Russell Shorto "Amsterdam"

tonight it is my pleasure to introduce Russell short oh he is the author of four previous award-winning books including the cards bones and the island at the centre of the world mr. shorter is also a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine from 2008 to 2013 he was the director of John Adams Institute in Amsterdam which was established to promote culture exchange between the United States and Netherlands and to provide a window onto the United States for Dutch audiences whereas the island at the center of the world told the story of New York New York's founding by Dutch colonists in his latest book mr. shorter goes back to Netherlands and to the city where he had lived for six years Amsterdam a history of the world's most liberal city he's both a fascinating biography over city and the biography of liberalism as an idea Publishers Weekly already picked it as one of the best books of 2013 and also has quite a few fans on staff including myself and now I'm going to pass the mic to our guests please welcome Russell short oh thanks Thank You Anton and Thank You P & P for including me in your illustrious series and thank you all for being here you all have many things you could be doing and yet here you are so I appreciate it I I'll just get orient you excuse me my voice is a little fuzzy from traveling around promoting my book which is a good problem to have i I've been giving talks that is just talking about the book and then last night the event I was at the Dutch embassy of all places and they suggested that I do a reading so I did and I kind of liked it so I'll talk a little bit and then read just a couple of pages if you don't mind in that I'm happy to have kind of a conversation I well to start in the story of storytelling way once upon a time I was living in the East Village of New York and my daughter was a toddler and the nearest open space for her to run around and toddle was the churchyard of st. Mark's in the Bowery which if any of you know it is many of the tombs of early New York families are there flush with the ground and one of the tombs is actually in the foundation of the church and that's Peter Stuyvesant grave and because the church was originally his family chapel and that was his board did I his family at the farm when he was a director of the Dutch colony of New Netherland and I have four I I guess I've learned enough about myself to have some idea of the way I work at least in retrospect and I tend to try to go to origins of things and living in New York I was interested in trying to get at the origins of New York and I knew as most people do that New York was founded by the Dutch and New York was once New Amsterdam and that there was somebody named Peter Stuyvesant and that he had a wooden leg and probably not much else I knew at the time but so I thought I would first look for something to read and didn't find much really about that besides the stories of Washington Irving which are really kind of surreal fiction and I eventually discovered that there has been a project going on since 1974 to translate and publish the archives of this colony at the New York State Library in Albany and I hooked myself up to the to them and began working with them and eventually realized that this was the subject not just for a magazine article which is what I originally thought but for a book because it was really a way to tell the beginnings not just of New York's history but of American history in other words you could just as legitimately tell the story of American history from this vantage point as you could from say Boston which is New England anyway which is the traditional model so I I wrote that book excuse me I wrote that book and I argued in it that the Dutch left some important things behind they left a lot of little things behind it I'm just as interested frankly in the little things like why do we eat cookies why don't we eat biscuits the English word is biscuit well the Dutch word is cookie that's why and the fur cookies were in New Amsterdam and coleslaw is Dutch for cabbage salad and we for better or worse that has that is hung around the American Santa Claus comes from the Dutch Sinterklaas so there are a lot of these little things which are kind of clues to the fact that the idea that in fact they left something here but the big things they left behind I argued were to the notion of tolerance which they more or less invented in the 17th century in Europe as kind of a glue to bind different peoples together and they're very original approach to free trade and if you think about it tolerance a mixed society and free trade those two things together are kind of a recipe for New York City and when the English took over in 1660 for which of course they did which is why I'm speaking to you in English they they realized that this was a going concern New Amsterdam was a fully functioning trading city and they kept everything in place and a lot of the first governors of New York are the first mayors of New York City were were Dutch so they kept everything in place and if you fast forward into the 19th century when the great waves of people came from Europe to America they landed by and large in Manhattan and they saw there this teeming mix of people speaking different languages and striving to get ahead by what we would call upward mobility and they said this is America and it wasn't America it was New York and it was New York because it had been New Amsterdam but as they emigrated westward they took that idea with them so as as a writer I'm interested as a historian I'm interested in how ideas spread and so this cluster of ideas that form in this one part of Europe and land in this on this wilderness island of Manhattan and then eventually spread around I find that fascinating so then a few years later I moved to Amsterdam and I shortly thereafter decided that I would write a book about the city and when I did it occurred to me that the approach that I would take would be to to write about a city there are few places I think that are so identified with an idea and to me Amsterdam is really identifiable with the idea of liberalism I called the book the subtitle that a history of the world's most liberal city because for one thing I wanted to immediately you know went out over the past six years when I say to someone that I live in Amsterdam they go uh okay you know because everybody has a certain association with Amsterdam and I wanted to kind of address that right off the bat and I try to do that in the book but really what I'm getting at with this notion of liberalism is the classical a definition of the word which goes back to the Latin libéré meaning free and is a philosophy very broadly speaking of philosophy based on the idea of individual liberty individual freedom the valuing of individ individuals so that then broadly is what underlies these things that the Dutch that I was interested in that the Dutch brought to the colony of New Netherland and that spread around America so the next question then was well how why did this city become associated with these things so that's what I tried to do in the book I tried to look at this city and this idea and how they kind of grew up together and why and very briefly I'm somebody who's interested in looking at how culture develops in relation to geography looking at geography as a measure or an arbiter of the development of culture and I think that it just makes sense that the more inhospitable inhospitable climate and geography the more that culture will be identified by it whether it's in a desert or a mountaintop or in this case in a this little far northern shoulder of Europe that is essentially a vast River Delta so the people there started in the Middle Ages when the rest of Europe in the Middle Ages you you have the picture in your mind of the manorial system where you've got a nobleman who has castle and has grounds and peasants who worked the grounds and they they work for the noblemen they pay rent and he in turn provides protection and this it's a fixed system that that carries from one generation to the next so that if you're born into it your children are gonna occupy the same position and it lasted for a long time but in this corner of Europe that didn't take hold largely because the land didn't allow it it's a vast River Delta and people had to deal with the fact that the effort that every year the shoreline would be remade you couldn't depend you couldn't be certain that the area that you're planting a crop is going to be there the next year might be underwater so people in small groups banded together and they did this back-breaking work to reclaim land from the sea and from the rivers to build dikes and dams and pumps and when they did they created what they call polders and when they did that land became theirs it wasn't owned by a nobleman or by a church or by a king and so they divide in the medieval records in the Dutch provinces show these transactions happening people become owners of plots and then they start buying and selling and renting these plots from each other so they develop a kind of proto modern economy which is very different from what was going on in the rest of Europe and so when that happens then that it sets off this notion I guess you could say inside the mind that there are other possibilities your children can have a better life you can you can get rich so that you have a sort of mental encouragement to think differently to innovate and that sets off this chain of events over the course of a number of generations innovations that allow them to build up improbably to build up to build this little corner of Europe into the very very brief period the greatest nation in the world the greatest shipping nation and and so the Dutch then become an empire that has no rival for a period of about 70 years really 1602 I think is when you could begin it and it ends very abruptly in 1672 but for that brief time all these things flourish and things when I hit on this idea of liberalism and associating it with this city then you sort of sound it out you know you try it out in different contexts and as I was thinking about what I would do is different people well-known people that you associate with Amsterdam in its Golden Age I would read about them with this in my mind and sure enough every single one of them every person in every innovation ends up relating easily relating back to this notion so it's something that that was quite remarkable that happened there and then that spread elsewhere so what I since since the book is about the idea of individualism and individual freedom I tried and since I write narrative history I tried to focus as much as possible in the book on individuals and let them tell the stories and let them tell the story so what I thought I would read briefly is a section about number as it happens most of those individuals are pretty well known but some of them are not and I thought I would read a few pages about one who is not well known and what i'm doing here is i'm i think anyone who writes history or reads history is interested in just try you know that simple childish thing of trying to imagine what it was like the dutch the great Dutch historian housing huh has this wonderful line about doing history where he says what motivates him is our perpetual astonishment that the past was once a living reality and that's what that's what motivates me and so that's what you tried it whether it's you know Athens in the age of Pericles or ancient Rome or Amsterdam in its golden age or Jazz Age New York whatever it is you you you are trying to grasp that so what I'm what I'm doing here is by means of this person who was a real person I'm following her entry into the city and in so doing trying to give a sense of what it must have been like to someone who is coming into this place that is suddenly the greatest city in the world let's follow as an almost random example a poor newcomer who arrived in the city just about at its height her name was here chu Dierks she was born in Edom to the north she had been married to a sailor and he died we know that and we know that she had worked in an inn in Horn and had some family in a village called Ron's Dorp and that her brother was also a sailor but the fact that she headed for Amsterdam tells us that in her widowhood she could depend on no one and so had to find a future for herself she might have traveled by water coach a transit system that had become commonplace in the province of Holland by the 1630s and that foreigners marveled at these were passenger boats that glided along the canals and rivers towed by horses and they signaled even before one entered the city a newly developing society one that stressed order comfort and egalitarianism the boats were covered were lined with benches could hold up to 50 people and followed a regular schedule between towns of which one could find printed copies passengers paid fares based on the length of the journey various currencies were accepted everyone rich and poor used them and foreigners often found this free mixing of castes to be one of their first experiences of the novel Dutch egalitarianism food and drink were sold on board people got drunk in the evening songs broke out sometimes fights if there was a dark corner a prostitute might try to make a quick Florin from a travelling salesman the passenger wound their way close enough to the landscape as to be in it and slowly enough for travellers to exchange words with farmers in the fields the countryside of Holland unfolded for a traveler as it still does in its endlessly massing flatness there was the green of the polder cut by the straight lines of water channels the horizon was aligned studded by cows and an occasional tree then there was the sky in its cloud scapes tunnels and chasms and cathedrals and phantasmagoria of clouds mounting the heights and marching in vaults and columns in noble by sunlight or furiously cross-hatched by the force of an impending storm then walls and church tops would rise up for interested passengers to observe a city and one hubbub of insects and birds would be replaced by another of people and commerce then would come the bells foreign travelers to the Low Countries always remarked on the ceaseless dawning of church bells in Dutch towns once ashore a newcomer like here to Dierks would want to wander and begin exploring sites that had become legendary in just a few years the main site was the city itself its alleys and keys the sleek new canal rings were already talked of as the physical manifestation of this golden age that had descended on the city some of the new houses which doubled his warehouses were 5 stories high skyscrapers to someone from a village at the time here to Dierks arrived the first portrait portion of this ongoing urban development project was finished with new brick homes lining both sides of each canal further along in the direction of the river the work of the pile drivers and bricklayers was still going on the ring canals were then as now both a tourist trap a tourist site and a trap for newcomers would be confused by the semicircular construction you would start out walking south along a street and without making any turns end up heading north you also had to watch out for the coaches which had only recently come into normal use among the wealthy and which would go barreling crazily through the Narrows and over the humpback bridges the Amsterdam errs themselves were as well a source of confusion for newcomers when vilem when William of Orange rode into the city in triumph in Amsterdam had had 30,000 inhabitants that was about 40 years earlier than this now there were close to a hundred and forty thousand plus swarms of undocumented aliens which a scholar recently estimated would have numbered in the hundreds of thousands flooding into the city to work on the expansion or looking for places on East India Company ships and the inhabitants were a bewildering mix at least a third were foreign burn born most immigrants were from Germany and Scandinavia but here two would also have seen and heard Africans Turks into its Laplanders and others the city was a cacophony of languages it was also however who very well-organized and that too would have taken some getting used to Amsterdam comprised a maze of bureaucracies and societies that had to be negotiated there were taxes to be paid on everything from beer to rent nearly every profession had a guild and each guild had rules to follow it must have seemed that the city had invented every possible job for a human to do and some that humans had no business doing there were people who made only balances for scales people who only made glue people who only board pearls to be strung the textile industry employed not just Weaver's but wool washers Knapp Shearer's bleachers dyers and Fuller's wire dryers worked gold silver and copper into wire for use in jewelry which more and more ordinary people were wearing and scientific equipment fowl nice fighters hung hauled dung piss hikers literally piss lookers could cure whatever was ailing you or said they could by studying your urine a small-town girl would have been rendered dizzy by the activity and in this city that had set itself to be the entrepot to the world the display among the canals you could find live elephant elephants and armadillos pickled snakes and frogs microscopes and telescopes old Chinese porcelain and new Delftware and of course spices and herbs not only for cooking but for aiding digestion loosening stools dilating cervixes and warding off disease stores went far beyond garden-variety pepper and cinnamon to include exotica likes Kemeny Zadora galangal spiked nard euphorbia and what was billed as dragon's blood there was food everywhere to goad poor and yearning immigrants there was a poultry market a butter market vegetable markets and butcher stalls street hawkers sold cinnamon cakes and roasted nuts at noon the traveler might see and smell through house windows families sitting down two bowls of pea soup or the national dish of hoots pot a stew of vegetables chopped meat ginger and lemon juice along with knobs of hard dark rye bread and beer for young and old peering through the stained glass windows of finer houses our woman from the provinces would have noted that the wealthy were now eating on porcelain drinking from porcelain mugs employing finely wrought silver cutlery nowadays after a meal people were fanatics for tobacco men young and old alike would pull out their long stemmed pipes and start puffing Kircher would likely have found temporary residence in residence in the yard on the area of the new part of the city that sat astride the canal belt which housed mostly which mostly housed the poor and working-class we don't know when she first arrived in Amsterdam but in 1642 here Chu Derrick's began her own upwardly mobile trajectory when she made her way to the brace trot or Broad Street it ran through what had until recently been one of the fashionable neighborhoods of the old city until it's wealthier residents began to decamp for the new Canal Zone and their places were taken by members of Amsterdam's large Jewish population as well as by artists and artisans here too needed work and she had gotten a tip there was a couple who lived here in a grand double-sized house they had recently had a baby the wife was doing poorly they needed help here just stood on the stoop perhaps still heavily swaddled in her north-holland dress with the bonnet drawn tight around the sides of her face a bonnet might have obscured some of her features but it could not have masked the fact that she had eyes that danced eyes that whatever she had been through showed a keen will to survive someone's still vibrant to life's possibilities now I I talked about her eyes they're the reason I know about her eyes is because the person whose house she went to was Rembrandt and Rembrandt and his wife his wife was had just given birth and she was doing very poorly his wife was and they took they needed someone to help care to became their servant either before the wife died or after his wife died she became his lover and they then and she he then that their affair lasted a number of years he gave her his wife's jewelry then he hired a younger housekeeper and she became his new lover and he was ready to set here two aside and this is where I inferred that her personality was a feisty one because she didn't sit still for that and so she wanted though jewelry back she wouldn't give it back they set off a lawsuit and countersuit and it ended with Rembrandt using his power with the authorities to have her committed to a workhouse so her her story ended sadly she she was in the workhouse for a number of years came out and died shortly thereafter and if you know anything about Rembrandt his the end of his life was was pretty sad too so but what I this so I'm focusing on individuals but also on this notion of liberalism and as I said the people and things that you associate with Amsterdam and its Golden Age all seemed to come back to this notion and Rembrandt is to me a stunning case in point this kind of society that developed this new individualism as we're now in the golden ages it's manifesting itself and also of ways and the most obvious way was in art this turn that Dutch art took toward not just the secular but toward individuals and very ordinary individuals is sort of what everyone was doing someone selling fish on the street or someone pouring milk into a bowl and you have to kind of stop and try to think back how strange that would have been to others to see that people are devoting paintings to subjects like this to such ordinary subjects but this was the sudden craze there and it eventually caught on and spread elsewhere Rembrandt became famous he moved from Leiden to Amsterdam and he became famous originally for his way with portraits portraits were suddenly a craze among the Dutch and this I mean nothing speaks more to this this notion of this new valuing of the individual than that people lined up to have him paint them he painted a few were wealthy and famous of famous people almost everybody painted was wealthy because he charged a lot but most of them wealthy merchants there were wealthy merchants or furniture makers and their wives and they lined up to pay a lot of money for him to do it and there were a lot of good Dutch artists who could paint what you looked like but Rembrandt seemed to do one better he seemed to be able to paint who you were inside and that's what captivated them and these people are you know by and large completely unimportant to history but every one of them has a Wikipedia page today every one of them they're there their portraits are in the Hermitage or in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam or in the Metropolitan Museum in New York or in the National Gallery of Art and people are fascinated by them still I think because they are the first people who are like us they are the first people who are interested in individuals in the way we are that's a in art you see that you see it in a way that you can't see it anywhere else it was also in this new this new liberalism was also apparent in publishing about a third of all the books published in the entire world in the 17th century were published in the city of Amsterdam it was it was incredibly open center in during the English Civil Wars peep both sides came to Amsterdam publishers to have their tracks printed it was apparent in the structure of the city itself as Amsterdam expanded and they dug these canals that I was just talking about there the character would have witnessed increasing the city 5/4 the size of the city fivefold it it was this new city that they developed around their medieval center was something new it was all kind of devoted to and wrapped around this idea of valuing the individuals it was made for the comfort of individuals there was it was the first place ever to develop street lighting at night to develop a modern what we would call kind of modern fire department with a fire engines and fire hoses and the canals themselves were first of all they were a very practical way to turn the problem of water to an advantage but they were also became like arms that just reached around the world which is what the the Dutch East India Company did and grabbed all the world's goods and brought them back home so that you could be a trader a merchant in Amsterdam who you could ride out to the East Indies to to oversee the collection of your shipment of spices say and you could ride with him all the way back to Europe into the eye the harbor of Amsterdam and transfer with them onto a lighter vessel and ride up one of the canals right to your doorstep because it was the whole city was structured for the convenience of these people of the people who owned these individual canal houses and the house the canal house was the the you came up a few steps and you were in the office of the the merchant or whoever was whatever the work they did behind there and upstairs was where the family lived and in the top floors was where your products were stored and all these canal houses have what's called a hoist beam would you ever see it sticks out the top with a hook on it and so the goods were just hauled right up there with a rope and pulley and that was your your whole settle your whole um set up the the writer Witold River schinsky wrote a book called home a short history of an idea in which he argues that the original home as we think of it originated with the Dutch canal house of the 17th century so that it's the first place he said where home meant a man and a woman in their children before that it was a much looser thing that was extended family and servants and various others people sort of coming in and out but this was a defined place and that is yet one other way that this this new focus on the individual sort of comes into a very practical in a you know you can't get more practical and than bricks a more into this very practical shape and it helps to define the city and this this new relationship of the city to two individuals let me just say a couple of quick words to you know I'm we're still in the 17th century I meant to kind of go further but I'll bring it up a little bit further and talk just for a minute about more recent times in the city and then I'll happily entertain questions or if somebody disagrees with everything I said you can do that the city in you know the the Association that we have with Amsterdam that so many people have now I think is in fact related to everything I've just been talking about liberal in the sense of individual freedom there is a whole strain and has always been in the Dutch sensibility that sees this as kind of an ideological value as a good to sort of keep pushing individual freedom and keep allowing people the progressive movement you might say World War two was this you know needless to say was this tremendous threat to this whole notion of liberalism the city was under Nazi occupation not just that but Amsterdam it has that the higher percentage of Jews who had lived in Amsterdam died in the war than in any other city in Western Europe so this was a to say the least an enormous failing and in the aftermath of the war for the for the a book like this I was able to do research in the form of interviewing people say since the war for research and a lot of them told me how in the 50s and 60s there was a huge amount of soul-searching because they felt that there had been this great had transgressed this tradition and they wanted to do something about it and so in the 50s okay so you we survived this war we survived this terrible thing and now what starts to happen they said is here come corporations and here come TV commercials and cheap products and cigarettes and cars and and American bombs being stored on their soil and so suddenly comes this counterculture movement and so Amsterdam in a very different way leads the way and they their movement there was called provo as in provoke they wanted to provoke the authorities because the young people were upset about about all of this and all of that then comes to a head I think when John Lennon and Yoko Ono decide that they will hold their bed in for peace at the Amsterdam Hilton and spend one week inviting all of the world's press to come and talk with them when this sort of side effect of that was all this press came to Amsterdam and they saw this place with you know it's version of hippies and counterculture and and protests and that then began to cement this idea that we have of Amsterdam now on on people's minds and that's you know kind of been stuck ever since and you know the the people the leaders of Amsterdam have tried lately they're trying to deal with that they want to clean it up they don't want to have that image on the other hand they're very proud of the image and they want it so they want to try to find figure out what's the right balance and it goes all the way back I think to this notion of you know how these people developed in the Middle Ages and that's still that everybody forming these these groups to reclaim land from the sea do in the process of doing that created this sensibility the sensibility of these groups sticking together and that so one thing that leads to is this notion of tolerance because what you're going to do is you're going to allow you're gonna try to allow everybody something you're going to try to give everyone their say and that you see that for example with the phenomenon of the coffee shops which is where you buy marijuana coffee or marijuana is not leaked not legal in the Netherlands but if you ask a policeman where can i buy marijuana they'll say in the coffee shop but if the coffee shop changed its name to a marijuana shop it would be closed down so this is part of the this is you know this is not an expression of tolerance as like oh we all think it's great to do whatever you want it's some people thinking that and other people very much thinking the opposite and yet they're all sitting around the table as they were in the Middle Ages trying to decide you know that they have to band together against nature and the the feeling is we'll give everybody something so you don't want it legal so we won't make it legal but you think it's a value so we'll allow it in a certain way and so this is the there's a Dutch word for dokkan which gets at this notion you know Americans kind of think of tolerance as this grand you know celebrating diversity thing for the Dutch mostly it's a more restricted more practical thing that has to do with everybody making everybody a little bit happy keeping everybody at the table and in that sense Dutch politics is kind of the opposite of American politics where American politics you know it's like we hate you so much that will shut down the government the Dutch find that they just to them that's unfathomable because no matter what you stay you keep negotiating you stay at the table I'll leave it at that thank you very much and I'm happy to take questions

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 12,437

Keywords: P&P TV, Washington DC, Politics and Prose, Authors, Books, Events, Amsterdam, Russell Shorto, Holland, East India Company, Liberalism, New Amsterdam, Netherlands, Dissidents, Marijuana, History

Id: fs41WQ_BVM4

Length: 34min 43sec (2083 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 11 2013