Van Loon The World of the Roosevelts Published in Cooperation with the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Hyde Park, New York General Editors: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., William vanden Heuvel, and Douglas Brinkley FDR AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES ADENAUER AND KENNEDY Foreign Perceptions of A Study in German-American Relations an American President Frank A. Mayer Edited by Cornelis A. van Minnen and John F. Sears THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE NATO: THE FOUNDING OF THE ATLANTIC A Study in Presidential Statecraft ALLIANCE AND THE INTEGRATION William N. Tilchin OF EUROPE Edited by Francis H. Heller and TARIFFS, TRADE AND EUROPEAN John R. Gillingham INTEGRATION, 1947–1957 From Study Group to Common Market AMERICA UNBOUND Wendy Asbeek Brusse World War II and the Making of a Superpower SUMNER WELLES Edited by Warren F. Kimball FDR’s Global Strategist A Biography by Benjamin Welles THE ORIGINS OF U.S. NUCLEAR STRATEGY, 1945–1953 THE NEW DEAL AND PUBLIC POLICY Samuel R. Williamson, Jr. and Steven L. Rearden Edited by Byron W. Daynes, William D. Pederson, and Michael P. Riccards AMERICAN DIPLOMATS IN THE NETHERLANDS, 1815–50 WORLD WAR II IN EUROPE Cornelis A. van Minnen Edited by Charles F. Brower EISENHOWER, KENNEDY, FDR AND THE U.S. NAVY AND THE UNITED STATES Edward J. Marolda OF EUROPE Pascaline Winand THE SECOND QUEBEC CONFERENCE REVISITED ALLIES AT WAR Edited by David B. Woolner The Soviet, American, and British Experience, 1939–1945 THEODORE ROOSEVELT, THE U.S. NAVY, Edited by David Reynolds, AND THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR Warren F. Kimball, and A. O. Chubarian Edited by Edward J. Marolda THE ATLANTIC CHARTER FDR, THE VATICAN, AND THE ROMAN Edited by Douglas Brinkley and CATHOLIC CHURCH IN AMERICA, David R. Facey-Crowther 1933–1945 PEARL HARBOR REVISITED Edited by David B. Woolner and Edited by Robert W. Love, Jr. Richard G. Kurial FDR AND THE HOLOCAUST FDR AND THE ENVIRONMENT Edited by Verne W. Newton Edited by Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner THE UNITED STATES AND THE INTEGRATION OF EUROPE VAN LOON Legacies of the Postwar Era Popular Historian, Journalist, and Edited by Francis H. Heller and FDR Confidant John R. Gillingham Cornelis A. van Minnen VAN LOON POPULAR HISTORIAN, JOURNALIST, AND FDR CONFIDANT CORNELIS A. VAN MINNEN VAN LOON © Cornelis A. van Minnen, 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-53213-1 ISBN 978-1-4039-7714-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781403977144 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: October 2005 10987654321 To William J. vanden Heuvel, Founding Father of the Roosevelt Study Center and Generous Friend All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history, only biography. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “History,” in Essays: First Series (1841), reprinted in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 240. The biographer is sentenced to labor under the brutal certainty that he can at best construct only a rough approximation of the life that was actually lived, of the personality that actually existed, and changed, from this year to that; and that most of the important knowledge he needs is never to be had....By shrewd inferences from the extant data, and by an equally careful process of selection and arrangement, it may be possible to recreate a man and his life, if not in their full literal truth, then in their essence. Such is the hope that has always sustained biographers as they have gone about their impossible task. Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 303. Contents Illustrations ix Foreword by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. xi Acknowledgments xiii Prologue 1 Part I The Formative Years 5 1. A Troubled Youth in Holland (1882–1902) 7 2. Cornell–Harvard–Cornell (1902–1905) 17 3. Associated Press Journalist in Russia and Poland (1905–1907) 25 4. Historical Training in Munich (1907–1911) 33 Part II In Search of a Place 39 5. Washington Years of Trial and Error (1912–1914) 41 6. The Great War (1914–1918) 47 7. Life in the Village (1918–1920) 59 Part III The Jazz Age 71 8. The Breakthrough (1921–1922) 73 9. The Prince of Popularizers (1922–1928) 83 10. The Veere Paradise (1928–1931) 109 Part IV The 1930s 137 11. The Educator (1931–1935) 139 viii Contents 12. For Roosevelt and the Arts (1936–1937) 161 13. The Prophet of the Coming Wrath (1938–1940) 175 Part V The Great Fight For Freedom 197 14. The One-Man Army Division (1940–1941) 199 15. The Reincarnation of Erasmus (1942) 219 16. Living on Borrowed Time (1943–1944) 243 Epilogue 261 Notes 269 Bibliography 331 Index 344 Illustrations 1.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon, aged 6, 1888 9 1.2 Hendrik Willem van Loon aboard the Holland–America Liner S.S. Potsdam en route to New York, July 1902 15 2.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon in his study at Cornell University, September 1902 19 10.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon with “Miss America” in Zeeland costume and the mayor of Veere, August 1929 119 10.2 Hendrik Willem and Jimmie van Loon photographed by Ilse Bing in Veere, 1931 133 11.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon with Noodle at his New York Washington Square apartment with a copy of Van Loon’s Geography on the table, 1932 144 12.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon with Eleanor Roosevelt, probably at Hyde Park, 1936 162 12.2 Hendrik Willem van Loon photographed by Ilse Bing, 1936 165 12.3 Cover image of The Arts, 1937 171 13.1 Professor Albert Einstein, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and noted author Thomas Mann (left to right) are pictured as they attended the preview of Hendrik Willem van Loon’s first motion picture, The Fight for Peace, May 1938 178 13.2 Hendrik Willem van Loon at the Greenwich Time editorial offices typing his column “Deliberate Reflections,” November 1938 183 14.1 Hendrik Willem van Loon in front of WRUL microphone broadcasting as “Uncle Hank” to the Netherlands during the war years 207 15.1 Hands of Hendrik Willem van Loon which were similar, van Loon thought, to the hands of his alter ego, Erasmus of Rotterdam 222 15.2 Hendrik Willem van Loon’s drawing of Erasmus in Veere, in Van Loon’s Lives, 1942 223 This page intentionally left blank Foreword Over forty years ago, this author reflected that in an age when knowledge grows increasingly specialized, the capacity to write about serious subjects in a lucid and arresting way becomes a necessity of civilized society. This was a gift, which the Dutch-American author Hendrik Willem van Loon possessed to a high and abundant degree. In this arresting biography, Cornelis A. van Minnen reminds us of why van Loon was such a popular “popularizer.” He had a fair amount of academic training; he took his Ph.D. at the University of Munich and lectured European history at Cornell and Antioch. Yet, while he thus served his professional apprenticeship, he never let the inhibitions of the historian’s guild restrain his own exuberance. This exuberance had its origins in his own massive and extravagant personality. He seems to have done everything on a large scale. He was six feet three inches tall; he weighed nearly three hundred pounds; he wrote over forty books; he illustrated many of them himself; he had a vast appetite for freedom, courage, friendship, and debate. He was, above all, perhaps, a man of gusto. Nearly everything interested or excited or charmed or appalled him; and this overflowing vitality accounts for the gaiety and excitement he brought to his retelling of history. As van Minnen shows, van Loon sometimes got his facts wrong— an attribute that his critics were always quick to point out. But such reproaches never unduly shook van Loon. He would denounce “pedagogical persecution” and say with appropriate bellicosity that, if he himself believed a thing long enough, it must be true. Yet the occasional exaggeration or error is less important than the essential spirit of his work. Van Loon cared deeply about history, especially American history. He had a quick and penetrating sympathy for the American experi- ence. He remained faithful to the deeper character of American life. And for him, America was a moral and intellectual adventure. He hated the identifi- cation of America with material success; “The domination of Things,” he wrote, “militates against the free and the healthy development of ideas.” He detested the displacement of the old American rule, “Be true to your own xii Foreword personality and you will be happy,” by the latter-day doctrine, “Forget that you have any personality of your own and you will be rich.” The Second World War was a year away from its conclusion when van Loon died.