From the President:

During the past few months of graduate study I have been impressed by two discoveries. These are not radically new things either to me or anyone else. But they are being driven home with greater force.

The first discovery is the power of modern technology in conducting historical research. In a recent class we were discussing a book published in mid 1960s in which the author compiled from census records a database of about 800 people. The information was recorded on note cards and the patterns were studied by shuffling the cards into various configurations. If you stop and think about it, that represented a prodigious amount of work.

In the past few weeks using my trusty laptop I compiled from census records a database that now numbers approximately 1200 entries. By manipulating a few bells and whistles in the program I can figure out how many Dutch farmers in Mille Lacs County, Minnesota owned their farms, and how many of them had mortgages against them. In a few more seconds the computer will figure out the average age of the landholders. And for good measure we can also see where these farmers lived before settling in the central part of the state. Elapsed time: approximately two minutes.

Computers, the Internet, and even more senior technology such as microfilm give us access to so many things that at one time we had to travel around the world to consult. All the publicly accessible census records for the United States are available on line for a price comparable to dinner for two at a good restaurant. Who needs food when you can study history? It is an exciting time to be studying history—Dutch-American history being no exception.

My other discovery has been how much the Dutch-American story deserves to be told. This editorial is a form of preaching to the converted. But we all need to be reminded that we have a good story to tell. That story is both important and fascinating. The numbers of people we deal with are not as daunting as they are for many other ethnic groups. The geographical spread, until very recently, has not been

that great. And there are many well-kept sources waiting to be mined. This uniqueness is one of our greatest assets. It makes Dutch American history extremely doable.

There is a large audience willing to listen to well-researched and well-told accounts of the Dutch-American experience. Though our membership is small, we are not the only people interested. We need to do more to extend our reach beyond our modest number and to embrace a wider audience.

One goal for AADAS is to encourage research. But there is a second, and equally important objective: we must also ensure that the stories emerging from that research reach the largest audience possible. Maybe the means we now use for collecting so much information should be the means we increasingly use to broadcast the results. It is certainly worth thinking about.

Meanwhile, it’s time to add another hundred names to that Mille Lacs County database.

Robert Schoone-Jongen
University of Delaware

Ohio’s Calvin College
Robert P. Swierenga
A.C. Van Raalte Institute, Hope College

Did you know that Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan had a twin in Cleveland, Ohio in the nineteenth century? The October 1, 1890 issue of the Christian Intelligencer, the weekly periodical of the Reformed Church in America (RCA), carried an article by “A Calvinist” about a Calvin College in Cleveland, owned by the Reformed Church in the United States (RCUS), the German sister of the Dutch Reformed Church. “A Calvinist” noted that Ohio in 1890 is a “stronghold” of the RCUS, with 37,000 communicant members organized in two synods, an English-speaking one with 20,000 communicants and a German-speaking one with 17,000. Cleveland alone counted ten congregations in 1890, nine German and one English, with a total of 2,200 communicants. All grew from the mother congregation planted in 1860 by immigrants. The writer is very likely a member of one of the Cleveland congregations.

After this brief introduction to the German Reformed Church in Ohio, “A Calvinist” tells in his quaint way the story of Calvin College in Cleveland, Ohio.

We have a college here, named by its founders after Calvin. This is probably the only literary institution in all the world named after the great Reformer. Perhaps it was right that our Reformed people thought best not to make Calvin’s name an ecclesiastical landmark, in view of the fact that Lutherans came near idolizing Luther and forgetting paul’s warning to the Corinthians with respect to such partisan names. But when we remember how unpopular is our Calvin, and how shamelessly he has been maligned and misrepresented, we feel like standing up for him, braving his enemies and professing our love and admiration for him in some public and permanent manner. And this gives us great joy.

But we wish Calvin College were more of an honor to Calvin than it is, for it is not in a flourishing condition for various reasons. In the first place, it was founded by German congregations who were poor and who needed all their resources for

“A Calvinist” admirably defended the great reformer, but he also revealed the surprising insularity of the German Reformed community in Ohio. There actually were three Calvin Colleges when he wrote (1890), the oldest being the French-speaking Calvin College in Geneva, Switzerland, founded by John Calvin’s student Theodore Beza in 1559. Cleveland’s German-speaking Calvin College was founded in 1863, thirteen years before the Dutch-speaking Calvin College in Grand Rapids in 1876, an institution of the Christian Reformed Church. All three colleges began as academies, or preparatory schools, tied to theological seminaries.¹

(Continued on page 5)

The Dutch Heritage Center, located at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois, is an organization dedicated to the preservation of the history of people of Dutch heritage in the greater Chicago area, including their culture, customs, and institutions.

The Center serves as a depository for historical materials relating to Chicagoland churches, schools, organizations, businesses, and families of Dutch heritage, and it seeks to collect such materials in an ongoing way.

In 1981, Trinity Christian College librarian, Hendrik Sliekers, and several others interested in the history of the Dutch in Chicago, began collecting newspapers, books, letters, photographs, and other records from basements, attics, and files, in order to preserve this cultural heritage that was important in the development of Chicago and its ethnic diversity.

In 1991, a dream was realized when space was provided by Jake and Rita Van Namen in the new Jenny Huizenga Memorial library at Trinity. In three rooms on the upper level of the library, the Dutch Heritage Center has a home for its growing collection of historical materials.

The Center is governed by its own board, composed of historically minded persons from the Chicago area. The Center does not have a staff to maintain regular open hours, but anyone interested in using its resources can do so by appointment with the library director at Trinity (708-239-4794).

Don Sinnema

The Roosevelt Study Center (RSC) in Middelburg, the Netherlands, is a research institute focussing on twentieth-century American history. Although most of its collections (on microfilm) deal with presidential policies and federal agencies in the twentieth century, from president Theodore Roosevelt to Gerald Ford, the RSC has also built a considerable collection of books, journals, and audiovisual materials on Dutch immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also has a complete run of American diplomatic reports on the Netherlands from 1782-1966.

The research interests of the RSC assistant director, Dr. Hans Krabbendam, and the projects he has overseen, have

helped make the RSC a clearing house of information for Dutch patrons. For example, during the past three years a research group of four students from the Open University has undertaken a comparative study of emigration from four regions in the province of Zeeland during the little-studied period from 1900 to 1920. In recent years the RSC library has also acquired the Zeeland Record and the Sheboygan Nieuwsbode, collections that graduate students at various Dutch universities have used for writing M.A. theses.

The RSC also has suitable material—including a substantial collection of books and prints—for an extensive study comparing Dutch and Flemish Roman Catholic emigration to the United States. The center would welcome a Ph.D. candidate to undertake this project.

Recently the RSC acquired the collection of the late Dutch historian Henk van Stekelenburg (1929-1999). Apart from being a specialist on Dutch concentration camps in World War II, Van Stekelenburg was a foremost expert on Roman Catholic emigration from the Netherlands. The materials donated to the RSC formed the basis of the three books and numerous articles he wrote about this subject.

In the past six years, the RSC has been involved in a series of conferences on Dutch-American (immigrant) relations. In close cooperation with Dr. George Harinck of the Free University in Amsterdam, the RSC organized conferences on the Reformed tradition in the Netherlands (1996) and the United States, about the (dis)continuities of Reformed subculture (1998), and on the Dutch in California (2000).* These conferences can be considered as the Dutch counterparts to the biennial AADAS conferences and are generally organized in the years that the AADAS does not meet. The next conference is scheduled for February 2003; there the focus will be on the small Dutch Reformed denominations in the United States. In cooperation with the Free University and the Amsterdam Municipal Archives, the RSC is preparing a conference called Parallel Cities: Amsterdam-New York, 1653-2003 to commemorate 350 years of city rights in New Amsterdam and the subsequent historical relations between the two cities (see the announcement on the RSC’s webpage).

* The first two conferences resulted in the volumes:
George Harinck and Hans Krabbendam, eds., Sharing the Reformed Tradition: The Dutch-North American Exchange, 1846-1996. VU-Studies in Protestant History 2 (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1996), 188 pp.
George Harinck and Hans Krabbendam, eds., Breaches and Bridges: Reformed Subcultures in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States. VU-Studies in Protestant History 4 (Amsterdam: VU Univ. Press, 2000), 166 pp.

The Joint Archives of Holland
Hope College

In response to the terrorist aircraft attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, the Joint Archives of Holland put out a call to the Holland and Hope College communities for their memories of September 11, 2001. An interview with Geoffrey Reynolds aired on The University of Michigan’s Michigan Radio morning show resulting in even more memories from southeastern Michigan.

The September 11, 2001 collection (H01-0911) includes audiocassettes with recordings of persons’ approximately 90-second oral history of their memories (audiocassette and transcriptions), letters of memories, internal memos, newspaper clippings, publications (People Magazine), hardcopy versions of website pages from Hope College, local newspapers documenting the event and its aftermath, and an audiovisual interview with local survivor, Chad Creevy, concerning his escape from the World Trade Center (edited and unedited videocassettes, audiocassettes, and transcriptions).

Due to reductions in staffing, the Joint Archives of Holland has changed its hours of service to the research community. We are now open Monday-Friday from 8 a.m. to noon and 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. This change will not alter the total hours we are available for research and will allow for earlier service for many. We are committed to providing the same fine service to our researchers that we have in the past.

Geoffrey Reynolds worked with the communications department at Hope College to produce a new video on the history of Hope College for use in alumni meetings and by advancement staff. Another video, covering the history of Tulip Time, was also produced by this collaborative group for use in the Tulip Time Festival’s new Kopenplaats. He has continued his research and writing efforts on the maritime history of the Holland area with the completion of many oral histories with local boat builders. He is currently writing a book length manuscript on the subject for future publication.

Geoffrey D. Reynolds

Heritage Hall
Calvin College

Heritage Hall of Calvin College has recently completed a number of projects that may interest the AADAS reader. We have organized 84 feet of seminary records and have

also opened to research 27 cubic feet of correspondence from various The Banner editors, from John Vander Ploeg through John Suk. Our complete inventory of all our records from CRCNA congregations has also been updated.

We have also completed gathering data for a historical Directory of the Christian Reformed Church NA. The finished directory will contain all ministers, ministries (including names various and mergers), Calvin Theological Seminary faculty, Calvin College Faculty and administrative staff, evangelists, and specialized ministers. The Historical Committee of the denomination has selected this directory as its first publication project.

Our website has been updated to include the Young Calvinist’s list of deaths in military service from 1941-1973. The website also contains membership records data from Drenthe, Michigan (Dutch) Presbyterian Church and Vriesland, Michigan Christian Reformed Church—data which are used primarily by genealogists. The website also offers a subject index to Origins. Incidentally, the fall issue of Origins focused on the life of Rev. Albertus C. Van Raalte on the 125th anniversary of his death.

Heritage Hall also received anniversary materials from nineteen Christian Reformed churches. In addition, archival records from 83 CRCNA congregations were received and microfilmed. We also microfilmed the records of six Christian school organizations. The microfilm copies are stored in our vault and are available only with the written permission of the individual congregation or school.

Lastly, until the end of June 2002, Heritage Hall is hosting “Wisdom of the Ages,” a unique collection or first and early editions of classical works in Western philosophical, political, historical, social, and legal thought. The titles are made available by the Remnant Trust. Included are a leaf from the first edition of a Gutenberg Bible, a page from an intricately illuminated Bible written in 1250, St. Augustine’s City of God (1610) and Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae (1475 - one of three copies of this edition known to exist). Other authors include Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, Paine and Marx, Smith, Malthus, Douglass, Franklin, and Wollstonecraft. The Remnant Trust encourages patrons, exercising reasonable care and under appropriate supervision, to use these valuable items. The books are displayed in Heritage Hall in The Hekman Library. Please provide at least 24 hour advanced notice (616.957.6913) if you wish access to an item. The list of titles can be found at www.calvin.edu/library/searreso/classes/remnantlist.htm.

Richard Harms

Ohio's Calvin College (continued from page 2):

Ohio’s German College stemmed from the vision of one man, the Rev. Dr. H.J. Ruetenik. In the midst of the American Civil War in 1863, he founded the school and served as its main teacher. He even owned the building, which stood near the city center on Pearl Street near Trowbridge. Ruetenik, a product of the East Pennsylvania Classis, came to Cleveland in 1860 to organize the First German Reformed Church there. By 1888 Cleveland boasted seven congregations numbering 2,000 souls.

Ruetenik rose to be a leading cleric in the German section of the RCUS. He was president of the 1881 General Synod and in 1888 represented his denomination in Philadelphia at the conference on church union with the Dutch Reformed Church.² His publications added to his reputation. He founded and edited the monthly magazine, Evangelist (1856-75), which gained 6,000 subscribers in Ohio German churches, and was merged into the Kirchenzeitung (1875-81), an organ of the anti-Mercersburg, low-church faction of the church. For twenty years he also edited Der Wächter (1865-85), the German voice of the western wing of the church. His pen and his post as the first agent of the German Bible Society enabled Ruetenik to launch the German Reformed Publishing House (later the Central Publishing House) in Cleveland. Its successful Sunday school paper had 20,000 subscribers.³

Ruetenik is described in a church booklet as “an extraordinary man, with a mind richly endowed by nature, of splendid attainments, a persevering worker, firm of will, who knew what he wanted. He had an no ambition for worldly gain or honor, but devoted his service to the Master and the Reformed Zion.”⁴

After launching Calvin Institute as his private mission, Ruetenik arranged for the Ohio Classes of Heidelberg, Erie, and St. John’s to assume ownership. The Institute would be a second preparatory school for seminarians in the Synod of the Northwest, alongside Mission House College (now Lakeland College) in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, which was founded in 1860. In 1881, Calvin Institute came under the control of the newly-created Central Synod, which comprised the three Ohio classes. Ruetenik served as president of this General Synod, and it was his driving energy that made the regional institute a denominational school, under its own synodically-elected board of trustees, which elevated it to full college status.⁵

Although Ruetenik managed to have Calvin College gifted to Central Synod, which recommended it to the “liberal support of the congregations,” he could not ensure that support. Indeed, the school suffered financially more as a

synodical than a classical institution. The German Reformed churches could not, or would not, support two literary institutions. At its 1884 meeting, Central Synod proposed to merge the two colleges and move to “some centrally located city.” But the plan was rejected by the higher assembly, the Synod of the Northwest.

At this, Central Synod, meeting in special session at Galion, Ohio, in 1884, renewed its commitment to Calvin College: “It is the conviction of this Synod that in the present situation it is our positive duty to continue Calvin College in the future, to care for its needs and support it until the time comes when, through God’s providence, a union with the college of the Mission House in Wisconsin can take place.” The body concluded by calling on the congregations “to send the larger part of their gifts for educational work of the church, to Calvin College.”

But the gifts were meager. “Many ministers and members of our Synod seem to doubt the real necessity of another German institution in our Synod besides the college in the Mission House,” which also included a seminary. In 1887 Central Synod returned legal ownership of Calvin College to Erie Classis, recommending it to the “friends of education.” The next Synod authorized the Classis to raise $10,000 “within her bounds” for Calvin College, but to little avail. The Ohio congregations lacked a commitment to the Cleveland school. Perhaps they had never taken “ownership” of Ruetenik’s project. The lack of a seminary on campus was also critical.

Erie Classis in 1895 made another attempt to save “German-English education” in the church by asking the four eastern synods of the denomination—Central, Eastern, Potomac, and Pittsburgh—to assume ownership and direction of the college. Its real estate at the time was valued at $20,000 and enrollment ranged from thirty to forty students. Under Ruetenik’s lead, Classis convened a conference in Cleveland between representatives of the four synods and the college board of trustees to lay out the proposal. The conference acknowledged that the “thorough and satisfactory nature of the training given at Calvin College is fully attested by the fact that the seventeen graduates of this institution and the seventeen other young men who partially took their college courses there, and who are all now in the ministry of the Reformed Church in the United States, uniformly are men of mark, and are preferred to other men for responsible positions in German-English communities.”

The meeting dealt primarily with financial issues. Classis Erie asked the four synods to permit College agents to raise $20,000; $5,000 to liquidate Ruetenik’s ownership in the property, $5,000 to renovate the dilapidated classroom building, and $10,000 to erect a commercial building on the lot fronting on Pearl Street, to be rented at $1,500-1,800

annually to “furnish revenue sufficient to continue the work of the college.”

The general assembly rejected the conference proposal and continued to recommend merger with Mission House College of Classis Sheboygan, which was thriving under the enthusiastic support of the churches, especially the mother congregation, Immanuel Reformed Church of Sheboygan.

Erie Classis was now desperate to find another solution. In 1896 it offered to disband the college and merge it into the Sheboygan institution, which was already owned by Central Synod, “provided the Theological Seminary of Mission House be transferred to Cleveland, Ohio, or some other large city.” Erie offered to pay $10,000 to cover part of the consolidation and removal costs. But Central Synod in 1897 “resolved to drop the matter of relocating the Mission House for the present.” Sheboygan Classis would not hear of the loss of its institution.

By 1899, Erie Classis had no choice but to close Calvin College and dispose of its property. “The action was taken with a feeling of sadness and sincere sympathy for the founder. The struggle had ended. A number of prominent Christian educators and some very efficient pastors came from the halls of this school. Calvin College being dead, yet speaks and exerts its beneficial influence.”

Thus ended Ohio’s Calvin College, after nearly thirty years of fighting for its life. Its proprietor and advocate, the churchman Dr. H.J. Ruetenik, was never able to build a broad base of support among the German-speaking congregations in Ohio and the eastern United States, like the Wisconsin congregations did for their beloved college. His congregation, First German Reformed Church of Cleveland, failed to match the commitment of the Sheboygan congregation to its college. And the nearest RCUS seminary was Heidelburg in Tiffin, Ohio, many miles away. Calvin College in Cleveland showed promise in preparing men for the ministry, but it never gained a loyal constituency in the church.

Notices:

The 2003 AADAS Conference will be held at Trinity Christian College on June 6-7, 2003. More information will follow in the fall newsletter.

AADAS News is published twice yearly, in Spring and Fall. We welcome items of interest, brief articles on relevant topics, and updates on institutional activities and research. Please contact me at the Department of Germanic Languages, Calvin College, 3201 Burton St. SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546, or at hermdevr@calvin.edu.

--Herman De Vries, newsletter editor

Gerald De Jong (continued from page 1):

graduated from Northwestern Junior College in 1948 and (after a year at Georgetown University) from Morningside College in Sioux City, studied at the University of Utrecht (under Pieter Geyl) with a Fulbright grant, and earned his Ph. D. degree in European history from the University of Wisconsin in 1955.

Gerald’s teaching career was spent at Indiana Central College, Emporia Kansas State College, North Dakota State College in Fargo, Northwestern College (serving as its first academic dean), Midwestern College (Denison, IA), and the University of South Dakota at Vermillion. He retired in 1988, returning to Orange City to live his last thirteen years. A living illustration of both the Calvinist work ethic and devotion to family, he enjoyed the life of teaching, but his jobs provided him with the financial means to provide for the education of his six children (three of whom earned doctorates) and to pursue his first love, which was research and writing. His wife Jeanne, also a graduate of Northwestern Junior College and to whom he was married fifty-one years, was a Masselink (a prominent Christian Reformed ministerial family). She was absolutely essential to his scholarly success, not least because she did all of his typing (later word processing).

De Jong’s publications included four books – one each on the Dutch in the United States (the standard treatment), the Dutch Reformed Church in the American colonies, Northwestern College, and the Reformed Church in China. He also wrote many articles for scholarly journals (e.g., Church History) as well as shorter independent pieces, on topics such as the Dutch Reformed in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, South Dakota, and Borneo. Other published monographs included subjects like the first black minister in the Netherlands; an eighteenth-century Dutch minister’s library; the colonial Dutch Reformed and slavery; and non-immigrant, pre-Civil War Reformed churches in the Midwest. His fifth book, on which he was working until near his death, was to have been a history of the nineteenth-century American Reformed Church. All but the first of his books were written for the Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America.

Perhaps more than most scholars, Gerald De Jong, a somewhat private man, worked largely independently of others and was not a joiner. He was never a member of the AADAS and never, to my recollection, attended its meetings, at least in recent times. I do not know of any other organization’s conferences in which he took part. He accepted appointment to the Historical Commission of the RCA largely, if not solely, because this would provide him with free transportation twice a year to New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he could work in the archives of the RCA. The commission wanted to encourage his research

as much as possible. He was “Jerry” to his eastern acquaintances but remained “Gerald” or “Jed” to his Orange City friends.

My memories of Gerald begin with his role, as academic dean, in hiring me to teach at Northwestern College in 1963. Our contacts, usually in regard to our mutual interest in Reformed church history, continued intermittently through the years. I particularly admired his determination and focus, as well as his careful scholarship. As I recall him, a few qualities come to mind, some of which I appreciated more than others. He did not suffer fools gladly. He was “Frisian” in temperament, a carpenter, a Democrat, usually unostentatious, with an upper “Midwestern” twang and a certain sense of humor.

He spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars of his own money (as he often remarked) on photocopying publications and documents as sources for his writing - as well as making innumerable slides to illustrate his lectures. He devoted countless hours, particularly in the Northwestern College Library during his last years, reading The Christian Intelligencer, the weekly newspaper of the (eastern) RCA, in preparation for his history of the Reformed Church in the nineteenth century. He never, however, made much use of Dutch language materials, evidently because of his lack of real comfort in that language. He was an outspoken advocate of historical positivism, i.e., he believed that history could and should be written objectively, although his own predilections inevitably showed in his writings (e.g., his frequent use of “fortunately” and “unfortunately”). He was thus not in this sense a “Christian” historian, doing history in the Kuyperian tradition (he had never studied at Calvin College!). But he professed faith in Christ, generally attended church, and was a member of the First Reformed Church of Orange City in his last years. Although he did not wear his spirituality on his sleeve and may have had a touch of anti-clericalism, he was apparently attracted to genuine piety, including that which he saw (at a distance) in missionaries and the church as a whole, for he spent much of his life writing about these subjects in a generally sympathetic way.

During his retirement in Orange City, he would regularly trudge to work at the college library with his briefcase in hand. Almost every time I saw him then, as his health was slowly deteriorating, when he wanted to describe his own work, somewhere in the conversation he would say, as if it were his motto, “Keep on truckin’!” Gerald De Jong kept on “truckin’” to the end, an example to me of his faithfulness to God’s call to him to tell the story of those parts of the church that Gerald knew and, in his own way, loved, for the edification of those who came after. And even though he had nothing directly to do with the AADAS, the rest of us are greatly in his debt for his writings and example.