where Dutch, American, and English friends visited them regularly.20 In another letter to Mencken, van Loon praised the scenery and the local inhabitants, who at times seemed “five hundred years behind the times.” He also reported that he was working on “a trilogy of a sort-of-Erasmiancommon-sense. First Mankind showing the mess, then the Bible showing how the mess came. Now the third one nobly entitled ‘Laughing Philosophers. The Story of the Struggle for the Freedom of Thought.’ ” By the end of July van Loon had sent the finished manuscript of The Story of the Bible off to his publisher, Horace Liveright, and he became increasingly bored and restless. At the end of the summer, the van Loons moved on, first visiting other Dutch cities new to Jimmie and then, at her insistence, going to Paris. Hendrik Willem had never been to the French capital before, and they thoroughly enjoyed its delights. After a trip to Venice and one last week in the Netherlands, they set sail for America on 12 December. Right after Christmas Jimmie “scouted for houses [and] found one in Westport.”21 Meanwhile, Boni and Liveright had published The Story of the Bible in late October. In the foreword van Loon once again addressed his two sons, telling them that he had written the book because he thought they ought to know more about the Bible than they did. He added that he was not “defending or attacking a cause” but hoped that his account of the Bible would make their lives “more full of understanding, of tolerance and of love for that which is good and beautiful, and therefore holy.” Whereas van Loon had found it “comparatively easy” to write about the Old Testament, which he described as “a national Jewish scrap-book [containing] histories and legends and genealogies and love poems and psalms, classified and arranged and reclassified and rearranged without any regard for chronological order or literary perfection,” the New Testament had been more difficult for him. Centering on Jesus, “who asked nothing of life and gave all,” his life story was a most interesting one and van Loon promised his sons to give them “a very simple account of his life as I see it, not a word more and not a word less. For that, I am sure, is the way he would like to have me tell it.”22 The year before, van Loon had suggested similar reasons for writing this book, telling the New York Times “Books and Authors” column “that large numbers of our children are growing up without any moral or religious code whatsoever. When the children read my story of the Bible, I hope they will be kinder to the kitty! I mean I hope they will be kinder to every living thing, that they will love better—love each other and the world.”23 Times critic Thomas L. Masson characterized the book as “essentially a listen-my-children-and-you-shall-hear book, a book for boys, a just-as-goodas Bible, a campfire Bible without the incentive after reading it to read

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the Bible itself.” According to Masson the author was “not so much concerned with the maker or the original as he [was] to advertise it, to have the boys know more ‘about’ it and to make it clear that he is only discussing its machinery and not its maker.” The reviewer thought that the way the author dealt with the Bible stories, “waving [the miracles] away with a beautiful gesture,” was “a fascinating performance, leaving us in doubt as to where reality leaves off and the illusion begins.” His conclusion was that van Loon had “not drawn upon his admirable creative faculties enough to make his inaccuracies a work of art, but, according to a well-known formula, [had] produced a saxophone Bible which . . . will be swallowed by the boys who read it as if it were the gospel truth.” Strangely enough this reviewer saw only boys as an audience for this book. Apparently The Story of the Bible was not for girls.24 Critical reaction to the new book was decidedly mixed. The Literary Review preferred the “imaginative” pictures over the “facile and amusing story,” and the best Time could say was that it would be a popular Christmas present.25 The fundamentalists had geared up to attack van Loon’s version of the Holy Book and protests over The Story of the Bible continued over the winter. In February 1924, the Detroit Free Press informed its readers that “They are still storming over” it and that “Every now and then we see sorrowful reviews which complain among other things, that the book is ‘grotesque and wholly unworthy,’ but sales keep right on despite sanctimonious protests.” The impact of the protests is hard to judge since van Loon presented two sharply different sales reports that month. He told Mencken that “The Bible has come to a complete standstill. . . . Critics who liked the book were warned by their editors that they wrote for a church-going public and must not praise it. Booksellers refuse to merchandise the book because their pious customers refuse to go near the counter where the book reposes.” Three weeks later he was telling Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin, “The Bible is doing nicely. The first fundamentalist blast has come to an end. . . . The book seems to have lived through the not inconsiderable barrage of the Bryan cohorts.”26 As soon as Hendrik Willem and Jimmie set foot on U.S. soil after their European trip, he struck back at his fundamentalist critics. In a New York Times story published on Christmas, he characterized most clergymen as “ignorant”—even those who had received college and seminary education— and compared the fundamentalists of his day with those in the Middle Ages who considered learning Greek a heresy. Dulling no punches, he said, “The Fundamentalist doesn’t want anybody to learn anything. Today most of our clergymen do not get their education in the seminaries, but get their training in the Y.M.C.A. and their learning from the correspondence courses of

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William J. Bryan. Many of the churches do not want their clergymen to go to seminaries. They fear education.” Three weeks later, van Loon continued the attack in an article he himself wrote for the Times. He preferred “the Laughing Philosophers”—Erasmus, Montaigne, Voltaire, Spinoza, Cervantes, Socrates—“the whole honorable company of spiritual pioneers [who] knew to smile and who were the only people who have ever accomplished anything of lasting value” over “the dismal doctrine of the zealots.” Although it was not mentioned in the Gospels, van Loon was convinced that Jesus, too, “possessed the sublime gift of the smile that understands all things” and “thoroughly despised those qualities which we now head together as Puritanism.”27 Overall, the reviews of The Story of the Bible were more positive than negative. Even if the book did not sell as well as The Story of Mankind, it definitely was not the “flop” that Gerard Willem dubbed it. The book was reprinted every decade since 1923, most recently in 1985.28 When van Loon’s two recent best sellers were published in Dutch translation in his native country in 1923 and 1924, the Dutch response showed once more that he was increasingly distanced from his fatherland. The Middelburgsche Courant and the daily Voorwaarts in Rotterdam both gave The Story of Mankind positive reviews. However, Het Vaderland in The Hague dismissed this Dutch translation and the Utrecht-based Catholic newspaper Het Centrum called it “unreliable and harmful,” recommending it be kept away from youngsters.29 Although van Loon was used to this kind of fundamentalist criticism, what really hurt him was a review by the eminent historian Johan Huizinga. Because of its “pseudo-knowledge, platitudes and vulgarisms,” the book in Huizinga’s view was unsuitable for children and more geared toward grownups without any cultural background. Huizinga, who was already a scholar of American history (and not a particularly admiring one), found the success of van Loon’s book in the United States “a bad omen for our civilization.”30 The Dutch reviews of The Story of the Bible were even harsher. The theological editor of the Algemeen Handelsblad, for instance, flatly condemned the book and accused the author of a complete lack of “knowledge, seriousness, and refinement.” Here, and with Huizinga’s critique, a Dutch-American observed that any “cultural kinship with Dr. Van Loon’s writings is quite strenuously denied by his racial kinsmen who are leaders of public opinion in Holland” and concluded that van Loon’s “Americanization” in these critics’ eyes was not seen as “a process of evolution or growth, such as other famous Dutchmen have undergone, but as a negative, reactionary process, in which the Dutch spirit of painstaking research, fair criticism, and reasonable objectivity, has tended to disappear.”31

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Van Loon explained the rash of attacks in a letter to his old teacher Esther Bell-Robinson. “Holland takes it almost as a personal offense that I should, in a measure, have succeeded after I bade them farewell,” he contended. “I act upon the excellent burghers as a red rag before a steer.” And to George Burr, he wrote, “The Dutch historians are in such a rage at the success of my books among the younger generation in my native land that they can hardly express themselves in decent terms. Many don’t. Erasmus would have enjoyed it.” He even told his Dutch friends that their fellow countrymen were considered backward in the eyes of foreigners; they were “angry spiders” who worked with all their energy to do away with persons who really meant something in the world, such as Edward Bok. In another letter to his friend Aagje Moussault, the wife of an Amsterdam newspaperman, he confessed that he and Jimmie were both “enthusiastically disgusted with the whole attitude of [his] beloved Vaderland towards their distinguished lost son” and he compared coming to Holland with having to drive an unstable Ford car through a swamp.32 Van Loon’s criticism of the Dutch was not limited to his personal correspondence. From October 1922 until September 1924 he made himself heard by publishing a series of articles in the Dutch weekly De Amsterdammer. In these “American Letters” van Loon explained several aspects of the United States. He did this with pleasure, he wrote in the opening article of 28 October 1922, since his adopted country in his opinion was terra incognita in Holland. As a consequence of “Europe’s suicide,” van Loon argued, the United States had become the most powerful nation on earth and in order to understand the modern world, one had to understand America. This was not just another country, but a completely different and new civilization with the Americans having a different psyche than the Europeans. In his articles van Loon discussed such topics as America’s isolationist position toward Europe, Warren G. Harding’s personality, Prohibition and its negative consequences, and differences between the eastern and western states. Of course, he also wrote about his pet topic: the anti-Darwinist movement led by Bryan and the intolerance of the many religious fundamentalists, which he dubbed “the sour-grapes complex.” The “American Letters” also provided a venue for van Loon to regularly express his annoyance about the Dutch. Clearly with his own position in mind, he complained about the lack of recognition in the Netherlands of talented writers, philosophers, or painters, who had lived there in the past and had made Holland famous in the outside world, and he criticized the lack of appreciation in his native country for those Dutch persons who had become prominent U.S. citizens. He described Dutch history books, novels, and newspapers as an “unpleasant genre.” He observed that the low country near the sea almost collapsed of complacency. Those young Dutch people who

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wanted to start a new life in the United States certainly had a chance of success, he argued, provided they worked very hard and had stamina and humor—characteristics he hardly noticed in the Netherlands. And in case his readers had some ideal image of Michigan, where many Dutch settled, van Loon was quick to shatter that perception. He could only express himself in pejorative terms about the Dutch immigrants there. Their “backwardness” and servility toward their religious leaders made him characterize this group of fellow Dutch immigrants as the worst category of prejudiced primitive provincials.33 All his criticism of the Dutch notwithstanding, he would continue to visit his native country annually throughout the 1920s. In the meantime, however, from January 1924 on the van Loons had settled in Westport, Connecticut, which was very much in vogue among artists, musicians, and writers—a sort of rural Greenwich Village. Van Loon often quipped that “there was more adultery per square bed in Westport than any place east of the Rockies.” There was a hedonistic atmosphere and for all their sophistication most of his neighbors struck him as materialistic and provincial. The teetotaling, sexually frustrated, and cosmopolitan van Loon felt lonely and out of place. He wrote to Lewis Mumford about the severely diminished “spiritual life in this land” and the lack of a liberal party to which he could attach himself. To other friends he sometimes described himself as “the last of the old-fashioned liberals whom the Smithsonian wanted to buy for its collection.”34 Fortunately, there were a few like-minded people in Westport, notably the writer Van Wyck Brooks, an old friend whom he knew already from his work for The Seven Arts back in 1917. Theirs was a warm relationship based on mutual respect and admiration. In his Autobiography Van Wyck Brooks paid tribute to van Loon, calling him “a humanist” and giving him the honorary title “prince of popularizers.” Brooks compared van Loon’s popularity to that of Mark Twain’s, and assessed his mind as “almost as prodigal, impulsive and chaotic.” Though Brooks appreciated van Loon’s writings as “consistent unfoldings of his own special nature,” he nevertheless thought his friend’s “personality was more significant than his work, for [van Loon] usually wrote without tension, en pantoufles.” Although van Loon often managed to offend Brooks’s Westport acquaintances, Brooks was always ready to defend his Dutch friend “as an heir of the traditions of European magnanimity”—this despite their being so different on the surface (Lewis Mumford in his memoir described Brooks as “the perfect gentleman” and van Loon as a “Rabelaisian character” known for “his flood of coarse Dutch-flavored anecdotes” yet commented that they were “immensely at ease” with each other).35 Horace Liveright, van Loon’s publisher, had in mind a third volume, The Story of America, but in 1924 van Loon deferred (he would write that volume

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later). He thought his genius functioned best when “there was an emotion somewhere” with which he could “fight stupidity”—a thing he called his “Erasmian job.” But in writing a history of America he felt “little to emote about.” Instead, as he explained to Burr and Mencken, he was picking up an idea he’d had the previous summer on a book about the struggle for the freedom of thought, tentatively called The Story of Tolerance. He did not expect it to be a commercial success, but to keep his self-respect he felt he had to write it. After that, he told a Dutch friend, he wanted to write a novel about Rembrandt’s life.36 In the summer of 1924, van Loon attended the national conventions of both political parties. His articles about the Republican gathering in Cleveland and the Democratic one in New York City reflect disappointment as well as boredom. Van Loon observed that both political parties, “dinosaurlike, have increased beyond the point where they can either walk or swim.” He was therefore very worried to see the rise of new parties, especially a Catholic party, which in turn would be followed “by a more intensive cult of the Ku Klux Klan bigotry, . . . fighting to preserve something which has already been doomed by history, throwing themselves into a lost cause.” In another article, he stated that the Klan was “in the hands of very incompetent and grossly ignorant citizens who have regarded their position merely as a source of revenue and have been totally indifferent to whatever good their association might do for the land they pretend to love with such lily-white ardor. As a result, wherever there is a fight between decency and indecency, tolerance and bigotry, greed and generosity, the Klan is found on the side of the oppressors, of the robbers, of the bigots.”37 After the conventions, Hendrik Willem went to Holland and Belgium for a holiday with his elder son, Hank (now seventeen and no longer answering to Hansel), Jimmie, and his old friend Louis Fuertes. He spent the remainder of the year writing Tolerance, keeping a small circle of friends informed about the ups and downs of the work. In December van Loon reported that he had managed in between to write and draw a small book, a philosophy of life in a fairy story called Wilbur the Hat, which was to appear in early 1925. “Of course,” he wrote to Fuertes, “I pay for the terrible exertion of four days and nights of brain-burning by weeks of pain, but anyway I will leave something to the kids.”38 When the new 110-page book came out in March, it was advertised by the publisher as an “extraordinary book [that would] take its place among the great satires of all times,” and by the author as “the only esoteric philosophy written since 473 B.C.” The reviews that followed, however, in general were lukewarm. Though the Saturday Review of Literature described Wilbur the Hat as “flippantly profound,” the New York Times called it “no more than a mildly amusing book,” while Mark Van Doren in The Nation wrote that

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“Mr. Van Loon has been too sure of himself, too jaunty with error and too slapdash with truth, to produce anything better than a primer of idealism.” It was obvious that the quality of this book suffered from the speed with which it was created. The same could be said, for that matter, about the articles he dashed off this year for such periodicals as The Forum, Hearst’s International and Cosmopolitan, The Nation, The Woman Citizen, and Harper’s Magazine.39 Shortly thereafter, the van Loons took a short working vacation in Europe, but they were back in America by mid-July 1925. A few days later some Westport friends gave a luncheon in their honor; among the other guests was Broadway actress Frances Goodrich. A Vassar College graduate, she was focused on her career after a divorce from an alcoholic actor. Hendrik Willem fell instantly in love with her. Starting the next day, van Loon bombarded her with love letters and telegrams—215 from August through December and promising her another 7,725 letters in the next twenty-five years. In midAugust, he wrote, “I have within three weeks poured down upon your poor head more than most women get in a lifetime.” He was trying to convince her that “I am essentially a one-woman man.” Hendrik Willem’s sexual fixation on women’s feet now found expression in “Little Fives,” a poem he wrote for Frances that included the phrase “You may buy all the pretty dresses you want and all the lovely things that shall make your own loveliness the greater but your feet, dear Heart, belong to me and they shall be garbed so fittingly that the flowers shall grow where you tread the ground.”40 It didn’t matter to him that Frances made it clear that she did not want to remarry or break up Hendrik Willem’s marriage. He assured her that his marriage to Jimmie had been a mistake—even while Jimmie was typing the final draft of Tolerance and wondering what was going on. Van Loon decided to go to Paris where, he was told, he could get a divorce “quickly and efficiently.” Frances tried to discourage him, telling him, “Go away and find other women and go on a series of debauches,” but this only heightened his ardor to make her his wife. Van Loon stopped off in London, to see his British publisher, and in The Hague. Once he got to Paris, he sent Frances yet another ardent love letter: “Damn it Frances, must I beat you to make you believe that this ain’t no common flirtation, that this love of mine for you is something that is going to go thundering through the ages whether you want it or not, that you have lighted a fire compared to which such trifles as the San Francisco fire . . . were backyard fires of dry leaves.”41 Accompanied by a friend, Lila Howard, Jimmie also sailed to France. Lila reported Jimmie tried to be stoic and cooperative but “cried her way across the Atlantic.” Upon arrival in Boulogne, they went to Paris. Before the divorce proceedings got very far, van Loon received a very polite but definitive no

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from Frances. Switching gears, he made peace with Jimmie and set off on a tour of southern France and northern Italy with her and Lila. Nonetheless, he continued writing to Frances, telling her that nothing had changed. Goodrich cut off the correspondence in a frosty letter (the salutation was “Dear Doctor Van Loon”): “My real feelings you have never known. . . .” The Frances Goodrich affair had come to an end—so it seemed. On New Year’s Eve in 1925 Jimmie noted in her diary, “Han worked all day and was tired and cross. Louzy end to a louzy year”; the next day she penned, “The New Year was ushered in by a very mauvais quart d’heure and I wonder how it will go out.”42 Reviews of Tolerance, which dealt specifically with religious intolerance rather than tolerance, were appearing that fall and winter. The first half of the book described the development of intolerance among Christians and the second half offered biographical portraits of such fighters against intolerance as Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, Spinoza, Voltaire, and Thomas Paine. Charles Willis Thompson in the New York Times was downright negative. He criticized the inappropriate title, was struck by van Loon’s “roughness in style, looseness of judgments, free and easy way of dealing with historical facts” and stated that in his view the book was written “in a cocksure and assertive manner.” Though the reviewers in the New York World and The Outlook were more positive, they both were of the opinion that the book could have been much better had the author given his subject more time. Charles Beard, in the New York Herald Tribune review, wrote that it did not pretend to be a scholarly work, but since the book was “full of wise sayings, amusing characterizations, diverting scenes, thrilling tales and stinging blasts,” he commended it to readers.43 To a Dutch friend van Loon described the review of his book in the “arch conservative” New York Times as “a blunt attack of a donkey”—thus displaying a lack of tolerance himself—and expected the book would not bring him much income in the United States, “the country of conservatism.” But surprisingly, this negative review gave him an incentive to work with a revitalized enthusiasm on the book Horace Liveright wanted him to do, The Story of America. He told Mencken and Gertrude Lane, the editor of the Woman’s Home Companion (who had bought serial rights for the volume), that he had never wanted to write this new book but while working on it “suddenly found that the whole damn thing was neatly rolled up in a corner of my brain and asked to be taken down.” To Burr he reported that writing his American history had made him discover not only how much the United States meant to him, but also “how many million miles away the present state of our civilization—the present triumph of matter over mind—is removed from the original promise of an empire at four cents an acre.” After finishing this book, he told Burr, “I shall leave history and farewell. For there are others who can do it infinitely better than I.”44

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But his task as a historian would not be finished at all. On the contrary, he had a mission to fulfill. In his chapter “History” in Harold Stearns’s 1922 book Civilization in the United States (a collection of essays by thirty American intellectuals, including Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, and H.L. Mencken) van Loon not only criticized the American public for a lack of historical interest, but also the members of the historical profession: “No one has ever been able to convince the man in the street that time employed upon historical reading is not merely time wasted.” And that, was exactly the mission he saw for himself and that he described in one of his Sun columns as an “attempt to humanize history and to bring it within reach of the average thinking person.” To someone else Hendrik Willem confessed in 1926 that “history is an obsession with me. It is the only way in which I can try to make the world a little more ‘human,’ perhaps a more agreeable place of abode for those of us who think that this foolish planet might be a pleasant place of abode for a few more people than it is today.”45 Early in 1926, van Loon once more expressed his feelings of admiration for Erasmus. Not only was his fellow Rotterdammer his number-one choice on a list of van Loon’s favorite writers the New York Times published, but the newspaper quoted his praise of Erasmus for embodying “that spirit of an allencompassing humanity mixed with humor which seems to be the only cure for most of the evils of which our planet is suffering.” In Tolerance, Hendrik Willem wrote that the sixteenth-century humanist “like a gigantic beaver, worked day and night to finish that famous dam of reason and common sense which he vaguely hoped might stem the waxing tide of ignorance and intolerance.” In fact, as van Loon told a Boston newspaper a few years later, “All my life I seem to have been following in the footsteps of Erasmus.” And in an introduction he wrote in 1942 for Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly, he declared, “whenever I am asked in what kind of a world I would like best of all to live, my answer is all ready: ‘Turn me loose in a universe re-created after the Erasmian principles of tolerance, intelligence, wit, and charm of manner and I shall ask for no better.’ ”46 In June 1926 Waldo Frank profiled van Loon in The New Yorker. Frank, who had known van Loon since his lean years in Greenwich Village, described him in this profile as a very talented person who was doomed to be “always out of place.” Inside that large and fat body was “a bright little boy, tender and savagely egotistic.” Frank presented van Loon as a contradiction: “He is an aristocrat and scholar, who has spent his life in the scrimmage of mobs, of wars, of newspapers. He is a believer in caste, who has aimed his skill at caste’s destruction.” Frank argued this successful author was as delicate as his specially made tiny silver paint box, “the smallest complete water-color set in one of the largest waistcoats—of prairie-dimension—in New York.”

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Surrounded by America and the modern world the historian was deep at heart “as medieval as the Holland burghers from whom he revolted are modern. This medieval splendor of the mind is what you find, in the tiny Castle of van Loon. . . . He may write of Tolerance, but what he needs is a château high on the rock of feudal privilege.” In his attacks on priests and kings, Frank concluded, van Loon was in fact reproaching them that they had “compelled a lord like himself to go slumming through a world he was born to master.”47 Later that summer, having finished the manuscript of America, van Loon became restless again. The “essentially a one-woman man” (so he had described himself to Frances Goodrich), rediscovered his former fiancé, Rene Gibbs Scudamore. Having finally left her alcoholic husband, Rene was living in a Gramercy Park hotel. This began another period of marital turmoil, once again spanning two continents. Persuading Rene to go to Paris for a quick divorce, he booked passage for her, a female friend, and himself on a ship to Holland. On the day of departure he also found time to write Frances, asking, “Why? Frances, why?” The three stayed a week in Holland after which Rene and her friend proceeded to Paris while van Loon went to visit Willem at the Swiss boarding school his son was now attending. He soon rejoined Rene, who had found a publicity job for the couturier Jacques Worth. Paris was a gathering place for expatriates, and van Loon was glad to see his old pal Sinclair Lewis there. But later, when Hendrik Willem and Rene saw Lewis in a restaurant for dinner, he was so drunk that they tried to avoid him by retiring to a far corner. When Lewis spotted them, he made a scene, and threatened to beat van Loon up. Ordered to leave the restaurant he yelled, “Who in hell does van Loon think he is? A writer?” The incident caused a breach in a longtime friendship that would not be mended until 1933.48 Meanwhile Hendrik Willem had cabled Jimmie to join him, and the couple spent the autumn in northern Italy and in Villefranche, near Nice. Rene even stayed with them for a week. Whatever each woman thought of the other—Jimmie feared that the long-deferred break was inevitable but hung on, hoping against hope, and Rene, ignorant of Frances, was prepared to marry Hendrik Willem when he was free—the situation was further complicated at the holidays when van Loon’s Christmas mail brought a vaguely conciliatory note from Frances. On New Year’s Day 1927, while Jimmie was still recovering from a terrible hangover, Hendrik Willem packed his suitcases and dashed off to the United States, leaving Jimmie behind on the Riviera.49 Frances turned down another marriage proposal and Hendrik Willem soon returned to Europe to shuttle between the other two women. Jimmie went on a Mediterranean cruise while he paid court to Rene in Paris. He nevertheless continued to write Frances, promising to love her humorously instead of tragically from now on. Then Hendrik Willem took Jimmie with

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him to The Hague and on to Berlin, where he was feted by his German publisher. There he gave his wife a pedigreed dachshund puppy, whom Jimmie christened Noodle. The couple parted ways briefly again, van Loon returning to Paris for a brief reunion with Rene, before they set sail for New York where they arrived by mid-April.50 While Hendrik Willem complained to Oswald Garrison Villard of The Nation that he had “the desperate feeling” that America was “one of the worst books and the most hopeless failures of the ages,” Jimmie spent the month of May correcting the book’s galleys. It was her last act of wifely assistance, for the next month Hendrik Willem moved out of the Westport house. A few days later, from the Brevoort Hotel in Greenwich Village, he sent Jimmie a letter telling her he wanted to be free and that he had contacted a Tucson lawyer who would engineer a Mexican divorce for that reason. Despite the ups and downs of the last two years, this news hit Jimmie hard. Referring to herself in the third person, she told the diary “The bottom dropped out of James’ world.” And a week later she wondered, “How can I bear it?” In another letter van Loon accused Jimmie of having “fought all the time against the idea of being a woman.” Had she spent more money on herself and given the effort to make their house “to look like something more than a workshop and a missionary home, . . . I would not have gone off into this slouch of despondency and this general state of nuttiness that drove me away.”51 Van Loon cabled Frances, who was in Little Compton, Rhode Island, that he was in a fragile state “bordering upon [the] verge of complete and total collapse.” At the suggestion of his elder son, Hank, who was studying architecture at Columbia University, he made plans to go to Paris to relax until the divorce came through. Before he sailed, Frances visited him, which lifted his spirits immensely. On the transatlantic passage, Hendrik Willem worked with revitalized energy on a new book project, Life and Times of Pieter Stuyvesant. In Paris van Loon walked Rene to work every morning, checked his mail for letters from Frances, and asked friends which of the two would make a better wife for him. At the same time he wrote Jimmie that he saw only unsuccessful marriages around him and therefore had decided not to marry ever again as “the thing is a terrible bondage to me.” In September Hendrik Willem returned from Paris to New York as a free man. Both Rene and Jimmie were flabbergasted the next month, after learning that on 11 October 1927, Hendrik Willem van Loon and Frances Goodrich were married in Elizabeth, New Jersey.52 By this time van Loon’s America (in later editions it was once more called The Story of America) had come out and the reviews were once again mixed. The reviewer in the New York Times, who missed the originality that should have made this van Loon’s best work, still expected this illustrated book to “stimulate a wider interest in American history.” The Yale Review characterized

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the book as “refreshing and entertaining” while criticizing the author for “so often ignoring the findings of modern historical research”; it too hoped van Loon’s book would serve “to make Americans read their own history.” Even as The Nation told readers that there was “no resisting” America’s “jolly flings at hoary traditions, or its sweeping judgments of motives and acts, or its dramatic word-paintings of men and their ways,” it reminded them that van Loon was not a historian but one of the group of popularizers like Will Durant.53 Van Loon’s third marriage was a fiasco from the very start. It was termed a “companionate marriage” because the newlyweds, as an experiment, had decided to keep their own apartments—Hendrik Willem on East Ninth Street and Frances on East Fifty-Seventh Street. Van Loon, the flamboyant and romantic troubadour, wanted to show off his new wife in his favorite restaurants, but Frances preferred the company of her own theater friends, with whom her husband did not get along. Van Loon’s friends wondered how long he could stand his new wife’s uncivil behavior but during those first weeks he remained infatuated. Even so, he rebuffed a proposal from Frances to try to live together wherever he wanted in order to make their marriage a happy one, coldly replying, “I am satisfied with the present arrangement— i.e. separate apartments.” The novel van Loon–Goodrich ménage was closely monitored by the New York Times, which avidly tracked a burglary at Frances’s apartment in late November.54 The forty-eight blocks between their residences were very symbolic of the relationship. As a Christmas gift van Loon gave his wife a check of several hundred dollars in an envelope he had decorated in his characteristic humorous style. Frances tore both check and envelope to pieces before his and her mother’s eyes, declaring icily she was an independent woman who did not need his financial support. Her callousness made him escape her presence and on 14 January 1928 he celebrated his forty-sixth birthday without her and in the company of two close friends, journalist Lorena Hickok and literary historian and critic Carl Van Doren. A few weeks later Hendrik Willem asked Hank to get rid of the apartment and sailed to Italy, taking the advice of his friends who were concerned that his staying any longer with Frances would lead to his mental breakdown. Still, as his ocean liner left the New York harbor, Hendrik Willem held out hope in a letter to his third wife: “Somewhere in that pile of iron and stone is Frances—whom I love—I do want to be so good to you—I do want so much to make that adorable willful child happy—I am going to sit and think. I will find a way. This is the last until you get the first from the other side. Be well—be happy—whatever you want— whatever I have to give—is yours.”55 By April 1928, having thought about the hopelessness of the situation, van Loon was able to admit to Frances he had created the failure himself by

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imposing his love on her and ignoring the fact that from the very beginning it had not been a mutual affection, that—as he put it—he had never been “an integral part of [her] landscape.” It was clear to him that his playing “the husband-protector” and “the husband-lover” had only annoyed her and that his presence had only made her uncomfortable and their being together “an agony.” He not only accepted the marriage fiasco as a personal defeat but also explained it as “a conflict of different sorts of civilizations,” talking past each other but at least, he maintained, he had tried very hard to change and “would have become a terrible imitation of something American.” Given this situation he had now decided, he wrote Frances, to “keep on the bleak side of the ocean.” He doubted whether he would ever return to America.56 As a blessing for his hurt soul van Loon felt flattered that—even while not staying in the United States anymore—he was asked by Charles Beard to contribute a chapter on “Ancient and Medieval Civilizations” in his book Whither Mankind: A Panorama of Modern Civilization, which was to include chapters written by such eminent authors as Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Lewis Mumford, and Carl Van Doren. The volume, as Beard put it in his preface, was “a challenge, not a summary of fragile dubiosities” and contrary to the pessimistic view of Spengler and others, aimed to present “a more cheerful outlook upon the future of modern civilization, without at the same time resorting to the optimism of the real-estate agent.”57 During the 1920s “outline craze,” the word “civilization” was very much in vogue and was used in numerous book and article titles. As cultural historian Warren Susman observed, “So much that was produced during the twenties can be seen and read in terms of a thinking that self-consciously considered itself a part of the issue of civilization and even as a technique or instrument involved somehow in sustaining, modifying, destroying, or creating ‘civilization.’ ” A year before his Whither Mankind Charles and Mary Beard published their best seller The Rise of American Civilization and van Loon had contributed a chapter to Harold Stearns’s 1922 Civilization in the United States. In 1926 van Loon wrote an introduction to a volume entitled What is Civilization? and gave as his personal view that “the highest civilization is that form of society which allows the greatest number of people to show the greatest amount of consideration for the physical happiness and spiritual comfort of the largest number of their neighbors.” But civilization, in the true sense of the word as he saw it, had not even begun: “Contrary to the generally accepted belief we are not ‘modern’ people, . . . we are not heirs to the glories of a noble past, but . . . we are the last off-shoot of prehistoric man.” He made the same point two years later: “mechanically we live in the year of grace 1928 while spiritually we are but little removed from our earliest ancestors. . . . We are but cave-dwellers going on a joy-ride in a Chevrolet.”58

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Perhaps the most lasting effect of the popularizing movement was the establishment in 1926 of the Book-of-the-Month Club and of the Literary Guild of America. Both organizations offered the public twelve books a year at a reduced price, which were selected for the club members by a board of editors. Van Loon served on the editorial board of the Literary Guild whose editor-in-chief was Carl Van Doren. In a 1928 promotional publication of the Literary Guild van Loon explained to the American reader the Guild’s objective: “Heaven knows I am no rabid admirer of Things European. I know that promontory of Asia too well to sing its wholesale praises and hold it up as an example for the rest of the world. But in the matter of reading the truth must be confessed that Europe reads more, and more intelligently, than we do. We read fewer books, we own fewer books, than almost any other nation. . . . It is our avowed and serious purpose to encourage by every possible means at our command the general habit and the most excellent custom of reading and owning books. And when we have helped to form the bookreading and book-owning habit of the nation which has suddenly been called upon to carry the burden of modern civilization we shall consider that our efforts have not been entirely useless.”59 It can be safely argued that van Loon indeed contributed more than a modest share to America’s cultural life of the Jazz Age. A journalist of the Boston Evening Transcript observed that van Loon “was writing history in a new way. He was treating with a light ironic humor those subjects that had previously been discussed with the utmost seriousness. To the conventionalist, he is the fresh youngster throwing rocks through the hothouse windows to attract attention; to his admirers he is the originator of a new and delightful form of history; while to the public at large he is the man who created some sort of indescribable sensation.” Van Loon told this newspaper man: “When the critics say I am jazzy, it merely means that I am using the spirit of the times. . . . All I am doing is bringing to history what Gershwin has brought to music.” He was not only widely known for his outlines such as The Story of Mankind, The Story of the Bible, and America but also for innumerable drawings and cartoons he had contributed to The Survey (1922–1925) and The Nation (1926–1928). Also in that field of creativity he was able to capture “the spirit of the times” and had his admirers. The Nation’s publisher, Oswald Garrison Villard, for instance, on one occasion spoke about “a masterpiece” and wrote van Loon that “Nothing finer ever appeared in The Nation.” And the Beards in their Rise of American Civilization made a reference to an extraordinary van Loon cartoon “showing God as at last worthy of being naturalized into American citizenship.” Van Loon’s editorship of the Literary Guild, finally, was likewise an important contribution to the cultural climate of the decade.60

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A 1928 publication, Intimate Sketches of Leading American Story Tellers, provided a short biography of van Loon’s alongside those of such noted authors as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Carl Sandburg, Will Durant, and Upton Sinclair. In that sketch van Loon was portrayed as “essentially a European” with “an inherent sense of Rabelaisian humor, [and an] urbanity such as marked the character of Erasmus” with whom he felt a special bond. Indeed, he was even described as “a scholar whose hermitage is the world, whose companion is mankind.” Van Loon had confessed having “only two hates—stupidity and intolerance, and the desire to swat these,” he said, “has given me a sort of Jehovah complex.”61 It was this Jehovah complex that had led to his failed love affair with Frances Goodrich. And so, the “prince of popularizers” unexpectedly sneaked out of the country that had made him a celebrity, fleeing back to Europe— the only place he instinctively felt he would find shelter to recover from his self-inflicted psychological wounds. A few months earlier, a confused van Loon had asked H.L. Mencken to come see him “and listen to the soul-stirring perturbations of this Hendrik who does not even have any Canossa to visit, who can do just about whateverdamnwell pleases him and does not know whither, whence or wherefore.” To fill the vacancy in the editorial board of the Literary Guild, Carl Van Doren requested no one less than Baltimore’s literary lion to “take the place of Van Loon who is just resigning in order to devote all his time to staying away from his wife.” Nothing better than this could express van Loon’s status at the time or explain the reason for his sudden flight.62

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Chapter 10

The Veere Paradise (1928–1931) Aboard the President Harding running away to Europe, van Loon met Dr. Alice Bernheim, a bone specialist at New York Hospital. The well-to-do, well-bred, and happily married Alice Bernheim discovered van Loon’s name on the passenger list, tipped the dining room steward, and was seated at his table; several hours later, they felt as if they were longtime friends. Although she was petite, not quite reaching Hendrik Willem’s chest, she could stand up to him on any subject. More important, as a sharp-witted and perceptive listener, she was exactly the right person the psychologically wounded van Loon badly needed. In Gerard Willem van Loon’s words, Alice had “just the necessary combination of worldliness, clinical detachment, and humor to make her one of the chosen few whom Hendrik needed more than they needed him.” And in the next seven years he sent her an avalanche of letters expressing his inner feelings to this woman for whom he had a deep respect.1 Upon arrival in Genoa on 16 February 1928, van Loon contemplated what to do next. He ruled out going back to the United States or living by himself for a while. Since he lacked the courage to get in touch with Rene in Paris and try to explain a couple of things, he chose the easiest of possibilities: he returned to Jimmie, who was on an extended trip to Europe and happened to be in northern Italy. As if nothing had happened, Hendrik Willem and Jimmie—in the company of her dachshund, Noodle—met at the Bellinzona railway station and set off for Locarno, where they registered at the Grand Hotel Palace as man and wife. Here he drugged himself with work again and felt “as dead as a very dead snake that was run over a couple of weeks before by a truck.” With his eyes and back aching “from sitting without interruption at his desk for sixteen days,” he finished his Life and Times of Pieter Stuyvesant. He wrote to Alice Bernheim, “If there ever was a duller subject I would like to know about it.” Once again he and Jimmie worked together

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well and once again he became restless as soon as the job was done. The van Loons now headed for Zurich, from where they paid a short visit to Willem at school, and then went on first to Salzburg and then to Munich.2 In Munich van Loon not only met several old friends from the days he was working there on his Ph.D., he also wrote his chapter for Charles Beard’s book Whither Mankind and spent some time at the Deutsches Museum doing research for a new “nice little book”: a history of inventions, tentatively called Multiplex Man. To Alice Bernheim he described himself as an “animated brain,” doing nothing but work from morning till night and hoping that his body could stand the strain. At the same time he reflected upon his “hopelessly idiotic and foolish” failure with Frances Goodrich, which had been an “uninterrupted period of humiliation [during which he] felt all the time like a lion in a circus grinding coffee or bleating on a saxophone, dressed up in a dickey.” While in the Bavarian capital, van Loon made a decision about his next step. As soon as he finished his research in Munich, he and Jimmie now headed north to Veere, the village they had so enjoyed on their trip to Holland in 1923. He had decided to settle in Zeeland for a couple of years, not only to “live like the lower forms of one-celled animals,” but also to write the long planned book that needed his own and his subject’s native soil to germinate: a life of Rembrandt van Rijn. As he explained to Alice Bernheim, this would be “my effort to enter fiction.”3 Late in April, van Loon had bought De Houtuin, a house originally constructed in 1572 on the quay facing the harbor. While a small army of workmen were refurbishing the house according to the new owner’s wishes, Hendrik Willem and Jimmie stayed at the Abdij Hotel in nearby Middelburg. Van Loon made business trips to Amsterdam, The Hague, and London. He also visited his relatives and once again experienced his sister Suus’s tense disapproval of his marital record and of Jimmie. In early June the van Loons moved into De Houtuin; three days later, Jimmie recorded in her diary that “Han began to write Multiplex Man.” This proved to be a far from easy job. Indeed, as he complained to Alice Bernheim, “I have such a hard time fishing it out of my inner consciousness that I am ready to blow up almost any moment. And in order not to blow up I continue to work and work a little harder than usual.”4 To American friends van Loon described Veere in terms like “the smallest and most deserted town on the most distant Dutch isle,” “a fairy-like place,” and “a relic of the fourteenth century where peace drippeth from the trees, [located] twenty minutes from Flushing, eight hours from London, six from Paris, six days from America. Absolutely central and yet a million miles removed from the rest of the world.” He had had a telephone installed—a rarity for a private residence in Zeeland—and was very excited about the front room on the ground floor, where he was going to work. As there was no

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straight wall in the house, the white plaster in his workroom was “so uneven that it is discolored enough to give a pattern to the walls. The other effects are by the well-known firm of the Lord God Almighty for when he shineth his sun . . . the room acquires a million different patterns.” On one of the walls van Loon drew a huge map of the world, illustrated with sketches and comments. On the location between Euphrates and Tigris, the Biblical paradise, for instance, he wrote, “Here the damn trouble started.” He didn’t mind that there was no running water—for a bath the van Loons returned to the Middelburg hotel—and “sanitary arrangements [were] not ideal but by paying the local collectioneur ten cents per day, [they enjoyed] the unbelievable luxury of a fresh and noble wooden barrel every twenty-four hours.” And it was here, “the most inaccessible hole in the mud I could find,” that he intended to stay to recover from his psychological wounds, for “I was pretty damn hard hit and now that I am returning to spiritual normalcy, I am beginning to discover how badly hit I was.” He wrote Alice Bernheim that he could not return to the United States “until I shall have rehabilitated my own intelligence in my own eyes. That may take some time, doc, some time.”5 Thinking that he needed “to do something rather big and showy” to regain his self-respect, Hendrik Willem threw himself into civic activities. “[T]o jazz up life in the shrimp kettle,” as he put it in an article in the national magazine of the Dutch tourist organization ANWB, he organized a sailing race of fishing boats that August and contributed a silver goblet as the first prize in horseback games held on Middelburg’s Abbey Square. Still another token of goodwill that impressed the local population was his acting as an anonymous Santa Claus at Christmas. Several of the poorest families of Veere answered a ring at their door in the evening, saw no one there, and found a bottle of wine and an envelope with money on their doorstep. Furthermore, his regular baking of pancakes for the Veere community as well as the bicycle he had bought and made available for all who needed it, also belonged to his legendary acts and more spectacular ones were to follow. Through articles in Dutch newspapers van Loon raised the alarm about the damage water leaks was inflicting on Veere’s late-fifteenth-century Town Hall. In 1931 a thorough restoration of the building and its remarkable latesixteenth-century tower began. To this very day Town Hall is widely acclaimed as Veere’s pride.6 Their first summer there, he wrote Bennett Cerf, a Boni and Liveright executive who had gone on to found Random House, that “the town of Veere continues to be a city of surprise.” One day when van Loon was on business in The Hague, Prince Hendrik, the consort of Queen Wilhelmina, called unannounced at De Houtuin. The prince was surrounded by “so many guys in gold lace that [Jimmie] felt sure the house was pinched.” Jimmie let the guest of honor grind his own coffee with an antique coffee grinder, something

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the prince had never done before, and he and his company enjoyed this very unusual informal visit. Before leaving the van Loon home, Prince Hendrik climbed a chair he had put on a table in Hendrik Willem’s workroom and was just able to reach the map of the world on the wall to put his signature on that part of Germany, Mecklenburg, where he came from. Van Loon felt flattered royalty had honored his house but found out the true reason for the visit a little later. It was not his books that had made the prince pay him a call, but “His Highness had heard that I did such marvelous card tricks. Such is fame!”7 It was not only the big-sized van Loon himself who made a remarkable impression upon the inhabitants of Veere. Also the bohemian lifestyle of the frail, bobbed, and chain-smoking Jimmie did not remain unnoticed. During that first summer at De Houtuin she bought a Chevrolet, obtained her Dutch drivers license, and often drove like crazy along the roads of the Walcheren district—a phenomenon never seen before. Jimmie adapted herself remarkably well to the new situation and was glad she did not have to dress up in the small community. Within a few months, she mastered most of the Dutch she needed. With two maids—dressed in traditional Zeeland peasant costume—taking care of the household, she had little more to do than to keep up with Hendrik Willem’s work and taxi him or friends around. To Alice Bernheim she wrote about Veere, “there isn’t a thing to do but read and rest and rattle around the roads with the Chevvy. But somehow, I never get bored here for a minute.” She kept a bottle hidden in her desk but the town soon knew of her drinking problem, about which Hendrik Willem continued to harangue her.8 In the fall, the town of Veere according to Jimmie consisted “of rain, mud and sugarbeets,” piles of which were “rising higher, higher, even higher” on the quay. The sugarbeet harvest was vital to the area’s economy. Van Loon reported that from six o’clock in the morning on “high carts with red wheels and green bodies and terrific horses, as wide as the horizon come trundling down the cobblestones.” The beets were “dumped upon the slippery stones of the Quai and then begins the job of dumping it into the boats which are of all the colors of the rainbow.” In the same letter he praised “the regularity of the simple life in this village: tides and storms and lighthouses and shrimpfishermen and a ferryman to the next island whose family has had the job since 1500.” During this “year of atonement,” as he described it to Alice Bernheim, van Loon felt very much at ease “in this queerest of towns of which I am the humblest inhabitant.”9 Van Loon had still not come to terms with his “Calvin ridden” native country, which did not recognize him as a serious author. The Algemeen Handelsblad by this time, however, published a favorable article about him and his life in Veere, commending the “Dutch Yankee” for having made

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“the hurried, future-focused, and child-like Americans” realize that history can be as important in life as “the highly worshipped future.” As a matter of fact, van Loon maintained as tense a life-long relationship with the Dutch as he had with the sixteenth-century reformer John Calvin, whom he described in his chapter in Beard’s Whither Mankind as “That queerly biased and perverted person.” As van Loon admitted in his autobiography, Calvin was “one of my pet abominations.”10 Meanwhile, the American press had found out that Hendrik Willem had returned to Jimmie. On 16 September 1928 the New York World featured an article headlined “Free Marriage Advocate Returns to Second Wife.” Eleven days later the New York Times reported that Frances Goodrich had initiated divorce proceedings. Her lawyer hired a Parisian detective to investigate the situation in Veere. The man did not understand a word of Dutch, so all he managed to find out was that, according to the inhabitants of Veere, Hendrik Willem and Jimmie were man and wife. Many months later, van Loon poked fun at him and told his lawyer, Charles Recht, that the bill of the French detective had delighted the people of Veere. “To have to pay gratuities and give drinks to the people of Veere to find out how and what and which we were here seems almost too much of a good thing for they would have given that information free of charge and gladly. But his charge for ‘boats’ is what gladdens the hearts of the honest inhabitants. Walcheren was an island a hundred years ago. To get here now by boat is as easy as to get to Dayton by boat.” Meanwhile, Frances was asking for $3,000 to make up for the alimony she had lost from her first husband by remarrying and also wanted her lawyer’s fees paid. This last demand angered Hendrik Willem. He told his lawyer that he was unwilling to pay, would stay married if necessary, and could even regain his Dutch citizenship—and in that case where would Frances’s lawyer be?11 In August he had written Alice Bernheim that “in a long and varied life I have discovered that most women are bitches. Unless they are intelligent they must be bitches to get ahead in this world.” And two months later he reported that “the whole New York episode is beginning to assume the qualities of a very unpleasant nightmare.” The American scandal sheets were having a field day with the story of van Loon’s marital life (the headlines included, “Historian Jilts Actress,” “Love Nest on Dutch Isle,” and “Professor van Loon’s Loony Romance”). Receiving those clippings, van Loon felt the press made him “a pathetic fool to be laughed at by every bum who can afford a tabloid.” Closer to home, a Dutch ladies’ magazine, De Haagsche Dameskroniek, featured a column in December on his marital experiences. The author used the sensational stories in the American yellow press as a warning to his female readers that the idea of companionate marriage could

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lead only to disappointment. In the new year the New York Evening Post dispatched a journalist to Veere to interview the “man of many wives.” Her ironic article upset van Loon, and he included this reporter, whom he had entertained for three days, in the category of bitches: “the dear dame was a liar and a cheat and she ate my dinners and drank my booze and abused every bit of confidence.”12 Although van Loon was inclined to do anything to “get this marriage dissolved,” his lawyer cautioned against agreeing to Frances’s escalating demands. In Hendrik Willem’s view, there had not been a marriage, not even a companionate marriage as they had only slept once or twice together in “four months that have killed every sentiment.” Charles Recht advised him not to “make it possible for her to be pensioned for the rest of her life, because you happen to have been an idiot for three nights of your life.” By the fall of 1929, a settlement was reached. Appearing at New York County Supreme Court on 23 October to make the divorce official, Frances declared, “Never again, I have had all the marriage I want, part-time or otherwise.” Nevertheless, in February 1931 she married her collaborator Albert Hackett and van Loon immediately stopped his payments to her. She and Hackett would go on to write such movies as The Thin Man and It’s a Wonderful Life and the Pulitzer Prize winning play The Diary of Anne Frank.13 To a young Dutch friend, Erik “Din” Smit—whom Hendrik Willem and Jimmie had “adopted” as their nephew—van Loon wrote shortly after the court session, “We want to inform you that your sweet aunt Frances is now deposited in the Museum of Family Curiosities and that we are divorced in order to make your aunt Jimmie a decent girl again, but she doesn’t want to as she says, ‘We never had such a good time since we live in sin,’ and so, long live sin.” Jimmie herself a few weeks later strongly advised Erik to take seriously her warning: “Keep away from matrimony, unless the material advantages are great enough to balance the inconveniences thereto attendant. In other words,” she wrote in capital letters, “MARRY FOR MONEY, MUCH MONEY, or not at all. And hold out for a settlement—a good one— BEFORE the ceremony.”14 The same month that Frances had filed for divorce, September 1928, van Loon secretly reestablished contact with his former fiancé, Rene Gibbs Scudamore. In the months that followed he dashed off a number of times to Paris to meet Rene there. As he wrote her, “Our lives have been so absolutely intermingled and mingled and interwoven and upgebusted and thrown together,” and he wondered why he had always hurt her and himself since they had met a decade before. His relationship to Jimmie, he explained, was that of “a working team. We can remove vast quantities of work when working together . . . but when there is no work and only cogitation Veere is a very small place.” His rendezvous with Rene were usually followed by desperate

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long letters, full of self-pity and telling her she was the one and only woman for him. But as he had jilted her twice, Rene just wanted to be friends, nothing more. By now she had established herself in the Parisian fashion world and had no inclination to take Jimmie’s place in Hendrik Willem’s life. Nevertheless, the very same day the divorce was made final in New York, van Loon hastened to Paris to propose to Rene for the third time. She flatly refused, telling him he was “obese.” In fact, Hendrik Willem weighed over 270 pounds and was proud of his ponderous belly—according to his son, it was “the personification of his ego and he pampered it accordingly.” He returned to Veere like a wounded animal and found solace in the company of Jimmie, big plates of food, and the Rembrandt project. Apparently Rene’s straightforward observation made van Loon diet for a while. In December he reported to a friend, “my food supply has been reduced to half and I am so damn hungry all the time that one of these days I will bite a piece out of the frontdoor.” This regime was soon abandoned.15 Although these marital difficulties complicated Hendrik Willem’s first year in Veere, it was a productive period professionally—three of his books appeared in 1928. However, the reviewers seem to have picked up on his boredom with Pieter Stuyvesant. Among the major American newspapers and magazines, only the Atlantic Monthly gave Life and Times of Pieter Stuyvesant a glowingly positive review—and that piece was written by van Loon’s friend Lewis Mumford.16 The second volume that came out in 1928 was his inventions book telling the story of man’s inventiveness to mechanically augment the limited powers of his body from earliest times on. Although he had been able to finish the manuscript in only three months, writing it, as he had reported to Alice Bernheim, had caused him quite a headache. The author’s struggle with the book was apparently obvious to Thomas Smith, his editor at Boni and Liveright, who changed the title to Man the Miracle Maker. (“It smacks of Jesus!” was van Loon’s complaint.) Hendrik Willem blamed any lukewarm reviews on Smith’s editing of the manuscript. Fortunately, the reviews were mostly positive. The New York Times said the book was “as entertaining as anything Mr. van Loon has done.” The critic in the New York Herald Tribune called it “a well knit narrative, full of humor and seriousness. It is a successful combination of information, illustration and sound social philosophizing.” The book was not as warmly received in Britain (where it retained van Loon’s original title, Multiplex Man) or Holland, but there was wide acclaim in Germany. There, according to van Loon’s son, “the author of Der Multiplizierte Mensch was hailed as a prophet before his time [and] enjoyed his greatest popularity in the intellectual circles.” Van Loon was not so much surprised at the Dutch criticism of his book but found it remarkable that “the hatred”

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expressed in most reviews against his work was also “transformed into a hatred against America.” And that explained, he thought, the reason that Upton Sinclair—in his opinion “the most un-American, annoying and humorless of all American writers”—was so popular in Holland: the Dutch loved to hear from that author what was all wrong with America.17 In addition to these two volumes, van Loon also published a short work on another Dutch-American seventeenth-century topic, Adriaen Block: Skipper, Trader, Explorer. According to the title page, it was privately printed for the members of Block Hall, Inc. Most of the text dealt with the European search for the roads to the Indies and America and it is only in the last fifteen pages, after his telling the story of Henry Hudson’s expedition with his ship Halve Maen, that van Loon gives homage to the rather obscure Adriaen Block who through his expedition of 1613–1614 “had laid the foundation for a new colonial Empire.” Van Loon admired this daring skipper for whom Block Island was named, “who hammered himself a seaworthy craft out of a couple of Manhattan firtrees and added a thousand odd square miles to the sum total of the geographical knowledge of his day as unconcernedly as if he had gone on a mere fishing expedition.”18 At the start of 1929, the one-man factory van Loon, after years of writing “stories of this and stories of that and stories of everything,” came to the conclusion that his Mankind formula was “out.” What in 1921 had been “a clarion call for a new history” had lost its attraction to him and he would leave the field of history writing as such. After all, he told Rene, “History is like running a train . . . useful but not very inspiring for there is the time-table . . . and I want to be free and wander aloft without the consciousness of being . . . tied to a time-table.” In early April, he reported to Alice Bernheim that “after rather terrific spiritual searchings,” he had found a new formula for a new book: “There are 437842 books about Rembrandt. Most of them awful. There ought to be a good book. I am writing it. It is the autobiography of a doctor who took care of him, met him first when the wife died . . ., saw him on and off all during the rest of the misery . . . you see it is a fine piece of melodrama.” Having liberated himself from history, van Loon put as much autobiographical material into the novel as he wished. His fictitious ancestor Dr. Jan van Loon shared a Christian name and some characteristics with his uncle Jan Hanken, and two women in the book were obviously taken from his own life: the one and only woman Rembrandt’s physician loved dearly but was afraid to marry was a portrait of Rene and Dr. Jan’s brother, Willem, had an affair with an actress that came to a bad end. In addition, there were autobiographical elements to other characters, including Rembrandt himself. Van Loon explained to his old friend publisher Benjamin Huebsch, “I had always wanted to write a life of Rembrandt but a

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painter’s life is apt to be dull and I had always wanted to write me an autobiography. . . . I have discovered a way of doing them both at the same time. I am writing my own autobiography in the form of an imaginary autobiography of an imaginary ancestor who was the doctor who took care of Rembrandt.”19 Whatever his reasons, the work went well and he was soon reporting to Thomas Smith at Boni and Liveright that “the fool brain is working overtime with more pleasure than at any moment during these ghastly years and I have decided as the best way of purging myself of the whole damn mess to write a book about it.” Even if the book would have only five readers he would write it as it was to be “something novel in the line of biography.” Since he was so familiar with Holland in the seventeenth century, the historical facts would be “correct enough.” Nevertheless he would take “endless liberties” by bringing people together who may have met each other and did not care if professional historians quibbled, observing, “a hundred years from now no one will be able to prove that I knew Heywood Broun for I never wrote him a single line of letter or postal card but what of it? Isn’t it logical that we should have met and illogical that we should not have met?”20 By June van Loon was so deeply involved in his Rembrandt biography that, he wrote Alice Bernheim, “If I am not careful that book will run away with me. I have rarely been as happy as doing this.” Four months later, as Frances was renouncing matrimony in a Manhattan courtroom, the writing was still going well: “I am merely a working machine, hammering away day and night at this incredible Rembrandt book, . . . I shall never have another chance to write a book in which I can say absolutely everything I want to say and this time I have got to make a go of it or bust.” By late January 1930 the manuscript was up to 1,000 pages and on 6 February Jimmie noted in her diary, “Han finished Rembrandt today.” Meanwhile, Horace Liveright was very excited about the book’s prospects. When ultimately van Loon sent his publisher the result of his labor, “the literary infant weighed 12 pounds,” without the illustrations. A parcel like that with so much postage had never before been sent from Veere and to an American friend van Loon boasted that he and Liveright kept the local post office alive.21 Van Loon took moments off from his work on Rembrandt, to play the fiddle, draw endless numbers of pictures, and—on a very limited scale—do some exercise. Veere continued to fascinate him. As he wrote in De Groene Amsterdammer,22 it was the calming effect of the tide in Veere’s harbor twice a day that gave him the peace of mind he had been looking for in vain anywhere else in the world. To Alice Bernheim he exclaimed, “Veere is at times so lovely that it hurts and hurts badly from sheer beauty. . . . I am here to confess publicly and openly that the last winter has been by far the happiest of my 47 summers.”23

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The summer of 1929 marked another “big and showy” van Loon stunt in Veere. The American monthly magazine The Smart Set, formerly edited by H.L. Mencken and just taken over by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, in an attempt to boost its sales had organized a nationwide contest to win the title “Typical American Girl.” The winner of this contest was the twenty-four-year-old teacher of elocution in Miami, Florida, Edna Peters who was described in The Smart Set’s August issue as “a leader in [her] city’s younger social set, an excellent cook and seamstress” who liked to play golf, swim, hunt and ride and who was judged “as being most representative in personality, intellect and appearance of the Typical American Girl for 1929.” The dark brown-haired and hazel-eyed Edna Peters, standing five feet four and weighing one hundred and nine pounds, made a tour of Europe where she was hailed as “Miss America.” Her publicity manager of this European tour was Paris-based fashion writer Dora Miller, a friend of van Loon’s. After all the social swirl of Paris night life and before heading to Cannes and other resorts, the schedule of the publicity tour had a couple of empty days and Dora Miller cabled Hendrik Willem asking him whether he could arrange Edna to meet with the Dutch queen. Van Loon flatly replied “No”—“the queen was not that kind of a girl”—and said that it was much better for Edna to come to Veere to meet him.24 In no time van Loon set up his public relations circus. On the morning of Dora Miller’s and Edna Peters’s arrival in the Netherlands Hendrik Willem and Jimmie drove to the Roosendaal railway station to welcome their guests and van Loon, in Jimmie’s words, had himself “thoroughly photographed” with the American beauty by a photographer of a local newspaper and interviewed by a reporter from the Algemeen Handelsblad whom he had summoned for the event. The journalist was deeply impressed by the beauty and charm of Edna Peters and described her in his article as “the queen of queens and the most perfect woman in the world.” Then the van Loons and their guests dashed off to Veere. As that day happened to be Queen Wilhelmina’s birthday and therefore a national holiday, van Loon threw a big party with all sorts of games “and heaps of prizes” for the children of Veere. Van Loon for his own pleasure had Edna dressed up in traditional Zeeland costume and endlessly photographed with him and local people, including Veere’s mayor who for this special occasion “dashed home and put on his official silver chain” (figure 10.1). That evening Veere was treated with fireworks, sponsored by van Loon’s friend Frits Philips, and the next morning they first toured the island of Walcheren, followed by an afternoon sailing trip, and finally Hendrik Willem and Frits drove their special guests back to Roosendaal where they caught a night train to Paris.25 The visit of “Miss America” to Veere—an event to be remembered for decades by the local population as one of the legendary van Loon acts—was,

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Figure 10.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon with “Miss America” in Zeeland costume and the mayor of Veere, August 1929 (Hendrik Willem van Loon Papers, 1884–1972. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library).

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of course, covered by the Middelburgsche Courant. The newspaper mentioned Edna Peters’s “well-known” host and complimented her elegance in Zeeland costume. More important for van Loon, however, was that The Smart Set in its December issue that year featured an article, entitled “All Europe gives the little Typical American Girl a great big hand,” which not only included photos from Edna Peters’s successful visits that summer to Berlin, London, and Paris (according to Louise Selby, the foremost American designer in France, “Edna Peters was born to wear the dresses that are driving Paris mad!”), but also featured a picture from her visit to Veere on which she posed smilingly in Zeeland costume together with an equally smiling and victorious looking big-sized author.26 That summer was also the beginning of a new long-lasting friendship with another American woman. In a letter passed on by his publisher Ruby Fuhr, a schoolteacher in Terre Haute, Indiana, asked van Loon permission to use a picture from The Story of Mankind in a textbook she was working on. Van Loon wrote back, “As long as you live in the town which was the home of the only honest political leader I have ever known [Eugene V. Debs], you can do any damned thing with anything of mine and good luck to you.” When Ruby Fuhr then asked his permission to publish this letter in her local newspaper, van Loon felt flattered and, of course, agreed. When a third letter from her revealed to van Loon that she was not a Mrs. but Miss Fuhr, his romantic feelings were heightened and he asked her to send him a picture of herself. She sent a group picture of a number of schoolteachers, asking him to guess which one she might be. Van Loon guessed wrong but soon a correspondence between the two started that would continue until his death. Due to Ruby Fuhr’s wisdom in staying aloof and reserved toward his often overwhelming personality, their friendship was not spoiled by another amorous catastrophe. She even became fast friends with Jimmie, who realized that this warm but unpretentious Midwestern teacher was not seeking to take her place.27 In one of his early letters to Ruby Fuhr, van Loon expressed his contempt for behaviorism—J.B. Watson’s psychological theory that posited that humans did what they did in response to stimuli more than from conscious introspection. In van Loon’s opinion behaviorism was a theory that did not work and he asked Ruby, “Can you, seeing the little darlinks, give yourself any hope to turn more than 3 percent of them into halfway intelligent and decent citizens?” Sure, he admitted, one can teach the kids a few things, but it was clear to him that one could not “interfere seriously with the dreadful law that Homo est homo quod est or quis est in this case.” One should not expect too much, “except from a very small group of people for whom God has thrown dice.” After expressing these aristocratic views, van Loon also commented on Spengler and Marx. What both authors had in common, he

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wrote, was “great learning but no fresh air.” Spengler reminded him “of those charming young American students who go to Paris to write a doctor’s dissertation upon Madame the Pompadour and then run home to Mama when some flossye creature says ‘Bonsoir Chérie’ to them on the street. [And] if old Karl had spent one week of his life in a factory he would have written a different book. But he did not.” No, van Loon was not really the champion of the common man. On a postcard he sent his younger son that spring he had written, “May 1, and long live the Proletariat as long as it does not live in Veere.”28 Van Loon’s relationship with Willem, incidentally, had developed into a tense one. At eighteen, the son showed, in his father’s view, some “very dangerous and unpleasant tendencies” as a consequence of his being exclusively under the wings of his mother. When they had seen each other that summer, van Loon observed that Willem, “always slightly femininely inclined and a sissy as the other kids called him,” was now “rapidly degenerating into a complete and absolute fairyboy.” That fall Willem entered the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna to become a dancer and actor, more evidence to his father that he was heading “straightway for fairydom.” However when, in 1932, Willem made his debut in Paris as a professional dancer, the New York Times reported that Hendrik Willem had withdrawn his objections to the young man’s career as a dancer. During the previous few years, while Willem was at his Swiss boarding school, he had sent his father a series of nasty letters. Willem’s complaints centered on Hendrik Willem’s treatment of Eliza; in van Loon’s opinion, his ex-wife had filled the boy’s soul “with a desire for martyrdom” and Willem was standing on the breach to defend “the Ideal of his Mother against his cruel parent.” Naturally, van Loon resented paying for Willem’s education while getting these “incredibly patronizing letters” in return. He tried to persuade Willem that contrary to what the boy might think, he was not “sitting up nights to evolve deep-laid schemes” to make Willem’s and Eliza’s lives miserable. At the same time, van Loon was aware, as he once admitted to Frances Goodrich, that his younger son had inherited his “few abilities” and he told Willem, “you probably have a great deal of your Pa in you.” His letters to both Hank and Willem over the years testify to a deep fatherly love.29 For his part, his older son, Hank, was “as different from his father as two human beings can be. And yet there is something between us that pulls stronger than anything that we can control ourselves.” In the fall of 1929 Hank came to Holland to work for a couple of months as an unpaid apprentice for an Amsterdam architect. On the weekends, he stayed with his father and Jimmie in Veere. Hank got along well with Jimmie (unlike Willem) and remembered that there were a great many visitors to the house. People who wanted to see his father, “just walked in, no formality, no ringing of the bell.”

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At that time, following Hendrik Willem’s post–divorce pursuit of Rene, Hank’s moral support was salutary. The aggrieved father wrote that his elder son was “the best and only excuse for my temporary appearance on this planet.”30 Van Loon’s best friend in Veere, Frits Philips, died after surgery in December 1929. The loss of his friend, with whom he had shared so much pleasure in Zeeland, drove Hendrik Willem to melancholia. His black mood was removed, however, when asked by the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in New York to be the host of a transatlantic radio broadcast of music from Amsterdam on Christmas Day—an opportunity he avidly seized. The experimental NBC broadcast proved to be a great success. As the New York Times reported, it was “the first international Christmas celebration by radio, heralded by engineers and scientists as epoch-making for broadcasting and international relations transmitted on wave lengths calculated to reach listeners in every quarter of the globe.” The event consisted of an American broadcast for European listeners, followed by similar programs transmitted on short radio waves from Holland, Germany, and England designed especially for American listeners. Van Loon told his fellow Americans that this was the first time “Old Amsterdam [spoke] directly to her long-lost daughter, New Amsterdam, across the water” and on behalf of the “old republic greeted the new republic.” Despite some occasional “bubbling sounds,” the foreign Christmas greetings were heard with “exceptional clarity and distinctness” and after the program NBC President M.H. Aylesworth said that the “successful interchange of radio programs between the United States and the European nations [was] broadcasting’s greatest achievement to date.” After the broadcast van Loon received a great many congratulatory letters and cables from friends and unknown listeners across the United States.31 What had delighted van Loon most about the historic radio broadcast was the fact that he had been asked to represent the Netherlands instead of one of his former compatriots. In his correspondence, van Loon often fulminated against the Dutch and criticized them for their narrow-mindedness, arrogance, and materialism. In his view the Dutch got “enough shekels from their blasted Indies to keep on being dumb and arrogant.” But it all served a purpose, he admitted to Alice Bernheim, as the Dutch atmosphere provided him with “the necessary irritation to make Rembrandt a good book.” To Ruby Fuhr he wrote that his “dumb ex-compatriots” made him lose his temper “on the average of 57684 times a day.” Van Loon wrote another series of articles for De Groene Amsterdammer, a number of which criticized aspects of Dutch life. His main complaint was that despite material progress, the country’s spiritual life had lost touch with the modern world. The school system prepared youth for the past instead of for the present and future. Dutch music,

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art, and literature were full of outdated expressions—the language itself, left in the hands of schoolmasters and clergymen, was committing suicide as it had lost touch with common people. In addition, the narrow-minded, pedantic, and arrogant attitude of the Dutch, in van Loon’s view, created a kind of Great Wall around the country, preventing the Dutch from realizing how much they had isolated themselves from the modern world. Fortunately, he told his readers, there was another Holland too: the Holland of those young and vigorous and adventurous and cosmopolitan-minded Dutchmen who had left the country and who had given the Dutch a good name in the world. Implicitly, of course, van Loon was glad to belong to that category.32 Van Loon also told his Dutch readers that America’s often criticized wealth was not only based on its natural riches but also sprouted from the conviction that each individual should take care of himself and that the role of the state or federal government should be minimal. This stood in stark contrast to the European situation, where in his opinion the state was “degraded” into some corporation whose main purpose was the maintenance of the majority of the population as civil servants—a situation he assessed as unrealistic. But his criticism on the Dutch and Europe in general did not mean that he closed his eyes to what he saw as shortcomings of the United States.33 Unfortunately, many of his criticisms exhibit the then common beliefs of the American establishment about race and religion: in the first half of the twentieth century, especially as the country absorbed millions of southern and eastern European immigrants, the white ruling class remained convinced of its innate superiority. As one scholar observed, in the years between the world wars “suspicion and hostility toward non-Protestant immigrant and ethnic groups remained strong in the United States.” We have already seen how van Loon was elitist in this matter as well, he was a child of his times and his views on Native Americans, African Americans, Italian Americans, and Jews clearly express the widely held WASP point of view (he included himself and all Protestants of northern European descent among the Anglo-Saxons).34 In one of his Groene Amsterdammer articles, for instance, van Loon likened the American political situation to the chaos of fifth-century Rome, when the mass immigration of “foreign” tribes resulted in the collapse of the Empire. In New York City, after this huge surge of Catholic and Jewish immigrants, the “real” Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent were finding their political power threatened. To their dismay, they now saw that one of these “barbarians,” New York State Governor Al Smith, an Irish Catholic, was the Democratic presidential nominee. In private, van Loon fully shared the anti-Irish feelings of his peers; he once wrote to Alice Bernheim, “Irish-Catholics are my niggers. I will not sit with them at bread and fish . . . I draw the line at the dear Irish.” In the same Groene Amsterdammer article he also wrote without

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further comment or moral indignation that the indigenous Indian population had been “too weak and indifferent” to be able to resist colonization and had simply been wiped out like the “prehistoric natives” in Europe had been wiped out “by our ancestors.”35 He rarely mentioned Jewish immigrants in his Groene Amsterdammer pieces, but he had already gone on record while a columnist for the Baltimore Sun. “[T]he hordes of Polish Jews” who had come to the United States from the 1890s on had, in his view, brought with them “a specific Jewish inferiority complex” from centuries of maltreatment. Van Loon wrote that the Jews were now getting “even with the American people for something of which the Americans were entirely innocent.” And so, Jewish immigrants, acting as “[a] herd of foreign people with foreign gestures and foreign garb and a strange fire in their eager eyes pushing, shoving, tramping upon each other in their mad haste to make up for the lost ages,” caused resentment and created the so-called Jewish question. He considered “this attitude of mutual suspicion between Jew and Gentile [as] one of the most regrettable facts of our day and age.” This Jewish question could be solved only by the Jews themselves.36 While Hendrik Willem was glad to know that there were “Jewish leaders of great insight, deep understanding, sincere tolerance and infinite patience” who understood the causes of bad feelings between Christians and Jews, he couldn’t see much else. He continued to make patently anti-Semitic statements over the years, as did many other WASPs. As historian Leonard Dinnerstein has clearly demonstrated, anti-Semitism has existed throughout American history; at least through the end of World War II, Americans thought of their country as a Protestant one, and most Protestants regarded Catholics and Jews as inferior, at best tolerated but not embraced. Attacks on Jews, Catholics, and in general immigrants from southern and eastern European countries intensified in the 1920s and anti-Semitism would become more virulent and vicious in the Depression and during the war.37 Although van Loon held progressive views for the time about African Americans, his often segregationist rhetoric still betrays racist sentiments. In De Groene Amsterdammer, he denounced lynching, calling it “the unforgivable shame” in American society. Lynchings, he explained to his Dutch readers, occurred mainly in rural areas that were both highly religious and deeply conservative. And American puritanical belief, he explained, put more emphasis on sin than on virtue and that caused a lack of tolerance toward other groups. He also told the Dutch that race relations was not a problem America would soon solve. The intelligent part of America, he wrote, tried to encourage mutual respect between blacks and whites and wanted to give each group the freedom to work out its own way of life. But as the mentality of the blacks, as van Loon saw it, was “another, explicitly not an inferior one,” than that of the white population, he believed it would be best for both races

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“to live next to each other instead of living artificially with each other” in the same neighborhoods. For that reason, he admitted, he had never been in Harlem, New York City’s black neighborhood.38 When van Loon finished his Rembrandt manuscript in early February 1930, he decided to go to New York the next month. Jimmie stayed in Veere, while Hendrik Willem and Hank—who was eager to see Janet Hall with whom he had fallen in love the previous summer—set sail. Before embarking on the Bremen, van Loon suggested to Ruby Fuhr that they meet in New York. Ruby, of course, wanted to know more about his relationship with Jimmie and what he had done to make her happy before deciding to travel east from Indiana. He told her about Jimmie’s loyalty toward him and that he had foolishly left her for “some roundish object that never took care of me and did not care a hoot about me but was roundish which James was not.” After that companionate marriage had ended, Jimmie was there to resume life with him again but they had decided not to remarry. According to van Loon, Jimmie was as happy as could be as she was playing the role that satisfied her completely in her own eyes. In another letter he confessed to Ruby Fuhr: “I have never yet sat in a room alone with a woman without offering her matrimony and alimony for the rest of her days . . . as I have no more alimony to offer, I also am deprived of the matrimonial pleasures of saying, ‘now couldn’t I take those burdens off your shoulder,’ etc. etc. (Jehovah complex 4711).” But he would not play that role anymore and he promised Ruby, “You are safe. I shall not expose you to anything more than 1% of boredom.”39 Upon arrival in New York, van Loon was besieged with friends who welcomed him back. It was, as he reported to Jimmie, a “triumphant re-entry” and he wondered, “My God James, do I really amount to something in this world? Do I really?” Horace Liveright, who could only see his best-selling author briefly before sailing to England, placed his apartment at Hendrik Willem’s disposal, rent free. Van Loon met many friends, including Alice and George Bernheim whom he visited in their Westchester home for a weekend with Ruby Fuhr, who had indeed made the trip from Terre Haute to meet her pen pal. Being plain, thin, lacking in chic, the little bespectacled teacher was not exactly as Hendrik Willem had seen her in his imagination. Nevertheless, they enjoyed each other’s company immensely. Ruby had a great time being introduced to people she had only read about in books and magazines, and their being together only deepened Hendrik Willem’s admiration for her as a loyal, unassuming, and platonic friend.40 Having been away from the United States for two years, van Loon viewed the country as an outsider and soon reported his disappointment to Jimmie. After the stock market crash of October 1929 the country was sliding into the Great Depression, although no one appreciated the depth of the crisis at first.

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In that spring of 1930 van Loon was upset to see “the whole country engaged in a drunken orgy [and] everybody hectically doing useless things and chasing something vague and nonexistent.” Although he met nice people—including Janet Hall, who would marry Hank that September—he described American society as “the lowest form of middleclass bunk I have ever seen.” This made van Loon feel so bored and depressed that he wanted to return to Veere as soon as possible. In a letter to Willem he wrote melancholically: “your pa at 48 is an old fossil broken down by the cares of the world.” But before returning to Holland by the end of April on the Statendam, he could boast some financial successes. Carl Van Doren of the Literary Guild had liked the Rembrandt manuscript enough to take it as a selection for the subscribers, and van Loon was able to sell some articles on Rembrandt and other topics to American magazines. He also signed a $1,000 contract for a ten-minute commercial broadcast from Amsterdam to the United States that fall which would be a novelty both technically and commercially, and even sold his name to a manufacturer of games for a map game based on The Story of Mankind.41 In outpourings of romanticism and even eroticism without precedent to her, Hendrik Willem also wrote Jimmie that he missed and wanted her “like hell” and had fallen in love with her again. As a present he had bought twenty-six pairs of stockings for her and was eagerly anticipating dressing and undressing her and making love to her. He especially was looking forward, he wrote, to kissing her between the legs and added, “whether the little pussy is worn out or not, the few years that remain I might as well spend all the time I can in it for it is a nice and restful little spot that gives one peace of mind everlasting.” He promised Jimmie “first class service” and told her that he had saved “an exuberance of certain dangerous juices” for her benefit. Though at that moment he realized that “we have never loved enough Jamesy,” he nevertheless gave her the greater responsibility for their love life to bear when he wrote, “it is partly up to you to make yourself so desirable that I shall not be able to keep away from you.” Hendrik Willem asked Jimmie to meet him in England and romantically share the Statendam cabin with him from Plymouth to Rotterdam. As could be expected, this idyll was short-lived and by the time they arrived in Veere their love life was back to the status quo ante. To both Alice Bernheim and Willem he complained about “the mess” he had made of his emotional life. Although he realized that “the incredible J. . . . has turned me into a sort of private religion of her own and devotes all her time and energy to this unworthy creature,” he confessed that the woman he really cared for and whom he missed so very much was Rene—“a product of the vL school of training” to whom he had used “sledgehammer methods.”42 On board the Statendam Hendrik Willem had met the aviator Charles Edward Kingsford-Smith. The thirty-three-year-old Australian’s 1928 first

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trans-Pacific flight from Oakland, California, to his birthplace, Brisbane, and his record-breaking flight a year later from Australia to England had been front-page news. On his way to the Fokker aircraft factory near Amsterdam to pick up a new plane to complete the round-the-world trip by flying that June from Ireland to California, Kingsford-Smith became friends with the van Loons. Hendrik Willem was delighted to be seen disembarking in Rotterdam with the hero of the day. To show his appreciation for his new Dutch friends, Kingsford-Smith before heading for Ireland flew his new plane, Southern Cross, to Veere and, as van Loon reported, “after three circles above our house and a farewell in which the whole machine slowly flapped its wings three times,” continued its westbound journey. That Kingsford-Smith had decided “to have the Southern Cross leave [for] the American continent from Veere of all places was the damnedest, nicest compliment I ever had.”43 In early August Kingsford-Smith was back in Holland and the van Loons attended a big party in his honor in Amsterdam. The next day they took the exhausted pilot home to Veere where he would stay a couple of days and catch up on lost sleep. The second day, however, he woke up with a terrible pain and Hendrik Willem called in a Middelburg friend, Dr. Charles Koch, who diagnosed appendicitis. Koch had the aviator immediately taken to the Middelburg hospital and removed the appendix. In no time news got out about the famous patient in the Middelburg hospital and for the next ten days the van Loons visited him daily, not only to cheer him up but also to protect him from the swarm of reporters, photographers, and adoring women. When a week after the operation the press was finally given access to Kingsford-Smith, it was Hendrik Willem who with his usual flair orchestrated the press conference and photo session. Kingsford-Smith made a quick recovery and rested with the van Loons before heading back to Amsterdam. Nevertheless, the aviator was so pleased with Dr. Koch’s surgical skill that he returned to Middelburg later in the month to have his tonsils taken out too. Later that year he made his first solo flight from England to Australia; he was knighted in 1932, but in 1935, in an attempt to better his time between England and Australia, he vanished near the Burmese coast where a wheel of his plane was found. For Jimmie he remained a hero till the end of her days and she always kept a picture of him close at hand.44 Apart from the excitement around Kingsford-Smith’s visit, van Loon felt far from happy that summer. He complained to friends about being depressed and extremely tired. A trip to Berlin and Prague brought some distraction and also Willem’s visit to Veere made him feel somewhat better. He was more reconciled to his younger son’s homosexuality and on several occasions they had a lot of fun. (Several months later, however, van Loon would write Rene Scudamore that his son’s “mannerisms—the way he uses his hand, eyes, and

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body, twisting and turning like a randy woman” in the company of other people made him feel very embarrassed and that he hoped Willem would “overcome his handicaps” and would “understand that his queerness must be kept a secret from the world.”)45 Reading the galleys of his Rembrandt biography was another source of unhappiness. Boni and Liveright wanted to publish R.v.R.: The Life and Times of Rembrandt van Rijn in September for the Literary Guild but what in manuscript had seemed to its author “the noblest of books that was going to be the greatest work of the ages,” now looked terrible in print: “It rambles and wallows and rumbles. It is clumsy. It makes me vomit. And the glorious future that was to come from this great effort towards immortality is Boloney.” He frantically tried to fix as much as possible, but because of the tight schedule, he had to cable his corrections to New York. The Dutch telephone operators and postal clerks between Veere and Amsterdam mixed up English names and their American colleagues got the Dutch names wrong. It all made him so depressed that “the Veere harbor at high tide looks inviting. Just no good. No good,” as he wrote Mencken. His mood did not improve when his British publisher, Harrap, turned down R.v.R. In addition, van Loon reported to Alice Bernheim, the Woman’s Home Companion flatly rejected the first of his four articles on Rembrandt because it contained too much historical background, a thing—van Loon remarked sarcastically—the American public did not like: “History and historical background are not necessary. We follow that principle in almost everything we do . . . and the result is fairly disastrous and we go blustering through life and really understand nothing but we can talk about everything and that is that.”46 He took a short trip to Paris, thinking he could still persuade Rene to marry him. But Rene was more interested these days in an Englishman named Marcel Godfrey. When he told her she was making a mistake, she made it plain that she disliked his unasked-for comments on Godfrey. And so, he left the city in as bad a mood as he had arrived there and concluded that “the Paris chapter is closed. The remnants of fourteen years of the one great relationship of a life.” For the moment he was sure he would not give up his relationship with Jimmie, even if life with her was “almost too damnably comfortable.” But as far as women were concerned, not long after his trip to Paris van Loon urged Erik Smit to marry only when it was absolutely necessary, warning his friend that marriage could be extremely tedious and boring. And to his son Willem, he wrote that the public image in the press of his love life, “a noisy blustering hvl in public print who marries everybody and makes love to every woman,” was completely different from reality. In his own view he was in fact “very lonely.”47 He continued to feel unappreciated in his native country. When his Dutch publisher postponed a decision about doing R.v.R. until he saw the

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American reaction to the book, Hendrik Willem found a new way of taking revenge on the Dutch. Although Rembrandt’s paintings were now a national treasure, the painter had died in bankruptcy; van Loon started a campaign to have the authorities discharge the debts and erase that blot on Holland’s honor. He found a descendant of Rembrandt’s sister-in-law who could bring the bankruptcy case before the court of Amsterdam and ask for rehabilitation of the painter. But then the descendant backed out and the case was thrown out of court. Van Loon did not want people to say that the plan had been an advertising stunt, so he paid the lawyers himself. As he wrote Willem, it was “foolish work in this country where everybody is always afraid of everybody else’s opinion until no one dares to do a single original thing.” But he at least had the satisfaction of discomforting the Dutch and having done something for Rembrandt in reciprocity for the money he hoped to make of the book. A dozen years later, van Loon would admit that his efforts to get Rembrandt discharged from the bankruptcy court had been “slightly idiotic.”48 When R.v.R. was published in the United States in the fall of 1930, the reviews were much better than van Loon had expected. The Chicago Daily Tribune praised it as “an amazing book that fuses the soaring figure of Rembrandt with the dense reality of the age in which he lived” and the New York Times Book Review described R.v.R. as “an extraordinary tour de force, a melting pot of history, customs, manners and even topography.” The Times reviewer did think the technique of using a fictitious ancestor to tell the story was “a little annoying,” especially since it was obvious that “the good doctor is only Hendrik van Loon in a seventeenth century disguise.” Lewis Mumford wrote enthusiastically in The New Freeman that this was van Loon’s best book, “one of the most fascinating pieces of historical biography that have been done during the past decade.” The reviews in The Outlook and in the New York Evening Post were equally laudatory but nevertheless expressed the view that the 570-page book could, to its advantage, have been 200 pages shorter.49 And this was exactly what happened to the German edition of the book, which came out in 1931. When van Loon discovered upon receiving a copy of Der Überwirkliche that many chapters, totaling some 200 pages, had been drastically cut from the book, he was furious. His anger dissipated, however, when he saw himself described in German reviews as “the great biographer with the epic sense of a Dos Passos and the sociological insight of Upton Sinclair” and he heard that German booksellers could hardly keep enough copies on their shelves to meet the overwhelming demand. (Eventually, van Loon would cut R.v.R. himself for a 1939 American reissue, realizing it made a much better book.) By the end of 1930 he could write Ruby Fuhr that the reviews so far had made him happy. Although the volume did not “sell like the proverbial hot cakes,” he wanted “to be known for that book and not for

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any other.” Or, as he phrased it to someone else in the spring of 1933, “The Rembrandt is the only book I shall take with me when I walk up to the Pearly Gate to try and offer the Almighty an excuse for my having lived at all.” Even the 1931 Dutch edition was well received for a change.50 Although he did not look forward to it, van Loon decided to go on an American lecture tour to promote the book in early 1931. As he wrote Willem, “this winter is devoted to a money raising campaign. To that and nothing else . . . we need the cash. I shall have a terribly hard winter for lecturing is not easy for me . . . it kills me more effectively than almost anything else I can think of.”51 Hendrik Willem and Jimmie boarded the Belgenland in December 1930 in Antwerp. Albert Einstein was among the passengers, and the two men hit it off immediately. As it turned out, both enjoyed playing the violin to relax. Jimmie’s diary and Gerald Willem’s biography of his father both speak of their playing together, but in the New York Times article on the physicist’s arrival, Einstein said that he had left his violin at home “because the tropical climate we will encounter in going to California by way of the Panama Canal might harm it.” That arrival was front page news. Just before docking in New York, the Belgenland was met by a tug with fifty camera men and an equal number of reporters who wanted to interview the Nobel Prize winner. Einstein had clearly not expected such a crowd of people. He was far from fluent in English and with a shy smile handed the journalists a short statement, prepared by van Loon, in perfect English. The newspapermen and women started firing questions at him before he could withdraw and, according to the New York Times, in fifteen minutes “he was called upon to define the fourth dimension in one word, state his theory of relativity in one sentence, give his views on prohibition, comment on politics and religion, and discuss the virtues of his violin.”52 The whole scene, as van Loon described it a few weeks later in an article for The New Republic, had been “the most monstrous, scandalous performance New York harbor had witnessed since the days when the ship reporters first sallied forth on board the pilot boats. None of us was prepared for such an outburst of hysteria.” He thought that the country, in great need of a prophet, “was Einstein-wild” and that the boundless media attention had turned “this man with his mysterious formulas . . . [into] our most recent short cut to God.” In Gerard Willem van Loon’s account, it is his father who in an attempt to protect the dazzled physicist from the hysterical journalist crowd places himself between the people of the press and their quarry, and as an experienced multilingual showman conducted the interview in a fast back-and-forth of German and English. In the New York Times report, however, it was Einstein’s wife and the German consul, Paul Schwarz, who acted as interpreters.53

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In any case, van Loon’s arrival in the United States was certainly noticed as the press encounter aboard the Belgenland also included two short radio “greetings to America” and it was in one of them, aired by the Columbia Broadcasting System, that van Loon introduced Einstein to the American public. Later that month, in a letter sent from California where he was working at the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, Einstein wrote van Loon that he had pleasant recollections of their being together on the ocean liner and that he had survived the overpowering New York welcome successfully but weakened.54 Within twenty-four hours of his arrival in Manhattan van Loon, as he reported to his younger son, had been on the radio twice and had spoken to more people than during the last three years in Veere. And although both he and Jimmie felt a little homesick, he was glad to be in New York as “this is the future.” In the summer of 1930 he wrote Alice Bernheim that he felt the Veere phase in his life was coming to an end. It had provided him the perfect surroundings to produce Rembrandt but he now rather preferred to work in Veere part-time and live the rest of the year “in that part of the world where mankind hath not entirely gone to sleep. [He was] too young just to sit and vegetate.” In a newspaper interview a week after his arrival, van Loon declared that he felt torn between New York and Veere: “I can’t work in New York. I defy anybody to write here, with all this pressure. At the same time, I can’t stay away. Practically all the people I like are here. I have to go back to my own country to work. But my countrymen are seventy years behind the times. What is a man to do?”55 The van Loons spent Christmas with the Bernheims and in January started the lecture tour of the Midwest and the West Coast. As van Loon had feared, it became an ordeal: his public speaking performances always left him soaking wet, which easily made him catch a cold and fever, and so his hotel rooms became sickrooms and Jimmie had to play the role of standby nurse. Visiting the Grand Canyon was a pleasure, however, and a highlight of the trip. Van Loon cabled to Alice Bernheim, “If the prohibitions, the Christians, and the dear old mothers had only left our beloved Republic alone, what a marvellous country this would be to travel in.” Once the tour was over and they were back in New York, van Loon still held the same view of the West and Chicago he had expressed years before in two of his Sun columns: he never felt “the call of the prairies” and considered the West what the Romans used to call “brutum factum, a fact and not a fancy.” Opposed to New York, Chicago in his view was just “big, [lacking] spiritual and intellectual qualities [and looking] as if no one ever intended to finish anything at all, [which gave him] a vague uncertainty about the why and wherefore of human life.”56 At a dinner hosted by Alice and George Bernheim at their Park Avenue apartment, van Loon met Richard L. Simon, an employee of Boni and

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Liveright who like Bennett Cerf had left to found his own publishing house. In 1924 he and Max Lincoln Schuster started issuing crossword puzzle books, soon had a smashing hit with Will Durant’s best seller The Story of Philosophy, which sold over two million copies, and became known for their aggressive advertising. Van Loon was very loyal to Horace Liveright, giving him much credit for the success of his books. He would never voluntarily have left Boni and Liveright, but the glamorous Liveright—described by his biographer as “a Gatsby-like figure who sometimes epitomized the excesses of the Twenties at their most blatant” (he was a gambler, an alcoholic, and a skirt-chaser)— had been forced to sell out his interest in Boni and Liveright even before R.v.R. came out. Liveright moved to California, where he tried to establish a career in movie production. While on his lecture tour, van Loon met Liveright in Los Angeles and was distressed to see how much his former idol had disintegrated from alcoholism. So, while in New York, van Loon was looking for a new publisher, and the young and enterprising Dick Simon filled the bill.57 At the end of February 1931 there were four van Loons aboard the Rotterdam-bound Nieuw Amsterdam: Hendrik Willem and Jimmie were accompanied by Hank and Janet, who were visiting Europe on their delayed honeymoon. Van Loon told a New York Times reporter that he was now “commuting” between Veere and New York, “studying and writing in the peace and quiet of Holland and returning to New York for play and recreation.” He was hardly back in Veere (figure 10.2) before he realized that while Jimmie was perfectly happy there, he needed another challenge. For the first time in his life, he wrote to Alice Bernheim, he felt “infinitely more American than European.” He thought he belonged in the United States and that in Europe he was out of place. He told Alice that he needed to move around a bit, but would avoid Paris, where “every corner” reminded him of Rene Scudamore. Nevertheless, the very next day he wrote Rene that he was on his way to the French capital, not as “the great and glorious hero who has a hell of a reputation and endless credit and is the life of the party, [but] just as the Earth doth its daily stuff around the Sun. . . . I am following an urge which bids me go where I shall find the only life I have ever wanted since I first saw you. . . . I have been deprived of all my fine feathers and have nothing to protect the terrible exposure of failure except my love for you. That I am no longer IT; That you are IT. That the roles have been turned and that I now need you as you once needed me.” A week after he had arrived in Veere van Loon, accompanied by Janet and Willem, was in Paris, while Jimmie and Hank remained in Veere.58 Van Loon rented a furnished apartment on the Boulevard St.-Germain for six weeks where he entertained guests and worked on a new book project,

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Figure 10.2 Hendrik Willem and Jimmie van Loon photographed by Ilse Bing in Veere, 1931 (Courtesy of the van Loon family).

a geography. When Rene’s English friend Marcel Godfrey insisted on meeting Hendrik Willem, the two men felt such hostility and behaved so disagreeably over lunch that Rene did not want to see either of them for a week. Tired of Hendrik Willem’s flamboyance and propensity to run her life, Rene more and more felt attracted to the Englishman’s gentleness. Nevertheless, in late April, Rene went with Hendrik Willem to a hotel in Versailles where they took separate rooms. During the weekend, Hendrik Willem invaded her privacy and tried to force himself on her, which so disgusted Rene that she ordered him not only out of her room but also out of her life. Van Loon fled Paris.59 The first week back in Veere, he complained to Alice, was “the damnedest loneliest period I ever lived through.” His life in Europe had been built around Rene, the one woman who had become “so absolutely part of my flesh and blood”—since that period had definitely come to an end, he intended to finish his geography book as soon as possible and then would return to the United States. To Willem he confessed he had lost Rene through his own stupidity and concluded that he was a curse unto himself; he would go back to America because he desperately needed money “and a hell of a lot of it.”60

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Of course, before he left Europe, he tried to explain to Rene how much he needed her. She could do whatever she wanted but he asked just one favor: that she allow him to talk to her once in a while as without her brain he would “shrivel up and die.” He compared his own brain to a twenty-four cylinder car that was forced never to use more than half of its power and Rene had been the only woman “that ever made me work on 24 cylinders and made me regret that I did not have 25.” He added that without using his twenty-four cylinders all the time, life was “as dull as flat ginger ale” and that Rene was “the only sparkplug I ever found that could handle my 24.” There was no reply.61 Nevertheless, before sailing to New York in late June 1931, Hendrik Willem mailed Rene another letter. He told her that “the Veere chapter is ended and Lorena gets the big Olympic medal for having kicked 240 pounds clear across the ocean, though little Rene could gain an even bigger one for all she will have to do is to get that same heavy-freight back by the help of a single smile. . . . Goodbye . . . the door remains open as wide as it ever has been . . . that door will remain open until they shall carry me out of it feet first and if they take the trouble to do a little dissecting they will find one name on my heart . . . Rene . . . whom I am a fool enough to love . . . love beyond everything . . . love beyond life.”62 There was a postscript the following summer. In June 1932 Hendrik Willem heard that Rene had planned to take a leave of absence from Maison Worth for a long holiday in Majorca and he wrongly concluded that her affair with Marcel Godfrey was on the rocks—ergo he was back in the picture. Without consulting her, he got Simon and Schuster to agree to publish a book by Rene about the Paris fashion world. Informing her about this plan, van Loon fantasized about their future. He expected to have “still fifteen perfectly good years before me” and wanted to spend these with her. After all, she was “the only woman who ever could make me into God” and with whom and from whom he wanted to have children. For his geography book he designed a dedication page that showed a reindeer—Rene, dear—that was looking at a globe that was fast moving through space and that represented himself. Only Jimmie knew the significance of the pictogram about which she remarked to Hendrik Willem, “Why not? She meant more to you than anybody else.”63 In her reply Rene accepted the challenge to write the book van Loon had in mind while making it plain to him that theirs was not to be a common future; she was still seeing Godfrey and he would go to Majorca with her. This drove van Loon up to the wall and in a single-spaced three-page letter he gave expression to his anger. When Rene visited New York that fall, she called to see whether he would look at the outline of the fashion book; he flatly said no and hung up. Without van Loon’s backing, Simon and Schuster did not

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pursue the book project and Rene returned to Paris. In due course she left Worth’s, married Marcel Godfrey, and disappeared from Hendrik Willem’s life for some years.64 After van Loon wrote this long and bitter letter to Rene, he and Jimmie, accompanied by some Westport friends, sailed to Holland. While they stayed in Veere for a month, a KLM pilot invited Hendrik Willem for a publicity flight to London in a new Fokker aircraft. Although he had been afraid, once inside the plane he enjoyed the ninety-minute flight as a “magnificent” experience. This first was also his last flight, however.65 Once Hendrik Willem left Holland late that summer, he would never see Veere again. But the picturesque little town where he had lived for three years remained an integral part of his mental makeup. Both in his self-designed stationery as well as in numerous book illustrations the silhouette of Veere would show up time and again, whereas in his private correspondence and books he frequently would refer to “that little paradise.” He named the house that he bought in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, Nieuw Veere. And in the foreword of his 1942 best seller Van Loon’s Lives he wrote that “Veere was the only completely satisfactory answer to the question: ‘Where can a civilized human being spend his days with the least possible minimum of irritation and the greatest possible maximum of inner satisfaction?’ ” Consequently, van Loon claimed that the few years spent in Veere “were the happiest years of my life.”66

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Part IV

The 1930s

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Chapter 11

The Educator (1931–1935) Upon arrival in New York in July 1931, van Loon found solace in his work. The New York Herald Tribune quoted him saying that “something in the atmosphere abroad . . . prevents Americans from working on subjects which they hope will interest American readers. He found that most American writers in Europe become victims of lassitude and instead of working they ‘just sit.’ ” And he wrote his mentor, George Burr, that he was back in New York toiling on another big project, his geography book: “Nothing remains of any real value except work. It may be a drug but it is such a pleasant drug . . . a drug and a companion at the same time and what else or what better arrangement has the good Lord ever offered to any of us?”1 That state of mind, however, had its ups and downs. Whereas in the sweltering New York summer heat he told Willem that he worked himself “into a state of complete anesthesia,” a few weeks later he complained, “I want adventure son, . . . something to do in the world beyond merely writing lousy little books.” In August, van Loon asked Roy W. Howard, chairman of the board of the Scripps-Howard newspapers with whom he had a friendly relationship, to advise him on what to do next: “Am I going to spend the next twenty years of my life working fifteen hours a day attacking the whole problem of education single handed?” He felt he was using only a part of his talents, telling Howard in another letter, “I was looking for some sort of way in which I could use all of my twelve cylinders instead of merely using six. I can always go on writing books. There is a steady market for them. They are read and apparently they are wanted. But while our planet is going through the present great upheaval, I have the feeling as if I were sitting safely on the grandstand while others are busy in the arena.”2 By October, the van Loons had settled in an apartment on Washington Square West, very close to where Jimmie’s tea room The Mad Hatter had

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been. Meanwhile, Jimmie had undergone a hemorrhoid operation and Hendrik Willem sent her to California to recuperate. By early December she was back in New York.3 In the second half of August 1931 and through the first months of 1932, van Loon was incredibly productive. While writing the first draft of his geography book, he was writing dozens of articles for leading newspapers and magazines, including a series of twenty-three articles, entitled “Speaking of Revolution,” in The Nation. In October, Roy Howard, who owned the newly merged New York World-Telegram, asked him to sit in for Heywood Broun while the popular columnist of “It Seems to Me” went on a short holiday. Van Loon wrote this column anonymously for twelve days, temporarily renaming it “It Seems to the Spectator” and illustrating the title with a selfcaricature in the guise of Erasmus. Howard and van Loon were both pleased with the result.4 In addition, van Loon contributed four lengthy articles on “Philosophy of History” to the New York Herald Tribune, pieces to The Forum and the Saturday Review of Literature, and an essay, “If the Dutch Had Kept Nieuw Amsterdam,” to a book called If: or History Rewritten. About this last piece, he told Ruby Fuhr, “I faked the history so noble that now the fake seems more real than the real history.” Indeed, reading his counterfactual analysis, it is hard to deny that van Loon’s creative imagination made his story of New Netherland from 1674 to1930 into a plausible and “noble” history.5 Despite this output, he was looking for something that paid better. He wrote Willem, “My revenue is in inverse ratio to my reputation. I am infinitely better known than most writers but the spoils go to the cheap brethren and sisters who know how to write just what fits into the general make-up of our magazines and movies.” He thought he was unable to write for the magazines, because they were aiming at “the lowbrow and I am by nature the highbrow.” And in a letter to Ruby Fuhr, he angrily compared his rate for The Nation with that of his old friend Walter Lippmann, who got much more for writing what he termed “the platitudes of Moscow of yesteryear in an American gravy for the benefit of Hooverians of today.”6 After reading the first draft of what was to be published as Van Loon’s Geography: The Story of the World We Live In, his editor at Simon and Schuster, Clifton Fadiman, wanted him to cut the manuscript by about one quarter. Van Loon already had great confidence in his new publisher and editor. He praised the staff of Simon and Schuster as “the pleasantest people I ever worked with” and as “demon sales promoters” and described Fadiman as “the brains of the house in a literary way.” In that harmonious spirit, therefore, he agreed to remove “that literary overgrowth” from his manuscript. As he told Burr, “I can’t expect people to be building extensions to their houses for the mere purpose of putting little Hendrik’s books in them.”

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What gave him much satisfaction was that Dick Simon whetted the appetite of both the Literary Guild and the Book-of-the-Month Club for the upcoming Geography to get a bidding war started, which the Book-ofthe-Month Club won. And so, by May 1932, van Loon could write that Geography, three months before its publication, had already earned its costs for his publishers and that he had been given an additional advance.7 With the Great Depression in full swing and even bankers on the dole, van Loon knew this payment was a blessing. Meanwhile, the country was committing suicide, he thought, since so many people were doing nothing to end the crisis as they hoped for a return to prosperity. During the winter of 1932–1933 at least thirteen million people were unemployed in the United States and breadlines had become a common phenomenon in American cities. In fact, between 1929 and 1932 (the year when the Depression was at its worst), the suicide rate rose twenty-four percent.8 In February 1932 van Loon was confronted with the grim consequences of the Depression right at his doorstep. An old man shot himself right outside the window of the van Loons’ Washington Square apartment. Hendrik Willem reported to his son, “I wish that old man in the Square had chosen some other place to blow his brains out than right underneath our window. He looks like an absolutely helpless case, an unwanted and undesired asset to humanity. He looks very old and he is out of it but my God what a system, what a system and the Hoovers and these other grabbers prattling sweetly about sturdy individualism. The cops meanwhile have borrowed newspapers to cover him up and the mess. The cops, being Irish and having a certain training of decency about Death, handle the situation very decently. The crowd is held at a respectable distance.” After an ambulance removed the man’s remains and drove away quietly, without ringing “its everlasting gong,” he told Willem, “The park employees have got brushes and water and are scrubbing the sidewalk. It would not do for the dear kiddies to play there. Most of the time they play at racketeer anyway and shoot at each other with toy pistols. The sturdy individualism goes on even in the nursery. . . . The crowd has gone back to its own business and the world proceedeth as ever. Wonder who the poor old wreck was. No use looking in the paper tomorrow morning, there are so many of them.”9 Van Loon reported to his Dutch friend Henri Mayer that every day he heard of more people whom he knew losing all their money. In contrast to the despairing lives of many homeless and unemployed people on New York’s streets who had built shantytowns called “Hoovervilles” along Riverside Drive and had even moved into Central Park, stood the grand skyscrapers, conceived in the boom years of the 1920s and completed in the midst of the Great Depression, such as the seventy-seven story Chrysler Building in 1930, the 102-story Empire State Building in 1931, and Rockefeller Center

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(including Radio City Music Hall and the RCA Building) in 1932. Because of the economic crisis, Manhattan’s skyscrapers contained many empty offices and Fifth Avenue, according to van Loon, now had the appearance of an empty small village street. He blamed a lot of the situation on the Prohibition and, as he wrote Ruby Fuhr, on the “pokergame in which for a few years every chip was called by a value it never had and never could have.”10 That spring, van Loon went to New Orleans to be the keynote speaker for the American Library Association. Despite the tiresome thirty-six-hour train ride “through the most unpleasant part of America,” he was in high spirits about the hearty welcome he was accorded in the Crescent City. In contrast to the lousy food he had experienced on the train, he praised the New Orleans restaurants for even serving better quality food than in Paris.11 Once van Loon was home, he illustrated his lecture text, and it was then published as To Have or To Be—Take Your Choice. Van Loon’s was the twelfth in a series of 25-cent pamphlets that included contributions by Walter Lippmann, Rexford G. Tugwell, Charles A. Beard, and even Joseph V. Stalin. His was, as he told George Burr, “an appeal to the younger generation of America,” aiming to answer “the perplexing questions of today. We have preached ‘to have’ and the acquisitive society has made us all yawn until we simply have lost interest.” Although he admitted that economics certainly played a part, the current crisis was in his view more spiritual. He complained to Ruby Fuhr that his pamphlet “tumbles into the ocean of oblivion and people don’t see it,” but he was glad that it had at least accomplished something: Maxim Gorky apparently read it and had allegedly said that the “only two dangerous enemies among the capitalistic classes writing history” were Hendrik Willem van Loon and Oswald Spengler.12 Van Loon also told the general session of the National Education Association in Atlantic City in early summer, that the Depression was mainly caused by the dominating and false philosophy of “To have rather than to be,” of size being substituted for contents and quantity for quality. In his opinion American society was “not suffering from an overproduction of material goods but from an underproduction of honest thinking.” He invited his audience of teachers to choose “to be” instead of “to have,” and to join him “in that new Declaration of Independence which holds that a man’s conscience is, and of right ought to be, superior to the size of his bank account.” He wrote Ruby Fuhr, “Until I was thirty I was a newspaperman and from thirty to fifty I wrote history to get a background and now I have a little background and so why not try to become America’s Greatest Exponent of Modern European Affairs . . . profound European background . . . vast linguistic ability . . . my humble literary reputation will open most doors.” In another letter that summer, he asked Roy Howard to contribute money to an appeal fund for the

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Scottsboro boys. Nine young African Americans had been convicted of rape, despite little or no evidence, by all-white juries in Alabama. Van Loon hoped that the Supreme Court would give the victims of southern racism some respite, “unless the merry holiday spirit of the crowd turns their prison into a bonfire.” The whole affair had made him realize once more that although justice should be the same for the rich and the poor, “the poor have a somewhat more difficult time getting hold of that money without which our legal machinery does not seem able to function.”13 Holland seemed to be far from his mind in the spring of 1932. At least in his correspondence he pretended it did not play a role anymore. “Holland lies millions of years behind me,” he wrote Willem. “Whenever I get news from that part of the world, I feel as if I heard a sharp little tinkly bell ringing in a small county store where you go to buy a loaf of bread . . . it is all so utterly uncomprehending . . . yes, they know a lot but understand nothing.” He thought, as he expressed it to the Dutch author Theun de Vries, that the people in his native country behaved as if they were living under a glass bell: they saw what was happening around them but did not understand a bit of it and were making long noses to the world. And to his old mentor Burr he confessed, “I hate to think what would have become of me had I remained in that Hollow Land of my birth. The fate of my good uncle awaited me. I don’t mean to say that it has always been so terribly easy over here, but I have at least been alive. Amen.”14 He not only found it problematic to deal with the Dutch in Holland, also the Dutch in the United States were not the kind of people he liked to be associated with. To Willem he reported that the Dutch in New York had established a new society, as he wrote sarcastically, “to propagate the Dutch idea in this country with the usual excellencies and stuffed shirts of various grades and sizes and having founded it with all due formality.” When this organization sent him an invitation to join their efforts, he flatly refused, exclaiming to his son, “Good God, I AM the Dutch idea here.”15 When, after his last summer trip to Veere, van Loon returned to New York in August 1932, he was immediately swept into good spirits by the astonishing sales of his Geography, which became a best seller even before its official publication date of 8 September (figure 11.1). He happily told Willem that “the swellest grandest book I ever writ” caused more excitement than anything else he had ever done before.16 Van Loon’s Geography opened with a preface in which the author stated, “History is the Fourth Dimension of Geography. It gives it both time and meaning.” Thus, the volume offers a lot of historical information in addition to the more traditional physical geographical data. The definition of geography

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Figure 11.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon with Noodle at his New York Washington Square apartment with a copy of Van Loon’s Geography on the table, 1932 (Hendrik Willem van Loon Papers, 1884–1972. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University library).

he used for his book was “a study of man in search of food and shelter and leisure for himself and for his family and an attempt to find out the way in which man has either adapted himself to his background or has reshaped his physical surroundings in order to be as comfortable and well nourished and happy as seemed compatible with his own limited strength.” As a consequence, “Man comes first in this geography. His physical environment and background come next. The rest is given whatever space remains.” In other words, his was a “human” geography.17 Though the book deals with the world as a whole, it is Europe-centered. In the seven-page chapter about the Netherlands, van Loon could not suppress his pride on the cultural influence of his native country in the seventeenth century and ended with a comparison to ancient Athens: “Next to the territory of Attica, this narrow strip of land between the Rhine, the North Sea and the Zuyder Zee has probably contributed more to the sum total of our arts and sciences than any other region of similar diminutive proportions. Athens was a barren rock and Holland was a water-logged swamp. But they had two things in common . . . an excellent geographic location from the point of view of international commerce, and a superabundance of animal spirits and spiritual curiosity, left over from the days when they had

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been obliged to fight or perish. And out of these their glory was born.” However, there was a dark side to this glorious past and in his chapter on Africa van Loon did not hesitate to assign blame for the slave trade to the Dutch.18 In his conclusion, van Loon noted that easier and faster communication facilities had made the world a smaller place. This tied in with a theme earlier in the book, one for which he was often quoted: “We are all of us fellowpassengers on the same planet and we are all of us equally responsible for the happiness and well-being of the world in which we happen to live.” Here he showed himself to be a cosmopolitan, an attitude that contrasted with his simultaneously held WASP point of view on America’s ethnic minorities, especially the Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe.19 The reviews were mostly positive, stimulating further sales. For instance, the Chicago Daily Tribune recommended it as “a grand book” to simple and sophisticated readers alike. Thomas Barbour, director of the Harvard Zoological Museum, in his review in the Atlantic Monthly, was among those who pointed out “some silly if unimportant blunders,” but he saluted the author “for his vast reading, his power to give the result of his industry to his public with a sharp clarity, a shrewd philosophy, and a graceful wit.” Van Loon’s friend Carl Van Doren, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, admitted that no doubt there would be experts who would criticize details, but hastened to say that Van Loon’s Geography was, “of course, van Loon’s geography. It deals with the earth and its human history not as a map-maker or a statistician might have done, but as a philosopher and a scholar, a wit and a poet has done. . . . Unsurpassed by any man of letters that Rotterdam has produced since Erasmus, van Loon is unequaled by any man of any sort that Holland has ever sent to America.”20 The success of his Geography—at the end of 1932, he estimated that he would net about $40,000 from the book that year, placing him in the top 1 percent of U.S. wage-earners—also kept van Loon in the news. In an interview with the New York Evening Post, he gave his opinion on such topics as the Depression (“Individualism, Hooverism, is the last rearguard action of the laissez-faire school: you know, each one for himself and the rest go to the breadline.”) and women, who he thought were more pragmatic than men. “I admire clever American women—they face reality, they face today’s problems.” Yet, in an article in the New York World-Telegram van Loon criticized the American woman for rarely knowing what she wants: “She insists upon equality with men, but she will not take it in the cold logical way of the European woman. The average American wife wants to be treated as if she were a first-class mistress.” In van Loon’s opinion it was “in the hardy climate of small Northern countries that one finds the happiest women in the world. These are the places where women not only have the most complete equality

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with men, but also a serene sense of their own importance.” Therefore, he maintained, “Women in the Scandinavian countries, for example, have in the past ten years gone way ahead of the American women in economic and intellectual independence.” Van Loon also gave radio interviews and at least one of his speeches, about his one-world concept and a plea for economic internationalism, was broadcast. His Dutch accent, however, made it difficult for people to understand him at times.21 After the debacle with Rene Scudamore, Hendrik Willem set his eyes on June Hamilton Rhodes, a young woman active in the Democratic party. She politely declined his offer to become the fourth Mrs. van Loon and they remained friends. It was she who asked van Loon to contribute to the Democratic presidential campaign by writing an article about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s library.22 Van Loon had supported Alfred Smith for Democratic nomination and was skeptical about Roosevelt, the governor of New York and the presidential candidate. But when he met Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at a large lunch on 11 September at their Hyde Park estate, he was immediately charmed by the couple. His opinion on Roosevelt completely changed and afterward he wrote that FDR was “well-read and has a good library . . . knows German and French, is a cultivated man of the world.” He observed that Roosevelt was “much more crippled than most people know” and added, “gawd what a moral courage to run for THAT job when you are like that.” Ten days after his initial visit van Loon went back to Hyde Park to work on his article.23 When that article was published in the Saturday Review, van Loon described Roosevelt’s home Springwood, not as “a house with a library, but a library that is also a house,” so ubiquitous were the books. Most books were histories—particularly on naval and early American history—and biographies and books on current social and economic problems. There were hardly any novels or poetry. It had dawned on van Loon, he wrote, that Roosevelt, “to overcome the terrible obstacles and difficulties of the last ten years of his life”—a reference to FDR’s fight against polio—“had identified himself with his own historical past. He had made this part of his library the arsenal from which to arm himself for the inevitable encounters of the future.” In early November, just before her husband won the election, Eleanor Roosevelt sent van Loon a very complimentary letter about the article and expressed her wish to remain in touch. Over the ensuing years a warm friendship was established between the president and first lady and Hendrik Willem van Loon.24 That fall van Loon volunteered to present a weekly half-hour program on history for the small New York City socialist radio station WEVD, named in honor of Eugene V. Debs and founded by Oswald Garrison Villard, socialist

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leader Norman Thomas, and Heywood Broun. The program consisted of a twenty-minute talk and ten minutes of string quartet music from the period van Loon had talked about. The audience response was enthusiastic, and van Loon expanded the program by enlisting the cooperation of John Dewey, Fannie Hurst, Carl Van Doren, Elmer Davis, several scholars from Columbia and New York Universities, and many others. This resulted in the creation of the “University of the Air,” of which van Loon was made dean; it offered listeners five half-hour adult education programs per week on history, philosophy, music, theater, literature, psychology, and economics.25 In a letter to Roy Howard, van Loon explained that the idea of the University of the Air “was born one evening when I was thinking of the endlessly repeated accusation that the radio was an instrument of greed and private gain which with the exception of an occasional symphony concert or a lecture by some celebrity did absolutely nothing to educate the public at large.” The management of WEVD embraced his idea of putting on the radio “something a little more serious, something that should fill a need in the lives of those who still believe that education, even if it cannot cure all our ills, will be of tremendous help to carry us safely through the present social, spiritual and economic revolution.” Hendrik Willem was thankful for the many small donations from listeners, which funded the university and for “the number of people of eminence willing to give their services (and believe me, it means hard work, for the mike is an exacting taskmaster!).”26 Van Loon, who had discovered the speaking technique while sitting before a radio microphone, was completely different from standing at a public lectern, took the criticism about his accent seriously. He tried his best to be well understood. According to his judgmental younger son, van Loon’s “enormous bulk caused shortness of breath, which gave rise to unpredictable voice production. He would blast one minute and become inaudible the next.” Over the years, van Loon’s proficiency with the new medium improved markedly. In 1941 the entertainment-industry weekly Variety praised his “calm and mellowness that is frequently a happy change of pace from the hysterics of the commercial hit-that-line boys.” Although Hendrik Willem would always struggle with his accent, by this time he also had better control over his breath as the critic observed, “Obviously, under repeated engineering warnings he manages to keep a tendency to wheeze asthmatically into the mike’s very kisser down to an occasional flurry of air venting.”27 By the end of 1932 van Loon’s reputation as an educator seemed to be firmly established, as was shown by his name being included in “The Nation’s 1932 Honor Roll.” Van Loon was honored “for making geography the fascinating science it should be” and on this 1932 Honor Roll he was in the company of such distinguished Americans as Eleanor Roosevelt, U.S. Congressman and

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soon to be mayor of New York Fiorello H. La Guardia, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, composer Aaron Copland, journalist Walter Lippmann, writers John Dos Passos and Van Wyck Brooks, and aviation pioneer and heroine Amelia Earhart.28 Between the success of Geography and the launch of the University of the Air, van Loon felt himself to be so much in the news that in January 1933 he wrote his son Willem, “I wish I could turn off the publicity . . . it is getting to be funny . . . every paper you open has something . . . people are beginning to suspect me of having a special couple of very active publicity people working for me and I have not even got a clipping bureau.” That spring van Loon lamented, “I am fame-poor the way other people are land-poor. I have too damn much fame and too little of everything else.” Surrounded by dull people he felt bored and told Willem, “I need laughter, son, as badly as a plant needs water and I get very little of it . . . I wish to God I could find some amusing female person with whom I could laugh and sleep the tedious hours of night away . . . I am shriveling and drying up from sheer boredom . . . work and work and work and nothing else.” To get out of this situation, he was thinking of taking a trip to Europe by himself that summer.29 In late June Jimmie went off for a holiday to California. Thinking he had become too dependent on Jimmie, Hendrik Willem expected separate vacations to be beneficial to their relationship. However, by the day he was to board the Bremen to sail to Europe, he lost courage and telephoned Jimmie in California to ask her to come to Europe, too, on another ship ten days later. That same day he also wrote her, “When you come to Europe, I shall first of all dress you in Paris and no kept woman shall ever have looked the way you do, you have grand looks, now make something of them and someday I shall not only be your husband but also your lover.” Despite the “Damn!” she wrote in her diary that day, Jimmie did travel back to New York and boarded an ocean liner for France.30 But hardly had van Loon started his transatlantic crossing than other women caught his eye. On board the Bremen he was introduced to a pair of identical twins, Ruth and Helen Hoffman, commercial artists in New York. Soon after landing, Ruth went off to Greece to visit the Englishman she had met on a previous trip to Europe; by then, Hendrik Willem was smitten with Helen, had proposed to her, and took her to Holland, where they visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and visited his sister, Suus, who wasn’t too pleased with her brother’s new infatuation. Back in Paris, Jimmie arrived and told Helen, “If you want Hendrik Willem, it’s okay with me,” and she went to Veere to pack the last of their belongings and say good-bye to her friends there and in Middelburg.31 Hendrik Willem and Helen, meanwhile, went to Bad Gastein, a spa in Austria. Van Loon had the time of his life, reporting to Willem, “I live like a

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vegetable, tended most motherly by the excellent Helen who keeps me to diet and sleeping hours as if I had been her offspring. . . . The pounds of overweight are disappearing, I can walk for three hours at a time and when you see me again I really may have your figure and they may take us for brothers.” After Ruth had joined them, van Loon, like a triumphant king, paraded the streets of Bad Gastein with an identically dressed twin beauty on either side of him. But though he praised the sisters in all his letters that summer to his son, he also came to the conclusion that “like all that sort of American women of extraordinary beauty, there never was any great necessity of using their brains,” and so for him, “no more entangling alliances in this life.” He did not say this to Helen, however.32 The Hoffman twins next went on to Italy, so van Loon returned to Paris, where he spent one week with Jimmie before she sailed home alone. Van Loon stayed for another month in the French capital. Shortly after his return to New York his first grandchild was born. Though named Hendrik Willem, Hank and Janet’s baby was immediately nicknamed Piet.33 Before his summer trip to Europe a representative of the New York office of the Netherlands Railways had asked van Loon to write a short, six-page travel guide to Holland “and a few of those funny little pictures. You know what we mean.” “As a farewell” to his native country now that his “Dutch days [were] over for good since Rembrandt,” van Loon agreed to write and illustrate this pamphlet but when van Loon sat down to write it, as he explained in the “Personal Confession to the Reader,” to his “great surprise it started to write itself,” mushrooming into a 117-page guidebook with fortyone pen drawings. To the Netherlands Railways he said: “Look here! You wanted a shrimp and I am giving you a whale.” After some discussions, the pamphlet-grown-into-a-book was published as An Indiscreet Itinerary or How the Unconventional Traveler Should See Holland. The “personally conducted tour through unknown territory,” including a historical background of the country, was well received in the American press.34 Right after his return to New York another van Loon book was published: An Elephant Up a Tree, a satire on present-day civilization disguised as a fable about an aristocratic elephant—the author himself—going to America on a tour of investigation. Van Loon compared with Candide and bragged in the New York Times, that whereas Voltaire had needed three days to write his book, he had written it in only two days. To his friend Alfred Harcourt he reported that the forty-eight hours writing “the whole damn 30,000 words at a stretch” had “completely exhausted” him and added, “I should not do such stunts at my age any more but ideas are bursting forth in me so like a volcano when the spouting is good.” But contrary to his travel guide to Holland, the reviews of this literary eruption were far from positive.35 Van Loon told both his son and Ruby Fuhr that Americans were misinterpreting his message, mostly because they did not understand irony.

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About this time, he also told his son that he had come to the conclusion that Americans were “essentially different” from Europeans and that he himself would “never really be an integral part of this country, nor of any other either.”36 In his disappointment about the low sales of the elephant book he also blamed his publishers for not having done enough to promote it. In his view they should have arranged sessions for signing copies at well-known New York bookstores, at Macy’s and other locations, or they “could have hired an elephant from the Republican party headquarters for next to nothing these days” for a parade up Fifth Avenue, and added, “Why must I always think of those brilliant ideas?” “Disappointedly but as ever with fatherly affection and regret,” he warned Simon and Schuster that he was “brimful of ideas”; henceforward, instead of playing the role of the “author,” he would be the “educator.” He had studied his position in regard to the younger generation and had come to the conclusion that there was “a steady demand” for the educational books he could provide. He therefore had outlined a book plan for the coming years in which the first “hefty work with many pictures” would be a history of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, music, painting, and literature. “Don’t tell me that it can’t be done, for it can be done, and I see very distinctly how it can be done. . . . This is the time every high school in the land is interested in just this sort of thing and the teachers ask for literature upon the subject and there is none.”37 However, this was not a new plan: in 1929 he had announced to Horace Liveright that he was trying to consolidate his ideas about education. After finishing his Geography he would “give the school-world a sensible and understandable history of the arts and by general articles and such-like map out a policy which will turn me into one of the prophets of a new sort of education.” And in a promotional periodical of his British publisher George Harrap, The Harrap Mercury, van Loon in the spring of 1933 had said he was “absolutely convinced that the system of education as well as the systems of economics and politics and democracy and all the other systems that seemed so staunch and solid before the War need absolute revision”; it was his aim “to give the coming generations a new conception of the values of life and living [to] help guide mankind out of the present morass.” It was now up to him and other educators, he felt, “to show the road to a newer and happier world.” And in the fall of 1933, in a letter to the book department editor of Better Homes and Gardens, he had dramatically phrased his mission as follows: “in the present race between Anarchy and Education those of us who in some way (however small) can be of service should devote our time and energy to just one thing—to try to prevent a catastrophe from which the human race could never recover.” Hence, his one-world concept as expressed in his Geography and his “philosophy of tolerance and a more human existence,

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which has been the leitmotif, or theme, in all my books.” This vision of “the brotherhood of man, the imperative kinship of the nations,” was called van Loon’s “own New Deal” by a journalist of the New York Evening Post who had interviewed the author that summer and portrayed him in his article as “A man of elephantine proportions who emits ponderous groans to relieve pent-up mental processes, just as a volcano gives off smoke and gases.”38 In a moment of boredom, van Loon agreed to go on a five-month-long Cunard Line cruise as a “lecturer extraordinary.” He and Jimmie would have free passage and he would receive a fee of $5,000 for a series of “erudite and whimsically witty talks” (as Cunard’s ads promised) as the luxury liner Franconia made its way around the world on an itinerary concentrating on the Southern Hemisphere. As the departure date of 9 January 1934, neared, Hendrik Willem was not exactly looking forward to the adventure; he told Ruby Fuhr, “The trip looms before my eyes like an ice barrier.” The boat left New York for the Caribbean and he spent his fifty-second birthday at Kingston, Jamaica, pleased to see, as he observed to Alice Bernheim, that “the nice crowd on board [was] much better than expected.” Nonetheless, as the Franconia approached the Panama Canal and Hendrik Willem had problems adjusting to the heat, he decided to arrange more simpatico company. He dispatched a radiogram to Helen Hoffman asking her to join him. She met the ship in Los Angeles before it set sail for Hawaii and New Zealand. Hendrik Willem and Helen passed the time by drawing together (many of their pieces would end up in his 1940 volume The Story of the Pacific) and he also prepared his lectures, while Jimmie preferred the liner’s daily cocktail hour. Once they got to Australia, they went ashore to a warm welcome from Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith and his wife. Van Loon also delivered lectures while in Sydney and, he boasted to Alice, made “a nationwide broadcast—I mean a continent-wide broadcast, which was something new in my little life. The strange thing to me is that those funny books of mine seem to have wandered all over the globe and that they want to hear further new things from me.”39 His visit to Bali was indeed a high point, but he was offended by a sarcastic article written by the Bali correspondent of the Indische Courant, a Dutch language newspaper published in the capital of the Netherlands East Indies, Batavia. The Dutch grieved him again! he thought. And was it a coincidence that on this Dutch territory he was not asked to speak? As the Franconia churned westward through the Indian Ocean and they were halfway through the cruise, van Loon began to get tired of “these endless islands where time has not yet been discovered.” He concluded that he was “[n]ot born for the tropics,” an impression confirmed by an arduous three-day trip overland to Colombo, Ceylon. Fortunately, however, once they reached Capetown he

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found a climate more to his liking, and he was delighted to be lionized there. He gave six well received lectures in South Africa—to the delight of Afrikaner audiences, he spoke in Dutch—and another nationwide radio broadcast and the South African prime minister invited him to lunch. But here, too, a Dutchman spoiled his pleasure: the local correspondent for a Dutch newspaper wrote that although van Loon was an experienced speaker who was able to create enthusiasm among large audiences, “when all was said and done it was just a small fireworks of words and sentences,”—that is, nothing that would really merit serious attention.40 When by mid-May the Franconia called on Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, the end of the trip was nearing, to van Loon’s great delight. The hardest part, he told Alice in another of his frequent shipboard letters, had been “the complete absence of people of one’s own ilk. There just was not a soul— not a single blessed soul with whom to get into intellectual and spiritual contact”; he was looking forward to a summer in the wilderness of Vermont. (As for the lack of intellectual camaraderie on board, there may be another side to the story: H.L. Mencken reports in his memoir the rumor in New York that during van Loon’s world cruise “many of the passengers aboard the tour ship were jumping overboard to escape him.”)41 After a last stop at Barbados, the Franconia docked in New York exactly on schedule on 31 May. Although upon arrival van Loon told a New York Times reporter that he didn’t like the tropics and that in his view “the white man ought to stay out of them,” several months later, he expressed his “happy remembrances” of the cruise. Not only was he impressed by the exotic beauty of that part of the world, but his opinion of his fellow passengers also seemed to have mellowed: the trip had “transformed me from a suspicious pessimist to an avowed optimist, [being confirmed] that this is a good world and a world in which all of us could be reasonably happy if we applied our intelligence to the problem of living as we have thus far to the problem of making a living.” He was especially pleased to get letters almost every week from people “who were complete strangers until we set foot on their little island and who are now friends for life.” Last but not least, the cruise in the Southern Hemisphere had lit “a little candle in the dark caverns of my ignorance [of ] all those distant countries.”42 Van Loon did indeed spend the summer of 1934 in Dorset, Vermont, where he and Jimmie enjoyed the company of Hank, Janet, and his grandson. On one memorable occasion he hosted Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, who was en route from Australia to England, and Amelia Earhart. According to Jimmie, the two aviation pioneers “liked each other immensely.” Sadly enough, both heroes of the sky would disappear during ocean flights, Kingsford-Smith in 1935 and Earhart two years later. In August van Loon and Helen Hoffman

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had a joint exhibit at Macy’s of their Franconia drawings and watercolors. Van Loon’s aim for that exhibit, he told George Burr, was “to establish the fact that I am a serious artist.” He was pleased, therefore, with the positive notices in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune.43 No matter how much he liked her, van Loon had lost his romantic interest in Helen Hoffman. As he told his son Willem, while in Dorset in July, “I have lots of swell jobs before me . . . and am not interested in all the normal interests of normal females of 34.”44 That summer and fall van Loon worked on a book called Ships and How They Sailed the Seven Seas. He also published articles in Esquire and the Atlantic Monthly, and enthusiastically prepared for another winter season of WEVD University of the Air radio broadcasts. As he explained to a friend, “Anything we can do to help educate the masses is the thing to do just now.” This was especially so since in his opinion the big radio stations filled the air with “terrible bilge”—in a letter to the New York Herald Tribune he voiced his “protest against the ghastly stuff that drippeth all day long from the air by way of the big stations”—and he dramatically termed the thing he was doing on WEVD “a race between education and anarchy.” Van Loon was very pleased, therefore, that two months ahead of the opening evening on 8 December of the University of the Air’s new season in New York’s Town Hall all 1,800 seats were sold out for the event and that the Radio Commission had doubled the voltage in return for the public service rendered by WEVD. To Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he invited for the opening session, he expressed his pleasure in doing this unpaid work of “popular enlightenment” for WEVD and added, “If the President ever wants a station on which he can really say what must sometimes be on his mind, we shall be very happy to offer him our hospitality; no copy read, no restrictions, and a sense of humor and good humor, which I never found on one of the commercial stations.”45 At the end of October the van Loons moved to a furnished house in Riverside, Connecticut. From this village between Stamford and Greenwich van Loon frequently commuted to New York; he and Jimmie also often invited guests to the big rented house, which had many spare bedrooms, four bathrooms, eight toilets, a three-car garage, and even its own private beach. Having no interest in housekeeping at all, Jimmie secured the services of a German couple, Ida and Fritz Kroeschl, to live in and run the household.46 That fall van Loon turned down an offer to become editor in chief of the New York Evening Post, but he did agree to write a daily column for William Randolph Hearst’s King Features Syndicate. Starting in November 1934, millions of Americans all over the country could now read in their local newspapers van Loon’s column “Meet the Commentator,” which ran six days a week. In New York “Meet the Commentator” was published in the Daily Mirror.47

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In his first column van Loon introduced himself to the readers as a commentator “upon affairs both serious and mild” who was more than ever convinced “that a thorough and sober-minded understanding of the past is the best of all possible safeguards for the happiness of our future.” He made it clear that he had “no axes to grind and no doctrines to preach.” As a real educator he had “only one duty to perform. I must tell you how things were in the beginning, how they developed afterward and how therefore they had to become what they are today. When that has been done, I shall take my bow and bid you farewell. For then we enter upon the realm of ‘final conclusions,’ and those, my friends, are up to you.”48 Van Loon used this daily platform to present his thoughts on numerous topics that he picked from history and daily life in the United States. When commenting on European affairs, he showed himself to be a convinced isolationist. As he wrote in one column, “There is not a single foreign problem that is worth the bones of a single American buck private.” And in his comments on the United States he made it clear that his complete allegiance went to the America as the Founding Fathers had in mind when they formulated the Constitution—“an America that was to be a country of about equal wealth and an absolute equality of opportunity for everybody.” However, in van Loon’s opinion there was also an entirely different America that disgusted him so thoroughly that he was willing to fight it. That was the selfish greed, which had exploited the riches of the country and had attracted millions of immigrants who did not care about the ideals of the Founding Fathers, turning the country into what Theodore Roosevelt had phrased “a polyglot boarding-house.” In such a climate ideals were for sale at the next election, van Loon thought, and he expressed his concern that “the moron and the mucker are at the gates. Some day, we may have to fight them, or they will destroy everything we ourselves deem necessary for our intellectual happiness.”49 By February 1935 van Loon was already expressing severe doubts about working for Hearst. He complained that instead of the liberty that was promised him to write whatever he liked, Hearst’s editorial policy interfered more and more with this agreement. He was especially upset to discover that Hearst was friendly to Hitler and that articles of his in which he severely criticized Hitler were refused. This situation let to a row and in April to the termination of his contract. For van Loon it was a relief and he wrote his son, “I am, God be glorified, out of the Hearst affair. Simply could not make it. It was like playing the Brahms concerto in a whorehouse. No matter how well you play—or how wonderful the music—it is still a whorehouse. I shall be very poor again but also very happy. It was impossible to work with that man.”50 In November 1934, shortly after he had moved to Riverside, van Loon heard a pianist on the radio perform a Brahms sonata so well, that he stayed tuned

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afterward to catch the musician’s name. It turned out to be a woman, Grace Castagnetta, of whom he had never heard before. He immediately sent her a letter to compliment her performance and to invite her to his house to play Bach with him. Jimmie, who saw the outgoing envelope, noted in her diary: “Got warning on 24th”—Hendrik Willem’s twenty-fourth romance; she kept score. Grace, a young tiny woman in her mid-twenties from Wood-Ridge, New Jersey, with curly black hair, startlingly alert eyes, and a good sense of humor, visited Riverside in January. Hendrik Willem, of course, fell in love with her and proposed, but Grace had only one lifelong passion—her piano—and gently turned him down. Though Jimmie, as Hendrik Willem put it, hated music “as a cat hates rain,” she liked Grace from the start. Grace became a loyal, devoted friend, almost a member of the family. She and van Loon in the following years published a series of eight songbooks together and as a staunch supporter of her musical career, he was instrumental in opening many doors for her.51 Grace clearly observed that though “Jimmie had none of the things Hendrik Willem wanted in a woman,” she provided him the stability for his creative work. As van Loon himself once wrote, “I am an artist and therefore apt to be slightly emotional. On such occasions, I need a balance wheel. The good Lord knows that I have got it [as Jimmie was] made of Grade A commonsense, and ours is therefore a most useful arrangement.” Van Loon’s elder son, Hank, recalled that “Jimmie was 100% interested in Pop and in his success. What Pop needed or wanted came first.” She therefore accepted Hendrik Willem’s “playing around with girls” and knew by experience that it was she to whom he would always return. The main reason for Hendrik Willem’s failures in his love affairs, according to Hank, was that his father had difficulties “in having a full-blown sexual relationship with any girl. It didn’t come to things.” Willem attributed this to his father’s feelings of guilt and shame as a consequence of his Victorian upbringing and his adolescence spent in a dream world of troubadours and Minnesinger where the courtly attitude toward the opposite sex was more important than the sexual act itself. He even wondered whether his father’s “lack of capacity for sex” was not a consequence of his being “essentially narcissistic”—a typical Gerard Willem interpretation.52 Published in February 1935, Ships and How They Sailed the Seven Seas presented the history of ships from the earliest times to the present, covering some seven thousand years. Van Loon’s view was that until the modern vessels of the twentieth century, “life on board ship was simply unfit for human beings, originally created after the image of God. It was indecent and filthy [and a] sailor’s life [was] nothing but one unending and gruelling record of misery and pain and hunger and thirst and bodily abuse, a plain slice of hell-on-earth.”53

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No matter this negative view on sea life, the book was well received. For the New York Times it was obvious that the author had enjoyed working on this book. Considering its vast scope it might have become “top-heavy with its burden of fact,” but that was not the case as Ships in his view “sails along on even keel.” The New York Herald Tribune observed that “Mr. Van Loon is one of those happy authors who couldn’t write a dull book if they tried.” Of course, van Loon was pleased with such positive reactions, though he had no idea what made a book successful. As he explained to Cornell Professor Carl Becker, he had had great expectations of his R.v.R. but that book did not do well in the United States and yet “such an absurd little thing like Ships [hopped] into the best seller list within ten days.” Even in Holland, for once the reception was favorable. The critic in De Haagsche Post was not only impressed by van Loon’s historical knowledge but also absorbed by his narrative style.54 In a letter to Franklin Roosevelt that March van Loon explained that his work as a historian was based on the concept of “universality” and aimed to contribute to “a common consciousness of ‘belonging together’ ” and to teach his readers “how to attain some sort of workable democracy.” In that way, he felt, he could begin to repay his “debt of gratitude to a country that has been such a good home to me.” The next month he, Jimmie, and Janet were invited to spend a weekend at the White House. Van Loon reported that on the second night, when the other guests had long retired, “the President kept me up till 2 o’clock. I think I gave him a lecture on history.” In August he returned for another visit, “talking too much, I fear me,” he wrote to Burr, “but a pleasant holiday—the only one I have had for twenty years or so.” Several more visits were to follow in the years ahead. And in the meantime he regularly sent the president stamps for his collection, copies of his books, and even Dutch cheese and herring.55 From May through December, van Loon took a microphone at the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) for a twice-weekly fifteen-minute program of comments on current events and popular history—a kind of column on the air. In an interview about this radio program, van Loon said that he was “not the discoverer of a new Truth, with a capital T. On the contrary, if I have anything at all to sell . . . it is Doubt, with a very large capital D . . . Wisdom . . . can only be acquired by the constant practice of a reasonable amount of doubt.” About his radio program van Loon told Roosevelt, whom he sent a copy of his Thomas Jefferson speech delivered on the fourth of July, that there was no censorship from NBC and that he aimed to “preach a sort of general mental attitude which we shall need if the New Deal is ever to be incorporated into our national consciousness.” In his opinion, “the New Deal was not, as most people seemed to believe, a bundle of laws and

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regulations, but a new attitude of mind.” Indeed, as historian David Kennedy has argued, the New Deal’s lasting historical meaning was that it gave many Americans a sense of security they had never had before, a feeling of having a stake in their country that reflected FDR’s wish, once expressed to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, “to make a country in which no one is left out.”56 Van Loon was soon receiving a steady stream of fan mail from listeners on the East Coast and in the Midwest. They enjoyed the educational value of his talks. As one letter said, “We have sadly needed some counter action of that kind against the wild and irresponsible would-be demagogues who are persistently reaching the ears of the people.” This was a clear reference to Father Charles E. Coughlin, the “Radio Priest,” and Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long, known as the “Kingfish,” who both skillfully used the radio in their attacks on President Roosevelt. As many requests came in for reprints of van Loon’s talks, forty of these NBC radio columns were published in November 1935 under the title Air-Storming. This book not only found praise in the United States, but was also well received in the Netherlands. And, upon receiving a copy of Air-Storming, Franklin Roosevelt in a thank-you note told van Loon he had heard one of his broadcasts that summer and had decided that he was “a Jack of all Trades after [his] own heart,” as he much more preferred these to the “one art” specialists.57 Among the many guests who visited van Loon that year in Connecticut was Thomas Mann, the winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize for literature. Mann’s considerable prestige had grown in his exile from Nazi Germany; he was generally considered the spokesman for the “other,” better Germany. Mann and his wife, Katia, stayed with the van Loons for a few days in June after he accepted an honorary degree from Harvard. Hendrik Willem was amazed at the punctual work rhythm of Mann—the novelist wrote in longhand every morning, seven days a week, from ten to noon, producing an average of one and a quarter pages daily. When in conversation Mann expressed his admiration for President Roosevelt, van Loon set his mind to arranging an invitation for the Manns to the White House. This was tricky since as a stateless person, having lost his German citizenship, Mann could not officially be presented to the American president. But van Loon and Eleanor Roosevelt “cooked up a little plan” so that the Manns had a private dinner together with the Roosevelts on 29 June. This not only led to Mann’s gratitude and an ongoing correspondence, but also gave van Loon a reputation among other German refugees as a person who was instrumental in opening doors at the highest level. As a consequence, from then on through World War II a parade of refugees came to visit van Loon and seek his support.58 In sharp contrast with the Manns’ successful visit to Riverside was that of van Loon’s sister Suus and her youngest son, Jan, in August. Their month

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long stay reminded him, van Loon wrote a friend, of his “miserable childhood” when he lived like a stranger among strangers. In his view his sister did not understand a thing of the United States and he sincerely disliked her 16-yearold son, who was bored and moody. Jimmie took the Dutch relatives for a couple of days to New York for a sightseeing tour and to her dismay “they liked Macy’s best of all, our largest and cheapest and most thoroughly horrible store.” When Suus finally left, he thought she misunderstood him as much as did his former countrymen. Hendrik Willem and Suus would never see each other again.59 In the spring of 1935 van Loon wrote and illustrated a charming new book with his grandson, Piet, very much in mind. Around the World With the Alphabet aimed “to teach little children their letters and at the same time give their papas and mamas something to think about.” The text dealt with the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, each section telling a little story—with historical information, of course—about a geographical location in the world, and accompanied by an attractive, typical van Loon-style illustration. When the book came out in October, Simon and Schuster told the public that the “utterly fantastic” four color pictures had made them hesitate to publish the book as it would have to be too expensive. But since the author had insisted upon publication as he “would like to see the kids of America have at least one book of their own that was just written and drawn for the fun of it” and therefore had declined any royalties, he had thus made it possible to publish the book for one dollar a copy instead of three. The reviews of the book were all most favorable. Both text and pictures were praised and in fact not only children but also adults, according to the New York Times critic, would enjoy “the quality which distinguishes the finest picture books.”60 Van Loon sent a copy to New York Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia whom he had met at the Dutch Treat Club. In a covering letter to La Guardia’s secretary he explicitly asked not to acknowledge the package as the mayor “might expect me to vote for him the next time, and as a citizen of the sovereign village of Riverside, that would only get me into deep trouble.” La Guardia immediately reached for the phone to thank van Loon personally and a friendship blossomed between New York’s “Little Flower” and the Dutch-American author of “elephantine proportions.” In the next few years they would serve together on numerous committees and address audiences at the same platform. Also La Guardia became one of the many recipients of a steady stream of van Loon humorous and often illustrated letters, postcards, drawings, copies of new books, and Dutch cheese. When in December 1935 WEVD’s University of the Air’s fourth season started, van Loon not only announced this radio program of “a little bit of reasonable enlightenment . . . for the benefit of the community” in the New York Times,

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but also sent a personal invitation to New York’s mayor to attend the opening program.61 Van Loon actually published four books in 1935, an unusually productive year. After Ships and How They Sailed the Seven Seas, Air-Storming, and Around the World With the Alphabet, the fourth volume was an illustrated pamphlet, A World Divided Is a World Lost, in which he pleaded for international economic cooperation as a means of overcoming the worldwide economic crisis. He voiced a similar message in his NBC radio broadcast of 3 October: “The present form of strictly national trading among the people of the West of each one for himself, will have to make room for international trade. And national hatreds and rivalries will have to make room for international cooperation.” When 1935 came to an end, Jimmie recorded in her diary that it had been “the most uneventful year for a long time but a very pleasant one.”62

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Chapter 12

For Roosevelt and the Arts (1936–1937) In December 1935, van Loon informed the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) that he would be stopping his radio broadcasts at the end of the year. Although he had had “a grand time” with his on-air segments, he needed to concentrate on a new book, one that he had been thinking about for the past two years. He had realized, he told his son Willem, that a writer didn’t make any reputation on small books, adding contemplatively, “I am getting old enough to think of posterity.” He was convinced that there was a need for a new magnum opus on the arts; his goal was to “try and make the average American kid see that art is something which 1) is not feminine and not quite the thing for manly little American males, and 2) is not a luxury but an absolute necessity.”1 Even as Hendrik Willem kept the arts book a priority, he could not clear his calendar of all other commitments, especially since 1936 was an election year. He turned down H.L. Mencken’s suggestion that they cover the political conventions and the presidential campaign together, but he did agree to a request from FDR himself. As van Loon put it in a letter to a friend, he was asked “to play his Plutarchus” by writing a brief campaign biography of Roosevelt. To the consternation of his Republican friends, who prophesied career suicide, Hendrik Willem dashed off a portrait of the president. In his view, it was Roosevelt’s inherited “Dutch obstinacy, born out of the everlasting conflict between Nature and Man,” that had enabled him to fight with great courage and strength his struggle against polio and the problems caused by the Great Depression. The president’s character and courage to endure hardships, as well as his willingness to accept responsibilities, in van Loon’s view, would therefore guarantee “a complete and decisive victory.”2 Van Loon also chaired a joint effort by WEVD and the educational department of the Rand School for Social Science in New York to get out the

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vote. As he told Missy Le Hand, FDR’s private secretary, both of these left-wing institutions believed “a Democratic vote this year will help them more than a wasted Socialistic vote.” Meanwhile, he declined an offer to make speeches on behalf of the president, on the grounds that his Dutch accent would only invite Republicans to accuse Roosevelt of using “furriners.” To show his appreciation for van Loon’s contributions to the campaign, FDR invited him for lunch at Hyde Park in October (figure 12.1).3

Figure 12.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon with Eleanor Roosevelt, probably at Hyde Park, 1936 (Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum).

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Roosevelt won a landslide victory in November: nearly twenty-eight million votes as opposed to seventeen million votes for his opponent, Kansas Governor Alf Landon. He won 60.8 percent of the popular vote—the greatest in recorded history—and every state except Maine and Vermont. Van Loon immediately sent the president a letter of congratulations and “as a humble worker in Clio’s slightly disorderly backyard” also offered his interpretation of the election results. FDR’s triumph was not only the result of the president’s own personality and James Farley’s successful campaign strategy, van Loon argued, but was also a historical phenomenon in which the millions who voted for Roosevelt had done so to protect their own ideals of Democracy— of which Roosevelt was the visible embodiment—against the threat of the unwelcome foreign dictatorships. The political developments in Europe, “a constant menace to that ideal of self-government,” were seen and felt, van Loon believed, “like a threatening cloud” hanging over the United States. Thus, Roosevelt’s name had become “a battle-cry” to protect the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Although van Loon overestimated the foreign policy factor in the 1936 campaign, Roosevelt expressed his appreciation for van Loon’s “awfully nice letter,” adding, “There is much in what you say and I do hope that with four more years we can give liberal government in this country enough impetus to keep it going forward permanently.”4 That summer, the van Loons moved ten miles east to a smaller rental on Wilson Point, near South Norwalk. Only some twenty families lived on the hilly peninsula and, in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, van Loon sized up his new neighbors as “people who, next to their dividends, cherish the Constitution and the conviction that, for some reason, they and their friends were called upon to enjoy the bountiful riches of our land and to convert them into pleasant homes, beautiful gardens and children, who can go correctly to the correct preparatory schools to be correctly prepared for the continuation of this charming arrangement, world without end and trust-funds without limit. Amen. To confess openly to a certain admiration for the achievements and intention of your husband (to whom my humble services) is almost like singing the old Russian national anthem in Moscow!”5 The first lady was unable to accept Hendrik Willem’s invitation to visit his new house for “a polite Democratic Kaffee-Klatsch,” but to the dismay of many a Wilson Pointer, the van Loons did host “a big buffet supper” in honor of Mayor La Guardia. After Roosevelt’s triumph, van Loon noticed that many people from his area refused to accept the Republican defeat. To a friend he wrote he had never before seen “such a humiliating sight of bad sportsmanship.” And what’s more, since he had written Roosevelt’s biography for the Democratic National Convention, he was considered to be “a traitor to my own class.” A silly thing in his opinion, as he saw himself as “an ordinary

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workingman except that I make my living fishing little words out of a bottle of ink instead of laying bricks or messing around in the gazettes of the Law.”6 But even as “an ordinary workingman” doing his job in Clio’s garden, he came to realize more and more, as he told his friend Ben Huebsch, that history was “one of the most difficult of all the arts and takes one hell of a lot of training.” He was convinced “that one should no more write history from notes than that one should play a Beethoven concerto from notes. One should know the job so that if necessary one can ad lib. with the utmost freedom and catch up again with the main course of the music or the history when the time cometh to do so.” He regretted that America’s specialized society did not produce historians with a broad training in many fields of human endeavors but only “historians that would make ideal candidates for a Guggenheim scholarship.” There was one exception, however: van Loon had a great admiration for Carl Becker. He envied the Cornell historian’s style “in the way that one of us might envy Rembrandt, just because there is somebody who can do something which we ourselves will never be able to do.”7 The Songs We Sing, the first of the van Loon-Castagnetta series of juvenile songbooks, came out in the fall of 1936 and turned out to be a great success. The collection of twenty-five nursery songs with attractive van Loon illustrations, was praised by the critics as a little gem. The New York Times described it as “a fresh and charming song book . . . that should be in every child’s library, along with Mr. van Loon’s Around the World With the Alphabet.”8 On the flap of the book van Loon expressed his criticism of children’s books, especially the Sunday comics, which he regarded “as the most pernicious artistic, literary and ethical pabulum that could possibly be fed to our younger generation.” The Songs We Sing and the projected books in the series were to serve, he argued, as a kind of counterattack against “the harm done by so many of those children’s books” that in his view were “merely cheap and utterly lacking in either beauty and dignity.” In his opinion, as he wrote in a music magazine, American parents did not sufficiently appreciate and emphasize the value of music in the education of their children. He hoped that that would change, for there was no greater joy in life than to be able to play music. Music had made his own life “fuller, more interesting, more fascinating.” That there was a great interest in the book was shown by the sales figures. Whereas most children’s books then sold about 6,000 copies, van Loon reported to friends that Around the World With the Alphabet had sold 14,000 copies thus far and by the end of December The Songs We Sing had 35,000 copies in print. While there was every reason to be happy with that success, apparently Hendrik Willem was unable to enjoy the fruits of his labor; in a letter he expressed his regret that “at 54 I can no longer work more

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Figure 12.2 Hendrik Willem van Loon photographed by Ilse Bing, 1936 (Courtesy of the van Loon family).

than 14 hours a day. And my eminent medical men tell me that that is too much. Yet, there is so much to be done and so little time”9 (figure 12.2). In January 1937, after he had finished the first draft of his arts book, van Loon resumed his NBC broadcasts. One of his first programs was about the marriage of Holland’s Princess Juliana; he worked very hard on the text to ensure it would not “be considered sob-stuff.” He then went to Washington

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to cover the second inauguration of President Roosevelt. In an inaugurationeve broadcast, van Loon told his listeners that by living in America they were a most privileged people, “infinitely better off . . . than any other race, nation or people in this whole world.” He also warned them that after the hardships of the Depression, they had to face a new crisis, “as yet invisible but absolutely unavoidable . . . brought about by the fact that Europe is permanently in a desperate plight.” During that new coming crisis, he prophesied, “we shall have to exert ourselves to the utmost lest we lose what we have got.” An avalanche of letters from listeners in every state showed van Loon that he had touched the people’s heart and he therefore sent a copy of the talk to Eleanor Roosevelt. The first lady showed it to her husband who in turn thanked van Loon for “that gem of a broadcast” and his “much-needed” advice to the American people. And he added, “I shall feel deeply insulted if you come to Washington again without letting me know.”10 The president—himself a master in using radio, as his famous fireside chats demonstrated—was kept informed about van Loon’s radio activities. Van Loon, for instance, sent him two special broadcasts on dust storms then raging in the Midwest, and about expanding WEVD’s University of the Air. Among van Loon’s fan mail was a letter from Montreal, Quebec, in which a grateful listener wrote: “The great audience of unseen listeners thank you for your fine words and clear reasoning, and trust that you shall long remain on the radio, as a Pilot standing on the Ship of Destiny and Hope, encouraging countless Mariners—the listeners-in of this world—to go forward on the golden search in the ship called ‘Quest’ for truth, and abiding faith and love.” Van Loon’s publisher Max Schuster thought that van Loon’s broadcasts “constitute an oasis of intelligence in a desert of blah,” and John Royal, NBC vice president for programming, wished that more radio people would be able to “crowd so much common sense into so few minutes” like van Loon. As far as Royal was concerned, NBC would keep van Loon in the air “from now until hell freezes over, providing they haven’t already put in air conditioning down there.”11 Once again listeners often asked for van Loon’s radio scripts and sometimes they ended up being published. A series of broadcasts for NBC’s parent company, the Radio Company of America, that summer also led to a special book. RCA commissioned van Loon to write and illustrate A Short-Wave Journey of Discovery With Hendrik Willem van Loon. The company printed 230,000 copies of this work in which van Loon encouraged readers to acquire a shortwave set as “a worthwhile investment” to find out what is happening in the rest of the world that had become “merely one vast suburb.” He also confessed that even after some eight years of radio experience during which he had broadcast from countries the world over, he still suffered “most horribly from an almost irrepressible stage-fright” when he found himself facing

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the microphone. Whatever the truth of that confession, he could certainly boast a great popularity on the radio. By September he wrote an acquaintance, “believe it or not . . . there appears to be so vast an audience for just the sort of thing I am trying to do, that even NBC is beginning to wake up and poor CBS is horrified . . . they have just discovered that I rate 20% higher in listeners’ appeal than [Alexander] Woollcott who was always the big drawing card and, as I am never advertised, they don’t know how it all came about.”12 Early in the summer of 1937, to his own great surprise, van Loon’s work found recognition from where he expected it least of all: Holland. Queen Wilhelmina bestowed on van Loon the Order of Orange Nassau in special recognition of his literary works, which had contributed so much to spreading knowledge about Dutch history and culture, not only in the United States but in translation all over the world. In a letter to the Netherlands legation in Washington, van Loon expressed his gratitude for the royal decoration, which he saw as an encouragement to continue his efforts to get uneducated multitudes to read about history and geography and to make them acquainted with the Dutch role in history and civilization. On 14 July van Loon was the guest of Eleanor Roosevelt on her regular Wednesday evening broadcasts for NBC. After the broadcast, van Loon asked the first lady to pin in his lapel the orange and blue ribbon of the Order of Orange Nassau, thereby, as he said, “pinch-hitting for Her Majesty the Queen.” The Dutch consul-general in New York had already officially presented him with the decoration on behalf of the queen, but van Loon apparently wanted to receive the award twice.13 Although he was pleased with the royal recognition, van Loon could not get over the feeling that the Dutch had ignored his success in the United States and elsewhere for so many years and he therefore expected only jealousy among a great many of his former countrymen. To his friend Marvin Lowenthal he wrote, “Can you see all the schoolmasters and all the official stuffed shirts and all the sons of darkness hating me and my voluminous guts . . . and asking themselves and each other ‘What has he got that we have not got, what has he done what we have not done?’ . . . For the rest, my very dear friend, . . . you should know that I am still the same simple loveable little Dutch boy I have always been and that nobody will notice any difference except in the innermost depth of my Christian soul where it singeth ‘Awake all you basterds, I have got it and you ain’t. So what?!’ ”14 This perception of the Dutch reactions toward his having received the Order of Orange Nassau was really much too negative. The New York-based Dutch correspondent of the newspaper De Telegraaf, G.J.M. Simons, for instance, in a letter to the Netherlands legation in Washington wrote that van Loon had more than deserved the honor. And the author F.J.W. Drion

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stated that though not being taken seriously in Holland, van Loon due to his witty and playful approach—the secret of his success in America—was able to reach out to the masses, both in his writings and radio talks, and passed on more knowledge about the Netherlands to his readers and audiences than any other immigrant about his native country. The Dutch should realize, Drion argued, that one could serve the cause of the Netherlands better in the United States by being American, like van Loon, than being Dutch. The royal decoration was therefore a long overdue recognition of van Loon’s “invaluable merits.”15 That spring the van Loons had to move again. Jimmie and Hendrik Willem found a house in Old Greenwich that they liked enough to buy. He was in high spirits about his “delightful house” where he intended to—and indeed did—spend the rest of his days. The house was on a sandy peninsula jutting into Long Island Sound called Lucas Point. The surroundings were so reminiscent of Veere that van Loon immediately dubbed the house Nieuw Veere. It offered, he enthusiastically wrote one of his friends whom he invited there, “the loveliest view this side of Paradise and no Saints to bother you with questions.” Guests that first year included H.G. Wells and FDR biographer Emil Ludwig, whom Jimmie considered a pain in the neck.16 One visitor to Nieuw Veere later in 1937 was van Loon’s old love Rene, now married to Marcel Godfrey. They had reestablished contact that spring through a mutual friend, Betty Goodwin, who worked at the NBC press department. In an April broadcast van Loon had incorporated a personal message to Rene that included the words: “I am an expert at making the same mistakes, not once but every time I have a chance to do so. . . . Some of the greatest wisdom in the world is contained in only four words—Sorry, I was wrong!” Betty sent a copy of van Loon’s script for that program to Rene, who was living with her husband on her mother-in-law’s estate near Vancouver. To van Loon’s delight by the summer their correspondence was resumed. He did not hesitate to mention again that Rene was “the one person I have ever really loved” and he promised her, “Whatever I do, I never want to hurt you again by one percent of one percent.” But there was not the slightest chance that the happily married Rene would give him another chance at romance— and failure. Theirs was to be a friendship and their different roles worked out well when the Godfreys spent Christmas at Nieuw Veere. Van Loon accepted the situation and realized, he told her, that thanks to her he had been fortunate enough to “have known a perfection of beauty and laughter which is given unto few mortals.” But “if there is an eternity,” he wrote her a year later, “I will spend it with you, just spend it with you.”17 Although van Loon had supported Roosevelt’s 1936 election campaign and regularly kept in touch with him, he did not always agree with the

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president’s politics. When in 1937 a series of sit-down strikes led to victories for the unions in the auto and steel industries and the unionization of much of industrial America, this transfer of social power had the support of Roosevelt. But many property-minded citizens, even those initially sympathetic to the cause of labor, were less tolerant of the sit-downs, got scared by the seizure of factories, and alarmed by flying squadrons of workers who marched, or threatened to march, from city to city. It apparently frightened van Loon too. In letters to his friends Henri Mayer and Ruby Fuhr that spring, van Loon expressed his annoyance at Roosevelt’s flirtations with labor—in order to get a third term, he felt. Nevertheless, he was soon writing the president again and in August he told FDR he was “rapidly developing into a sort of general illustrator of the New Deal ideas”—this was a reference to two government publications for which he had provided the illustrations. The pamphlet Why Social Security? published by the Social Security Board in Washington was, according to the title page, illustrated by van Loon “to express his own personal interest in the development of social security in the United States.” Van Loon had also illustrated the book The Unique Function of Education in American Democracy which, based on a draft by Charles A. Beard, was published by the Educational Policies Commission. Furthermore, “as an entertaining piece of archival sleuthing,” van Loon wrote an article entitled “Roosevelt Alias Geldersman. A Study in Applied Genealogy.” It dealt with the Zeeland origins of FDR and was published in Redbook. No conclusive documents to prove that the Roosevelt family had come from the isle of Tholen in Zeeland had been found but like the president van Loon, “as a fellow-Zeelander,” had no doubts about Roosevelt’s Dutch roots. It was a recurring theme in their correspondence.18 They had already discovered they were both born in January 1882. In 1938, van Loon wrote the president: “Sir, has it ever struck you that while you now happen to be one of the most powerful people in this world of ours, there is one thing you will never be able to do—you can never hope to catch up with me in years. I was 56 two weeks ago. You will be 56 next Sunday.” FDR thoroughly appreciated this “mighty nice birthday letter” and replied, “I gladly concede your three weeks’ advantage over me. Think of all the wisdom you imbibed during that three weeks’ period! I am glad we share the excellence of a common heritage.”19 Van Loon was busily struggling the first half of 1937 with the final manuscript of The Arts. In moments of desperation he felt it was “a sheer waste of time. How can I make anybody hear what Bach’s G-minor Fugue sounds like without playing it for him?” he wrote Henri Mayer. And to Van Wyck Brooks he described his objective to combine all the arts into one single volume as “too ambitious for my rather restricted cranial radius of expression and observation.”

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No one before him had ever written a history of all the arts, so he had to find his own way and feared “that it may not click, as my publishers expect and hope that it will.”20 But his publishers’ business instinct proved to be far better founded than Hendrik Willem’s fears. Simon & Schuster ordered a huge first printing of 155,000 copies, three-quarters of which were for the Book-of-the-Month Club. These figures were staggering, not in the least to the author himself. Van Loon explained to Rene that a whole industry worked frantically to finish the book in time for its 30 September publication date: “hundreds of printers and lithographers keeping busy day and night, 200 girls working on tipping pictures, . . . the Book-of-the-Month Club preparing if you please to send out 4,000,000 circulars, . . . an entire publishing office planning a campaign of psychological ‘curiosity’ in this new opus—and all that comes out of a bottle of ink, value ten cents.”21 By the week of publication, the Book-of-the-Month Club had ordered another 40,000 copies, and Dick Simon who was preparing to reprint the book called van Loon to tell him that he “could now buy Radio City.” At the same time an exhibit of van Loon’s original watercolors and drawings for The Arts opened at one of the biggest art galleries on Fifty-seventh Street. “With Napoleontic precision,” as van Loon put it in a letter to Henri Mayer, S&S planned every detail of its public relations strategy to get The Arts in the public eye. There were full-page ads in major American newspapers. And, of course, the avalanche of sales was helped by a wave of favorable reviews.22 In a heavily illustrated volume of almost 700 pages, van Loon covered painting, architecture, music, sculpture, and the so-called minor arts, such as theater, the manufacture of violins, mosaic work, pottery, and weaving, from prehistoric days to the present (figure 12.3). According to the flap text The Arts was van Loon’s “most ambitious work,” which would take its place with Van Loon’s Geography and The Story of Mankind “as one of the foundation books of any intelligently selected modern library. . . . Every American home in which the sense of beauty is nursed and encouraged . . . , will draw inspiration and knowledge from its pages.”23 William Soskin, in the New York Herald Tribune, exclaimed without hesitation that van Loon’s new volume was “the healthiest history of the arts I have ever read.” In the Washington Post, Agnes E. Meyer was impressed by the “remarkable achievements” of this book. In her opinion The Arts was “a balanced summary of man’s cultural development; it popularizes a difficult subject without debasing it, and it is a book upon the arts that is not dull, but on the contrary radiates a vigorous enjoyment of life and of all manifestations of beauty. This is the work of a great amateur in the true sense of the word, that is one who truly loves the arts and can therefore impart that robust joy in creation which is the origin of the arts themselves.”24

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Figure 12.3 Cover image of The Arts, 1937 (Courtesy of the van Loon family).

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Similar praise came from such newspapers and periodicals across the country as the Chicago Daily Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Dallas Morning News, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Saturday Review of Literature, which featured no less than five reviews: one from a lay reader who gave an overall, positive, impression, and the rest from experts who focused on specific fields and, unsurprisingly, disagreed with some of van Loon’s judgments.25 Van Loon was glad that most critics understood what he had tried to do with The Arts, which was not “to write yet another history of art, but a general philosophy of life built up around the arts.” To noted pianist Harold Bauer he explained, “The man who would never approach within a thousand miles of the arts—he is the fellow I am after. I have sacrificed much which I hated to sacrifice to get this strange creature won for the arts.” He was pleased, of course, to receive numerous positive reactions from all sorts of everyday people living all over the country and he very much appreciated the congratulatory notes he received from such luminaries as Albert Einstein and Franklin Roosevelt. The president in his enthusiasm invited van Loon to come down and discuss how both their plans to bring art to the people could dovetail each other.26 Before the book was published, van Loon had already observed that despite all efforts of museums, art departments, and music programs on the radio to encourage art, art “still [remained] something outside ourselves and outside our inner lives. We never do it for fun.” In The Arts he regretted that art had ceased to be an integral part of people’s daily life with the artist having become someone who is standing apart from life. As in his view the laboring man would get more power in the coming years, van Loon’s educational—yet still paternalistic—aim was “to catch him now [as] we may still turn him into a civilized human being—something better than the illiterates of Park Avenue and using his leisure for better purposes.” Speaking at the New York Times National Book Fair in November, he said he had written The Arts to enable people to discover that art is fun, and hoped that his book would stimulate his readers to draw their own pictures and play their own music. Even if the quality would be lousy, he argued, it would bring cheerfulness and joy. Or, as he expressed it in The Arts, his ultimate desire was to reach “a world that shall create beauty out of the sheer joy of being alive.”27 Van Loon derived the greatest satisfaction from his volume The Arts when during World War II he received a letter from a British Royal Navy lieutenant who wrote him from his submarine Osiris: “Dear Mr. van Loon, . . . Never before in my life have I been guilty of writing any form of fan mail, but your book The Arts has given such pleasure to me and my messmates. We spend days and days at sea, below the surface for most of the time, and boredom and monotony are our greatest enemies. A book like yours, however, gives

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immeasurable relief, and through all that is sinister and ugly in these dreadful times, through you we are vouchsafed a glimpse of what is beautiful in the world, and it is such a relief.”28 By the end of 1937, van Loon had every reason to be pleased with the year’s work. Christmas Carols, his second collaboration with Grace Castagnetta, featuring twenty Christmas songs “for the whole family,” had come out in November, and it proved to be as successful as its predecessor. The Arts continued to sell during the holiday season and on December 19 reached the top spot on the New York Herald Tribune Books best seller list. Not only had van Loon’s effort topped books by such noted authors as Alexander Woollcott, Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Lippmann, and Winston Churchill, but it particularly pleased him, as he told friends, that The Arts had knocked “the terrible Dale Carnegie” out of first place after his How to Win Friends and Influence People had held the slot for over a year.29 Not being able to relax for a while, van Loon continued writing magazine articles and also wrote and illustrated two more booklets, Observations on the Mystery of Print and the Work of Johann Gutenberg for the Book Manufacturers’ Institute and How to Look at Pictures: A Short History of Painting for the National Committee for Art Appreciation. He enjoyed being a celebrated guest speaker at the Montreal Book Fair and in Buffalo, New York, where— in his words—the police almost had to rescue him from an overenthusiastic audience.30 There were fresh honors, too. On 4 November 1937 van Loon was elected president of the Authors’ Guild, a division of the Authors’ League of America. To his old friend John Loudon, at that time the Dutch minister plenipotentiary in Paris, van Loon reported that the presidency of the Authors’ Guild was the highest position one could get as an author. Higher of course, he admitted in jest, was the presidency of the United States, but another Dutchman already had that position and so he would refrain from competing with the incumbent of the White House. More seriously, in a letter to John Royal, van Loon said his main goal in the position was to work on international copyright protection for American authors. Soon afterward, Malcolm Cowley informed van Loon of another recognition: he had been elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Hendrik Willem was pleased to be, as far as he could discover, “the only foreign-born element” in this assemblage of prominent American artists and writers.31 Van Loon’s fame in the United States was firmly based upon his work as an educator that had a wide appeal. His popularization of knowledge reached wide and hitherto unreached audiences, but a steadfast group of domestic critics blamed him for oversimplifying too much—van Loon called them “the sterile professors,” and certainly many of them were scholars. By now, of

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course, van Loon was used to these scholarly attacks, as well as the narrowminded, sour criticism he was once more receiving in Holland. He tried to keep it all aloof and, he told a friend, he now felt too old to be bored, adding, “in the few remaining years I prefer to laugh.”32 But with the spectacle of swelling Nazi power in Europe, van Loon became increasingly concerned about the situation in the Old World and how it would affect America. And so, in the next few years of the gathering storm there was little to laugh about. His role of educator turned into that of prophet of the coming conflict.

Chapter 13

The Prophet of the Coming Wrath (1938–1940) Van Loon was an early critic of the German FÜHRER Adolf Hitler. When he was in Bad Gastein, Austria, in the summer of 1933, he bought a copy of Mein Kampf, a few months after Hitler became chancellor. “I have carefully read every word Hitler has written. I did not want to judge him on the ‘say so’ of the Jews. I wanted him to tell me his own story. That his style is abominable beyond words is neither here or there,” he wrote to his former wife Eliza. “But the contents of the book. . . . The most ignorant book I ever read. . . . And all this brutal ignorance is paraded about as if it were a new and glorious discovery. I consider the man the worst menace to the peace of the world since Napoleon.” As a result, van Loon decided “it is my duty to go back [to America] and preach an anti-Hitler campaign, not merely because he does not like the Jews, but because he is the sworn enemy of everything that alone can save our civilization. . . . We should not take him as a joke. He is nothing of the kind. His half-corked philosophy is eminently fit to appeal to semi-normal and sub-normal mentalities. . . . We have millions of them at home. Unless we fight the man from the beginning he will destroy us.”1 Back in the United States later that year, van Loon warned a Jewish friend to be prepared “for years of serious warfare against the Hitler spirit,” a spirit he had described to Eliza some months earlier as “a flat denial of everything this child has ever preached.” In that same letter he told her that he had to resent Hitler’s treatment of the Jews as in his own work he had experienced “endless generosity” of so many of them. For that very reason he offered the president of Harvard University, James B. Conant, a year later a sum of two hundred dollars to be earmarked for “some bright undergraduate of Jewish descent.”2

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Over the next few years, van Loon’s distrust of Hitler grew and he raised warnings against the Nazi regime in newspaper columns and letters. By 1937, he was describing the Nazis as “butcherboys gone wild” and “the enemy of every decent human being.” But his clear and outspoken attitude did not prevent him from making two serious mistakes in an attempt at personal diplomacy that year. Having agreed to present New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia with the annual award of the newspaper American Hebrew, van Loon wrote President Roosevelt half jokingly that instead of making this the occasion for a hate-feast, he wished to extend an invitation to Hitler, who had never seen much of the world, to visit the United States to “see what a country can be when there is complete freedom of religion, when there is equality of opportunity for everybody.” He even suggested that the president ask Hitler to visit the White House. In any case, in presenting La Guardia his medal van Loon would express his hope “that out of the miserable misunderstanding that leads us nowhere, there may arise a magnificent understanding to the everlasting benefit of both nations.” Roosevelt was stunned by this idea, and telephoned to squash it. Van Loon was not surprised, having already had negative reactions to his trial balloon from Jewish friends.3 The second faux pas happened that fall, when he had informed the Nazi-controlled Schützen Verlag, which had taken over his literary rights in Germany after the regime had liquidated his Jewish-owned publishing house, that he would not have any of his books published in Germany anymore. He targeted his anger at Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who in his view had “deliberately and systematically insulted every man and every woman within the realm of the arts.” Van Loon had sent a copy of his letter to Das Neue Tage-Buch, a German-language anti-Nazi weekly published in Paris and Amsterdam. But the letter also said that he did not “belong to the sort of people who grow red in the face whenever the name Hitler is mentioned” and that he respected “the man and his desire to give the German people back that which they were on the point of losing—their self-respect.” Jewish exiles in the United States who read this were left wondering where he really stood.4 One of these confused exiles was Albert Einstein. He wrote van Loon that he had read the letter in Das Neue Tage-Buch “with a certain amazement” as it seemed to him that his friend did not mind Hitler’s policy. Van Loon hastened to reassure Einstein that he hated Hitler, “the unspeakable little mucker who now disgraces the name of Germany.” He explained that he thought Goebbels was unpopular among Germans and—in what he admitted may not have been “a superior demonstration of ethics”—he had been lenient on Hitler to aim at “the weakest point.” Einstein could not understand van Loon’s arguments, he replied, as van Loon’s letter would never reach the people in Germany—Das Neue Tage-Buch being forbidden there—and abroad it could only lead to misinterpretations, which it had.5

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In the meantime, van Loon in a letter to Rene Scudamore expressed his mixed feelings about the huge numbers of Jewish refugees in the United States who, in his view, “in a ghastly fashion [were] scrambling for a new foothold.” No matter he realized they had had a very difficult time in Germany, he thought they were overplaying their hands in their efforts to get a good job, especially in the arts and music, by “pushing the others out who push less brutally and desperately.” It made him very concerned, he wrote, to see New York “being divided into two hostile camps which never existed before.” When, in order to avoid disaster, he suggested Jewish leaders to be a bit more moderate in their aims, he was accused of being pro-Hitler. A very unfair accusation, he told Rene, as he had fought him “so bitterly that my name is at the head of the German blacklist.” The “terrific Jewish problem in New York” made him feel “pretty desperate.”6 He felt even more desperate when in March 1938 Hitler annexed Austria. As Hitler’s troops triumphantly motored into the Austrian capital, van Loon told his NBC listeners, Grace Castagnetta playing Strauss’s “Blue Danube” in the background, “A lovely lady died tonight. Her name was Vienna.” Van Loon wrote his Dutch friend Henri Mayer that listening to the news from Europe made him feel terribly miserable. The whole situation “with that bastard in Berlin on top of the garbage dump” seemed to him worse than in 1914.7 In his campaign to warn his fellow Americans of the threat to civilization and democracy posed by the warlike ambitions of Germany and other fascist states, van Loon conceived the story for a documentary called The Fight for Peace. Produced by Warwick Pictures, the movie used newsreel footage to cover events from the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 through Hitler’s annexation of Austria, all intended to show the causes and monstrous effects of war. In van Loon’s words, the film showed “the horror of war more effectively than words.” And indeed, as a New York Times critic observed, van Loon had made “a sickening and heart-breaking film” that was a “frightening, horrible, sorrowful document of the beautifully monstrous sport of kings.” In an interview to the Times, van Loon said, “We are fast asleep in America. And while we sleep do you know that there are active today in our country some 136 organizations which take advantage of our Bill of Rights to work for the destruction of that bill? Are we going to let them continue?” He furthermore predicted that the film was going to be “attacked by all of the ‘right wing’ organizations in the country.” In fact, according to van Loon, the producers had “already received numerous threats warning them not to show the film.”8 Nonetheless, The Fight for Peace was released, and Scholastic joined the chorus praising it; the magazine’s critic observed that its clear and challenging message was that “America must fight against the forces which make war if she would save democracy for the world.” But the greatest compliment for

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Figure 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 (Courtesy of Bettmann/Corbis/TCS).

the movie came from Thomas Mann, who had seen it in New York in the company of Albert Einstein. Both men were very impressed, Mann wrote van Loon in a warm-hearted letter that cherished their friendship (figure 13.1).9 In the summer of 1938, van Loon returned to Scandinavia. He had fond memories of his visits there in 1916 and 1922, but this time there was an added urgency. After the president of the Scandinavian Authors’ League expressed his concern during a trip to New York about Nazi propaganda in northern Europe, the officers of the American Authors’ League felt it would be a good idea to have van Loon—as their president “representing the intellectual life of America”—visit the Scandinavian countries as a sign of support for their colleagues and as “some sort of democratic encouragement.” Hendrik Willem wrote FDR asking for his approval of this private mission and for an interview with the president and Secretary of State Cordell Hull to discuss the content of the speeches he would deliver. Mindful of another possible van Loon faux pas, Roosevelt replied, “as you will be speaking unofficially, I think it would be better to leave anything you may say completely to your own initiative and discretion.” As indications of his and Secretary Hull’s thoughts, Roosevelt had some recent speeches included in his letter.10

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While he was in Sweden, NBC assigned van Loon to cover in a shortwave broadcast the eightieth-birthday celebration of King Gustavus V, and the network also arranged for him to speak at several Scandinavian broadcasting stations. During this goodwill trip, Hendrik Willem told FDR, he would be accompanied by “a good, sane working-team” of three women: Ruby Fuhr, Grace Castagnetta, and the devoted Jimmie. There might have even been a fourth woman in the team, had Eleanor Roosevelt accepted van Loon’s suggestion to take a vacation and join them to Finland, “where there are no telephones and where the happy peasantry still believes that it is your uncle Theodore who now resides in the White House.” FDR was “delighted” that the trip was going to happen and expected it “to do good.”11 The party set sail on 28 May and had a stormy, unpleasant crossing. Upon arriving in Göteborg, van Loon was flattered that he was interviewed by seventeen journalists, whose photographers treated him much more respectfully than their American counterparts; instead of saying, “Hey, you sonnamabeech, smile!” they bowed from the waist. Clearly the red carpet was unrolled for him during the two weeks they spent in Sweden.12 The group continued on Helsinki, where there were again, Jimmie noted in her diary, “lots of reporters for interviews.” In the nearby town of Järvenpää, van Loon and Grace visited Finland’s famous composer, Jean Sibelius, and during the three-hour tea party both men “roared with laughter.” The next stop for Hendrik Willem, Jimmie, and Grace—Ruby had to return to the United States to teach summer school—was far north, in Lapland. Seeing the landscape for the second time, he wrote Eleanor Roosevelt, “I love this land beyond all others—it looks as if it had only arisen from the Deluge yesterday.”13 But what Hendrik Willem had most hoped the atmosphere in Scandinavia would bring him—inspiration for a new big book—did not come. His fear of drying up made the trip, Ruby Fuhr recalled almost twenty years later, “for the most part sadly painful, probably no less for Hendrik than the rest of us. He was unreasonable, irascible, short-tempered.” In the preceding months he had been thinking of writing a “History of the Average Man” for which he already had signed a contract with S&S. But no matter how much he wrestled with it, he could not get it underway. As he was making another attempt at writing an introduction while in Lapland, he wrote Van Wyck Brooks, “I shall write my ‘Average Man’ as Machiavelli wrote his Principe, in order to educate the ruler of his country. Machiavelli believed in the rule by the Prince and tried to educate him. The Average Man is our ruler. So let me try and train him for the job.” But also this time he did not “feel” the book and his inspiration evaporated.14 After a side trip to Oslo, where Grace gave a successful concert, they went back to Stockholm where they settled in an apartment for two months. Van Loon reported to friends in the United States and in Holland from his

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listening post in the Swedish capital on the political situation in northern Europe. From the many exiles who had only temporary refuge in Stockholm, he heard “all the horror news at first sight. It is happening just across the water—we hear the shrieks.” It was alarming to see Stockholm’s shops selling gas masks and that air-raid drills were being held. The threat of war was increased in late summer, when Hitler demanded that the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia, which included more than three million ethnic Germans, be annexed into the Third Reich. British and French leaders hurried to Munich to negotiate with Hitler.15 While those Munich meetings were going on, van Loon and company stayed for a week in Copenhagen; there, in an attempt to make peace with his sister, he entertained Suus’s eldest son, Wim. The visit of his nephew was as disastrous as that of his sister and her youngest son in August 1935. After only a few days, he described his nephew as “the most unmitigated bastard I have ever met . . . [he is] self[-]satisfied and arrogant and without a scrap of humility or charity.” Nor did van Loon’s bad temper improve when a manager of Schützen Verlag contacted him and told him to stop talking against Hitler and the German government as he had done to the Swedish and Norwegian press. It might have a bad effect on the sale of his books in Germany, the young man warned. Van Loon replied he could not care less.16 When Hendrik Willem, Jimmie, and Grace returned to Göteborg in late September to board their ocean liner, an Austrian refugee was at the dock waiting for him. Lucie Tal was the widow of a publisher who had been a close friend of Ben Huebsch and though van Loon had corresponded with her in the previous years, the two had never met. To her great relief van Loon offered cabin space to bring her to the United States. During the crossing, they heard that in the Munich agreement Britain and France sacrificed the Sudetenland on the altar of appeasement. Hearing of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s return to London, where he told cheering crowds that Munich meant “peace in our time,” Hendrik Willem put a note under Grace’s cabin door that read: “To Gracie, on the morning the British Empire ceased to exist and Moscow took the lead.” A week earlier he had already written his younger son in a melancholy mood, “farewell to Europe, I don’t ever want to see it again.” The New York Times captured his thoughts well when the interview held with him upon his arrival in America was headlined: “Van Loon Returns Bitter on Europe.”17 After his trip van Loon was not only horrified by the prospects in Europe but also shocked at the indifference and ignorance of so many Americans about the situation in the Old World. When, at a Columbus Day celebration in New York Mayor La Guardia’s name was hissed and the name of Benito Mussolini wildly cheered, he decided “to play the prophet of the coming

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wrath” by writing his own manifesto against the imminent danger of Hitler. “If the native, with all his endless advantages, ceases to believe in our Democracy,” he explained to Roosevelt, “then it is up to the immigrant to do so and to give evidence of his belief in that cause which is now the last hope of a truly civilized world.” Within six weeks, he had written a short book, Simon & Schuster had typeset it; he had corrected the page proofs, and it was out in the stores. Our Battle: Being One Man’s Answer to “My Battle” by Adolf Hitler was in bookstores before the end of 1938. He had been working “so fast and furiously” on the book, he told Van Wyck Brooks, that he had no idea whether it was “sublime or lousy,” but at least he had done his patriotic duty.18 There could be no doubt that Our Battle was a political manifesto, written for the sake of democracy. Van Loon offered an intriguing psychological portrait of the similarities between Adolf Hitler and Robespierre, diagnosing both of them as dangerous hysterics, and he tried to make clear that there could be no compromise between the spiritual philosophy of American democracy and Hitler’s philosophy of hate and revenge. He prophesied there could only be war until one of the two would suffer defeat. H.V. Kaltenborn, veteran news analyst and dean of radio commentators, had written a blurb for the book, saying, “Our Battle is a great historian’s blazing torrent of indignation against the indecencies of Nazidom. It shows a genial philosopher and a kindly humanitarian transformed into a militant champion of endangered democracy. . . . I beg all my fellow Americans to heed van Loon’s appeal before it is too late. Here is a clarion call to America to awake, to rearm, and to resist!”19 As soon as the book came out, van Loon received notes of praise from playwright Thornton Wilder, Albert Einstein, who hoped it would indeed act as a wake-up call, and FDR himself. The New Republic described Our Battle as “a masterpiece, despite its quality of charming naïveté.” The reviewer felt the book offered “a vivid character sketch of Hitler, etched in Freudian colors and embellished by a challenging comparison with Robespierre.” The critic in the Saturday Review of Literature wrote that the book presented “about the most forceful expression which has yet appeared of the widespread conviction that no compromise is possible between the Nazi and American systems.”20 But that conviction was not that widespread as this reviewer thought. The critic of Commonweal, for instance, had severe doubts about van Loon’s “calm assumption of the inevitability of war” between the United States and Germany and Japan. He also criticized van Loon’s “disregard for careful statement,” which was likewise done by the reviewer in The Nation who thought that the volume should have been written with more dignity instead of, as van Loon had done, fighting “fire with fire.”21

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Our Battle registered sales of 30,000 copies in its first two months in the marketplace—a respectable figure, but much less than van Loon’s previous best sellers and a disappointment to him. The reason, he explained to Van Wyck Brooks, was that “Our great American Public refuses, absolutely refuses, to read anything that is unpleasant. . . . As a nation, we refuse to accept disagreeable facts,” and he and Roosevelt were the only two persons who realized “the howling need” of the book. What made him feel bitter, he lamented to Brooks, was that the very people on whose behalf he had written the volume, the Jews, resented “the idea of fighting—it should all be done by means of moral persuasion. . . . They resent everything in [Our Battle] and they have been so charming in their utterances that I shall never move another finger on their behalf.” Since his return from Europe accompanied by Lucie Tal, Hendrik Willem had written FDR twice about the growing problems of refugees from the Nazi regime, but now Jewish friends were asking him not to bring anyone else from Europe because that made it so difficult for those who were already in the United States. He was so sick of these disappointing reactions, he told Alice Bernheim, that he would now withdraw to an ivory tower, just to “write a few more books when I too will be happy to call it a day and remove myself from a world which perishes because of its complete and abysmal mental lethargy.”22 But the flamboyant van Loon was not the type to stay out of public life. That October he had been appointed to the board of directors of his local newspaper, the Greenwich Time, and was offered his own column, “Deliberate Reflections,” which till mid-June 1940 provided a platform for his thoughts on issues of both domestic and foreign policy (figure 13.2).Nor could he resist raising his voice on behalf of victims of the Nazi regime and offering advice on American foreign policy. A few days after the infamous Kristallnacht in November 1938, he proposed the U.S. government protest that night of anti-Jewish destruction by recalling its ambassador from Berlin (which Roosevelt did) and expelling the German ambassador in Washington (the Germans reciprocated by withdrawing their ambassador). On 1 December he used a Greenwich Time editorial to publish “An Appeal to the President of the United States” in which he urged Roosevelt to offer the former Chancellor of Austria, Kurt von Schuschnigg, at that time imprisoned by the Nazis, a safe haven in America. Van Loon’s suggestion met with wide approval locally and from Thomas Mann, who probably read about it in a New York Times article. Van Loon himself was well aware, as he admitted in a letter to Roosevelt’s secretary Marvin McIntyre, that he “could not suggest to the Great White Father how to run the Universe,” but he had written this “Appeal” because it gave a lot of people the satisfaction that at least somebody said what they felt themselves.23 The general mood in the United States toward refugees, however, was rather xenophobic. A 1938 Fortune survey showed that fewer than 5 percent

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Figure 13.2 Hendrik Willem van Loon at the Greenwich Time editorial offices typing his column “Deliberate Reflections,” November 1938 (Hendrik Willem van Loon Papers, 1884–1972. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library).

of Americans were willing to raise the immigration quotas to help refugees. More than two-thirds agreed that “with conditions as they are we should try to keep them out.” The next year, even after the barbaric eruption of Nazi ferocity in Kristallnacht, Fortune reported that 85 percent of Protestants and Catholics, as well as 26 percent of Jews, said that, if they were a member of

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Congress, they would vote against allowing more European refugees into the country. As historian David Kennedy observed, “The Depression had helped to reinforce an isolationism of the spirit, a kind of moral numbness, that checked American humanitarianism as tightly as political isolationism straitjacketed American diplomacy.”24 Nevertheless, van Loon continued to plead the case of the refugees. In an address at a January 1939 literary luncheon, he said that the United States should serve as a temporary haven for the refugees as “a matter of common, human American decency.” He believed that at some point dictatorships would end, which would allow refugees to go back to their home countries. Meanwhile, the refugees “should be taken care of as temporary guests.”25 He practiced what he preached: in January 1940, he wrote a friend that he had spent $20,000 of his own money on refugees. One of the many beneficiaries of van Loon’s generosity was the German playwright, novelist, and poet Carl Zuckmayer whose work was banned by the Nazi regime in 1933 and who was living in exile in Switzerland in the spring of 1939. The two men had corresponded about books but never met. Van Loon sent an affidavit to the U.S. consulate in Geneva, in which he promised to serve as Zuckmayer’s financial guarantor, so the German writer was given a visa. In early June Zuckmayer and his wife arrived on board the Holland–America Liner Zaandam in Hoboken, New Jersey. Zuckmayer was surprised to see, standing next to a friend of his on the pier, “a big colossus of a man” who was also waving at him and whose impressive bulk made the Statue of Liberty look like a slender miniature. This, of course, turned out to be van Loon who had come from Connecticut to welcome the Zuckmayers in person. A few weeks later, they were van Loon’s guests for an enjoyable weekend at Nieuw Veere. Carl Zuckmayer was immensely grateful for van Loon’s efforts on helping to make his immigration to the United States successful. In a memoir he described his benefactor as a “poly historian par excellence” with the personality of a “hyper sensible, introvert artist” who simultaneously was a successful salesman of his works. Though Zuckmayer observed that van Loon complained about the troubles immigrants caused him, on the other hand he did everything to help the newcomers.26 In late January 1939 Hendrik Willem and Jimmie traveled to Washington, D.C., to spend the weekend with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Staying in the Lincoln bedroom, van Loon wrote on White House stationery to his old teacher, Esther Bell-Robinson, “If you had not taken the trouble to teach me English, would I ever have written you this from my room in the White House? I doubt it and am deeply grateful.” FDR was celebrating his fiftyseventh birthday that weekend, and the van Loons accompanied the president and his wife to the National Theatre, for a special performance of the play

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Outward Bound, a benefit for infantile paralysis. Van Loon sat next to the president and, in front of them in that box, Jimmie was alongside Eleanor. The whole situation reminded van Loon of President Abraham Lincoln’s fatal visit to Ford’s Theater in 1865. “All that evening,” he recalled, “I knew that I was the one body between the Great White Father and anything that might come.” Fortunately, Roosevelt’s secret service men were more alert than Lincoln’s and all went well. Van Loon was especially impressed by FDR’s ability to hide his handicap. It was, he wrote afterward, “a virtuosity in human willpower.” During the busy two-day visit, the president found some time to talk privately with the van Loons. They discussed the threatening political situation in Europe and Asia and the president expressed his special concern about the American people, who in his view slept and needed to be awakened. To help achieve that, FDR urged van Loon to take up his regular radio broadcasts again (which he had stopped since the spring of 1938). Once he was back in Old Greenwich, van Loon sent a thank-you note for the hospitality that had given him the opportunity to “feel” history. “This dip into the Laboratory of Applied History,” he wrote Roosevelt, “was a most welcome diversion from the usual wood-pulp routine.”27 The day after returning from his cheerful Washington weekend, van Loon happened to hear a radio speech by Hitler that filled the air with words of doom and hatred. The Führer was, he wrote in his column, “An Aryan Jehovah, gone berserk with impatient self-pity—the thundering God of the windswept deserts touching the earth with the flames of his burning, blazing vengeance.” There could be no greater contrast with the pleasant atmosphere of the White House. Hitler’s speech, which really frightened him, reminded van Loon of a description of the Inferno in Dante’s Divine Comedy. That’s why he called upon his readers to fight the danger, “for it is better to perish honorably than to live in a world which we have to share with—that!”28 When Franklin Roosevelt asked about returning to the radio, van Loon was already talking to NBC about resuming his broadcasts. He warned the program director that he would be speaking out against Hitler on the air. The new series, also called “Deliberate Reflections,” debuted on Sunday, 19 February. Van Loon “hammered away” at Nazi ideology, which he judged “the most dangerous threat” to Western civilization. In his 19 March program he called Hitler “the three times perjured paranoiac”; once Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry heard of that broadcast, van Loon’s books were banned in Germany. (FDR congratulated Hendrik Willem for thereby attaining “the summit of permanent fame.”) Van Loon told his listeners that Hitler could not make him stop talking. “And now that I can no longer write, I will have to talk twice as often and four times as loud.”29 However, all this was too controversial for NBC, which asked van Loon to be “just a little milder and not to hurt the feelings of the Germans and the

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friends of Father Coughlin.” The radio station was swamped with anti-van Loon mail from listeners who were pro-Nazi or at least isolationist and there were even picketing lines at the NBC building on Sundays when van Loon arrived. Around the same time, H.V. Kaltenborn was getting heat for his radio programs covering the final stages of the Spanish Civil War, in which he criticized the fascist General Francisco Franco and the Spanish Catholic Church; principally because of Roman Catholic opposition to his broadcasts, Kaltenborn’s sponsor canceled its advertising. In a letter to his fellow broadcaster, van Loon commiserated that neither of them could warn the American people, who were “hopelessly asleep while the world collapses around their dumb heads.” NBC did not renew Hendrik Willem’s ten-week contract, and when “Deliberate Reflections” went off the air in April, Hendrik Willem was convinced that this, too, was due to the influence of the Catholic Church.30 Van Loon hit back at the so-called radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin, an anti-Roosevelt and isolationist demagogue. In his column on the front page of the 21 August Greenwich Time, he observed, “I never quite understood the meaning of the word ‘blasphemy’ until I heard a man by the name of Coughlin say ‘God bless you’ over the air.” After an editorial the next day apologized to readers—this statement, it claimed, did not “express the feeling and conviction of this newspaper”—van Loon was furious and threatened to resign immediately from the board of directors. It turned out that the editorial had not been seen or approved by the newspaper’s editor and general manager, Wythe Williams, who was out of the office on business at that time; the business manager, an Irish Catholic, had inserted it. Once Williams apologized for his business manager’s high-handed action, van Loon decided to continue his association with the Greenwich Time. Two months later, he repeated that he considered Coughlin a menace to the safety of America on account of “the utterly insidious and insincere way” the priest addressed himself to “the intellectually handicapped.”31 In his column van Loon frequently criticized Neville Chamberlain and his appeasement policy, and, repeatedly, he beat the drums against Hitler and warned his fellow Americans for this “gangster with the smirk.” When, in August 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact, followed the next month by the German invasion of Poland and the Soviet invasion of Finland in November, van Loon also included Joseph Stalin, “the successor to Ivan the Terrible,” in his attacks. He described both leaders as modern versions of Attila and Genghis Khan who had joined hands in their struggle against Europe’s civilization. Once Hitler rejected their ultimata to withdraw from Poland, the prime ministers of Great Britain and France on 3 September declared war on Germany. World War II had begun.32 In his fireside chat that day Roosevelt confirmed that the United States would be a neutral nation in the European conflict but, he added emphatically,

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“I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. . . . Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or close his conscience.” Later that month, he called for a special session of Congress to consider revising the Neutrality Act of 1937. A chorus of protests sounded from isolationist senators and such allies as Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh. In a series of impassioned radio addresses against any revision of neutrality, the celebrated aviator pointed out that it was America’s destiny, protected by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, not to be involved in a foreign war.33 Van Loon thought Lindbergh did not understand history well. The war that had broken out was, as he put it in an article in Redbook, “a clash between two diametrically opposed philosophies of life” that could not help but affect the lives of U.S. citizens. But this Armageddon, van Loon was absolutely certain, would pass as he optimistically believed that in the end “the inner conscience of the human race” would triumph over tyranny. And in an article published in Omnibook, he repeated that Hitler, despite the “tremendous amount of damage” he did, could not possibly win this war and establish the thousand year Reich he was dreaming of. The laws of history, van Loon argued, had shown that empires that last for hundreds or a thousand years are never made but just happen and that empires being created by individuals “collapse even more rapidly than they have been put together.”34 In the present situation, van Loon wrote FDR in late October, “There is very little room for the Historian when old Clio has pushed him off his seat, has taken the pen out of his hand and has told him to be gone while she herself does a little writing.” He added that he was ready to offer his services to the president whenever he could be useful.35 After several weeks of contentious debate in Congress, Roosevelt in early November signed a revised Neutrality Act. The arms embargo was lifted but American credits to belligerents were prohibited. Arms and ammunition could be shipped from the United States only in foreign vessels and after full payment had been made. This revised law reflected a precarious equilibrium of hope and fear: hope that the Allies in Europe could defeat Hitler with American help, and fear that the United States might become involved in the conflict. Van Loon thought the Americans were deceiving themselves by thinking that they could stay out of the war. To Ruby Fuhr he described the general feeling in America as: “We need to forget that there is a war. We must be made to believe that it won’t touch us,” and “We have taken it for granted that the Allies will win.” In such a climate of blindness, he thought, it was useless to go on lecturing and in low spirits he added, “I shall let the world go to hell in its own sweet way.” The prophet had warned in time, had obviously been right, but—the classical story—was far from being listened to. As he had written a friend at NBC two months earlier,

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“in all humility, I usually am about a year ahead of the crowd, get my share of the overripe eggs and then hear people say, ‘we knew it right along.’ ”36 Van Loon may have given up writing history for the time being, but he continued turning out articles during the first months of the war. He also wrote introductions to two books, one of which was another warning against the dangers of Nazidom. In a 15 September 1939 radio address, published in Vital Speeches of the Day, he declared that he was “not really very much interested in democracy,” a remarkable statement at first sight. But, as he explained, the word democracy was not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence or in the Constitution and only served as a means to establishing and maintaining a reasonably well-functioning form of representative self-government. In his view the term had become a byword for cowardice, betrayal of given promises, and the complete lack of leadership and of the will to fight for one’s own ideals. Instead of democracy, van Loon argued, more emphasis should be placed on the word “liberty” as “the most precious heritage of the American people.” The important choice Americans had to make was: “Do we want to listen to that [voice] which two thousand years ago spoke unto us from a hillside in Galilee, or do we want to listen to that which today shrieks at us from a hilltop near Berchtesgaden?”37 Van Loon also contributed an essay to I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Certain Eminent Men and Women of Our Time. Edited by Clifton Fadiman, this anthology contained twenty-one essays by such intellectuals as W.H. Auden, Emil Ludwig, Thomas Mann, George Santayana, and Rebecca West. Introducing van Loon’s essay, Fadiman, who had left Simon and Schuster, wrote that van Loon “unites, both in his writing and in his social intercourse, enormous erudition, unfailing sturdy common sense, and refreshing humor” and that his versatility placed him in the tradition of the Enlightenment.38 In his contribution, van Loon said he had come to the conclusion “that none of the so-called revealed religions will ever give me the slightest satisfaction.” For his own needs he had evolved “some sort of workable creed” that had been inspired by “that small band of human benefactors” whom he grouped together as “the Companionship of the Laughing Philosophers.” In his private pantheon of “true prophets” were Socrates, Christ (but without “the dark shadow of the self-righteous and arrogant Paul of Tarsus”), Erasmus, Montaigne, Spinoza, and Immanuel Kant, as well as musicians preaching “the greatest gospel of gaiety of all times,” such as Bach, Mozart, and Schubert. In fact, he explained, anyone who shared his “belief that life was meant to be gay, and that it is only our own ignorance, our own cowardice, and our unwillingness to make use of our God-given faculties which prevents it from being so,” was welcome in his pantheon. Echoing the motto of The Arts that

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“the highest of all the Arts is the Art of Living,” his efforts, van Loon claimed, were directed at contributing “to make this world . . . a place in which every man, woman, and child will be truly able to say, ‘We are grateful that we are alive, for life indeed is good!’ ” Realizing, however, that in “the year of Disgrace, 1939,” this sounded like “mocking blasphemy,” he was optimistic enough to believe that centuries from now man would be able to become “the true master of his fate and therefore dependent for his ultimate happiness upon no one but himself.”39 In his series of illustrated songbooks published with Grace Castagnetta, van Loon added another two volumes that year, The Last of the Troubadours: The Life and Music of Carl Michael Bellman (1740–1795) and The Songs America Sings. The first one, clearly inspired by his trip to Sweden the previous year, was an attempt to introduce Sweden’s eighteenth-century poet, musician, and ballad writer to the American public, but some critics thought that the translation of the twenty Swedish ballads had resulted in stiff and often ungraceful English song texts that did not do full justice to Bellman. Much more unrestrained acclaim was given to The Songs America Sings, which contained such classics as America the Beautiful, My Old Kentucky Home, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, America, The Star-Spangled Banner, and Deep River.40 During the summer of 1939 van Loon had also been feverously working on a book for which he had laid the groundwork back in 1934 while making his Franconia cruise: The Story of the Pacific. He told a friend that the book was writing itself and he thought he had discovered an entirely new way of doing a travel book. This may not have been an improvement, since when the volume came out in 1940, this history of the islands of the Pacific Ocean was roundly criticized for its sketchy knowledge and factual errors. Though the volume was “briskly entertaining,” as the critic in the New York Times Book Review wrote, she and other reviewers strongly recommended readers to look elsewhere for more reliable information on the topic. The Saturday Review of Literature was more positive about the book and introduced a new verb in the American language: the heading of the review was “Van Looning the Pacific.”41 In his 1940 memoir Do Not Disturb, Algonquin Hotel owner Frank Case not only admitted that van Loon could write faster than Case himself could read, but, referring to The Story of the Pacific, he also observed that van Loon “knows so much about the globe that he is beginning to look like it.” Indeed, van Loon’s sedentary lifestyle and his compulsive need to eat were making him bulk up to if not global at least elephantine proportions (he often depicted himself as an elephant in his cartoons). In a three-installment profile in The New Yorker in 1943, the writer described the 290-pound van Loon as “massively proportioned [and] Falstaffian in design.” His clothes, as

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Greenwich Time editor Wythe Williams observed, “were baggy and ill-fitting” and, in van Loon’s own words, his tailor was “Omar the tentmaker.”42 Obesity was in fact the main cause of his recurring ailments. In early 1940 he wrote, “I look like a prize fighter and I have not had a day without pain for more years than I can remember.” Van Loon admitted that his almost 300 pounds were too much to carry, even if he thought that his six feet three inch frame hid them pretty well. He nevertheless had been annoyed, Jimmie reported to a friend, when FDR during their White House visit in January 1939 had told him he was looking “fat and prosperous.”43 No matter the advice of his physician and that of others, van Loon could summon the discipline to stick to a diet only briefly. For instance, a simultaneous effort in February 1939 to stop smoking and to lose weight was a failure. As opposed to eating, he had, as he expressed it himself to a friend, “an almost pathological aversion for alcohol” and it was beyond his understanding how so many millions of Americans could derive joy from it. He once told Willem, “Drinking alcohol makes people sloppy, self-absorbed, and sick. Eating makes them expansive and conversational.” According to his younger son, however, Hendrik Willem’s compulsion to eat was based on his loneliness: his work was lonely and he had a lonely mind and a not too happy private life. Work was a refuge from himself. “The more he worked, the lonelier he became—and the more he ate. It was a tragic and a vicious circle.”44 Despite van Loon’s regularly expressed complaints to Henri Mayer about the New York Jews who in his view were ungrateful for his anti-Hitler campaign and even intolerant toward him, he did not stop his activities for European refugees, whether or not from Jewish stock. In a 1940 newspaper interview van Loon said that the influx of European immigrants into New York would be beneficial to the literature, music, and pleasantry of the city and that America would benefit from their immigration. In his view real German culture was no longer in Germany but in America.45 After the war broke out, van Loon went to Cincinnati to help launch a Jewish campaign to raise twenty million dollars for the benefit of the European Jews. He reported to Franklin Roosevelt that it was “rather pathetic to see those completely Americanized and highly civilized Jews—intelligent, broad minded and cultivated—ruining themselves for the Polish Jews and the Lithuanian Jews, with whom they have about as much in common as we would have with a group of Digger Indians. But since they intend to do their duty, I had to go.” To Henri Mayer, however, he disclosed another, less idealistic and more prosaic reason for going: the one-hour lecture in Cincinnati yielded him enough money to pay a doctor’s bill for the tonsillectomy of his grandchildren (at this time Hank and Janet had three boys: Piet, Jan, and Dirk).46 When the Soviet Union invaded Finland that November, van Loon was instrumental in organizing a protest meeting on 20 December in New York

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City’s Madison Square Garden. This rally against the Soviet act of war made headlines and led to the establishment of the Finnish Relief Fund. Fiorello La Guardia acted as chairman and van Loon as vice chairman of the New York chapter of the new group, which was headed by former President Herbert Hoover. In January 1940 the former president thanked van Loon “for so unselfishly giving time and energy to this worthy cause.” For his part van Loon was deeply impressed by Hoover’s practical abilities to raise funds for charities and soon considered him a friend.47 In a Greenwich Time interview van Loon explained that his motivation to work on Finnish relief was based on his conviction that “if Finland goes, than all the neutral nations are doomed and the whole civilization of North Western Europe goes to pieces.” And though he was all for internationalism, he said, and did not claim any superior virtues for them, he felt most at home among Protestant Northern Europeans as he claimed himself to be a product of that civilization. In America the Bill of Rights, he felt, was a creation of the northern, individual freedom-loving peoples and he was willing to fight for that heritage. In that same interview he said he was proud to belong to the class of the white Protestant Americans and felt that newcomers of other backgrounds were pushing away the Americans of WASP origin and were even abusing and threatening to destroy the Bill of Rights. The cause of Finland was therefore in his eyes the cause of the individual freedom of the WASPs in the United States. To a friend he wrote that it was also his upbringing that had provided him with a sense of responsibility toward the community that had made him “waste” two years on anti-Nazi movements, helping refugees, and finally start the Finnish relief work. For these activities, he claimed, he had spent his last penny and had to begin all over again.48 In both van Loon’s private correspondence and his Greenwich Time column, he made no secret of his frustration with the official U.S. policy of neutrality. “We are neutral. We are touchingly, hopelessly neutral,” he wrote in a March 1940 column, adding, “Letting all the small neutrals in Europe go to destruction while we sit by and talk sweetly about our neutrality seems hardly the purpose for which these United States were founded.” The German occupation of Denmark and Norway in early April provoked another column against neutrality, which in his view was based on “fear and self-interest,” two words that were not to be found in the Declaration of Independence, he argued, and should not be the guiding principles of a nation that in that document had proclaimed itself “the champion of liberty and the defender of human rights.”49 Van Loon also desperately pointed to the danger of treason by “every-busy Nazi boys and girls” within the United States who used the free speech and free action laws of the country to encourage pacifism and “subversive attacks” on America’s independence. “How long, oh Lord, how long,” he wondered, “must we sit idly by” while this domestic treason was going on? In later

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columns he continued to hammer upon this theme of the American Trojan Horse: “Wake up, Americans, to the dangers at home if you wish to protect yourselves against the perils from abroad.” However, at times his proselytizing seemed fruitless and he was even accused of being a warmonger. It was all so hopeless, he thought, and so, when in June 1940 the American Civil Liberties Union invited him to participate in a radio broadcast in support of civil liberties in defense of democratic rights that were “threatened by growing [war] hysteria,” he was so annoyed that he refused to comply with that request, replying that he hated to awaken them from their “happy day-dreams,” and accused the organization of “obstinate blindness.”50 After having received a desperate request from Great Britain’s new prime minister, Winston Churchill, for war supplies such as destroyers, airplanes, anti-aircraft equipment, and ammunition, President Roosevelt on 16 May made a dramatic appearance before a joint session of Congress and asked for a supplemental defense appropriation of nearly $1.3 billion, to be used as the beginning of building what was soon to be dubbed a “two-ocean navy” and for the production of “at least 50,000 planes a year,” the majority of which were to be delivered to foreign nations. FDR’s emphasis on producing arms for foreign buyers provoked severe criticism, not only from members of Congress but also from senior diplomatic and military advisers in his own administration. And though Roosevelt confided to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes that his decision to give maximum aid to England was “nothing more than a guess,” he stuck firm with his risky bet.51 Roosevelt’s strong support of the British provoked more attacks from isolationists, including a Connecticut Congressman whom van Loon challenged to a public debate in which he would defend the president’s point of view. That month van Loon resigned from the Dutch Treat Club after its president, author Clarence Budington Kelland, remarked that “the fifth column in this country is headed by that fellow in the White House.” Van Loon’s anger about these attacks on Roosevelt was softened momentarily when Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, awarded him an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in recognition of his having achieved “the reputation of being one of America’s outstanding men of letters.”52 With the Nazi invasions in Europe weighing heavily on his mind, van Loon was now working on a volume of fiction, entitled Invasion, which after the flop of Our Battle, he hoped would be more successful in waking up his fellow Americans. As a try-out he had published an article in the Greenwich Time in April that reported on a fictitious, sudden Nazi attack on New York that month, which was carried out by twenty German warships and a fleet of transport ships with 120,000 troops on board. The invasion of New York and the set up of a new city government by American Nazis were successful

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in that story because Peace Societies all over the country and U.S. senators were of the opinion that “at all cost America must be kept out of the war until after the elections and that no steps must be taken to provoke the wrath of the Führer.” The property of New Yorkers was confiscated and sent to Germany, and henceforth the earth was to be known as “Deutsche Planet” where the Germans established a rule of the “Herrenvolk.”53 The next day a letter to the editor objected to this article as “an insult to many Americans of German birth”; the letter writer thought that this was “not the time to give way to sordid imagination.” Van Loon replied that the situation he described in New York had actually occurred in Norway. He merely had changed Oslo to New York, and his objective had been “to create a profound sentiment of disgust with the present rulers of Germany” and to make his readers see that the United States would not have any chance at all to make its influence felt at a peace table later on when the survivors of the war would realize that “during the hour of their agony we withdrew into the Ivory Tower of our own self-righteousness and refused to acknowledge that there is a difference between Christ and anti-Christ.”54 During the summer van Loon worked quickly on Invasion but had confidence in neither his writing skills nor public reaction. In his view the public did not care at all and believed that an invasion could never happen in the United States. In a September letter to FDR, van Loon hoped that Invasion, which preached the same lesson as Our Battle but a little more directly, would be more successful in reaching the public’s attention. To another friend van Loon described his new book as “a dirty and contemptible little volume in the worst Goebbels style, but you can only fight a gangster by being a little more of a gangster.”55 The concert of the novel, published by Alfred Harcourt in the fall of 1940, was that it was the memoir, written in 1960, of an eyewitness to the Nazi invasion of the United States in 1940. In his Postscript, van Loon explained that the events described in the book were based on what actually had happened to neutral countries in Europe and that America would soon have to decide what course it wanted to follow. The reader of the book, van Loon argued, could draw his own conclusions and “learn the lesson that a democracy, more than any other form of government, depends for its existence upon just two things—eternal vigilance and the cheerful willingness of all its citizens to give unto the land of their birth and allegiance not only their strength, but—should the occasion demand it—that which is the most cherished of all their terrestrial possessions—their lives.”56 That van Loon had been successful in getting his message across, was shown by the reviews, as well as letters from such notables as Thomas Mann and William Allen White, the famed editor of the Emporia [Kansas] Gazette. “Our best-known Dutchman knows intimately how it happened,” the critic

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in the New York Herald Tribune Books section wrote, “He is in dead earnest.” The Nation observed that the book “is obviously intended to make the blood run cold. It does.” The New York Times Book Review thought van Loon had presented his story with “punctilious verisimilitude,” and with “earnestness and dramatic skill” had succeeded in making the reader seriously think about the war situation, but in the daily Times Charles Poore thought that the tale had “a slap-dash air about it that does nothing to nourish the vital illusion of credibility.” The Saturday Review of Literature also gave a mixed assessment of Invasion: “The minutiae of this narrative are practically perfect,” critic Fletcher Pratt wrote. “Mr. van Loon is inferior to none in capturing the reaction of the individual to major events. . . . Unfortunately, the flow of this excellent detail is not constant. . . . All told it is a rather light effort, not at all bad in giving a picture of what Nazi attack would mean to the average citizen, but with some pretty obvious loopholes.”57 But the most devastating criticism of this van Loon book was given posthumously by his younger son. In Willem’s view his father carried “his egomania to new heights” in Invasion that made the book “an absurdity.” And letting his recurring criticism of his progenitor completely out of control, he trashed the volume as “a shoddy, self-glorifying piece of work which never should have been dignified by appearing in print.”58 Within a month of publication of the book van Loon already called it “a dead-born baby” as the public didn’t want to hear his warnings. And in a letter to Albert Einstein, who had offered him to help the book along, van Loon again complained that the people were “willingly blind.” At the same time, Harcourt had published Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s The Wave of the Future—a short book in which Charles Lindbergh’s wife saw democracy as finished and totalitarianism the predestined successor. And whereas Invasion had only sold fewer than 5,000 copies in two months’ time, Lindbergh’s book sold 80,000 copies. That explained all about America’s indifference, van Loon sadly concluded. But he did not want to give up. “I go on fighting,” he told Einstein, “but it is a lonely game.” And to his son he wrote some time later, “the whole country seems to be on a spree of selfishness, greed and we-mustnot-get-hurt and I feel about as lonely as Roland at Roncevalles but without an elephant to blow.”59 During the period before America’s entry into World War II, van Loon was not the only one trying to awaken his fellow countrymen. Many others sounded warnings about the dangers posed by the Nazis, including his friends Dorothy Thompson—the first female journalist to be expelled from Germany on the personal order of Adolf Hitler—H.V. Kaltenborn, Lewis Mumford, and Thomas Mann. The American public was also kept informed about the German situation and the dangers ahead by such courageous

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journalists as Leland Stowe of the New York Herald Tribune and two correspondents from the Chicago Daily News, Edgar Ansel Mowrer and John Gunther. Especially after the Munich crisis of September 1938, radio began to play a dominant role in the public’s understanding of what was going on in the rest of the world. Round-the-clock coverage on foreign affairs with an emphasis on the situation in Europe “did irreparable damage to isolationism,” according to one scholar.60 No American could pretend not knowing about the imminent dangers. But despite Roosevelt’s unprecedented third-term victory in November 1940, the isolationist forces in the United States were still strong. The majority of Americans supported the Allies, but they wanted the country to stay out of the war. FDR therefore used a short-of-war strategy to aid the Allies, including the famous Lend-Lease Act. His aim, he said in a 29 December 1940 fireside chat, was to make the United States “the great arsenal of democracy.” Though Lend-Lease passed in Congress by wide margins and polls showed that the public supported the bill, it was not until the Japanese attacked on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 before the Americans were ready to become actively involved in Word War II.61 Van Loon’s role as “prophet of the coming wrath,” meanwhile, had dramatically come to an end when in May 1940 Hitler’s Blitzkrieg overran the Low Countries in a matter of days. In that action Luftwaffe bombers flattened the center of Rotterdam, including the house where van Loon was born. Middelburg bore a similar fate. “I have been obliged to shut the book of my childhood days,” he wrote a few months later to Oswald Garrison Villard. “Everything I knew as a small boy is now a pile of rubbish. The house in which I was born, my grandfather’s house, my school, all the familiar sights are gone. Our beloved city of Middelburg has been destroyed, the old Abbey ruined. The archives of Zeeland burned. The lovely sixteenth century houses gone. . . . Now Hitler has slammed the covers of the book.” Van Loon’s long-felt fears for the Nazi Armageddon had come true and from that very moment on he had a new mission: to help regain the freedom of his native Holland. To this objective van Loon would dedicate himself totally and unconditionally. As he had written an American friend during his 1938 trip to Sweden, “I detest war and I am a personal coward but I would rather die fighting to set the world free from this ghastly monster called Nazi-mentality than live in a world in which it could destroy the last vestiges of human rights and decency.”62

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Part V

The Great Fight For Freedom

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Chapter 14

The One-Man Army Division (1940–1941) A ringing telephone in the middle of the night roused the peacefully sleeping van Loon household in Nieuw Veere on 10 May 1940. Calling from New York was van Loon’s friend Elmer H. Davis, who had a daily radio program on CBS. Davis told van Loon that a few hours before German troops had invaded the Netherlands. The fragmentary news dispatches and Davis’s own unfamiliarity with the country’s geography, made him seek van Loon’s help in trying to explain the situation in Holland to the American radio public. In a matter of minutes van Loon was en route to New York where in the remaining hours of the night he worked side by side with Elmer Davis in the studio.1 Only five days after the invasion began, the Dutch army capitulated. Van Loon wrote President Roosevelt in rather bombastic terms that “today we start upon the gigantic task of recreating that strange bit of mud along the shores of the North Sea, which by some mysterious alchemy of the soul has succeeded in transforming itself into a bulwark of civic freedom, a haven of refuge for the oppressed of all nations, and a stronghold of that tenacious sort of character, which today will allow you to bear its burdens. . . . I realize that those who gave their lives for the cause of the Netherlands were at the same time contributing to the ultimate and certain victory of the selfsame principles, which are the living force that underlies the philosophy of life of the United States of America. . . . We start a fresh page in full confidence that its contents will be worthy of those who died that we ourselves over here might live.”2 That same day the New York Herald Tribune featured a van Loon letter to the editor in which, pointing to the events in Europe, he made another

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attempt at waking Americans from their dream that the Nazi danger would not affect their country. This piece was widely reprinted throughout North America, he reported a few days later to the Dutch minister in Washington, Alexander Loudon, and had been entered into the Congressional Record. Van Loon’s task was, he told Loudon in this cable, to “tend to our literary front [and] you will soon see more concrete evidence of our literary counter attack.”3 Van Loon met Alexander Loudon, a cousin of his old friend John Loudon, in early 1939 when the younger Loudon arrived in the United States and was the guest of honor at a lunch at New York’s Harvard Club. Hendrik Willem wrote Ben Huebsch that to his relief, “at last and after years of terrible duds, the Dutch have sent an intelligent and human young man here to represent them, willing to take America as it is and not as one might have wished it were.”4 Van Loon’s great appreciation for the new Dutch diplomat, however, did not prevent him from engaging in backstairs diplomacy between FDR and Dutch Prime Minister Dr. Hendrik Colijn. Around the time of van Loon’s January 1939 weekend at the White House, Roosevelt had suggested Crown Princess Juliana and her husband be invited to come to Washington on a state visit. Van Loon had transmitted this message to Prime Minister Colijn, but soon reported back to the president that this idea was not feasible, since Queen Wilhelmina “did not want to see her daughter go to America without also visiting the Indies, and just now the Princess is supposed to provide the House of Orange with a great many little Oranges, a task which the dutiful Princess is fulfilling most dutifully.” Van Loon suggested that instead FDR ask Prime Minister Colijn to be his guest and offered to again act as a go-between. Though he described Colijn as a “strong minded old Calvinist,” he was also convinced that FDR would find him “congenial company, . . . being a man of great physical and mental energy and an excellent speaker of the American language.” To Colijn van Loon explained that Roosevelt frequently chose personal friends to convey messages rather than using official diplomatic channels. In any event, the visit could not be arranged before Colijn left office in August 1939.5 The next month, van Loon in another undiplomatic move offered to put his house, Nieuw Veere, at the disposal of Princess Juliana and her children for the duration of the war in case they had to leave their country, guaranteeing her “complete quiet and absolute privacy.” Colijn turned him down politely, convinced that the Dutch government would be able to guarantee the safety of the royal family. When, in May 1940, Hendrik Willem’s fears came true, he cabled Princess Juliana in London—where the Dutch royal family had fled after the German invasion—to offer her his house again.

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Reporting this to FDR, as a private citizen he hoped not to have “interfered with our staunch neutrality.” Although the president responded through his secretary Missy Le Hand that he saw no problems, in official circles around the princess van Loon’s suggestion was considered to be inappropriate, if not insulting. It had led, van Loon told Lorena Hickok, to “a furious exchange of cables” between the Dutch government in exile and the Dutch minister in Washington, who, van Loon thought, “was told to keep away from this scandalous person.” He was amused to see that he had caused the Dutch officials to get so easily upset.6 In fact, Franklin Roosevelt had made his own offers of hospitality for the Dutch royal family. Queen Wilhelmina deeply appreciated FDR’s repeated overtures but at the moment she saw no reason to accept the hospitality, even after the fall of Holland. Writing from London, Queen Wilhelmina told FDR that she considered his offer “a great comfort to me in these days of stress. If circumstances should call for it—may God forbid its necessity—I will not fail to remember your generous initiative.” Shortly thereafter, however, for the sake of their safety, the queen did let her daughter and two granddaughters leave England. In early June, they crossed the Atlantic in a Dutch warship and settled in Ottawa. They remained in the Canadian capital until the Allies liberated Holland, while Queen Wilhelmina and Juliana’s husband, Prince Bernhard, stayed in London during the war years.7 At the beginning of 1940, van Loon expected the Nazis to occupy Holland soon. In fact, he spent his fifty-eighth birthday on 14 January with the Dutch consul-general in New York formulating a plan, in case of a German invasion, to mobilize Dutch-American New Yorkers and Dutch citizens living in the area to assist stranded Dutch sailors or help in other ways. Upon hearing of the 10 May invasion, van Loon called a meeting of a Dutch Relief Committee. Three days later some sixty-five persons representing Dutch official and business interests gathered at the office of the Dutch consulate-general in Rockefeller Center. That meeting led to the establishment of the Queen Wilhelmina Fund, which sought to raise $3 million nationwide for an emergency fund to aid distressed citizens and refugees of the Netherlands. At the first meeting of the board of directors of the Queen Wilhelmina Fund on 16 May, van Loon was elected as the national chairman. The sponsoring committee was chaired by Thomas J. Watson, president of the International Business Machines Corporation and of the Netherland–America Foundation, and the honorary chairmen of the new organization included President Roosevelt’s mother, Mrs. James Roosevelt, former New York State Governor Alfred E. Smith, Mrs. Vincent Astor, and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. To Alexander Loudon van Loon cabled that the Queen Wilhelmina Fund should

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have two main divisions: one to raise the necessary money, and the other “to keep up [a] steady stream of information about Holland under Nazi rule running through [the] American press.” And he added, “The news is so bad that [I] have dropped everything to devote myself to [the] emergency for we have got to win.”8 Local committees authorized by the Queen Wilhelmina Fund were to solicit contributions throughout the United States and more than seven hundred clergymen of the Dutch Reformed Church were asked to aid in the campaign. “The plight of thousands of residents and refugees of peace-loving, democratic Holland is desperate,” van Loon said in a New York Times interview. “We need money, of course, but first we need workers to help us organize the committees through which the money need can be raised. Speed is essential. The physical suffering and mental anguish of the citizens of Holland cannot wait.” To get his message across, van Loon issued an appeal in a self-designed leaflet entitled I Come to You as a Beggar, Proud of My Mission. Recalling the “endless number of appeals” made to the American public in the last two years for the aid to war victims in Asia and Europe, van Loon said he came to the door proud of his mission, asking “for some small pittance on behalf of a people whose only fault was that they put their trust in one in whom there is no truth and who, faithful to their international obligations, arose to defend their native soil against a foreign invader. . . . Four hundred bombers can do a lot of damage when those who handle their controls love cruelty for the sake of cruelty, destruction for the sake of destruction and death for the sake of death. It is not easy for me to pass the hat and to say, ‘Please give.’ But that is exactly what I am going to do—what I am going to do on behalf of the race that gave me birth. . . .” Fund-raising began well and by the end of August van Loon told the New York Times that “substantial sums already have been sent” to help Dutch refugees in France before it, too, fell to the Germans, and to refugees in England, Spain, and Vichy France. He stressed, “No funds have been sent to Nazi-occupied Netherlands or France.”9 Though van Loon was pleased that a great many Americans had contributed to the Queen Wilhelmina Fund, he was annoyed at the very modest contributions that came from Dutch-Americans in Michigan. To an American friend he complained, “There are 200,000 Dutch settlers in Michigan. Pious as hell. Small-townish as hell. Selfish as Beelzebub himself. They were even too goddamn indifferent about the country of their birth to establish a relief fund.” And to another person he angrily wrote that the Calvinistic Dutch in Michigan were neither Dutch nor American but first and foremost members of their own religious denomination. The reason for their lukewarm support of the Queen Wilhelmina Fund, van Loon felt, was that they saw him as a heretic, the man who had dared to translate the Bible in modern idiom, the

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man who never went to church, who was a danger to their own way of life and whose books they forbid their children to read.10 With Princess Juliana settled in Canada, van Loon in his own way tried to take care of her. Back in 1929, during his stay in Veere, he had described the princess to Ruby Fuhr as “clever but fat and dowdy.” But now that she was in Canada, he was under the impression, he wrote Eleanor Roosevelt, that “the poor girl is fairly lonely and would be grateful for any token of affection, especially if it came from you.” He therefore suggested the first lady send Juliana “a few flowers with your good wishes.”11 Alexander Loudon asked van Loon to write a speech for the crown princess, which was transmitted throughout North America on 17 June. In this radio address, Princess Juliana expressed her thanks for the support given in Canada and the United States to the refugees and for relief in general. She asked, “Please do not regard me as too much of a stranger now that I have set foot on these shores which my own ancestors helped to discover, to explore and to settle.” She talked briefly about her mother in London, her two daughters, Beatrix and Irene, and Prince Bernhard, “one of the most indefatigable men I know, . . . doing his share in the most righteous cause that was ever fought.” She asked her listeners, “Whatever you do, do not give me your pity. No woman ever felt as proud as I do today of the marvelous heritage of my own people. . . . Pity is for the weak and our terrible fate has made us stronger than ever before. But if you want to show us in some way that we are welcome among you, let me ask you just one favor. Give us that which we ourselves shall give unto you from our most grateful hearts—give us that which just now we need more than anything else. You people of Canada and the United States, please give us your strengthening love.”12 Van Loon sent a steady stream of letters in often wonderfully illustrated envelopes, drawings especially made for “the little princesses,” van Loon songbooks, boxes of Vermont apples, Edam cheeses and other gifts to Princess Juliana’s home in Canada and, of course, he kept her posted on his never-ending ideas for new books. In late January 1943, for instance, he wrote her that he thought of writing a history on the last four thousand years from the point of view of 1943, and a week later he came up with the new idea of writing a biography of Juliana’s ancestor William the Silent, Prince of Orange.13 Despite his sympathy for the princess, he could not stand the “official” Dutch around her and complained to American friends about functionaries both in Canada and in Britain who, in his view, lacked the vision and skills to run a Dutch propaganda campaign. In promoting the Dutch cause, van Loon noticed a big difference between Dutch and American methods. The government in exile thought that the American concept of reaching out to the public was too vulgar, he explained to Princess Juliana’s secretary, Willem van

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Tets; they preferred to send out pamphlets and letters that were so boring that no one read them, thus wasting time and money. He himself, by contrast, used and by far preferred the American way of propaganda and had decided to fight his battle alone. He told Dutch journalist and literary critic Jan Greshoff that his position in the United States was “equal to the value of a whole army division.”14 His dealings with the Europeans and the war there made van Loon appreciate his adopted country and being an American all the more. He wrote Oswald Garrison Villard, “We can get more done once we start than Europe can get done a year after it has started. At least our people are not wrapped up in all the endless and fussy prejudices which the European carries around with him as a dajak carries his lice with him to use an unappetizing but true simile.” And to Lorena Hickok he exclaimed, “I am glad, godalmighty glad that I am an American. . . . I asked myself by what rare good fortune I ever came to this land and still could sink my roots into the beloved soil of this lovely part of Connecticut.”15 In the summer of 1940 van Loon received a letter from the Dutch novelist Johan Fabricius who with the outbreak of the war had narrowly escaped to England with his family and tried to work on a new novel. Having lost all contact with his friends on the Continent, and without any friends in England, he now felt the need to renew his contact with van Loon, whom he had met in New York in 1935. Fabricius contemplated visiting again. He wrote teasingly that for van Loon everything was just an easy game and that success came his way automatically.16 Another Netherlander with whom van Loon corresponded that summer and fall, was Johan Huizinga. Despite Huizinga’s having trashed The Story of Mankind in 1924, van Loon generously offered to arrange for the eminent historian to come to the United States. But whether it was feasible or not to flee his Nazi-occupied country, Huizinga was determined, he wrote van Loon, that his place was in the Netherlands and in his position at Leiden University—whatever the future had in store.17 One of the Dutch refugees the van Loons took under their wings was Adriaan van der Veen. The young journalist had arrived in the United States in March on assignment for the newspaper Het Vaderland and was now stuck there by the war. Van Loon met him in April, finding him more intelligent than most of the Dutch people who visited. He therefore decided to help the twenty-four-year-old van der Veen and introduce him to his circle of friends, including Thomas Mann. Jimmie described van der Veen as “a very nice lad” and many of her diary entries in the years 1940–1942 show that van der Veen not only became a regular visitor to Nieuw Veere but also a sort of family member of the van Loons.18

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In that position van der Veen noticed, of course, the sometimes tense relationship between van Loon and Jimmie as a consequence of her drinking habits, which made life bearable for her, and the fact that she often showed more interest and passion for her dog than for most visitors. He also witnessed Hendrik Willem chasing every woman who crossed his path “like a puffing hippopotamus yearning for love,” but that his efforts were mostly unsuccessful and he always returned to Jimmie. After being cold-shouldered by the Dutch he had met in New York, van der Veen was particularly impressed by van Loon’s myriad activities and warm generosity. As he felt a strong bond with van Loon, he chose him as a “father.” For some time he served as van Loon’s secretary, assisted him in the preparation of his radio broadcasts, and accompanied him to his many appointments in New York. To a journalist who interviewed van Loon at the time and wrote that “the distinguished writer” was “spouting ideas like a Texas gusher,” van der Veen said that “he would be seriously disturbed if van Loon would come to the breakfast table without the plans for at least one new book.” Right from the start, van Loon stressed to van der Veen that he was annoyed at not being taken seriously in Holland, especially by academics, a category of Dutchmen he described as “despicable fossils.” If it were not for him, van Loon had told van der Veen, the American public would still think that Holland was some branch of tasteless cheese. He declared, “I put Holland on the map, and that’s the simple truth.”19 As president of the Authors’ Guild, in the summer of 1940 van Loon also tried to draw President Roosevelt’s attention to the plight of several hundred writers from France, Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia who were stranded in France. Van Loon pleaded that these people, whom he described as “the world’s most useful shocktroops of liberal front fighters” and “defenders of the democratic philosophy of life,” be given visas for the United States since they were now on the mercy of the Nazis. He knew that in Marseille a U.S.-bound ship was ready to bring these people to America, provided they were granted visas and in that case, he thought, “the ship would return with cargo even more valuable than the Red Cross supplies that she had carried to France.” Roosevelt’s secretary, Edwin M. Watson, had a reply drafted at the Department of State in which he stated he was “entirely sympathetic” to van Loon’s cause and that the Department of State was doing all it could to expedite things but that consular officers had to consider each visa application individually. Later that year, in a letter to the New York Times, van Loon highlighted the plight of refugees trapped in France, “among them many homeless writers and intellectuals in whose behalf more than one committee in America has been active,” and who were still waiting for exit visas that the Vichy government had apparently promised to issue. Van Loon publicly asked the State Department to take action and “perform an inestimable

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service by appealing to the French Government to speed the solution of this imperative problem.”20 Working on Finnish and Dutch relief and a variety of other anti-Hitler activities did not leave van Loon time for much else. He told one journalist that he was discouraged that the principal result of two years of speaking up against the Nazis, fighting “windmills of indifference and lethargy and ignorance” in the United States, was that he was now considered a warmonger. Reading Van Wyck Brooks’s new New England: Indian Summer was a welcome respite. As he wrote Brooks, “the civilized pages of that book are about the most intelligent company I could ask for while trying to catch a little rest.” But reading this book also made him realize that his friend had been wise to keep to his desk and concentrate on writing instead of being “mixed up in applied living and politics for two years.” He therefore had decided, he told Brooks, to curb his participation in such activities and devote more time to his artistic impulses. In his reply, Brooks felt he had to reassure his old friend that he had done the right thing: “You have drawn in enough at your pores to make you a great man, and if you are not a great man I will eat my hat. . . . You live at all the human cross-roads, and it takes an outsider to see how you’ve thriven on it, although your purse and your brain may have been picked. . . . You will be remembered as one of the big men of your day.”21 Despite van Loon’s own doubts about such activities, he continued his anti-Hitler fight. And that included radio broadcasts in Dutch on WRUL, “the most powerful short-wave radio station in the United States,” as historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has described this Boston-based broadcaster. After the German invasion of the Netherlands, Walter Lemmon, the founder and president of the station, asked van Loon to present fifteen-minute programs in Dutch as “Oom Henk,” or Uncle Hank (figure 14.1). Five times a week, the “Oom Henk” programs started with a short musical prelude to give the audience the possibility to tune in exactly, followed by van Loon’s talk and ended with a regular Dutch newscast. Of course, he could not do all these broadcasts by himself and therefore, he reported to Princess Juliana’s secretary, Willem van Tets, divided the work between New York and Boston. The main purpose of these broadcasts was to provide news and keep up the morale of the Hollanders. Van Loon also announced the names of collaborators, giving “a gruesome picture of the Fate that awaits them once the Nazis shall have been driven out” and hoping to frighten others who were “inclined to play with” the Germans. Even if it was illegal for the Dutch to listen to WRUL, van Loon was proud to tell Stephen Early, FDR’s press secretary, that in January 1941 students in Delft had placed a wreath around the neck of Grotius’s statue in that city with a card saying, “Today this iron man

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Figure 14.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon in front of WRUL microphone broadcasting as “Uncle Hank” to the Netherlands during the war years (Hendrik Willem van Loon Papers, 1884–1972. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library).

is the only person in the Netherlands who does not listen to the news from WRUL.” The shows were also intended for Dutch sailors—there were three million tons of Dutch ships afloat, and those men needed news. Van Loon continued, “I have now arranged for concerts for them and they write in what they want. Keeps them from worrying about submarines.” That the Oom Henk programs were successful is attested by the volume of mail that

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streamed in from listeners in Nazi-occupied Holland and from Dutch sailors at sea—sometimes addressed only to “Hendrik van Loon, WRUL, Boston” or even to “Hendrik van Loon, America.”22 In September 1940 van Loon lunched at Hyde Park with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Lorena Hickok, and some thirty representatives of the Authors’ Guild. The atmosphere had been cozy and cheerful as ever, he reported to van Tets, just like the food was as bad as ever. He intensely disliked the hamburgers that were served and that apparently, he thought, belonged to the concept of democracy. Van Loon offered to arrange for Princess Juliana to meet with the president and the first lady at the White House and to visit New York where he, van Loon, would handle the press (“American journalists were sharp as a knife: if one knew how to use it, it was handy, if not, one would cut his fingers”). Van Loon reminded van Tets that the Roosevelts were used to circumventing official routes of protocol in this way. Besides, he argued, “we need to hurry to save the old fatherland and if there is a fire one cannot wait until one is first introduced to the chief fireman.”23 Five days later, van Loon had dinner with Eleanor Roosevelt and also gave an NBC broadcast to support Roosevelt’s presidential campaign. In that radio address van Loon referred to the war in Europe where “a perfidious and perjuring enemy [had] destroyed what were probably the most human civilizations ever achieved by mankind.” As he wanted to save his adopted country from the fate of his native country, he now wanted to shriek from the housetops, “Be ye prepared for your enemy” who would deprive the Americans from their freedom. In the last four years he had heard “one voice which in clear and unmistakable terms” had shared his own fears. He would therefore, he told his audience, vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “because I feel that his words and his actions of the last twelve months have turned him into something more than the President of the United States of America and have made him the last and only hope of our common civilization—the Defender of the Freedom of this world.”24 Van Loon told a friend that his Republican neighbors in Old Greenwich were “indulging in an orgy of hate” against Roosevelt and that his broadcast for the president did not make life there very cheerful for him. At Halloween he got his revenge by passing out FDR buttons instead of candy to trick-ortreaters who came to Nieuw Veere. Shortly after Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term, van Loon told Willem van Tets that his neighbors were in sackcloth and ashes and that he, as an active worker for the reelection of Roosevelt, was looked upon as a dangerous man. He was very glad, however, that in the current situation the right man was at the White House and the counterattack could begin.25

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The week after the elections, van Loon did a broadcast to Canada dealing with fact-blindness in history and the failure to understand the handwriting on the wall, which had led to great human misery. To avoid being caught napping, van Loon therefore pleaded to train citizens to keep their mind wide open by studying history. He then concluded with a personal message for Princess Juliana, whom he had informed about his upcoming broadcast. He spoke about Veere, where a song of freedom had been played by the chimes of the Town Hall until it was stilled by the German occupation. In his final words van Loon addressed Princess Juliana in Dutch, proclaiming that freedom would soon be regained while in the background Grace Castagnetta played the same song on the piano. Both van Loon’s addressing her in Dutch as well as hearing “the Veere carillon” had moved the princess very much, reported her aide, Rear-Admiral C. baron de Vos van Steenwijk. In a letter to Henri Mayer, Hendrik Willem boasted that the Canadians had doubled the number of printed copies of the speech they needed and that the Dutch legation in Ottawa was besieged with inquiries for more information on the song Grace Castagnetta had played. And he was flattered when Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein praised his radio speech.26 In the meantime the efforts to have the Dutch crown princess meet with the American president and first lady came to fruition. In October Eleanor Roosevelt sent out an invitation to Princess Juliana for a stay at the White House in December and de Vos van Steenwijk soon wrote van Loon that the princess had accepted.27 Juliana’s overnight visit to the White House was scheduled for 19 December, and Mrs. Roosevelt invited the van Loons to the dinner in the princess’s honor and also asked to spend the night. At a tea given at the Dutch legation that afternoon, van Loon, Mr. Holland in America, and the crown princess, Mrs. Holland in persona, met for the first time. For the rest of the day they enjoyed each other’s company so much that, even after the Roosevelts retired that night, Juliana and the van Loons continued their discussions in the Lincoln bedroom, where Hendrik Willem and Jimmie were to sleep. As Jimmie wrote Eleanor Roosevelt in her thank-you, note, “To a little Dutch boy like Hendrik, brought up in the stiff atmosphere which emanated from the Netherlands court, it was a terrific kick when the Princess came into our room on the way to bed and cheerfully tripped over his shoes and pyjamas while observing the Lincoln historical setting. Hendrik was positive that the dear queen would not have approved!” That was quite likely, just as Queen Wilhelmina had not approved of Juliana’s accepting Eleanor Roosevelt’s invitation without first consulting her. But afterward Juliana’s mother had to admit that the crown princess’s first visit to the United States had been successful.28

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As far as his attention for the Dutch was concerned, van Loon certainly did not focus on royalty only. He felt a warm sympathy for Dutch sailors who were stranded in the New York area. He supported a Christian sailors’ home in Hoboken, paid for Thanksgiving dinners for sixteen sick Dutch sailors he had found in a hospital there, and was pleased to note that the Seamen’s Church Institute in lower Manhattan was finally doing something. What annoyed him tremendously, he wrote Willem van Tets in November, was that these sailors—who were called national heroes in the Dutch press that still existed—had to enter the consulate in New York through a separate door than the entrance that was reserved for “gentlemen.” The sailors also had to wait in their own waiting room; van Loon threatened not to enter the Dutch consulate anymore until the sailors were given an equal treatment. As he could not avoid the consulate for certain meetings, however, he preferred to use the sailors’ entrance, where he liked to chat with the seamen, invite them for lunch, and often gave them some money.29 That same month Jimmie asked Eleanor Roosevelt to “do a little knitting” for the Dutch sailors who as the “silent and inconspicuous heroes of the great Fight for Freedom” carried the war materials to England, were in constant danger of being torpedoed, and needed “heavy sweaters, heavy socks and heavy gloves” on the wintry ocean. Van Loon added in his own letter to Mrs. Roosevelt that he was of course aware that the first lady’s busy schedule would not allow her to knit more sweaters, but that in an effort “to build up [the Dutch sailors’] morale, . . . a few lines indicating your interest in them, . . . would mean a tremendous boost to their ego.” The first lady generously and quickly granted this request.30 For the Dutch sailors’ home at the Seamen’s Church Institute, van Loon supplied stationery with one of his characteristic letterheads, a Dutch seascape. But since most Dutch ships docked in Brooklyn, van Loon helped organize a home for Dutch sailors in that section of New York City. Van Loon was pleased, as he reported to Alexander Loudon in Washington, that the sailors now also had a place to go near their landing place in Brooklyn. With that accomplished, Hendrik Willem had to give his time and attention to more basic matters again. Because his two books Our Battle and Invasion had flopped and two years of relief activities had reduced his income, he had to withdraw and concentrate on writing another fat book. Besides, as he wrote Klaus Mann, Thomas’s son, “These last two years I have been suffering from an ever increasing pain in my leg. I neglected it. There was too much to do but now it has become quite insufferable.” While the doctors were trying now to find the causes of this pain, he was strongly recommended to reduce his workload. For once he intended to obey orders.31 Van Loon was much less sympathetic to Jews who had fled the Netherlands. He wrote to Loudon unashamedly in early December, “The Dutch invasion

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in the United States is becoming a Jewish invasion and it is a rather disreputable company for whom our door is closed and remains closed.” Also to Alice Bernheim and Willem van Tets he expressed his contempt for these Dutch Jewish immigrants who in his opinion splurged in all the big hotels and restaurants and thought they knew so well how things should be run in America. In a strong mood of anti-Semitism he even observed to someone else, “New York is full to overflowing with refugees—mostly Jews—who cleverly snap up any jobs going and I think bigger and better pogroms are indicated and the sooner the better!”32 Conversely, he was extremely upset that the Holland Society in New York had decided to give a medal to Henry Ford, who, like his fellow isolationist Charles Lindbergh, had accepted a medal from Adolf Hitler. He hastened to send a letter to the New York Herald Tribune in which he stated that the Holland Society had “nothing whatsoever to do with either the modern Kingdom of the Netherlands or its present and uninterrupted struggle against the oppression on the part of the Nazis.” It was clear, van Loon wrote, that “[t]he fact that this so-called Holland Society had the effrontery under the present circumstances to bestow a medal upon a Knight of the Hitler Cross should be sufficient to show all decent Americans where the Holland Society has taken its stand. It has taken its stand on the side of the enemies of Democracy. It has taken its stand with the murderers of the people of the Netherlands. It should now at least have the courage of its convictions and drop the name it has dishonored.”33 In late 1940, van Loon published an article in Redbook in which he tried to encourage his fellow Americans who were upset by the constant avalanche of depressing war news. He pointed out that after the war America would have “to carry on the work of the world, because Europe will have sunk beyond hope of recovery.” Van Loon also finished a short biography of his musical hero, Johann Sebastian Bach. This labor of love was boxed together with a four-record album of piano arrangements of some of Bach’s works played by Grace Castagnetta, thus making an attractive Christmas present. “The best introduction to Bach that has yet been given to the amateur,” exclaimed M.L. Becker, the New York Herald Tribune Books critic. Also the reviews in the New York Times and The Etude music magazine were very positive. However, The Life and Times of Johann Sebastian Bach soon went out of print after selling only 4,000 copies.34 In late February and early March 1941, Hendrik Willem and Jimmie were once again guests of the Roosevelts at the White House. The van Loons had traveled to Washington to attend a performance of the National Symphony Orchestra featuring a Bach concerto played by Grace Castagnetta and Hendrik Willem had been asked to speak about Bach that same night.

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The van Loons stayed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for three nights, and had secured an invitation for Grace as well. Their visit included a lunch with Mrs. Roosevelt one day and a dinner hosted by her the next, followed by watching some movies Harry Hopkins had brought back from a recent trip to London as Roosevelt’s personal representative. The president also came to see the movies but to van Loon’s irritation another guest that evening was critic Alexander Woollcott, whom van Loon hated. Having seated herself between van Loon and Woollcott and clearly feeling van Loon’s antagonism toward the other prima donna, Eleanor Roosevelt later allegedly said she was “never so uncomfortable.” Jimmie, who did not make a note of this tension in her diary, recorded that the president came to sit by her for the movies.35 When, a week after the White House visit, Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease bill, van Loon wrote the president that he had sent that important news via WRUL to Norway, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia. In his view the United States had “once more gained the decent respect of all mankind.” His loyalty to the United States came first and foremost, he had told Eleanor Roosevelt, and in his dealings with the official Dutch “in their bewildered London exile” he had noticed they were speaking two entirely different languages. Theirs was in his view a completely archaic language dating from the early nineteenth century, whereas his “Dutch ‘front’ covers a thoroughly American dwelling, hot water and steam-heat included.” But despite this noticeable difference in language and attitude, van Loon continued to offer his services to his native land. And this included his suggestion to Eleanor Roosevelt that the president invite Prince Bernhard to Washington in order to give Princess Juliana a chance to be with her husband for a few days. The first lady let van Loon know that the president was sympathetic to this idea and intended to carry it out at the right time. The visit of Bernhard and Juliana to the Roosevelts did take place that June, but it occurred in Hyde Park and not in the capital. Juliana visited Hyde Park once more in November, and in April 1942 she and Bernhard were guests at the White House.36 Van Loon’s efforts to keep up the morale of the Dutch in Holland through his daily shortwave broadcasts on WRUL continued throughout 1941 and were so successful that “barrels of letters” from grateful listeners in occupied Holland and from Dutch sailors at sea addressed to “Oom Henk” continued to arrive. As van Loon wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that December, a by-product of his radio program was that his listeners “began to use me as their letter distributor and gradually I think I have heard from practically every family in search of a lost son or husband or other relative.” He was pleased to be able to do that kind of work for his fellow Dutchmen and considered it his duty “to pump the Dutch people so full of courage, patience and endurance that they would continue to fight.” Initially Walter Lemmon was

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not paying van Loon, and the latter was even contributing toward the costs of the broadcast. However, after about six months the Dutch government in exile sponsored the program. With this financial support, a staff was hired for a WRUL studio in Rockefeller Center, and a Saturday broadcast specifically targeted at Dutch in the Caribbean and Latin America, was added.37 In April 1941 van Loon wrote Fiorello La Guardia that the Dutch broadcasts had become “one of the most annoying annoyances to the Germans in Holland” and that they helped “the Dutch to keep up that guerrilla warfare which they have been conducting for almost a year against their Nazi oppressors.” With the upcoming first anniversary of the German invasion of the Netherlands on 10 May, van Loon asked La Guardia’s permission to hold a meeting that day for the New York people of Dutch descent at a flagpole in Battery Park, which was donated some years before by the Dutch to commemorate the landing of the first settlers in New Amsterdam, and have the Dutch flag hoisted on that occasion. The purpose of the meeting, van Loon explained, was to “make the people of Dutch descent in New York conscious of their duty to continue the fight by all means at their disposal. And since we are in this war too (and probably will be officially by May tenth), it could only help in stirring up the feelings of our still indifferent populace about the menace to our own American safety.”38 Before that rally, van Loon went to Detroit to address a Jewish audience. To his great delight, afterward he met with “a choice collection of rabbis” with whom he had “a lovely time.” In sharp contrast to his earlier anti-Semitic observations, van Loon now reported in a letter to Alice Bernheim that his heart went out “with deep and sincere affection to [that] race” and that he thanked God “that there are Jews in this world—the wisdom and the humor and the mellowness.” His enthusiasm would not last long, however, and in a letter written that November, he would resume his complaints about the Jews, this time because many of them had voted against La Guardia who in his eyes had been “their best friend.” And he wondered “why they make such a mess of their lives and of things in general, why they always will pee on the floor when nobody is looking, why they destroy their own chances?”39 During that trip to the Midwest most people he had met, he reported to FDR, were behind the president’s efforts to help Britain and that the general feeling was, “All we now want is definite leadership towards an active participation in this conflict. Let the President go ahead and we will follow, for we are ready to follow.” But to Hendrik Willem’s chagrin, the United States did not enter the war that spring. To his old friend Henri Mayer he complained, “the bad side of FDR is that he wants no strong men around him and this is no time for weaklings but nobody can give him any advice.”40 Van Loon saw his fight against Hitler and Nazism as a private war and was not very modest in claiming his own role in that struggle. His bragging made

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one journalist write ironically, “Van Loon, who does not hold himself cheaply, regards himself as the leading apostle of the humanities in the world today, and, just as he is the earth’s leading symbol of the good, the true, and the beautiful, so Hitler is the symbol of all that is evil. Battle between the two is inevitable.” In another magazine interview, however, van Loon was described more positively as “a one-man charitable organization that could be counted upon.” His relief activities included “many radio appeals, dozens of public appearances as a speaker, scores of long distance telephone calls as a negotiator, the handling of enormous quantities of correspondence, and the entertainment of hundreds of visitors.” Van Loon told this journalist that during the previous summer he had “served six hundred and forty-seven extra breakfasts, luncheons and dinners” at his house. Every time he went to New York, he said, it was “To serve some Cause. I sleep with Causes, I eat and drink Causes— and where does it get me?” In order to keep van Loon’s private charity under control, it was arranged that Simon and Schuster doled out his royalty payments. As S&S executive Leon Shimkin recalled three decades later, van Loon “was a good-natured Dutchman with no gift for holding onto money,” so the firm paid him $200 a week, almost like a salary. “Then he’d come into the office, take off his shoe, show me a hole in the sock and say, ‘This is the way you keep an author?’ I’d guess that he wanted to give $1,000 to some Dutch down-andouter, so I’d argue him down to $500 and give him a check.”41 Van Loon told his friend Maurice Hanline in June, “In the sight of God if not of men I have done my duties as a Christian gentleman. I have indeed spent all my cash on a private war on little Adolf and have devoted the rest to immigrants and victims of concentration camps. . . . I am grateful indeed that I had [money] when it was needed. I can always make it again, for my public has been most patient and faithful but I have got to write me a book and so I have resigned from all extraterritorial activities.” This fight with Hitler was bad for his blood pressure, he told Hanline, “but who cares? This goddamn swine has got to be killed and if I die in the attempt, it will be a happy death.” A few days before, he had resigned as chairman of the Queen Wilhelmina Fund, explaining, “now that the country of my adoption is making preparations for war, I feel it to be my duty to enter the service of the United States and I shall have to be careful to avoid any suspicion of a divided loyalty. . . . [T]oday there is only one chance for the people of the Netherlands to regain independence, and therefore in working for the United States I shall at the same time be furthering the cause of that freedom which is close enough to my heart to make me willing to accept any sacrifice rather than defeat.”42 Van Loon may have been trying to limit his myriad of activities that spring, but it was too little too late. On 12 June 1941 the one-man army division

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suffered a major heart attack, which brought his activities to a sudden halt. He was ordered to bed for a month’s rest—not his strong suit. The steady stream of guests to Nieuw Veere decreased as Jimmie, Willem, and Adriaan van der Veen now shielded van Loon from the outside world. To provide him some distraction in late July Hank, Janet, and their three boys came down from Vermont and in early August Grace Castagnetta visited. “Her job is to keep Hendrik amused and from under foot,” Jimmie wrote a friend.43 From his sickbed van Loon wrote Henri Mayer that the doctors had warned him many times that his heavy workload and political and philanthropical activities would lead to this result and that now they had taken him “out of circulation for three months.” From now on he would restrict himself to literary labors. Now that he had a lot of time to think, he was developing an idea for a new book. Feeling a strong nostalgia for Veere, he decided to write a book in which he and his deceased friend Frits Philips would invite a number of historical personages for dinner in the little town where he had been so happy. Even before the heart attack, he had written his Spanish translator, Maria Vasquez-Lopez, that such a book would give him the opportunity to write “a Plutarchian biography” of all the guests. Once he was allowed to sit up a few hours a day at his drawing board, he made a number of sketches, but as soon as he went back to his desk in mid-August, he wrote at a torrid pace. By the middle of September he had written 900 pages. “A strange book,” he observed. “I did not write it. I found it completely written in the attic of my brain.” The whole process of working on this book was so fascinating, he told another friend, that it even made him temporarily forget about the war. He completed the first draft in early October and felt the “very bulky volume” included everything he ever wanted to say.44 The good side of van Loon’s heart attack, his son Willem wrote in a letter to Rene Scudamore, was that it had made his father “human.” When he had seen the real fright in his father’s eyes, Willem thought “he had at last come to grips with reality.” His father’s life had taken on a new meaning and Willem was glad to see him working on Van Loon’s Lives—after titles like “Historical Dinners,” “Dinner Party,” and “Table Talks” had been rejected— with “absolute verbal diarrhea and having a hell of a good time.” The positive effect of that situation was that Willem no longer felt he was not wanted— his own big neurosis, he admitted, that went through his life “like a dark shadow and drops up in the funniest places.” He now enjoyed the moment of being wanted by his father and of belonging, and was glad to report on the happiness in both their lives.45 Willem continued to have a difficult relationship with Jimmie. She drank to make up for what he saw as “a completely empty life, a life which has given her nothing, nothing but the feeling that she is Mrs. Hendrik van Loon and that, as Mrs. H.W.v.L., she has the right to be rude to as many people as she likes

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because fundamentally she dislikes people.” Willem’s take on the relationship, as he explained to Rene, was that Hendrik Willem “always came back to Jimmie because with her he never had to make any compromises. She took him just as he was and let him do just as he pleased and always gave him companionship. That is all and he knows it but he couldn’t stand being alone.” Some months earlier Willem had warned his father, “Don’t let Jimmie’s complete negation of all things shut you off from the world. I admire your wife’s positive qualities enormously, but you are, even as other mortals, very sensitive to your surroundings and her negation of life is slow poison in your veins.”46 Van Loon’s illness did not reduce his will to battle and in August he crossed swords with syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler. That month Pegler wrote a sneering and sarcastic piece against van Loon’s erstwhile editor and old friend Clifton Fadiman whom he accused of leftist sympathies. In a letter to the editor of the New York World-Telegram, van Loon defended Fadiman who “in his youthful enthusiasm, [had] played a little with the Pinkies.” He continued, “As a student of abnormal psychology (and what else, in the last analysis, is a historian except a student of abnormal psychology?), I am deeply interested in the case of Mr. Westbrook Pegler. For with most assassins (whether of the body or the character of their opponents) we can at least discover some sort of method in their murderous activities. But one never knows where the Peglerian wrath will strike next.” And he wondered whether “a close investigation of [Pegler’s] past [would] not reveal . . . some secret ambition of which today he would feel deeply ashamed.” Pegler reacted with a piece a few days later saying he had “always felt a robust aversion to this moist and buxom continental with his lacy mannerisms and flouncing furies” and referring to van Loon’s mind “dwelling on the abnormal,” supposed that he may have suppressed his desire to be a milliner or a nurse. This reaction highly amused van Loon, who shrugged it all off, and confessed to Eleanor Roosevelt that his “little scalping expedition” on Westbrook Pegler had “been excellent medicine for my exhausted heart.” The first lady, who had also been a target of the reactionary columnist, was glad, she replied, that van Loon felt so much better after writing his article about Pegler.47 Van Loon continued to be critical of how the U.S. government “sold” its war policy to the public at large. In his view government propaganda to set the nation into motion had failed and all interest in the war was dwindling. He thought that Roosevelt was not giving sufficient leadership to the country, and he complained, “no democracy has ever survived without leadership and there is no leadership here. Lewis runs Labor and Ma Perkins lets herself be run, [the isolationists including] Herr Lindbergh run the rest, . . . and Eleanor Roosevelt thinks that everything can be done with sweetness and light, and so I sit outside the arena and contemplate.”48

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Van Loon’s criticism was not limited to the American government, however. He railed against the Dutch government in London for its weak attitude and for, in his view, using the wrong methods to fight this war. To L.A. Ries, a former Dutch Finance Ministry official who arrived in New York in the spring of 1941 to work in the Netherlands Information Bureau, van Loon wrote that the Dutch government and its Washington legation, which in his view had no understanding of the American psyche, had not been able to create a “spirit of victory.” Van Loon therefore announced that he and a small number of other Dutchmen who better understood the American psyche, would fight for the old fatherland on their own and in a creative way. Pierre van Paassen, a journalist who was born in Holland, raised in Canada, and now a U.S. citizen, also felt the same way. He advised van Loon to keep calm and try not to be upset about the government in exile’s incompetence. “I know it’s hard,” van Paassen admitted, “but there are too damned many of us here who don’t want to see you an invalid,” referring to Hendrik Willem’s heart problems. “We need your guidance too much, for we are like a lot of wandering sheep. Spare yourself for the tens of thousands of your followers.”49 On Sunday, 7 December 1941, “a day which will live in infamy,” as FDR told Congress the next day, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and brought an end to what van Loon had experienced as a most frustrating period of U.S. neutrality. To deafening applause and a standing ovation both chambers approved the president’s request for a declaration of war. “Isolationism collapsed overnight,” wrote historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “After months of vacillation, confusion, and hesitation, the United States was committed at last to a common course of action.” A few days later, on 11 December, Hitler declared war against the United States and the next day the U.S. Congress, responding to a written request from Roosevelt, declared that “a state of war exists between the United States, Germany and Italy.” Jimmie had penned in her diary, “We are in the war and how!”50 The United States was in the war and van Loon’s warnings had come true, but he did not contemplate the situation with satisfaction. “I have been howling and shrieking and shouting from every available housetop that we would have to prepare for war,” he wrote a friend. “The disapproval of my action was generous. I was a warmonger and a liar and I was trying to get poor American boys murdered to save my native land and it could not happen here. . . . And now that the terrible thing has happened, and I worked myself to pieces, now people say, ‘Oh, yes, but you were not born in this country,’ and I am literally out of every job. . . . I am in a state of complete exhaustion. I see valuable jobs go to people who use them for their own little salary increase. The advisers-ex of the Great White Father have made fortunes out of their influence and I have literally ruined myself on all the relief work

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I have done.” A request from the Department of Justice to join a citizens’ program in which his “voice might ‘thrill the multitudes’ and help in the common cause of ‘democratic defense,’ ” also annoyed him. Hendrik Willem replied to Attorney General Francis Biddle that this was “no time for ‘thrilling’ anybody” and that he was not “in the mood to join still another mild campaign of defense. . . . This business of defeating Herr Hitler, my dear Mr. Secretary, is something that will take a little more effort than a few ‘thrilling speeches’—especially to the Godforsaken Dutchmen of Michigan, who for the greater part are as offensive a crowd of isolationists and defeatists as are to be found anywhere outside of Herr Lindbergh’s domains in Minnesota.” It was clear to him, van Loon told the secretary, that the war could only be won “by attack and not by defense.”51 In a two-part article in The Christian Science Monitor, van Loon again explained that in a world of strife nothing could be gained or kept without fighting for it. “Democracy, personal freedom, liberty of thought and action, . . . all these spiritual ingredients that go toward the making of a truly free citizen,” required the willingness to fight for them. Optimistically he wrote, “We are the youngest among the nations, full of life, still (and in spite of all our wastefulness) richer than any other country on earth. Only just beginning our career and, best of all, able to plan our own course by all the mistakes of the last 3,000 years. . . . The terrific seriousness of the hour” now had made Americans realize the need to fight.52 With Christmas approaching, van Loon participated in a fund-raising drive to send Christmas boxes to 1.3 million French prisoners of war. At a luncheon in the Plaza Hotel, organized by the Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies, he reminded those who were indifferent to the suffering of French prisoners of the Biblical passage, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Also with Christmas in mind, van Loon and Grace Castagnetta published the sixth in their series of songbooks, Good Tidings. In their introduction van Loon and Castagnetta wrote that “The terrible and frightening problems which face us today have brought us at least one blessing. They have made us realize that Christmas is not merely an occasion for the exchange more or less of useless gadgets with our friends, but that it is the day on which, for the first time since the beginning of history, a definite message of hope was brought unto our long-suffering human race.”53 On Christmas 1941 the van Loons hosted fifteen people, almost all of them Dutch, for a “big pea-soup luncheon.” After the guests had left Nieuw Veere that afternoon, van Loon fell ill with bronchitis and stayed in bed the next several days. New Year’s Day would therefore have to be a quiet day, Jimmie wrote a friend, and in her diary she noted, “What a lousy year this has been!”54

Chapter 15

The Reincarnation of Erasmus (1942) Early in January 1942, a week before van Loon’s sixtieth birthday, the New York Times reported that the works of Hendrik Willem van Loon, Thomas Mann, and Erich Maria Remarque were on a list of 120 books whose sale had been banned in the Netherlands by the Nazis. This sad news was counterbalanced by a surprise on 13 January: a cable from Alexander Loudon announcing that Queen Wilhelmina had decided to bestow on van Loon the Order of Knight of the Netherlands Lion, the highest honor he could receive from the Dutch government, in recognition of his important work since the outbreak of the war. On 14 January, the very day Hendrik Willem turned sixty, this news broke in the New York Times, which led to a stream of congratulation cables and letters, including one from Princess Juliana. Columbia University’s Professor Adriaan Barnouw was among the well-wishers, writing van Loon, “Better late than never! [It] is more than deserved.”1 While van Loon, as usual, was working in his upstairs study on 14 January, he had no idea that Dick Simon and Max Schuster were planning a surprise party at Nieuw Veere with Jimmie. Even the neighbors were part of the conspiracy, accepting deliveries of catered food and drinks. When Jimmie called him downstairs, the scene that awaited him to his great surprise, in Willem van Loon’s words, “resembled the bus terminal at rush hour, and Hendrik bounced about among his guests like a small boy splashing in the surf.” A buffet supper was served for some fifty people and many pictures were taken. Among the guests were Van Wyck Brooks, H.V. Kaltenborn, Ruth and Helen Hoffman, Grace Castagnetta, van Loon’s literary agent Thomas Stix, and, of course, his publishers Simon and Schuster who not only brought a huge cake as a birthday present, but to Jimmie’s delight also gave van Loon “a really gorgeous bathrobe made by Wetzel.” Alexander Loudon presented van Loon with a gold fountain pen with the inscription, “To Hendrik

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Willem, friend of the Netherlands, on his sixtieth birthday.” According to Jimmie the birthday party was a great success as “For once the Dutch rallied round and honored the old man!” In his thank-you speech that evening, Hendrik Willem said he still had many plans and “today on my sixtieth birthday, I feel I have learned just enough to be able to carry them out.”2 Another party guest was the publisher Walter J. Black for whom van Loon was writing the introduction and drawing illustrations of a new Classics Club edition of Desiderius Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly. In October 1941 van Loon had been thrilled when one of Black’s editors, Ruth McDonald, asked him to cooperate on the reissue of Erasmus’s famous work, in which the humanist satirized all worldly pretensions and ambitions, those of the clergy most emphatically. “That would be just about up my alley,” van Loon wrote her. “For old Desiderius and I were born on the same street (the Germans took care of it—and how!) and I have come to know him almost more as a sort of distant cousin than as a remote historical figure. And the idea of illustrating him fascinates me, for it has not been done since Dürer3 and it would be a labor of love. . . . It is just the kind of job for a man who has had to give up a thousand chairmanships and all other kind of good works and it will keep me happily engaged until the old heart ceases to wobble.” By midDecember van Loon invited McDonald to come to Nieuw Veere to see the pictures he had drawn of the life of Erasmus, predicting these would astonish her since “until now Erasmus has never been a human being in the illustrated material but always a strangely old looking fossil with an inktstand in his hand.” When the volume came out in late April, van Loon sent the first copy of The Praise of Folly to the White House. He wrote FDR aide Stephen Early that the president might enjoy it as bedtime literature and thought it would “be consoling to discover that the world was just as stupid, as nasty, as dumb, as greedy and generally speaking as pestilential in the year 1506 as it is in 1942.”4 From childhood, as we have seen, van Loon felt a special bond with Erasmus. Not only did he have a great admiration for this most notable figure of the entire humanist movement, he also said in an interview that “his hands and his nose are living images of the dead hands and dead nose of Erasmus who came from the same Holland town and probably of the same blood line.” When a visitor to his house in September 1940 asked van Loon for a photograph, he gave him a picture of his hands, explaining, “After all they did the work.” The hands emulated the famous etching of the hands of Erasmus as done by Albrecht Dürer. That Hendrik Willem fancied himself the twentieth-century reincarnation of Erasmus is also suggested by the title page of this edition of The Praise of Folly, where the author and illustrator credits are not only in the same size type but given in parallel form: “Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam” and “Hendrik Willem van Loon of Rotterdam.” At the end of

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his long introduction, van Loon nevertheless told the reader that “Erasmus Rotterodamus is the real hero of this volume and not his humble admirer and pupil Henricus Rotterodamus.”5 Incidentally, at the beginning of his introduction, van Loon told the reader that now that he had “passed three score,” he wanted to state as emphatically as he could “that all the usual bugaboos about the Horrors of Advancing Years have proved to be mere chimerae and that I do not want to go back by one single year along the road which has carried me to my present state of incipient old age.” The only thing he regretted “in regard to the state of senectitude,” was that after having read books in several languages for more than half a century, he did not come across any more new authors who could give him “solace and delectation.” Despite the modern output of huge quantities of new books he questioned himself: “What in Heaven’s name can I read that I have not already read a dozen times before?” He therefore envied the reader who now for the first time would read Erasmus’s “piece of highly explosive literary dynamite known the last four centuries and a half as The Praise of Folly.”6 A year later, a profile in The New Yorker explored his relationship with Erasmus. Van Loon told the writer, Richard O. Boyer, that he considered himself the reincarnation of Erasmus. If not, then at least his illegitimate descendant but preferably Erasmus’s “out-and-out reincarnation.” To prove his point, van Loon mentioned a long list of similarities: “Speaking in the present tense, van Loon occasionally points out that their handwriting is the same and that both have hands which are large and freckled, both are brilliant conversationalists, both are hypochondriacs, both have long noses, both like to draw, both hate professors, both like catnaps, both had unhappy childhoods, both are kindly, both are tolerant, both wear their spectacles on the ends of their noses, and both are popularizers.” Van Loon had also predicted that, like Erasmus on his deathbed, his own last words would also be spoken in his native Dutch. And Boyer concluded the last of his three articles on van Loon by mentioning an exhibit at Holland House of all of van Loon’s The Praise of Folly illustrations. The show included a photograph of his hands (figure 15.1) and a drawing of Erasmus’s hands, as well as samples of the handwriting of both men and self-portraits drawn by van Loon (figure 15.2) placed beside contemporary portraits of Erasmus—all of which served as “overwhelming proof to a skeptical world” that both persons were one and the same: named Erasmus in the sixteenth century and van Loon in the twentieth.7 To his son Willem, van Loon flatly denied that he had held the exhibit to show his relationship to Erasmus and explained that the man who had organized the sale of his illustrations for The Praise of Folly for charity, had merely laid a copy of Erasmus’s hands by Dürer and a drawing of his own hands side

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Figure 15.1 Hands of Hendrik Willem van Loon which were similar, van Loon thought, to the hands of his alter ego, Erasmus of Rotterdam (Hendrik Willem van Loon Papers, 1884–1972. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library).

by side as “an amusing trick.” But the reincarnation theory was not just fabricated by an eager journalist of The New Yorker; clearly, van Loon himself created and sustained that image, especially during the war years.8 Now that van Loon’s “wobbly heart” prevented him from going to New York regularly for his WRUL broadcasts, he worked at home writing scripts. Walter Lemmon had a special telephone line installed in Nieuw Veere so that he could continue his broadcasts without coming to the studio. To a friend van Loon noted that despite the condition of his heart—“a verdict for the rest of my days”—he could still write and in his view he could achieve more with the goose quill than with a cannon. For instance, in the next two years he contributed some twenty articles and forty illustrations to the DutchAmerican magazine Knickerbocker Weekly, edited by Albert Balink and Jay Bradley.9 To Stephen Early van Loon explained that the objective of the Knickerbocker Weekly was to keep the Dutch “in their mood of obstinate refusal to have anything to do with the Nazis.” He therefore urged his readers in his very first article to “go on fighting! For this is not a matter that can

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Figure 15.2 Hendrik Willem van Loon’s drawing of Erasmus in Veere, in Van Loon’s Lives, 1942 (Courtesy of the van Loon family).

ever be settled by a compromise. Between the philosophy of death of Hitler and that conception of the Good Life which we ourselves had developed out of centuries of trial and experiment, there never can be a truce. Either they win or we do.” Later that month, van Loon wrote an illustrated article in honor of those who had defended and died for freedom in the Netherlands, in which he emphasized that the living now owed a debt to those who had sacrificed their lives for the ideal of liberty. The text of that article, enthusiastically applauded by Alexander Loudon in a letter to van Loon, was reused

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again in a May solicitation of the Queen Wilhelmina Fund. Sometimes he supplied illustrations without articles. In September, for instance, he drew Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian who in 1938 had betrayed his country to the Nazis and was now Reichskommissar (governor) of the Netherlands, and carried the heading “wanted for murder.” Three weeks later, the Knickerbocker Weekly featured his cartoon of Anton Mussert, the leader of the Dutch Nazi party with the caption “wanted for the betrayal of his own people.”10 Preparing a special Knickerbocker Weekly issue, to be distributed by the tens of thousands all over the Netherlands by the Royal Air Force, van Loon asked FDR to contribute a few words for the front page directly addressed to the Dutch because that “would be the mightiest blow we could strike, for it would bring the people of the Netherlands into direct contact with the man in whom they have placed their hope for the future.” Press Secretary Early sent back various presidential statements from which van Loon could compile a brief article, since the White House was too busy to write something especially for the occasion.11 The sixteen-page pamphlet featured portraits of FDR and Queen Wilhelmina on the cover and recent pictures of the Dutch royal family inside. On the editorial page the Knickerbocker Weekly described itself as the voice of the Netherlands in America that would not rest until the last Nazi had been chased from Holland and the last Japanese from the Netherlands East Indies. Description of such activities as the training of Dutch aviators in Jackson, Mississippi, the breathtaking statistics of the military production in the United States, “the arsenal of democracy,” and the daily Dutch-language broadcasts from stations such as WRUL, all served to give courage to the Dutch in their occupied country. The pamphlet also contained a contribution from van Loon himself in which he stressed that the Dutch in America and Americans of Dutch descent were doing their utmost to help liberate the Netherlands and he was sure that that glorious day would come soon. The pamphlet ended with the message, “Read and Pass On!”12 In April, Princess Juliana and Prince Bernhard were again the guests of the Roosevelts. Wilhelmina cabled FDR that she was delighted to hear this, which made her very “eager” to cross the Atlantic and “talk things over together.” From the White House, Princess Juliana sent a cable to van Loon in which she thanked him for the new herring he had sent her there—a typical van Loon gesture, underlining their common roots.13 Van Loon tried to be optimistic in his correspondence with Crown Princess Juliana and had no doubts about the war production and the capability of the American soldiers, but he was concerned about the approach to wartime propaganda being taken in Washington. He disdained the “publicity boys who . . . were trying to sell us this war as if it were a laxative or a new hairdo.”

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Or, as he wrote in another letter, “They are trying to give us the will to fight by dangling Marlene Dietrich’s noble legs before the sailor boys and the lovely Irish colleens before the boys in the army.”14 Van Loon preferred a more realistic approach, one that did not downplay the steely will, commitment, and sacrifice needed to defeat a powerful foe. He outlined his views in a letter to poet Archibald MacLeish, who then served as director of the Office of Facts and Figures (in June 1942, its functions were folded into the Office of War Information). Although MacLeish concurred with much of what van Loon was saying and wanted to recruit him and other popular writers such as Rex Stout for a series of radio broadcasts, nothing ultimately came of this. In despair van Loon complained to a friend, “Here we have a hundred and forty million people trained not to think for themselves, and now they must defend a world about which they have no conception—no notion—no idea—and so we fight the Nazis with pretty girls and texts about Democracy. God help us all!” He could come to no other conclusion, he wrote Morris Bishop, than “what we call so hopelessly the ‘war effort’ has no use for my services.”15 Meanwhile, Hendrik Willem was saddened to learn of the death of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who had committed suicide in Brazil in February. The two men had corresponded for years and when Zweig was visiting the United States the year before, they met for the first time for dinner the night before van Loon had his heart attack. Upon hearing of Stefan Zweig’s death, van Loon described him as “one of the great writers of this world and one of my oldest friends, . . . a grand seigneur of the old Austrian type . . . Jew and all . . . a most aristocratic person and when the world was too full with and of vulgarity he preferred to step out and leave the show which had become disgusting.” He was glad that Carl Zuckmayer had paid him homage by having written “one of the noblest obligatories I have ever read about any other human being.”16 What gave him a boost, however, was a visit from Alexandra Tolstoy, the daughter of the great Russian author of War and Peace, to Nieuw Veere in late April. Countess Tolstoy told him he reminded her of “her sainted papa—in my happier moments, of course,” van Loon reported to Morris Bishop. And he proudly wrote another friend that the countess, who in his view looked like her father, “except for the whiskers,” had told him she thought that in his Rembrandt biography he wrote in a similar way as her father. When van Loon explained his working method to her, she allegedly said, “Just like dear Papa.” In a letter sent in July, Alexandra Tolstoy wrote that it had been “a great joy” to have met van Loon in his “temple of thought, creative art and hard labor.”17 Also cheering van Loon up was Jay N. “Ding” Darling, the famous cartoonist for the Des Moines [Iowa] Register. Not only did Darling single out

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R.v.R. as “a number one book in this generation,” but he also praised van Loon’s art work: “Your drawings fairly explode with vivid feeling. No one does a better job of it.” Darling, who claimed never to have gone to an art school, wrote van Loon that in his opinion, “Art Schools are for mental cripples who can’t stand on their own legs so have to be pushed around in a wheel-chair.” In a letter to a friend, Hendrik Willem wrote that the matter of the individual and the arts puzzled him. When people asked him how he drew “those funny pictures,” he always said he didn’t know. “I sit down, and there they are. How do I start them? I don’t know. . . . Some day we may discover this secret. Until then I shall humbly thank whatever Powers rule this absurd universe for at least the blessings of Genius.” And in an entry about him in a biographical dictionary published that year he was quoted saying, “My work would not be my work without those endless little pictures. . . . I will draw with anything that comes handy within reach.” In any case, Darling was impressed by van Loon’s work, adding “When I look at the monumental pile of creative stuff you have produced, and not taking into consideration the extra-curricular activities, I am not surprised that the old pump rebels a little.”18 But despite his weak heart, van Loon’s reply to “Ding” Darling showed that he was in an extremely belligerent, reactionary mood. Once again, he wrote from the standpoint of a WASP confident of the supremacy of his kind as he almost exploded in wrath over Jews, Catholics, and other groups: There are Jews who do their job, but the majority somehow or other tries to sneak out . . . finds ways and means to wriggle out and as you say they are working day and night to bring about a feeling of resentment which will lead to anti-semitism over here and God knows we did not want it. By the same token I predict a great deal of anti Church-feeling after the war. The Church is NOT in this war. It loves stinkers like Franco and Mussolini and even Hitler. Several cardinals are known to be Nazi’s and they preach openly: Tolerance is not a Catholic doctrine . . . we have no tolerance for Protestants and for the Jews and we never can nor will have. . . . I thought of all those things the other day and suddenly had a vision. I too have all my live-long days tried to be a good American in the sense that I did my best to love all races and creeds. It was not easy but I considered it my duty and I done it. Now I give up. I have gone home, spiritually speaking. I realize as I never did before that I am white and Protestant. White means nothing to me because I never felt the slightest prejudice in the matter of color. But I just can not love all the Mediterraneans and the Poles and the Russians and the Patagonians and the Jews. . . . To hell with it says I. We people from the northern seas of the old world have these last five hundred years done the work of the world. We have not burned heretics. We have not murdered political opponents. We have indeed opened up our gates and widely too, to all the persecuted of the world. We have

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in the northern countries established the fairest social arrangements the world had ever seen. And I am getting very sick and even more tired of being considered something inferior. I have had enough of Russian introspectivism and Jewish Talmudistic reasoning and of Catholic accepting. I like my own protestant method of investigating everything for myself and thinking and doing whatever pleases me as long as I do not interfere with my neighbor’s rights to do the same thing. I have no interest in protestant theology which is a hateful form of old testamentish theocratic finagling but I insist upon the right to protest against anything and anybody who or which tries to interfere with my own rights to think and act as I do. You probably get me. I have come to hate the whole goddamn kaboodle of Balkan and Levantine races with their lousy priesthood and their medieaval notions about every detail of life from childbirth to procreation. If they like to live that way . . . it is OK by me but I intend to lead my own life. . . . You will argue that you find me in a pretty belligerent mood and right you are. I have gone back to the old Homestead which God knows was no Paradise but it was mine own home and I don’t like the mob of unpleasant people who have moved in since and I am trying to throw them out again and bring up my own grandchildren with their papa and mama . . . and together with my own friends (whom I shall not try to bring up however) in the fear of our own Gods. I am losing myself in the mire of rhetoric but you will be able to follow me. Enough is enough and I have reached the point where I have had enough.19

In contrast to this private expression of his feelings about other groups, van Loon took the opposite tack in public a couple of months later. Speaking to a large audience at the annual membership tea of the Women’s American ORT at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel that November, he denounced the suspicions and prejudices of those national groups who were animated by hatred toward others. “Everybody is carrying a lumber-yard of suspicion and prejudice on his shoulders and everybody is shouting loudly for the right to display his own particular lumber-yard and to curse the lumber-yard of his neighbor. . . . To keep the peace between those contending groups is an almost herculean labor,” he told his audience, and he suggested that “we turn our private lumber-yards of touchiness and mutual suspicion into one great international bonfire” and make common cause to give the forces of good a chance and help create a world based upon reciprocal goodwill and mutual understanding.20 One way in which van Loon himself contributed to the forces of good was his continued effort to help European refugees. Just after the United States entered the war, he and Thomas Mann sponsored the visa application of the Polish-born writer Hermann Kesten and his wife. The State Department granted the Kestens visa on the grounds that Kesten was a prominent author and that the sponsors had firmly declared that the applicants’ political beliefs were neither pro-Nazi nor pro-Communist but strictly democratic. However,

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as a memo in van Loon’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) file shows, the FBI had different opinions: it believed that Kesten was “a Communist and possibly a German espionage agent” and charged that State’s Visa Board of Appeals had made its decision based on “questionable statements of Thomas Mann and Hendrik van Loon.” This was not the first time that these two writers’ sponsorship of refugees had bothered the FBI, up the office of the director. The previous October, J. Edgar Hoover, known throughout his long career as FBI head as a fervent anti-Communist, sent a strong objection to the State Department over Mann’s and van Loon’s sponsorship of another applicant, whom he called a “German Communist intellectual.” The FBI had labeled Thomas Mann as a Communist, ignoring his many public statements praising his new country as a land hospitable to him as a person and to his ideas. Hendrik Willem’s own FBI file records various charitable donations and other activities that marked him, in Hoover’s eyes, as a foreign-born intellectual with leftist sympathies.21 If van Loon in his perception could not contribute his share to the “war effort” in Washington, he found another forum for his thoughts by contributing to The New Leader. Curiously enough, his writing for the socialist New York– based weekly was not mentioned in his FBI file. On 14 March 1942 the front page featured a van Loon letter, below the headline “Towards a New Ideal— Hendrik Willem van Loon Joins us in the Pages of the New Leader.” In this letter van Loon explained his reason for joining the weekly. “Until now,” he wrote, “I have usually fought my battles in the Times and the Tribune. I have now come to the realization that we might as well join all our forces . . . the forces of all those who realize that this war cannot be won unless we accept a new ideal. This ideal will have to go along socialistic lines. We will have to provide the American people with their new ideal.” And in an effort to add drama to his statement he wrote, “My heart is wobbly and will be so for the rest of my days. I worked it to pieces in the years when I tried to warn our people and got thrown out of every radio station as a menace to our public safety and as a warmonger. But I can write all I want. . . . I suddenly remember that I was born on that side of the North Sea where people do not surrender. A silly habit to go on fighting when you are licked. You can finish this line of thought for yourself.” A week later the magazine introduced van Loon’s first article by describing him as “the most energetic and effective antifascist” of all American writers and one who had “always been consistently and vigorously against all forms of dictatorship.” Hendrik Willem’s column, “Van Loon’s Diary,” appeared regularly in The New Leader until his death.22 In his 1942 articles he repeatedly warned that the war in his view could only be won “with steel in our heart” but that the government had completely failed to mobilize the civilian part of the nation. He thought that the

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civilian population was “still far from war-minded. To the average citizen, this war is still an affair of heavy taxes, automobile discomforts, sugar shortage and a few other slightly annoying inconveniences.” What was needed, he felt, was a morale “based upon an inner conviction of the righteousness of the cause for which we are fighting. That morale must be turned into the absolute determination of every man, woman and child to win the war because life without such a victory would not be worth living. And that morale, being a matter of spirit, has nothing at all to do with the mere collecting of vast piles of money.” Similarly, appearing as the guest of honor at an “Author’s Night” at New York City’s Stage Door Canteen that September, he told the soldiers and sailors there that they were fighting and risking their lives for “the American decencies which are the only decencies in the whole world.”23 Van Loon expected it to be a long war, he wrote in a June New Leader article, in which the United States “shall have to be the arsenal, the treasure chest and the reservoir of manpower for all the rest of the world.” It was clear to him that “[t]oday it is towards the United States of America that the whole world lifts its eyes. Whether we like it or not, the business of salvaging the world’s civilization has become our job. . . . We can still save ourselves. But by only one thing—by action!”24 Writing in the left-wing New Leader, van Loon may have lacked confidence in the Washington bureaucracy, but he still found common cause with FDR’s wartime government. He was extremely bothered by what he termed “treacherous attacks” on the government’s war policy from conservative newspaper publishers like Colonel Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, and William Randolph Hearst. He believed that the United States needed to put an end to this “attack from the rear even if the method we must employ shall not be in conformity with the ethics, commonly associated with the ideals of a Democracy.” His fellow émigré Thomas Mann also supported muzzling the freedom of the press a bit during a wartime emergency, having told NBC Radio in 1940, “I do not think freedom of speech should be permitted to those who would use it to our harm. Democracy’s concept of freedom must never include the freedom to destroy it.”25 In July, The New Leader reported that van Loon had heard that his nephew, Wim van der Hilst, had been executed by the Nazis as a retaliation for van Loon’s broadcasts to the Netherlands via shortwave station WRUL. This news, of course, netted him many expressions of sympathy, from Thomas Mann and many others. According to Gerard Willem van Loon, however, the truth was quite different. Wim, whom van Loon had seen for the last time in September 1938 in Copenhagen, had been working for the Dutch resistance; betrayed by a collaborator, he had developed ileitis while in custody and died before he could be operated on. Thus, in Willem’s words,

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the story of the Nazi retaliation for van Loon’s broadcasts was “a monstrous, self-aggrandizing fabrication” of his father, “impossible to check on and refute.” Van Loon’s younger son was equally annoyed that his father called a series of eleven articles in The New Leader that summer and fall “Letter to My Son in the Army,” and sharply asked him “to write about himself if he had to but to kindly leave me out of it.”26 In June 1942 Queen Wilhelmina was finally able to fulfill her wish to see her daughter and grandchildren in Ottawa and to visit the United States to meet the Roosevelts. An American flying boat sent by Roosevelt brought her from the British Isles to Ottawa on 18 June. The next day van Loon sent Princess Juliana a cable to welcome her mother and expressed the hope that she would “find some much needed rest from her arduous labors for the old homeland.” On 24 June the queen sent a cable to Roosevelt, telling him that after a train ride with Juliana and the children they had just arrived at their “charming” vacation house in Lee, Massachusetts. It was there in the Berkshires, on 29 June, that the American and Dutch heads of state met for the first time. While having tea with Queen Wilhelmina, Roosevelt to his delight was also surrounded by four princesses: Princess Juliana, her daughters Beatrix and Irene, and the handsome Crown Princess Martha of Norway, who accompanied the president on this visit and for whom Roosevelt had developed strong feelings of affection.27 Though they would get along very well, Roosevelt later admitted to New York Post publisher Dorothy Schiff that “the only person ever who had overawed him” was Queen Wilhelmina but it had pleased him to hear later on that “Minnie,” as he called her affectionately, had been “equally scared” to meet him. William D. Hassett, a presidential aide present at that first meeting in Lee, observed that the queen “is past sixty, no make-up, solid, stolid, substantial, Dutch—the embodiment of the national type as the Sovereign should be and plenty stubborn, too, I dare say. . . . There is something about her that commands respect.” Earlier that year van Loon had written an American friend that the Dutch queen was considered by many as “a relic of the past, dowdy and indifferent to outward appearances,” but that in his opinion “this strange and lonely woman, hardened in a grim determination to do her duty, will be remembered [long after] all our dear movie actresses doing their bit for Democracy will have been forgotten. As we intend to ‘sell’ the war by the usual processes of publicity,” the Dutch queen, he felt, was “the very antithesis of everything we think necessary in a crisis.”28 From 11 to 14 July the Dutch royal family stayed at Hyde Park, where they had an enjoyable visit with the Roosevelts. Then Wilhelmina went on to New York City. Her visit began with a reception at City Hall that had been arranged by a special committee chaired by George S. Van Schaick, head of

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Civilian Defense, and with van Loon as vice chairman. Van Loon reported to L.A. Ries, the deputy director of the Netherlands Information Bureau, that as Mayor Fiorello La Guardia delivered his welcoming speech to the queen, it was “the usual democratic mess” at City Hall. Uninvited people walked in and tried to come as close as possible to the queen who kept an appearance of calmness while “hundreds of flashlights of press photographers exploded around her.” On this occasion van Loon met a Noorthey classmate, whom he had not seen in decades; George C.W. van Tets van Goudriaan, who accompanied Wilhelmina as her private secretary, seemed less enthusiastic about this reunion. After the reception, a small group drove to La Guardia’s residence, Gracie Mansion, for lunch. The queen, the La Guardias, the Van Schaicks, the van Loons, and the Loudons ate what van Loon thought an odd meal, with the soup served at the wrong temperature, and strange, unappetizing flavors in the main course and dessert. Observing the queen’s attitude during this humid day in New York increased van Loon’s respect for her; in his opinion, she did everything with an enthusiasm as if she really enjoyed it. Unlike FDR, van Loon was not overawed by the Dutch queen, or at least pretended not to be, and talking about Wilhelmina’s visit to New York several months later in an interview for The New Yorker, he bragged, “Her Majesty is used to holding the floor in conversation. I showed her that that wasn’t done in America.”29 Shortly after Wilhelmina’s New York visit, the van Loons and Adriaan Barnouw and his wife were invited by the queen for tea in the Berkshires. Van Loon thought her cottage was “a stinky little house with terrible pictures and full of extra furniture and heat.” Though his impression of her was that of “a charming but poor old lady,” she did not appear to understand very much of the United States, nor of his position there. “A funny idea,” he wrote his son Willem, “to sit there with that most remote person who even today does not quite know what your pa may have meant here for her cause.” At one point during the tea, Jimmie reported with much pleasure, Her Majesty— “wearing a highly un-smart black print dress with a wilted white ruffle around her neck”—asked Barnouw, “And where do you teach, Professor, and what?” This was, of course, a most painful question to the man who since 1921 rejoiced in the proud title of Queen Wilhelmina Professor of the History, Language and Literature of the Netherlands at Columbia University. But apart from this incident it had been a pleasant afternoon.30 The official highlight of Queen Wilhelmina’s trip to the United States that summer was her visit to the White House on 5 August, including a state dinner, and her speech the following day to a joint session of Congress. The Dutch queen emphasized the friendship between the two countries in her remarks on Capitol Hill (in May that year Roosevelt had given the Dutch legation in Washington the status of embassy, which made Alexander Loudon

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the first Dutch ambassador to the United States). Wilhelmina was the first reigning sovereign ever to deliver an address before Congress. During the crowded three-day program in the American capital she also granted a press conference to Washington’s newspaper women, sitting together on a sofa with Eleanor Roosevelt, and spoke at a presidential press conference where Roosevelt introduced her to the members of the White House Correspondents Association. In her prepared statement she emphasized the importance of “freedom of speech and a free press, two conditions no dictator ever grants.”31 No doubt, the queen’s visit generated a lot of publicity for the Dutch cause. From a political point of view, however, not so much was accomplished. The conversations with Roosevelt at Hyde Park about international affairs, for which she had meticulously prepared, were rather superficial. To Queen Wilhelmina, accustomed to leading conversations, it was frustrating that Roosevelt was continually telling anecdotes and hardly let her speak. Foreign Minister Eelco van Kleffens, accompanying her on that visit to Hyde Park, observed the queen’s disappointment and when Roosevelt took her to visit a house of the Delano’s farther north on the Hudson, wrote in his report that “she did not talk much and sat a bit pitiful, a bit stoical and a bit out of place amidst of the loudly speaking Americans with their Scotch and rye and ice tea.” Queen Wilhelmina also clearly noticed an anticolonialist mood in American leaders and that a restoration of the Dutch colonial territories in Asia after the war would not have the support of the United States.32 Because of the war, in 1941 the federal government had begun to take over blocks of time on various shortwave stations and then took control of the stations. This development also affected WRUL in 1942 and in August van Loon expressed his sincere concerns to Elmer Davis, director of the Office of War Information. The Dutch broadcasts that had been so successful so far because they were handled by Dutchmen who knew the situation in the occupied country, van Loon wrote Davis, were now placed under the “incompetent” supervision of government officials who had no clue about the local situation and language nuances in Europe and who tried to make the shortwave broadcasts 100 percent American. In van Loon’s eyes the men in charge now of the American end of the programs seemed to think that the mentality of the oppressed nations was similar to Americans living in Indiana and Wyoming. This was surely not the case, he wrote. The Dutch vernacular broadcasts were getting now daily instructions and hints as to what to stress and these, van Loon felt, were “absolutely the wrong thing” for the people in Holland and merely irritating and causing despair. “It is the job of these foreign-language broadcasts to keep up the morale of the invaded countries. We are not trying to sell them pepsi-cola,” Hendrik Willem said, adding “the leadership of the psychological preparation for this war has been left to

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incompetents.” In his reply Davis promised to look into this matter though he also made it clear that there were “four hundred things that all demand my personal attention each moment” and that he thought that “the reluctance to be too much influenced by particular groups of exiles [was in general] a good principle which might always go sour in practise.”33 Van Loon also complained to others that year about the ignorance of American government officials toward the ins and outs of Europe. “We may be winning this war from a military angle but psychologically we are losing it because the wrong boys and girls have been entrusted with a job for which they lack all the necessary ability and poor Elmer Davis can’t do it all alone,” he wrote Maurice Hanline. And he told Harvard University historian George Sarton, himself born in Ghent, Belgium, “This ignorance of ours is a most dangerous thing, my friend, and it frightens me for it may well account for all the hopeless mistakes we have made in dealing with diverse European nations . . . they just don’t understand.”34 In November van Loon again asked Elmer Davis about the broadcasts in Dutch, his “spiritual child of which I have real reason to feel proud” and that he described being “as Dutch as pea-soup and in a starving community, a few drops of that nutritious dish, served at regular intervals and by well-known and trusted vocal spoons, have been so effective” in keeping up morale. He hated to see two years of constructive work by WRUL undone by “a wrong psychological approach” by the unified Washington policy toward the foreign broadcasts. And once more he saw “our lack of understanding of the true psyche of both our enemies and our friends” as one of the causes of a failing “war-effort.” As he explained, “We seem to proceed from the premise that the whole world must necessarily like Frankfurters and American icecream sodas. All the efforts of better informed writers to convince our public of the contrary have been brushed aside as both unpatriotic and undemocratic. That, however, has not made the others any the fonder of our Frankfurters and our American icecream sodas and in these foreign broadcasts we are not dealing with theories but with definitely established facts.” Elmer Davis tried to reassure van Loon and let him know that even if the matter may have been handled “awkwardly” by government officials, there was no intention of stopping his broadcasts.35 In the fall of 1942 the staff preparing Dutch radio broadcasts for the Netherlands Information Bureau included journalist and literary critic Jan Greshoff. Van Loon and Greshoff had known each other for a long time. They had met once or twice in the Netherlands and exchanged some letters since. Back in 1929, when living in Veere, van Loon had expressed his respect for Greshoff ’s writing style and thought Greshoff could be successful in America too, provided he would directly write in English. As soon as

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Greshoff had arrived in New York in early October 1942, he and his wife, accompanied by Adriaan van der Veen, visited van Loon at Nieuw Veere. During these war years Greshoff developed a warm affection for van Loon and would later testify of these feelings in a number of his writings. In one of these he even called van Loon “a walking vacation.”36 Even as van Loon was criticizing the American ignorance of the European psyche, he also felt that he, far better than his former countrymen, understood the American psyche. As we have seen, back in 1932 he had already exclaimed, “Good God, I AM the Dutch idea here.” Having criticized Dutch officials in a letter to L.A. Ries in July 1941, he did so again after Queen Wilhelmina’s visit. Van Loon thought the Netherlands Information Bureau had done nothing to underline the historical importance of the queen’s visit to New Amsterdam and, apart from the Dutch broadcasts, did a poor job in public relations. Statistics about oil and rubber did not touch the heart of people. What was needed, he felt, was emotional propaganda. It was through the indirect propaganda for Holland in his books, that he hoped to make America “Dutch-conscious.”37 Van Loon never had a lack of ideas for new books to be written. That year he was toying with writing a “Story of Freedom,” which aimed to explain to the enlisted men in the army and navy what exactly they were fighting for. This book, then, van Loon told FDR aide Stephen Early, was in fact what the president had suggested him in 1940 to write, a “History of Democracy.” He told a number of his friends that he was also considering a book on Beethoven and his era, and a thorough history of his native land—part of his effort to make the American public “Dutch-conscious”—as his next project. These book ideas and many others for which he drafted an outline and introduction, never came to fruition but illustrate his never-ending stream of ideas. As Jan Greshoff put it eloquently, van Loon was “a force of nature, an inexhaustible, violent spouting source of thoughts, feelings, and bright ideas.” Adriaan van der Veen observed that van Loon for each new book idea wrote at least four prefaces in which he had full confidence for a day, and then rejected the whole idea and replaced it with new ones. To Harvard’s Professor George Sarton van Loon wrote that he had many ideas about the topic for his next book, “but I change every hour and I am going stark crazy with the uncertainty.” As The New Yorker reported, Simon and Schuster had some thirty contracts for van Loon books that never went beyond the stage of idea.38 That summer, van Loon felt very tired and on doctor’s orders had to be very careful. He told Jay Darling his was “a case of physical exhaustion” and this was hard to accept for someone like himself “who seemed to be endowed with inexhaustible energy.” His enforced rest brought him once again into a contemplative mood. As if he felt his end was nearing, he wrote a friend,

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“I am 60—I live on borrowed time.” To be sure, he still had plans for some books before he would call it a day, but looking back on his life at this point he felt reasons for gratitude. He wrote another friend, “[W]e have had a most satisfactory life. We have done what we wanted to do and is there really anything else that matters?”39 But his time was not over yet. Instead of death, it was time for Van Loon’s Lives! In June van Loon was busy correcting the page proofs of this new “bulky volume,” whose advance sale was almost as good as The Arts. His publishers were totally convinced that Van Loon’s Lives was the best title for this new book, though the author himself, he told Willem van Tets, was not so sure whether the public would understand and appreciate it. But in his heart he knew there was really no need to worry about that. S&S had proven itself a master at introducing a book so that everyone wanted to read it. The marketing campaign this time would cost $100,000.40 At 888 pages, Van Loon’s Lives is by far his longest book. A mixture of fact and fantasy, it offered biographical outlines of the more than forty notable guests invited by van Loon and his old friend Frits Philips for dinner in Veere, including a description of the food served and the music accompanying the conversation during the dinner meetings which, according to some hints and references made by the author, took place in 1929. The conversations with the guests are, of course, purely fictional. Sometimes they are rather superficial, sometimes very convincing. However, the entire approach—using these imaginary meetings to explain how these people left their mark on history, and conveying his own evaluations of the guests’ achievements—is extremely creative. Van Loon’s Lives is a pageant of historical personages with the omnipresent van Loon as the tambour maître, or “The Pied Piper of History” as he was called in the Baltimore Sun in 1922. The whole parade never gets boring or annoying. On the contrary, this is his most charming and witty book. As he had in The Arts, van Loon offered his public many pleasant hours of informative reading.41 Obviously, the most important guest is Desiderius Erasmus. Not only is the first chapter dedicated to van Loon’s hero, also in the succeeding chapters Erasmus is always present and takes part in the fictional conversations with the other guests. Writing about Erasmus, van Loon could not resist the temptation to tell his readers again about the similarities he saw between himself and the sixteenth-century humanist. Their attitude toward life was similar, van Loon said, noting his own preference for the middle of the road instead of having to take sides in too definite a way: “I was like Erasmus. I felt attracted toward the Lutheran way of thinking, but I wanted to combine the Lutheran way of thinking with the more polished popish way of living.”42 The other guests at the Saturday night dinner parties in Veere were invited in combination of two or three. As homage to both his native and adopted

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countries, van Loon brought together in the second chapter William the Silent and George Washington who both fought for the independence of their country. To present Erasmus with a pleasant surprise, van Loon invited Erasmus’s friend Thomas More, and Erasmus reciprocated by inviting as a surprise to his hosts the Bach and Breughel families, the former having a lovely jam session on the Veere marketplace while the latter were busy drawing. Other guests included Cervantes, Shakespeare, Molière, Descartes, Emerson, Theodora of Byzantium, Elizabeth I, Plato, Confucius, Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Emily Dickinson, Chopin, Beethoven, Voltaire, Peter the Great, and Benjamin Franklin. The book ended with a chapter on Thomas Jefferson, “the last of our guests as well as the most honored of all,” about whom van Loon observed that he considered him to be “the greatest American who ever lived” and “the noblest champion of freedom the world has ever seen.”43 Van Loon wrote that the evening with Saint Francis of Assisi, Hans Christian Andersen, and Mozart (who, according to their host had in common that “they had all been in love with life, they all had cared for children and animals, and all of them had known how to laugh”), as well as the dinner meeting with Plato and Confucius, had been a real highlight. In his fantasy he went so far as to have a jam session with Leonardo da Vinci (himself playing the violin and da Vinci the lute), and he played a violin duet with Thomas Jefferson. At the end of the dinner with Empress Theodora, van Loon had himself dancing with her. While putting his hand around her waist, he then wrote, “I touched her as gently as I would have touched the feather mantle of an Hawaiian princess. There was an instant response. Her body seemed to nestle in the hollow of my arm. Those incredible black eyes looked up at me. She leaned forward, and her gentle little breasts touched me. I suddenly understood a thousand years of history. I knew what no mere scholar had ever found out.”44 Another hero of van Loon’s featured in the book was Michel de Montaigne whom he invited together with Rabelais. Montaigne’s Essais had become van Loon’s Bible at quite a young age and had remained so ever since, he wrote. He took his copy of the Essais always with him and in a time as the present one when the world seemed “to be out of gear,” reading some chapters from this book had always been “very soothing.” Van Loon claimed he had never been disappointed by reading Montaigne whose text “like a mighty mountain stream rushes toward the sea through a landscape of unparalleled charm and loveliness.” He therefore venerated this “singularly honest man” who had distinguished himself so much by his moderation and tolerance and van Loon gratefully proclaimed himself “his most humble pupil.” He praised Montaigne for being “the best balanced human being whom we encounter within the pages of the past.”45

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Van Loon, however, did not invite only persons from the past for whom he felt sympathy, explaining, “It was not enough that we should meet all the nice people of the past. We must also learn something about the unpleasant ones.” The two most unpleasant guests were Maximilien Robespierre and Tomás de Torquemada who, according to the chapter title, provided their hosts “with a nightmare we shall never forget.” As he had done in Our Battle, van Loon compared Robespierre with Adolf Hitler.46 Before the official publication date, van Loon made sure that copies of his Lives were shipped to Herbert Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, and friends like Morris Bishop, Van Wyck Brooks, and Thomas Mann. He told the first lady that in these trying times she might find “a certain amount of satisfaction in having dinner with the motley assemblage of queer guests who came to our little house in Veere.” He explained that the book did not want to prove anything and had no message. His guests seemed to be interested in the problem of leadership but he had nothing to do with their conversations and had merely written down what they had said. “In a way,” he told Eleanor Roosevelt, “the whole arrangement seemed ‘out of my own hands.’ ” This does not mean that the book had no structure and certainly not that between the covers there was just “absolute verbal diarrhea,” as van Loon’s son Willem had observed the preceding summer when his father was working on the book. The comments of van Loon’s literary friends, who all showered him with praise, showed quite the contrary. Morris Bishop was so impressed by van Loon’s chapter on Montaigne that he even wrote him, “you are Montaigne”; Van Wyck Brooks after reading the book exclaimed, “you are the Erasmus de nos jours”; and Thomas Mann thought that Van Loon’s Lives was a “unique” book and believed the future belonged to the kind of books as written by van Loon.47 The compliments from friends and acquaintances were heartwarming; the news that S&S had ordered a second printing, despite wartime paper shortages, was encouraging; but best of all were the hosannas of praise in the press. Clifton Fadiman, his former editor, wrote in The New Yorker, “The inexhaustible van Loon, surely the nearest thing we have to the inexhaustible Voltaire,” had produced with his Lives a book that “makes heartening reading in these days, for every casual, free-flowing page is filled with that quality the radio and the newspaper have almost destroyed for us—the quality of glimpsing the odd and sometimes frightening activities of man in the non-distorting mirror of historical perspective.” In the New York Times, John Chamberlain observed, “When Hendrik van Loon writes history you can be certain of getting both plenty of history and plenty of van Loon.” That was also the case in Van Loon’s Lives but this “enlightening and instructive” volume made Chamberlain only wish he, too, had been present at the Veere dinners where “with a sublime disregard for the rules and regulations governing

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sequestration in both heaven and hades, the shades of the illustrious dead appeared punctually.” Katherine Woods in the New York Times Book Review was equally laudatory: “it would be foolish to complain that [van Loon’s] bright, loquacious writing is opinionated and sometimes carelessly glib. The object here is not to be erudite and unbiased, but entertaining and alive— and, in being that, to sound the humanist’s clarion call again in this present inhuman world. This objective, with enormous gusto, Van Loon’s Lives achieves. It is a considerable achievement. And good fun.”48 There were only two notable negative reviews in the national press. The Atlantic Monthly described Van Loon’s Lives as “a biographical-historicalphilosophical-literary vaudeville entertainment.” J.K. Cartwright in Catholic World thought the book was “characterized by the usual ‘liberal’ hand-medowns of thought and the usual proletarian claptrap.” As for academic critics, Lives was the only of van Loon’s books ever to be reviewed in the American Historical Review. The reviewer wrote ironically, “The research in the kitchen is more in evidence than the scholarship in the dining room.” He was sour on the success of van Loon as a popularizer of history and thought that to the readers familiar with van Loon’s “previous profitable ventures in the dilution of history,” no comment on the Lives was needed, as the book was “perhaps more Van Loony than any previous one.” For him there was no doubt that Van Loon’s Lives would be a best seller as it gave “the ‘human’ touch to characters and to the buying public’s pocketbook.” He expected “stuffy historians” to recommend it to their students in college and high school as supplementary reading. And, seeing that the book had been acclaimed by newspaper critics, this reviewer came to the painful conclusion that “history has its fifth columnists.”49 Despite the dazzling sales in the fall of 1942—it reached the fifth slot on the New York Herald Tribune Books’ best seller list—the author himself, he wrote a friend, found it “a queer book. I still hold my legs crossed.” And he granted, “I know that I am good but I cannot be as damn good as all that.” Van Loon had first hesitated to send a copy of the book to the president, but by midOctober he realized, he wrote FDR, that it had become “a curiosity,” because the letters he had received “from unknown and humble readers in all sorts of villages and hamlets of our broad Republic” had shown him there was a great interest among the public in the topic of the book, leadership. And so he advised the president, “If you will glance at the pages on a sleepless night, you will see what bothers and interests most of your constituents most of all.” In that same letter van Loon told FDR that he had “been taken out of circulation and definitely so, I fear me. . . . I can from now on only fight with my pen and the only usefulness I still have is that of a fisherman of words.” In that capacity he was now working on a book about Thomas Jefferson,

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“America’s wisest and noblest leader,” the commemoration of whose two hundredth birthday was coming up in 1943.50 That late summer and fall van Loon was not only working on a biography of Jefferson, but he and Grace Castagnetta produced the last two songbooks in the series of eight they had been collaborating on since The Songs We Sing in 1936. The success of Lives and the subsequent sales of these Christmas songbooks, clear signs of his American popularity, did not make van Loon forget two categories of lifelong enemies: history professors and sour Dutchmen. In a letter to Elmer Davis, van Loon wrote that the professors “never cared a damn about my work but the public does and that is all that matters.” To George Sarton, van Loon wrote in November, I have, my learned neighbor (and I say this in all modesty), probably made more people read History than all the historical professors together and with 157 translations in some 23 languages I have made a part of the world historyconscious which never before had dreamed of opening a work of history. And so the professors may rave and I bid them go jump in the lake for I merely took their unpalatable product and fixed it up in such a way that the average man and woman began to suspect that history was not completely a waste of time.

On the last page of Van Loon’s Lives, S&S emphasized the author’s influential role as educator and popularizer and told the reader, The new method of writing history established by Hendrik Willem van Loon has now become an integral part of the teaching method of most civilized countries, and his works on history, geography, and the arts have appeared in 147 different translations in 21 languages. The country of his birth has knighted him. His adopted country has honored him by the affectionate devotion of millions of readers who, without his writings, might never have been tempted to take an interest in history or the arts.51

Despite his renown, when a woman of Dutch descent in Grand Rapids, Michigan, criticized a passage in Van Loon’s Lives, the author was unable to take it. In a letter to Willem van Tets, Hendrik Willem expressed his indignation about the Dutch community in Michigan, who were neither Dutch nor American but “strange people.” And he continued to tangle with unpleasant Dutch and Dutch-Americans closer to home. Van Loon told Adriaan Barnouw, for instance, that he would continue his efforts for “the old fatherland” but he refused any longer to let himself be abused by the selfcentered official Dutchmen in New York. In a gloomy mood van Loon confessed to L.A. Ries that his work for the Dutch cause was not so much based upon his love for contemporary Dutchmen but more on his love for a Holland that did not exist anymore. “The whole world has become a rather

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lonely experiment for this Renaissance lad. Fortunately I can drug myself with work.”52 Work also helped him to escape the realities of life at home, where Jimmie collapsed in September. Her physician blamed this on “alcoholism and severe malnutrition” and warned her that unless she stopped drinking immediately she would die in three months. That, van Loon reported to Willem, “scared the wits out of her” and he now hoped she would be strong enough to keep away from the bottle that for so many years had been a curse. He himself, he told his younger son, was endlessly sitting at his desk, “working, working, working so as not to lose his temper for there is nothing that exasperates me as much as drunkenness and here I was being punished with having to live with someone who was a sufferer from that dreadful plague.” After only a few days of her not drinking, van Loon was glad to notice “a tremendous improvement” of Jimmie’s condition and remarked, “when sober she is one of the swellest and fairest of women I ever met.”53 Talking about women to his son, van Loon at that time complained, “I have so damned little laughter for all the women who come to this house have been desexed and those can never really laugh.” This feeling was sharply in contrast with what he had written in the introduction of The Praise of Folly, when referring to his age, he noted in himself “a gradual decline in the violence of those devastating emotions which caused an otherwise sensible citizen to waste so much time upon the pursuit of certain ideals of female pulchritude which were apparently unattainable on this faulty planet of ours. But these disturbing passions are now being replaced by certain far more satisfying sentiments of true comradeship and sincere affection which are the reward of that rather bizarre quest for the One Perfect Individual.” That the “disturbing passions” and unpredictable changes of moods were still there, Willem was quick to confirm and referring to the latter in a candid letter to his father he wrote, “You are indeed the most wilfully moody of all creatures. What you roar at today you frown on tomorrow.” Van Loon himself, as he once admitted to a friend, thought of his own emotions as being very sensitive, “I’m the size of a mountain with the works of a Swiss watch.”54 While Jimmie was trying to recover, right under her nose van Loon was once more having an affair. In the spring he had met Josa Morgan, an Austrian Jew whose husband had been murdered in a concentration camp. She had been able to get to America and was living in New York. However, as an enemy alien—she was a de facto German citizen after the Anschluss—Josa was having a difficult time and refugee agencies turned her away. When she saw van Loon for the first time at his house, wearing only his pyjama pants, she said smilingly, “I know you better than anyone does.” Van Loon was delighted and to Alice Bernheim he wrote that compared to the “mess of refugees and lost souls” he had seen, this was “one of the most interesting

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women” he had met. And he described the black-haired, bright-eyed Viennese as “hard as nails and of incredible courage,” blessed with “the damnedest handsomest eyes I ever saw.”55 Some months after their first meeting, Morgan was falsely accused of being a German spy and taken to Ellis Island. Through van Loon’s intervention, who brought her case to the attention of Mayor La Guardia and the White House, she was released and the way was cleared toward her eventually gaining U.S. citizenship. Van Loon brought her to Nieuw Veere to recover from the stressful experience at Ellis Island. A relationship developed and before long van Loon proposed. Instead of becoming his new bride—feeling guilty and embarrassed for Jimmie’s sake, she did not want that—Josa instead became van Loon’s secretary. She accompanied him to his publishers, radio studios, lunches, and other meetings, and efficiently took care of a thousand odds and ends for him. Through her charm Josa also managed to hit it off with Jimmie initially. Nor was she afraid to speak her mind to him; van Loon, in high spirits about her, wrote his son, “She is the first person in many years who called dear Papa’s attention to his less loveable qualities in such a way that he had to confess that she was right and he was wrong and he may have grown in reasonableness and general likeableness.”56 Gerard Willem had meanwhile been drafted into the U.S. Army and after his preliminary military training had been sent to an officer’s training camp for the field artillery, for which he felt himself totally unqualified. His father agreed and, after some hesitation, sent a letter to Elmer Davis emphasizing that his son had “a complete knowledge of three languages, a terrific and almost uncanny gift for dialects and a thorough understanding of the psychology of the people who speak those languages and dialects”; because of these qualifications, Hendrik Willem thought his younger son could be much more useful in the army intelligence. Though Davis had little direct contact with army intelligence, he promised van Loon to look into the matter and try to recommend Willem for that branch of the service. A few months later, Lieutenant van Loon was in fact transferred to the Military Intelligence Training Center in Maryland (Willem preferred to give the credit for his transfer to his commanding officer).57 Van Loon’s warm feelings for his son Willem were also expressed in a Christmas Eve speech at Freedom House in New York City, broadcast live on WNCA Radio’s “The Voice of Freedom.” After pondering the theme of liberty and freedom, which the radio station had asked him to do, he made references to Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and the Biblical assignment to love one’s neighbor, which was all so much in contrast with the current situation. Standing on the threshold of a new year that would decide whether the world would be a “world of good or world of evil,” van Loon hoped the fight would lead to “a world based upon the liberty and the integrity of the human individual.” He concluded his radio talk with a

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message that was personal but also on behalf of millions of parents in the United States assembled around a Christmas tree whose thoughts were with sons in the armed forces. On behalf of these fathers and mothers he said, “We miss you my boy. We miss you more than we hope you will ever know. But it is right that it should be that way. . . . You left everything but by doing so you gained everything. For future generations will bless you and will revere your name and they will say: ‘He was one of those who gave us a world at last fit for decent human beings—a world based upon the liberty and the integrity of the human individual.’ ”58 As a well-known American, van Loon’s activities in 1942 were regularly covered by newspapers and periodicals. For instance, a full-page article in New York Herald Tribune Books mentioned van Loon’s playing the violin as his favorite form of relaxation, while House and Garden in its July issue featured a big photo of van Loon and Grace Castagnetta on the porch of Nieuw Veere showing van Loon’s hobby of reconstructing famous battle lines of the past with tin soldiers. And the New York Times kept track of his activities as a much sought-after public speaker.59 Despite his “wobbly heart,” the year that was drawing to a close had again been very busy for van Loon with the publication of his Lives as a highlight. He could also boast that an essay on Beethoven, repurposed from The Arts, was included that year in This Is My Best. On the flap this anthology was advertised as “a veritable library in one volume of contemporary American literature in all its phases” and “a truly democratic anthology” because the choice of the authors in this volume was not made by the editor; instead ballots had been sent to some twenty thousand librarians, literary critics, book dealers and to many readers of books and magazines—all of which had resulted in the selection of “America’s 93 Greatest Living Authors.” As the editor observed, this book represented “America in its many moods, its various colors, its many aspects.” Van Loon was in select company as one of his adopted land’s best writers, along with such luminaries as Carl Sandburg, John Steinbeck, Eugene O’Neill, Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, H.L. Mencken, Van Wyck Brooks, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos. In the biographical section of This Is My Best, van Loon said that he had “always been much too busy to (1) make money (2) reduce.” As a consequence he now weighed 269 pounds (here he was flattering himself, as he weighed close to 300 pounds) and was “obliged to work as hard as ever before to make both ends meet.” The only ambition he admitted of was “that he may be remembered as that disciple of Erasmus and Spinoza who devoted all his time to the propagation of the faith of Mutual Goodwill and Tolerance.”60

Chapter 16

Living on Borrowed Time (1943–1944) In an article published in the December 1942 issue of TOMORROW, van Loon had expressed his concern about the younger generation who, in his view, felt lost because the older generation had failed to teach them the importance of ideals and had not sufficiently provided them with spiritual leadership and heroes who could serve as an example. Van Loon hoped, he wrote, that “the younger generation once more be shown the road to true happiness, let them be shown that the only lasting treasures are those things we have discarded, let them once more understand that life can be the most magnificent, the most glorious of all experiences.” That conviction was an important reason for him to sign a contract with Dodd Mead to produce a number of children’s biographies of heroes, which he called the Fighters for Freedom. The series would begin with Thomas Jefferson and Simon Bolivar was to follow.1 Van Loon’s biography of Jefferson came out on 13 April 1943, the twohundredth anniversary of the birthday of America’s third president—an event marked in Washington by President Roosevelt’s dedication of the recently completed Jefferson Memorial. In his dedication address FDR hailed Jefferson as “Apostle of Freedom” and expressed his view that with the dedication of this “shrine to freedom” the nation was “paying a debt long overdue.” Van Loon also presented Jefferson to his readers as a hero and described him as “the greatest American of all time and books” and as “a man whose mind was so versatile that he himself was the most marvelous of ‘wanderers’ in the best sense of the word.” In short, as a man he wanted his readers “to know, to understand and to love.” However, van Loon was not afraid to bring up the question that puzzled so many people: Why did Thomas Jefferson—who declared before the whole world that all men are created equal and entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—keep almost a hundred slaves on his own plantation? According to van Loon, Jefferson

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“way down deep in his heart felt just the way all of us do today—that there is absolutely no excuse” for the system of slavery but in his days “he had practically no other choice” as the economic and social fabric of Virginia was based on “the wicked nightmare of human slavery.” The best Jefferson could do and did in that situation, van Loon argued, was to treat his slaves well, like a father treated his children, and he tried to persuade his neighbors to do likewise.2 Although the New York Times Book Review thought this portrait was “all light and no shade,” and had hoped the author would have captured more fully the flavor of Jefferson’s personality, the critic did acknowledge van Loon’s ability “to set forth most eloquently” Jefferson’s “lifelong ardor for freedom in all its forms, . . . the variety of [his] services to America as well as the great sweep of his vision.” The New Yorker observed, “There have been other lives of Jefferson for young people which were more detailed and probably more accurate, but none which, in such short space, so vividly places Jefferson in relation to his own time and to ours.”3 Just before the publication of Thomas Jefferson, van Loon was the subject of a three-part profile in The New Yorker. In Richard Boyer’s “The Story of Everything,” van Loon was portrayed as a lonely, misunderstood genius, massively proportioned with a fragile and delicate spirit hidden in his bulk. In the interview van Loon attributed his loneliness to “his five-track mind,” which went so fast that ordinary people had trouble to follow him. His monologues, switching from one topic to another without interruption, were a barrier behind which lurked the lonely van Loon. In his ambition “to give all knowledge to all men” van Loon, Boyer wrote, served as “the dean of the popularizers” (“the school of writers who wish to make knowledge popular, painless, and profitable”) and was in a perpetual struggle with academia, where “knowledge was the victim of a conspiracy by the pedagogues and professional scholars, who had swathed it in an obscure and tedious ritual which made it an absolute monopoly of their priesthood.” By publishing one book after another, van Loon worked feverishly to rescue knowledge from academic darkness and was dismayed when his critics pointed out errors in his works. “Who gives a damn about some little professor?” he rhetorically asked. Boyer ironically noted, “These fellows simply fail to grasp the fact that van Loon is a self-contained universe. They cannot know that he has studied the universe by studying himself. He is his own source material and his own research. . . . The difference between van Loon and other historians is that he goes to the vivid reality of his own personality for information, while his more anemic rivals are forced to derive their material second-hand from the dusty records of mere authorities.” No less devastating was Boyer’s observation that van Loon had “one sure test of whether a fact is right or wrong. If he finds it in his own memory, it

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must be right. If he plumbs his own depths without finding it, it must be wrong. If he has believed a thing for years, it must be true.” Boyer wrote that in subject matter van Loon had “a greater range than a Sears Roebuck catalogue” but that the author, “always the dominant figure” in his books, had disarmingly said that the common theme of all his books was “Van Loon on Life.” Being a hypochondriac van Loon had told the interviewer that thirty years ago he had started to create a myth about himself: He did not give the public a picture of himself as he is but as he would once have liked to be, having “felt that the real van Loon was rather lacking in glamour.” This constant play-acting, he admitted, had led to the situation in which he sometimes “gets mixed up and doesn’t know which van Loon he really is.” Indeed, Jan Greshoff would later note that, although one-on-one van Loon was simplicity itself, the moment he was in the company of others he play-acted the role of the Great Writer and Celebrity. As mentioned earlier, Boyer ended his profile by poking fun at van Loon’s theory of being the reincarnation of Erasmus.4 Van Loon fumed when seeing the profile, calling it “a foul and rotten piece of work full of misstatement and misquotations.” He regretted having given “the stinker” his time and the hospitality of his house. As he complained to his son Willem, “The purpose of the Profiles is to sell New Yorkers at the expense of the victims who can not help themselves because they are rarely in a position where they can answer.” He intended to wait until someone else was attacked and would then write an article on how a New Yorker profile is made. Some time later he could write an acquaintance that to his satisfaction the author of his profile “was beaten up the other day by a fellow whose wife he tried to approach in a night club, and so after all, there is a God.”5 Richard Boyer had written that van Loon suffered “from either real or imagined heart trouble” and had described a scene at the Waldorf-Astoria where van Loon, before tiptoeing like “an elephant acting cute” and surprising the young ladies he had invited for lunch, entered the famous hotel “by walking backward up the stairs to the lobby.” This procedure, of course, Boyer wrote, stopped many ordinary, forward-walking folk in their tracks, but it was based on van Loon’s theory that walking in reverse lightened the burden upon his heart which, he claimed, had been so strained by his many years of hard work. In the summer of 1943 van Loon told several people that he was “living on borrowed time” and was convinced that the beginning of “the last chapter” had started. His chest felt, he told L.A. Ries, “like Rotterdam must have been immediately after the destruction.”6 Despite his obesity, van Loon continued to eat as heartily as before and showed his delight for food by contributing that year to no less than three books with recipes and he published a booklet on an eighteenth-century

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chef de cuisine and saucemaker. His heart condition also made him more prone to irritability and fits of depression than usual. According to his son Willem he “grew more morose, petulant and touchy” and the atmosphere at Nieuw Veere in 1943 became “damp and dismal.” Hendrik Willem was irritated at Jimmie’s loosing herself in crosswords and exclaimed, “not an idea or a thought or a suggestion or an act—this drugging of the mind by puzzles, puzzles, puzzles.” At the same time he drugged himself with work and observed, “I should never have a breathing space during which I am able to realize the absurdly one-sided existence I have lived and now, beloved son, it is too late to do much about it.” He also complained to Rene Scudamore about his boredom and sighed, “I have reached such a point of despondency that I of all people bought a bottle of cognac today to try and see what I can do with a small glass after dinner but Jimmie who hates sitting at table after dinner will gulp it down and will go and sit in the other room to listen to the news.” He felt his life had dwindled down to an “abjectly dull and uninspiring” existence and before long he would “begin to contemplate bidding farewell to the whole mess.”7 Even his warm friendship with Grace Castagnetta suffered. When he had heard her playing on the radio in November, he wrote his son in a dark mood that “she used to have a lovely tone and now it is harsh as hell, magnificent but no appeal.” In his view she had “changed completely and for the worse.” His relationship with Josa Morgan also had ups and downs. One time he wrote that having the Austrian around was fun “for I have not laughed so much for two dozen years.” Another time he told her “that love made him sad and sex was just sh . . .” He tried to play her off against Rene Scudamore, whom he invited in March to stay at Nieuw Veere. But the two women got along well, and the visit also cured Rene, as she wrote Willem, of “a 25 year old infatuation.” The presence of Josa, whose gaiety was counterbalanced by black moods, jealousies, and temperamental outbursts, created so much tension at Nieuw Veere that Willem thought the letters he received from his father, Jimmie, Rene, Josa, his sister-in-law Janet, and the house servant William Spiess, each reporting on the situation, were like “bulletins from a domestic war zone.” What really drove van Loon crazy was Josa’s possessiveness and her not understanding the importance of privacy. She was always there, seeming to know the contents of every letter and overhearing every telephone conversation, and making it impossible for him to be a moment by himself. He knew he had done everything he could to help her, including paying for medical treatment, new clothes, and a weekly stipend. Her presence led to Jimmie’s loss of control of the household and old friends disappeared one by one as there was no space for them.8 In April Jimmie recorded in her diary that “Han and Josa had a fight but all is not yet ended.” Two months later she noted that Hendrik Willem had

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once more sent Josa back to New York to get some rest. But in September she was back again, peace was made, and for the time being the old life was resumed. In October van Loon reported to the poet and editor Henry G. Leach he was glad Josa did odd jobs for him in New York and on the occasions he had to attend meetings, “she goes with me for I like company in my misery of walking through the forbidding gulleys of the Big Town.” Josa’s assistance was all the more welcome, he felt, since Jimmie had come to hate New York and preferred to stay at home. In her diary entry of 31 December 1943, for instance, Jimmie penned, “Have not spent one night out this entire year!”9 Fortunately, there were also brighter days at Nieuw Veere with visitors whose company van Loon enjoyed. In October, for instance, Thomas Mann and his wife came to stay. On the last day of the visit, Jan Greshoff and L.A. Ries joined the party for lunch. Greshoff was struck that, unlike at other occasions—where van Loon dominated the conversation and made himself the center of all attention—this time van Loon listened and that all attention in a natural way went to Thomas Mann, whom van Loon clearly admired. Accompanying the Nobel Prize winner back to New York, Greshoff observed that he had a great respect for “the depth and sincerity of van Loon’s humanity, his sacrifices, his resourcefulness, and his ardent and militant convictions.”10 In the meantime van Loon had kept up his correspondence with Princess Juliana and her secretary, Willem van Tets. Juliana was expecting a baby in January 1943, and van Loon knew that according to the Dutch constitution the child had to be born on Dutch territory to be an heir to the throne. On his own initiative, in December 1942, van Loon suggested to New York Mayor La Guardia that as Canada had no historical relationship with the Netherlands, he invite the princess to come to the former New Amsterdam and bear the child there. He expected La Guardia’s legal department to easily “fix up some legal hokus pokus” by which the floor of some New York hospital could for a few hours be declared Dutch territory. The news of such an arrangement, he thought, would “do marvels for our propaganda in the Netherlands.” La Guardia, of course, pointed out that such a matter could be easily solved through an embassy, always considered to be part of the domain of the original country. In any case, the playful relationship between the two men was demonstrated in the mayor’s reply: “Naturally, anything you say that I do not agree with, I must assume that you are right and I am wrong.” And he emphasized, “I need not tell you that anything that I may be able to do to make you happier is a command.”11 On 19 January 1943 Princess Juliana gave birth to her third child, Princess Margriet, on a location in Ottawa that Canada had temporarily declared

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Dutch territory. President Franklin Roosevelt was Margriet’s godfather. After a visit from Princess Juliana and her children that October, FDR delightfully reported to Prince Bernhard, “Juliana and the children were at Hyde Park for three days and I have completely fallen in love with my Godchild—the very best behaved baby I have ever seen. She took to me at once.”12 Van Loon kept sending a stream of presents, drawings, and book ideas to Ottawa, which were very much appreciated by Princess Juliana and her family. In February the crown princess’s thank-you note included her attempt at a van Loon style drawing, as she mentioned her wish to show him Princess Margriet in the near future. On the first of January 1943 she also sent van Loon by telegram a poem she had especially written for him, the closing lines of which read: “Your lovely gifts in tea and art gave forty three a splendid start.” In March Jimmie wrote the princess that van Loon had been forced to take rest as “his heart rattled on as if it were the propeller of an empty ship facing a storm” but she hoped he would be able to go back to his desk again in April when his book Thomas Jefferson came out. He began working on the second volume in his Fighters for Freedom series, a biography of Simon Bolivar. And he was contemplating to write another history of Holland, which in his view was needed in order to keep the Americans interested in the country of his origin as he had no confidence at all in the “un-American” propaganda efforts of the Netherlands Information Bureau in New York.13 Because the Nazi authorities in the Netherlands by this time had confiscated all radio sets, van Loon was asked to contribute fortnightly comments on the American news; these were sent to London, printed, and distributed from the air over occupied Holland by allied planes in the pamphlets De Wervelwind and De Vliegende Hollander. Alexander Loudon cabled the Dutch government in London that van Loon’s news comments, because of the author’s sensitivities, had not been checked by either himself or the Netherlands Information Bureau. He therefore cautioned his government about the author’s “impulsive nature which currently made him see everything through very rose-colored spectacles.” Soon Adriaan Pelt of the Netherlands Government Information Bureau in London reported criticism received through underground channels from people in Holland; van Loon’s projections of when the war would end were considered far too optimistic, to cite just one complaint. Because everyone involved was keen on having van Loon continue his contributions, he was asked to send more factual information, “dry as a bone” and whenever necessary, just “soberly explained.” When L.A. Ries discussed the criticism with van Loon, the latter agreed to adjust his texts and even to submit them beforehand to the Netherlands Information Bureau. But once Ries reviewed two new van Loon texts, including the requested factual information, he could come to no other conclusion than

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that a London journalist could supply “dry news” better, and that it was improper to ask van Loon for this sort of thing. In Ries’s opinion, one could only ask van Loon for his strongly personal, sometimes paternalistic and pathetic, sometimes very funny views—in short, the “Oom Henk” from America was needed. Adriaan Pelt agreed that since this approach would not fit anymore, it was wiser to stop asking for van Loon’s help.14 If he could not be of service to the Dutch in Holland, van Loon continued his war relief activities in the United States, and in July 1943 he accepted the chairmanship of the Nationalities Division of the New York Committee of the National War Fund. The press release announcing his appointment quoted Hendrik Willem adding drama to his frail health: “I had resigned as chairman of the Queen Wilhelmina Fund and from all other organizations because my doctor had suggested that a slight rest would not be out of place. But since living in a world dominated by Adolf Hitler is worse than all the rhumba-ing hearts in the world, I may as well forget a minor personal inconvenience and take a little more active part in the affairs of today. You can therefore depend upon me to do my share of such things as have to be done and, as long as you do not hire space from our good friend Governor Smith and hold your meetings on top of the Empire State Building and expect me to walk up, I will be there and with surprising punctuality.” Over the next six months, van Loon did a good job as chairman of the Nationalities Division, which soon was renamed the United Nations Relief Wing, appearing at many events in New York and doing some radio broadcasts as part of its fundraising efforts. Afterward, van Loon was happy to report to Mrs. Roosevelt that the United Nations Relief Wing had exceeded its quota of $750,000.15 In his State of the Union address of 6 January 1941 Franklin Roosevelt formulated his vision of a postwar world, one based on four essential human freedoms: Freedom of Speech and Expression, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. The concept of the Four Freedoms was incorporated into the Atlantic Charter, signed by Roosevelt and Churchill that summer, and it subsequently served as the moral cornerstone of the United Nations. As the Four Freedoms were at first rather abstract for many Americans, the well-known artist Norman Rockwell made them concrete in four paintings that appeared in the popular weekly Saturday Evening Post. Roosevelt’s concept of the Four Freedoms, transformed into enduring national symbols by Rockwell’s paintings, made the American public aware of the war’s objectives and served for many as an inspiration to continue their war efforts and sacrifices. But Hendrik Willem van Loon was not excited at all about the Four Freedoms. In 1943 he continued to criticize Washington’s public relations policy and felt that his ideas were not appreciated enough. As he expressed it sulkily in a letter that summer, “I find that most of my

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charming little plans for the decent future of the human race have been successfully ditched, and all we have got is the Four Freedoms, with a collection of the world’s worst artwork to grin at us from every station wall.” And in another letter he wrote in dismay about Roosevelt and the Four Freedoms, “Mr. Roosevelt has definitely made up his mind that politics come first. And as a result, all his liberal-minded former supporters have been forced to leave the camp of what once upon a time was their natural center of interest. I am sorry, but we were forced out. We do not intend to cooperate with the yessaying incompetents who now surround him . . . We wanted a leader for a great human cause and we got a politician. And the Four Freedoms . . . won’t do the trick. We wanted something a little more concrete on the side of a positive idealism. We did not get it and that is that.”16 Because of his disappointment in the president, van Loon did not correspond with FDR that year. In his New Leader column, “Van Loon’s Diary,” he expressed the view that the president had “lost all direct touch with the people entrusted to his care” and was surrounded by opportunists. In his posthumously published autobiography, Report to Saint Peter, van Loon even had his son assert about these opportunists, “New Deal boys don’t go to heaven. God doesn’t like them. They’re always bothering him with their pamphlets about how he should really rule the world.” Van Loon’s criticism, to be sure, was not targeted at the first lady. Although he did not always like her linguistic skills in her “My Day” column, he did admire her travels overseas to visit the American troops, which were, he wrote in his New Leader column, a clear sign of her “essential kindness of heart,” which made him “bow to her as one of our great women.”17 In several New Leader contributions that year van Loon disparaged U.S. foreign policy which, in his opinion, was too naive to deal with “the world’s foulest collection of sharp-minded hyena’s and panthers,” referring to representatives of the Axis powers. In that respect he thought that Joseph Stalin, for whom, he hastened to say, he had no great personal affection, had a much better understanding of his enemies than the State Department. His heart even overflowed, van Loon wrote, “with sincere gratitude towards our Bolshevik friends for doing such a magnificent job at killing Nazis.” In September he wrote, “Our State Department does not know its job because it does not know history . . . Furthermore, it seems to be under the impression that by giving certain things certain names you turn them into things into which you want to turn them. . . . [S]omehow or other we continue to exist without any true understanding of the motive which makes the nations of Europe and Asia click the way they do.”18 As far as making blueprints for a peaceful postwar world was concerned, van Loon thought that first and foremost absolute priority should be given to winning the war. In his “Gloomy New Year Thoughts” of January 1944 he

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anticipated “two months of such hideous news that my wobbly heart trembles at the mere thought of it.” Although he realized that such news was to come sometime, “for one can only make war by either killing or getting killed,” he resented that the American public had been kept “in such complete ignorance about the real issues at stake.” In his last contribution to The New Leader in February 1944 he was upset that many radio programs discussing the postwar world seemed to suggest that winning the war was taken for granted. This, in van Loon’s view, was still far from the case and he criticized the government’s policy for being driven by expediency instead of moral principles. “For the sake of expediency,” van Loon asserted, “we have made every kind of sacrifice to our national self-respect and have betrayed our destiny. We have practised expediency in Japan, in Spain, in Italy, in dealing with the French, in dealing with every nation on the face of the earth.” It was the great mistake of the United States government, van Loon felt, that the country for the sake of expediency had been unwilling “to make a bold declaration of the principles for which we are fighting—the decency of the human race and the integrity of the individual.” What a terrible mistake van Loon made here. As if Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter were not based on moral principles par excellence. It is clear that van Loon had become prejudiced against the government’s efforts to create a moral basis for a postwar world. His criticizing the government had become pathetic.19 That educating the people was still close to his heart, van Loon made clear again in a New Leader column stating that education, though maybe not “the remedy for all our ills, . . . surely can do wonders with an awful lot of them.” He regretted to say that labor in the United States, compared to its sister organizations in European countries like England, Holland, and Switzerland, had been lagging behind in providing the people a general education. This attitude of indifference about the cultural aspects of life, the so-called highbrow stuff, and its preference for “the Hollywood fodder which is opium for the adolescents,” he thought, would after the war keep labor in the United States from playing an important role in political, social, and economic life. Van Loon therefore suggested that a Book-of-the-Month Club for labor be started that could serve as “a broad historical (in the widest sense of the word) foundation upon which the individual reader can afterwards construct his own philosophy of life.” He realized that “Such a Labor Book Club might not prove to be a short-cut to the Millennium. But it would allow millions of people who are now without any intellectual compass . . . to find their way with a much better chance of getting where they want to go than is possible for them if left to their own limited experiences and lack of concrete knowledge.”20 It was clear to him, as he also had written some months before in a memo about the same theme, that labor in America would remain “a sluggish party”

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until it recognized “the need of raising the cultural level of the mass of the labor population and has put itself intellectually on the same basis as those whom it intends to replace.” Van Loon was very well aware that the laboring man was “a pretty suspicious person about all efforts to ‘educate’ and ‘sissify’ him.” But, fortunately, he could recommend three “readable books” that could serve as “a sort of preliminary course in general education” and help raise the “present unsatisfactory cultural standards” of America’s laboring classes. These three books, he claimed shamelessly, were The Story of Mankind, Van Loon’s Geography, and The Arts. He admitted that these three volumes maybe did “not contain all the facts, but they contain a sufficient number of facts to give the average reader a workable background for a somewhat larger view of life and history than he possesses at the present moment.” The records do not give evidence that van Loon’s memo, which was probably addressed to the editor of The New Leader, led to any follow-up by labor leaders.21 Van Loon was performing his role as educator when in November 1943 his second book in the Fighters for Freedom series, The Life and Times of Simon Bolivar, was published. Having realized during the writing process his own “abysmal ignorance” about the history of South America and that the continent had produced at least three George Washingtons, had made him rewrite the whole manuscript all over again to get the right perspective, he asserted in the foreword. And he confessed that even after a year of studying the topic, the very thought of exposing his book to the criticism of South American scholars made him tremble. But as that ignorance was shared by most of his fellow Americans, he had decided not only to tell the story of Bolivar’s life, but also provide the historical background of the Liberator’s struggle for freedom and independence. By doing so, he hoped to contribute to his countrymen’s understanding that the United States was not the only country on the American continent “with a noble and glorious past.” And he hoped, too, that “their ignorance, thus exposed, [would] only lead to a greater sense of humility.” He gave credit to Bolivar as the first man with the vision of a United States of the whole of the American continent and it is clear from this captivating story that for van Loon Simon Bolivar was “the great apostle of liberty, the man who had sacrificed everything he had ever called his own, his life, his wealth, his happiness and health, upon the altar of freedom.” And as such he was in van Loon’s eyes an example of an inspirational leader “who fought the good fight until the bitter end, and who prevailed.”22 Van Loon told Ding Darling that he had written the book primarily for South Americans. For that reason it simultaneously appeared in Spanish and Portuguese. He thought that the lives of Bolivar published thus far in the United States had portrayed him as “a nice New England gentleman or pseudo-Jefferson and that just don’t work with them South Americans. Now they have a nice and flattering little booklet devoted exclusively to their

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hero and I hope they won’t find too many mistakes in it, though I am so tired I hardly care what anybody finds or says.” But, of course, he did care what others thought about this new publication. And when reviews did not come out quick enough, he impatiently and prematurely complained to Van Wyck Brooks that the book did not get any attention because of the lack of interest in South America and that none of the reviewers knew anything about the southern part of the American continent.23 When the reviews appeared, van Loon was pleased to be recognized for writing an enthusiastic, readable, and appealing biography for children. He was even surprised, he wrote his banker friend Alfred Howell, to see that The Life and Times of Simon Bolivar gave him “a hell of a swell press” in some Catholic periodicals—Commonweal, for instance, had praised it as “a fine tribute to the work of the Church with the Indians of South America. An excellent book”—and van Loon even wondered, “Is anything the matter with me? My black Protestant heart, though wobbly, is beginning to feel worried. Praise from the Pope, indeed!” It apparently made him forget his criticism of Roosevelt and in early January 1944, having read in the newspapers that FDR had the flu, he wrote the president’s secretary that he had asked his publisher to send a copy of Simon Bolivar to the White House as “a light diet of literature” for the patient whom he also sent “all the good wishes of his obedient servant Hendrik Willem van Loon.” This was to be his last letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt.24 The publication of Simon Bolivar even led to the invitation by the president of Venezuela, General Isaias Medina, who was visiting New York for two days in late January 1944, to meet van Loon in the city. On the first day of his visit to New York President Medina was presented with a gold medal by the Bolivarian Society of the United States to honor him “as a high exponent of democracy in Latin America,” as the New York Times reported. So, a meeting the next day with the author of Simon Bolivar seemed all the more appropriate. Van Loon enjoyed the pleasant conversation with the president which, he reported to Stephen Bonsal, took place in “a non-existent English and a very rusty and completely italianized Castilian” and, of course, it caressed his ego to be singled out for this literary honor. Van Loon and Jimmie were even invited to visit Caracas as guests of the Venezuelan government, an invitation that was flattering indeed, but one that van Loon could not accept because of the frail condition of his heart.25 After van Loon had published his successful Lives, in the next “two miserable years of indecision,” as he phrased it in his autobiography, he made many attempts at writing another big opus but to no avail. These attempts included the trilogy on the history of the Netherlands and a book on the eighteenth century that he intended to make a part of a projected new history of the world in eight volumes. As he wrote, “I would do thirty or forty pages

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and then I would realize that once more I was barking up the wrong tree. Then these discarded bits of manuscript would go into the drawers of my desk until there were so many that I had to relegate them to the attic.” His books in the Fighters for Freedom series were therefore, as Willem called them, “potboilers” until an idea for a big book could be worked out successfully. But as this did not happen, van Loon’s younger son suggested his father start working on an autobiography, hoping that by coming to grips with his childhood “he might perhaps exorcise his own personal demons.” In June 1943, a friend brought a Dutch Franciscan friar to Nieuw Veere and contrary to van Loon’s expectations, they had such a pleasant time together—as he had written in his Lives, St. Francis of Assisi was one of his favorite historical figures—that afterward instead of a thank-you note the Franciscan sent his host a charming three-page story entitled “Hendrik Willem van Loon Goes to Heaven.” Gerard Willem advised his father to use this little story as an introduction to the autobiography. This, then, became van Loon’s Report to Saint Peter.26 Of course, Van Wyck Brooks and others had already suggested van Loon write an autobiography. As usual, van Loon kept several friends, including Willem van Tets and Eleanor Roosevelt, informed about the progress he made with this project. “It takes a spiritual exhibitionist to write a good autobiography,” he asserted in the book. But he did not see himself as “an ideal candidate for self-confessional honors.” His aim therefore, he told Elmer Davis, was to write “an autobiography without any bios in it but the sort of things I would present to St. Peter if, when and how I had to present myself to that gentleman at the Heavenly Gate and offer some sort of excuse for being let in. I can make it a sort of Voyage autour de ma Vie and put everything into it like a good old French pot au feu. I hope to have it finished before the end of the war.” The book had to be positive, he wrote his son, with “no Spenglerian gloom,” and, he told Rene, it would be done in two volumes. Part one would deal with his youth in Holland and if after a year or so the public remained curious, he would report in volume two on the next forty years. When not churning out a magazine article or raising money for the United Nations Relief Fund, he spent the summer and fall of 1943 immersed in writing his autobiography. Writing this book was not easy, he wrote a friend: “I am a bit afraid of that job. It is so much like playing the Lord Almighty and all I am is a little middle class Dutch boy.” By November van Loon had scaled down the project to one volume, intending to end the story when he turned twenty-one. When van Loon died in March 1944, the manuscript stood at some two hundred pages and was still in his school days. The rest of the Report, as Jimmie wrote a friend, “he will have to make in person.”27 Although van Loon had never been religious, in 1943 he had joined New York City’s Unitarian Church of All Souls, where an old friend, Laurance

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Neale, was minister. Though in jest van Loon told someone he liked the Unitarian Church because “the only time the name of Jesus is mentioned in a Unitarian Church is when the janitor falls downstairs,” in his Lives he had praised the Unitarians for always having been “among the most courageous and intrepid champions of human freedom” and to have significantly contributed to the progress made in American civilization.28 Van Loon made a public statement of his allegiance to the Unitarian Church in his article “This I Believe,” which was published in the April 1943 issue of The Christian Register, the monthly publication of the American Unitarian Association. Though he had lived sixty years without feeling the need of becoming a member of a religious organization, he explained in this article, by 1942 he felt that he was not doing right in keeping entirely to himself. He was attracted to the Unitarians because Unitarianism offered “room for every thought and every opinion, if it be based upon the conviction that mankind can save itself only if it accepts the words of the greatest spiritual benefactor of all time, that humble but undaunted prophet from the village of Bethlehem, who first of all had the courage to proclaim these words, ‘My brethren, nothing can ever be accomplished in this world unless, first, you learn to love one another.’ It seems perhaps a little too simple! But all the great things in life are really very simple.” Van Loon hoped for a postwar world in which “good humor and tolerance would prevail and all religious tenets be reduced to one sublime expression of faith: ‘We are all of us fellow travelers along the same road and, as such, it behoves us to work together for one common purpose, the greatest amount of happiness for each and all of our companions.’ ”29 Van Loon’s often strained relationship with the Dutch community in New York again found expression in some grumpy letters he wrote in December 1943 and January 1944. The Netherland–America Foundation had decided to honor Princess Juliana for promoting Netherland–American friendship. Eleanor Roosevelt had agreed to present a medal to the princess at a dinner on 10 January at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Presiding over the occasion would be Thomas J. Watson, president of the Netherland–America Foundation and president of the International Business Machines Corporation. Van Loon, himself a director of the foundation, was annoyed that Watson had kept a medal he received from Hitler in 1937. This, of course, van Loon wrote a Dutch friend, made a bad impression on many Americans. The day before “that absurd dinner for Juliana” he angrily wrote his son that he had withdrawn from it. Was he jealous of the princess? Perhaps he thought that he should have been honored—after all, he saw himself as Mr. Holland in America. In any case, he deemed the princess’s speech as “terrible” and was upset about the behavior of Prince Bernhard, who was spotted in

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nightclubs like El Morocco. He also reported to Willem that Ambassador Loudon was having his troubles “with the princess who is not as bright as her Ma but as headstrong and who does not understand her position here at all and wants to go sightseeing and visit Hollywood and the like and [Loudon] says quite rightly it makes a hell of an impression what with no room on the trains to have a foreign royalty take up seven berths for secret servicemen and the like and maids and secretaries while there is no room for the soldiers.”30 On 14 January 1944, H.V. Kaltenborn gave a small dinner party in New York for van Loon’s sixty-second birthday. This lifted Hendrik Willem’s spirits a bit as that same day he had written a friend that the news from Holland was terrible and that he would never see his native country again. He felt that he was still “the uncle . . . who gets all the Dutch burdens loaded on his shoulders.” And he repeated the old complaint, “The official Dutch outfit is so hopelessly smug, Bourgeois in the stiffest sense of the word, that they affect my gastric ulcers.” However, when, shortly afterward, his Spanish translator, Maria Vasquez-Lopez, accused van Loon of having a bourgeois background himself, he was outraged. His indignant reply, with its self-aggrandizing but witty arguments, gives a good picture of his self-image shortly before his death.31 “Bourgeois background!” I love your nerve, Lady—indeed but I do! Me a bourgeois background, when I am the only historian who has actually lived through every experience he ever wrote about, from being blown sky-high to having seen peace made and having observed the nefarious influence of women upon the men who make the world go round! When I have even sacrificed myself to study that kind of women at first hand, which is worse than a charge of Cossacks with long lances, which prick you in the fanny unless you scramble. “Bourgeois background” indeed! And that to come from a woman who lived through one little lousy civil war and me the veteran of war and revolution and shipwreck and financial catastrophe (chronic catastrophe, at that) and then to tell me that I am an armchair savant! . . . When I got through college, I said to myself, “This will never do, for I don’t know applied history,” and I took service with the Associated Press and I went through every goddamn thing there was to be got through and I have seen it all with the exception of bullfighting, which was too much for me. . . . Bourgeois indeed! Who was the only correspondent in Antwerp during the siege! Me on account of my fine Flemish, and who started the Belgian Relief by his sob stories about the Flemish fugitives. Me, Lady. Who was arrested by the Germans and marched through Antwerp with the people lining the streets and saying, “What a pity that such a handsome man is going to be shot.” Me! Who was in every country during the last war! Me! Who went to Europe at the time everything was sunk and was almost sunk! Me! And who among historians knows what it means to sit in a lifeboat and spend the night on a stormy sea in a lifeboat? Me! Modesty (which is so characteristic of my makeup) forbids me to

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continue, but I have been there, Lady, and I know what it is to be caught by a nice drumfire and to be locked up in a pigsty by a drunken Belgian officer who did not understand how I, a civilian, could get there. Who has sacrificed himself time and again to know the inside working of the White House by eating the food in that noble mansion? Me! Who started the Finnish Relief business five years ago right here in this room? Me! . . . Who started and for three years ran the Dutch Relief business—started it five minutes after the invasion at midnight by releasing forty telegrams that had been prepared beforehand and saw to it that no Dutch man, woman, child, dog, or cat need go hungry? Me! Who started shortwave broadcasts to Holland five days after the invasion—broadcasts hidden in Bach concertos by the nimble-fingered Castagnetta? Me! Who has a heart that has murmurings on account of his years of overwork within the realm of practical and applied history? Me! And then you come and tell me I am a lousy bourgeois who don’t know anything but what he has thought about sitting on his broad fanny at his little desk, and that is the meanest thing any woman has ever done to me short of marrying me, and believe me, I had thought they had done everything. But they never at least accused me of being a bourgeois, and now it had to come from the one woman in the world from whom I had hoped for better things. . . . Here I sit and literally never go anywhere but stay home and work. . . . For work I must, since otherwise there are too many things I remember that are not so good. And here I am bourgeois, who does not know what the world is all about, though the goddamn Nazis killed my nephew in retaliation for my Dutch shortwave service and that was only the beginning and though even now our American prisoners of war are not allowed any of my books because, in spite of all their efforts, those broadcasts always came on the dot and then the Carmen of my dreams . . . calls me a lousy bourgeois! For that I shall not even bother to correct this letter. There! That will hold you! Hendrik Willem van Loon. (This for the censor for for you, I would not even sign this. Bourgeois, indeed!)32

Van Loon kept his loyalty to Clio, the Muse of History, until the very end. He was well aware, as he wrote a friend that winter, of the Americans’ “lack of sense of the historical values of life,” which still filled his “heart with profound anxieties” and he realized, “I can not make over a nation which for a hundred years has refused to consider history as something more than the diversion of gentlemen of leisure during their more casual hours.” Yet, in what was to be his last article, published posthumously in The Rotarian and appropriately entitled “Every Man a Historian,” he made a final attempt at persuading his readers that time spent on the study of history was significant for a better understanding of the present. To read a number of first-rate history books, he claimed, would be a wise preparation for postwar life and would make clear “that history is not merely a vague and distant subject. . . . On the contrary, it is the most vital and necessary study to which

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a citizen who means well by his fellowmen and the community at large can ever hope to devote himself. For the purpose of history is to give meaning to that which otherwise would make no sense. And sense is the basis for that reasonable and decently human life for which we are fighting.”33 In early 1944, in addition to the autobiography, van Loon worked on the third volume of Fighters for Freedom, a biography of Gustavus Vasa, who set Sweden free from tyranny and became King Gustavus I. Of the books in the series this was the one he liked most, van Loon told Willem, because he admired the Swedes for their dignity. Published posthumously, the book is more a sketch of the geography and history of the Scandinavian peninsula throughout the Middle Ages than a conventional biography focusing on the protagonist—only the last twenty pages tell of Gustavus Vasa’s heroic role in Swedish history.34 While working on his Gustavus Vasa, van Loon was also playing with several other book ideas. Among them was a plan for a new history for a new world that, he reported to Elmer Davis in January, was “burning in me as no book has ever done before.” He wanted to make the book a “contribution to the war. . . . If I could do the trick . . . and write a book that would open the eyes of at least a few people all over the world (and that much I have at least achieved) to the avoidable mistakes of the past.” Because he received a lot of fan mail from American soldiers, van Loon on 9 March presented the director of the Office of War Information his “bright idea” that he write his new history for a new world in the form of weekly illustrated letters to be sent to those American soldiers in camps and hospitals who would ask for it. He would give them a liberal view of history, mixing it up with art and geography. His aim was “to educate them in such a way that they are not conscious of being educated, and above all things, to give them a new interest in life.” The government did not have to pay him a penny for that nor for the stamps, he told Davis, as “America has been pretty good to me and I would take care of those details.” He trusted that in case the demand would exceed his funds, his publishers, who had “made a heap of money out of me, . . . would chip in.” In typical van Loon style, the educator wrote Davis, “This whole idea may be phoney but then again, it may mean a hell of a lot to thousands of poor devils who are waiting hungrily for just that. I have made the whole world read history. It sounds like a big order but it is true. Now why shouldn’t I be able to do the same thing for the poor kids in our own army, who judging from their letters to me are crazy for just that sort of thing?” The next day, however, van Loon decided instead to make another stab at writing his history of the eighteenth century and, as Jimmie recorded, “went happily to bed full of his new program.”35 None of these plans would come to fruition because his physical condition was rapidly deteriorating. On 1 February he suffered a heart attack and was

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urged by his physician to shun the staircase, take his meals in his rooms, and, of course, to avoid coffee, cigarettes, and any excitement. This inactive life set off a disastrous mood of melancholia and in no time van Loon had another fight with the equally temperamental Josa Morgan, triggered again by her reading his mail. This clearly meant exit Josa Morgan and van Loon exclaimed to his son, “God save us from any further Austrian intermezzi no matter how funny.” On 24 and 28 February van Loon again suffered heart attacks. The next several days he spent in bed, “feeling miserable,” as Jimmie penned in her diary. But after about a week he seemed to have regained enough strength to ponder his life and the immediate future. “Funny when you suddenly find yourself face to face with the prospect of the Finis,” he wrote a friend. “But on the whole I have no complaint. It has not been a happy but a very interesting life and that is the mood in which I will have to write if I want to keep alive. Yes, I am even getting sentimental. . . . I am so damnably grateful that I met a few people in my life whom I could truly love.” He was worried though, he wrote L.A. Ries, about the postwar position of the Netherlands and its colonies. With the anticolonial mood in the United States and the lack of imagination of the Dutch government, he feared the worst for his native country.36 Despite his fragile physical condition van Loon kept up his fighting spirit as was shown by a letter he sent to the Knickerbocker Weekly between his first and second heart attack. Printed in the 28 February issue of the weekly, van Loon’s letter again emphasized that this war was not just a struggle for oil or for territory, but that it was “a fight between common ordinary decency and a philosophy of life which common, ordinary, decent people could never accept.” He continued, “We have got to see to it that the people of the Netherlands shall once more be free. And until every kid on every shore can once more stick his little red, white and blue flag into every mudpie he has proudly made himself, we have but a single purpose in life and what that purpose is all of us know. We have got to fight and we must think only of those who depend upon us to give them that for which they themselves have made such gruesome sacrifices, THEIR FREEDOM AND RENEWED INDEPENDENCE.” But van Loon was not given to see that day.37 On the morning of Saturday, 11 March, van Loon felt rather well and, like the previous day, had his breakfast downstairs. This included burnt-butter omelettes, bread and butter, fried potatoes, and even two cups of coffee— taboo for a man in his physical condition, and sufficient ammunition to strike the final blow to an overstrained heart. He then went to his upstairs study where he typed a letter to Willem, then in London seconded to the British War Office, and went to the bathroom to shave. While he was standing before the mirror, his heart valve collapsed. Gasping for breath, he tore the bathroom door open and, purple-faced, tried to reach his bed.

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The housekeeper heard the commotion, raced to his bedroom, and caught him before he fell to the floor. But nothing could be done—by the time she got him on the bed, he was dead. It was 9:30 A.M. Jimmie reported to a friend, “It would have been hell for him to give up the vita activa and he went the best way for him: suddenly, without knowing anything about it.” Death came so suddenly that it prevented van Loon from carrying out his last wish: to revert to his native Dutch and recommend his soul to a “lieve God.” Just like Erasmus had done on his deathbed, but Hendrik Willem could not complete the final parallel between himself and his famous alter ego.38

EPILOGUE When van Loon’s doctor arrived, he could do no more than sign the death certificate and notify the undertaker. Jimmie then called Hank in Dorset, Vermont, who arrived that afternoon with Janet. She sent telegrams to the White House and the Netherlands embassy in Washington. FDR immediately replied, “Am shocked and saddened by the news that Hendrik’s life came so suddenly to its close. He was my true and trusted friend. Please accept this assurance of heartfelt sympathy for yourself and for all who mourn with you.” Eleanor Roosevelt was away on a three-week tour of the U.S. bases in the Caribbean and South America, so, she only heard the news upon returning to Washington. She then wrote Jimmie, “I have just heard the sad news of Mr. van Loon’s passing and feel I have lost a good friend. I always enjoyed meeting him and reading what he wrote and I am grateful for his many contributions to this period.”1 From the Netherlands embassy in Washington, Ambassador Alexander Loudon cabled Jimmie that he now had lost “a very dear friend with a big heart of gold.” A few days later he sent another cable on behalf of Queen Wilhelmina who had instructed him to convey her “sincerest sympathy” to Mrs. van Loon “in this moment of deep sorrow in which Holland has lost one of its great sons and a staunch champion of its cause.” Princess Juliana also sent her condolences from Ottawa.2 In the days and weeks after van Loon’s death Jimmie received hundreds of cables and letters from across the United States. Included were condolences from Herbert Hoover, Thomas Mann, Van Wyck Brooks, Carl Van Doren, Clifton Fadiman, Carl Sandburg, Albert Einstein, Elmer Davis, and Archibald MacLeish.3 On 27 March 1944 the Knickerbocker Weekly published a special memorial issue. In the editorial the readers were reminded that van Loon had suffered because of the lack of appreciation from many of his former countrymen. The editors hoped, therefore, that after the war Holland would realize what van Loon had done for the Dutch in the New World and would then understand “that never again a man will rise who at once had such a grip on America’s opinion and such a love for the country of his birth.” This special

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Knickerbocker Weekly issue contained heartfelt tributes to van Loon by famous persons who had known van Loon well, such as Adriaan Barnouw, H.V. Kaltenborn, Pearl S. Buck, and Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia. These and other contributors saluted him warmly and predicted that van Loon would live on in his works.4 There were glowing encomiums in other periodicals. In The New Leader’s obituary van Loon was hailed as a “laughing philosopher” and “a citizen of the world and of all the ages.” Other obituaries were published in the Saturday Review of Literature, Publishers’ Weekly, Time, Newsweek, The Nation, Survey Graphic, Scholastic, and The Horn Book. In the last periodical Anne Carroll Moore, curator of the Children’s Book Division of the New York Public Library, recalled her longtime friendship with van Loon, his intense love for Veere, and his performances for children in the Children’s Room of the Library. She had no doubt that van Loon “was a great educator in the true sense of the word.”5 Tributes to van Loon’s memory in the following months included a memorial program on radio station WEVD; “The Story of van Loon,” a musical profile written by David Broekman, director of music for the U.S. Treasury Department, the royalties of which would be donated to Dutch War Relief in the name of van Loon; and the launching of a 10,000 tons Liberty Ship, christened Hendrik Willem van Loon, by Jimmie in Florida in June. Earlier that month she had been invited by the Roosevelts to stay at the White House again, which was likewise a tribute to her deceased husband.6 A month after van Loon’s death his will was probated. Everything was left to Jimmie and upon her death it would be equally divided between his two sons, Hank and Willem. Jimmie slowly cleaned up his things and Willem was dismayed by how she gave away valuable books in Hendrik Willem’s library to strangers. Jimmie sold Nieuw Veere in 1954 and spent her last years in a nursing home in Stamford, according to Willem, drinking and allowing “herself to sink into apathy.” After her death in 1958 Willem kept what was left of van Loon’s papers at his home while working on his father’s biography. Ultimately, the Hendrik Willem van Loon papers ended up at Cornell University.7 It wasn’t until February 1947 that van Loon’s autobiography came out. CBS gave attention to the book in two radio broadcasts, the first was a review of the book and the second an interview with Jimmie. As Report to Saint Peter had been unfinished at the time of van Loon’s death, The New Yorker thought it had not much more than sentimental value. More positive was the review in the Saturday Review of Literature: “This fragment of an autobiography, wandering and untamed as the soul of which it writes, is a friendly hand extended in the darkness. It is the beginning of a great attempt to ‘tell us what the world is all about.’” Eleanor Roosevelt, who received a copy of Report to

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Saint Peter from Jimmie, wrote in her syndicated column that she grieved the author had not lived long enough to finish his story and only wished that this had been “one of his good, fat volumes instead of this fragment.”8 After van Loon’s death a number of his books, such as The Story of the Bible, The Life and Times of Rembrandt van Rijn, and The Arts, were reprinted. In 1999 van Loon’s first best seller, The Story of Mankind, was not only still in print but even “updated in a new version for the millennium.” Translations of The Story of Mankind, Tolerance, Rembrandt, The Story of America, Ships and How They Sailed the Seven Seas, The Story of the Pacific, Simon Bolivar, Gustavus Vasa, Van Loon’s Lives, The Life and Times of Johann Sebastian Bach, and Report to Saint Peter appeared between 1944 and 1951 in Portuguese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch.9 In 1957 The Story of Mankind was even turned into a Warner Brothers’ movie by producer, director, and cowriter Irwin Allen who assembled a cast of fifty Hollywood stars, including Vincent Price, Ronald Colman, Hedy Lamarr, Groucho, Harpo and Chico Marx, Dennis Hopper, Virginia Mayo, and Agnes Moorehead, to play the many historical figures. Advertised as the “greatest star cast ever,” Irwin Allen’s 92-minute movie was trashed, though, in the New York Times as “a protracted and tedious lesson in history that is lacking in punch, sophistication and a consistent point of view.” Variety thought the screenplay was “ponderous and dull” and that the producerdirector had also been unsuccessful “in his casting and handling of players, resulting in many uneven or stock performances.” The London Times assessed the movie as “an extremely odd film” and “an animated strip cartoon.” In retrospect, Hank van Loon thought it was a wonder this Hollywood product did not kill off all interest in his father’s writings but was relieved “that the movie was so lousy it never got to the public.”10 When The Story of America was reprinted in 1959, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. supplied an introduction, “In an age when knowledge grows increasingly specialized, the capacity to write about serious subjects in a lucid and arresting way becomes a necessity of civilized society. This was a gift which Hendrik Willem van Loon possessed to a high and abundant degree,” the historian wrote. “The Story of America is a book which has brought the American past to life for thousands upon thousands of readers. It still has its juices, and I am glad that another generation has an opportunity to savor and enjoy its spirit.” In the subsequent decades, however, few people in the United States are familiar with van Loon’s work. No doubt, his books have become outdated. In fact, his style now seems grandfatherly, but The Arts and Van Loon’s Lives are still extraordinary books that deserve to be remembered. The popularity of van Loon’s books seems to have been buried with the author. Of course, the fact that in the post–World War II era many more people had

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the opportunity to get a college education than in van Loon’s days and the increasing specialization of knowledge made the appetite for “outlines” obsolete and attempts to synthesize all knowledge more and more problematic, if not impossible. The heyday of the popularizers, the “merchants of light,” was indeed definitely over.11 Van Loon’s charming illustrations were an integral part of his work. As he himself once bragged to Jimmie, “most writers can only write and most artists can only art. But I can do both and so I ought to make my books into something like a good Wagner opera and make the pictures carry the text and vice versa.” Benjamin Huebsch observed that van Loon had a compulsive need to draw all the time. While in company in restaurants, Huebsch recalled, van Loon combined eating and talking with making drawings on the table cloths and napkins. Even while broadcasting, he turned out a number of doodles that were prized by studio staff. It was all a part of his showmanship. His letter writing was as compulsive and generous as his sketching. His correspondence ran into the thousands of letters each year.12 In their memorial issue, the editors of the Knickerbocker Weekly predicted that after the war van Loon would have his statue in Rotterdam or Veere and that streets or squares would be named after him, but his posthumous reputation in the Netherlands never rose that high. In the mid-1950s the Dutch government did begin offering a Hendrik Willem van Loon fellowship to an American graduate student working in the Netherlands, and a Hendrik Willem van Loon Foundation was established in Veere to raise funds to acquire and restore van Loon’s house De Houtuin. Its efforts to do that and make the house into a van Loon museum failed, and the foundation was dissolved in 1966. Its only visible remnant is a commemorative stone above the door of De Houtuin with van Loon’s face and the inscription “Here lived and worked Hendrik Willem van Loon, 1927–1932”—getting the facts wrong, since Hendrik Willem did not buy the house until 1928 and lived there actually until the summer of 1931 with one brief final visit a year later.13 Decades later, a revival of Dutch interest finally took place, more or less. The sailing race van Loon had organized in Veere in 1928 for the fishermen of Arnemuiden was revitalized in 1994 and since then the Hendrik Willem van Loon Sailing Day has become an annual event there. Around the same time, the town acquired a private collection of van Loon’s writings, artwork, and other memorabilia and put selections from it on exhibit in its beautiful Town Hall—in the very room even where, according to Van Loon’s Lives, Erasmus had stayed. In 1998 the Amsterdam weekly De Groene Amsterdammer published a list of the 100 Dutch men and women who had made their mark on the twentieth century. Anne Frank was number one, with van Loon at fifteen and Princess Juliana and Prince Bernhard eighteen and nineteen, respectively. It was a clear sign that Hendrik Willem van Loon was not completely

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forgotten in his native country, even if his ranking was not as high as he himself would have liked.14 In 1972 Gerard Willem van Loon published the first van Loon biography. Unfortunately, the son used this book to come to terms with his father, whom he considered to be a capricious egomaniac; the book barely focuses on Hendrik Willem’s work and influence. As he told someone during the many years he worked on the book, “in one way or another while Hendrik Willem was alive I stayed out of his way as much as possible for, although we were basically very close, his ego was such that he would have swamped me, like an ocean liner running over a canoe.” When Willem visited the Netherlands in 1957 to interview people for his biography, he left the impression with Dutch relatives and friends of his father that he was collecting materials against Hendrik Willem and Jimmie and made no secret that his resentment was based upon his feeling being neglected in his childhood. To Frances Goodrich he admitted that the writing of his father’s biography was based on his “desire to set the record straight” and should be seen as “an act of selfpreservation.” Indeed, he felt the writing process was like subjecting “himself to a long and grueling operation to have a deep-seated tumor removed.”15 Not surprisingly, the end result is an unbalanced biography that bristles with rancor and rage. Some quotations from van Loon’s letters are presented out of context and a few are even fabricated. According to his brother Hank the biography was based on bitterness. “Willem was just bent on emptying the slops on his old man and he only filled his own pants in the effort.” Of course, Willem had his own take on his book. When the work was finally finished, he wrote a friend that it was “ruthlessly honest. I have let the chips fall where they may. At the same time I do not think it is written without compassion for even the attempt to understand why things were as they were denotes a wish to forgive. Tout savoir c’est tout comprendre, tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.”16 Morris Bishop wrote in the Cornell Alumni News that van Loon deserved and with this book had received a fine biography but it was also obvious to him that the book had been “written largely to shake off an obsession.” Adriaan van der Veen, reviewing the biography in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, regretted that the son had not been able to take more distance from his father, showing himself several times as “the merciless critic.” Lacking in this book, according to van der Veen, was an analysis of van Loon’s works and he wondered, too, whether this biography made sufficiently clear how warm and generous van Loon had been toward others.17 In the Knickerbocker Weekly memorial issue, Carl Van Doren wrote, “Hendrik Willem van Loon was a noble scholar and a great man. I shall miss him as

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I should miss a mountain that had suddenly left its place. But the works of his mind will endure, still a mountain peak of learning and light.” Jan Greshoff, however, saw van Loon’s exuberant and unique personality as more important than his books. Van Wyck Brooks, too, did not see van Loon so much as an important writer, but as a unique character of his time and an important public figure. But for the public at large he was the gifted storyteller, the “prince of popularizers” as Brooks had called him and he therefore had no hesitation to describe the “all-curious, compassionate, humane” van Loon as “one of the lieutenants in the pilgrimage of humanity up from the caveman.” What’s more, Brooks claimed that “there were few in our time who so enabled one to share what Burckhardt called the ‘banquet’ of the art of the past.”18 That was the impression many contemporaries had. Abram Chasins, a composer, musician, and himself a host of radio music programs, recalled that van Loon “made me see history as a living and colorful and exciting adventure, not as a collection of dull dates.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed that van Loon was a man of gusto and that his overflowing vitality made his history books so witty and exciting. That professional historians at the time did not pay much attention to van Loon’s writings was, according to Schlesinger, “partly because of his rather slapdash scholarship, partly because his books sold too many copies.”19 In the end it is the fascinating personality of this talented and complex man that counts the most. About his positive sides a close friend wrote Jimmie right after van Loon’s death, “aside from his inspired talents with brush and pen, Hendrik was a singular genius, because of his ideals, his generosity and his loyalty. Plus his irrepressible humor. Those things in Hendrik meant more, in my humble estimation, than all his books and pictures combined. The world is well supplied with scholarly books and treasured art, but what an awful scarcity of decent-dealing men . . . and laughter!” His private life, however, amply shows that van Loon was not a saint: his many talents, energy, wit, and generosity were counterbalanced by flaws, such as vanity, egocentrism, arrogance, naivete, and stubbornness. He had all the prejudices of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant of his time: he was confident of his superiority to Catholics and to immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, and he often exhibited a deplorable anti-Semitism. Although he was aware of and even condemned the race problem in American society, he rarely interacted with African Americans in his daily life. Toward women he was the self-centered adult who wanted to be admired and babied. It made Gerard Willem sad to think that the “man who could give strangers and the world at large so much joy, could give himself so little.” In an earlier letter he had written that his father was “a thoroughly unhappy man as most clowns are.”20 But viewing the total picture, we may come to the same conclusion as did Wythe Williams in his obituary about van Loon: “This man had

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imperfections—as customary to all mankind. His character was many faceted as a diamond. Some of the facets were rough, even crude. But others filtered the light in a manner that both warmed and dazzled, and shot forth shafts that will shine throughout time.” It is unlikely that van Loon, as he expected, will be rediscovered as a genius a hundred years after his death. However, there can be no doubt that this Dutch-American Renaissance man made his mark on American cultural life in the 1920s through 1940s as a historian, journalist, artist, and radio commentator. He was first and foremost an educator, albeit a popularizer who aimed successfully at the public at large. Van Loon’s strength lay in bridging the gap between scholarship and the mass audience that admired him; without his books, articles, and radio talks, they would have little or no contact with history and art. (One can only speculate what his role as educator would have been in the television age.) Furthermore, in his role as Cassandra he warned the American public of the Nazi danger that lay ahead and he generously helped innumerable refugees.21 Simultaneously, this successful immigrant maintained a hate–love relationship with his native country and as a one-man propaganda bureau he tried to make the Americans “Dutch-conscious.” In his efforts, not in the least helped by his warm friendships with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Princess Juliana, he also served as a unique bridge between the United States and the Netherlands. Indeed, for many Americans in this era van Loon and the Netherlands were synonymous. The Dutch writer Maurits Dekker, for instance, recalled meeting a farmer in rural Georgia while traveling across the United States in 1939; upon hearing that Dekker was Dutch, the farmer took him home and proudly displayed a number of van Loon books in his bookcase, saying, “Your fellow countryman, our radio professor, has taught me to read.” And when he was in California, Dekker met a man on furlough from Alaska who claimed that he was able to pass the cold and long winters in his lonely post in Alaska thanks to the books of the famous Dutchman. His vanity aside, there was thus not too much exaggeration when van Loon once asserted, “I AM the Dutch idea here” and “I put Holland on the map.” No one, before or since, could claim a similar position. No other Dutch-American immigrant, before or since, was quoted more often in the New York Times. Hendrik Willem van Loon who fancied himself the twentiethcentury reincarnation of Erasmus and in his last years unashamedly signed letters as Henricus Rotterodamus, was, indeed, larger-than-life and many contemporaries agreed that life was much smaller when he died in March 1944.22

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Notes ABBREVIATIONS USED AMBZ COL COR

IN

NOTES

Archief Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken Columbia University, Butler Library Cornell University, Carl A. Kroch Library, Rare and Manuscript Collections EBvL Eliza Bowditch van Loon EBvLP Eliza Bowditch van Loon Papers ER Eleanor Roosevelt ERP Eleanor Roosevelt Papers FBI U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation FDR Franklin Delano Roosevelt FDRL Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum GAR Gemeentearchief Rotterdam GWvL Gerard Willem van Loon HAL Holland-America Line HHPL Herber Hoover Presidential Library HU Harvard University, Houghton Library HWvL Hendrik Willem van Loon HWvLP Hendrik Willem van Loon Papers KHA Koninklijk Huisarchief, Archief Prinses Juliana LC Library of Congress, Manuscript Division NA Nationaal Archief, Tweede Afdeling NIOD Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie NLMD Nederlands Letterkundig Museum en Documentatiecentrum NYPL New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division PPF President’s Personal File, Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers PSF President’s Secretary’s File, Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers SHSW State Historical Society of Wisconsin Story GWvL, The Story of Hendrik Willem van Loon (Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott Company, 1972) SUL Syracuse University Library, Department of Special Collections UIL University of Iowa Libraries, Special Collections Department UP University of Pennsylvania, Van Pelt Library, Special Collections Department ZA Zeeuws Archief

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Notes

Prologue 1. “Van Loon Buried in Old Greenwich,” New York Times, 15 March 1944; “Van Loon Rites Conducted in Old Greenwich,” New York Herald Tribune, 15 March 1944; “Van Loon Rites Attended By La Guardia, Dutch Envoy,” Greenwich Time, 15 March 1944; Unitarian Church of All Souls Archives, Rev. Laurance I. Neale Collection, HWvL Files, Text spoken by Rev. Laurance I. Neale at funeral service for HWvL in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, 14 March 1944; COR, HWvLP, box 3, folder 23, unidentified person to Rene Scudamore, 14 March 1944, and Jimmie to Rene Scudamore, 23 March 1944; GWvL, Story, 374–375; Author’s interview with Henry B. van Loon, 8 January 1994; F. Fraser Bond, “Hendrik and the Gate of Heaven,” Saturday Review of Literature 29 (15 June 1946): 22–23. 2. New York Times, 12 and 13 March 1944; New York Herald Tribune, 12 March 1944. 3. L.A. Ries, “Hendrik-Willem van Loon. An Appreciation of the Man,” Netherlands News Digest 3.1 (15 March 1944): 1–3. 4. J. Greshoff, “Hendrik Willem van Loon,” Knickerbocker Weekly, 20 March 1944: 38; Adriaan J. Barnouw, Monthly Letters on the Culture and History of the Netherlands (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1969), 240–244. 5. Grant Richards, “Mr. H.W. van Loon. An Appreciation,” The Times, 14 March 1944; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, FDR to Mrs. HWvL, 11 March 1944.

1 A Troubled Youth in Holland (1882–1902) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

HWvL, Report to Saint Peter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947), 190. HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, 21, 94; GWvL, Story, 6. GWvL, Story, 7; HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, 40–41. HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, 46–47. GWvL, Story, 7; HWvL, My School Books (Wilmington, Delaware: E.I. DuPont De Nemours and Company, 1939), 13, 16; HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, 106–109. HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, 28–29; HWvL, The Story of Mankind (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), 450. HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, 61–69. HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, 202–205, 214. HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, 208. Clifton Fadiman, ed., I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Certain Eminent Men and Women of Our Time (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939), 308–309; HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, 189, 194, 196, 200, 202. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to unidentified person, 3 March 1939. HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, 42–43, 105–106. GWvL, Story, 12–13. HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, 22.

Notes

271

15. GWvL, Story, 13–15; HWvL, Van Loon’s Lives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942), 5, 21–22; The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, With a Short Life of the Author by Hendrik Willem van Loon of Rotterdam Who Also Illustrated the Book. Published for the Classics Club (Roslyn, New York: Walter J. Black, 1942), 21. 16. COR, HWvLP, box 4, folders 1 and 2, mostly undated letters from HW’s mother to HW; HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, 212–213; The Praise of Folly, 22. 17. GWvL, Story, 16–17. 18. GWvL, Story, 17–18; HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, 15. 19. GWvL, Story, 18–19; COR, HWvLP, box 19, folder 21, obituary notice Elisabeth Johanna Hanken, 2 May 1900. 20. GWvL, Story, 20; COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 5, George L. Burr to Sarah Parker Hanken, 27 January 1902. 21. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 5, HWvL to George L. Burr, 27 March 1902. 22. GWvL, Story, 21–22, 24; GAR, HAL Passenger Lists 1900–1940, departure S.S. Potsdam, 24 July 1902; Photo in COR, HWvLP, box 58, folder 3, N4551.

2 Cornell–Harvard–Cornell (1902–1905) 1. HWvL, “I Knew a Saint,” Omnibook Magazine 1.10 (September 1939): 1; James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan Company, 1888). Two decades later, in his “H.v.L.” column in the Baltimore Sun, van Loon wrote that although most foreigners who came to the United States to study the country were advised to read Bryce’s American Commonwealth, he thought that these two volumes were “rather difficult to read.” Though Bryce’s book explained the political system, according to van Loon it was “not so good [at trying] to explain just what sort of people the fertile soil of this great continent produced during a century of pioneering and fighting and working and suffering, when the foundations of our modern state were being laid.” “H.v.L.” Sun column, 11 July 1922. 2. HWvL, “I Knew a Saint,” 1–2. 3. HWvL, “Impressions of Cornell,” in Raymond F. Howes, ed., Our Cornell (Ithaca, NY: The Cayuga Press, 1939), 2–4. 4. COR, HWvLP, box 1, folder 1, HWvL to Esther Bell-Robinson, 20 August 1902. 5. Photo in COR, HWvLP, box 58, folder 22, N4548, and in box 53, photograph album. 6. COR, HWvLP, box 1, folder 1, HWvL to Esther Bell-Robinson, 29 September 1902. 7. Charles L. Williams, retired U.S. Army major, to the mayor of Greenwich, Connecticut (probably 14 March 1944). The letter was published in the Greenwich Time, 16 March 1944, 3. 8. GWvL, Story, 25.

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9. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to George L. Burr, 9 August 1903; ibid., box 8, folder 7, HWvL to Mr. L. Cooper, 28 September 1903. 10. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to George L. Burr, 29 September and 27 November 1903; ibid., box 10, folder 5, HWvL to George L. Burr, 3 March 1904. 11. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 5, HWvL to George L. Burr, 7 May and 8 June 1904. 12. GAR, HAL Passenger Lists 1900–1940, departure S.S. Potsdam, 17 September 1904; GWvL, Story, 27–33. 13. GWvL, Story, 33–35. 14. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 5, HWvL to George L. Burr, 26 October 1904. 15. HWvL, “Impressions of Cornell” in Howes, Our Cornell, 9–10. 16. GWvL, Story, 35; COR, HWvLP, box 2, folder 9, HWvL’s résumé enclosed to his 24 April 1914 letter to Professor Goodnight of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. 17. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to George L. Burr, 17 July 1903; ibid., box 1, folder 1, Franklin Matthews to Charles H. Hull, 18 December 1904. 18. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 10, HWvL to Andrew D. White, 31 December 1904; ibid., box 56 contains HWvL’s “certificate of graduation,” which states that HWvL “was in residence at Cornell University from September 1902 to June 1905 [not mentioning the year at Harvard] and received the AB on June 22, 1905”; GWvL, Story, 36.

3 Associated Press Journalist in Russia and Poland (1905–1907) 1. COR, HWvLP, box 2, folder 9, HWvL’s résumé enclosed to his 24 April 1914 letter to Professor Goodnight of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. 2. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 6, HWvL to George L. Burr, 3 July 1905. 3. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 6, Henry P. Bowditch to George L. Burr, 6 July 1905 and George L. Burr to Henry P. Bowditch, 8 and 10 July 1905. 4. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 6, HWvL to George L. Burr, 21 September and 25 October 1905. 5. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 10, HWvL to Andrew D. White, 29 September 1905; ibid., box 10, folder 6, HWvL to George L. Burr, 25 October 1905. A decade later, HWvL wrote that during his Washington days as Associated Press journalist he did “everything: State Department, Army, Navy, Congress, dog shows, Chinese viceroys, White House.” In retrospect he considered it “rather flat work.” Ibid., box 2, folder 9, HWvL’s résumé enclosed to his 24 April 1914 letter to Professor Goodnight of the University of Wisconsin. 6. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 6, HWvL to George L. Burr, 21 November 1905, and Henry P. Bowditch to George L. Burr, 8 December 1905; ibid., box 66, folder 10, Hermann Hagedorn to GWvL, 26 October 1960.

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7. COR, HWvLP, box 4, folder 6, HWvL to Fanny Bowditch, 28 November 1905; ibid., box 10, folder 6, HWvL to George L. Burr, 15 December 1905. 8. GWvL, Story, 39–40; HWvL asked Professor Burr to attend the wedding ceremony and “to give me such support as I will badly need.” COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 6, HWvL to George L. Burr, 31 May 1906; Dr. Andrew D. White congratulated HWvL on both his marriage and his appointment in St. Petersburg, which he considered to be “the most interesting position” in HWvL’s profession. Ibid., box 17, folder 10, Andrew D. White to HWvL, 7 June 1906. 9. Radcliffe College, Schlesinger Library, EBvLP, EBvL to her parents aboard the Potsdam, 27 June 1906; COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Henry P. Bowditch aboard the Potsdam, 26 June 1906. 10. On the two weeks spent in the Netherlands, see Radcliffe College, Schlesinger Library, EBvLP, EBvL to her parents, 5 and 12 July 1906. 11. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 10 April 1907; Radcliffe College, Schlesinger Library, EBvLP, EBvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 29 July 1906. 12. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to George L. Burr, 19 August 1906. 13. Radcliffe College, Schlesinger Library, EBvLP, EBvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 24 August 1906. 14. Radcliffe College, Schlesinger Library, EBvLP, EBvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 2 and 9 September 1906. 15. Radcliffe College, Schlesinger Library, EBvLP, EBvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 9 and 16 September 1906. 16. Radcliffe College, Schlesinger Library, EBvLP, EBvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 23 and 30 September, 7 and 21 October 1906. In a 14 March 1907 letter to her sister Fanny, Eliza described Dmowski as one among those few men “who stick to their country and put their energies into solving her problems [and therefore] ought to be placed higher than the Angels.” 17. Radcliffe College, Schlesinger Library, EBvLP, EBvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 16 September, 7 and 14 October 1906. 18. Radcliffe College, Schlesinger Library, EBvLP, HWvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 7 October 1906. 19. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to George L. Burr, 2 November 1906 and HWvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 4 November 1906; ibid., box 4, folder 8, HWvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 7 January 1907. 20. COR, Andrew Dickson White Papers, HWvL to Andrew D. White, 5 February 1907. 21. COR, HWvLP, box 4, folder 8, HWvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 20 February 1907. 22. COR, Louis Agassiz Fuertes Papers, box 17, folder 14, HWvL to Louis A. Fuertes, March 1907. In early 1907 Eliza expressed her mixed feelings about the Polish population to her family: “The more we see of them [the Poles], the more we are struck by their prejudices, their narrowness and their absolute self-complacency.” And in another letter: “There are a few nice, sane people

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Notes

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

here, as also in Russia but the average homo Poloniensis is very far from sapiens and we shall have no regrets in our manly breasts when we have to say ta-ta. If only they don’t send us back into Russia again.” Radcliffe College, Schlesinger Library, EBvLP, EBvL to Fanny Bowditch, 8 January 1907 and to Selma K. Bowditch, 27 January 1907. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to George L. Burr, 2 November 1906; ibid., box 4, folder 8, HWvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 25 March 1907. COR, HWvLP, box 4, folder 9, HWvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 2 July and August 1907. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 10, HWvL to Andrew D. White, 2 September 1907; ibid., box 4, folder 8, HWvL to Henry P. Bowditch, undated spring 1907 letter on his desire to become a U.S. citizen; Radcliffe College, Schlesinger Library, EBvLP, EBvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 3 September 1907. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 10, HWvL to Andrew D. White, 2 September 1907. HWvL, Van Loon’s Geography: The Story of the World We Live In (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932), 240, 260–261; HWvL, “Van Loon’s Diary,” The New Leader, 1 May 1943: 4.

4 Historical Training in Munich (1907–1911) 1. At the turn of the twentieth century, new American graduate schools emerged with programs more suited to the American situation. World War I brought the end of the massive influence of German academic practice and thought, and consequently of the American student migration to Germany. See Jurgen Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship. A Study in the Transfer of Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), 1–22. 2. GWvL, Story, 53–55; COR, HWvLP, box 4, folder 10, HWvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 6 November 1907. 3. GWvL, Story, 56. 4. COR, HWvLP, box 54, Diary, entry 12 December 1907; ibid., box 4, folder 10, HWvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 16 December 1907; ibid., box 10, folder 6, HWvL to George L. Burr, Easter Morning 1908. 5. COR, HWvLP, box 54, Diary, entries (often undated) December 1907 through June 1908, the first quotation from entry 13 January 1908; ibid., box 10, folder 6, HWvL to George L. Burr, Easter Morning 1908. 6. GWvL, Story, 57–58, 60–61; GAR, HAL Passenger Lists 1900–1940, departure S.S. Statendam, 28 November 1908; COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 7, HWvL to George L. Burr, 14 November 1908 and 15 December 1908; ibid., box 54, Diary, entry 16 February 1909. On HWvL’s speech for the Harvard Cosmopolitan Club, see COL, Oral History Collection, Reminiscences of H.V. Kaltenborn, Radio Unit, no. 10, vol. 1, 36–37, where Hans von Kaltenborn, who made a career as radio commentator and served as one of the founders and the second president of the Harvard Cosmopolitan Club, mixed up his memories on his Harvard years (1905–1909) and thought that Hendrik

Notes

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

275

Willem had talked about his experiences as a reporter of World War I in 1909!; HWvL’s remarks about beer and its effects on him: COR, HWvLP, box 4, folder 11, HWvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 23 June 1908. COR, HWvLP, box 54, Diary, entries 16 February, 3 and 9 March, and 1 April 1909; GWvL, Story, 61–62. GWvL, Story, 63. COR, HWvLP, box 4, folder 13, HWvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 31 January and 24 August 1910. COR, HWvLP, box 4, folder 13, HWvL to Henry P. Bowditch, 24 August 1910. GWvL, Story, 57, and GWvL’s correspondence on the van Loon coat of arms in COR, HWvLP, box 67, folder 20, GWvL to unidentified persons on 15 November and 17 December 1967. GWvL, Story, 58–60; HWvL, Report to Saint Peter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947), 54. GWvL, Story, 65–67. COR, HWvLP, box 4, folder 15, HWvL to Selma K. Bowditch, 23 April 1911. COR, HWvLP, box 4, folder 16, HWvL to Selma K. Bowditch, 28 June 1911 and EBvL to Fanny Bowditch, 21 July 1911. GWvL, Story, 69; GAR, HAL Passenger Lists 1900–1940, departure S.S. Noordam, 28 October 1911.

5 Washington Years of Trial and Error (1912–1914) 1. GWvL, Story, 70–71; COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 25, includes invitation cards sent by President and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson to Mr. and Mrs. van Loon; ibid., box 54, Diary 1913–1914, entry 27 March 1913 on HWvL’s visit to Lord Bryce. 2. GWvL, Story, 71–72. 3. HWvL, The Fall of the Dutch Republic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913); GWvL, Story, 72–73. On the start of van Loon’s friendship with Benjamin W. Huebsch, see COR, HWvLP, box 13, folder 13, HWvL to the editor of The Nation, 2 and 24 April 1913, and HWvL to Benjamin W. Huebsch, 24 April 1913; ibid., box 54, HWvL’s Diary 1913–1914, pages 14 and 16, also contain clippings of HWvL’s 2 and 24 April 1913 letters to The Nation; COL, Oral History Collection, Reminiscences of Ben W. Huebsch, vol. 3, 402–404. 4. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 7, HWvL to George L. Burr, 26 March 1913, and George L. Burr to HWvL, 5 April 1913; George L. Burr to Houghton Mifflin, 5 April 1913; HWvL’s Diary 1913–1914 (COR, HWvLP, box 54) on page 18 contains a clipping of Burr’s laudatory words in The Nation of 17 April 1913. 5. COR, HWvLP, box 54, Diary 1913–1914, entries 1, 7, 14, and 16 April 1913; ibid., box 2, folder 2, HWvL to Roger Pierce of Houghton Mifflin Company, 13 April 1913; GWvL, Story, 74. 6. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to George L. Burr, 9 May 1913; ibid., box 2, folder 7, M.J. Brusse to HWvL, 18 June 1913, including the review in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant of the same date, and

276

Notes

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

W.G.C. Byvanck, director of the Royal Library, to HWvL, 27 June 1913; Review by N. Japikse in Bijdragen voor Vaderlandsche Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde 5. 1 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1913): 388–389; See also COR, HWvLP, box 54, Diary 1913–1914, entries 5 and 10 May 1913; HWvL mentions his appointment as member of the Utrecht Historical Society in his 19 January 1914 letter to George L. Burr (ibid., box 10, folder 8) and in the résumé he sent on 24 April 1914 to Professor Goodnight (ibid., box 2, folder 9). “A Republic’s Fall,” New York Times, 3 August 1913; Yale Review 3.1 (October 1913): 178–180; Chicago Record, 13 January 1914. GWvL, Story, 73, 75; COR, HWvLP, box 54, Diary 1913–1914, entries 18 May and 6 June 1913; ibid., box 10, folder 7, HWvL to George L. Burr, 21 May 1913; ibid., box 10, folder 6, George L. Burr to HWvL, 24 May 1913. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 6, HWvL to George L. Burr, 30 June and 24 July 1913; ibid., box 17, folder 10, HWvL to Andrew D. White, 8 August 1913; ibid., box 54, Diary 1913–1914, 10 August 1913 and undated, most likely September 1913, entry. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 7, HWvL to George L. Burr, 10 October 1913; ibid., box 17, folder 10, HWvL to Andrew D. White, 23 October 1913; ibid., box 54, Diary 1913–1914, entries 13 and 20 October 1913, and 5 December and Christmas 1913; GWvL, Story, 76. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 7, HWvL to George L. Burr, 10 October 1913; GWvL describes his father’s attitude toward his Boston relatives as an “almost paranoid resentment” and that he “was obsessed with the notion that his being kept was common knowledge.” GWvL, Story, 77–78. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 8, HWvL to George L. Burr, 19 January 1914; ibid., box 54, Diary 1913–1914, pages 44 and 47 contain the comments on van Loon’s lecture at Wellesley College (Wellesley College News, February 1914 issue and accompanying letter to HWvL of 20 February 1914), Yale University (clipping “Notable Amsterdam [sic] Journalist Lectures Interestingly at Yale”), and at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (editorial “Making History Live” in the Boston Transcript of 11 February 1914). COR, HWvLP, box 54, Diary 1913–1914, HWvL’s circular on page 53 and entries 24 March and 16 April 1914. COR, HWvLP, box 2, folder 9, HWvL to Bayard Q. Morgan, 27 April 1914, HWvL to Professor Goodnight, 24 April 1914, and “To whom it may concern,” a letter of recommendation on HWvL by the University of Wisconsin, 31 July 1914. COR, HWvLP, box 66, folder 18, Bayard Q. Morgan’s reminiscences on HWvL in his letters of 10 May 1945 (“To whom it may concern”) and of 4 June 1957 to GWvL. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 27, Consul of the Netherlands to HWvL, 18 August 1914; ibid., box 10, folder 8, HWvL to George L. Burr, 22 August 1914. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 14, Douglas Z. Doty to HWvL, 24 August 1914; GWvL, Story, 79–80; GAR, HAL Passage delen, inv. nr. A 1395, Eastbound Passagierslijsten 1914, departure S.S. Nieuw Amsterdam, 25 August 1914.

Notes

277

6 The Great War (1914–1918) 1. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL cable to the Associated Press, undated, probably early September 1914; GAR, HAL Passage delen, inv. nr. A 1393, Eastbound Passagierslijsten 1914, arrival S.S. Nieuw Amsterdam, 8 September 1914; GWvL, Story, 81. 2. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Katy Codman, 30 September 1914; NYPL, The Century Collection, HWvL to Douglas Z. Doty, 30 September 1914. 3. “Vóór Antwerpen. Hoe gruwelijk de oorlog is,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 7 October 1914. 4. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 8, HWvL to George L. Burr, 13 November 1914. 5. NYPL, The Century Collection, HWvL to Douglas Z. Doty, 5 December 1914. Emphasis in original. 6. Algemeen Handelsblad editorial, 16 November 1914; The Washington correspondent’s comments in the London Times, 19 November 1914; HWvL’s 23 November 1914 letter in The Nation 100 (21 January 1915): 77–78; Lord Northcliffe was the proprietor of the Times. 7. HWvL, “Why Holland is Neutral,” New York Times, 27 February 1915. 8. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Katy B. Codman, 27 February and 2 March 1915, and Andrew D. White to HWvL, 4 March 1915. Emphasis in original. 9. HWvL, “Analogy Between Wars and Earthquakes,” New York Times, 6 April 1915. 10. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Katy B. Codman, 27 February 1915; ibid., box 10, folder 8, HWvL to George L. Burr, 8 March 1915. 11. HWvL, The Rise of the Dutch Kingdom (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1915); COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to George L. Burr, 18 April 1915; “Rise of the Dutch Kingdom,” New York Times Book Review, 11 July 1915. 12. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 8, HWvL to George L. Burr, 19, 25, and 27 May 1915; ibid., box 2, folder 8, Letter of recommendation by Jacob G. Schurman, 31 May 1915 (also in COR, Jacob Gould Schurman Papers, Letterbooks, “To whom it may concern,” 31 May 1915); ibid., box 17, folder 12, U.S. Secretary of State William J. Bryan “To the Diplomatic and Consular Officers of the United States of America in Europe,” 28 May 1915; HWvL’s appointment as lecturer at Cornell University was mentioned in the New York Times, 26 May 1915. HWvL, “Anarchy of Might in the Open Sea,” New York Times, 29 May 1915; GAR, HAL Passage delen, inv. nr. A 1395, Eastbound Passagierslijsten 1915, departure S.S. Rotterdam, 1 June 1915. 13. HWvL, “ ‘Planmaessig’ and ‘Ausgeschlossen.’ The March on Paris, the March on Warsaw, and the March on London,” The Century Magazine 90 (June 1915): 219–224; HWvL, “No. 45,637 Missing,” The Century Magazine 90 (August 1915): 529–542; Introduction by HWvL (361–362) in T. Lothrop Stoddard, “Imperiled Holland,” The Century Magazine 90 (July 1915): 361–368.

278

Notes

14. HWvL, “Jealous Dutch Neutrality,” New York Times, 30 July 1915; HWvL, “What Happens to Small Neutrals,” The New Republic 5 (22 January 1916): 306–307; HWvL, “Holland’s War Policy,” Yale Review 7.4 ( July 1918): 748–759; Other HWvL articles on neutrality include “Searching Neutral Ships,” New York Times, 18 December 1915; “The Citizen Army of Holland,” The National Geographic Magazine 29 no. 6 ( June 1916): 609–622; “The Neutrals and the Allied Cause,” The Century Magazine 94 (August 1917): 610–620. 15. HWvL, “The World After the War,” The Century Magazine 91 (February 1916): 514–521; Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914 (New York: Macmillan, 1966), xiii. 16. Randall J. LeBoeuf, Jr. in Cornell Alumni News 73 ( January 1971): 18. 17. Morris Bishop, A History of Cornell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 395; Richard O. Boyer, “The Story of Everything-II,” The New Yorker, 27 March 1943: 27; David Karsner, Sixteen Authors to One. Intimate Sketches of Leading American Story Tellers (1928; Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), 209; COR, Jacob Gould Schurman Papers, Letterbooks, Jacob G. Schurman to HWvL, 2 May 1916; ibid., Benjamin F. Levy Papers, HWvL to Benjamin F. Levy, 15 November 1915; HWvL’s letters and articles in the New York Times of 5 January, 4 February, 10, 17, and 29 March, 16, 23, 26, and 30 May, 29 June, 12 July, 19 and 29 September, 1, 2, and 8 October 1916. 18. COR, Andrew Dickson White Papers, Andrew D. White to Robert Lansing, 22 May 1916 and Robert Lansing to Andrew D. White, 2 June 1916 with enclosure Robert Lansing to HWvL, 1 June 1916; COR, Jacob Gould Schurman Papers, Letterbooks, Jacob G. Schurman “To whom it may concern,” 6 June 1916. 19. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 10, HWvL to Andrew D. White, 3 July 1916. 20. HWvL, “Saw Zeppelins from Liner,” New York Times, 19 September 1916; HWvL, “Difficulties Beset Travel in Wartime,” New York Times, 1 October 1916; HWvL, “Ships Face Perils to Reach Kirkwall,” New York Times, 2 October 1916. 21. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 10, George L. Burr to Andrew D. White, 24 December 1916. 22. Morris Bishop, A History of Cornell (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1962), 396; COR, Jacob Gould Schurman Papers, Letterbooks, Jacob G. Schurman to HWvL, 4 June 1917. 23. HWvL, The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators (New York: The Century Co., 1916), vii–xi; HWvL’s 23 January 1917 talk in Addresses Made at the Annual Meetings of The Netherlands Society of Philadelphia, Bellevue-Stratford Hotel 1913 to 1930, n.p., n.d., 160–168. 24. HWvL, A Short History of Discovery (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1917), 3. 25. GWvL, Story, 86–87, 69–70, 91–93; Some of Coba de Bergh’s letters to HWvL, for instance of 3 and 18 June 1917, are in COR, HWvLP, box 4, folder 22.

Notes

279

26. William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932, second ed. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 23–26, 42–46; In September 1917 the Washington Post came out with the headline “Holland Government Gives Increasing Aid to Teutons,” and the New York Sun depicted the Dutch court as “strongly pro-German.” Quoted in Marc Frey, “Trade, Ships, and the Neutrality of the Netherlands in the First World War,” The International History Review 19.3 (August 1997): 554. 27. GAR, HAL Passage delen, inv. nr. A 1399, Eastbound Passagierslijsten 1917, departure S.S. Noordam, 11 July 1917; LC, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, series 1, reel 240, HWvL to Theodore Roosevelt, 12 July 1917. 28. LC, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, series 1, reel 240, HWvL to Theodore Roosevelt, 12 July 1917; Randolph Bourne’s essay “The War and the Intellectuals” in Carl Resek, ed., War and the Intellectuals: Essays by Randolph S. Bourne, 1915–1919 (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1964), 3–14, originally published in The Seven Arts 2 ( June 1917): 133–146. 29. HWvL, “Friday, June 22, 1917,” The Seven Arts 2 (August 1917): 425–427. 30. HWvL, “Liner Noordam Hits Mine Off Holland But Stays Afloat; No Casualties Aboard,” New York Times, 5 August 1917; GAR, HAL Passage delen, inv. nr. A 1399, Eastbound Passagierslijsten 1917, arrival S.S. Noordam, 8 August 1917; COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 10, HWvL to Andrew D. White, 17 August 1917; GWvL, Story, 95. 31. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Katy B. Codman, 27 June 1917; NA, Archief J. Loudon, 1866–1955, inv. nr. 8, HWvL to J. Loudon, 17 October 1917, HWvL to W.J. Doude van Troostwijk, 15, 18, 19, and 20 December 1917 (including HWvL’s memoranda to Kühlmann’s spokesman in The Hague, Eduard von der Heydt, and to John W. Garrett). 32. GWvL, Story, 95–96.

7 Life in the Village (1918–1920) 1. Corinne Lowe, “The Village in a City,” Ladies’ Home Journal 37 (March 1920): 28; Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1934), 69–71, 57; On Cowley’s life in the Village, see Hans Bak, Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1993), chapters 5 and 7; Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams. Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910–1960 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), ix, xi. 2. Caroline F. Ware, Greenwich Village, 1920–1930: A Comment on American Civilization in the Post-war Years (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), 3; Lowe, “The Village in a City,” 29; Under the heading “Important events in 1920” in the January 1921 issue of her in-house journal “Mad Hatter Mutterings,” the owner of The Mad Hatter noted that the “Pictures of the shop in the Ladies’ Home Journal [of March 1920] brought many of the subscribers to see us.” COR, HWvLP, box 63, folder 19; Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams, 14.

280

Notes

3. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Katy B. Codman, 11 March 1918; ibid., box 5, folder 1, HWvL to Katy B. Codman, 7 May 1918; GWvL, Story, 97–98. 4. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 1, HWvL to EBvL, 29 May 1918. 5. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 1, HWvL to Katy B. Codman, 7 May 1918; Creel committee work is documented by ibid., HWvL to EBvL, 4 June 1918 (a letter on stationery of the Committee on Public Information), and FBI, HWvL Files, Chicago File no. 100–2477, 28 February 1945, 13. 6. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 9, HWvL to George L. Burr, 14 and 27 August 1918, and 26 November 1918; HWvL, R.v.R.: The Life and Times of Rembrandt van Rijn (New York: Horace Liveright, 1930). 7. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 2, HWvL to EBvL, 6 and 16 September 1918; GWvL, Story, 100. 8. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 2, HWvL to Charles H. Blood, 4 November 1918. 9. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 2, HWvL to Charles H. Blood, 6 November 1918. 10. COR, HWvLP, box 66, folder 10, Hermann Hagedorn to GWvL, 26 October 1960. 11. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 1, HWvL to EBvL, 27 June 1918; Shaun O’Connell, Remarkable, Unspeakable New York: A Literary History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 138; GWvL, Story, 101, 104. 12. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 3, HWvL to EBvL, 15 January 1919. 13. Thomas A. Bailey, The Policy of the United States towards the Neutrals, 1917–1918 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1942; reprint New York: Arno Press, 1979), 237; Joh. de Vries, ed., Herinneringen en dagboek van Ernst Heldring (1871–1954) (Utrecht: Nederlands Historisch Genootschap, 1970), 228, 235, 237, 238; C. Smit, Tien studiën betreffende Nederland in de Eerste Wereldoorlog (Groningen: H.D. Tjeenk Willink, 1975), 113–117. 14. NA, Archief Nederlandse Overzee Trustmaatschappij 1914–1919, inv. nr. 46, HWvL to J.T. Cremer, 28 and 29 June 1918, enclosures B and C to Report meeting of 12 September 1918. 15. NA, Archief Nederlandse Overzee Trustmaatschappij 1914–1919, inv. nr. 46, Report meeting of 12 September 1918; de Vries, Herinneringen, 249; Smit, Tien studiën, 121–122. 16. Walter H. Salzmann, “Bedrijfsleven, overheid en handelsbevordering. The Netherlands Chamber of Commerce in the United States, Inc. 1903–1987” (Ph.D. diss., University of Leiden, 1994), 65–69, 76, 81–83; NA, Archief Gezantschap in de Verenigde Staten van Amerika, 1814–1940, inv. nr. 476, HWvL to W.H. de Beaufort, 27 August 1919; NA, Archief J. Loudon, 1866–1955, inv. nr. 8, HWvL to J. Loudon, 9 February 1920. 17. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 3, HWvL to Katy B. Codman, 5 June 1919; HWvL, “A New Historical Division,” The Nation 106 (May 25, 1918): 616–617; HWvL, “Napoleon as Propagandist,” The Nation 108 (April 5, 1919): 501; HWvL, “Primitive Reconstruction,” The Dial 65.780 (December 28, 1918): 602–603; HWvL, “American History Anglicized,”

Notes

18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

281

The Dial 67.799 (September 20, 1919): 247–248; HWvL, “Holland,” The Bookman 48 (December 1918): 441–445; HWvL, “Peaceful Annexation,” The Century Magazine 98 (September 1919): 618–620; HWvL, “Shop-Talk Jimmy,” Everybody’s Magazine 40 (February 1919): 48–49, 78–81; HWvL, “The Road of Glory, A Short History of the House of Hohenzollern,” New York Tribune, 1, 8, and 15 December 1918. Walker Gilmer, Horace Liveright: Publisher of the Twenties (New York: David Lewis, 1970), vii–ix, 20, 23, 24, 32; In 1939 van Loon urged a friend not “to waste [her] time” on reading the work of William Faulkner: “that stuff is so utterly filthy that I who have a magnificent Flemish peasant mind and who can be dirty with the pigs, won’t let one of his books into the house. For God’s sake, if we want dirt let us have honest dirt and none of that degenerate rotten filthy stuff about degenerate rotten backwoods of Mizzoore. Why read it?!” COR, HWvLP, box 14, folder 3–5, HWvL to Elizabeth Marion, 13 February 1939; ibid., Louis Agassiz Fuertes Papers, box 17, folder 14, HWvL to Louis A. Fuertes, 1 June 1919. William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932, second ed. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 66, 81, 83; COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 9, HWvL to George L. Burr, 9 June 1919. HWvL, Van Loon’s Lives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942), 263–264. COR, HWvLP, box 63, folder 32, Transcript CBS broadcast, 1 March 1947. Radio interview with Jimmie van Loon on the occasion of HWvL’s posthumously published Report to Saint Peter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947); ibid., box 64, Diaries, entries June 1919. GWvL, Story, 107–110; Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford. The Early Years (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), 297. COR, HWvLP, box 63, folder 8–28, “Mad Hatter Mutterings,” April 1920(probably) October 1921. GWvL, Story, 106, 111. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 11, HWvL to Jimmie Criswell, 13 September 1919; See also ibid., box 10, folder 12, HWvL to Jimmie Criswell, 23 and 25 October 1919. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 4, HWvL to Hansel and Willem van Loon, 27 October 1919; ibid., box 10, folder 12, HWvL to Jimmie Criswell, 30 October 1919; ibid., box 10, folder 13, HWvL to Jimmie Criswell, 1 November 1919. NA, Archief Gezantschap in de Verenigde Staten van Amerika, 1814–1940, inv. nr. 852, Chargé d’affaires ad interim in Washington to Netherlands Minister of Foreign Affairs van Karnebeek, 17 August 1920 (classified), with enclosures A. van C.P. Huizinga to J.T. Cremer and to M. de Hartogh, 16 February 1920; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 22 and 27 September 1920, 4 November 1920, and 6 June 1921. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 13, HWvL to Jimmie Criswell, 7 November 1919; ibid., box 10, folder 15, HWvL to Jimmie Criswell, 26 November 1919. GWvL, Story, 114–115, 106–107.

282

Notes

30. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 11, HWvL to Jimmie Criswell, 13 September 1919; ibid., box 10, folder 15, HWvL to Jimmie Criswell, undated December 1919 and 5 January 1920; ibid., box 63, folder 32, Transcript CBS broadcast, 1 March 1947. Emphasis in original. 31. GWvL, Story, 115; HU, b MS Am 1803 (1797), folder 1, HWvL to George Sarton, 8 February 1920; NA, Archief J. Loudon, 1866–1955, inv. nr. 8, HWvL to John Loudon, 9 February 1920. 32. HWvL, Ancient Man: The Beginning of Civilizations (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 7–8; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 15 November 1920 mentions that HWvL “brought in first copies of his new book”; GWvL, Story, 122. 33. GWvL, Story, 115–117. 34. COR, HWvLP, box 63, folder 32, Transcript CBS broadcast, 1 March 1947. 35. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 9, HWvL to George L. Burr, 3 September 1920.

8 The Breakthrough (1921–1922) 1. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries January and March 1921; Sinclair Lewis, Main Street and Babbitt (New York: The Library of America, 1992), 857; Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (New York, Toronto, London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1961), 261, 274, 299. 2. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 7, HWvL to his sons, 17 March 1921 and to Hansel, 23 March and 3 May 1921; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entries 21 March and 3 May 1921; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to EBvL, 5 March 1921 and to George L. Burr, 15 May 1921. 3. H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, 2 vols. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920); HWvL, “A Builder of History,” The Dial 70.2 (February 1921): 202–203; COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 6, HWvL to Hansel, undated Sunday 1920; ibid., box 5, folder 7, HWvL to Hansel, 23 March 1921; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entries 31 May, 25 June, and 16 July 1921. 4. P. van der Veen, Collectie HWvL, HWvL to unidentified Dutch friends, 8 July 1921; COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 8, HWvL to EBvL, 6 August 1921; HU, b MS Am 1925 (1829), folder 1, HWvL to Ferris Greenslet, 13 and 23 July 1921; HWvL, The Story of Mankind (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), ix–xii. 5. COR, HWvLP, box 63, folder 24 and 27 with “Mad Hatter Mutterings” issues of July and (probably) August 1921; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entries 15 and 16 August 1921. 6. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 8, HWvL to EBvL, 6 August 1921; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to George L. Burr, 14 August 1921; ibid., box 67, folder 18, Anthony Veiller to GWvL, 21 May 1962. 7. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to EBvL, 5 September 1921; ibid., box 5, folder 8, HWvL to his sons, 12 September 1921; ibid., box 63, folder 28, undated (probably October 1921) issue of “Mad Hatter Mutterings”; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entries 6, 7, 8, 10, and 26 September 1921.

Notes

283

8. COR, HWvLP, box 67, folder 18, Anthony Veiller to GWvL, 21 May 1962. 9. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 2, HWvL to George L. Burr, 4 October 1921; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entry 19 October 1921; ibid., box 5, folder 8, HWvL to EBvL, 3 December 1921; ibid., box 10, folder 1, HWvL to Morris Bishop, 30 November 1921. 10. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 2, HWvL to George L. Burr, 4 October 1921. 11. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to EBvL, 5 March 1921, EBvL to HWvL, 7 March 1921; ibid., box 5, folder 7, Eliot N. Jones to EBvL, 7 February and to Charles H. Blood, 21 February 1921, Charles H. Blood to Eliot N. Jones, 21 April 1921, and Henry B. (Hansje) vL to HWvL, undated March 1921 letter; ibid., box 5, folder 8, Eliot N. Jones to EBvL, 2 and 16 June 1921, HWvL to Eliot N. Jones, 29 June 1921, and HWvL to EBvL, 3 December 1921; GWvL, Story, 120, 125. 12. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 21 and 22 November 1921; ibid., box 67, folder 18, Anthony Veiller to GWvL, 21 May 1962; ibid., box 5, folder 8, HWvL to EBvL, 3 December 1921. 13. Carl Becker, “Vivid History for Children,” The Literary Review, 12 November 1921: 165; Samuel Abbott, “A Pictorial History of Man,” New York Tribune, 4 December 1921; “Truth Told Like a Fairy Tale,” New York Herald, 18 December 1921; F.P.H., “An Open Door to a Knowledge of World Events,” Boston Transcript, 28 December 1921; “An Original History That Is Making a Great Hit,” Boston Herald, 24 December 1921; M.G.B., column “Literary Review,” Cornell Alumni News 24.13 (December 22, 1921): 153; Austin Hay, “Another Outline of History,” New York Times Book Review and Magazine, 8 January 1922; Anne Carroll Moore, “Holiday Books for Children,” The Bookman 54 (January 1922): 468. 14. J. Salwyn Schapiro, “History Wise and Witty,” The Nation 113 (28 December 1921): 759–760; Schapiro was much less enthusiastic about Wells’s Outline of History, which he had reviewed earlier that year. J. Salwyn Schapiro, “Mr. Wells Discovers the Past,” The Nation 112 (9 February 1921): 224–231. 15. Charles A. Beard, “The Story of Mankind,” The New Republic 29 (21 December 1921): 105; Lewis Mumford, “The Proud Pageantry of Man,” The Freeman 4 (18 January 1922): 449–450. 16. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 1, HWvL to Morris Bishop, 21 December 1921; UP, Lewis Mumford Collection, folder 5107, Letters 1921–1945, HWvL to Lewis Mumford, 21 January 1922. 17. UP, Lewis Mumford Collection, folder 5107, Letters 1921–1945, HWvL to Lewis Mumford, 21 January 1922; COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 9, HWvL to GWvL, 22 January 1922; H.L. Mencken, My Life as Author and Editor, edited and with an introduction by Jonathan Yardley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 399; HWvL’s article on Cornell was published as “The Higher Learning in America,” The Smart Set 68 (May 1922): 61–67. 18. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 2, HWvL to Louis A. Fuertes, 28 January 1922; Harry Hansen’s column “A Page about Books and the People Who Write Them,” Chicago Daily News, 1 February 1922.

284

Notes

19. John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 4 vols. (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1972–1981), 3: 34; GWvL, Story, 128–129; Walker Gilmer, Horace Liveright: Publisher of the Twenties (New York: David Lewis, 1970), 32, 33, 202; HWvL quotation about the misperception of his fame in The Survey 48.13 (1 August 1922): 543. 20. COR, HWvLP, box 67, folder 18, Anthony Veiller to GWvL, 21 May 1962. 21. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 1, HWvL to Morris Bishop, 21 December 1921; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entries 8 March and 11 May 1922; GWvL, Story, 131–132. 22. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 10, Jimmie van Loon to EBvL, undated but most likely mid-May 1922 letter; GWvL, Story, 132. 23. For the correspondence on HWvL’s expected payments to Eliza and his refusal to do so, see COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 9–12, letters dated 3 March, 13 April, and 16 December 1922, 2 and 3 February, 24 July and 9 September 1923, 2 and 20 May 1924; GWvL, Story, 137–138. 24. “Dr. Van Loon Gets Medal, For Best Contribution to Literature for Children in 1921,” New York Times, 28 June 1922; “Medal Puts Dr. Van Loon On Top Of Another Tower,” Evening Sun, 28 June 1922; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 27 June 1922. 25. The preceding section on the outlines is based on: Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xi–xx, 209–211, 219; James Steel Smith, “The Day of the Popularizers: The 1920s,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 62 (Spring 1963): 297–309; Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 106–108, 112. For a contemporary discussion of the outline vogue and an assessment of its significance, see John Erskine, “Outlines,” The Bookman 61 (March 1925): 29–32. 26. Will Durant, “In Defense of Outlines: Apologia pro Libro Suo,” The Forum 83 (January 1930): 10; Durant used the term “merchants of light” for the first time in his Columbia University Ph.D. thesis Philosophy and the Social Problem (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917), 237; On Will Durant, see for instance Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, 219–265, Raymond Frey, William James Durant: An Intellectual Biography (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), and Will and Ariel Durant, A Dual Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977). 27. HWvL, How I Came to Publish with Essandess. Published for the New York Times National Book Fair (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), 8; The outlines serving as elevators: Erskine, “Outlines,” 31.

9 The Prince of Popularizers (1922–1928) 1. Fred Hobson, Mencken: A Life (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), xi, xiii, 218, 251, 547–548; Louis Kronenberger, “H.L. Mencken,” in Malcolm Cowley, ed., After the Genteel Tradition: American

Notes

2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

285

Writers 1910–1930 (1936; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), 83, 85, 86. NYPL, H.L. Mencken Papers, box 110, HWvL to H.L. Mencken, 17 and 26 October 1920; COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 2, HWvL to Gwethalyn Graham, 16 July 1923; H.L. Mencken, My Life as Author and Editor, edited and with an Introduction by Jonathan Yardley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 400. Hobson, Mencken, xiv, 226–231; Mencken, My Life as Author and Editor, viii, 398–400. HWvL’s criticism on Henry Ford in his “H.v.L.” Sun column, 30 June 1922; A few years later van Loon in a letter to the editor of The Nation wrote that Henry Ford was “a man with limited powers of observation and meditation.” The Nation 125 (23 November 1927): 571. “H.v.L.” Sun columns, 18 May and 18 July 1922. “H.v.L.” Sun columns, 29 June and 5 July 1922. “H.v.L.” Sun columns, 10, 11, 13, and 15 November 1922 on the situation in Germany. ZA, Collectie familie Moussault, Correspondentie HWvL–Aagje MoussaultWegerif 1922–1925, HWvL to A. Moussault, 10 December 1922; COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, Suus van der Hilst to EBvL, 10 January 1923; GAR, HAL Passenger Lists 1900–1940, departure S.S. Volendam, 4 November 1922; GWvL, Story, 131, 134. “H.v.L.” Sun columns, 20 October 1922 and 27 January 1923. The Baltimore Sun and the New York Times, 21 November 1922; “H.v.L.” Sun columns, 27 February and 17 April 1923. On the Algonquin Hotel and the Round Table, see Robert E. Drennan, ed., The Algonquin Wits (New York: Carol Publishing Group Edition, 1995), Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), xv–xix, 67–92, and Frank Case’s memoirs Tales of a Wayward Inn (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1938) and Do not Disturb (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1940); Grace Hegger Lewis, With Love From Gracie. Sinclair Lewis: 1912–1925 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955), 139; Van Loon’s observations on the Algonquin Hotel in his “H.v.L.” Sun columns, 10 August 1922 and 30 March 1923, and in Frank Case, Tales of a Wayward Inn, 378–379, 381. “H.v.L.” Sun column, 4 December 1922; For the reviews of The Story of Mankind in British periodicals, see COR, HWvLP, box 12, folder 15, enclosure to HWvL’s letter of 21 August 1925 to F. Goodrich; For an example of a positive review, see The Bookman (London) 63 (October 1922): 31–32. “H.v.L.” Sun columns, 26 July 1922, 26 March and 5 February 1923. HWvL, Report to Saint Peter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947), 90, see also 86–87; GWvL, Story, 133; “H.v.L.” Sun columns, 26 March, 4 and 5 April 1923. The New York Times of 28 March 1937 recorded a fight of the Baptist Rev. Verdi Allen in Indiana against the evolution theories of van Loon and the State school officials for allowing The Story of Mankind to be on the approved list of textbooks.

286

Notes

15. On the Scopes trial, see William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932, second ed. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 217–224 and Hobson, Mencken, 256–261. 16. “H.v.L.” Sun column, 23 April 1923. 17. Enoch Pratt Free Library, H.L. Mencken Collection, H.L. Mencken, “Thirtyfive Years of Newspaper Work,” 334 and ibid., H.L. Mencken, “My Life as Author and Editor,” 997; GWvL, Story, 136. 18. GAR, HAL Passage delen, inv. nr. A 1421, Eastbound Passagierslijsten 1923, departure S.S. Nieuw Amsterdam, 28 April 1923; “H.v.L.” Sun column, 12 February 1923; GWvL, Story, 134, 138–139; NYPL, H.L. Mencken Papers, box 110, HWvL to H.L. Mencken, 8 June 1923. 19. On the rise and decline of Veere and its reputation as a “dead town,” see Peter Blom, “Demografie van een dode stad. Bronnen voor het onderzoek naar de bevolkingsontwikkeling van de stad Veere vanaf 1470,” Nehalennia 96 (1993): 2–10, and Bertus Aafjes, De wereld is een wonder (Amsterdam: J.M. Meulenhoff, 1959), chapter “Kroniek van een dood stadje.” 20. GWvL, Story, 141–143. 21. NYPL, H.L. Mencken Papers, box 110, HWvL to H.L. Mencken, 27 July 1923; GAR, HAL Passenger Lists 1900–1940, departure S.S. Nieuw Amsterdam, 12 December 1923; On the van Loons’ trip to Europe in the second half of 1923, see COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries June through December 1923, and GWvL, Story, 139–144. 22. HWvL, The Story of the Bible (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923), ix–x, 277; The foreword of the book and the first two chapters had already been published in McCall’s Magazine of December 1922, 8–10, 56. 23. “Books and Authors,” New York Times, 2 April 1922. 24. Thomas L. Masson, “Van Loon Discovers The Bible,” New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1923. 25. The Literary Review, 17 November 1923: 254; Time, 5 November 1923: 19; See also The Literary Digest 79 (15 December 1923): 31–32; American Hebrew, 8 February 1924. 26. Free Press, 3 February 1924; NYPL, H.L. Mencken Papers, box 110, HWvL to H.L. Mencken, 3 February 1924; HU, b MS Am 1925 (1829), folder 1, HWvL to Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin Company, 22 February 1924. 27. New York Times, 25 December 1923; HWvL, “The Author’s Story of ‘The Story of the Bible,’ ” New York Times, 13 January 1924. 28. For reviews of The Story of the Bible, see Book Review Digest 1923: 529–530; GWvL, Story, 145; HWvL, The Story of the Bible (New York: Bell Publishing Company, 1985). 29. Reviews in Middelburgsche Courant, 21 November 1923; Voorwaarts, 5 December 1923; Het Vaderland, 18 November 1923; Het Centrum, 29 January 1924. 30. J. Huizinga, “Aanleeren of afleeren?” De Gids 88.4 (April 1924): 130–137, reprinted in J. Huizinga, Verzamelde Werken, 9 vols. (Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink en Zoon, 1948–1953), 7: 237–243.

Notes

287

31. C.E.H., “De Bijbelsche geschiedenis . . . in ‘t Amerikaansch,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 12 July 1924; Francis J. Wahlen, “Hendrik van Loon and His Dutch Critics,” The Catholic World 121 (July 1925): 499–502. 32. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 3, HWvL to Esther Bell-Robinson, 25 December 1924, and to George L. Burr, 24 November 1924; ZA, Collectie familie Moussault, Correspondentie HWvL-Aagje MoussaultWegerif 1922–1925, HWvL to Aagje Moussault, 18 April 1924, 27 January 1925 and undated, probably February 1925 letter; ibid., HWvL to Theo Moussault, 5 May 1924. 33. HWvL’s “American Letters” appeared in De Amsterdammer of 28 October and 4 November 1922; 6 and 20 January, 3, 10, and 24 March, 21 April, 14, 21, and 28 July, 4, 11, and 18 August, 1, 22, and 29 September, 13 October 1923; 9 and 16 February, 1 and 15 March, 12 and 19 April, 3 and 24 May, 14 June, 12 and 26 July, 13 September 1924. 34. GWvL, Story, 149–151; COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 3, HWvL to Lewis Mumford, 7 July 1924; ibid., box 11, folder 18, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 22 August 1929; Van Wyck Brooks, An Autobiography (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1965), 379. 35. Brooks, An Autobiography, 379–380, 390; Raymond Nelson, Van Wyck Brooks: A Writer’s Life (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1981), 157; Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life. The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford: The Early Years (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), on Van Wyck Brooks: 357–364, on van Loon: 362, 367. 36. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 3, HWvL to George L. Burr, 1 February 1924; NYPL, H.L. Mencken Papers, box 110, HWvL to H.L. Mencken, 3 February 1924; P. van der Veen, Collectie HWvL, HWvL to anonymous Dutch friend, probably Aagje Moussault, 19 February 1924. 37. HWvL published his reports on both national conventions in: The Westport Standard, 12 June 1924; The Nation of 25 June 1924: 727–728, 2 July 1924: 7–8, 9 July 1924: 37–38, 16 July 1924: 66–67; and in De Amsterdammer of 14 June, 12 and 26 July 1924; HWvL, “Why Denver Knifed Ben Lindsey,” in Plain Talk 1.2 (November 1927): 66. 38. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries August and September 1924; ibid., box 18, folder 3, HWvL to George L. Burr, 9 October 1924 and 24 November 1924, and HWvL to Louis A. Fuertes, 14 and 27 December 1924; HU, b MS Am 1925 (1829), folder 2, HWvL to (probably Ferris Greenslet of ) Houghton Mifflin, 12 November 1924. 39. HWvL, The Story of Wilbur the Hat (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925); Boni and Liveright ad of the book in Cornell, HWvL Papers, box 14, folder 17, enclosure to letter HWvL to Henri Mayer, 23 March 1925; HWvL “ad” in COL, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Special Manuscript Collection Keppel, HWvL to Frederick Paul Keppel, 17 March 1925; Saturday Review of Literature 1 (4 July 1925): 881; New York Times Book Review, 29 March 1925; The Nation 120 (22 April 1925): 469; HWvL articles: “Heroes All,” The Forum 73 (January 1925): 102–106; “A Chapter From My Autobiography,” Hearst’s International and Cosmopolitan 78.3 (March 1925): 66–67, 202;

288

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

Notes

“Our Nordic Myth-Makers,” The Nation 120 (1 April 1925): 349–350; “Sense or Censorship,” The Woman Citizen 9 (4 April 1925): 9–10; “My Private Opinion of School-Teachers,” Hearst’s International and Cosmopolitan 78.6 (June 1925): 108–109, 182; “The Promised Land: Promised to Whom?” Harper’s Magazine 151 (November 1925): 680–683. GWvL, Story, 152–155; Biographical data on Frances Goodrich in COR, HWvLP, box 66, folder 11; HWvL’s love letters to Frances Goodrich from July through December 1925 in ibid., box 12, folder 10–25, above quotations in HWvL’s letters of 1, 12, and 18 August 1925. GWvL, Story, 155–157; GAR, HAL Passage delen, inv. nr. A 1427, Eastbound Passagierslijsten 1925, departure S.S. Volendam, 29 August 1925; COR, HWvLP, box 12, folder 22, HWvL to Frances Goodrich, 20 September 1925. GWvL, Story, 156, 158–159; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries September through December 1925 and entry 1 January 1926; ibid., box 12, folder 25, Frances Goodrich to HWvL, 1 December 1925. HWvL, Tolerance (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925); Charles Willis Thompson, “Van Loon Opens His Arms To the World’s Heretics,” New York Times Book Review, 18 October 1925; New York World, 15 November 1925; The Outlook 142 (6 January 1926): 34; New York Herald Tribune, 20 December 1925; Other reviews in The Nation 122 (10 February 1926): 158–159; The New Republic 44 (11 November 1925): 309; Saturday Review of Literature 2 (14 November 1925): 293; The Bookman 62 (November 1925): 342; The Literary Review, 26 December 1925: 3. COR, HWvLP, box 14, folder 17, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 9 November 1925; ibid., box 18, folder 4, HWvL to George L. Burr, 29 January 1926; NYPL, H.L. Mencken Papers, box 110, HWvL to H.L. Mencken, 19 January 1926; LC, Gertrude Battles Lane Papers, file 5, HWvL to Gertrude B. Lane, 22 February 1926. Harold E. Stearns, ed., Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922). Chapter “History” by HWvL, 297–308, quotation, 308; HWvL on his mission as a historian: “H.v.L.” Sun column, 4 January 1923; COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 4, HWvL to Albert V. Sielke, 4 May 1926. HWvL quoted in New York Times article of 25 July 1926; HWvL, Tolerance, 210; Franklin Everard Jordan, “Hendrik Willem van Loon: Disciple of Erasmus,” Boston Evening Transcript, 18 February 1928; The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, With a Short Life of the Author by Hendrik Willem van Loon of Rotterdam Who Also Illustrated the Book. Published for the Classics Club (Roslyn, New York: Walter J. Black, 1942), 8. Search-Light [Waldo Frank], “Poor Little Rich Boy,” The New Yorker, 19 June 1926: 19–20. GWvL, Story, 160–162; COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 9, HWvL to Jimmie, 3 July 1933. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries September through December 1926 and entries 1 and 5 January 1927; GWvL, Story, 162–163.

Notes

289

50. COR, HWvLP, box 13, folder 3, HWvL to Frances Goodrich, 4 March 1927; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entries January–April 1927; GWvL, Story, 163. 51. HU, b MS Am 1323 (3964), HWvL to Oswald Garrison Villard, 27 May 1927; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 12 May and 11 and 19 June 1927; ibid., box 10, folder 18, HWvL to Jimmie, 9 June 1927, and ibid., folder 19, undated July 1927 letter. 52. COR, HWvLP, box 13, folder 4, HWvL to Frances Goodrich, 30 June 1927; ibid., box 10, folder 19, HWvL to Jimmie, 12 August 1927; GWvL, Story, 164–165. 53. HWvL, America (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927); Allen Sinclair Will, “History as Mr. Van Loon Writes It,” New York Times Book Review, 2 October 1927; Thomas J. Wertenbaker, “Critical Surveys,” Yale Review 17 (January 1928): 410–413; William MacDonald, “America,” The Nation 125 (12 October 1927): 388–390. 54. GWvL, Story, 165–166; COR, HWvLP, box 13, folder 7, Frances Goodrich to HWvL, 15 November 1927 and HWvL to Frances Goodrich, 16 November 1927; New York Times articles on the van Loon–Goodrich marriage arrangement and the burglary in Frances Goodrich’s apartment: 3, 4, 7, 26 November and 1, 3, 6, and 21 December 1927. 55. COR, HWvLP, box 66, folder 11, HWvL to Charles Recht, 18 January 1929; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Frances Goodrich, 6 February 1928; GWvL, Story, 167. 56. COR, HWvLP, box 13, folder 11, HWvL to Frances Goodrich, 23 April 1928. 57. Charles A. Beard, ed., Whither Mankind: A Panorama of Modern Civilization (New York-London-Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928). Chapter HWvL, “Ancient and Medieval Civilizations,” 42–62. 58. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 113–115; Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927); HWvL, “Introduction,” in Maurice Maeterlinck, Dhan Gopal Mukerji and others, What is Civilization? (New York: Duffield and Company, 1926), 8, 10; HWvL, Man the Miracle Maker (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), 138. 59. On the Book-of-the-Month Club, see Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), chapter 3 and Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997); On the Literary Guild of America’s objectives and editorial board members, see the first issue of its monthly publication Wings (undated, probably January 1927); HWvL on the Literary Guild in The Guild Annual (New York: The Literary Guild of America, 1928), 116–117. 60. Jordan, “Hendrik Willem van Loon: Disciple of Erasmus,” Boston Evening Transcript, 18 February 1928; HU, b MS Am 1323 (3964), Oswald Garrison Villard to HWvL, 26 May 1927; Beard and Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 2: 729.

290

Notes

61. David Karsner, Sixteen Authors to One. Intimate Sketches of Leading American Story Tellers (1928; Freeport, New York: Books for Library Press, 1968), 202–203, 216. 62. NYPL, H.L. Mencken Papers, box 110, HWvL to H.L. Mencken, 16 October 1927 and Carl Van Doren to H.L. Mencken, 27 September 1929.

10 The Veere Paradise (1928–1931) 1. GWvL, Story, 168–169; The HWvL–Alice Bernheim correspondence is deposited at COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 5–33 and covers the years 1928–1944. During the years 1928–1934 van Loon wrote her 316 letters and from 1935 till his death in 1944 another fifty-five. 2. GWvL, Story, 169; COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 5–8, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 8 March 1928 and an earlier, undated letter written from the Grand Hotel Palace in Locarno; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entries February and March 1928. 3. COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 5–8, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 1 and 12 April 1928. 4. According to van Loon’s former neighbor, Dirk L. Broeder, an overzealous house painter corrected the strange spelling by adding a T to the name above the frontdoor after van Loon had left the house (Dirk L. Broeder, “De Houttuin anno 1572,” Middelburgsche Courant, 11 December 1936). In the literature dealing with van Loon’s residence there and published after his departure, the house is usually referred to as De Houttuin. Nowadays, however, and more historically correct, the name on the house is spelled as De Houttuyn; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries of 25 and 30 April, 4 and 7 June 1928; ibid., box 9, folder 9, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 23 June 1928; GWvL, Story, 175–179. 5. COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 5–8, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 27 April, 22 and 27 May, 4 and 9 June 1928; ibid., box 5, folder 17, Jimmie to Henry B. van Loon, 3 June 1929; ZA, Collectie HWvL, folder miscellaneous letters, HWvL to Helen Augur, 9 and 20 May 1928; LC, Benjamin W. Huebsch Papers, container 28, HWvL to Benjamin W. Huebsch, 11 June 1928; ibid., Stephen Bonsal Papers, container 3, HWvL to Stephen Bonsal, 7 July 1928; Dirk L. Broeder, “De Houttuin anno 1572,” Middelburgsche Courant, 11 December 1936. 6. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 24 June 1928; ibid., box 9, folder 9, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 24 July 1928; HWvL, “Veere gaat varen!,” De Kampioen 45.30 (27 July 1928): 847–848; On the sailing race, see Middelburgsche Courant, “Zeilwedstrijd te Veere,” 4 and 6 August 1928 and J.H. Midavaine, Veere in vroeger tijden, 3 vols. (Oostvoorne: Deboektant, 1994), 1: 57, 2: 54, 68; Provinciale Zeeuwse Courant articles on van Loon of 17 October 1953 and 14 December 1968; Dirk L. Broeder, “Hendrik Willem van Loon. Bohémien en kosmopoliet,” Elsevier, 8 March 1969; HWvL, “Een mooi bouwwerk in gevaar. Het stadhuis te Veere,”

Notes

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

291

De Groene Amsterdammer, 1 June 1929; HWvL, “Een monument in nood,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 18 December 1929. COL, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Special Manuscript Collection Random House, HWvL to Bennett A. Cerf, 19 August 1928; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 16 August 1928; A. Koch-De Waard, “A Veere Legend: Hendrik Willem van Loon,” Knickerbocker International 26.2 (February 1964): 38. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 25 August and 5 September 1928; ibid., box 9, folder 12, Jimmie to Alice Bernheim, 2 November 1929; A. Koch-De Waard, “A Veere Legend,” 38; L.W. de Bree, “Herinnering aan Hendrik Willem van Loon,” Zeeuws Tijdschrift 21.3 (1971): 78; GWvL, Story, 186, 192–193. In the fall of 1928 a record number of 8,417,310 kilo sugar beets was shipped in Veere’s harbor. J.H. Midavaine, Veere in vroeger tijden, 2: 62; ZA, Letters from HWvL and Helen Criswell van Loon to Erik “Din” Smit, 1928–1952, Jimmie to Erik Smit, 26 September and 27 November 1929; COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 9, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 24 August 1928; ibid., box 9, folder 10, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 9 October 1928. COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 10, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 22 December 1928; “Een Hollandsche Yankee in een doode stad,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 4 November 1928; Charles A. Beard, ed., Whither Mankind: A Panorama of Modern Civilization (New York-London-Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928), 47; HWvL, Report to Saint Peter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947), 36. New York World, 16 September 1928; New York Times, 27 September 1928; COR, HWvLP, box 13, folder 5, Henry B. Uterhart to Frances Goodrich, 3 August 1928; ibid., box 15, folder 12, HWvL to Charles Recht, 9 June 1929; ibid., box 9, folder 10, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 10 October 1928; GWvL, Story, 189–190. COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 9, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 24 August 1928 and ibid., box 9, folder 10, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 9 October 1928; P. Kloppers, “Professor Hendrik Willem van Loon en zijn opvattingen over het huwelijk,” De Haagsche Dameskroniek, 15 December 1928, 5–6; GWvL, Story, 190, 195–196; Caroline Bancroft, “Van Loon Feels Happy Among a Simpler Mankind,” New York Evening Post, 12 October 1929; On van Loon’s indignation about this article: COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 18, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 27 October 1929. COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 12, HWvL to Charles Recht, 26 September and 6 October 1928, and 18 January and 9 June 1929; ibid., box 15, folder 12, Charles Recht to HWvL, 18 December 1928, 11 January 1929, 24 October 1929; HWvL agreed with his lawyer’s assessment of his idiocy in letters to friends and his son. See, for instance, ibid., box 5, folder 17, HWvL to GWvL, 19 January 1929; HU, b MS Am 1323 (3964), HWvL to Oswald Garrison Villard, 19 January 1929; UP, Horace B. Liveright Collection, Folder 499, Correspondence File 1929–1930, HWvL to Horace B. Liveright, 2 January and 29 May 1929; All of the New York press covered the court

292

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

Notes

proceedings; Frances’s vow is in the New York Times and New York City Graphic, 24 October 1929. ZA, Letters from HWvL and Helen Criswell van Loon to Erik “Din” Smit, 1928–1952, HWvL to Erik Smit, 6 November 1929, and Jimmie to Erik Smit, 27 November 1929, capital letters and italics by Jimmie. Already a year before Jimmie had decided not to remarry Hendrik Willem as she rather preferred “to live in sin” than to take the risk he would divorce her again. COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 10, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 10 October 1928. COR, HWvLP, box 16, folder 16, undated letters HWvL to Rene Scudamore, 1928 and 1929; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entries 8 and 16 November 1928, 10 and 16 January, 2 and 25 March, 10 and 17 May, 21 and 27 June, 6 and 10 September, 23 and 25 October 1929 for HWvL trips to Paris (see also GWvL, Story, 187–188, 194–195, 201–202, 203–204, 213–215); ibid., box 11, folder 18, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 16 December 1929; That Rene had a prominent and—as an American woman—unique and influential position in the Parisian fashion world as publicity manager of Maison Worth, was also noted by American magazines and newspapers, such as Elite and The Christian Science Monitor, who published articles about her. According to a newspaper of her hometown Ithaca, Rene in her contacts with American clients had become “the American ambassador of the establishment, interpreting Worth to Americans, and Americans to the establishment and its employees.” Undated newspaper clippings, most likely from 1928 and 1930, in ibid., box 16, folder 21. HWvL, Life and Times of Pieter Stuyvesant (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1928); Reviews in The Nation 127 (12 December 1928): 665; Boston Transcript, 29 August 1928; Allen Sinclair Will, “That Sturdy, Gallant Dutchman, Pieter Stuyvesant,” New York Times Book Review, 30 September 1928; Atlantic Monthly 142 (December 1928): 22. HWvL, Man the Miracle Maker (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928); “Mr. van Loon Sets Down the Story of Man the Inventor,” New York Times Book Review, 5 May 1929; New York Herald Tribune, 27 January 1929; See for other reviews, Book Review Digest 1929: 980; Foreign editions of the book: Multiplex Man; or, The Story of Survival through Invention (London: J. Cape, 1928); HWvL, Van zintuig tot werktuig, of hoe de mensch het uitvinden leerde (Den Haag: H.P. Leopold, 1928); HWvL, Der Multiplizierte Mensch (Berlin: Rudolf Mosse, 1930); GWvL, Story, 183, 202–203; COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Erik Smit, undated 1930 letter. HWvL, Adriaen Block: Skipper, Trader, Explorer (New York: Block Hall, Inc., 1928), quotations 54, 4. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 17, HWvL to Henry B. van Loon, 6 February 1929; ibid., box 16, folder 16, HWvL to Rene Scudamore, undated February 1929 letter; ibid., box 9, folder 11, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 2 April 1929; LC, Benjamin W. Huebsch Papers, container 28, HWvL to Benjamin W. Huebsch, 16 June 1929. COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 11, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 5 April 1929; ibid., box 1, folder 6, HWvL to Thomas Smith, 6 April 1929.

Notes

293

21. COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 12, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 6 June and 9 October 1929; ibid., box 11, folder 19, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 26 January 1930; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entry 6 February 1930; ibid., box 11, folder 18, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 22 August 1929; UP, Horace B. Liveright Collection, Folder 499, Correspondence File, 1929–1930, Horace B. Liveright to HWvL, 27 September 1929 and HWvL to Horace B. Liveright, 30 May 1930. 22. Because of its green cover, the Dutch weekly De Amsterdammer had been popularly known as “De Groene” when van Loon wrote a column for it in 1922–1924. In March 1925, the publication officially incorporated the color in its title. 23. HWvL, “Overpeinzingen in de trekschuit tusschen Middelburg en Veere,” De Groene Amsterdammer, 24 August 1929; COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 12, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 20 June 1929. 24. “Edna Peters: The Typical American Girl,” The Smart Set 84.6 (August 1929): 10; ZA, Letters from HWvL and Helen Criswell van Loon to Erik “Din” Smit, 1928–1952, Jimmie to Erik Smit, 5 September 1929. 25. ZA, Letters from HWvL and Helen Criswell van Loon to Erik “Din” Smit, 1928–1952, Jimmie to Erik Smit, 5 September 1929; “Miss Amerika in ons land,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 1 September 1929; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 31 August and 1 September 1929; On Edna Peters’s visit to Veere, see also GWvL’s correspondence with Dora Miller in ibid., box 66, folder 19, GWvL to Dora Miller, 7 October 1957 and Dora Miller to GWvL, 19 October 1957; Edna Peters photographed with HWvL and Veere’s mayor, M.Q. Buys Ballot, in ibid., box 58, folder 9, N4552, and with a group of Veere girls in traditional costume in J.H. Midavaine, Veere in vroeger tijden, 2: 52. 26. Middelburgsche Courant, 3 September 1929; “All Europe gives the little Typical American Girl a great big hand,” The Smart Set 85.4 (December 1929): 6. 27. COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 18, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 12 July 1929; The HWvL-Ruby Fuhr correspondence covers the years 1929–1944 and is included in COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 18–26, and box 12, folder 1–9; GWvL, Story, 208–209. 28. COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 18, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 27 October 1929; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to GWvL, 1 May 1929. 29. COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 12, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 6 July and 22 August 1929; LC, Benjamin W. Huebsch Papers, container 28, HWvL to Benjamin W. Huebsch, 17 August 1929; “Van Loon’s Son a Dancer,” New York Times, 19 October 1932; COR, HWvLP, box 2, folder 10, HWvL to Werner Zuberbuehler, 8 January 1926, 14 April 1928, and 12 February 1929; ibid., box 5, folder 14, HWvL to GWvL, 22 November 1926; ibid., box 5, folder 16, HWvL to GWvL, 5 July 1928; ibid., box 5, folder 17, HWvL to GWvL, 4 June 1929; ibid., box 12, folder 19, HWvL to Frances Goodrich, 1 September 1925; In an interview Henry B. van Loon said that he always felt his father’s letters to his children showed that both sons “were very precious to him” and he thought his father “maintained a great affection for us kids.” And, contrary to Willem’s perception, Hank was convinced that his

294

30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

Notes

father “looked after mother as best as he could.” Author’s interview with Henry B. van Loon, 8 January 1994. COR, HWvLP, box 12, folder 19, HWvL to Frances Goodrich, 1 September 1925; Author’s interview with Henry B. van Loon, 8 January 1994. On Hank’s visit to Veere, see also GWvL, Story, 212–213, 215, and on Willem’s visits there, ibid., 192–195, 264–265. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 11 and 25 December 1929; “Radio Unites World in Christmas Fete: 4 Nations Broadcast,” New York Times, 26 December 1929; GWvL, Story, 215–216. Van Loon’s criticism of the Dutch in COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 12, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 6 June, 12 July, 22 August, and 2 October 1929; ibid., box 11, folder 18, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 16 December 1929; Van Loon’s eighteen articles in De Groene Amsterdammer were published on 14 July and 27 October 1928; 23 February, 2 and 9 March, 6 and 20 April, 11 May, 1 and 22 June, 20 and 27 July, 24 August, and 28 September 1929; 22 February, 1 March, 19 April, and 16 August 1930 and he expressed his critical remarks on his native country in seven of them. HWvL, “Overpeinzingen in de trekschuit tusschen Middelburg en Veere,” De Groene Amsterdammer, 20 July 1929. Terry A. Cooney, Balancing Acts: American Thought and Culture in the 1930s (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 150. HWvL, “Amerikaansche Presidentsverkiezing,” De Groene Amsterdammer, 14 July 1928; COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 20, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, undated April 1932 letter. HWvL on “the Jewish question” in his “H.v.L.” Sun columns, 12 and 13 June 1922. HWvL, “H.v.L.” Sun column, 13 June 1922; HWvL expresses anti-Semitic feelings in COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 5, HWvL to Mary Sullivan, 12 December 1926; ibid, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Jimmie, 18 October 1930; ZA, Collectie HWvL, Miscellaneous letters, HWvL to unidentified person, 2 May 1931; Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), viii, x, 58–149. HWvL, “Nieuwe Amerikaansche litteratuur,” De Groene Amsterdammer, 11 May 1929; HWvL, “Wit-Amerikaan contra Zwart-Amerikaan,” De Groene Amsterdammer, 19 April 1930, emphasis added. COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 19, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 20 January and 18 February 1930; ibid., box 11, folder 20, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, undated March 1930 letter. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–63, HWvL to Jimmie, 14 March 1930; GWvL, Story, 219, 222. COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 5, HWvL to Jimmie, 28 March 1930; ibid., box 5, folder 18, HWvL to GWvL, 21 March 1930; ZA, Letters from HWvL and Helen Criswell van Loon to Erik “Din” Smit, 1928–1952, Jimmie to Erik Smit, 27 April 1930; On HWvL’s meeting with his daughter-in-law-to-be, Janet Hall, see GWvL, Story, 225–227; HWvL’s broadcast from Amsterdam to an American audience over the Columbia Broadcasting System took place

Notes

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

295

on the evening of 14 November New York time (and early morning of 15 November local Amsterdam time). Scheduled as a part of a program presented by an affiliation of American jewelers, it was the first sponsored international broadcast from Holland to the United States. Unfortunately, however, van Loon’s talk “was cut off within a few minutes by the unusually severe static disturbance [. . .] which made further broadcasting impossible.” New York Times, 15 November 1930; On this broadcast from HWvL’s room in the Amsterdam Carlton Hotel, see also the newspaper article “Dr. Van Loon spreekt Amerika toe,” De Telegraaf, 15 November 1930 and Milton H. Biow, Butting In: An Adman Speaks Out (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1964), 51–54. In his memoir, published more than thirty years after the broadcast, Biow presented some facts slightly different from contemporary sources: according to Biow he had offered van Loon $2,000 for his radio talk—twice as much as Jimmie recorded at the time—and whereas the New York Times reported that van Loon was cut off within a few minutes, in Biow’s memory the speaker from Amsterdam could not be heard at all! COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 6, HWvL to Jimmie, 11 and 18 April 1930; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entries 1, 3, and 4 May 1930; ibid., box 9, folder 13, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 9 May 1930; ibid., box 5, folder 19, HWvL to GWvL, 30 May 1930. GAR, HAL Passage delen, inv. nr. A 1442, Eastbound Passagierslijsten 1930, departure S.S. Statendam, 26 April 1930, arrival in Rotterdam on 4 May 1930; GWvL, Story, 228–230; COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 14–15, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 5 June 1930; ibid., box 49 includes a HWvL drawing, dated 31 May 1930, of Kingsford-Smith’s Southern Cross circling Veere’s Town Hall tower. This drawing was also used as the illustration to HWvL’s article written that same day about this event, “Een handje uit de lucht. Hoe Kingsford-Smith mij kwam groeten,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 3 June 1930. ZA, Letters from HWvL and Helen Criswell van Loon to Erik “Din” Smit, 1928–1952, Jimmie to Erik Smit, 12 August 1930; NYPL, H.L. Mencken Papers, box 110, HWvL to H.L. Mencken, 5 August 1930; A. Koch-De Waard, “A Veere Legend,” 38; GWvL, Story, 230–231; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries August 1930; ibid., box 58, folder 28, contains a photo (N4546) showing a tea party in the backyard of van Loon’s house in Veere with a recovered Kingsford-Smith seated between Hendrik Willem and a happy-looking Jimmie; Kingsford-Smith’s operation and recovery at the Middelburg hospital was covered by Middelburgsche Courant articles of 4, 5, 13, 14, and 15 August 1930. The newspaper described Kingsford-Smith as a courageous hero of the sky, comparable to the Dutch heroes of the sea in the past. COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 14–15, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 5, 23, and 28 June, 6 and 8 July 1930; ibid., box 13, folder 15, HWvL to Hattie B. Johnston, 8 August 1930; ibid., box 16, folder 17, HWvL to Rene Scudamore, 10 January 1931. HWvL, R.v.R.: The Life and Times of Rembrandt van Rijn (New York: Horace Liveright, 1930); COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 14–15, HWvL to Alice

296

47.

48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

Notes

Bernheim, 17 June, 8, 13, and 24 August 1930; ibid., box 13, folder 15, HWvL to Hattie B. Johnston, 8 August 1930; ibid., box 67, folder 1, Arthur Pell to GWvL, 8 January 1960 with enclosure George G. Harrap to HWvL, 27 August 1930; ibid., box 18, folder 5, HWvL to Louis N. Feipel, 3 September 1930; NYPL, H.L. Mencken Papers, box 110, HWvL to H.L. Mencken, 5 August 1930; HWvL’s other three Rembrandt articles were published in the Woman’s Home Companion 58 (March 1931): 15–16, 66, 69; (April 1931): 31–32, 172–176; (May 1931): 31–32, 138–140. COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 14–15, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 6 July and 24 August 1930; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 19 September 1930; ibid., box 5, folder 18, HWvL to GWvL, 15 October 1930; ZA, Letters from HWvL and Helen Criswell van Loon to Erik “Din” Smit, 1928–1952, HWvL to Erik Smit, 8 October 1930. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to H.H. Davis, 3 September 1930; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entry 2 October 1930; ibid., box 9, folder 16, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 9 October 1930; ibid., box 11, folder 21, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 31 October 1930; ibid., box 5, folder 18, HWvL to GWvL, 28 November 1930; ibid., box 17, folder 22, HWvL to Arthur Pell, March 1931; New York Times, 13 December 1930; HWvL, Van Loon’s Lives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942), 284. Reviews of R.v.R. in: New York World, 2 October 1930; New York Evening Post, 4 October 1930; The Outlook 156 (8 October 1930): 229; Saturday Review of Literature 7 (11 October 1930): 204; New York Times Book Review, 16 November 1930; Chicago Daily Tribune, 13 December 1930; The New Freeman 2 (17 December 1930): 331. COR, HWvLP, box 66, folder 7, GWvL to Ralph L. DeGoff, 6 November 1970; GWvL, Story, 236; R.v.R. in the revised Heritage Press edition had 378 pages and in the years 1939, 1944, and 1954 respectively sold 12,000, 30,000, and 28,000 copies; COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 21, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 22 November 1930; HU, b MS Am 1803 (1797), folder 1, HWvL to George Sarton, 26 March 1933; HWvL, R.v.R. Het leven en de tijd van Rembrandt van Rijn (Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff ’s Uitgevers Maatschappij N.V., 1931); An early Dutch positive review of the American edition of R.v.R. in De Haagsche Post, 18 October 1930, and equally positive reviews about the Dutch edition in Het Vaderland, 19 December 1931 and De Telegraaf, 20 December 1931. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 18, HWvL to GWvL, 26 October 1930. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 1, 6, and 11 December 1930; GWvL, Story, 238; New York Times articles on arrival of Albert Einstein in New York, 11 and 12 December 1930. HWvL, “Short Cut to God,” The New Republic 65 (31 December 1930): 185–187; GWvL, Story, 239. COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 17, Albert Einstein to HWvL, 24 December 1930. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 18, HWvL to GWvL, 12 December 1930; ibid., box 9, folder 14–15, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 23 June 1930; ibid.,

Notes

56.

57.

58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

66.

297

box 14, folder 20, undated and unidentified but most likely New York newspaper article by Louis Sherwin with the headline “Discontent Seen by Van Loon as Greatest Spur to Artists.” COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries January through 11 February 1931; ibid., box 9, folder 17, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 16 January 1931; GWvL, Story, 241–243; “H.v.L.” Sun columns, 27 and 28 March 1923. GWvL, Story, 224–225, 240–241, 242, 243; Peter Schwed, Turning the Pages: An Insider’s Story of Simon and Schuster 1924–1984 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1984), 6, 8; On S&S, see also Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 245–254; Walker Gilmer, Horace Liveright: Publisher of the Twenties (New York: David Lewis, 1970), ix, 101–103, 199–201, 224–225, 228, 232–237; HWvL, How I Came to Publish with Essandess. Published for the New York Times National Book Fair (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), 4–6. GAR, HAL Passage delen, inv. nr. A 1446, Eastbound Passagierslijsten 1931, departure S.S. Nieuw Amsterdam, 24 February 1931, arrival Rotterdam, 6 March 1931; New York Times, 25 February 1931; COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 17, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 11 March 1931. Also in a 16 March 1931 letter to Bernheim he wrote that for the first time in his life he was “American in feeling” and that Europe had become “a foreign land”; ibid., box 16, folder 17, HWvL to Rene Scudamore, 12 March 1931; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entries 24 February, 6, 9, and 14 March 1931. GWvL, Story, 246–247, 250–251. COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 18, HWvL to A. Bernheim, 8 May 1931; ibid., box 5, folder 19, HWvL to GWvL, 27 May 1931; ibid., box 5, folder 20, HWvL to GWvL, undated probably June 1931 letter. COR, HWvLP, box 16, folder 17, HWvL to Rene Scudamore, undated probably May/June 1931 letter. COR, HWvLP, box 16, folder 17, HWvL to Rene Scudamore, 26 June 1931; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entries 26 and 27 June 1931. GWvL, Story, 262; COR, HWvLP, box 16, folder 17, HWvL to Rene Scudamore, 23 June 1932; ibid., box 16, folder 18, HWvL to Rene Scudamore, 31 July 1937. GWvL, Story, 263; COR, HWvLP, box 16, folder 17, HWvL to Rene Scudamore, 29 June 1932. GAR, HAL Passage delen, inv. nr. A 1450, Eastbound Passagierslijsten 1932, departure S.S. Rotterdam, 2 July 1932; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 1 and 23 July, and 14 August 1932; see also GWvL, Story, 264–265. HWvL, Van Loon’s Lives, xvii–xviii.

11 The Educator (1931–1935) 1. New York Herald Tribune, 30 July 1931; COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 9, HWvL to George L. Burr, undated 1931 letter.

298

Notes

2. COR, HWvLP, box 5, folder 19, HWvL to GWvL, 29 July 1931 and 17 August 1931; LC, Roy W. Howard Papers, container 55, HWvL to Roy W. Howard, 23 and 31 August 1931. 3. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries September through December 1931. 4. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 13 January 1932; HWvL articles “Speaking of Revolution” in The Nation of 19 and 26 August, 2, 9, 16, 23, and 30 September, 7, 14, 21, and 28 October, 4, 11, 18, and 25 November, 2, 16, 23, and 30 December 1931, 13, 20, and 27 January, and 3 February 1932; HWvL articles “It Seems to the Spectator” in the New York WorldTelegram of 12 through 24 October 1931; LC, Roy W. Howard Papers, container 55, Roy W. Howard to HWvL, 2 September, 27 and 31 October 1931, and HWvL to Roy W. Howard, 2 November 1931; On Heywood Broun, see Richard O’Connor, Heywood Broun: A Biography (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975). 5. HWvL’s “Philosophy of History” articles in the New York Herald Tribune of 20 and 27 December 1931, and 8 and 10 January 1932; HWvL, “The Seven Blunders of the World,” Forum and Century 86.3 (September 1931): 146–150; HWvL, “How Not to Educate Children,” Saturday Review of Literature 8 (14 November 1931): 284–285, 288; HWvL, “If the Dutch Had Kept Nieuw Amsterdam,” in J.C. Squire, ed., If: or History Rewritten (New York: Viking Press, Inc., 1931), 63–106; COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 21, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 31 October 1930. 6. COR, HWvLP, box 6, folder 1, HWvL to GWvL, 19 January and 3 May 1932; ibid., box 11, folder 23, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, undated September 1931 letter. 7. HWvL, Van Loon’s Geography: The Story of the World We Live In (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932); COR, HWvLP, box 16, folder 17, HWvL to Rene Scudamore, 22 and 29 June 1932; ibid., box 18, folder 6, HWvL to George L. Burr, 19 January 1932; ibid., box 6, folder 2, HWvL to GWvL, 28 March and 20 May 1932. 8. COR, HWvLP, box 6, folder 1, HWvL to GWvL, 25 February 1932; HWvL, “Prosperity Around the Corner,” New York Times, 11 February 1933; Terry A. Cooney, Balancing Acts: American Thought and Culture in the 1930s (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 3–5, 162. 9. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to GWvL, 26 February 1932. 10. COR, HWvLP, box 14, folder 21, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 14 March 1932; ibid., box 11, folder 24, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 23 May 1932; Shaun O’Connell, Remarkable, Unspeakable New York: A Literary History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 206–207. 11. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 26 April through 2 May 1932; ibid., box 14, folder 21, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 14 March, 1 and 4 May 1932. 12. HWvL, To Have or To Be—Take Your Choice. The John Day Pamphlets, no. 12 (New York: The John Day Company, 1932); COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 6, HWvL to George L. Burr, undated May 1932 letter; ibid., box 11, folder 24, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, undated June 1932 letter.

Notes

299

13. HWvL, “To Have or To Be,” published in School and Society 36 ( July 2, 1932): 6–8; and in Journal of the National Education Association 21 (October 1932): 210; COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, undated June 1932 letter; LC, Roy W. Howard Papers, container 68, HWvL to Roy W. Howard, 1 July 1932. 14. COR, HWvLP, box 6, folder 1, HWvL to GWvL, 6 March 1932; ibid., box 18, folder 6, HWvL to George L. Burr, undated May 1932 letter; NLMD, Collectie HWvL, HWvL to Theun de Vries, 6 April 1932. 15. COR, HWvLP, box 6, folder 1, HWvL to GWvL, 14 March 1932, emphasis in original. 16. Charles Lee, The Hidden Public: The Story of the Book-of-the-Month Club (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1958), 66; COR, HWvLP, box 6, folder 3, HWvL to GWvL, 25 August 1932. 17. HWvL, Van Loon’s Geography, 1, 9, 11,12. 18. HWvL, Van Loon’s Geography, 215, 418–419. 19. HWvL, Van Loon’s Geography, 8, 500–504. 20. Reviews of Van Loon’s Geography in New York Times Book Review 11 September 1932; The Bookman 75 (September 1932): 511–512; The Nation 135 (7 September 1932): 205 and ibid. (7 December 1932): 570; Chicago Daily Tribune, 10 September 1932; Commonweal 16 (28 September 1932): 513; Yale Review 22.2 (December 1932): 408–410; Atlantic Monthly 150 (October 1932): 11; New York Herald Tribune Books, 11 September 1932. 21. COR; HWvLP, box 14, folder 21, HWvL to Henri Mayer, undated December 1932 letter; David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 276; New York Evening Post, 8 September 1932; New York World-Telegram, 14 September 1932; HWvL, “An Historian Looks at Life,” Advertising Club News (10 October 1932): 6–7, 10–11; For HWvL’s accent, see Variety 108 (11 October 1932): 56, and Ruth Hale, “Hendrik Willem,” Book-of-the-Month Club News, August 1932. 22. GWvL, Story, 265–266, 268. 23. COR, HWvLP, box 6, folder 2, HWvL to Eliza Bowditch, 12 April 1932; ibid., box 11, folder 25, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 20 September 1932; ibid., box 6, folder 3, HWvL to GWvL, 13 September 1932, emphasis in original; LC, Roy W. Howard Papers, container 68, HWvL to Roy W. Howard, 11 June 1932. 24. HWvL, “What Governor Roosevelt Reads,” Saturday Review of Literature 9 (15 October 1932): 169–171; COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 20, ER to HWvL, 2 November 1932. 25. COR, HWvLP, box 6, folder 4, HWvL to GWvL, 16 October 1932; ibid., box 14, folder 21, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 5 November 1932; ibid., box 18, folder 6, HWvL to Janet Sabloff, undated November 1931 letter; GWvL, Story, 270; On HWvL’s activities for WEVD, see also New York Times articles “Brain-building for Adults,” 6 November 1932, and “Plan Air University,” 26 January 1933.

300

Notes

26. LC, Roy W. Howard Papers, container 80, HWvL to Roy W. Howard, 17 January 1933; HWvL was also involved in other educational activities— to help unemployed musicians, a program of adult education, and a conference of the Child Study Association of America—as was recorded by the New York Times of respectively 14 and 19 November 1932, and 7 December 1932. 27. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 6, HWvL to Janet Sabloff, undated November 1932 letter; GWvL, Story, 269; Variety 141 (1 January 1941): 29. 28. New York Herald Tribune, 29 December 1932. 29. COR, HWvLP, box 6, folder 5, HWvL to GWvL, 30 January 1933; ZA, Collectie HWvL, Folder miscellaneous letters, HWvL to unidentified person, 13 May 1933; COR, HWvLP, box 6, folder 5, HWvL to GWvL, 23 March 1933. 30. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 16 June through 27 July 1933; ibid., box 11, folder 9, HWvL to Jimmie, 3, 10, and 11 July 1933. 31. GWvL, Story, 276, 279; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries, 3 August through 12 September 1933. 32. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to GWvL, 10, 11, and 25 August 1933 and one undated August 1922 letter. 33. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 20 September through 27 October 1933; New York Times, 5 November 1933. 34. ZA, Collectie HWvL, Folder miscellaneous letters, HWvL to unidentified person, 13 May 1933; HWvL, An Indiscreet Itinerary or How the Unconventional Traveler Should See Holland (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933), quotations, vii–ix; Reviews of the book in: New York Herald Tribune Books, 11 June 1933; New York Times Book Review, 11 June 1933; Saturday Review of Literature, 24 June 1933. 35. HWvL, An Elephant Up a Tree (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1933); HWvL’s comparison to Voltaire, New York Times, 28 October 1933; UIL, Jay N. Darling Papers, HWvL to Alfred Harcourt, undated 1933 letter; Reviews of the book in: Boston Transcript, 29 November 1933; New York Times Book Review, 5 November 1933; Saturday Review of Literature, 25 November 1933. 36. COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 26, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 15 December 1933; ibid., box 6, folder 7, HWvL to GWvL, 19 December 1933; ibid., box 6, folder 5, HWvL to GWvL, 23 January 1933; ibid., box 6, folder 10, HWvL to GWvL, 3 October 1934. 37. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 7, HWvL to Simon and Schuster, undated 1933 letter (most likely November or December), and letter of 30 December 1933. 38. UP, Horace B. Liveright Collection, Folder 499, Correspondence File, 1929–1930, HWvL to Horace Liveright, 2 January 1929; HWvL, “Rebuild the World!” The Harrap Mercury 2.9 (May 1933): 129–131; HWvL letter to Eleanor Hubbard Garst, published in Better Homes and Gardens 12 (October 1933): 24; Norman Klein, “Van Loon Shuffles Cards of Philosophy for New Deal,” New York Evening Post, undated clipping in COR, HWvLP, box 27, folder 1, most likely of June 1933 as it refers to the London Economic Conference of that month.

Notes

301

39. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries18 and 25 April 1933; ibid., box 14, folder 22, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 3 May 1933; ibid., box 11, folder 26, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 1 December 1933; HWvL brochure A Voyage of Re-Discovery with Hendrik Willem van Loon; Franconia Southern Hemisphere World Cruise, 1934 (New York: Cunard Line, 1933). Cunard Line ads “Around the World in the Franconia with Hendrik Willem van Loon” in the September and November 1933 issues of The American Spectator; COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 8–9, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 14 January, undated January letter, 7 and 26 February, 7 March 1934; GWvL, Story, 285–287; HWvL, The Story of the Pacific (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940). 40. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 8–9, Indische Courant article of 15 March 1934, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 28 March and 25 April 1934, Dutch newspaper article by Capetown correspondent of 4 May 1934, and HWvL to George L. Burr, 15 September 1934; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to GWvL, 23 March 1934. 41. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 8–9, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 16, 21, and 24 May 1934; Enoch Pratt Free Library, H.L. Mencken Collection, H.L. Mencken, “Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work,” 334. 42. New York Times, 1 June 1934; COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 8–9, HWvL to Ross Skinner, 20 October 1934. 43. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 8–9, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, undated summer 1934 letter and HWvL to George L. Burr, 15 September 1934; ZA, Collectie HWvL, Letters from HWvL and Helen Criswell van Loon to Erik “Din” Smit, 1928–1952, Jimmie to Erik Smit, 1 October 1934; Reviews of the exhibit in New York Times and New York Herald Tribune, 12 August 1934. 44. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to GWvL, 4 July 1934; The Hendrik Willem van Loon papers at Cornell University contain an “off the record” note by Willem that Helen upon return of the Franconia trip was pregnant by his father and that “an abortion finally performed revealed she would have produced twins.” The statement of the pregnancy was not confirmed by any other source, however, and neither did Willem use this ammunition against his father in his biography. The fact that van Loon kept up his friendship with the Hoffman twins in the following years and that they never let him down, is a clear indication that this “off the record” note on the pregnancy is devoid of any basis. Ibid., box 65, folder 1–8, Notes on Helen Hoffman. 45. HWvL, Ships and How They Sailed the Seven Seas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935); HWvL, “On Being Fashionable,” Esquire, November 1934, 37, 150, 152; HWvL, “Hints for Reformers,” Atlantic Monthly 154.6 (December 1934): 743–745; COR, HWvLP, box 6, folder 9, HWvL to GWvL, 10 August 1934; ibid., box 18, folder 8–9, HWvL to George L. Burr, 15 September 1934 and HWvL to Alfred C. Howell, 17 September 1934; ibid., box 9, folder 2, HWvL to Harold Bauer, 20 November 1934; ibid., box 27, folder 1, undated newspaper clipping, “Mr. Van Loon and Columbus,” of HWvL letter, dated 13 October 1934, to the New York Herald

302

46.

47.

48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

53. 54.

55.

56.

57.

Notes

Tribune; FDRL, ERP no. 100 Personal Letters, box 1323, HWvL to ER, 8 October and 14 November 1934. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 29 October 1934; ZA, Collectie HWvL, Letters from HWvL and Helen Criswell van Loon to Erik “Din” Smit, 1928–1952, Jimmie to Erik Smit, 25 November 1934; GWvL, Story, 351. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 8–9, HWvL to J. David Stern, 30 September 1934; David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 323; HWvL column “Meet the Commentator” in the New York Daily Mirror, in COR, HWvLP, box 25, folder 60–64. HWvL’s introductory column appeared on 12 November 1934. On HWvL’s opinion on U.S. nonintervention in Europe or elsewhere, see for instance HWvL, “Meet the Commentator,” Daily Mirror, 11 December 1934 and (with quotation) 12 April 1935; HWvL expressed his view on the two different Americas in his column of 18 March 1935. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Hattie-Bell Johnston, 20 February 1935 and HWvL to GWvL, 12 April 1935 (italics in original). COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 8–9, HWvL to Grace Castagnetta, 16 November 1934; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entry 17 November 1934; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to GWvL, 23 January 1935; ibid., box 65, folder 1–8, GWvL interviews of Grace Castagnetta, 28 March 1957 and 26 October 1961; LC, Stephen Bonsal Papers, container 3, HWvL to Stephen Bonsal, 20 October 1935; On Grace Castagnetta, see also GWvL, Story, 301–303. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 1–8, GWvL interview of Grace Castagnetta, 28 March 1957; ibid., box 66, folder 10, GWvL to Maurice Hanline, 7 July 1958; HWvL, How I Came to Publish with Essandess. Published for the New York Times National Book Fair (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), 6; Author’s interview with Henry B. van Loon, 8 January 1994. HWvL, Ships and How They Sailed the Seven Seas, 1. Reviews in New York Times Book Review, 24 February 1935; New York Herald Tribune Books, 3 March 1935; Saturday Review of Literature 11 (23 February 1935): 503; De Haagsche Post, 5 October 1935; COR, Carl L. Becker Papers, HWvL to Carl L. Becker, 18 March 1935. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1934–1937, HWvL to FDR, 11 March and 25 April 1935; COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 14 April 1935; ibid., box 15, folder 20, ER to HWvL, 23 April 1935; ibid., box 15, folder 21, FDR to HWvL, 26 April 1935; ibid., box 18, folder 10–11, HWvL to George L. Burr, 23 August 1935. HWvL quoted in News-Week, 1 June 1935; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1934–1937, HWvL to FDR, 7 July 1935; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 365, 378–379. On the reactions of listeners to HWvL’s broadcasts, the internal NBC correspondence on the successful program, and the decision to publish forty HWvL talks, see SHSW, NBC Archives, Central Correspondence series, box 42, folder 40; Quotation of one listener, ibid., Allan H. Candee to NBC,

Notes

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

303

21 May 1935; On the “radio demagogues” Coughlin and Long, see Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); HWvL, Air-Storming (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935); Reviews in New York Herald Tribune Books, 24 November 1935, New York Times Book Review, 17 November 1935, and in De Telegraaf, 31 January 1937; COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 21, FDR to HWvL, 18 November 1935; Air-Storming contains HWvL’s broadcasts delivered from 19 May through 3 October 1935. For his other NBC broadcasts delivered through 19 December that year, see COR, HWvLP, box 25, folder 81–91. The Library of Congress’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division has a considerable number of HWvL broadcasts covering the years 1933 through 1943 with an emphasis on the years 1935 (45), 1938 (24), and 1939 (9). COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 21 through 27 June 1935; ibid., box 15, folder 1, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 28 June 1935; ibid., box 18, folder 10–11, HWvL to Ben Huebsch, 13 July 1935; Even five years later—when the Manns lived in the United States—Thomas Mann in a letter to van Loon referred with gratitude to his first meeting with FDR and asked van Loon if for a second time he would be willing to arrange a meeting with the president. Ibid., box 14, folder 1, Thomas Mann to HWvL, 16 December 1940; On Thomas Mann’s work habits, see Robert Van Gelder, Writers and Writing (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946), 57–58; On Thomas Mann’s visit to van Loon and FDR, see also Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1935–1936, herausgegeben von Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1978), 123–131 and Donald Prater, Thomas Mann: A Life (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 239–240; On Jewish and political refugees from the Nazi regime to the United States in the 1930s and afterward, see Anthony Heilblut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America, from the 1930s to the Present (New York: Viking Press, 1983). COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 1, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 12 August and 4 September 1935; ZA, Collectie HWvL, Letters from HWvL and Helen Criswell van Loon to Erik “Din” Smit, 1928–1952, Jimmie to Erik Smit, undated August 1935 letter. HWvL, Around the World With the Alphabet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935); From the Inner Sanctum of Simon and Schuster, 5 October 1935; Reviews in, for instance, New York Herald Tribune Books, 17 November 1935 and New York Times Book Review, 5 January 1936. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 10–11, HWvL to Fiorello H. La Guardia, 16 October, 19 and 23 November 1935; “Van Loon Rings School Bell,” New York Times, 1 December 1935. HWvL, A World Divided Is a World Lost (New York: Cosmos Publishing Company, 1935); HWvL’s 3 October 1935 NBC broadcast in HWvL, Air-Storming, 299; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 31 December 1935.

304

Notes

12 For Roosevelt and the Arts (1936–1937) 1. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to John F. Royal, 4 December 1935, and to GWvL, undated January 1935 letter; ibid., box 6, folder 10, HWvL to GWvL, 16 September 1934. 2. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 21, H.L. Mencken to HWvL, 29 February 1936; ibid., box 15, folder 2, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 20 March 1936; ibid., box 18, folder 12, HWvL to Frank Kingdon, undated August 1936 letter; HWvL, “A Study In Backgrounds,” The Democratic National Convention 1936 and in the subsequent new edition, The Democratic Book 1936 (Philadelphia: The Democratic National Convention, 1936), 13–20. 3. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1934–1937, HWvL to Margaret Le Hand, 1 September 1936; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 18 October 1936. The FBI took a more sour view of HWvL’s pro-Roosevelt work, especially since the Rand School had been described as “a socialist training school for labor agitators”: see FBI, HWvL Files, Chicago File no. 100–2477, 28 February 1945, 14. 4. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1934–1937, HWvL to FDR, 5 November 1936 and ibid., FDR to HWvL, 13 November 1936; On the 1936 election, see William E. Leuchtenburg, The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), chapter 4. 5. COR, George Lincoln Burr Papers, box 19, HWvL to George L. Burr, 29 August 1936; ibid., HWvLP, box 18, folder 12, HWvL to ER, undated August 1936 letter. 6. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 21 August 1936; ibid., box 18, folder 12, HWvL to ER, undated August 1936 letter; COL, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Manuscript Collection Coudert, Sr., HWvL to Frederick R. Coudert, 5 November 1936. 7. LC, Benjamin W. Huebsch Papers, container 28, HWvL to Benjamin W. Huebsch, 30 March 1936; COR, Carl L. Becker Papers, HWvL to Carl L. Becker, 7 March 1935. 8. HWvL and Grace Castagnetta, The Songs We Sing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936); Review in New York Times Book Review, 15 November 1936. For other reviews, see Book Review Digest (1936): 983. 9. HWvL, The Songs We Sing, front and back flap; HWvL, “Getting Joy Out of Music,” The Etude 54 (February 1936): 69–70; COR, HWvLP, box 6, folder 13, HWvL to Katy Codman, undated fall 1936 letter; ibid., box 15, folder 2, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 30 December 1936. 10. SHSW, NBC Archives, Central Correspondence series, box 51, folder 6, Phillips Carlin to Thomas Stix, 24 December 1936 and HWvL to Phillips Carlin, 28 December 1936 and 2 January 1937; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1934–1937, HWvL to ER, 26 January 1937 (with 19 January pre-inauguration broadcast) and FDR to HWvL, 2 February 1937. 11. On FDR’s mastery of the radio, see Russell D. Buhite and David W. Levy, eds., FDR’s Fireside Chats (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992); FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1934–1937, HWvL to FDR,

Notes

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

305

8 March 1937; SHSW, NBC Archives, Central Correspondence series, box 57, folder 57, HWvL to John F. Royal, 26 March 1937 and John F. Royal to HWvL, 18 May and 29 June 1937; COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 23, Max L. Schuster to HWvL, 19 April 1937. SHSW, NBC Archives, Central Correspondence series, box 57, folder 57, L.H. Titterton to HWvL, 23 June 1937 and HWvL to John F. Royal, 4 September 1937; ibid., box 65, folder 25, L.H. Titterton to HWvL, 22 December 1937 and 31 January 1938, and L.H. Titterton to Julian Street, Jr., 3 February 1938; HWvL, June 16th, 1937. A broadcast delivered on that day over the networks of the National Broadcasting Company (New York: National Broadcasting Company, 1937); RCA Victor Radio, A Short-Wave Journey of Discovery With Hendrik Willem van Loon (Camden, N.J.: RCA Manufacturing Company, 1937), 6–8; COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to a Mr. van Peursam, undated September 1937 letter. AMBZ, Washington, Gez./Amb. 1940–1952, box 104: L3/33, Correspondence on Decoration HWvL, including HWvL’s 10 July 1937 letter of thanks to W.C. graaf van Rechteren Limpurg, Netherlands legation in Washington; Archief Kabinet der Koningin, 28 May 1937 no. 53, signed decision of Queen Wilhelmina to bestow decoration of officer in the Order of Orange Nassau on HWvL; New York Times articles on HWvL decoration, 1 and 3 July 1937; FDRL, ERP, Speech and Article File, box 3034, ER interviews HWvL, 14 July 1937. See also SHSW, NBC Archives, Central Correspondence series, box 57, folder 57, Arthur J. Daly to William S. Rainey, 14 July and HWvL to John F. Royal, 15 July 1937; New York Times, 15 July 1937. COR, HWvLP, box 13, folder 19, HWvL to Marvin Lowenthal, 15 July 1937. AMBZ, Washington, Gez./Amb. 1940–1952, box 104: L3/33, Correspondence on Decoration HWvL; NLMD, Collectie HWvL, F.J.W. Drion, Vaderlandsche Jaarboeken (1937): 256–257. GWvL, Story, 311 and for a detailed description of the house, 314–318; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 4, 6, and 15 January, 28 April and 24 October 1937; ibid., box 12, folder 4, Jimmie to Ruby Fuhr, 25 October 1937; ibid., box 15, folder 3, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 4 July 1937; NYPL, H.L. Mencken Papers, box 110, HWvL to H.L. Mencken, 27 April 1937; AMBZ, Washington, Gez./Amb. 1940–1952, box 104: L3/33, Correspondence on Decoration HWvL, HWvL to W.C. graaf van Rechteren Limpurg, Netherlands legation in Washington, 5 and 10 July 1937; COL, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Special Manuscript Collection Meloney, HWvL to Marie M. Meloney, 5 January 1939; Emil Ludwig, Roosevelt: A Study in Fortune and Power (New York: The Viking Press, 1938); FDRL, Lorena Hickok Papers, box 17, Correspondence and Subject File, Folder HWvL, Jimmie to Lorena Hickok, 30 December 1937. COR, HWvLP, box 16, folder 18, Betty Goodwin to Rene Scudamore, 14 March and 26 April 1937, and HWvL to Rene Scudamore, 13 and 31 July 1937; HWvL NBC broadcast of 4 April 1937 in ibid., box 25, folder 80;

306

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

Notes

ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Rene Scudamore, 3 December 1938. On the strikes and the unionization of industrial America, see William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 1932–1940 (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 239–243, and David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chapter 10; COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 30 May and 10 June 1937, and HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 15 June; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1934–1937, HWvL to FDR, 10 August 1937, and 1937 Booklet Why Social Security? illustrated with drawings by HWvL; Educational Policies Commission, The Unique Function of Education in American Democracy (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association of the United States and the Department of Superintendence, 1937); FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1934–1937, HWvL to FDR, 29 July and 10 August 1937; HWvL, “Roosevelt Alias Geldersman. A Study in Applied Genealogy,” Redbook Magazine 70.2 (December 1937): 4, 104–105; On FDR’s Dutch roots see also Frank Freidel, “The Dutchness of the Roosevelts” in J.W. Schulte Nordholt and Robert P. Swierenga, eds., A Bilateral Bicentennial: A History of Dutch-American Relations, 1782–1982 (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff and Octagon Books, 1982), 149–167. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1938–1939, HWvL to FDR, 25 January 1938 and FDR to HWvL, 27 January 1938. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Henri Mayer, undated March 1937 letter, italics by HWvL; ibid., box 18, folder 13–14, HWvL to Van Wyck Brooks, 7 July 1937. SHSW, NBC Archives, Central Correspondence series, box 57, folder 57, HWvL to John F. Royal, 4 September 1937; COR, HWvLP, box 16, folder 18, HWvL to Rene Scudamore, undated summer 1937 letter. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 13–14, HWvL to John F. Royal, 1 October 1937; ibid., box 15, folder 4, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 1 October 1937; On van Loon’s exhibit at Ferargil Galleries, see New York Times, 1 October 1937, New York World-Telegram, 9 October 1937, and New York Herald Tribune, 10 October 1937; See S&S ads for The Arts in, for instance, New York Times, 10 October and 6 December 1937, and in New York Herald Tribune, 12 October 1937. HWvL, The Arts (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937). On the page listing previously published van Loon books, S&S mentioned that van Loon’s books were published in translation in twenty-one other countries around the world, that there were even translations into Urdu, Bantu, Esperanto, and Braille, and that The Arts was not only published in the United States, but would also simultaneously appear in England, Austria, France, and Italy. Reviews in New York Herald Tribune Books, 3 October 1937 and Washington Post, 3 October 1937. Chicago Daily Tribune, 2 October 1937; The Christian Science Monitor, 30 September 1937; Dallas Morning News, 3 October 1937; New York Times

Notes

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

307

Book Review, 3 October 1937; Los Angeles Times, 17 October 1937; Newsweek, 4 October 1937; Atlantic Monthly, November 1937; Saturday Review of Literature 16.23 (2 October 1937): 5–6. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Scott Perky, 2 November 1937 and to Harold Bauer, 25 October 1937 (italics by HWvL); ibid., box 11, folder 17, Albert Einstein to HWvL, 20 October 1937; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1934–1937, HWvL to FDR, 10 November 1937, and ibid., Folder HWvL 1938–1939, HWvL to FDR, 4 January 1938 and FDR to HWvL, 6 January 1938. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 13–14, HWvL to John F. Royal, 8 September 1937; HWvL’s views on art in New York Times, 25 April and 20 November 1937; HWvL, The Arts, 8, 47, 632, 635. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, Lieutenant Jocelyn Raban-Williams to HWvL, July 1940 on board H.M. Submarine Osiris. This letter is also printed in Robert Van Gelder, “Author at Home: Inside the Van Loon Household,” page 55 of unidentified periodical, most likely from early 1941, in ibid., box 27, folder 1. HWvL and Grace Castagnetta, Christmas Carols (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937); Reviews of Christmas Carols in New York Times Book Review, 12 December 1937 and in New York Herald Tribune of 14 November 1937; New York Herald Tribune Books, “What America Is Reading,” 31 October and 19 December 1937; COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Scott Perky, 2 November 1937; Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947), 314, 327, 330; Cultural historian Warren Susman described Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People as “the bestseller” of the 1930s and its publication in 1936 “a landmark for the study of American popular culture.” In its first year, Carnegie’s book sold 750,000 copies. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 165, 305 note 55; By July 1938, Meredith Wood of the Book-of-the-Month Club assessed The Arts as “a most substantial best-seller.” COL, Oral History Collection, The Book-of-theMonth Club, vol. 4, 664–665, interview with Meredith Wood. HWvL, Observations on the Mystery of Print and the Work of Johann Gutenberg (New York: Book Manufacturers’ Institute, 1937); HWvL, How to Look at Pictures. A Short History of Painting (New York: National Committee for Art Appreciation, 1938); COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 4, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 30 November 1937. New York Times, 5 November 1937; NA, Archief J. Loudon, 1866–1955, inv. nr. 8, HWvL to J. Loudon, 22 October 1937; COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 15–18, HWvL to John F. Royal, 4 and 6 January 1938; ibid., George Lincoln Burr Papers, box 19, HWvL to George L. Burr, 12 January 1938. A sour review of The Arts appeared in Het Vaderland. The success of HWvL’s book in the United States was dealt with in pejorative terms and echoed Johan Huizinga’s criticism of The Story of Mankind. “Literatuur in Amerika,” Het Vaderland, 16 January 1938; NLMD, Collectie HWvL, HWvL to W. van der Schoor de Boer, 26 April 1935.

308

Notes

13 The Prophet of the Coming Wrath (1938–1940) 1. COR, HWvLP, box 6, folder 6, HWvL to EBvL, 20 August 1933. 2. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 7, HWvL to Philip Cowen, 1 November 1933; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to EBvL, undated August 1933 letter; ibid., box 9, folder 26, HWvL to Harvard’s President James B. Conant, 4 October 1934. 3. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 13–14, HWvL to Max L. Schuster, 18 April 1937; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1934–1937, HWvL to FDR, 24 April and 6 May 1937, and FDR telephone note 26 April 1937. 4. HWvL’s letter to the Schützen Verlag published as HWvL, “Absage nach Berlin,” Das Neue Tage-Buch 5.39 (25 September 1937): 933. He sent an English translation of the letter to his mentor, see COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to George L. Burr, undated October 1937 letter. 5. COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 17, Albert Einstein to HWvL, 20 and 26 October 1937 and HWvL to Albert Einstein, 23 October 1937. 6. COR, HWvLP, box 16, folder 18, HWvL to Rene Scudamore, undated, probably June, 1937 letter. 7. GWvL, Story, 312; COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 5, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 16 March 1938. 8. Daily Mirror, 25 May 1938; New York Times, 14 and 15 May 1938. 9. Scholastic 32 (28 May 1938): 33; COR, HWvLP, box 14, folder 1, Thomas Mann to HWvL, 25 May 1938. 10. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1938–1939, HWvL to FDR, 16 February 1938 and FDR to HWvL, 4 March 1938. 11. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1938–1939, HWvL to FDR, 19 April 1938 and FDR to HWvL, 21 April 1938; COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to ER, 23 April 1938. 12. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 28 May through 16 June 1938; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Thomas L. Stix, 9 June 1938. 13. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 29 June through 9 July 1938; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to GWvL and to John F. Royal, 5 July 1938, and HWvL to ER, 9 July 1938. 14. COR, HWvLP, box 12, folder 9, Report Ruby Fuhr, May 1957; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to GWvL, undated Winter 1938 letter and HWvL to Van Wyck Brooks, 15 July 1938. 15. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to GWvL, 29 July 1938; ibid., box 15, folder 6, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 2 September 1938; COL, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Manuscript Collection M.L. Schuster, HWvL to Max L. Schuster, 20 August 1938. 16. COR, HWvLP, box 6, folder 17, HWvL to GWvL, 21 September 1938; GWvL, Story, 330. 17. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 16 September through 7 October 1938; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Grace Castagnetta,

Notes

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

309

30 September 1938 and to GWvL, 21 September 1938; GWvL, Story, 331; New York Times, 9 October 1938. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 15–18, HWvL to Van Wyck Brooks, 25 October 1938; ibid., box 15, folder 6, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 16 November 1938; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1938–1939, HWvL to FDR, 13 November 1938; HWvL, Our Battle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938), 3–5. HWvL, Our Battle, 66, 136, 138, back cover. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 25, Thornton Wilder to HWvL, 14 November 1938; ibid., box 11, folder 17, Albert Einstein to HWvL, 1 December 1938; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL, 1938–1939, FDR to HWvL, 27 November 1938; The New Republic 97 (11 January 1939): 293–294; Saturday Review of Literature 19 (17 December 1938): 20. Commonweal 29 (23 December 1938): 229; The Nation 148 (14 January 1939): 71–72. COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 7, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 14 February 1939; ibid., box 18, folder 15–18, HWvL to Van Wyck Brooks, 1 and 22 December 1938; ibid., box 16, folder 19, HWvL to Rene Scudamore, 21 November 1938; ibid., box 9, folder 29, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, undated December 1938 letter; FRDL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL, 1938–1939, HWvL to FDR, 13 and 18 November 1938. “Van Loon’s Appointment as Greenwich Time Director Hailed By La Guardia, Lowell Thomas And Many Others,” Greenwich Time, 29 October 1938; The Greenwich Time serialized Our Battle in thirteen installments in November and December 1938; HWvL’s resignation at the newspaper was announced in the Greenwich Time of 17 June and the New York Times of 18 June 1940; HWvL, “Deliberate Reflections,” Greenwich Time, 14 November, and articles in same newspaper 1 and 3 December 1938; New York Times, 2 December 1938; COR, HWvLP, box 14, folder 1, Thomas Mann to HWvL, 5 December 1938; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1938–1939, HWvL to Marvin H. McIntyre, 24 December 1938. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 415–417. New York Times, 11 January 1939. COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 3, HWvL to Harold Bauer, 19 January 1940; ibid., box 17, folder 26, Carl Zuckmayer to HWvL, 15 April, 7 May, 26 June, and 30 December 1939; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entry 24 June 1939; Carl Zuckmayer, Als wär’s ein Stück von mir. Horen der Freundschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994), 548–551. HWvL letter to Esther Bell-Robinson in GWvL, Story, 17; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 29 and 30 January 1939; ibid., box 14, folder 3–5, HWvL to Elizabeth Marion, 31 January 1939; ibid., box 15, folder 7, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 31 January 1939; ibid., box 17, folder 9, Jimmie to Lucie Tal, 3 February 1939; FDRL, Usher Books, entries 29 and 30 January 1939; ibid.,

310

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

Notes

Diary and Itineraries, entry 29 January 1939; ibid., PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1938–1939, HWvL to FDR, 31 January 1939. HWvL, “Deliberate Reflections,” Greenwich Time, 1 February 1939. SHSW, NBC Archives, Central Correspondence series, box 73, folder 35, HWvL to Phillips Carlin, 21 January 1939; HWvL broadcasts 19 February through 23 April 1939 in COR, HWvLP, box 25, folder 92–103. Quotations from HWvL broadcasts of 19 March and 2 April 1939; Radio Guide 8.21 (11 March 1939): 4; New York Times, 23 March 1939; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1938–1939, HWvL to FDR, 23 March 1939 and FDR to HWvL, 27 March 1939. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 19–21, HWvL to H.V. Kaltenborn, 8 April 1939; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to GWvL, undated April 1939 letter; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1938–1939, HWvL to FDR, 18 April 1939. HWvL, “Deliberate Reflections,” Greenwich Time, 21 August and 23 October 1939; Editorial “To Our Readers,” Greenwich Time, 22 August 1939; COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to GWvL, 22 August 1939. HWvL’s criticism on Chamberlain in his Greenwich Time “Deliberate Reflections” columns of 21, 23, and 28 March, 27 and 28 June 1939, 25 January, 18 March, and 10 April 1940; For his attacks on Hitler and Stalin, see, for instance, his columns of 23 and 30 August, 2, 5, 7, 12, 19 September, and 17 November 1939, 30 January, 23 February, and 7 June 1940. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 426–427, 432–433. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to unidentified person, 25 September 1939; HWvL, “Woe to the Conqueror!” Redbook Magazine 74.1 (November 1939): 15, 121–122; HWvL, “Empires Are Not Made, They Happen,” Omnibook Magazine 2.1 (December 1939): 3–4. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1938–1939, HWvL to FDR, 27 October 1939. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 433–434; COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 22 November 1939; SHSW, NBC Archives, Central Correspondence series, box 73, folder 35, HWvL to Phillips Carlin, 7 September 1939. HWvL articles in Omnibook Magazine issues of April 1939 through January 1940, Redbook Magazine of November 1939, Survey Graphic of February 1939, The Rotarian of July and December 1939, and Current History of January 1940; HWvL introductions in Helen Augur, The Book of Fairs (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939), xi–xvii, and in Konrad Heiden, The New Inquisition (New York: The Starling Press and Alliance Book Corporation, 1939), 9–16; HWvL, “America Looks at Europe’s War: We Will Have to Make A Choice,” Vital Speeches of the Day 6 (15 October 1939): 29–30; See also HWvL on democracy and liberty quoted in New York Times articles of 13 April and 10 August 1939. Clifton Fadiman, ed., I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Certain Eminent Men and Women of Our Time (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939). Quotation, 302.

Notes

311

39. HWvL’s essay in Fadiman, I Believe, 303–318. 40. HWvL and Grace Castagnetta, The Last of the Troubadours: The Life and Music of Carl Michael Bellman (1740–1795) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939); Reviews in The New Republic 100 (18 October 1939): 320, and New York Times Book Review, 31 December 1939; HWvL and Grace Castagnetta, The Songs America Sings (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939); Review in New York Times Book Review, 17 December 1939. 41. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 6, HWvL to Mary Sullivan, 24 July 1939; HWvL, The Story of the Pacific (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940); Reviews in New York Times Book Review, 30 June 1940; Boston Transcript, 13 July 1940; Commonweal 32 (23 August 1940): 372; Saturday Review of Literature 22 (6 July 1940): 6. 42. Frank Case, Do Not Disturb (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1940), 188; Richard O. Boyer, “The Story of Everything,” The New Yorker, 20 March 1943: 24 and 3 April 1943: 24; Wythe Williams, “Hendrik Willem van Loon,” Knickerbocker Weekly, 20 March 1944: 3. 43. UIL, Jay N. Darling Papers, HWvL to unidentified person, 1 February 1940; COR, HWvLP, box 14, folder 3–5, HWvL to Elizabeth Marion, 17 February 1939; ibid., box 17, folder 9, Jimmie to Lucie Tal, 3 February 1939. 44. COR, HWvLP, box 14, folder 3–5, HWvL to Elizabeth Marion, 21 January 1939; GWvL, “Father Liked His Food,” Town & Country 106 (December 1952): 134, 136. 45. COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 8, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 9 July and 19 August 1939; Van Loon’s remarks on the beneficial effects of the European immigrants on the cultural life of New York in John L. De Forest, “Stamford Given Important Role In Van Loon Book,” Stamford Advocate, 17 October 1940, 2. 46. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1938–1939, HWvL to FDR, 27 October 1939; COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 8, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 14 October 1939. 47. FDRL, ERP no. 100 Personal Papers, box 1765, HWvL to ER, 11 December 1939; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 19 and 20 December 1939; COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 18, Herbert Hoover to HWvL, 22 January 1940; HHPL, Post-Presidential Period, Individual Correspondence File, HWvL to Herbert Hoover, 21 December 1940; HWvL, “Van Loon’s Diary,” The New Leader: 15 May 1943. 48. “Interviewing Hendrik W. van Loon,” Greenwich Time, 3 January 1940; COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 22–25, HWvL to Scott Perky, 1 April 1940. 49. HWvL, “Deliberate Reflections,” Greenwich Time, 20 March and 9 April 1940; HWvL expressed his frustration about America’s not being able to help the Finns more actively in, for instance, his letters to Henri Mayer (COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 9, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 16 February and 12 March 1940), and to Franklin Roosevelt (FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to FDR, 4 March 1940). 50. HWvL, “Deliberate Reflections,” Greenwich Time, 18 and 22 April, 18 and 22 May, 14 June 1940.

312

Notes

51. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 444–448. 52. Greenwich Time, 17 and 20 May 1940; New York Times, 16 and 17 May 1940; Muhlenberg Weekly, 10 May 1940. 53. “Van Loon ‘Reports’ Nazi Attack on N.Y.,” Greenwich Time, 11 April 1940. 54. Greenwich Time, 12 and 15 April 1940. 55. COR, HWvLP, box 14, folder 6–8, HWvL to Elizabeth Marion, 14 August 1940; ibid., box 18, folder 22–25, HWvL to Maurice Hanline, 4 September 1940; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to FDR, 24 September 1940. 56. HWvL, Invasion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940). Quotation: 198–199. 57. COR, HWvLP, box 14, folder 1, Thomas Mann to HWvL, 18 October 1940; LC, William Allen White Papers, Series C, box 348, William Allen White to HWvL, 4 October 1940; New York Herald Tribune Books, 27 October 1940; The Nation 151 (9 November 1940): 457; New York Times Book Review, 8 December 1940; Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 11 October 1940; Fletcher Pratt, “U.S. Blitzkrieg, 1960,” Saturday Review of Literature 23 (16 November 1940): 13. 58. GWvL, Story, 346–347. 59. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 9, HWvL to Lucie Tal, 21 October 1940; ibid., box 18, folder 22–25, HWvL to Albert Einstein, 10 December 1940; ibid., box 7, folder 8, HWvL to GWvL, undated letter, probably of early 1941; Anne Morrow Lindbergh, The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940). 60. “Americans were well-served by the coverage given to Adolf Hitler, the Nazi party, and the Third Reich in their magazines,” is the main conclusion of Michael Zalampas, Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in American Magazines, 1923–1939 (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989), quotation, 214; On the radio’s role of reporting on foreign affairs, see David Holbrook Culbert, News for Everyman: Radio and Foreign Affairs in Thirties America (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1976), passim, quotation: 203. 61. On Roosevelt’s short-of-war policy, see Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, chapter 15. 62. HU, b MS Am 1323 (3964), HWvL to Oswald Garrison Villard, 31 August 1940; COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Leon Shimkin, 2 September 1938.

14 The One-Man Army Division (1940–1941) 1. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 9 [sic, should be 10] May 1940; ibid., box 7, folder 3, HWvL to GWvL, 12 August 1941; GWvL, Story, 341–342; Hitler’s 10 May invasion of the Low Countries made Davis turn from an antiinterventionist into a supporter of Roosevelt’s foreign policy, now advocating an Anglo-American alliance and full hostilities against Germany. In 1942 he was appointed director of the newly established Office of War Information.

Notes

2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

313

On Elmer Davis, see David Holbrook Culbert, News for Everyman: Radio and Foreign Affairs in Thirties America (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1976), 125–152. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to FDR, 15 May 1940. HWvL letter of 13 May 1940 in New York Herald Tribune, 15 May 1940, and included in Congressional Record 86 (1940), Congress 76, Session 3, Appendix 2973–2974; AMBZ, Washington, Pers Afd. Gez./Amb. 1940–1953, box 18: 234, HWvL to Alexander Loudon, 18 May 1940. COR, HWvLP, Diaries, entry 8 March 1939; LC, Benjamin W. Huebsch Papers, container 28, HWvL to Benjamin W. Huebsch, 20 February 1939. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1938–1939, HWvL to FDR, 9 March 1939 and FDR to HWvL, 11 March 1939; COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 10, HWvL to H. Colijn, undated March 1939 letter. COR, HWvLP, box 10, folder 10, HWvL to H. Colijn, 3 September 1939 and H. Colijn to HWvL, 6 September 1939; ibid., box 13, folder 16, HWvL to Juliana, 13 May 1940; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to FDR, 13 May 1940, and M.A. LeHand to HWvL, 14 May 1940; ibid., Lorena Hickok Papers, box 17: Correspondence and Subject File, Folder HWvL, HWvL to Lorena Hickok, 26 May 1940. FDRL, PSF, box 62, Folder Netherlands, FDR to Wilhelmina, 11 November and 19 December 1939, and 18 May 1940; ibid., Wilhelmina to FDR, 7 February and 20 May 1940; Cees Fasseur, Wilhelmina. Krijgshaftig in een vormeloze jas (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 2001), 283–284. COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 9, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 16 January 1940; ibid., box 18, folder 22–25, HWvL to John Royal, 16 January 1940; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entry 13 May 1940; AMBZ, Washington, Gez./Amb. 1940–1952, box 194: P3 Queen Wilhelmina Fund, Inc. 1940–1941, HWvL to Alexander Loudon, 13 and 17 May 1940; Greenwich Time, 14 May 1940; New York Times articles on Dutch relief, 24 and 29 May 1940. New York Times, 26 and 27 May, and 31 August 1940; HWvL leaflet I Come to You as a Beggar, Proud of My Mission in AMBZ, Washington, Gez./Amb. 1940–1952, box 194: P3 Queen Wilhelmina Fund, Inc. 1940–1941, enclosure to letter Candler Cobb to Alexander Loudon, 5 June 1940. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 22–25, HWvL to Marvin Lowenthal, undated mid-June 1940 letter; ibid., box 15, folder 11, HWvL to J.A.M. Meerloo, 24 August 1940. COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 18, HWvL to Ruby Fuhr, 16 December 1929; FDRL, ERP no. 100 Personal Letters, box 1765, HWvL to ER, 16 June 1940. COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 22–25, HWvL’s draft of Juliana’s speech; ibid., box 13, folder 17, complete released text of Princess Juliana’s radio address of 17 June 1940. In that same box and folder also a letter of Juliana’s secretary, Willem van Tets, dated 30 September 1942, to HWvL in which he described Juliana’s husband as “this rambunctious and energetic Prince.” KHA, file A52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Juliana, 26 January and 2 February 1943.

314

Notes

14. LC, Stephen Bonsal Papers, container 3, HWvL to Stephen Bonsal, 27 June 1940; COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Otis Skinner, 29 May 1940; Similar complaints about “the abysmal stupidity of that government in London or the poor Queen who has locked herself up in a castle of haughty aloofness and non-comprehension” in HU, b MS Am 1323 (3964), HWvL to Oswald Garrison Villard, 31 August 1940; KHA, file A52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Willem van Tets, 24 September 1940; J. Greshoff, Verzameld werk, 5 vols. (Amsterdam: Van Kampen, 1948–1950), 2: Het boek der vriendschap, 337–338. 15. HU, b MS Am 1323 (3964), HWvL to Oswald Garrison Villard, 31 August 1940; FDRL, Lorena Hickok Papers, box 17: Correspondence and Subject File, Folder HWvL, HWvL to Lorena Hickok, 26 May 1940. 16. COR, HWvLP, box 1, folder 11, Johan Fabricius to HWvL, 13 July 1940. 17. COR, HWvLP, box 1, folder 15, Johan Huizinga to HWvL, 15 August and 11 October 1940; See also J. Huizinga, Amerika Dagboek, 14 april–19 juni 1926, edited by Anton van der Lem (Amsterdam/Antwerpen: Uitgeverij Contact, 1993), 20. 18. NLMD, Collectie HWvL, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 24 April 1940; COR, HWvLP, box 14, folder 1, Thomas Mann to HWvL, 16 December 1940; ibid., box 17, folder 9, Jimmie to Lucie Tal, 1 August 1940; ibid., box 64, Diaries, many entries 1940–1942 on van der Veen’s visits. 19. Adriaan van der Veen, “Strooi mijn as uit boven Zeeland,” NRC Handelsblad, 18 August 1972, Cultureel Supplement, 1; Robert Van Gelder, “Author at Home: Inside the Van Loon Household,” pages 53 and 55 of unidentified periodical, most likely from early 1941, in COR, HWvLP, box 27, folder 1; See for Adriaan van der Veen’s portraits of HWvL: De Baanbreker. Onafhankelijk weekblad voor socialistische politiek en cultuur 1.16–1.17 (20 October 1945): 2, Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, 12 January 1957 with an English translation of this article in Delta. A Review of Arts, Life and Thought in the Netherlands. Henry Hudson Number (September 1959), 47–51, and his memoir Vriendelijke vreemdeling (Amsterdam: Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij N.V., 1969), 31, 49–61, 122–136, 166–169, 185–187. 20. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to FDR, 22 July 1940 and Edwin M. Watson to HWvL, 26 August 1940; HWvL, “Visa’ Delays in Vichy,” New York Times, 27 November 1940. 21. COL, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Special Manuscript Collection Meloney, HWvL to Marie M. Meloney, 22 August 1940; Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1940); COR, HWvLP, box 18, folder 22–25, HWvL to Van Wyck Brooks, 14 August 1940; ibid., box 1, folder 15, Van Wyck Brooks to HWvL, 8 September 1940. 22. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 247; GWvL, Story, 344–345; KHA, file A52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Willem van Tets, 11 November 1940;

Notes

23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

315

FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Stephen T. Early, 24 February 1941. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 22 September 1940; FDRL, Diary and Itineraries, entry 22 September 1940; KHA, file A52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Willem van Tets, 22 September 1940. KHA, file A52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL radio address of 27 September 1940. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Scott Perky, 2 October 1940; Anecdote on FDR election buttons told by Addison B.C. Whipple, a long time Greenwich resident and owner of HWvL’s house Nieuw Veere since 1953, author’s interview with Mr. Whipple, 24 October 1993; KHA, file A52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Willem van Tets, 11 November 1940. HWvL’s printed radio address of 10 November 1940, no. 18 in the series “Let’s Face the Facts” in FDRL, ERP no. 100 Personal Letters, box 1765; KHA, file A52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Willem van Tets, 11 November 1940; COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 9, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 15 November 1940; ibid., box 13, folder 16, C. baron de Vos van Steenwijk to HWvL, 24 November 1940; ibid., box 14, folder 1, Thomas Mann to HWvL, 29 November 1940; ibid., box 11, folder 17, Albert Einstein to HWvL, 4 December 1940. COR, HWvLP, box 13, folder 16, ER to Juliana, 10 October 1940 and C. baron de Vos van Steenwijk to HWvL, 24 November 1940. FDRL, Usher Books, entries 19 and 20 December 1940; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 19 and 20 December 1940; ibid., box 15, folder 20, Edith Helm, secretary to ER, to Jimmie van Loon, 5 December 1940; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Edith Helm, 16 December 1940; FDRL, ERP no. 100 Personal Letters, box 1582, Jimmie to ER, 21 December 1940; Fasseur, Wilhelmina, 393–394. COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 9, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 15 November 1940; KHA, file A52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Willem van Tets, 11 November 1940; GWvL, Story, 343–344. FDRL, ERP no. 100 Personal Letters, box 1765, Jimmie to ER, undated letter but most likely 23 November 1940; ibid., HWvL to ER, 23 November 1940, and ER to HWvL, 3 December 1940. AMBZ, Washington, Pers Afd. Gez./Amb. 1940–1953, box 18: no. 234, HWvL April 1940–March 1944, HWvL to Alexander Loudon, 2 and 16 December 1940; Yale University Library, Sterling Memorial Library, Manuscripts and Archives, Decision Magazine Papers, HWvL to Klaus Mann, 1 December 1940. AMBZ, Washington, Pers Afd. Gez./Amb. 1940–1953, box 18: no. 234, HWvL April 1940–March 1944, HWvL to Alexander Loudon, 2 December 1940; KHA, file A52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Willem van Tets, 11 November 1940; COR, HWvLP, box 65,

316

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

Notes

folder 61–73, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 26 November 1940; ibid., HWvL to Mr. Bright, 20 November 1940. KHA, file A52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, copy of HWvL letter to the editor of the New York Herald Tribune, 15 November 1940. HWvL, “How to Keep Sane in an Insane World,” Redbook Magazine 76.1 (November 1940): 38–39; HWvL, The Life and Times of Johann Sebastian Bach (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940); Reviews of the book in New York Herald Tribune Books, 12 January 1941, New York Times Book Review, 12 January 1941, and The Etude 59 (August 1941): 519; COR, HWvLP, box 67, folder 4, Bea Moore to GWvL, 27 August 1964. FDRL, ERP no. 100 Personal Letters, box 1765, HWvL to ER, 18 January 1941; ibid., Usher Books, entries 28 February and 3 March 1941; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 28 February through 2 March 1941; GWvL, Story, 350–351. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to FDR, 11 March 1941; ibid., ERP no. 100 Personal Letters, box 1765, HWvL to ER, 30 January 1941 and ER to HWvL, 3 February 1941; ibid., box 1625, HWvL to ER, 27 January 1941 and ER to HWvL, 28 January 1941; ibid., PSF, box 62, Folder Netherlands, FDR to Juliana, 6 June 1941 and Juliana to FDR, 8 June 1941; Fasseur, Wilhelmina, 395. COR, HWvLP, box 19, folder 1–4, HWvL to Maurice Hanline, 4 June 1941; HWvL, “Broadcasts to the Netherlands,” New York Herald Tribune, 13 December 1941; HWvL, “WRUL,” Current History 52 (May 1941): 22–23, 56; Richard O. Boyer, “The Story of Everything-II,” The New Yorker, 27 March 1943: 30; NIOD, Collectie Vrije Nederlandsche Omroep in Amerika, L.A. Ries to Chr. van Balen, 2 October 1941. COR, HWvLP, box 19, folder 1–4, HWvL to Fiorello La Guardia, 9 April 1941. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, 2 May 1941; ibid., box 14, folder 9–10, HWvL to Elizabeth Marion, 5 November 1941. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to FDR, 2 May 1941; COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 10, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 21 May 1941. Richard O. Boyer, “The Story of Everything-II,” The New Yorker, 27 March 1943: 30; Van Gelder, “Author at Home,” pages 52 and 54 of unidentified periodical, most likely from early 1941, in COR, HWvLP, box 27, folder 1; Leslie Hanscom, “A Half-Century of Simon and Schuster and Shimkin,” Newsday, 30 December 1973. COR, HWvLP, box 19, folder 1–4, HWvL to Maurice Hanline, 4 June 1941; AMBZ, Washington, Gez./Amb. 1940–1952, box 194: P3 Queen Wilhelmina Fund, Inc. 1940–1941, HWvL to Board of Directors Q.W.F., 25 May 1941. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 12 June 1941; GWvL, Story, 351–353; LC, Waldo Peirce Papers, container 14, Jimmie to Waldo Peirce, 4 August 1941.

Notes

317

44. COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 10, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 3 July 1941; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, HWvL to Maria Vasquez-Lopez, 8 May 1941; ibid., box 17, folder 7, HWvL to Mary Sullivan, 27 August and 16 September 1941; ibid., box 19, folder 1–4, HWvL to Harriet Durr, 8 October 1941; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entry 7 October 1941; LC, Stephen Bonsal Papers, container 3, HWvL to Stephen Bonsal, 30 August 1941. 45. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, GWvL to Rene Scudamore, 31 August 1941. 46. COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, GWvL to Rene Scudamore, 31 August 1941 and GWvL to HWvL, 17 February 1941. 47. HWvL’s letter to the editor published as “Case of Fadiman and Pegler Invokes ‘Abnormal Psychology,’ ” New York World-Telegram, 23 August 1941; COR, HWvLP, box 14, folder 9–10, HWvL to Elizabeth Marion, 26 August 1941 includes newspaper clipping of Westbrook Pegler’s reaction to HWvL in his column of that day; FDRL, ERP no. 100 Personal Letters, box 1765, HWvL to ER, undated August 1941 letter, and ER to HWvL, 30 August 1941. 48. LC, Stephen Bonsal Papers, container 3, HWvL to Stephen Bonsal, 5 November 1941; COR, HWvLP, box 14, folder 9–10, HWvL to Elizabeth Marion, 5 November 1941; ibid., box 19, folder 1–4, HWvL to Miriam Link, 30 October 1941. 49. On Leopold Abraham Ries (who was known as and published under the name of L.A. Ries), see E.W.A. Henssen, Een welmenend cynicus. Opkomst, val en eerherstel van Mr. L.A. Ries (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bas Lubberhuizen, 1994), especially 148–154; COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 13, HWvL to L.A. Ries, 23 July 1941; ibid., box 15, folder 13, Pierre van Paassen to HWvL, 13 October 1941. 50. Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 295, 297–298; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 7 December 1941. 51. COR, HWvLP, box 19, folder 1–4, HWvL to Elizabeth Marion, 18 December 1941, and to Attorney General Francis Biddle, 17 December 1941. 52. HWvL, “A Personal Primer of Democracy,” Weekly Magazine Section of The Christian Science Monitor, 13 December 1941, 2 and 13, and 20 December 1941, 3 and 13. 53. “Appeal for Boxes for French Captives,” New York Times, 28 October 1941; HWvL and Grace Castagnetta, Good Tidings (New York: American Artists Group, 1941). 54. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 7, Jimmie to Mary Sullivan, 30 December 1941; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entries 25 and 31 December 1941.

15 The Reincarnation of Erasmus (1942) 1. “Dutch Get 15 Years for Anti-Nazi Moves,” New York Times, 8 January 1942; Archief Kabinet der Koningin, 12 January 1942 no. 1, signed decision of Queen Wilhelmina to bestow Decoration of Knight in the Order of

318

Notes

2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

the Netherlands Lion on HWvL, including 12 January 1942 letter of recommendation by the minister of Foreign Affairs; AMBZ, Washington, Pers Afd. Gez./Amb. 1940–1953, box 18: 234, telegram Alexander Loudon to HWvL, 13 January 1942; “Queen Wilhelmina Honors American Author, Artist,” New York Times, 14 January 1942; COR, HWvLP, box 2, folder 13–18 contain congratulation telegrams and letters on HWvL’s sixtieth birthday and his Dutch award; ibid., folder 16, Adriaan J. Barnouw to HWvL, 16 January 1942; It would last till 9 October, however, before the insignia of the Order of the Netherlands Lion were ceremoniously presented to van Loon by Ambassador Loudon at a dinner meeting in the Netherlands Club on Rockefeller Plaza. At that meeting, which was attended by 200 members of the Dutch community in New York, also Professor Barnouw received the same prestigious award. Ibid., box 64, Diaries, entry 9 October 1942; “Win High Dutch Honor: Van Loon and Barnouw Receive Order of Netherlands Lion,” New York Times, 10 October 1942; a photo of Ambassador Loudon’s presentation of the Order of the Netherlands Lion to HWvL on 9 October 1942 is printed in the Knickerbocker Weekly, “HWvL Memorial Issue,” 27 March 1944: 13. GWvL, Story, 358; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 14 January 1942; ibid., box 12, folder 8, Jimmie to Ruby Fuhr, 18 January 1942; Publishers’ Weekly, 24 January 1942: 269; Richard O. Boyer, “The Story of Everything-III,” The New Yorker, 3 April 1943: 30; “Homage to Hendrik van Loon,” Knickerbocker Weekly, 26 January 1942: 29. Van Loon misremembered which artist illustrated the Basel edition of 1515; it was actually Hans Holbein the Younger. COR, Ruth S.B. McDonald Papers, HWvL to Ruth S.B. McDonald, 28 October and 13 December 1941; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Stephen T. Early, 16 April 1942. HWvL’s observations on his hands and nose as well as his blood relationship with Erasmus in Robert Van Gelder, “Author at Home: Inside the Van Loon Household,” page 55 of unidentified periodical, most likely from early 1941, in COR, HWvLP, box 27, folder 1; On van Loon’s picture of his hands, ibid., box 70, folder John L. De Forest, diary entry 10 May 1995; The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, With a Short Life of the Author by Hendrik Willem van Loon of Rotterdam Who Also Illustrated the Book, Published for the Classics Club (Roslyn, New York: Walter J. Black, 1942), 87. The Praise of Folly, 3, 5–6. Richard O. Boyer, “The Story of Everything-III,” The New Yorker, 3 April 1943: 33–34. COR, HWvLP, box 7, folder 11, HWvL to GWvL, 2 April 1943. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to FDR, 1 April 1942; COR, HWvLP, box 66, folder 15, Walter S. Lemmon to GWvL, 2 November 1964; Ibid., box 1, folder 17, HWvL to unidentified Dutch friend, 16 February 1942. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Stephen T. Early, 16 April 1942; HWvL’s quoted contributions to the Knickerbocker

Notes

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

319

Weekly: “An Anniversary and a Picture,” 2 March 1942: 3; “To the Last Defenders of the Kingdom of the Netherlands,” 23 March 1942: 3; SeyssInquart cartoon, 21 September 1942: 11; Anton Mussert cartoon, 12 October 1942: 13; AMBZ, Washington, Pers Afd. Gez./Amb. 1940–1953, box 18: 234, HWvL April 1940–March 1944, Alexander Loudon to HWvL, 24 March 1942; AMBZ, Washington, Gez./Amb. 1940–1952, box 194: P3 Queen Wilhelmina Fund, Inc. 1940–1941, 1942 Queen Wilhelmina Fund brochure. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to FDR, 1 April 1942 and Stephen T. Early to HWvL, 14 April 1942. Knickerbocker Weekly “Free Netherlands” special issue for occupied Holland, distributed by the RAF. HWvL’s contribution on 10–11. FDRL, PSF, box 62, Folder Netherlands, Wilhelmina to FDR, 15 and 23 April 1942; COR, HWvLP, box 13, folder 17, cable Juliana to HWvL, 23 April 1942. COR, HWvLP, box 19, folder 5–9, HWvL to Paul B. Sears, 21 May 1942; UIL, Jay N. Darling Papers, HWvL to Jay N. Darling, 30 May 1942. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 21, Archibald MacLeish to HWvL, 6 March 1942; National Archives, Record Group 208, Records of the Office of War Information; Records of the Office of Facts and Figures, Alphabetical Subject File 1939–1942, box 6, Archibald MacLeish to Ulric Bell, 13 March 1942; ibid., Decimal File of the Director 1941–1942, box 7, Archibald MacLeish to HWvL, 30 March 1942. HWvL’s cables to MacLeish are not in the National Archives or in the HWvLP; COR, HWvLP, box 19, folder 5–9, HWvL to René Fülop-Miller, 1 July 1942, and HWvL to Morris Bishop, undated May 1942 letter. COR, HWvLP, box 14, folder 11–12, HWvL to Elizabeth Marion, 12 April 1942; GWvL, Story, 305, 353; In 1939 Zweig wrote Jimmie, “I am not sure, if you know how much I love and admire Hendrik.” COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 26, Stefan Zweig to Jimmie, 22 February 1939. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 25 April 1942; ibid., box 19, folder 5–9, HWvL to Morris Bishop, undated May 1942 letter, and HWvL to Elizabeth Marion, 28 April 1942; ibid., box 17, folder 24, Alexandra L. Tolstoy to HWvL, 21 July 1942. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 14, Jay N. Darling to HWvL, 26 May 1942; ibid., box 19, folder 5–9, HWvL to Samuel R. Gaines, 4 August 1942; Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, eds., Twentieth Century Authors. A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature (New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1942), 1447. UIL, Jay N. Darling Papers, HWvL to Jay N. Darling, 3 June 1942. COR, HWvLP, box 25, folder 104, HWvL speech for ORT, “Let Us Turn Our Lumber-Yards Into Bonfires,” 18 November 1942; See also “Group Hatreds Here Scored by Van Loon,” New York Times, 19 November 1942. FBI, HWvL Files, recorded at Department of State Visa Division as number 40–13197–1, and FBI memos of 29 April and 5 May 1942; ibid., memo John Edgar Hoover to Visa Division Department of State, 25 October 1941; ibid., Chicago File no. 100–2477, 28 February 1945, 13 and 14; Thomas Mann,

320

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

Notes

An die gesittete Welt. Politische Schriften und Reden im Exil (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1986), 385–388, 458–461. In HWvL’s FBI file, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the names of the Kestens are blackened out, but they were kept intact on the related files at the State Department’s Visa Division. The New Leader, 14 March 1942: 1; Editorial introduction to HWvL’s first article, The New Leader, 21 March 1942: 5, and editorial announcing “Van Loon’s Diary” on 6 March 1943: 8; HWvL’s articles were published in The New Leader of 21 March, 25 April, 2, 16, 23, and 30 May, 6, 20, and 27 June, 18 and 25 July, 1, 15, and 22 August, 5 and 19 September, 10 October, and 7 November 1942; 13 March, 3 and 10 April, 1 and 15 May, 5 June, 17 July, 7 and 28 August, 4, 11, and 25 September, 9 October, 20 and 27 November, 18 December 1943; 1 and 22 January, 19 February 1944. HWvL in The New Leader, 16 May 1942: 5; 18 July 1942: 5, 7; “Van Loon at Stage Door Canteen,” Knickerbocker Weekly, 21 September 1942: 15; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, 9 September 1942. HWvL in The New Leader, 6 June 1942: 7. HWvL in The New Leader, 15 August 1942: 5; Mann, An die gesittete Welt, 388. “Nazis Execute Van Loon’s Nephew,” The New Leader, 4 July 1942: 3; COR, HWvLP, box 14, folder 1, Thomas Mann to HWvL, 10 July 1942; GWvL, Story, 360. Cees Fasseur, Wilhelmina. Krijgshaftig in een vormeloze jas (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 2001), 397; Archief Kabinet der Koningin, HWvL to Juliana, 19 June 1942; FDRL, PSF, box 62, Folder Netherlands, Wilhelmina to FDR, 24 June 1942; Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 149. NYPL, Dorothy Schiff Papers, box 64, folder Franklin D. Roosevelt, 21 October 1943 and 23 November 1981; William D. Hassett, Off the Record with F.D.R. 1942–1945 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1958), 75–76; COL, Special Manuscript Collection Meloney, HWvL to Marie M. Meloney, 31 January 1942. FDRL, PSF, box 62, Folder Netherlands, Juliana to FDR, 1 August 1942; “Queen Wilhelmina Will Arrive Today,” New York Times, 14 July 1942; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 14 July 1942; ibid., box 15, folder 14, HWvL to L.A. Ries, 21 July 1942; COL, Oral History Collection, Reminiscences of George S. Van Schaick, 53–54; Richard O. Boyer, “The Story of Everything-III,” The New Yorker, 3 April 1943: 30. According to the official invitation the meeting in Lee was scheduled on 30 July, a Thursday. In Jimmie’s diary and in her correspondence with GWvL, however, the trip to Lee and the tea party with the queen took place on Wednesday, 29 July 1942; Archief Kabinet der Koningin, George van Tets van Goudriaan to HWvL, 23 July 1942; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 29 July 1942; ibid., box 7, folder 12, HWvL and Jimmie to GWvL, 30 July 1942.

Notes

321

31. Queen Wilhelmina’s address on 6 August 1942 to the U.S. Congress in Cornelis A. van Minnen, ed., A Transatlantic Friendship. Addresses by Queen Wilhelmina, Queen Juliana and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands to the Joint Sessions of the United States Congress (Middelburg: Roosevelt Study Center, 1992), 13–18; “The Queen’s State Visit to Washington,” Knickerbocker Weekly, 17 August 1942: 4–11. 32. Albert E. Kersten, “Wilhelmina and Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Wartime Relationship,” in Cornelis A. van Minnen and John F. Sears, eds., FDR and His Contemporaries: Foreign Perceptions of an American President (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 89–93; See also Fasseur, Wilhelmina, 399–401. 33. Erik Barnouw, A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966–1970), 2: The Golden Web. 1933 to 1953, 129; COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 16, HWvL to Elmer Davis, 19 August and Elmer Davis to HWvL, 24 August 1942. 34. COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 18, HWvL to Maurice Hanline, undated letter, most likely of September or October 1942; HU, b MS Am 1803 (1797), folder 2, HWvL to George Sarton, 16 November 1942. 35. COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 16, HWvL to Elmer Davis, 2 November and Elmer Davis to HWvL, 6 November and 5 December 1942. 36. NIOD, Collectie Vrije Nederlandsche Omroep in Amerika, inventory; NLMD, Collectie HWvL, HWvL to Henri Mayer, 24 September 1929 and HWvL to Jan Greshoff, 27 September 1929; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 11 October 1942; Jan Greshoff, “Hendrik Willem van Loon,” Vrij Nederland, 14 December 1949; J. Greshoff, Verzameld werk, 5 vols. (Amsterdam: Van Kampen, 1948–1950), 2: Het boek der vriendschap, 334–345; J. Greshoff, Menagerie. Herinneringen en beschouwingen (’s-Gravenhage: Uitgeverij A.A.M. Stols, 1958), 146–147, 160. 37. COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 14, HWvL to L.A. Ries, 21 July 1942; AMBZ, Washington, Pers Afd. Gez./Amb. 1940–1953, box 18: 234, HWvL April 1940–March 1944, HWvL to Alexander Loudon, 6 August 1942, and to Adriaan Pelt, 18 August 1942; KHA, file A52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Willem van Tets, undated letter, most likely of 4 September 1942. 38. COR, HWvLP, box 16, folder 13, HWvL to Stephen T. Early, 19 April 1942; ibid., box 17, folder 7, HWvL to Mary Sullivan, 6 April 1942; KHA, file A52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Willem van Tets, 15 June 1942; NYPL, H.L. Mencken Papers, box 110, HWvL to H.L. Mencken, 8 July 1942; AMBZ, Washington, Pers Afd. Gez./Amb. 1940–1953, box 18: 234, HWvL April 1940–March 1944, HWvL to Alexander Loudon, 16 August 1942; Van Wyck Brooks to Lewis Mumford, 15 January 1942, in Robert E. Spiller, ed., The Van Wyck Brooks-Lewis Mumford Letters. The Record of a Literary Friendship, 1921–1963 (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970), 208; J. Greshoff, “Hendrik Willem van Loon,” Knickerbocker Weekly, 20 March 1944: 38; Adriaan van der Veen, Vriendelijke vreemdeling (Amsterdam: Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij N.V., 1969), 57; HU,

322

39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

Notes

b MS Am 1803 (1797), folder 2, HWvL to George Sarton, 16 November 1942; Richard O. Boyer, “The Story of Everything-I,” The New Yorker, 20 March 1943: 31. UIL, Jay N. Darling Papers, HWvL to Jay N. Darling, 5 August 1942; COR, HWvLP, box 16, folder 15, HWvL to George Saville, 13 August 1942; ibid., box 19, folder 5–9, HWvL to Henry Schindall, 4 September 1942. Emphasis in original. KHA, file A52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Willem van Tets, 15 and 19 June 1942; AMBZ, Washington, Pers Afd. Gez./Amb. 1940–1953, box 18: 234, HWvL April 1940–March 1944, HWvL to Alexander Loudon, 16 August 1942, and HWvL to Adriaan Pelt, 18 August 1942; ibid., Essandess compliments card to HWvL, dated 12 August 1942, with ad in Publishers’ Weekly of 8 August 1942 and “From the Inner Sanctum of Simon and Schuster” flyer on Van Loon’s Lives. HWvL, Van Loon’s Lives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942). HWvL, Van Loon’s Lives, xviii, 5, 22, 28, 801. Quotations on Jefferson in HWvL, Van Loon’s Lives, 855, 860, 883. HWvL, Van Loon’s Lives, 355, 431, 456–457, 467, 577, 668, 881. HWvL, Van Loon’s Lives, 676, 691–692, 696, 699–701. HWvL, Van Loon’s Lives, 418. On Robespierre and Hitler see 361, 368, 382, 387, 395. FDRL, ERP no. 100 Personal Letters, box 1765, HWvL to ER, 30 August 1942; COR, HWvLP, box 65, folder 61–73, GWvL to Rene Scudamore, 31 August 1941; ibid., box 10, folder 1, Morris Bishop to HWvL, 22 August 1942, italics of “are” mine; ibid., box 17, folder 12, Van Wyck Brooks to HWvL, 6 September 1942; ibid., box 14, folder 1, Thomas Mann to HWvL, 30 August 1942. Reviews of Van Loon’s Lives in: The New Yorker, 12 September 1942: 69–70; New York Times, 19 September 1942; New York Times Book Review, 20 September 1942; See also the reviews in the Saturday Review of Literature 25 (26 September 1942): 11; New York Herald Tribune Books, 20 September 1942; The Christian Science Monitor, 19 December 1942; The New Leader, 17 October 1942: 4. Atlantic Monthly 170 (November 1942): 144; Catholic World 156 (December 1942): 361; American Historical Review 48 (January 1943): 300–301. “What America is Reading,” New York Herald Tribune Books, 25 October, 22 November, and 27 December 1942; COR, HWvLP, box 19, folder 5–9, HWvL to Paul Sears, 23 September 1942: Correspondence from readers of Van Loon’s Lives in ibid., box 2, folder 19–20 and 22; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to FDR, 16 October 1942. HWvL and Grace Castagnetta, Christmas Songs (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1942) and The Message of the Bells (Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1942); LC, Elmer H. Davis Papers, container 1, HWvL to Elmer Davis, 15 December 1942; HU, b MS Am 1803 (1797), folder 2, HWvL to George Sarton, 16 November 1942; HWvL, Van Loon’s Lives, 888.

Notes

323

52. KHA, file A52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Willem van Tets, undated letter, most likely of 4 September 1942; NLMD, Collectie HWvL, HWvL to Adriaan J. Barnouw, 19 November 1942; COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 15, HWvL to L.A. Ries, 15 December 1942. 53. COR, HWvLP, box 7, folder 6 and 8, HWvL to GWvL, undated 1942 letters; GWvL, Story, 361. 54. COR, HWvLP, box 7, folder 9, HWvL to GWvL, undated 1942 letter; ibid., box 65, folder 61–73, GWvL to HWvL, undated 1942 letter; ibid., box 70, folder John L. De Forest, diary entry 26 October 1942; The Praise of Folly, 4. 55. GWvL, Story, 361–362; COR, HWvLP, box 9, folder 33, HWvL to Alice Bernheim, undated 1942 letter. 56. GWvL, Story, 362–363. 57. COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 16, HWvL to Elmer Davis, 29 September 1942, and Elmer Davis to HWvL, 7 October 1942; GWvL, Story, 363–365. 58. COR, HWvLP, box 59, R-53 audio tape, 24 December 1942, WNCA “Christmas Eve Message” and text of radio speech in box 25, folder 105. 59. “Hendrik Willem van Loon: Historian, Biographer, Artist, Musician,” New York Herald Tribune Books, 8 November 1942; House and Garden 82 (July 1942): 61; New York Times, 15 and 22 November 1942, respectively, mentions van Loon as a speaker at an Advertising Club luncheon meeting launching the Netherlands Committee of Russian War Relief, and as one of the writers addressing an audience of children and adults in a packed New York Times Hall as part of Children’s Book Week. 60. Whit Burnett, ed., This Is My Best (New York: The Dial Press, 1942), 697–708 (HWvL’s text on Beethoven that was earlier published in HWvL, The Arts (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937), 516–530), flap text, xi, xiii, 1165.

16 Living on Borrowed Time (1943–1944) 1. HWvL, “The Lasting Treasures,” Tomorrow 2.4 (December 1942): 29–31; Isaac Anderson, “Notes on Books and Authors,” New York Times, 14 February 1943. 2. FDR’s address at the dedication of the Jefferson Memorial in Samuel I. Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 13 vols. (New York: Random House, The Macmillan Company, and Harper and Brother, 1938–1950), 12: 162–164; HWvL, Thomas Jefferson (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1943), 25–30, 32, 89. 3. Ellen Lewis Buell, “Mr. Van Loon’s ‘Greatest American,’ ” New York Times Book Review, 18 April 1943; The New Yorker, 29 May 1943: 70; Other reviews in Weekly Book Review, 11 April 1943: 8, and Knickerbocker Weekly, 3 May 1943: 12–13. 4. Richard O. Boyer, “The Story of Everything,” The New Yorker, 20 March 1943: 24–31; 27 March 1943: 24–30; and 3 April 1943: 24–28, 30, 33–34; J. Greshoff, Verzameld werk, 5 vols. (Amsterdam: Van Kampen, 1948–1950),

324

Notes

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

2: Het boek der vriendschap, 336; J. Greshoff, “Hendrik Willem van Loon,” Knickerbocker Weekly, 20 March 1944: 38. COR, HWvLP, box 7, folder 11, HWvL to GWvL, 2 April 1943; ibid., box 19, folder 10–12, HWvL to S. Levitas, associate of The New Leader, undated 1943 letter. Boyer, “The Story of Everything-III,” The New Yorker, 3 April 1943: 26; Boyer, “The Story of Everything-I,” The New Yorker, 20 March 1943: 24; COR, HWvLP, box 17, folder 14, HWvL to Madge Fuertes, 7 July 1943; ibid., box 15, folder 16, HWvL to L.A. Ries, 24 June 1943. The Connecticut Cookbook, Being a Collection of Recipes From Connecticut Kitchens, Equally Adapted for Wartime and Peacetime, Compiled by the Woman’s Club of Westport and Illustrated by Connecticut Artists (1943; New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1944), viii; Introduction in What’s More, We Like It (Greenwich, CT: The Greenwich Tuberculosis Association, 1943), see review in New York Times, 4 May 1943; Florence Brobeck, Cook It In a Casserole (New York: M. Barrows and Company, 1943), 7, 57–58; HWvL, The Life and Times of Scipio Fuhlhaber (New York: The Louvaine Press, 1943); GWvL, Story, 370; COR, HWvLP, box 7, folder 11, HWvL to GWvL, 3 January 1943; ibid., box 16, folder 20, HWvL to Rene Scudamore, undated 1943 letter. COR, HWvLP, box 7, folder 12, HWvL to GWvL, 6 November 1943; ibid., box 7, folder 11, HWvL to GWvL, 3 January 1943; ibid., box 7, folder 10, Josa Morgan to GWvL, 13 March 1943, and Rene Scudamore to GWvL, 31 March 1943; ibid., box 7, folder 14, HWvL to GWvL, undated 1943 letter; GWvL, Story, 366–368. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 15 April, 7 June, 5 and 8 September, and 31 December 1943; SUL, Henry Goddard Leach Papers, HWvL to Henry G. Leach, 28 October 1943. COR, HWvLP, box 7, folder 12, Jimmie to GWvL, 29 October 1943; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entries 30 and 31 October 1943; Thomas Mann, Tagebücher, 1940–1943, herausgegeben von Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1982), 644–645; Greshoff, Verzameld werk, 2: Het boek der vriendschap, 336; J. Greshoff, Menagerie. Herinneringen en beschouwingen (’s-Gravenhage: Uitgeverij A.A.M. Stols, 1958), 160. COR, HWvLP, box 19, folder 5–9, HWvL to Fiorello La Guardia, 27 December 1942; ibid., box 17, folder 20, Fiorello La Guardia to HWvL, 30 December 1942. FDRL, PSF, box 62, Folder Netherlands, FDR to Bernhard, 12 October 1943. COR, HWvLP, box 13, folder 17, Juliana to HWvL, 1 January and 13 February 1943; KHA, file A52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, Jimmie to Juliana, 31 March 1943 and HWvL to Juliana, 2 and 20 May 1943. AMBZ, Washington, Pers Afd. Gez./Amb. 1940–1953, box 18: 234-A, HWvL May 1943–October 1943, Alexander Loudon to the Dutch government in London, 8 June 1943, Adriaan Pelt to N.A.C. Slotemaker de Bruïne,

Notes

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

325

19 July 1943, N.A.C. Slotemaker de Bruïne to Alexander Loudon, 31 August 1943, draft letter by L.A. Ries, 2 October 1943, N.A.C. Slotemaker de Bruïne to Adriaan Pelt, 6 October 1943. COR, HWvLP, box 2, folder 23, Willem van Doorn, president of the Queen Wilhelmina Fund, Inc., to HWvL, 23 June 1943, and Emil Schram to HWvL, 25 June and 1 July 1943; ibid., box 2, folder 23, New York Committee of the National War Fund press release, 14 July 1943; ibid., box 64, Diaries, entry 9 September 1943; ibid., box 2, folder 24, Agenda and Minutes of Luncheon Meeting United Nations Relief Wing, 9 September 1943, and Emil Schram to HWvL, 7 January 1944; “Van Loon Aids War Fund,” New York Times, 14 July 1943; “Queens Boys Get War Bonds From van Loon in Fund Contest,” New York Times, 20 November 1943; FDRL, ERP no. 100, Personal Letters, box 1765, HWvL to ER, 23 December 1943. FDR’s Annual Message to Congress of 6 January 1941 in Rosenman, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 9: 663–672; On Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and the successful pictorial representation by Norman Rockwell, see Stuart Murray and James McCabe, Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms: Images that Inspire a Nation (Stockbridge, MA: Berkshire House Publishers, 1993); COR, HWvLP, box 19, folder 10–12, HWvL to Jacob Billikopf, 14 June 1943 and undated July 1943 letter. HWvL, “Van Loon’s Diary,” The New Leader, 17 July 1943: 5, and 11 September 1943: 4; HWvL, Report to Saint Peter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947), 18. HWvL, “Van Loon’s Diary,” The New Leader, 13 March 1943: 5; 3 April 1943: 5; 1 May 1943: 4; 4 September 1943: 3; 25 September 1943: 4. HWvL, “Van Loon’s Diary,” The New Leader, 10 April 1943: 3; 1 January 1944: 5; and 19 February 44: 5. HWvL, “Van Loon’s Diary,” The New Leader, 5 June 1943: 4. COR, HWvLP, box 7, folder 11, HWvL “Memorandum to go with the Creamed Crabmeat,” 27 March 1943, most likely addressed to the editor of The New Leader. HWvL, The Life and Times of Simon Bolivar (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1943), Foreword, 87, 141, 146. UIL, Jay N. Darling Papers, HWvL to Jay N. Darling, 16 November 1943; COR, HWvLP, box 19, folder 10–12, HWvL to Van Wyck Brooks, 14 December 1943. Reviews of Simon Bolivar in The New Yorker, 4 December 1943: 136; Saturday Review of Literature 26 (25 December 1943): 7; Weekly Book Review, 14 November 1943: 6; New York Times Book Review, 2 January 1944; Commonweal 39 (19 November 1943): 121; COR, HWvLP, box 19, folder 13, HWvL to Alfred C. Howell, 14 February 1944; FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to FDR’s secretary, 5 January 1944. “Medina Urges U.S. to Aid Venezuela,” New York Times, 28 January 1944; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 28 January 1944; LC, Stephen Bonsal Papers, container 4, HWvL to Stephen Bonsal, 1 February 1944. HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, 1–19; GWvL, Story, 369.

326

Notes

27. COR, HWvLP, box 1, folder 15, Van Wyck Brooks to HWvL, 8 September 1940; ibid., box 17, folder 12, Van Wyck Brooks to HWvL, undated July 1943 letter; HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, 73, 81; LC, Elmer H. Davis Papers, container 1, HWvL to Elmer H. Davis, 30 August 1943; COR, HWvLP, box 7, folder 14, HWvL to GWvL, undated 1943 letter; ibid., box 16, folder 20, HWvL to Rene Scudamore, undated 1943 letter; ibid., box 13, folder 20, Jimmie to Marvin Lowenthal, 25 March 1944; See also HWvL’s reports on his progress with Report to Saint Peter in KHA, file A-52-xxb-30: Correspondence with HWvL 1940–1944, HWvL to Willem van Tets, 2 and 15 September 1943; FDRL, ERP no. 100 Personal Papers, box 1702, HWvL to ER, 9 October 1943; COR, Louis A. Fuertes Papers, box 17, folder 14, HWvL to Madge Fuertes, 7 October 1943; UIL, Jay N. Darling Papers, HWvL to Jay N. Darling, 16 November 1943. 28. COR, HWvLP, box 19, folder 5–9, HWvL to Paul B. Sears, 21 May 1942; HWvL, Van Loon’s Lives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942), 274, 276; As the records of New York’s Unitarian Church of All Souls testify, already back in 1924 van Loon had become a member of the All Souls Chapter of the Unitarian Laymen’s League and in February 1925 addressed the Chapter on “Tolerance,” the topic of the book he was working on at that time. The following years there is no evidence of van Loon’s involvement until on Laymen’s Sunday, 17 May 1942, when all parts of the regular morning service were taken by members of All Souls Chapter of the Laymen’s League, van Loon delivered the sermon on “History and Leadership.” Unfortunately, there is no record left of the text of his sermon. In December that year an attempt at formalizing van Loon’s membership of the Unitarian Church by his receiving the Right Hand of Fellowship in a ceremony, failed as a consequence of van Loon’s being not in time for the event. Though it was no fault of his own, van Loon felt mortified at his being too late and promised Neale to be there next time when new members were accepted. He was convinced, he wrote, that committing his act of faith in public was the right thing for him to do and he added, “With all the scared intellectuals running into the protective arms of the dear (not to me) mother Church, those of us who still have the courage to stand on our own feet ought to establish this fact as clearly and unmistakenly as they can.” Unitarian Church of All Souls Archives, Rev. Laurance I. Neale Collection, HWvL Files, correspondence between HWvL and Lawrence I. Grinnell, May 1924, and announcement HWvL lecture on “Tolerance,” 2 February 1925; ibid., Laurance I. Neale to HWvL, 1 and 9 December 1942 and HWvL to Laurance I. Neale, 8 and 11 December 1942; COR, HWvLP, box 14, folder 11–12, HWvL to Elizabeth Marion, Unitarian Church of All Souls program of Laymen’s Sunday, 17 May 1942. 29. HWvL, “This I Believe,” The Christian Register 122.4 (April 1943): 117–118, reprinted in October 1943 as publication no. 369 of the American Unitarian Association in Boston, nowadays called the Unitarian Universalist Association. 30. On the presentation of the Netherland–America Foundation Medal to Princess Juliana, including the texts of the speeches delivered on that occasion, see Knickerbocker Weekly, 17 January 1944: 8–9, 33, and 24 January

Notes

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38.

327

1944: 26–28; COR, HWvLP, box 15, folder 11, HWvL to J.A.M. Meerloo, 24 December 1943; ibid., box 7, folder 17, HWvL to GWvL, 9 and 15 January 1944. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 14 January 1944; ibid., box 19, folder 13, HWvL to Scott Perky, 14 January 1944. COR, HWvLP, box 19, folder 13, HWvL to Maria Vasquez-Lopez, 21 February 1944. LC, Stephen Bonsal Papers, container 4, HWvL to Stephen Bonsal, 1 February 1944; HWvL, “Every Man a Historian,” The Rotarian 64 (May 1944): 11. COR, HWvLP, box 7, folder 17, HWvL to GWvL, 12, 17, and 18 February 1944; HWvL, Adventures and Escapes of Gustavus Vasa and How They Carried Him from His Rather Obscure Origin to the Throne of Sweden (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1945); Reviews in the Saturday Review of Literature 28 (10 November 1945): 74; and New York Times Book Review, 19 August 1945. LC, Elmer H. Davis Papers, container 1, HWvL to Elmer H. Davis, 4 January and 9 March 1944; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 10 March 1944; HWvL, Report to Saint Peter, ix. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries, 1, 5, 24, 28 February and 3 March 1944; ibid., box 7, folder 17, HWvL to GWvL, 7 February 1944; ibid., box 13, folder 20, HWvL to Marvin Lowenthal, 7 March 1944; ibid., box 15, folder 18, HWvL to L.A. Ries, 7 March 1944. HWvL, “Well Done, Knickerbocker,” Knickerbocker Weekly, 28 February 1944: 3. GWvL, Story, 372–373; COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entry 11 March 1944; ibid., box 13, folder 20, Jimmie to Marvin Lowenthal, 25 March 1944; HWvL’s prediction to speak his final words in Dutch like Erasmus had done when facing death, in ibid., box 19, folder 5–9, HWvL to Carlton F. Wells, 4 April 1942, and in Richard O. Boyer, “The Story of Everything-III,” The New Yorker, 3 April 1943: 34; On Erasmus’s deathbed scene, see J. Huizinga, Verzamelde Werken, 9 vols. (Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink en Zoon, 1948–1953), 6: 178.

Epilogue 1. FDRL, PPF 2259, Folder HWvL 1940–1944, FDR to Mrs. HWvL, 11 March 1944 (FDR’s condolence was also published in the New York Times of 14 March 1944); ibid., ERP no. 100 Personal letters, box 1749, ER to Mrs. HWvL, 29 March 1944. 2. AMBZ, Washington, Pers Afd. Gez./Amb. 1940–1953, box 18: 234, HWvL April 1940–March 1944, Alexander Loudon to Jimmie, 11 and 15 March 1944; Cable Juliana to Mrs. HWvL, in COR, HWvLP, box 3, folder 2. 3. Condolence telegrams and letters in COR, HWvLP, box 3, folders 1–22. 4. Knickerbocker Weekly, “Hendrik Willem van Loon Memorial Issue,” 27 March 1944.

328

Notes

5. William E. Bohn, “The Faith of van Loon,” The New Leader, 18 March 1944: 11; See also Harry D. Gideonse, “Hendrik Willem van Loon On the Side of the Angels,” The New Leader, 25 March 1944: 6; Obituaries in the Saturday Review of Literature 27 (18 March 1944): 14; Publishers’ Weekly, 18 March 1944: 1201 and 1225; Time, 20 March 1944: 75; Newsweek, 20 March 1944: 8; The Nation 158 (25 March 1944): 360–361; Survey Graphic, April 1944: 214–215; Scholastic 44 (1 May 1944): 22; The Horn Book 20 (May 1944): 193–198. 6. COR, HWvLP, box 64, Diaries, entries 18 March, 3, 4, 13, and 14 June 1944; New York Times, 26 March 1944 on Broekman’s musical tribute; On the launching of the Liberty Ship Hendrik Willem van Loon, see Knickerbocker Weekly, 26 June 1944: 16 and 25, and 10 July 1944: 27; FDRL, Usher Books, entries 3 and 4 June 1944. 7. “Van Loon Will Probated,” New York Times, 12 April 1944; GWvL, Story, 375–376; COR, HWvLP, box 66, folder 8, GWvL to Pete Foster, 1 April 1957; “Mrs. Van Loon Is Dead,” New York Times, 9 November 1958; Author’s interview with Henry B. van Loon, 8 January 1994. 8. HWvL, Report to Saint Peter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947); COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 14, Transcript of CBS broadcast sent by Thomas L. Stix to Jimmie, 27 February 1947; ibid., box 63, folder 32, Transcript of 1 March 1947 CBS interview with Jimmie; Reviews of Report to Saint Peter in The New Yorker, 15 March 1947: 118; Saturday Review of Literature 30 (15 March 1947): 17; New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, 16 February 1947: 2; New York Times Book Review, 23 February 1947; The Knickerbocker, May 1947: 16; FDRL, ERP, Speech and Article File, box 3149, folder January–April 1947, “My Day,” 2 April 1947. 9. HWvL, The Story of the Bible (New York: Bell Publishing Company, 1985); HWvL, The Life and Times of Rembrandt (New York: Bantam Books, 1957); HWvL, The Arts (New York: Liveright, 1974); HWvL, The Story of Mankind (New York: Liveright, 1999); HWvL, História da Humanidade (Pôrto Alegre, Brasil: Livraria do Globo, 1944); HWvL, Tolerancia (Buenos Aires: Editorial Claridad, 1945); HWvL, Die Geschichte der Menschheit (Zürich: Rascher Verlag, 1947); HWvL, Rembrandt. Der Überwirkliche. Ein biographischer Roman (Zürich: Rascher Verlag, 1946); HWvL, Amerika. Der Roman eines Landes (Berlin: Verlag des Druckhauses Tempelhof, 1949); HWvL, La conquête des mers. Histoire de la navigation (Paris: Payot, 1947); HWvL, La conquista de los mares. Historia de la navegación (Mexico: Editorial Diana, 1948); HWvL, Historia del Pacifico (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Ercilla, 1948); HWvL, Storia del Pacifico (Milano: Bompiani, 1948); HWvL, La vida y la época de Simon Bolivar (Buenos Aires: Editorial Americales, 1945); HWvL, Gustav Vasa. Fahrten und Abenteuer (Wien: Humboldt Verlag, 1948); HWvL, La vite di van Loon (Milano: Bompiani, 1947); HWvL, Pioniers der vrijheid (Den Haag, 1947); HWvL, Uit het leven en de tijd van Johann Sebastian Bach (Den Haag: Servire, 1949); HWvL, Verslag aan Petrus (Den Haag: Servire, 1951; HWvL’s papers at Cornell University include translations of his books in

Notes

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

329

Greek, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Polish, Tschech, Hungarian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Hebrew, COR, HWvLP, box 30–33. “Story of Mankind Unravels at Paramount,” New York Times, 9 November 1957; film review in Variety 208 (23 October 1957): 6 and ad on 16; film review in London Times, 25 November 1957; publicity pictures for Warner Brothers’ movie The Story of Mankind in COR, HWvLP, box 57; Dirk van Loon, Van Loon Family Correspondence, Henry B. van Loon to Arthur Pell, 21 April 1976. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Introduction,” in HWvL, The Story of America (New York: Fawcett World Library, 1959), vii, x; Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 264–265. COR, HWvLP, box 11, folder 9, HWvL to Jimmie, 24 June 1933; COL, Oral History Collection, Reminiscences of Ben W. Huebsch, vol. 3, 402–404; NYPL, Theatre Collection, Photographs B File, Photo of HWvL in front of NBC microphone while making “doodles” and caption on backside of the photo about his making sketches everywhere and almost continuously, 20 February 1939. Knickerbocker Weekly, 27 March 1944: 3; “Dutch Grants Available,” New York Times, 13 February 1955; On the effort to establish a HWvL museum in Veere: Provinciale Zeeuwse Courant, 12 January 1957, and ZA, Collectie Stichting Hendrik Willem van Loon. On the Hendrik Willem van Loon Sailing Day, see Provinciale Zeeuwse Courant, 9 July 1997; “Top 100,” De Groene Amsterdammer, 16 December 1998, 58–59. GWvL, Story; COR, HWvLP, box 67, folder 17, GWvL to L.G. van Loon, 28 August 1967; ibid., box 66, folder 11, GWvL to Frances Goodrich, 17 October 1958; ZA, Correspondence Stichting Hendrik Willem van Loon, Zus Hanken to Dirk Roosenburg, 22 May 1957. Dirk van Loon, Van Loon Family Correspondence, Henry B. van Loon to Dirk van Loon, 13 February 1983, and Henry B. van Loon to Arthur Pell, 21 April 1976; Author’s interview with Henry B. van Loon, 8 January 1994; COR, HWvLP, box 67, folder 12, GWvL to Mary Tully, 23 September 1972. Morris Bishop, “Frankly Van Loon,” Cornell Alumni News 75 (October 1972): 33; Adriaan van der Veen’s review in NRC Handelsblad, 18 August 1972, Cultureel Supplement, 1. Carl Van Doren in Knickerbocker Weekly, 27 March 1944: 7; J. Greshoff, “Hendrik Willem van Loon,” Knickerbocker Weekly, 20 March 1944: 38; Van Wyck Brooks, An Autobiography (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1965), 379, 391–392. COL, Oral History Collection, Reminiscences of Abram Chasins, Radio Unit, no. 11, 49; Schlesinger, “Introduction,” in HWvL, The Story of America, vii; Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to Cornelis A. van Minnen, 3 December 1993, in author’s collection.

330

Notes

20. COR, HWvLP, box 3, folder 21, Christy Walsh to Jimmie, 13 March 1944; ibid., box 66, folder 2, GWvL to Burke Boyce, 9 January 1965; ibid., box 66, folder 8, GWvL to Clifton Fadiman, 26 August 1952. 21. Wythe Williams, “Hendrik Willem van Loon,” Knickerbocker Weekly, 20 March 1944: 15. 22. Maurits Dekker, “Hendrik Willem van Loon. Een persoonlijke herinnering,” in NLMD, Collectie M. Dekker.

Bibliography This bibliography is divided into the following sections: manuscript collections, main publications by Hendrik Willem van Loon, and a selected list of books.

Manuscript Collections Archief Kabinet der Koningin, The Hague, The Netherlands ●

Koninklijke onderscheidingen H.W. van Loon, 1937 en 1942

Archief Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, The Hague, The Netherlands ● ● ●

Archief A. Loudon (Washington), 1940–1945 Washington, Gez./Amb., 1940–1952 Washington, Pers Afd. Gez./Amb., 1940–1953

Columbia University, New York City Butler Library, Rare Book and Manuscript Library: ● Manuscript Collection Coudert, Sr. ● Manuscript Collection Edman ● Manuscript Collection M.L. Schuster ● Manuscript Collection Simon ● Manuscript Collection Steffens II ● Special Manuscript Collection Keppel ● Special Manuscript Collection Meloney ● Special Manuscript Collection Random House ● The Survey Art Files Butler Library, Oral History Collection: ● Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf ● Reminiscences of Abram Chasins ● Reminiscences of Marion Dickerman ● Reminiscences of Ben W. Huebsch ● Reminiscences of H.V. Kaltenborn ● Reminiscences of George S. van Schaick ● The Book-Of-The-Month Club

Cornell University, Ithaca, New York Carl A. Kroch Library, Rare and Manuscript Collections: ● Eugene P. Andrews Papers

332 ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Bibliography

Carl L. Becker Papers George Lincoln Burr Papers Lane Cooper Papers Cornell Era Miscellany, 1917, 1919, Randall J. LeBoeuf, Jr. Louis Agassiz Fuertes Papers Charles Henry Hull Papers Carl E. Ladd Papers Benjamin F. Levy Papers Ruth S.B. McDonald Papers Jacob Gould Schurman Papers Harry G. Stutz Papers Hendrik Willem van Loon Papers Andrew Dickson White Papers

Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Maryland ●

H.L. Mencken Collection

Gemeentearchief Rotterdam, The Netherlands ● ●

Holland–America Line Passage delen, Eastbound Holland–America Line Passenger Lists 1900–1940

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts Houghton Library: ● b MS Am 1323 (3964): Correspondence Hendrik Willem van Loon with Oswald Garrison Villard, 1919–1942 ● b MS Am 1803 (1797): Correspondence Hendrik Willem van Loon with George Sarton, 1915–1942 ● b MS Am 1925 (1829): Correspondence Hendrik Willem van Loon with Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921–1928

Historisch Documentatiecentrum voor het Nederlands Protestantisme, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands ●

Archief H. Colijn

Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa ●

●

Herbert Hoover Papers, Post-Presidential Period, Individual Correspondence File: Hendrik Willem van Loon, 1939–1942 Herbert Hoover Papers, Post-Presidential Period, Subject File: Belgian–American Educational Foundation, Inc.

Koninklijk Huisarchief, The Hague, The Netherlands ●

Archief Prinses Juliana

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Manuscript Division: ● Stephen Bonsal Papers ● Elmer Holmes Davis Papers ● Roy Wilson Howard Papers ● Benjamin W. Huebsch Papers

Bibliography

333

Gertrude Battles Lane Papers Waldo Peirce Papers ● Theodore Roosevelt Papers ● Hendrik Willem van Loon Papers ● William Allen White Papers Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division: ● Hendrik Willem van Loon Broadcast Recordings ● NBC Masterbooks Music Division: ● Harold Bauer Collection ● Walter Damrosch Collection ● ●

Nationaal Archief, The Hague, The Netherlands ● ● ● ● ● ●

Archief Gezantschap in de Verenigde Staten van Amerika, 1814–1940 Archief P.S. Gerbrandy Archief J. Loudon, 1866–1955 Archief Ministerie voor Algemene Oorlogvoering van het Koninkrijk, 1940–1945 Archief Nederlandse Overzee Trustmaatschappij, 1914–1919 Familie-archief Cremer

National Archives, College Park, Maryland ●

Records of the Office of War Information; Records of the Office of Facts and Figures

Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, Amsterdam, The Netherlands ● ●

Collectie H.W. van Loon Collectie Vrije Nederlandsche Omroep in Amerika

Nederlands Letterkundig Museum en Documentatiecentrum, The Hague, The Netherlands ● ● ● ●

Collectie A.J. Barnouw Collectie M. Dekker Collectie H.W. van Loon Collectie A. van der Veen

New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York City Manuscripts and Archives Division: ● The Century Collection ● Fiorello H. La Guardia Papers ● H.L. Mencken Papers ● Dorothy Schiff Papers ● Theatre Collection ● Hendrik Willem van Loon Miscellaneous Papers

Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America: ● Eliza Bowditch van Loon Papers

334

Bibliography

Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum, Hyde Park, New York ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Lorena Hickok Papers: Correspondence and Subject File Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers: Diary and Itineraries Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers: President’s Personal File Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers: President’s Secretary’s File Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers: Usher Books Eleanor Roosevelt Papers: Personal Letters Eleanor Roosevelt Papers: Speech and Article File

State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin ●

National Broadcasting Company Archives, Central Correspondence Series: Hendrik Willem van Loon Files

Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, New York Department of Special Collections: ● David Henry Dietz Papers ● Fred C. Kelly Papers ● Henry Goddard Leach Papers ● Dorothy Thompson Papers

Unitarian Church of All Souls Archives, New York City ●

Rev. Laurance I. Neale Collection: Hendrik Willem van Loon Files

University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa Special Collections Department: ● Jay N. Darling Papers

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Van Pelt Library, Special Collections Department: ● Theodore Dreiser Collection ● Horace B. Liveright Collection ● Lewis Mumford Collection

U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C. Federal Bureau of Investigation: ● Files on Hendrik Willem van Loon and Eliza Helen Criswell van Loon

P. van der Veen, Oostkapelle, The Netherlands ●

Collectie Hendrik Willem van Loon

Dirk van Loon, Liverpool, Nova Scotia, Canada ●

Van Loon Family Correspondence

Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut Sterling Memorial Library, Manuscripts and Archives: ● Decision Magazine Papers, 1940–1942

Zeeuws Archief, Middelburg, The Netherlands ● ●

Collectie Hendrik Willem van Loon Collectie Familie Moussault

Bibliography ●

●

335

Letters from Hendrik Willem van Loon and Helen Criswell van Loon to Erik “Din” Smit, 1928–1952 Collectie Stichting Hendrik Willem van Loon

Main Publications by Hendrik Willem van Loon (in chronological order; for his innumerable articles and illustrations in newspapers and periodicals, his chapters, introductions, prefaces, forewords, and illustrations in publications by others, as well as translations of his books in other languages, see the references in the chapter notes) The Fall of the Dutch Republic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913). The Rise of the Dutch Kingdom (Garden City, New York: Double Day, Page and Company, 1915). The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators (New York: The Century Company, 1916). A Short History of Discovery (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1917). Ancient Man: The Beginning of Civilizations (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920). The Story of Mankind (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921). The Story of the Bible (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923). The Story of Wilbur the Hat (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925). Tolerance (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925). The Story of America (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927). Adriaen Block: Skipper, Trader, Explorer (New York: Block Hall, Inc., 1928). Life and Times of Pieter Stuyvesant (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1928). Man the Miracle Maker (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928). R.v.R.: The Life and Times of Rembrandt van Rijn (New York: Horace Liveright, 1930). To Have or To Be—Take Your Choice (New York: The John Day Company, 1932). Van Loon’s Geography: The Story of the World We Live In (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932). An Elephant Up a Tree (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1933). An Indiscreet Itinerary or How the Unconventional Traveler Should See Holland (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933). Air-Storming (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935). Around the World with the Alphabet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935). Ships and How They Sailed the Seven Seas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935). A World Divided Is a World Lost (New York: Cosmos Publishing Company, 1935). How I Came to Publish with Essandess. Published for the New York Times National Book Fair (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936). The Songs We Sing (with Grace Castagnetta) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936). The Arts (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937). Christmas Carols (with Grace Castagnetta) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937). June 16th, 1937. A broadcast delivered on that day over the networks of the National Broadcasting Company (New York: National Broadcasting Company, 1937).

336

Bibliography

Observations on the Mystery of Print and the Work of Johann Gutenberg. Published for the New York Times Second National Book Fair (New York: Book Manufacturers’ Institute, 1937). Folk Songs of Many Lands (with Grace Castagnetta) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938). How to Look at Pictures. A Short History of Painting (New York: National Committee for Art Appreciation, 1938). Our Battle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938). The Last of the Troubadours: The Life and Music of Carl Michael Bellman (1740–1795) (with Grace Castagnetta) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939). My School Books (Wilmington, Delaware: E.I. DuPont De Nemours and Company, 1939). The Songs America Sings (with Grace Castagnetta) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939). Invasion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940). The Life and Times of Johann Sebastian Bach (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940). The Story of the Pacific (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940). Good Tidings (with Grace Castagnetta) (New York: American Artists Group, 1941). Christmas Songs (with Grace Castagnetta) (New York: American Artists Group, 1942). The Message of the Bells (with Grace Castagnetta) (Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1942). The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, With a Short Life of the Author by Hendrik Willem van Loon of Rotterdam Who Also Illustrated the Book. Published for the Classics Club (Roslyn, New York: Walter J. Black, 1942). Van Loon’s Lives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942). Thomas Jefferson (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1943). The Life and Times of Scipio Fuhlhaber (New York: The Louvaine Press, 1943). The Life and Times of Simon Bolivar (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1943). Adventures and Escapes of Gustavus Vasa (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1945). Report to Saint Peter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1947).

A Selected List of Books (for the numerous articles on Hendrik Willem van Loon—including the reviews of his works—in newspapers and periodicals, as well as the many other articles used for this book, see the references in the chapter notes) Aafjes, Bertus, De wereld is een wonder (Amsterdam: J.M. Meulenhoff, 1959). Altick, Richard D., Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). Altschuler, Glenn C., Andrew D. White: Educator, Historian, Diplomat (Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell University Press, 1979). The American Academy of Arts and Letters, The National Institute of Arts and Letters. Publication no. 179 (New York: The American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1958). Avent, John M., ed., Modern Essays (Boston and New York: Allyn and Bacon, 1924). Bailey, Thomas A., The Policy of the United States towards the Neutrals, 1917–1918 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1942; reprint New York: Arno Press, 1979).

Bibliography

337

Bainton, Roland H., George Lincoln Burr: His Life (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1943). Bak, Hans, Malcolm Cowley: The Formative Years (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1993). Balthazar, H. et al., eds., Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 15 vols. (Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1977–1983). Barnouw, Adriaan J., Monthly Letters on the Culture and History of the Netherlands (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1969). Barnouw, Erik, A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966–1970). Beard, Charles A., Hitlerism and Our Liberties (New York: The New School for Social Research, 1934). Beard, Charles A., ed., Whither Mankind: A Panorama of Modern Civilization (New York, London, and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Company, 1928). Beard, Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927). Berg, A. Scott, Lindbergh (New York: Berkley Books, 1999). Berkel, K. van, ed., Amerika in Europese ogen. Facetten van de Europese beeldvorming van het moderne Amerika (Den Haag: SDU Uitgeverij, 1990). Biow, Milton H., Butting In: An Adman Speaks Out (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1964). Bishop, Morris, A History of Cornell (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1962). Blake, Casey Nelson, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Bourne, Randolph, History of a Literary Radical and other Essays (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1920). Brinkley, Alan, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982). Brooks, Van Wyck, An Autobiography (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1965). Brooks, Van Wyck, New England: Indian Summer (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1940). Bryce, James, The American Commonwealth, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan Company, 1888). Buhite, Russell D., and David W. Levy, eds., FDR’s Fireside Chats (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). Burnett, Whit, ed., This Is My Best (New York: The Dial Press, 1942). Case, Frank, Do Not Disturb (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1940). Case, Frank, Tales of a Wayward Inn (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1938). Codel, Martin, ed., Radio and Its Future (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1930). Cooney, Terry A., Balancing Acts: American Thought and Culture in the 1930s (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995). Cowen, Philip, Memories of an American Jew (New York: The International Press, 1932). Cowley, Malcolm, ed., After the Genteel Tradition: American Writers 1910–1930 (1936; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964).

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Greshoff, J., Menagerie. Herinneringen en beschouwingen (’s-Gravenhage: Uitgeverij A.A.M. Stols, 1958). Greshoff, J., Verzameld werk, 5 vols. (Amsterdam: Van Kampen, 1948–1950). Gunther, John, Inside Europe (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1936). Hagedorn, Hermann, ed., The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Memorial Edition, 24 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923–1926). Harpprecht, Klaus, Thomas Mann: Eine Biographie (Reinbeck: Rowohlt Verlag, 1995). Hassett, William D., Off the Record with F.D.R. 1942–1945 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1958). Heald, Morrell, Transatlantic Vistas: American Journalists in Europe, 1900–1940 (Kent, Ohio and London: Kent State University Press, 1988). Heilblut, Anthony, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America, from the 1930s to the Present (New York: Viking Press, 1983). Henssen, E.W.A., Een welmenend cynicus. Opkomst, val en eerherstel van Mr. L.A. Ries (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bas Lubberhuizen, 1994). Herbst, Jurgen, The German Historical School in American Scholarship. A Study in the Transfer of Culture (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1965). Hobson, Fred, Mencken: A Life (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Hohenberg, John, Foreign Correspondence: The Great Reporters and Their Times, second edition (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995). Howes, Raymond F., ed., Our Cornell (Ithaca, New York: The Cayuga Press, 1939). Hoyt, Edwin P., Alexander Woollcott: The Man Who Came to Dinner (Radnor, Pennsylvania: Chilton Book Company, 1973). Huizinga, J., America: A Dutch Historian’s Vision, from Afar and Near, translated by Herbert H. Rowen (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). Huizinga, J., Amerika Dagboek, 14 april–19 juni 1926, edited by Anton van der Lem (Amsterdam, Antwerpen: Uitgeverij Contact, 1993). Huizinga, J., Verzamelde Werken, 9 vols. (Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink en Zoon, 1948–1953). Johnson, Gerald W., Frank R. Kent, H.L. Mencken, Hamilton Owens, The Sunpapers of Baltimore (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937). Karsner, David, Sixteen Authors to One. Intimate Sketches of Leading American Story Tellers (1928; Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1968). Kennedy, David M., Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Kersten, Albert, Buitenlandse Zaken in ballingschap. Groei en verandering van een ministerie 1940–1945 (Alpen aan den Rijn: A.W. Sijthoff, 1981). Ketchum, Richard M., The Borrowed Years 1938–1941: America on the Way to War (New York: Random House, 1989). Krabbendam, Hans, The Model Man: A Life of Edward William Bok, 1863–1930 (Amsterdam-Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi, 2001). Krabbendam, Hans and Larry J. Wagenaar, eds., The Dutch-American Experience: Essays in Honor of Robert P. Swierenga (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 2000).

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Index (n indicates item appears in note) ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), 192 Adriaen Block: Skipper, Trader, Explorer (van Loon), 116 Air-Storming (van Loon), 157 Algemeen Handelsblad, 41, 48, 95, 112–13, 118 Altick, Richard D., vi America, The Story of (van Loon), 100, 102–4, 263 American Church of the Ascension, Munich, 33, 36 American Commonwealth, The, 17, 41 “American Letters” (van Loon), 96–7 American Library Association, 142 Amherst College, 38 Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 22, 46–9, 57, 68, 87, 96, 110, 117, 121–4, 126–9, 132, 140, 148, 176, 213, 234, 247, 264 Ancient Man (van Loon), 64, 68–9 Anderson, Sherwood, 64, 107 Antioch College, xi, 73, 75–8 anti-Semitism, 27, 29, 30, 31, 118, 124, 182–4, 211, 213, 226, 266 Around the World With the Alphabet (van Loon), 158–9, 164 Arts, The (van Loon), 161, 165, 169–73, 235, 242, 252, 263 Associated Press, 23, 25, 27–9, 31–2, 35, 46–8, 58, 256, 272n5 New York City bureau, 23, 25 St. Petersburg bureau, 27, 28, 29 Washington bureau, 26–7 Atlantic Charter, 249–50, 251 Atlantic Monthly, 115, 145, 153, 238 Authors’ Guild, 205, 208 van Loon’s election as president, 175 Aylesworth, M.H., 122

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 2, 10, 155, 169, 188, 211, 236, 257, 263 Bailey, Thomas, 63 Baltimore, MD, 78, 80, 90–2, 107, 124, 235 Baltimore Sun, 83–7 Barnouw, Adriaan J., xiv, 3, 219, 231, 239, 262 Beard, Charles A., 77–8, 81, 105, 110, 169 Beard, Mary, 81 Becker, Carl, 164 Beebe Lake, 20 behaviorism, van Loon’s contempt for, 120 Belgenland, SS, 130–1 Belgium, 35, 98, 233 Bellman, Carl Michael, 2, 189 “The Butterflies at Haga,” 2 Bell-Robinson, Esther, 14, 18, 96, 184 Bergh, Coba de, 55 Berlin, Germany, 22, 28, 47, 103, 120, 127, 177, 182 Bernheim, Alice, 109, 110, 111, 113–14, 117, 123–4, 126, 131–2, 151, 182, 211 Better Homes and Gardens, 150 Bishop, Morris, 52–3, 54, 75, 78, 79, 237 Black, Walter J., 220 Blok, P.J., 34–5, 42 Blood, Charles H., 61–2 Bolshevism, 32, 65, 250 Boni and Liveright, 64, 93, 117, 128, 131–2 Bonsal, Stephen, 253 Bookman, The, 64, 77 Book-of-the-Month Club, 106, 141, 170 Boston, MA, 21–2, 26, 30, 35–6, 42, 44–5, 60–1, 69, 77–8, 101, 106, 206, 208 Bourne, Randolph, 56 Bowditch, Eliza Ingersoll (Lily), see van Loon, Eliza Ingersoll (Lily), Bowditch

INDEX Bowditch, Fanny, 27, 35, 38, 41 Bowditch, Henry Pickering, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38 Bowditch, Selma Knauth, 21, 22, 25, 26, 31 Boyer, Richard O., 221 negative profile of van Loon in The New Yorker, 244–5 Brooklyn, NY, 21, 210 Brooks, Van Wyck, 75, 97, 101, 148, 169, 179, 181–2, 206, 219, 237, 242, 253–4, 261, 266 Broun, Heywood, 61, 117, 140 Bryan, William Jennings, 50, 90 Bryce, James, 17, 41, 271n1 Buck, Pearl S., 262 Burr, George Lincoln, 14, 16–17, 20–2, 25–8, 30–1, 34–5, 42–4, 46, 48, 50, 54, 60, 65, 70, 74, 76, 96, 98, 100, 139–40, 142–3, 153, 156, 273nn7–8, 273n12, 273n19 Calvin, John, 113 Calvinism, 11, 32, 112–13, 200, 202 Cambridge, MA, 21, 27, 38 Case, Frank, 89, 189 Castagnetta, Grace, 1, 155, 177, 179, 189, 209, 211–12, 215, 218–19, 239, 242, 246, 257 collaboration with van Loon, 164, 173 Catholicism, see Roman Catholic Church Cayuga Lake, 18 CBS, 167, 199, 262, 294–5n41 Century Magazine, 46, 51–2, 64 Chamberlain, Neville, 186 Chicago Daily News, 78, 195 Chicago Record, 42 Christianity, 11–12, 20, 30 Christian Register, The, 255 Christian Science Monitor, 172, 218, 292n15 Christmas Carols (van Loon-Castagnetta), 173 Christy Walsh Syndicate, 73 Churchill, Winston, 192 “civilization,” and outline craze, 105–6 Codman, Katy, 47, 49, 50, 57, 60 Colijn, Hendrik, 200 Colorado Springs, CO, 38 Columbia University, 3, 38, 103, 231 Conant, James B., 175 Copland, Aaron, 148 Cornell Law School, 16

345

Cornell University, xi, 9, 14–15, 19, 119, 183, 207, 222 van Loon as lecturer at, 43–4, 50, 52–5 Cosmos Club, 41 Cowley, Malcolm, 59, 173 Creel, George, 55, 56 Creel committee, 55–6, 64 Cremer, Jacob Theodoor, 63, 64, 67 Criswell, Eliza Helen (Jimmie), see van Loon, Eliza Helen (Jimmie) Criswell Cummings, E.E., 64 Cunard Line, van Loon’s lecture tour on, 151–2 Darling, Jay N. “Ding,” 225–7, 234–5, 252 Darrow, Clarence, 90 Das Neue Tage-Buch, 176 Davis, Elmer H., 147, 199, 232–3, 241, 258, 261 De Amsterdammer, 96 de Bergh, Coba, 55 Debs, Eugene V., 120, 146 De Groene Amsterdammer, 117, 122–5 De Haagsche Dameskroniek, 113 De Haagsche Post, 156 De Houtuin, 110–12, 264, 290nn4–5 Dekker, Maurits, xiv, 267 “Deliberate Reflections,” 185–6 de Ruyter, Michiel, 18 de Vries, Theun, 143 Dewey, John, 105, 147 Dial, The, 64, 74, 241 Diary of Anne Frank, The, 114 Dixwell, Fanny Bowditch, 41 Dmowski, Roman, 29 Dodd Mead, 243 Dos Passos, John, 62, 129, 148, 242 Doty, Douglas, 46, 47 Dreiser, Theodore, 64, 84, 107, 242 Dresden, Germany, 21 Duma (Russian Parliament), 32 Durant, Will, 81, 104, 107, 132 Dutch community in America, van Loon and, 255–6 Earhart, Amelia, 148, 152 Early, Stephen, 206, 220, 222, 234 East Aurora, NY, 20 Einstein, Albert, 130–1, 172, 176, 178, 181, 194, 209, 261

346

INDEX

Elephant Up a Tree (van Loon), 149–50 Eliot, T.S., 55, 64 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, vi, 2 Erasmus, Desiderius, 2, 10, 13, 95–6, 100–1, 107, 140, 145, 188, 245, 260, 264, 267 van Loon’s connection to, 219–42 Evening Sun, 80, 90 Everybody’s Magazine, 64 evolution theory, 89–91 anti-evolution movement, 89–91 Fabricius, Johan, 204 Fadiman, Clifton, 140, 188, 216, 237, 261 Fall of the Dutch Republic, The (van Loon), 41–3 Farley, James, 163 Father Coughlin, 157, 186, 187 Faulkner, William, 64, 242, 281n18 Fighters for Freedom series, 254, 258 Fight for Peace, The, 177–8 Finnish Relief Fund, 191 fireside chats, 166, 186–7 Ford, Henry, 85, 211 Four Freedoms, 249–50, 251 France, 23, 52–3, 99–100, 102–5, 107, 110, 113–14, 117, 120–1, 148, 157, 180, 186, 202, 205, 265 writers stranded in, during WWII, 205–6 Franconia, SS, 151–3, 189 Frank, Waldo, 101–2 Franklin, Dwight, 66, 69 Freeman, The, 77, 129 Fuertes, Louis Agassiz, 31, 64, 79, 98 Fuhr, Ruby, 1, 120, 122, 125, 129, 140, 142, 149, 151, 169, 179, 187, 203 fundamentalists, attacks on van Loon, 89–90, 94–6 Garrett, John W., 57 Gedempte Botersloot, Rotterdam, 8 Germany, 21–2, 32–8, 49, 52, 56, 63, 65, 86–7, 112, 115, 122, 157, 176–7, 180–1, 185–6, 190, 193–4, 205, 217 Godfrey, Marcel, 128, 133–5, 168 Goebbels, Joseph, 176, 185 Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators, The (van Loon), 54 Goodrich, Frances, see van Loon, Frances Goodrich Good Tidings (van Loon and Castagnetta), 218

Goodwin, Betty, 168 Goodwin, Doris Kearns, 217 Göttingen, Germany, 33 Gouda, the Netherlands, 13 Great Britain, 49, 89, 115, 180, 186, 192, 203, 213 declaration of van Loon as persona non grata, 53 Great Depression, 12, 124–5, 141–2, 145, 161, 166, 184 Greenslet, Ferris, 42–3, 74, 94 Greenwich Time, 182, 186, 190, 191–2, 309n23 Greenwich Village, 59–70 Greshoff, Jan, 2, 204, 233–4, 245, 247, 266 Gustavus Vasa (van Loon), 258 Hackett, Albert, 114 Hagedorn, Hermann, 27, 62 Hague, The, the Netherlands, 12–14, 16, 18, 34–5, 48–9, 57, 95, 99, 103, 110–11 Hall, Janet, see van Loon, Janet Hall Halle, Germany, 33, 36 Hanfstaengl, Edgar, 33–4 Hanfstaengl, Ernst Sedgwick (Putzi), 34, 35 Hanken, Henri, 13, 92 Hanken, Jan, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 34, 35, 116 Hanken, Sarah (Aunt Sally) Parker, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18 Hansen, Harry, 78 Harcourt, Alfred, 73, 193 Harper’s, 99 Harrap Mercury, The, 150 Harvard Cosmopolitan Club, 35, 274–5n6 Harvard University, 17, 20–1, 22, 23, 34, 38, 175, 233 Hassett, William D., 230 Hearst, William Randolph, 118, 153–4, 229 Heidelberg, Germany, 33 Hemingway, Ernest, 64, 242 Henry Esmond (Thackeray), 14 Het Centrum, 95 Het Vaderland, 95, 204 Hickok, Lorena, 104, 201, 208 Hitler, Adolf, see van Loon, Hendrik Willem: anti-Hitler campaign Hoffman, Helen, 148–9, 151–3, 219 Hoffman, Ruth, 148–9, 219 Holland, see Netherlands, the Holland–America Line, 15, 35, 38, 56

INDEX Holland Club, Munich, 35 Holland Society, 211 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 41, 148 Holy Roman Empire, 11 Hoover, Herbert, 140–1, 145, 191, 237, 261 Hoover, J. Edgar, 228 Hopkins, Harry, 212 Houghton Mifflin, 42, 44, 74, 94 House of a Thousand Fears, 8 Howard, Lila, 99–100 Howard, Roy W., 139, 147 Hughes, Langston, 242 Huizinga, Johan, 95, 204 Hull, Charles H., 23 Hull, Cordell, 178 “HvL,” 84–7, 89–92, 271n1 “HvL” (Martindale), 84–5 Hyde Park, NY, xiii, xv, 146, 162, 208, 212, 230, 232, 248 I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Certain Eminent Men and Women of Our Time, 188–9 Ickes, Harold, 192 Indiscreet Itinerary or How the Unconventional Traveler Should See Holland (van Loon), 149 Invasion (van Loon), 192–3 Ithaca, NY, 17, 20–3, 25, 35, 55, 61–2, 70, 76, 80 Ithaca News, 23 It’s a Wonderful Life, 114 Jamaica Plain, MA, 21, 25, 26 Japikse, Nicolas, 42 Jazz Age, 106 Jews, 190, 210–11 fundraising for relief of European Jews, 190–1 refugees in America, 177, 182–4 and Russian pogroms, 29 van Loon’s view of, 27, 30–1, 124, 175, 177 Juliana, princess of the Netherlands, see Princess Juliana Kaltenborn, H.V., 1, 35, 181, 186, 194, 219, 256, 262, 274–5n6 Kaulbachstrasse, Munich, 35 Kennedy, David, 184 Kesten, Hermann, 227

347

Khan, Genghis, 32, 83, 186 Kingsford-Smith, 126–7, 151–2, 295nn43–4 Kipling, Rudyard, 83 Knickerbocker Weekly, 3, 222, 224, 259, 261, 265–6 Koch, Charles, 92, 127 Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, see Royal Library, The Hague Koninklijk Huisarchief (Royal Archives), The Hague, xiv Kremlin, Moscow, 28 Kristallnacht, 182–3 Kroch Library, Carl A., Cornell University, xiii Kühlmann, R. Baron von, 57 Ladies’ Home Journal, 59, 279nn1–2 La Guardia, Fiorello H., 1, 148, 158, 163, 176, 180, 213, 231, 241, 247, 262 Lake Starnberg, Munich, 35 Lansing, Robert, 53 Last of the Troubadours, The (van Loon and Castagnetta), 189 Le Hand, Missy, 162 Leipzig, Germany, 33 Leipzig University, 33 Lemmon, Walter, 212–13 Lend-Lease bill, 212 Leuchtenburg, William E., 64, 90 Lewis, Sinclair, 66, 73, 75, 84, 89, 102, 107, 242 Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., xiii Life and Times of Johann Sebastian Bach (van Loon), 211, 263 Life and Times of Pieter Stuyvesant (van Loon), 103, 109–10, 115–16 Life and Times of Simon Bolivar (van Loon), 252–3 Lindbergh, Charles, 187, 211 Lippman, Walter, 83, 140, 148 Literary Guild of America, 106–7, 126, 128, 141 Literary Review, The, 77 Liveright, Horace, 93, 97, 150 London, England, 3, 14, 47–8, 80, 89, 92, 99, 110, 120, 135, 180, 200–1, 203, 212, 217, 248–9, 259, 263 Long Island Sound, 168 Loudon, Alexander, 1, 200–1, 203, 210, 219, 223, 231, 248, 256, 261

348

INDEX

Loudon, John, 57, 173 Lowell, A. Lawrence, 38 Lowenthal, Marvin, 167 Loyola, St. Ignatius, 25 Lucatelli, Luigi, 2 Ludwig, Emil, 168 Luftwaffe, 10, 195 Luther, Martin, 36 Lutheran Church, 11, 235 MacLeish, Archibald, 225, 261 Mad Hatter, 65, 70, 74–5 “Mad Hatter Mutterings,” 66, 74, 279n2 Mann, Thomas, 157, 178, 193, 194, 204, 219, 227–8, 247, 261 Man the Miracle Maker (van Loon), 115 Martindale, Max, 84–5 Marx, Karl, 32 van Loon on, 120–1 Masson, Thomas L., 93–4 Mayer, Henri, 141, 169, 190, 213, 215 McCormick, Robert, 229 McDonald, Ruth, 220 Medina, Isaias, 253 “Meet the Commentator,” 153–4 Mencken, H.L., 61, 76, 78, 83–5, 90–4, 98, 100–1, 107, 118, 128, 152, 161, 242 Middelburg, the Netherlands, xiii, 13, 92–3, 95, 110–11, 120, 127, 148, 195 Middelburgsche Courant, 95, 120 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 62, 242 Miller, Dora, 118–20 Milton, John, 2 Montaigne, Michel de, 95, 100, 188, 236–7 Moore, Anne Carroll, 77, 262 Morgan, Bayard Quincy, 45 Morgan, Josa, 1, 45, 74–5, 240–1, 246, 259 Moscow, Russia, 28, 64, 140, 163, 180 Muhlenberg College, van Loon’s honorary degree from, 192 Multiplex Man, see Man the Miracle Maker (van Loon) Mumford, Lewis, 66, 77–8, 81, 97, 101, 129, 194 Munich, Germany, 33–8, 41, 110, 180, 195 van Loon in, 33–8 Museum of the Knowledge of This Earth, Rotterdam, 10 Mussolini, Benito, 180 My Life as Author and Editor (Mencken), 84

Nation, The, 42, 49, 61, 64–5, 77, 98–9, 104, 106, 140, 147, 181, 194, 262 National Education Association, 142 Nazi propaganda, 178 NBC, radio broadcasts, 122, 156–7, 165–8, 177, 179, 185–6, 208 Neale, Laurance I., 1–2, 255 Nederlands Letterkundig Museum, The Hague, xiv Netherland–America Foundation, The, 3, 201, 255 Netherlands Oversea Trust Company, 63 Netherlands, the, 1–3, 16, 27, 34, 38, 42–9, 54–6, 60, 67, 87, 92–3, 96–7, 118, 167–8, 220, 223–4, 229, 253, 259, 261, 264–7 aid to, 210–11 German invasion of, 199–218 negative press regarding, 63–4 Netherlands Information Bureau, 2, 217, 231, 233–4, 248 neutrality of, 51, 52, 56 Netherlands News Digest, 2 Neutrality Act (1937), 187 New Deal, 156–7, 161, 169 New Haven Railroad, 1 New Leader, The, van Loon’s contribution to, 228–30, 250–2, 262 New Republic, The, 51, 76–7, 130, 181 New Statesman, 89 New York City, 1, 23, 98, 123, 125, 146, 210, 229–30, 241, 254 van Loon in, 139–59 New Yorker, The, 101–2, 189, 221–2, 231, 234, 237, 244–5, 262 New York Evening Post, 114, 129, 145, 151, 153 New York Herald Tribune, 2, 100, 115, 139–40, 145, 153, 156, 170, 173, 194–5, 199, 211–12, 238, 242 New York Public Library, xiii, xv, 77, 262 New York Sun, 23 New York Times, 2, 42, 49–51, 53, 57, 77, 93, 98, 100–1, 103–4, 113, 115, 121, 130, 132, 149, 152–3, 156, 158, 164, 172, 177, 180, 182, 194, 202, 205, 211, 219, 237, 242, 253, 263, 267 Book Review, 129, 189, 194, 238, 244 New York Tribune, 64 Niagara Falls, NY, 20

INDEX Nicholas II, czar of Russia, 32 Nieuw Amsterdam, SS, capture of, 47–8 Nieuw Veere, xiii, 135, 168, 199–200, 204, 208, 215, 218–20, 222, 225, 234, 241–2, 246–7, 254, 262 Noordam, SS, 38, 56–7 Noorthey, 14, 18, 37, 231 Norway, 87, 191, 193, 212, 230 Odessa, Russia, 28 Old Greenwich, CT, xiv, 1, 37, 135, 168, 185, 208 O’Neill, Eugene, 64, 107, 242 Oosterhout, the Netherlands, 37 Order of Orange Nassau, 167 Order of the Netherlands Lion, 219, 317–18n1 Our Battle (van Loon), 181–2, 193 outline craze, 81–2, 105–6 Outline of History (Wells), 77–8, 80 Outlook, The, 100, 129 Panama Canal, 26, 130, 151 Paulus (apostle), 20 Pearl Harbor, 217 Pegler, Westbrook, 216 Peters, Edna, 118–20 Philips, Frits, 92, 118, 122, 215, 235 Pittsburgh, PA, 20 Plato, 2, 236 Poland, 25, 29–32, 186, 205 van Loon’s view of, 30–1 Potsdam, SS, 15, 21, 22, 27 Pound, Ezra, 64 Praise of Folly, The (Erasmus), 101 van Loon’s Introduction to, 220–1, 240 Prince Bernhard, 201, 203, 212, 224, 248, 255–6, 264 Prince Hendrik, 111–12 Princess Juliana, xiv, 165, 200–1, 203, 206, 208–9, 212, 219, 224, 230, 247–8, 255–6, 261, 264, 267 Princeton University, 38 Proud Tower, The (Tuchman), 52 Queen Wilhelmina, 42, 63–4, 111, 118, 167, 209, 219, 230–2, 234, 261 Queen Wilhelmina Fund, 201–2, 214, 224, 249

349

race, van Loon’s views on, 124–5, 143 radios, Nazi confiscation of, 248 RCA, 166 Recht, Charles, 113, 114 Red Scare, 64, 67 religion, van Loon and, 11–12, 254–5 Rembrandt van Rijn, 18, 45, 61, 69, 98, 110, 115, 116–17, 122, 125–6, 128–31, 149, 164, 225, 263 Report to Saint Peter (van Loon), 10, 14, 37, 90, 250, 254, 262–3 Rhodes, June Hamilton, 146 Ridderzaal, The Hague, 18 Ries, L.A., 2, 217, 231, 234, 239, 245, 247–9, 259 Rise of American Civilization, The (Beard), 105, 106 Rise of the Dutch Kingdom, The (van Loon), 44, 50 Rise of the Dutch Republic (Motley), 41 Roelvink, Herman, 22 Roman Catholic Church, 11, 31, 34, 95, 98, 123–4, 145, 183, 186, 226–7, 238, 253, 266 Roosevelt, Eleanor, xvi, 146–7, 153, 157, 162–3, 166–7, 173, 179, 184–5, 203, 208–10, 212, 216, 232, 237, 254–5, 261, 262–3, 267 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR), xvi, 3, 146, 156–7, 161–3, 166, 168–9, 172, 178, 181, 184–5, 186–7, 192, 195, 200–1, 205, 208, 211–12, 213, 216, 217, 224, 229, 230–2, 238, 243, 248, 249–51, 253, 261, 262 campaign biography, van Loon’s writing of, 161 concealment of handicap, 185 postwar plans, 249–51 see also New Deal Roosevelt, Theodore, 26, 56, 154, 179 “Roosevelt Alias Geldersman. A Study in Applied Genealogy” (van Loon), 169 Roosevelt Institute, Franklin and Eleanor, xv Roosevelt Library, Franklin D., xiii, 162 Roosevelt Study Center, the Netherlands, xiii, xiv, xv Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 21, 27, 37, 195, 245 Round Table, 89 Royal, John, 166, 173

350

INDEX

Royal Library, The Hague, 35 Russia, 21, 23, 25, 27–33, 35, 44, 46, 52, 65, 163, 225–7 van Loons’s view of, 25, 29–30, 31, 32 Russian Orthodox Church, 28 Russian Revolution, 28–31 R.v.R.: The Life and Times of Rembrandt van Rijn (van Loon), 117, 125, 126, 128–30 Ryan, Helen, 74 Sandburg, Carl, 107, 242, 261 Sarton, George, 233, 234 Saturday Review of Literature, 98, 140, 146, 172, 181, 189, 194, 262 Schapiro, J. Salwyn, 77 Schiff, Dorothy, 230 Schlesinger Arthur M., Jr., xi–xii, xv, 206, 263, 266 Schurman, Jacob Gould, 50 Schuster, Max, 132, 166, 219 Schutzen Verlag, 176, 180 Scopes, John T., 90 Scudamore, Rene Gibbs, 66, 69–70, 102, 114–15, 128, 132–5, 146, 168, 170, 177, 215, 246, 292n15, 292n19 Seven Arts, The, 56–7 Ships and How They Sailed the Seven Seas (van Loon), 153, 155–6 Short History of Discovery, A (van Loon), 54–5 Short-Wave Journey of Discovery With Hendrik Willem van Loon, 166 Siberia, Russia, 30 Siedlce, Poland, 29 Simon, Richard L. (Dick), 1, 131–2, 141, 170, 219 Simon and Schuster (S&S), 1, 134, 140, 170, 181 Sinclair, Upton, 107, 116, 129 Smart Set, The, 78, 118, 120 Smit, Erik “Din,” 114, 128 Smith, Alfred, 146 Smith, Thomas, 117 Songs America Sings, The (van Loon and Castagnetta), 189 Songs We Sing, The (van Loon-Castagnetta), 164, 239 Soskin, William, 170 “Speaking of Revolution” (van Loon), 140 Spence, Mathilda, 66 Spengler, Oswald, van Loon on, 120–1

Spiess, William, 246 St. Lawrence Church, Rotterdam, 10 St. Petersburg, Russia, 27, 28, 29, 31, 273n8 Stalin, Joseph, 32, 142, 186, 250 Statendam, SS, 126 Steinbeck, John, 242 Stearns, Harold, 101, 105 Stone, Melville, 23, 27, 42, 46–7 Story of Mankind, The (van Loon), 10, 74, 76–82, 84, 89–90, 92, 95, 106, 120, 170, 252, 263 Newbery Award for, 80, 82 Story of the Bible, The (van Loon), 90, 92–5, 106, 263 Story of the Pacific, The (van Loon), 189 Story of Utopias, The (Mumford), 81 Stowe, Leland, 195 Sunnyside (Bowditch house), 21, 22, 25, 27, 35, 41 Survey, The, 106 Sweden, WWII visit to, 178–80 Switzerland, 14, 184, 251 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 14 Thin Man, The, 114 Thomas Jefferson (van Loon), 238–9, 243–4, 248 Thompson, Dorothy, 194 Thompson, Howard N., 28, 29 Times (London), 3 To Have or To Be—Take Your Choice (van Loon), 142 Tolerance (van Loon), 98, 99–100 Tolstoy, Alexandra, 225 Tuchman, Barbara, 52 “Typical American Girl” contest, 118–20 Unique Function of Education in American Democracy, 169 Unitarian Church, 12, 27 Unitarian Church of All Souls, New York City, xiv, 1, 254–5, 326n28 United Nations Relief Wing, 249, 254 United States, 2, 14, 16, 20, 26, 27, 32, 35, 38, 44, 48, 51–2, 55–63, 67, 82–9, 95–7, 100–2, 122–6, 129–33, 154–8, 163, 169, 173–87, 224–32, 249–53, 259–67 Consulate in Munich, 33 Consulate in Warsaw, 29

INDEX Declaration of Independence, 2, 142, 163, 188, 191, 241 Department of Justice, 67 Department of State, 53, 205, 227–8 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 228 Secret Service, 64–5 University of the Air, 147, 161, 153, 158, 166; see also WEVD University of Wisconsin at Madison, 45 Valerius, Adriaen, 2 “Prayer of Thanksgiving,” 2 vanden Heuvel, William J., v, xv–xvi van der Hilst, Jan, 157 van der Hilst, Suzanne (Suus) van Loon, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 157–8, 180 van der Hilst, Willem, 14 van der Hilst, Wim, 180 death of, 229–30 van der Veen, Adriaan, xiv, 204–5, 215, 234 Van Doren, Carl, 61, 98, 104–7, 126, 145, 147, 261, 265 van Loon, Adrianus, 37 van Loon, Dirk, xiv, 190 van Loon, Elisabeth Johanna (Betsie) Hanken, 7–8, 11, 12–14, 18, 37–8 van Loon, Eliza Helen (Jimmie) Criswell, 1, 87, 92–4, 96, 148–9, 158–9, 168, 179–80, 184–5, 190, 204–5, 209–12, 215–20, 240–1, 246–8, 253–4, 258–66 early relationship with, 65–8 Grace Castagnetta and, 155 health of, 139–40, 240–1 marriage to van Loon, 69–70 reconciliation with van Loon, 109–10, 126 on SS Franconia, 151–3, 301n39, 301n44 and Story of Mankind, 73–6 troubles with marriage to van Loon, 79–80, 99–100, 102–3, 215 at Veere, 109–35 van Loon, Eliza Ingersoll (Lily), Bowditch, 1, 21–2, 25, 80, 175, 273n16 divorce from van Loon, 60, 61–2, 69 van Loon’s courtship of, 25–7 van Loon, Frances Goodrich, 99–100, 102–4, 107, 110, 113, 121, 265 van Loon, Gerard Willem, 22, 37, 38, 46, 74, 79, 95, 121, 126, 194, 221–2, 241–2, 246, 254, 265

351

van Loon, Hendrik Willem (grandfather), 12, 14, 37 van Loon, Hendrik Willem, Sr. (father), 8, 11, 12–14, 27 van Loon, Hendrik Willem anti-Hitler campaign, 175–95, 206–8, 213–14 biography, 265 coverage of political conventions, 98 criticism of Dutch, 96–7 criticism of US govt. in WWII, 216–17, 250–2 death, 260, 261–3 family coat of arms, 2, 12, 37 FBI investigation of, 228 fiction writing, 60–1 heart attack, 214–16 opinions on WWI, 88–9 refugees, aid to, 227–8 reprints of books, 263–4 ties to Dutch heritage, 18 U.S. citizenship, 32, 53, 62, 63, 86, 106 visits to Netherlands, 56–8, 87, 92–3, 97–9, 102–4 van Loon, Hendrik Willem (Piet), 149, 158, 190 van Loon, Henry Bowditch (Hank), xiv, 1, 74, 76, 80, 98, 104, 121–2, 126, 132, 149, 190, 206, 261–3 van Loon, Janet Hall, 1, 37 van Loon, Suzanne (Suus), see van der Hilst, Suzanne (Suus) van Loon van Loon-Hanken, Elisabeth Johanna, 7, 14 “Van Loon’s Diary,” 250–2 Van Loon’s Geography: The Story of the World We Live In (van Loon), 32, 140, 143–6, 150–1, 170, 252 Van Loon’s Lives (van Loon), 235–9, 242, 253–5, 263–4 Van Schaick, George S., 230–1 van Tets, Willem, 203–4, 206, 208, 210–11, 231, 235, 239, 247, 254 Vasquez-Lopez, Maria, 215, 256–7 Veere, the Netherlands, xiii, xiv, 13, 92, 109–35, 143, 148, 184, 209, 233–7, 264, 286n19 Veiller, Anthony, 75–6 Venice, Italy, 35, 93 Villard, Oswald Garrison, 103, 106, 146, 204 Volendam, SS, 88

352

INDEX

von Kaltenborn, Hans, see Kaltenborn, H.V. von Kühlman, R. Baron, 57 Voorburg, the Netherlands, 13 Voorwaarts, 95 Wadleigh, Henry R., 33, 36, 37 Wadleigh, Julia, 33, 36, 37 Walcheren, the Netherlands, 13, 112–13, 118 Warsaw, Poland, 28, 29, 31, 61 Washington, D.C., 25, 26, 41–7 WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), 123–4, 145, 191, 226 Watson, Edwin M., 205 Watson, J.B., 120 Watson, Thomas, 201, 255 Wave of the Future, The (Lindbergh), 194 Wells, H.G., 49, 77, 80, 168 Western Union Building, 25 Westport, CT, 93, 97, 99, 103, 135 WEVD, 146–7, 153, 158, 161–2, 166, 262 White, Andrew Dickson, 22, 23, 26, 30, 32, 53–4, 57, 273n8, 273n20 White, William Allen, 193–4 White Library, Cornell University, 14 Whither Mankind (Beard), 110 Wilbur the Hat (van Loon), 98–9

Wilhelmina, queen of the Netherlands, see Queen Wilhelmina Willem II, Count of Holland, 11 Williams, Wythe, 186, 190 Wilson, Woodrow, 41, 55, 63, 64 Wittenberg, Germany, 36 Woman’s Home Companion, 100, 128 Woman’s Wear, 70 Woollcott, Alexander, 167, 212 World War I, 46, 47–58, 61, 177, 274n1 World War II, 3, 124, 157, 172, 186, 194, 263 Worth, Jacques, 102, 134–5, 292n15 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 148 WRUL broadcasts, 206–8, 212–13, 222, 224, 229, 232 Yale Review, 42, 103 Yellow Springs, OH, 73–6, 78, 80 Zeeland, Province of, the Netherlands, 13, 92, 110, 112, 118–20, 122, 169, 195 Zeeuws Archief, xiv Zuckmayer, Carl, 184, 225 Zweig, Stefan, 225