In the 1930s, the Dutch American immigrant community of Holland, Michigan, underwent a cultural reawakening through its Dutch heritage Tulip Time festival. Tulip Time began in 1929 as a city beautification project. It was essentially a horticultural festival featuring 100,000 tulips imported from the Netherlands. Each year it added new cultural features such as a Dutch market, Dutch-language church services, Dutch cultural parades, and regular performances by klompen (wooden shoe) dancers traditionally dressed in the most colorful Dutch costumes, so that it continued to grow in popularity. By the mid-1930s, over a half million visitors per year came to see the tulips and partake in the traditions of old Holland.1 But while the festival and the new generations of Dutch Americans that organized it attempted to recreate and promote authentic Dutch culture, the portrayals of the Dutch, like the braided blonde-haired klompen dancers pushing brooms to scrub the streets, engendered stereotypes and caricatures that hardly represented the Dutch Americans of the past. The festival’s “Dutchness,” wrote Dutch American author Arnold Mulder, “was less a matter of nationality and blood than of an American flair for effective community publicity.”2 According to historian Suzanne Sinke, Tulip Time in later years was neither completely Dutch, nor wholly American, but rather was a peculiar hybrid, born and continuing to be reinterpreted in a dialectical process between cultures and shaped by an all too apparent subservience to the demands of commercialism and consumerism.
Tulip Time and the Invention of a New Dutch American Ethnic Identity
Tulip Time and the Invention of a New Dutch American Ethnic Identity
Recent Publications
- Common Law Liberalism: A New Theory of the Libertarian Society (Oxford University Press, 2024)
- “Diversity and Group Performance,” Encyclopedia of Diversity, Springer, 2024
- “Evading and Aiding: The Moral Case Against Paying Taxes,” with Christopher Freiman and Jessica Flanigan, Extreme Philosophy, ed. Stephen Hetherington, Routledge (2024)
- “Online Sports Betting Giants Place Their Bets Against Growing Rivals”
- “Liberal Tolerance for an Illiberal, Intolerant Age”
Recent News
- Business as a Force for Good: MBA Students Support Hurricane Helene Victims Through Ethics Project
- Advocacy group concerned pay-for-plasma clinics expanding to Ontario will hurt voluntary donations
- Jason Brennan and Hélène Landemore, Debating Democracy (University of Zurich’s UBS Center, 2024)
- Jason Brennan “Everything Wrong with Democracy” on the Alex O’Connor Podcast (January 28, 2024)
- On the affirmative action ruling, the Supreme Court got it half right