Marx may not personally have taken Amsterdam by storm, but the overall message of social liberalism was hitting as forcefully there as elsewhere. The economic liberals who had come to power in the 1850s, with a vow to keep government away and let private business run things, were now looked on by young people with anger: their laissez-faire approach had brought the city roaring into the industrial age—trade to the East Indies was resurgent, the city’s diamond processing industry got a new lease on life as new mines opened up in South Africa, the harbor was being modernized to accommodate steamships—but with virtually no thought given to its social effects, this activity had brought the city to the brink of chaos. The population was in the process of doubling in less than forty years. Slums on the outskirts of the city center had swelled. There was no building code in the slums, families of eight lived in airless one-room apartments without running water. Roads there were unpaved, there were no streetlamps, human waste was carried in buckets and dumped into the canals. Cholera epidemics were routine. One public health official, on his first tour of the city slums, fainted.
As a result, trade unions had formed and became hugely popular in a short time. The concept of individual rights began to be taken up by ordinary people, as the title of the newly launched social democratic newspaper, Recht voor Allen (“Rights for All”), indicated.
It was indeed now a city of work and workers, a city of the industrial age. Another transformation came in 1876, when the massive new North Sea Canal opened. It had involved years of herculean effort—millions of cubic yards of sand dug by men with shovels, resulting in a six-mile-long trench that ran straight west from the IJ and connected Amsterdam directly to the ocean. The city was ready for globalization, nineteenth-century style.
A young man of twenty-four who came from the southern part of the Netherlands moved to Amsterdam just as the canal was finished and got a room in his uncle’s house with a view of the harbor. Shortly after arriving, he picked up a pen and described the old-and-new mix spread out before him: “in the distance the masts of the ships in the dock” and in front of them a brand-new coal steamer, called the Atjeh, or Aceh, named for one of the provinces in the Dutch East Indies colony, “completely black, and the grey and red gun turrets.” Another time, he witnessed a predawn scene in the harbor and sent an evocative description of it in a letter: “A terrible storm blew up here this morning at quarter to five, a little while later the first stream of workers came through the gate of the dockyard in the pouring rain.… The poplars and elders and other shrubs were bent by the strong wind, and the rain pelted on the wood-piles and the decks of the ships, sloops and a little steamboat went back and forth in the distance, near the village on the other side of the IJ, one saw brown sails passing quickly and the houses and trees on Buitenkant and churches in more vivid colors.”
Indeed, it was a city of work and, at the same time, as it had been ever since the miracle of Amsterdam more than five centuries before, a city of churches. And that was what had drawn this young man. He had come to study for the ministry. Between his lessons in Latin and Greek, he made his way from church to church, sampling. He went to the St. Olof Chapel, where, in the late 1500s, merchants had gathered to buy and sell shares of VOC stock before there was a stock market. He went to the French-speaking Walloon Church, where in 1624 Joris Rapalje and Catalina Trico had gotten married before they ventured off to America. He compared the sermons in all of them. These days preachers, as much as politicians, were speaking up for the rights of workers. A sermon he heard at the Walloon Church “consisted mainly of stories from the lives of factory workers.” A preacher in the Noorderkerk spoke about the parable of the sower and drew from it the lesson of working and earning just rewards.
This preacher, Eliza Laurillard, struck the young man deeply. He equated God and nature. God, he suggested, was in all things; to find God, you didn’t look in the Bible or in church—you looked at life. The young man was thrilled by this insight, and even as his own studies were foundering—he couldn’t master the arcane languages, and increasing the intensity of his study drove him toward a hallucinogenic breakdown—he seemed to rediscover God, in himself and in the city around him. “It’s a beautiful city, this,” he wrote; “one finds it everywhere, the world is full of it, may our own heart be filled with it and become so more and more.” It was in a cemetery where he went walking, “especially in the evening when the sun shines through the leaves.” It was in the streets of Amsterdam: “those old, narrow, rather somber streets with chemists’ shops, lithographers and other printers, shops with sea-charts and warehouses for ships’ victuals.” He saw it as he walked past the massive sand mountains on the waterfront where man-made islands were being created, on which the new central train station was about to rise: “the moon was shining, … from there it’s such a wonderful sight across the city and towers, with lights here and there, … and everything was so deathly still.” It was in a burning barge that lit up the sky one evening: “the black row of people standing there watching, and the little boats going back and forth around the blaze also appeared black in the water in which the flames were reflected.” It was in “the people working with sand-carts,” in the “narrow little streets with gardens full of ivy,” along “a canal lined with elm trees,” in “the old tar-yards” and the “gnarled undergrowth and the trees with their strange shapes.” Most of all, it seemed, it was in the sky: “Today was stormy, on my way to my lessons this morning I looked toward the Zuiderzee from the bridge. There was one white stripe on the horizon with dark grey clouds above it, the rain pouring down from them in slanting lines in the distance.”
Yet despite this expansive insight, he suffered: “Why art thou cast down, O my soul?” he quoted desperately from the Psalms. “And why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God; for I shall yet praise Him, Who is the health of my countenance, and my God.”
Vincent van Gogh stayed only a year in the city. When he left, a failure at the ministry as he had been a failure several times before, he was still far from being, as it were, Vincent van Gogh, far even from the decision to devote himself to art. Yet in a sense devoting himself to art was precisely what he had been doing. Everywhere he went in the city, he thought of Rembrandt; street scenes and faces and landscapes reminded him of the master. Rembrandt was the artist of the interior life. Van Gogh would be as well, but he would impress the interior life onto the outer world: onto tree trunks and cornfields and starry skies. Spinoza said God and nature were one: or rather, that God was a name for all, that God envelopes and unites what is inside us and what is beyond. Van Gogh’s Greek lessons were painful, but he loved his teacher, a Portuguese Jew named Mendes who lived in the Jewish quarter, which was both Spinoza’s and Rembrandt’s old neighborhood and which Van Gogh loved to explore. Van Gogh was haunted by Rembrandt in Amsterdam, and finally he found him. In the last letter he wrote to his brother Theo before leaving Amsterdam, he expressed his delight that Theo had moved to Paris, and he also told him that he had discovered something he had been looking for. “I found the house in Breestraat where Rembrandt lived,” he wrote. And he added, as if as a bittersweet premonition for himself, “It can be so glorious in Paris in the autumn.”
Somehow, Amsterdam was simultaneously a hard-bitten, conservative place whose narrow streets were crammed with people who eked out livings as engine stokers and corn carriers and sawdust sellers, who bowed their heads in cold, echoey churches as hell and brimstone rained down, and also a place that exalted the individual, where people pushed for the spread of individual rights and nurtured an awareness of their city’s historic role in the development of liberalism and wanted to show it off. Seven years after Karl Marx made his appearance and a year after Vincent van Gogh gave up on the city, an international conference on advances in medicine was held in Amsterdam. At a break in the proceedings, a tableau vivant was staged for the amusement of the guests but also to call attention to one particular advance. In this performance piece, which was entitle
d The Future, the Amsterdam hosts staged for the benefit of their foreign medical guests a reenactment of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, using actors in period costume, but with one difference: all the parts were played by women. Everyone got the point; everyone knew that the actress at the center of the living canvas was meant not only to represent Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, the seventeenth-century Amsterdammer who pioneered surgery, but also one of the physicians present, who was easy to spot because she was the only woman among them. The audience broke out in applause, which she acknowledged.
Her name was Aletta Jacobs. She was only twenty-five years old—almost exactly Van Gogh’s contemporary—but already famous as the first Dutch woman to receive a university degree, the first ever to become a medical doctor, and one of only a handful of female doctors in the world. The idea that a medical school would accept a fully qualified female applicant had been so outrageous that she had appealed to the prime minister, Thorbecke, to intervene on her behalf so that she might gain admittance. (He approved, after first checking with her dad.)
Jacobs had become awakened to the subordinate status of women at an early age. She read, and was inspired by, Multatuli’s protofeminism, and at fourteen she read The Subjection of Women, a pamphlet arguing for equality of the sexes that was written by John Stuart Mill, perhaps nineteenth-century Britain’s most influential proponent of individual rights. “As a child I was obsessed with freedom and independence,” she later wrote, “and so it was no wonder that I was alternately inspired, depressed, and terrified by the title of the Dutch version: The Slavery of Woman. It became my personal touchstone, intensifying everything I saw, heard, or discovered. Girls did not become doctors. I was told that universities were only for boys. When I thought about all this, I realized that men not only made laws; they also had the power to reserve every privilege for themselves and to perpetuate women’s subordinate role. I knew that this had to change, but as yet I had no idea how.”
After receiving her medical degree, Jacobs set up a practice on the Herengracht, one of the chic areas of the city center. But she had the heart of a social liberal and came into contact with Bernardus Heldt, a furniture maker who had become head of the General Trade Union. Through him, she got to know workers and their families and became aware of the poor level of understanding among them about reproduction and basic health and hygiene. Heldt helped her to open a free clinic. Eventually she moved it to the Jordaan, the working-class slum just outside the canal ring.
There, she identified a recurring cycle that kept women in a downward spiral: families that were already poor and struggling to stay alive kept having more babies, dragging them down still further. In the 1870s she became the country’s first advocate for contraception, and one of the first anywhere. In the midst of a society and a medical profession that were rigorously Victorian in their attitudes about sex, she had patients conduct trials of contraceptives and concluded that the pessary, a kind of diaphragm, was the most effective birth control device.
She got more vocal in suggesting that it could help not only women but families and society as a whole, and she received in return, as she said, “the wrath of the entire medical establishment.” That establishment was, of course, entirely male, and some of her colleagues took her championing of contraception as evidence for why women—weak, naive, not understanding the complexities of the world—should not become doctors. As the condemnation raged she took to walking in the Vondelpark, the city’s new central park, wondering if maybe the prevailing arguments against contraception had validity: “Could the availability of contraception ultimately lead to a world without children?” she asked herself. “Would it cause adultery? And, if the birth rate fell, would the country’s economic position be threatened?” She emerged from her period of doubt with her conviction reaffirmed, and she voiced it in practical modern language: “contraception would certainly lower the number of unwanted pregnancies and hence should be welcomed for many social, sociological, and individual reasons.” Her office in the Jordaan became what some feminist historians have called the world’s first birth control clinic. In time, criticism faded, and she was sought by people around the world for advice on what she called “planned motherhood.”
As her fame grew, Jacobs became simultaneously a hero for many Amsterdammers and a source of confusion for her colleagues, the press, and the Dutch in general. She was a small, thin woman who would rail against injustice in what was considered a very unfeminine manner. In her bearing she remained dignified, yet in her personal life she chose a nonstandard path. She called marriage an economic trap for women, and when, at thirty-eight, she nevertheless married a radical politician named Carel Viktor Gerritsen, they crafted a modern partnership, with separate incomes and bank accounts and equality in their decision making. She led a campaign for shopgirls’ rights (at the time, shops were open from eight in the morning until eleven at night and female workers were required not only to work the entire time but to stand at attention, which resulted in physical problems) and became an internationally renowned pacifist leader, eventually meeting with President Woodrow Wilson to implore him to keep the United States out of World War I (he politely rebuffed her).
Early on Jacobs came to believe that women’s problems were all linked by what she considered to be the nonnegotiable matter of individual rights, and she became more strident in voicing her conviction that there was no moral justification for denying women the same rights and privileges that men had. She stepped from the birth control controversy directly into women’s suffrage. In 1883 she asked the mayor and city council of Amsterdam to put her name on the list of eligible voters, basing her argument on the fact that the Dutch constitution did not specifically deny women the right to vote. The matter went to the Supreme Court, which rejected her, using logic that further incensed her. The court argued first that women “do not have full citizenship or civil rights” because “they lack the right to vote.” “Ludicrous” was Jacobs’s response. The court further reasoned that “husbands and fathers pay taxes for their wives and underage children, a fact that unequivocally proves married women are excluded from enfranchisement.” Two years later, the Dutch constitution was revised to state explicitly that only men had the right to vote.
Jacobs took the fight abroad. In London in 1899 she participated in the first International Women’s Conference, where she befriended Susan B. Anthony. With another American suffrage leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, she toured the Middle East and Asia observing and writing about the plight of women, amplifying the issue in the echo chamber of the early twentieth-century media. She lived to see women in the Netherlands get the right to vote in 1919 and in America in 1920.
By the early 1900s, Amsterdam was in the midst of a renaissance, thanks to the coming together of the two liberalisms, and with considerable help from the global economy. It was a kind of mini–golden age, and if this one did not influence the wider world as the earlier one had, it allowed the city to fashion itself into a showpiece of twentieth-century urban life: prosperous, fair, comfortable, stylish, striving. Capitalism (a word that Marx himself made famous, and he meant it to sting, but economic liberals took it to their bosoms) brought new wealth. New or revitalized industries, many of which had their origins in the East Indies, flourished. Factories in and around the city had long churned butter; in the 1870s they began converting copra (coconut) into margarine and started a related industry. The discovery of oil on Sumatra led to the founding, in 1890, of Royal Dutch Petroleum, which later merged with Shell and as of 2012 was the fourth-largest company in the world. The next year, Gerard and Frederik Philips opened a plant in Eindhoven to produce lightbulbs, and Philips went on to become a leader in nearly every new technology, from radio tubes to video cassette recorders. But Amsterdam’s economic engine was multi-faceted, rooted in dozens of industries. Metalworking, shipbuilding, printing, coffee brewing, diamond polishing, and tobacco processing were mainstays; Gerard Heineken started brewing beer in the city in 1864.
/> Of course, the economic explosion came at a price. As factories got larger and competition increased, owners slashed wages and lengthened workdays, shredding the fabric of working people’s lives. Daily existence became harder to negotiate. Households came undone under the new strains. Parents were forced to send children to work; girls became prostitutes; boys stole; and when either were caught they were punished with a severity that convinced many people that the liberal government was little more than an enforcer of the capitalists’ system. Trade unions and socialist parties thus grew further in stature, because they held out the promise of making life fairer and less harsh, but also because with their regular meetings and newspapers they offered a new kind of community to replace lost comforts and traditions.
All of the above was true in many places, but the social and political struggle took on a different aspect in the Netherlands. Marxism and socialism had the goal—the dark and fearful goal, as many saw it—of outright revolution. The Dutch moved faster than others away from that ideology and toward the more pragmatic project of working within the system to improve the lives of workers. The debate between doctrinaire Marxists and social reformers came to a head in the 1890s. One of the leaders of the orthodox Marxist camp was a firebrand named Herman Gorter, whom I feel compelled to talk about for a couple of paragraphs because I find him such a rich personality: the sort of person you would fall into deep friendship with in one all-night conversation during college, then spend the rest of your life trying to avoid. Gorter studied classical languages at the University of Amsterdam and launched into a career as a poet of nature. At age twenty-five he published what would be his best-known work, May: A Poem. Then he collapsed in depression. What brought him out of it, besides his mother’s nurturing, was Spinoza, whom he took up as the final arbiter on truth and nature. He published a Dutch translation of Spinoza’s Ethics and also a collection of “Spinozistic poems.”
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