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First Sentences

“James Reyburn, a fifty-year-old Wall Street lawyer and cotton broker who was widely admired for his good works and infectious good humor, had a premonition that he would die of cholera.” Benjamin Miller, Fat of the Land: Garbage of New York: The Last Two Hundred Years.

“The scalloped hem of Caterina Lazzari’s blue velvet coat grazed the fresh-fallen snow, leaving a pale pink path on the bricks as she walked across the empty piazza.” Adriana Trigiani, The Shoemaker’s Wife.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto.

“District Attorney Varga was conducting the prosecution in the Reis trial, which had been going for almost a month and would have dragged on for at least two more, when, one mild May night, after ten and not later than twelve, according to various testimony and the autopsy, they killed him.” Leonardo Sciascia, Equal Danger.

“One of the things that happens when you get older is that you discover lots of new ways to hurt yourself.” Bill Bryson, The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain. (Library)

“There was going to be a funeral.” Alan Conway, Magpie Murders: An Atticus Pünd Mystery.

“Four hundred million years ago, dragonflies the size of crows drifted above a giant inland sea.” Eliza Griswold, Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America.

“Alfred Russel Wallace stood on the quarterdeck of a burning ship, seven hundred miles off the coast of Bermuda, the planks heating beneath his feet, yellow smoke curling up through the cracks.” Kirk Wallace Johnson, The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century.

“It was the smell that Mrs. Powell noticed first.” Minette Walters, The Echo.

“I wasn’t prepared to meet a condemned man.” Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.

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DSK–Polish Christmas Edition

A patron said that he was from Poland and asked where Aga was. The bartender replied that Aga had left DSK months ago, and he did not know where she had gone. The patron no doubt was interested in Aga because she, too, had been born in Poland. Aga, who worked at DSK when I first started going to the biergarten, struck me as different from the other servers who were not born in the United States. She seemed a bit older, her accent thicker, her English less good, her education less extensive than the others. She struck me as of a lower class than the others and less ambitious; she did not seem to have another career in mind as other servers did. Although I talked with her frequently, I don’t remember much from our conversations except for one last December.

She told me her son was getting excited about Christmas, but it quickly became apparent that the mother, too, was looking forward to the holiday. She told me that she was going to have a traditional Polish Christmas with her boyfriend. I had met him only once. Big and burly, clichés of Middle European thugs came to mind. But then I found he had the gentlest handshake, a twinkle in his smile, and a soft, soft voice. Aga said he doted on her son, and another staff member later told me that he was a Polish bear—a Polish teddy bear.

I realized that I knew nothing about the traditional Polish Christmas celebration. I was a bit surprised because I believe that if you live in New York for a while, you begin to take on new ethnic colorations. Thus, in some sense all true New Yorkers are a bit Jewish. You absorb some of the religious practices, Yiddish phrases, the rhythm of speech, the humor, the foods of Jewish people. And, similarly, a true New Yorker is at least part Irish, part Chinese, part Italian and has absorbed, aware of it or not, some southern gospel background.

This was not true, however, at least for me, with Poles who, after all, do not have as large a footprint in the City as other groups. I asked her about the Polish Christmas celebration. She told me that in the Polish countryside, hay was spread under the dining table to symbolize the manger Jesus was laid in, but Aga and her boyfriend were not doing that. They were, however, going to have the Christmas Eve feast of many dishes that started with eating something like a communion wafer. She said that carp was often served. I asked if this was similar to the traditional Italian Christmas Eve dinner of the misnamed seven fishes—misnamed because while all the courses are seafood, all are not fish. Italian food and clams always go together, as they do when honoring the birth of Jesus. Aga said that the Polish celebration was not the same. They did have carp and maybe some other fish, but all the courses, while meatless, were not seafood. Poles gotta have borscht, and they do when honoring the birth of Jesus. And they do not restrict themselves to a paltry seven courses; they have twelve. After the feast, presents are opened, and, traditionally, people go off to bed early to be ready for early morning mass. She told me that the dinner on Christmas was not meatless, but it was not as important as the meal the evening before.

I asked how long it took her to make the twelve courses. She laughed and said that she didn’t. Delis in the central part of Brooklyn where she lived sold many of the Christmas dishes that would be served. I got the name of the place she went, but like many other things, I have forgotten it. But the evening sounded incredible to me and made our family’s traditional Christmas celebration seem a bit scanty.

 

RELATED POST: https://ameliasdad.blog/?s=DSK

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City for Sale–Lessons, Parallels, Ironies (concluded)

If there is a hero to the 30-year old book City for Sale, it is Rudy Giuliani. The authors say about him: “The deepest passion of this priestly prosecutor was apprehending crooked politicians [emphasis added], an achievement that gave him a richer sense of satisfaction than even catching drug traffickers, financial finaglers, and Mafia godfathers. ‘I don’t think there is anybody worse than a public official who sells his office and corrupts others,’ Giuliani once said, ‘except maybe a murderer.’ He had a moral comprehension of why political corruption subverted democracy and injured the commonweal. Giuliani regarded corrupt public officials the way Robert Kennedy thought of Jimmy Hoffa; the outrage was personal.”

The government officials, friends, and family around Trump today may not take the kinds of kickbacks Giuliani zealously prosecuted, but I wonder if the former U.S. Attorney ever thinks about the possibilities of the president and cabinet and other high officials using their offices to further enrich themselves. (I say “further” because all of them already seem to be fantastically rich.) Does he think that what happened in New York three decades ago injured the commonweal, but what may be going on around him currently does not? If so, how does he justify his conclusion?

Giuliani, however, continues to show personal outrage, but now his targets are not the office holders. His targets are those who are much like what he used to be, people seeking to find out whether government officials, politicians, and Trump friends and family have entangled themselves with foreign governments. His targets are people, like the Giuliani of the seeking, seeking to determine who may have sought access and political favors after donating or spending money that has aided Trump interests; who has lied about what they have done; who may have sought to obstruct justice and corrupt our electoral system.

And there is Giuliani himself. At least in one way he has remained consistent. Murder is worse than political corruption. Except now, apparently, political corruption is not so bad. He said about Michael Cohen’s corrupt actions that implicate the president, “Nobody got killed, nobody got robbed. . . . This was not a big crime.”

Certainly, Giuliani now thinks that advancing private business interests can go hand-in-hand with being the president’s lawyer. He was recently in Bahrain meeting the king and the interior minister. In Bahrain Giuliani was described as leading a “high-level U.S. delegation,” but he was not there performing official duties. He instead was seeking a lucrative contract for a firm he owns, Giuliani Security and Safety, part of a worldwide effort he has been making to get the firm more business. This may not be illegal since Giuliani is not a government official, but the odds are strong that at least some of the foreign officials will think it wise to hire Giuliani Security to stay in Trump’s good graces.

Thirty years seems to me as both a long time and but a blink. The Trump of today seems to be, to put it nicely, the same ethically-challenged Trump who appears in City for Sale. But for Giuliani, those three decades have been enough to bring an apparent reversal of ethical and legal standards.

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City for Sale–Lessons, Parallels, Ironies (continued)

Trump is a minor character in the 1988 book City for Sale chronicling New York City corruption under Mayor Ed Koch, but his limited appearances are revealing. Even back then, Trump had close advisors who had conflicts of interest. In the late 1970s, Trump was seeking his first Manhattan real estate deal by converting an aged 42d Street hotel into what would become the Grand Hyatt. Trump turned for assistance to lawyer Roy Cohn, who had first gained national publicity as an aide to Joe McCarthy during the height of “McCarthyism.” Cohn approached Stanley Friedman, a deputy mayor under Abe Beame, the mayor before Koch. Friedman was also the Democratic political leader of the Bronx. Cohn promised Friedman a partnership in Cohn’s firm at the end of Beame’s tenure, which Friedman accepted. Friedman then “frantically forced city bureaucrats to tie together all the loose ends of a package for Cohn client Donald Trump’s renovation of the old Commodore Hotel on 42d Street.” Tax abatements had not previously been granted real estate projects unless financing for the deal was in place, but Trump got an unprecedented forty-two-year tax abatement to convert the Commodore into the Grand Hyatt without having first secured financing. This gave “Trump the largest tax write-off in city history.” In addition, Trump got a permit for the new hotel’s Garden Room to overhang 42d Street. “Trump, largely because of the success of this deal, would become one of Cohn and Friedman’s prize clients.”

Of course, many have noticed the irony when Trump, who had Roy Cohn as lawyer and mentor, labeling the Mueller investigation as “McCarthyism.” Trump’s recent invective, however, had a Koch parallel from thirty years ago. Daily News reporter Marcia Kramer started breaking seamy stories about Bess Myerson, Koch’s friend (who had been Miss America) and a commissioner in Koch’s administration, Andy Capasso, who was Myerson’s lover, and Judge Hortense Gabel, who was judicially involved with Capasso’s messy divorce. When Kramer reported that Myerson had befriended Gabel’s troubled daughter and hired the daughter for a city position while the mother was making rulings favorable to Capasso, Koch labeled the stories “McCarthyism.” Kramer labored on because she “understood Koch well enough to interpret his lashing out with invective like ‘McCarthyism’ to mean that she had struck a nerve and was on the right track.”

The reporter had to feel a certain justification the next year when the U.S. Attorney indicted Myerson, Capasso, and Gabel. Newfield and Barrett state, “The basic facts outlined by the indictment were in the stories published by the Daily News in May and June 1986, which the mayor had deplored as ‘McCarthyism’.” Oh, and who was that U.S. Attorney? The present mouthpiece for Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani.

Giuliani was not only aware of Trump back then but also of some of the future president’s shady deals. During Koch’s three terms as mayor, Giuliani’s office indicted Stanley Friedman, and Rudy personally tried the case. Friedman took the stand, and in what turned out to be a blistering cross-examination, Giuliani started by asking Friedman “about the excessive hotel tax abatement package he’d put together for Donald Trump, and his subsequent representation of Trump.” Although I can’t be sure, I doubt that Trump and Giuliani swap stories about their interactions with Friedman, who was convicted of getting kickbacks for rigging contracts with New York City and spent four years in prison. (Friedman appealed unsuccessfully. His appellate lawyer—Alan Dershowitz.)

But I do wonder if Giuliani ever wants to say something to the president about normal, or at least Rudy’s, prosecutorial tactics. As I write this, Trump and Fox news are trying to dismiss anything said by Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer until recently, because Cohen has admitted to lying. Meanwhile, Cohen and others the president is trying to denigrate are hoping to get reduced sentences for crimes they have admitted by giving information to the prosecutor. In perhaps every trial described in City for Sale that was prosecuted by Giuliani’s office, the prosecution presented witnesses who both were proven liars and who hoped to get reduced sentences for their cooperation. But my guess is that Rudy never mentions such inconvenient facts to Donald. And when complaints come that the FBI or Mueller have used abusive investigative techniques, I doubt that Giuliani says, “Oh, that’s nothing. Remember the Stanley Friedman trial? Remember that I bugged the defense attorney Tom Puccio even though he was my friend and a former prosecutor. Now that was hardball!” (Eavesdropping revealed nothing untoward on Puccio’s part.)

Concluded December 21)

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City for Sale–Lessons, Parallels, Ironies

I recently read a book published in 1988, City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York, by Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett, who were investigative reporters of that time. Koch was New York Mayor from January 1, 1979, through December 31, 1989, and the book is about the corruption, mostly from machine politicians, in New York City during the time of Koch’s administration. Koch first ran as a reformer and an anti-political machine candidate, but after he was elected, while making a failed attempt to become governor, he turned to the machines for support and then became allied with them.

The thesis is not the Koch was corrupt in the sense of seeking money, but in seeking to maintain political power, he turned a blind eye or was willfully ignorant of the corruption around him. The authors conclude: “Ed Koch’s tragic flaw had been a desire for power, not money. He became the mayor who didn’t want to know. Admiring his own performance, he didn’t notice anyone else’s. While he had been gazing into the mirror, his city had been for sale.”

The book was enjoyable to me partly to read about people whom I had not thought about for a long time, like Donald Manes, Meade Esposito, Stanley Friedman, Mario Biaggi, and so on. It was surprising to come across colleagues and friends who, unbeknownst to me, had had peripheral, noncorrupt roles in the scandals. It was almost nostalgic to revisit times when headlines and news reports were dominated by the bizarre plots and maneuverings of local politicians instead of the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up of the national politics of today. City for Sale, however, was also interesting for present-day lessons, parallels, and ironies.

The two authors, both of whom worked for the Village Voice during most of the chronicled events, drew heavily on their own investigative reporting but also utilized reports by many others who worked for the daily newspapers and local television stations. This made me wonder who today would cover comparable corruption stories since newspapers are disappearing and investigative budgets have dwindled. This could be as good a time as any to be corrupt, at least if it is kept local and does not attract national attention.

Although they came to office decades apart, I find parallels between Mayor Koch and President Trump. Koch was obsessed with the media and from early in his career looked for his name in the papers every day and sought to learn whether radio and TV had mentioned him. And he was good copy. “Koch had both a mastery of and an infatuation with the media. . . . Koch bombarded the public with foreign policy pronouncements, restaurant recommendations, opinions on pending court cases, and burlesque put-downs of his critics as wackos and kooks—all delivered in perfect, pithy, thirty-second sound bites for radio and television.” Twitter did not exist then, but if he could master the sound bite, surely Koch would have mastered twitter. Trump, who was coming of business age in New York during this time, must have envied Koch’s frequent domination of the media. But the parallel between Koch and Trump is not complete. Koch did seek the limelight constantly, but he also seemed to have some interest in actual governing.

(continued December 19.)

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Snippets

The room got dark. I said, “The sun went behind a cloud.” Why do we say that instead of, “A cloud went in front of the sun”?

If we offer an apple, pear, orange, kumquat, or apricot, we often ask, “Would you like a piece of fruit?” If we are offering a whole apple, pear, orange, kumquat, or apricot, shouldn’t we say, “Would you like a fruit?”

A recent New York Times article wrote “in defense of” the diner class, the open-faced hot turkey sandwich. The writer noted that making the sandwich can be as simple as pouring store-bought gravy over microwave-heated turkey and toasted white bread, with a spoonful of canned cranberry sauce. However, the article went on to present a recipe for roasting turkey thighs and then making your own gravy. The spouse, who has considered the open-faced hot turkey sandwich a rare delicacy since she first had one in a train’s dining car in her childhood, said about the article, “It really needed no defense, you know! White bread and white bread only will do. No toasting required. Canned gravy is just fine. Some of us still have standards.”

When I arrived in New York City years ago, I almost never attended a performance of any kind that received a standing ovation. Now they occur routinely. And, thus, our standards decline.

I remember those years ago when I finally had worn through a place on my jeans. There was a certain pleasure because I had had them for so long and had worn them so hard to produce a threadbare spot. Sometimes I would just keep the hole. Sometimes I would iron on one of those denim patches. (Do they still exist?) Now you can just buy jeans that come with holes. Some people buy intact jeans and cut holes in them. And, thus, our standards decline.

It is amusing to hear the spouse and the daughter discuss whether the spouse is wearing “mom jeans.” (She is.)

As I watched the recent movie about Vincent van Gogh, I wondered whether I would rather live a life with acclaim and ease, but shortly after I die, my shining reputation dims, and I am soon forgotten. Or would I rather live a life of ridicule and privation, but after my death I am recognized as a genuis. What’s your choice?

Perhaps you already knew this, but I just learned that in world-class competitive badminton, the shuttlecocks are made from the left wing of a goose. No, I don’t know why only the left wing.

Why is it that I must remove my shoes and belt in some airports but not in others?

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Let’s Talk about a Border Wall Again (concluded)

 New Amsterdam may have paid for The Wall’s materials, but it did not pay for the labor, or at least not for all the labor. The West Indies Company was involved in many commercial enterprises, and one of its most lucrative businesses was the African slave trade. New Amsterdam probably had slaves from its beginning, and by 1635 a person was appointed to be an official overseer for the Company’s slaves. By the 1660s, New Amsterdam had about three hundred slaves and perhaps seventy-five free blacks, accounting for about twenty percent of the village’s population.

Peter Stuyvesant “contributed” slave labor to The Wall. This may not have been the entire workforce for The Wall, but if not, we do not know who the other laborers were or what they got paid or what the relations were between the paid and coerced workers.

So, the New Amsterdam wall was constructed. Did it work? Did it make the village safer? Did it keep out the undesired? On one level, the answer is “yes.” No New Englanders or English ever attacked the settlement from the north. On the other hand, the New Englanders and English never tried to invade this way. Perhaps that means that The Wall was an effective deterrent, but that is doubtful. Even if enemies wanted to conquer the settlement from the north, the thought of slogging through forests and over rivers was more likely a deterrent than some planks stuck in the ground.

The Wall was certainly unlikely to be a successful defense by itself. It would only have been useful along with a strong military presence. The Wall surely could have been scaled. Fighting folks would have been necessary to repel the climbers. Furthermore, you would think that a cannonball would have gone through the wooden planks easily and that fire might have brought it down entirely. The Wall might have slowed an attack, but by itself seems unlikely to have stopped a determined force. The goal must have been to give the inhabitants time to gather their own forces to repulse an attempted incursion, not for The Wall to provide an impregnable barrier.

There were flaws in this reasoning, however. First, The Wall, as with infrastructure today, needed to be kept in good repair for it to function well, and that did not happen. Stories about the thrifty Dutchman come into play here. Apparently, many New Amsterdam residents when they needed a shelter for Petrus the pig or Harriet the hen wondered for a moment where they would get the wood for the structure and then—aha—remembered the planks a short walk away. The Wall was also an inviting source of firewood. Planks soon disappeared. A careful eye might have noticed that whenever there was a new gap in the wall, there was freshly sawn wood in someone’s yard.

The defense strategists, however, had a bigger problem. While the English and New Englanders never breached The Wall, unfriendly Indians did enter New Amsterdam. After The Wall was built, Stuyvesant left the village taking troops to confront Swedes in Delaware. At the same time, Indians of various tribes came down the Hudson heading to Long Island for a confrontation with traditional enemies. As they crossed Manhattan outside New Amsterdam, an Indian woman was killed by a Dutchman for stealing a peach from his orchard. The Indians then stormed into the village, ransacking houses. The Wall did not prevent them. The Indians did not even have to climb or breach The Wall; they simply went around it. The Wall may have gone from river to river, but even if it extended into the rivers, it was apparently not hard to wade or swim or canoe around it. (Remember the effectiveness of the Maginot line?) In what became known as the Peach War, fifty whites and fifteen or so Indians were killed. Peace was obtained not through better border protection but with a treaty.

This Indian incursion highlighted the fact that even if The Wall had successfully sealed off the northern border, it did not change a fundamental fact of New Amsterdam’s geography. The island–surprise, surprise–was surrounded by water. Why attack from the land when there were so many landing spots for boats and men?

Eventually, New Amsterdam was threatened by the English, but not from the north. Instead, the English in 1664 menacingly anchored four warships with a couple thousand men off Brooklyn at the entrance to the harbor. A quarter of those men proceeded to a ferry landing across from Manhattan. Stuyvesant wanted to fight, but not many other New Amsterdam residents, if any, stood with him. The settlers may have thought they would have been destined to lose any battle, but it also seems that having settled in New Amsterdam, they had no great tie to the Netherlands and no great enmity towards the English. Their true bond was to their life in New Amsterdam. The English promised that the residents could continue with their lives if they swore allegiance to the English king. This was an easy choice for these commercial men. Soon, without a shot having been fired, the men of New Amsterdam, including Peter Stuyvesant, had signed that English oath. (Stuyvesant was recalled to the Netherlands for a how-could-you-let-that-happen? conversation. He blamed the West Indies Company for not having better armed the colony. Even though it was now controlled by the English, Stuyvesant returned to New York and his house and farm where he died in 1672.)

On September 8, 1664, New Amsterdam was formally ceded to the English, and the settlement became New York. What remained of The Wall, which stood in the way of progress and expansion, was torn down by the English in 1699.

The Wall was a waste of time, effort, and money. It served no useful purpose other than to give the illusion of a defense to what was not a real danger. Are there lessons here?

Perhaps some other time we can talk about the Berlin wall. I believe it was the conservative Republican Ronald Reagan standing in its shadow who said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” It has now been down longer than it stood.

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Let’s Talk about a Border Wall Again (continued)

In response to the multiple threats against the settlement, in 1653 Peter Stuyvesant had a wall built across the northern border of New Amsterdam. (And again, what are the odds? It stretched along the present Wall Street.) Descriptions of the wall differ. One gives a suspiciously exact length of 2,340 feet. In any event, the wall was not long because New Amsterdam was a small place, smaller than today’s Manhattan below Wall Street. From early on, inhabitants threw refuse into the waters that surrounded the island, and this landfill expanded the land mass. The present shoreline is now several blocks further out into the waters than it was in the seventeenth century. Even with this expansion, however, lower Manhattan south of Wall Street is a small place. In my jogging days, I would run around the perimeter of the tip of Manhattan, and even though I was covering more ground than that which existed in New Amsterdam, it took only about ten minutes. My guess is that the entire perimeter of New Amsterdam could have been walked in 1650 in less than a half hour.

Not all agree what The Wall looked like. One historian describes it as a palisade by which he apparently means logs upright in the ground with sharpened points on top—think of those forts in John Ford westerns or, perhaps, F-Troop. (These cinematic structures were often placed on the treeless plains. Where did all those logs come from?) On the other hand, most of the historians I have read state that while a palisade was the original intention, The Wall in fact consisted of vertical planks. One, however, has said it was a double row of upright planks with Wall Street in between.

The construction of The Wall across the northern border of New Amsterdam teaches some additional lessons. Planks were needed, and this meant money was needed, and wealthy people stepped forward, as they always do—not to selflessly aid their homeland, but to make more money. The well-to-do loaned money for the building of The Wall at ten percent interest. What do we think will happen if we build a wall today on our southern border? Many contracting and supply companies will be involved, and no doubt most will make money—which will come from our tax dollars. (If we hold our breath waiting for Mexico to pay for it, even the red staters will have turned blue.) Construction, however, can be a risky business, and some of the construction companies may have financial difficulties and perhaps will not make money. On the other hand, I am confident that those who finance the wall, as they did for the seventeenth century wall, will profit. One of the certainties is that financiers will always make money out of wars and defense spending (and today pay a lesser tax rate than they would had they physically toiled for their gains.)

But I digress. Some of the money went for the planks, and many, if not all, were purchased from Thomas Baxter, an Englishman. It might seem strange that he was selling the material for a barrier against his fellow countrymen. Perhaps the reason was simply the frequent one of profit above all else. But Baxter had left England, and this might indicate that he felt few ties to his birth place. And while New Amsterdam was Dutch, it was not a hostile place to others.

New Amsterdam was a commercial establishment. The Company wanted to increase the population of Manhattan to increase trade and agriculture and thereby to grow profits. All things considered, Holland was a pretty nice place to live. Not enough Dutch wanted to move to the new world, and consequently the West Indies Company did not shun non-Dutch immigration. Thus, many of the New Amsterdam residents came from places other than Holland. In 1643, one correspondent said that he counted eighteen languages being spoken in the settlement. Twenty years later records indicate that perhaps from a third to a half of the possibly 2,000 inhabitants were non-Dutch.

Peter Stuyvesant, however, had one exception to this open-border policy. Stuyvesant was a devout member of the Dutch Reformed Church, which was the established church in New Amsterdam. (At least in my childhood experience, it was the Dutch Reformed Church, or at least that was what it was called by my high school friends who were members of it. With our never-ending adolescent humor, we called them dike jumpers. We also checked their thumbs to see if they could plug a hole in a dike to keep back the flood. Their church was stricter than those attended by the rest of us. On Sunday afternoons, we often played pickup baseball or football games, but Dutch Reformed kids were not allowed such frivolity on the Christian sabbath. That did not stop them from playing with us, but we had to move our games to some out-of-the way location where their parents were unlikely to drive by and spot them. Many years later, I ran into one of these childhood friends who had become a minister. When I referred to the denomination as Dutch Reformed, he corrected me and said now it was simply The Reformed Church.) While accepting of the non-Dutch generally, Stuyvesant was, to put it mildly, not overly fond of Jews, and when some moved into his town, he sought to expel them. His bosses did not take kindly to that and ordered Stuyvesant to allow the few Jews to remain. A healthy economy, they realized, required immigrants (there is a lesson here). Only the Dutch Reformed Church was permitted to have public services, but Jews, Puritans, Lutherans, Catholics, and Quakers were allowed to worship in the privacy of their homes. Jews could even have land for a burial ground about a mile north of The Wall. That plot is the oldest European cemetery on Manhattan. (Many of us owe a debt to the New Amsterdam Reformed Church. The Puritans did not celebrate Christmas; it was just another work day. Many of the Dutch in America saw Christmas time as both solemn and joyous. The joyous part included “Sinter Klaus” who gave presents on St. Nicholas Day, December 6.)

This acceptance of immigrants may have meant that many of the non-Dutch came to see New Amsterdam as home and felt little allegiance to their countries of origin. Certainly, Thomas Baxter, the Englishman who sold the planks to build The Wall to keep out the English, did not seem to have had much loyalty to the English. After his plank salesmanship, he became a pirate and preyed on English ships. But that does not mean that he had developed an attachment to the Netherlands. He also went after Dutch ships. It appears that his allegiance was simply to money.

(concluded December 12)

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Let’s Talk about a Border Wall Again (continued)

 In 1638, William Kieft came to govern New Amsterdam. He quickly angered many of the inhabitants by closing taverns, but his handling of Indian affairs was even more atrocious. While the Europeans had been living without Indian conflicts, Kieft’s Indian policies soon led to regular bloody skirmishes, and within a few years, Kieft ordered the Company’s militia to massacre 120 Indians. Because the Indians retaliated, New Amsterdam now had to think about defending itself in ways it had not before and it started fortifying the northern reaches of the settlement. First Lesson. The Europeans under Kieft had taken unnecessary, hostile actions against Indians. The actions had not made New Amsterdam safer but the opposite, and the result was that the Europeans now had to defend themselves from threats of their own making that had not previously existed.

The inhabitants of New Amsterdam were not pleased with Kieft’s governance. The West Indies Company realized that the settlement functioned better and more profitably if there were reasonably good relations between the governor and the inhabitants. They sent Kieft packing.

(A pattern seen in Kieft’s New Amsterdam has continued to this day. Kieft may have imposed restrictions on taverns to bring increased morality and order to the settlement, but morality and order seldom win out in New York. Money does. As many others have done after him, Kieft soon sought money more than morality. He built his own distillery and, not surprisingly, relaxed the tavern restrictions. A quarter of the buildings in New Amsterdam soon housed a tavern of some sorts. No one had far to go for a drink. That pattern continues in New York. My local is two short blocks away, and I pass two bars on the way there, and if I strolled a few more feet, I would find several more drinking establishments. Of course, this means that in New York there is often no need for a designated driver–yet another good thing about this place.)

William Kieft, once director-general of New Amsterdam, may no longer be remembered in New York, but reminders of his successor can be found in many places. Peter Stuyvesant’s name has been given to a high school, a street, a square, a housing complex, and city neighborhoods. A statue of him has been erected, and his remains are buried in a New York City church graveyard. But even if Stuyvesant had never made it to New Amsterdam, he would have had a memorable career.

Son of a minister in the Netherlands, he joined the West Indies Company and was sent to Dutch possessions off the cost of Brazil. After a half dozen years there, he was transferred to Curaçao, and shortly after he turned thirty, he became acting governor of that island, Aruba, and Bonaire. A few years later, he led an attack on St. Martin, an island the Spanish had captured from the Dutch. Hit by a cannonball, Stuyvesant had his right leg amputated below the knee. He returned to the Netherlands where he was fitted with a wooden leg, leading to his nickname–no surprise here–Peg Leg Pete. When he regained his strength, he was sent to New Amsterdam to replace William Kieft.

For several years he went about improving the ragged condition of New Amsterdam, and in 1653 he built The Wall. Although there are no records enunciating the reasons why it was built, fear of Indians could have been a cause. New Amsterdam was situated among tribes that were ancient enemies with each other, and that led to a restiveness that may have concerned the Europeans. And, of course, not long before, under Kieft, the Europeans had massacred Indians.

Other forces from the wider world came into play. England and the Netherlands were commercial rivals, and the mid-seventeenth century saw Anglo-Dutch wars in various parts of the globe. (I don’t remember my education ever covering these wars. Why is that?) The leaders of the sparsely settled New Amsterdam were concerned about being attacked by the English. These concerns were heightened by the Dutch colony’s precarious perch in North America. Although the Dutch claimed what is now Delaware, Swedes had been settling there, and to the northeast, New England seemed to be expanding–and warlike.

The Dutch had overlapping claims to land with the English New Haven colony, and it seemed to the Dutch in America that New Haven was trying to expand into Dutch territory. (New Haven was a Puritan settlement, and as far as my reading goes, the least joyful and the pettiest and meanest of the Puritan settlements. This says a lot about New Haven. We can be glad that the New Haven colony did not expand. I will concede that later New Haven did produce good, even if over-hyped, pizza. But, of course, New Haven also subsequently gave us Yale.) Furthermore, rumors flew that a former resident of New Amsterdam was raising an army in Rhode Island to attack his one-time settlement.

(continued December 10)

Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

Let’s Talk about a Border Wall Again

We were promised time and again a wall across our southern border, although we talk less and less about the part of the promise that said Mexico would pay for it. And again, we are having governmental crises about funding a wall. While you may be thinking about that and whether it should be constructed, I have been thinking about America’s first border wall and trying to figure out whether we can learn anything from its history.

We begin with a man who went looking for spices and found beaver. Englishman Henry Hudson, bankrolled by British merchants, had made failed attempts at finding a sailing route from Europe to the Far East. Hudson could not smooth-talk these businessmen into funding yet another voyage, so he jumped across the English Channel and convinced the Dutch East Indies Company to underwrite one more attempt. (I don’t think that the Dutch called it the Dutch East Indies Company. Perhaps to them it was just the East Indies Company.)

The story goes that Hudson was ordered to sail east, north of Russia to see if he could reach China. Apparently, Hudson was not enamored of the charms or likely success of such a route. He had heard rumors of a Northwest Passage through North America, so Hudson disregarded his bosses’ orders and went west, and in 1609 he found himself sailing up the Hudson River. (What are the odds that he would go across the Atlantic and then proceed up a river that bore his name?) He found that the Hudson petered out. This was not the Northwest passage, and he was not going to be bringing back cinnamon, cardamom, or nutmeg. But around the headwaters of the Hudson River, he found beaver, boatloads of beavers. (All those beavers building dams no doubt made this a much more exciting place than the Albany area has ever been since.)

Europeans then were in love with beaver fur. (Ever hear anyone talk about beaver meat? Ever see a beaver recipe? Europeans may have salted cod caught off North America and brought it back, but I never heard of salted beaver.) When Hudson returned to Holland, I do not know how he explained his wrong turn away from the rising sun, but his company overseers saw a moneymaking opportunity in the beaver sightings. Hudson also told them about this island with a great natural harbor at the mouth of his river. It was a marvelous place for a trading post for all the beaver skins that could be taken from the luckless animals and shipped to the fur-mad Europeans. The Dutch then laid claim to the land from what is now Delaware, up the Hudson and to what is now western Connecticut. They began a settlement, New Amsterdam, in 1625 on the southern tip of Manhattan.

(A few years later Hudson was up exploring Hudson Bay—again, what are the odds? He wanted to press on after some significant difficulties in those cold waters. His crew did not. You know those stories about how the Inuit set adrift their aged parents for the parental last voyage. I don’t know if the indigenous people learned from Hudson’s shipmates, or the Europeans learned from the natives, or it was merely coincidence. Having had enough of Henry Hudson, his ship fellows set him adrift near the arctic circle, and–surprise, surprise–he was never heard from again.)

The Dutch thus began a New World settlement. It was a commercial place, and it was run by a commercial enterprise. Not long on imagination on this front, it was called the West Indies Company. Beaver was the moneymaker, which explains why a beaver is on the seal of the City of New York. (I have never seen a beaver in New York City, not even in a zoo. I have only seen a few beavers anywhere. Perhaps my first sighting was as a boy with the family in a car driving to northern Wisconsin. A beaver was waddling across the road. The father came to an abrupt halt. Beaver do not move quickly on asphalt, and we waited for quite a while. The father looked in the rearview mirror and saw nothing. Assuming that the beaver had finally made it to the ditch next to the car, he inched on. Thump. The left rear wheel clearly drove over something. The father drove a little further and stole a glance in the mirror. He looked as if he were going to be sick. I glanced back and saw the beaver’s tail wave feebly once, twice and then stop. Total silence in the car. I never heard any of us ever mention this incident.  We certainly did not try to collect its fur.)

The heads of the Dutch colony in North America were employees of the West Indies Company. Few of us know the names of the first two, but the third one, Peter Minuit, has fame. He is the one who selected the Manhattan location as the headquarters for the new Dutch enclave, and, of course, many of us have heard that in 1626 he bought the island from the Indians for $24 worth of beads.

Surely it tells a lot about our national character that this story has been passed down through the centuries. What happened is now murky to say the least. I have read several accounts. They agree that there was a transaction in the 1620s between Indians and Minuit. Was it for $24? Well, since dollars did not exist then, probably not. Instead it is accepted that the Dutch valued the deal at 60 guilders, but, of course, money was not exchanged. Of what use would Dutch currency have been to the Indians? Instead, some sorts of goods went to the Indians. Was it beads? We do not know. Maybe it was a mixture of goods—a pot, sewing needles, clay pipes. Maybe beads. We simply do not know except that I am positive that we can rule out Bic lighters even though they would have been handy. The question then comes up, “They got it for 60 guilders. What would that be worth today?” Again, the historians don’t agree. For example, I have seen a source that says that the guilders would be about $1,000 in modern money, but I have no idea how that equivalency was calculated. I do buy into a valuation method–the beer one. Sixty guilders could buy 2,400 steins of beer in New Amsterdam. I pay $7 or $8 for a beer or ale today in New York, so at this beer rate, the transaction would be worth about $18,000 now.

But there is another set of questions? Did the Indians sell all of Manhattan to the West Indies Company? Some accounts suggest that the transaction only concerned the southern tip of the island, a small plot of ground. Others suggest that the Indians were not selling the land in a European sense because it is not likely the Indians had the same sense of “property” or ownership as the Dutch did. The Indians might have only been leasing the land or merely permitting the Dutch a non-exclusive access to it. Of course, an underlying message of the version that has come down to us is that the Dutch were sharp traders. In another version, however, the Indians were the clever ones. This story contends that the Indians who traded with Minuit had no claim to the land but were Canarsies from distant Long Island. Most versions, however, say that the transaction was with Manhattan-dwelling Lenapes. In any event, the transaction was a success. No Indian tribe bothered that tiny settlement at the tip of Manhattan while Peter Minuit ran the place. The wall and the troubles came when a less successful governor was head of the colony.

(continued December 6.)