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TULIP TIME, U. S. A.:
STAGING MEMORY, IDENTITY AND ETHNICITY
IN DUTCH-AMERICAN COMMUNITY FESTIVALS
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate
School of The Ohio State University
By
Terence Guy Schoone-Jongen, M. A.
* * * * *
The Ohio State University
2007
Dissertation Committee:
Approved by
Professor Thomas Postlewait, Advisor
Professor Dorothy Noyes
Professor Alan Woods
Adviser
Theatre Graduate Program

ABSTRACT
Throughout the United States, thousands of festivals, like St. Patrick’s
Day in New York City or the Greek Festival and Oktoberfest in Columbus,
annually celebrate the ethnic heritages, values, and identities of the communities
that stage them. Combining elements of ethnic pride, nostalgia, sentimentality,
cultural memory, religous values, political positions, economic motive, and the
spirit of celebration, these festivals are well-organized performances that promote
a community’s special identity and heritage. At the same time, these festivals
usually reach out to the larger community in an attempt to place the ethnic
community within the American fabric.
These festivals have a complex history tied to the “melting pot” history of
America. Since the twentieth century many communities and ethnic groups have
struggled to hold onto or reclaim a past that gradually slips away. Ethnic heritage
festivals are one prevalent way to maintain this receding past. And yet such
ii

festivals can serve radically different aims, socially and politically. In this
dissertation I will investigate how these festivals are presented and why they are
significant for both participants and spectators. I wish to determine what such
festivals do and mean. I will examine five Dutch American festivals, three of
which are among the oldest ethnic heritage festivals in the United States.
My approach to this topic is interdisciplinary. Drawing upon research
methods in several disciplines--theatre history, performance studies, theatre
semiotics, ethnography and anthropology, folklore, and American history--I will
describe and analyze how the social, political, and ethical values of the
communities get expressed (performed, acted out, represented, costumed and
displayed) in these various festivals. Instead of relying upon the familiar ideas of
“the Midwest,” “rural America,” “conservative America,” etc. that are often used
in political commentary today, I want to show just how complex and often
contradictory the festivals are in the ways they represent each community. At the
same time, by placing these community festivals in the context of American
history, I also intend to show how and why each festival serves as a microcosm of
particular cultural, social, and political developments in modern America.
iii

Dedicated to the memory of Louise Schoone-Jongen
1909-2005
iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I want to thank my advisor, Thomas Postlewait, for his
encouragement, support, feedback, and enthusiasm for this project, as well as for
his unflagging confidence in my ability to bring this project to fruition.
I want to thank Dorry Noyes for being particularly helpful in offering feedback,
insight, and encouragement during the research and writing process.
Special thanks are also due to Alan Woods, Jill Lane, Joe Roach, and
Harry Vredeveld for supporting this project in a myriad of ways.
I owe particular debts of gratitude to Janet Sjaarda Sheeres, Robert
Swierenga, Ellen Van’t Hof, Sue Ten Hoeve, Janie Van Dyke, Eric Walhof, Don
and Nelva Schreur, Marlys Hop, Phyllis Zylstra, Lisa Jaarsma Zylstra, Margaret
De Jager, and Carol Van Klompenburg, all of whom graciously supplied me with
advice and documents I otherwise would not have been able to obtain.
I would like to thank all of the archivists who assisted me at the Holland
Museum, the Joint Archives of Holland, the Pella Historical Society, Central
College, and Northwestern College; special thanks in this regard go to Deborah
Postema-George, Bill Sause, and Dan Daily. I would also like to give a special
message of thanks to Iris Vander Wal at the Pella Historical Society, who
v

provided much appreciated logistical support during my research trips to Pella,
and to Don and Nelva Schreur who provided invaluable help and advice while I
was in Orange City.
I would like to thank the offices of the Chronicle, Edgerton Enterprise,
and Sioux County Capital-Democrat for allowing me to rummage through back
issues on busy work days.
All of the individuals who consented to be interviewed for this project also
have my deepest gratitude for candid conversation, entertaining anecdotes, and a
willingness to sit down with me for what often was an hour or more. I feel that I
have made many new friends across the Midwest as a result of these interviews.
I owe debts of hospitality to Mel and Liz De Boer, Brett and Anita Gaul,
Grandpa and Grandma Lefever, and Ralph and Elaine Jaarsma.
Special thanks to Robert Hubbard, Debra Freeburg, and Teresa Ter Haar
for encouragement and moral support during this process.
Thanks to the good people at Café Apropos for keeping me well stocked
with coffee, biscotti, and wine.
Thanks to all of my many friends for providing the distractions necessary
to maintaining a somewhat balanced life while writing a dissertation; special
thanks in this regard to Lise, The Salo(o)ners, Blueforms Theatre Group, Tom D.,
Gina, Gib, and Sarah.
vi

I would not have been able to concentrate without the aid of the music of
Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Gustav Holst, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman,
Dave Brubeck, Hong Ting, and Mike Doughty.
Finally, a huge thank you to mom, dad, and Brendan for all their love and
support during the many ups and downs that have been part of this process.
The completion of this project was made possible by the generous support
of The Ohio State University Department of Theatre Morrow Fund.
The completion of this project was also possible thanks to an Ohio State
University Presidential Fellowship.
vii

VITA
August 24, 1978………………………….Born – Pipestone, Minnesota
2001………………………………………B.A., Communications Arts and
Sciences, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan
2003………………………………………M.A., Theatre History, Literature, and
Criticism, The Ohio State University
2001-2002………………………………..University Fellow, The Ohio State
University
2002-2005………………………………...Graduate Teaching Associate, The
Ohio State University
2006-present………………………………Presidential Fellow, The Ohio State
University
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: Theatre
viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract………………………………………………………………………….ii
Dedication……………………………………………………………………….iv
Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………….v
Vita……………………………………………………………………………..viii
Chapters:
1. Introduction………………………………………………………………1
2. Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Community Celebration,
Commemoration and Festivity………………………………………….. 45
2.1 Community-Oriented Festivals………………………………………46
2.2 Ethnically-Oriented Festivals………………………………………..59
3. Immigration and Settlement Patterns of the Dutch in the
United States: A Brief Overview………………………………………..73
3.1 Antecedents………………………………………………………….73
3.1.1 New Netherland…………………………………………...73
3.1.2 From 1664-1847…………………………………….…….78
3.2 The New Immigration……………………………………………….79
3.2.1 Economic and Religious Backdrop……………….……….79
3.2.1.1 Economic Factors………………………………..80
3.2.1.2 Religious Factors………………………………...82
3.2.2 The Afscheiding of 1834…………………………………..84
3.2.3 Towards Emigration……………………………………….89
3.2.4 Dutch Emigration/Immigration after 1850………………...95
3.2.5 Immigration vs. Settlement.………………………………106
3.3 The Dutch-American Community……………………………..…...111
4. Dutch Ethnic Heritage Celebrations: Antecedents, Emergence,
And Proliferation……………………………………………………….135
4.1 Antecedents…………………………………………………………136
4.2 The Emergence of Holland, Pella, and Orange City………………..155
4.2.1 Tulip Time in Holland, Michigan………………………...155
4.2.2 Tulip Time in Pella, Iowa………………………………...166
4.2.3 Tulip Festival In Orange City, Iowa…………………...…188
4.2.4 Hollandmania……………………………………………..200
ix

4.3 Proliferation………………………………………………………...226
5. The Quest for Authenticity: Costumes…………………………………233
5.1 The Rhetoric of Authenticity……………………………………….233
5.1.1 Quotes on Holland’s Tulip Time…………………………233
5.1.2 Quotes on Pella’s Tulip Time……………………………233
5.1.3 Quotes on Orange City’s Tulip Festival…………………234
5.1.4 Quotes on Edgerton’s Dutch Festival…………………….234
5.1.5 Quotes on Fulton’s Dutch Days………………………….235
5.2 Authenticity Issues………………………………………………….235
5.3 Costuming Practices…………………….………………………….238
5.3.1 Costumes in Holland, Michigan…..……………………...238
5.3.2 Costumes in Pella, Iowa………………………………….244
5.3.3 Costumes in Orange City, Iowa…………………………..251
5.3.4 Costumes in Fulton, Illinois...……………………………257
5.3.5 Costumes in Edgerton, Minnesota………………………..261
5.4 Authenticity: What It Means, What It Does…….………………….267
6. Stories We Tell To And About Ourselves……………………...………290
6.1 Stories and Narratives in Press and Promotional Coverage………..291
6.2 Town Tours…………………………………… ………………..…326
6.3 Parades, Programs, Pageants, and Plays…………………………....338
6.3.1 Parades…………………………………………...……….339
6.3.2 Programs………………………………………………….351
6.3.3 Pageants and Plays……………………………………….360
7. Other Stories; or, Stories We Tell In Spite of Ourselves……………….382
7.1 Disagreements………………………………………………..……..383
7.2 Demographics… …………………………………………………...394
7.3 Denominational Factionalism………………………………………408
8. Conclusion……………………………………………………………...429
Appendix A…………………………………………………………………….441
Appendix B…………………………………………………………………….443
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………445
x

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
In July of 1984, I was five years old (going on six). Like most other five-
year-old residents of Edgerton, Minnesota, the heat of June meant one thing: the
annual Dutch Festival would be coming soon. Parades, food stands, unusual
numbers of out-of-town visitors, two days of fun, and rides: lots of midway rides.
For a five-year-old, it was basically a dream come true. Along with my best
friends, Kris Kooiman and Brett Lamsma, I had already been entering into heated
speculation about which rides would come to town this year; we agreed that,
being six (or almost six, in my case), we would definitely be old enough this year
to go on some of the “big” rides. I had my sights fixed on the ferris wheel.
Meanwhile, my parents were occasionally disappearing across the street to
mysterious-sounding “section meetings,” where most of the neighborhood adults
were gathering to decide what our float theme would be for the parade. The
Fourth of July passed, and then the meetings grew more frequent. Most all of the
residents from the area near the intersection of Elizabeth Street and Mechanic
Street began descending on John and Darlene Ruiter’s garage, hammers and drills
1

in hand. As the neighborhood children played in the back yard, our parents set
about converting a flatbed trailer, ordinarily used for hauling bails of hay, into a
fantastic, magical float.
What would the float be? Who would get to ride it? Would it involve
candy? These were the questions which occupied my five-year-old mind as the
Festival drew nearer. To my delight and surprise, the answer to the second
question proved to be: me, as well as my father, almost two-year-old brother
Brendan, and Suzie Ruiter, my favorite babysitter (daughter of John and Darlene,
and a student of both my parents at Southwest Christian High School). Our
section’s float would not involve candy, but it would involve Dutch costumes.
All of the costumes were being lent to us from cousins, aunts, and uncles from
Orange City, Iowa. My mom, dad, brother and I would be wearing costumes that
belonged to my aunt Connie, uncle Bruce, and cousins Ryan and Ross; Suzie
would be wearing the Friesland costume my aunt Margaret had worn as part of
the 1978 Orange City Tulip Festival Court. A photograph of my family in
costume reveals that my mom wore a costume from the village of Volendam; my
father wore a costume the provenance of which I cannot identify; my brother
refused to wear his cap, and so his costume is unidentifiable; and I wore a
costume that combined a Volendam shirt and pants with a cap from the village of
Urk. I was particularly proud of my blue wooden shoes.
2

For the Festival, all of the Edgerton neighborhoods were building similar
floats. The parade theme, to which all floats had to conform, was “Anything
Dutch.” Our section contributed a float entitled “MET BLIJDSCHAP EN
LIEFDE GAAT ALLES WEL,” which, helpfully, was translated as “WITH
LOVE AND JOY ALL GOES WELL.” The float itself was decorated along the
sides and back with a blue-and-white color scheme. The floor of the trailer was
painted green; a bridge crossed a painted stream; a model windmill stood at the
edge of the bridge; a number of fake tulips were arranged all over the float; and a
backdrop with painted trapgevel-style buildings stood behind a bench, on which
Suzie sat, Brendan in her lap, my father standing (or crouching, depending on the
picture) off to the side. I sat on a piece of plastic so that the “grass” didn’t get
onto my costume, although a photograph reveals that during at least one of the
parades I had restationed myself atop the bridge. I can recall our float getting
pulled down the route both Dutch Festival evenings and looking out into the
crowd, several rows deep on each side of the street, and seeing a variety of
audience members wearing Dutch costumes of one sort or another, with various
degrees of detail.
Apart from a few isolated memories of rides and individual floats, this is
my earliest sustained memory of the Edgerton Dutch Festival. Accordingly, I
have an image of the Dutch Festival incorporating many Dutch elements into it:
costumes, tulips, wooden shoes, windmills, architectural depictions, etc. The
3

1984 Dutch Festival, however, was an exception rather than a rule: few Dutch
Festivals since that time have done much in the way of keeping “Dutch” elements
(costumes, food, dances, etc.) in the Festival.
Orange City, Iowa’s Tulip Festival, held each year in May, presents a
markedly different picture. Since the early 1970s at least, Orange City has gone
out of its way to introduce more and more “Dutch” elements into the May
festival. Costumes from many different Dutch towns and villages, most of them
painstakingly researched by local seamstresses, have been in evidence for many
years. Orange City is only an hour and a half to the south of Edgerton, and much
of my mother’s family lives in and around Orange City, so on several occasions
my family attended the Orange City Tulip Festival. On one such occasion, I
remember watching a group of dancers performing a folk dance. Many of the
dancers were dressed in Volendam costumes, but at least one was dressed in a
very different-looking costume, which I now know to have been a costume from
the village of Marken. I remember asking my dad why that one dancer wasn’t
wearing a Dutch costume; he responded that that was a different kind of Dutch
costume, but it was just as Dutch as the others. This would have been in the mid-
1980s. When I returned to Orange City’s Tulip Festival in 2006, an even greater
variety of costumes were worn by folk dancers and audience members. If
Edgerton’s Dutch Festival has little that is “Dutch” about it, Orange City’s Tulip
Festival tries to exhibit many different examples of Dutch dances, songs, and
costumes.
4

Across the United States, there are literally thousands of ethnic and
community festivals similar to the two described above. They are festivals which
celebrate or commemorate the heritage of the early settlers of a particular town, or
the ancestry of the majority of current residents. Some are massive, such as St.
Patrick’s Day in New York; some are small, such as Belgian Days in Ghent,
Minnesota. But the size of the festival is less important for these communities
than their determination to hold onto, celebrate, and profit from a specific version
of ethnic identity--however vague and inaccurate--even though the contemporary
organizers may be separated by generations from the original settlers of a
particular community. In 1987, Angus Gillespie reported that there were over
three thousand festivals organized across the United States in the late 1980s,
many of them celebrating a community’s ethnic background (152-161). Lizette
Graden says the 1997 the Swedish-American Handbook identifies “several
hundred events labeled Swedish” (3). According to Stephen Hoelscher, as of
1987 Americans staged over 3,000 folk festivals, “many of which celebrated
ethnic culture” (13). A vast number of these events are staged in the Upper
Midwest: a map in Hoelscher’s Heritage on Stage, using data compiled in 1991,
records almost 300 ethnically-themed festivals in the Upper Midwest/Great Lakes
regions (North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri,
Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio--15).
5

Despite the prevalence of such events, there has been surprisingly little
scholarly interest in them, especially those celebrating European ethnicities,
although a handful of scholars in several fields have addressed ethnic pride
festivals on a limited scale. Thus, in this study I will examine five community
festivals that celebrate Dutch heritage in the United States. I want to determine
what these festivals actually mean and do, both in the past and in the present. In
approaching the sociocultural significance of these festivals, this study examines
the performative elements of these festivals, such as parades, folk dances,
costumes, pageants, historical reenactments, and demonstrations.
I am focusing of Dutch festivals for two reasons. First, they represent a
limited sample, as there are only about twenty-five of them, as opposed to the
hundreds of German, Irish, or Scandinavian festivals. Yet within this sample
these festivals are quite diverse in terms of size, their emphasis on heritage, and
their purpose. To capture this diversity, I will investigate five festivals: a)
Holland, Michigan’s Tulip Time, a huge festival with many types of events; b)
Pella, Iowa’s Tulip Time, much like Holland’s, though on a smaller scale; c)
Orange City, Iowa’s Tulip Time, a still smaller, though important regional,
festival; d) Edgerton, Minnesota’s Dutch Festival, a small festival seemingly far
less concerned than Holland, Pella, or Orange City with accuracy in costumes or
exhibiting its heritage; and e) Fulton, Illinois’s Dutch Days Festival, a festival
with a more recent, and markedly different, origin from the other four.
6

I also want to focus specifically on Dutch heritage celebrations because
three of them--Holland’s Tulip Time Festival, Pella’s Tulip Time Festival, and
Orange City’s Tulip Festival--are among the earliest examples of towns
capitalizing on ethnic heritage to draw attention and tourists to themselves. These
three festivals were started between 1929 and 1936, a decade or more before
similar festivals celebrating other ethnicities began to emerge (Danielson, “St.
Lucia” 188). Thus, these Dutch festivals are interesting as the precursors to, even
prototypes for, subsequent ethnic pride festivals, whatever the ethnicity
celebrated.
The fact that the Tulip festivals in Holland, Pella, and Orange City were
among the first outward-directed annual celebrations of ethnic heritage make the
dearth of scholarship on these events unfortunate. To date, Suzanne Sinke and
Deborah Che have written published articles about Holland’s Tulip Time, and
Lisa Jaarsma Zylstra recently completed a master’s thesis that addressed Pella’s
Tulip Time, but only up to roughly 1947. Janet Sjaarda Sheeres has also written a
conference paper overview of Dutch Festivals in the United States
(“Klompendancing Through America”),1 and Ellen Van’t Hof has delivered two
conference presentations on the wooden shoe klompen dances performed during
Holland, Michigan’s Tulip Time (“The Netherlands/West Michigan Connection;”
“The Klompendance of Holland, Michigan”).
1 Sheeres’s paper was later published in Origins 18.2. Origins is a publication of
Calvin College’s Hekman Archives dedicated to “the gathering, organization, and
study of historical materials produced by the day-to-day activities of the Christian
Reformed Church, its institutions, communities and people” (“Origins”).
7

A more substantial, but still small, body of published work exists
concerning festivals that celebrate other ethnicities of European origin. Several
scholars--mostly folklorists and cultural historians--have written about
celebrations of Swedish heritage in Lindsborg, Kansas (Danielson 1972 and 1991;
Bodnar 1992; Graden 2003); the same is also true of celebrations and articulations
of Swiss heritage in New Glarus, Wisconsin (Hoelscher 1998; Zarilli and Neff
1982). A variety of other studies address recurring festivals that celebrate a
community’s heritage for the benefit of outsiders as well as the community itself.
For example, Hoelscher and Ostergren (1993) compare a Swedish celebration in
Cambridge, Minnesota to New Glarus. Robert Swiderski (1986) studies an
Italian-American festival. Michael Cronin and Daryl Adair (2002) investigate St.
Patrick’s Day celebrations. Deborah Anders Silverman (1997) writes on Dyngus
Day in Polish-American communities. And John Bodnar (1992) compares and
contrasts Norwegian, Swedish, Mennonite, and Irish celebrations. In addition,
Kathleen Neils Conzen (1989) has written on nineteenth-century German-
American celebrations, April Schultz (1994) on the 1925 Norse-American
Immigration Centennial celebration held in Minneapolis, and Robert Orsi (1985)
on Italian-American celebrations in New York in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
While literature on celebrations and articulations of ethnicity--
performances of ethnicity, if you will--within celebrations or festivals might be
limited, there is no shortage of literature on ethnicity and ethnic groups in the
8

United States. Such studies may deal with how ethnicity has been preserved
across several generations, the different ways in which succeeding generations
have related to their ethnicity, or the ways in which individuals claim, or are
claimed by, particular ethnic identities. Key works and collections which address
all of these issues of ethnicity among European groups in the United States
include Werner Sollors’s Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American
Culture, The Invention of Ethnicity (ed. Sollors), The Ethnic Enigma: The
Salience of Ethnicity for European-Origin Groups (ed. Peter Kivisto), and
American Immigrants and Their Generations (ed. Kivisto and Dag Blanck).
More specifically, ethnicity in communities on the Great Plains and the western
part of the United States is addressed in Ethnicity on the Great Plains (ed.
Frederick Luebke) and European Immigrants in the American West: Community
Histories (ed. Luebke).
As with literature on ethnicity in regards to European ethnic groups and
their descendants in the United States, much has been written about articulations,
stagings, and performances of heritage and tradition in the United States. By
necessity, this literature has often been concerned with questions of the
authenticity of such articulations, stagings, and performances. In the past, a
number of scholars have taken a skeptical view of events that, like the festivals at
the center of this study, are promoted as authentic (or at least as containing
authentic folk elements such as costumes, dancing, craft demonstrations, etc.).
Richard Dorson attempted to draw a distinction between authentic folklore and
9

spurious “fakelore,” which he defined as “a synthetic product claiming to be
authentic [. . .] but actually tailored for mass edification” which “misled and
gulled the public” (5). In a similar vein, Daniel Boorstin attacked “pseudo-
events,” non-spontaneous events planned primarily (though not necessarily
exclusively) for the purpose of being reported or reproduced and make themselves
important by stating their own importance (11-12). And Dean MacCannell
differentiated between authenticity and “staged authenticity,” which he defined as
a setting designed in advance to appear authentic, but which in reality is
inauthentic, geared toward tourists looking for authentic experiences (597, 599,
602). These concepts, however, are too skeptical to be useful in analyzing Dutch-
American heritage celebrations. Such celebrations do often claim a measure of
authenticity, but they are not designed to mislead or gull the public, as in
Dorson’s formulation of fakelore. Nor are they the “contrived [. . .] cultural
mirages” Boorstin denounces as “pseudo-events.” Similarly, MacCannell’s
characterization of “staged authenticity” as “superficial” or “tacky” events
designed to, in a sense, trap tourists (599, 602) does not ring true of the five
festival under study here. Indeed, none of these concepts do justice to, or seem
particularly concerned with, the evidently earnest townspeople attempting to stage
an “authentic” event for themselves as well as their visitors. The same is true of
Hobsbawm and Ranger’s “invented tradition,” which is inadequate for
understanding the ostensible “authenticity” present in these festivals. As Tad
10

Tuleja points out, for Hobsbawm and Ranger, “invented traditions” tend to be
imposed by an elite on the masses for purposes of social control on a national
scale (1-3), and such is clearly not the case with these five festivals .
As far as authenticity is concerned, this study will, following Regina
Bendix, Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimlet,
regard ethnicity, tradition, and heritage displays as categories which are inherently
constructed and therefore cannot be divided into “authentic” and “inauthentic”
camps. Bendix, who comments that “ethnicity and authenticity have grown to be
uneasy partners,” observes that, when applied to ethnicity, authenticity is
“contextually emergent, lacking the lasting essence that human beings have
wished to attach to it” (210). Regarding tradition, Handler and Linnekin argue
that it is “an ongoing interpretation of the past” (274) and that it is always
“invented because it is necessarily reconstructed in the present, notwithstanding
some participants’ understanding of such activities as being preservation rather
than invention” (279). Accordingly, “it is impossible to separate spurious and
genuine tradition, both empirically and theoretically” (281) because, quite simply,
“to do something because it is traditional is already to reinterpret, and hence to
change it” (281). And Kirshenblatt-Gimlet, building on the insights of Handler
and Linnekin, argues that heritage, “while it looks old [. . .] is actually something
new. Heritage is a mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to
the past” (7). In terms of the five festivals I am studying, one could say that the
performances therein (or each festival-as-performance) do not simply reflect,
11

recall, or remember heritage, tradition, or ethnicity. Instead, these festivals
actually help construct the heritage, tradition, and ethnicity on display. As Joseph
Roach states,
The social processes of memory and forgetting, familiarly known as
culture, may be carried out by a variety of performance events, from stage
plays to sacred rites, from carnivals to the invisible rituals of everyday life.
To perform in this sense means to bring forth, to make manifest, and to
transmit. To perform also means, though often more secretly, to reinvent.
(xi)
Instead of debating the objective authenticity of the performances in these
festivals, I will instead investigate the festivals and their component elements as
“creative strategies,” to use Stephen Stern’s term (xi-xx), or as “usable pasts,” to
use Tad Tuleja’s (7). In either case, the ethnicity, heritage, or traditions displayed
during the course of the festivals I am studying are best understood as strategies,
creative responses, or makings and remakings of tradition designed to address
present concerns, issues, or problems (Stern xi-xii; Tuleja 7). As such, I intend to
examine the articulations of ethnicity, tradition, and heritage in each of the five
festivals I am studying. Rather than judging them in regards to a principle of
objective “authenticity,” I will consider to what end ethnicity, tradition, and
heritage are employed or deployed in these festivals. I seek to discover why they
have been employed and deployed, and how successful such employments or
deployments have been. Some discussion of objective authenticity will be
necessary because the actors and organizers of these festivals employ a rhetoric of
authenticity. Nevertheless, ultimately the uses to which heritage, ethnicity, and
tradition are put are more important than their constructedness, authenticity,
12

accuracy, spuriousness, etc. As Tuleja observes, the fact that heritage, ethnicity,
or tradition are constructed or invented “no more saps them of constitutive
strength than an expose of Parson Weems’s cherry tree story would invalidate it
as a usable legend for American nationalism” (12).
Although “authenticity” is often understood in an objective sense, both by
scholars and the actors and organizers in the ethnic festivals, the insight of
scholars such as Stern and Tuleja that authenticity is itself constructed and of
necessity in dialogue with the present opens up the possibility of other kinds of
authenticity which are not simply matters of objective accuracy. Deborah Che
points out that even if objective authenticity could be applied to phenomena such
as Holland’s Tulip Time Festival, it would be problematic because such events
are “diasporic cultural tourism events, which are products of iterative, fluid hybrid
cultures” (262). Che observes that Holland’s founders were part of a Dutch
diaspora, and as such followed processes of hybridization found in other diasporic
cultures. By necessity, inherited Dutch traditions interacted with the American
“demands of the host society” (261). Thus, for a subculture such as Dutch-
Americans, “it is hard to define a pure or authentic culture,” a difficulty
compounded by the fact that “cultural forms of both diasporic and non-diasporic
groups constantly change as a consequence of external cultural influences” (262).
But if we set aside notions of objective authenticity--either because there is no
such thing or because a hybrid culture cannot have a static original to conform to-
-alternative conceptions of authenticity emerge. Che touches on three such
13

alternative conceptions. Wang Ning promotes the concept of existential
authenticity “in which the authentic self is realized and an existential state of
being is an outcome of tourists’ performance in events outside the routine,”
thereby allowing “for authenticity even if the tourism objects themselves are
inauthentic” (262). McIntosh and Prentice promote a view of authenticity in
which “authenticity is realized as tourists attain personal insights and associations
through their experiences” (262). Most importantly, Erik Cohen advances
“emergent authenticity,” wherein “crafts and festivals that were initially produced
for tourists and considered contrived or inauthentic can acquire new meanings for
locals as a means of self-representation before tourists” (263). In this
formulation, Che observes, “touristic events may eventually be recognized as
‘authentic’ local customs and products of an ethnic group or region” (263). In all
of these alternative conceptions, “authenticity” is more of a dynamic process than
an “original” to be emulated. George Hughes, also approaching issues of
authenticity from a tourism research perspective, advocates a conception of
authenticity joined to an existential perspective:
By resurrecting a more existential perspective, it is possible to find
manifestations of authenticity through individuals’ assertion of personal
identity. [. . .] Authenticity continues to reside in the resistances, choices,
and commitments that individuals express within the opportunities and
constraints provided by globalized markets and global imagery to which
international tourism is an increasingly major contributor. (799-800)
Such perspectives on authenticity thus encourage an examination of what uses
existential or emergent conceptions of authenticity can be deployed.
14

Also relevant to this study is tourism scholarship. I have already touched
on the Deborah Che’s tourism-centered approach to Holland’s Tulip Time
Festival, as well as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimlet’s Destination Culture, which
addresses issues of displays of heritage pertinent to understanding what festivals
similar to Dutch-American heritage celebrations mean and do. George Hughes
similarly addresses authenticity from a tourism research perspective (and makes
the salient observation that “the issue of authenticity runs, like an obligato,
through tourism studies” (781)). One other study in this area which deserves
mention is John Dorst’s The Written Suburb, which investigates the intersections
of local heritage, tourism, and postmodernity in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
Dorst’s work is particularly important owing to its introduction of the concept of
auto-ethnography (4). Dorst argues that late consumer capitalism (or
postmodernity) has resulted in a situation where a community such as Chadds
Ford generate their own ethnographic texts about themselves. In other words, a
community is capable of observing and documenting itself (2-3). Dorst presents a
model for studying a community such as Chadds Ford that involves collecting the
texts the community produces about itself and analyzing them. These texts
include postcards, brochure texts, comments by natives, local histories as
presented on items such as restaurant menus, historical society documents, arts
and crafts festivals, museum displays, photographs, popular histories, and
15

souvenirs (5). Like Chadds Ford, each of the festivals I am studying observes and
documents itself, producing a wide range of “texts”--printed and otherwise--that
merit attention in analyzing what each of these festivals means and does.
The various “texts” generated by the residents of each community I am
studying, then, form another incredibly valuable, albeit non-scholarly, body of
“literature” on which to draw. Residents of Holland, Pella, and Orange City have
all produced several popular histories concerning their towns’ festivals.
Newspaper articles from each community document the process of staging each
festival from start to finish. Accordingly, newspaper accounts offer historical and
contemporary comment on how each festival has changed in regard to its
structure, objectives, or effects on the staging community. Each festival has
produced a wide range of souvenirs. Holland, Pella, and Orange City each have
at least one institution which houses substantial documentation, promotional and
otherwise, of each towns’ festival. Orange City, Pella, Fulton, and Holland each
have museums dedicated in whole or in part to the Dutch heritage of each of these
communities. Each community has produced numerous photographs and
postcards. There is no shortage of people willing to talk to about the local festival
to an interested researcher. And, of course, there are the festivals and their
elements themselves. While little scholarly literature addresses Dutch-American
festivals, the people who organize and perform in these festivals have produced
an absolutely immense collection of “texts” concerning their festivals and staging
communities. If Dorst is correct that, in a way, the postmodern tendency to
16

produce a massive proliferation of texts about one’s self (individual or
community) already does what the professional ethnographer is supposed to do,
the problem in approaching the five festivals I am focusing on is not the dearth of
material on them, but rather that there is arguably too much material available on
one festival alone to adequately process it. An embarrassment of riches is, for the
purposes of a dissertation, preferable to a lack, however, and anyone brash
enough to make an entire culture or subculture, even if limited to its celebratory
performances, his or her dissertation topic is probably doomed to biting off more
than what one alone can chew. I therefore refer my readers to the
acknowledgments at the beginning of this document and give thanks that I can
stand on the shoulders of the scholars discussed to this point.
Apart from literature concerning festivals and celebrations which display
ethnicity, there is a growing body of scholarly literature on Dutch immigration to
the United States, as well as on the social, cultural, and economic history of
Dutch-American communities in the United States. This body of literature has
been produced almost exclusively by scholars of Dutch descent, as the relatively
small Dutch-American community has not attracted the attention of many
researchers from other backgrounds. Henry Lucas’s Netherlanders in America is
the foundational work on Dutch immigration, settlement, and the subsequent
history of the Dutch-American community. Published in 1955, this encyclopedic
volume remains a valuable source of information, but of course it is a bit dated.
The same is true of Jacob Van Hinte’s Netherlanders in America: A Study of
17

Emigration and Settlement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in the
United States of America (1928), Arnold Mulder’s Americans from Holland
(1947), and Gerald F. De Jong’s The Dutch in America, 1609-1974 (1974). The
current dean of Dutch-American scholarship is Robert P. Swierenga, who edited
The Dutch in America: Immigration, Settlement, and Cultural Change (1985), a
collection of essays on the Dutch-American experience which significantly raised
the bar of scholarship on this subject and introduced a variety of topics and
perspectives not addressed by earlier scholarship. Swierenga’s most recent
contributions are Faith and Family: Dutch Immigration and Settlement in the
United States, 1820-1920 (2000) which summarizes some four decades of
Swierenga’s research on Dutch immigration and Dutch-American history, and the
massive Dutch Chicago: A History of the Hollanders in the Windy City (2002)
which, while focusing exclusively on Chicago-area Dutch-American
communities, nevertheless provides important insights into the Dutch-American
community at large. The essays in The Dutch American Experience: Essays in
Honor of Robert P. Swierenga. (2000) continue to advance the cause of research
into the Dutch-American experience. In addition, Henry Lucas (Dutch Immigrant
Memoirs and Related Writings), Herbert J. Brinks (Dutch American Voices:
Letters From the United States, 1850-1930), and Johan Stellingwerf (Iowa
Letters: Dutch Immigrants on the American Frontier) have collected and
translated many letters and memoirs of Dutch immigrants, thus making valuable
firsthand accounts of Dutch immigration and settlement accessible.
18

One final area of scholarship deserves mention. There has, of course,
been a great deal of scholarship on festivals and the concept of festival. Part of
the scholarship on festival, however, has been, as well it might be, concerned with
setting out a festival vocabulary. To this point, I have been describing the five
events I am studying as “festivals” because that is the term their organizers and
actors use: Holland Tulip Time Festival, Pella Tulip Time Festival, Orange City
Tulip Festival, Edgerton Dutch Festival, and Fulton Dutch Days Festival. That
having been said, other terms may just as effectively describe these five events.
When compared to the terminology set out by Roger Abrahams in “An American
Vocabulary of Celebrations,” each of these events certainly is a celebration, in
that “people prepare and anticipate in common how they will act and feel”
(“American Vocabulary” 177). It is less clear, however, if these five Dutch-
American celebrations are best described as “rites” or “festivals” in the way
Abrahams understands these terms. Abrahams characterizes “rite” and “ritual” as
events that take place in sacralized spaces, whereas “festival” and “festivity” are
events that take place in the playful and profane domain (175). More specifically,
says Abrahams, “rites” are celebrations that
re-enact, in some part, the way in which the social or natural world is put
together. [. . .] These tend to be traditional--that is, memorable, learnable,
repeatable, susceptible to accumulating important meanings and
sentiments. The meanings, indeed, are often translated into messages,
value-laden lessons explicitly spelled out. (177)
Through this re-enactment, rites emphasize continuity and confirmation of certain
values or characteristics of the celebrants. “Festivals,” by contrast, are “detached
19

from confirmation and transformation” and “are often practiced ‘for the fun of
it.’” Festivals, furthermore, “commonly operate in a manner that confronts and
compounds cultural norms, and therefore operate for the moment in a way
antagonistic to customary ritual confirmation” (177). Rites, according to
Abrahams, are usually attached to ceremonial occasions such as “marriages,
funerals, or migrations,” whereas festivals “operate during those very times when
the life of the group seems most stable, in the “flat” times of the year” (177-178).
In sum, a rite reacts to sociocultural disturbances and emphasizes the community
ties and continuity; a festival creates a disturbance and temporarily disrupts
community ties and continuity (175-181). While setting rites and festivals in
opposition to each other, Abrahams also notes that in noncosmopolitan societies,
rite and festival are often joined together. The division between the two types of
celebrations is more the result of a modern, marketplace-driven separation of the
sacred from the profane than it is an essential, fundamental, or objective
difference between the two types of events. Indeed, according to Abrahams
festivals and rites are “part of the same human impulse the intensify time and
space within the community and to reveal mysteries while being engaged in
revels” (177). Moreover, despite the tendency to separate sacred and profane
occasions, “rites in contemporary culture are still often accompanied by
festivities, and festival often has a designating rite at its core” (177). One must
therefore be careful in drawing too sharp a distinction between sacred rite and
20

profane festival. These are two terms on a continuum of celebration terminology
and not mutually exclusive polar oppositions. And, of course, other terms exist
on this continuum.
Measured against these understandings of rite and festival, the five
celebrations I am investigating could be understood as rites. There is no doubt the
five celebrations are traditional in Abrahams’s sense. They have accumulated
many meanings and sentiments and often translated meanings into messages and
lessons. They emphasize certain values and characteristics of the celebrating
communities, and can be understood as strategies for dealing with current issues
and problems caused by changes or disturbances in the world around the
celebrating communities. At the same time, these events certainly do create
disturbances, in the sense that they interrupt everyday life. Moreover, the five
celebrations certainly contain other characteristics of festivals as described by
Abrahams. They open “the doors of the community” (“American Vocabulary”
178), inviting others in. Accordingly, they provide an opportunity for the
celebrating community to display itself to the outside world by “taking to the
streets,” quite literally, and transforming open spaces into festive spaces. Also,
Abrahams says, festivals ask the celebrants and audience members to remember
and reminisce (181), which each of the five Dutch-American celebrations
certainly does. Each of the five is, fundamentally, an occasion for opening the
community up and displaying it for an outside audience, and therefore a festival.
At the same time, each of the five is very much concerned with transmitting
21

messages in reaction to changes taking place in the surrounding world, and
therefore a rite. Arguably, then, each of these celebrations is a festival, but a
festival preoccupied with ritual concerns to the point that any meaningful division
between festival and rite is frequently blurred to the point of obliteration. This
overlap is hardly surprising; again, Abrahams explicitly states that it is common,
if not usual, for rites to include festival elements and festivals to include ritual
elements (177).
Further complicating the terminological picture, Abrahams provides
another term which also accurately describes these five celebrations: display
event. In her study of Lindsborg, Kansas’s Svensk Hyllningsfest, Lizette Graden
states that she finds “display event” the most useful term for analyzing
phenomena like the Svensk Hyllningsfest (10). The festivals I am studying are
very much analogous in form and character to Svensk Hyllningsfest (no surprise,
since a Dutch-America doctor familiar with Holland’s Tulip Time Festival was
instrumental in starting Svensk Hyllningsfest), and I agree with Graden that
“display event” is a useful, and perhaps more accurate, term for analyzing and
understanding these festivals. Abrahams defines a display events as “planned-for
public occasions [. . .] in which actions and objects are invested with meaning and
values are put ‘on display’” (“Shouting Match” 303). Display events “require
participation of a substantial group in the preparation and performance and in that
they presuppose an audience” (Graden 10). Moreover, a display event “provides
the occasion whereby a group or community may call attention to itself”
22

(Abrahams, “Shouting Match,” quoted in Graden 10) and wishes to display itself
(Graden 10). Yet another overlapping, and equally useful, concept is Don
Handelman’s “public events,” events which are “culturally designed forms that
select out, concentrate, and interrelate themes of existence--lived and imagined--
that are more diffused, dissipated and obscured in the everyday” (15-16). As
celebrations requiring substantial participation that are specifically staged for an
audience (and thus intended to draw attention to the celebrating community) and
that transmit particular themes, meanings, messages, and lessons, the five
celebrations I am studying can certainly be understood as display events and
public events, but they can also be legitimately understood as rites and festivals.
Therefore, I will use all four terms throughout this study. In doing so, I
acknowledge that the five festivals fit all four definitions and that, moreover, each
of these terms is a not-entirely-fixed node on a terminological continuum.
In the midst of all this literature about festivals, heritage, authenticity,
ethnicity, and ethnic celebrations, my study offers something of a new and unique
direction. In particular, I am taking up the often overlooked topic of Dutch-
American heritage celebrations, several of which were among the first to
specifically use ethnicity to draw an outside audience to the celebrating
community. In other words, three Dutch towns--Holland, Pella, and Orange City-
-were among the first to put their Dutch heritage and ethnicity on display
specifically for visitors to the town. Previous studies of Dutch-American heritage
celebrations have been a summary overview of such events with very limited
23

analysis (Sheeres), focused on a limited time period in an event’s history (Zylstra)
or a single element (such as Van’t Hof on Holland’s klompen dances), or limited
themselves to descriptions of how Holland’s Tulip Time has performed and
played a role in maintaining a separate Dutch-American identity (Sinke, Che).
Although this study cannot hope to analyze each of the many facets of these
festivals, it attempts to tie more threads together by analyzing each festival’s
history, addressing many different performance elements (parades, plays,
pageants, dances, church services, etc.), and more fully elucidating the ties
between the immigrant history of each of these communities and the present-day
ways in which a separate Dutch-American ethnicity is maintained in each of these
towns and represented (or not) in each celebration. I also go beyond previous
studies in several ways. First, I situate these festivals within the wider context of
American festivals, rituals, display events, and other celebrations in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. Second, I attempt to account for the emergence of these
festivals in their particular times and places. Third, I investigate the different
ways in which authenticity has been understood and employed in each of these
festivals. Fourth, I examine the rhetoric employed in various elements from each
celebration (especially tours) as well as in each celebration’s press coverage and
promotional materials. Fifth, I base my research on ethnographic interviews and
observation as well as on documentary research. Finally, I scrutinize each
24

celebration for themes, meanings, messages, and lessons presented in each
festival as well as for the discontinuities or disagreements manifested in each
celebration.
Beyond content, this study offers something new and different in terms of
structure. Previous studies of similar displays of ethnic heritage have tended to
intensively study one celebration in one community alone (Danielson, Hoelscher,
Graden, Zarilli and Neff, Swiderski, Silverman, Cronin and Adair) or compare
two celebrations from communities with different ethnic backgrounds (Hoelscher
and Ostergren). John Bodnar’s Remaking America and Collective Memory and
Ethnic Groups compares several different celebrations both within and across
community and ethnic lines, but each celebration is only treated briefly and, in
Remaking America, all of the celebrations studied are cited in service to Bodnar’s
overarching narratives about the changes in public commemoration over the court
of the twentieth century he detects (namely that local articulations of public
memory and commemoration have been increasingly replaced by national
articulations of public memory and commemoration). In this study, however, I
seek to open new ground by intensively comparing and contrasting multiple
display events celebrated by communities which share a common ethnic heritage
and, as chapter three shall demonstrate, a rather coherent, close-knit subculture.
These five events will be studied both in the present and past, and the concluding
chapter will address questions and concerns the celebrating communities have
about the future of their festivals. Throughout this study, rather than imposing my
25

own perspectives and theoretical models on each of these celebrations, I attempt,
as far as possible, to let the “texts” produced by organizers and actors, as well as
the organizers and actors themselves, speak for themselves.
As the beginning of this chapter indicated, I approach the study of these
five celebrations as an insider to the wider subculture being studied. Until the age
of 23, I lived in communities inhabited predominantly inhabited by Dutch-
Americans, went to their schools and colleges (specifically Calvin College), and
attended (and continue to attend) their churches (specifically the Christian
Reformed Church--see chapter three). More specifically, I grew up in Edgerton,
Minnesota and directly participated in almost every summer Dutch Festival until
the age of 21. Moreover, I attended many Tulip Festivals in Orange City and
spent many more hours in Orange City and its environs, since many friends and
relatives of my parents lived in Northwest Iowa. I spent four years living a half
hour away from Holland, Michigan, attending college with many individuals who
had grown up in Pella, Fulton, and Holland; some of my dearest friends were born
and raised in Holland. Bonds of education, church, family, and friends, as well as
my own Dutch heritage, inextricably link me to the wider Dutch-American
community (and as we shall see in chapter three, it is these bonds which have
allowed a distinct Dutch-American community to survive and flourish in spite of
a geographically scattered nature). I therefore come to this project equipped with
knowledge of the internal workings and characteristics of the Dutch-American
community and the Dutch-American enclave of Edgerton, Minnesota most
26

specifically. My insider status has allowed me to gain access to a number of
documents and resources which would have been much more difficult to come by
were I not positioned within the community. It also has served me well in terms
of interviewing individuals for this project, since I am aware of (and probably
bear) many of the distinctions, eccentricities, biases, and peccadilloes common to
Dutch-Americans. Outside researchers arguably would need more time to
identify and understand such factors. At the same time, my ability to identify and
speak to these distinctive qualities has also likely made me less aware of other
peculiarities and characteristics outside researchers might notice. I have tried to
remain a critical but balanced observer during my observations, research,
interviews, and analysis, but I do recognize that I am studying my people, and
therefore myself, which will naturally raise questions about how my own biases
are manifested in this study.
My methodology in approaching these five celebrations is, necessarily,
interdisciplinary. In the first place, my training is in theatre studies, and so I
accordingly will be focusing on the theatrical--broadly construed--elements
present in each of these celebrations, including pageants, plays, dances, floats, and
other programs. More importantly, however, I will be approaching each festival
as a performance or theatrical representation of the celebrating community’s
heritage, identity, and Dutchness. Each of these celebrations employs costumes,
sets, sound, and lighting effects as one would encounter in a theatrical
performance. Each celebration presents a series of images and representations to
27

an audience with the aim of communicating something about the celebrating
community to that audience. And each celebration follows a script of one sort or
another. At times the script is fairly loose, developed and constructed because of
the spatial and temporal gaps between planned events; at other times, it is quite
specific, particularly during town tours, parades, and plays and programs. I am,
therefore, approaching these celebrations as one might approach and analyze a
dramatic text. First, I look for common themes, internal continuities and
discontinuities, repeated tropes, metaphors, etc. Then, I speculate on the effects
and purposes of the (re)presentations of these themes, tropes, and metaphors, as
well as any internal inconsistencies.
In the second place, descriptions and analyses of festivals and celebrations
have often been the domain of folklorists and ethnographers; accordingly, I
approach these festivals from a folkloric and ethnographic perspective. I have
endeavored to gather as much material produced by the organizers and viewers of,
and participants in, each of these celebrations as possible. This has, of course,
meant a good deal of on-site fieldwork, gathering what documents are available
but, of equal importance, interviewing townspeople who have been involved in
these celebrations and, naturally, observing the various festival events themselves.
In doing this fieldwork, I have been particularly influenced by John Dorst’s
notion of autoethnography, as described above. It is my conviction that the
residents of each of these five towns have already described and documented
themselves; my job has been to gather together the documentation (or “capture” it
28

on recording and paper, in the case of my interviews), consult the documenters
and collectors in each of these towns, and then apply my own analysis and
interpretations to the material. In doing so, however, I have attempted, as far as is
possible, to be thorough in presenting the individuals and communities I am
studying in their own words rather than starting with my own preconceived
notions and forcing the gathered materials into particular preexisting frameworks.
I have, in fact, found most of my preconceived notions about these celebrations
(and how best to study them) woefully inadequate to presenting the complexity of
these events and the people involved in them. I began, for instance, thinking that
I would find a high degree of similarity from celebration to celebration, and that it
would be my task to show how these events impose particular political or social
agendas on participants and observers. What I have found is a remarkable amount
of variation among these five celebrations and communities, despite their
undeniably common subculture, and while there are undoubtedly certain agendas
present in each celebration, these agendas are not necessarily those I expected to
find.
Finally, I am approaching these five celebrations from the perspective of
social and cultural history. I have busily plumbed the depths of various archives
in each of these communities and spent more hours staring at microfilmed
newspaper reels than is probably healthy. For Holland’s Tulip Time, most of the
documents I was able to collect were found in the “Tulip Time, Inc.,” collection
of the Holland Museum Archives, although a number of important documents
29

were housed in the “Tulip Time Oral History Project” and the “Latin Americans
United For Progress” collections at the Joint Archives of Holland, Michigan. For
Pella’s Tulip Time, a wealth of material (much of it unsorted, leading me to
suspect much more could come to light in the future) was available through the
Pella Historical Village Archives and the Pella Historical Village front office; the
Central College Archives were also a source of some material. A great deal of
material on the Orange City Tulip Festival was housed in the Northwestern
College Archives in the Ramaker Library, including scrapbooks made by the late
Leona Vander Stoep, who chronicled every Tulip Festival from 1936 to the early
1990s. A parallel scrapbook collection on the Orange City Tulip Festival is in
development by Nelva Schreur, the current Tulip Festival historian. Fulton and
Edgerton do not have archival collections, nor was I able to locate any scrapbook
collections for either of these Festivals; however, most all of the promotion and
coverage of these festivals is contained in the local newspapers, the Edgerton
Enterprise and Fulton Journal. As far as the other towns were concerned, I had
access to back issues of the Sioux County Capital and Sioux County Capital-
Democrat (Orange City), the Chronicle (previously known as the Pella Chronicle
and Pella Chronicle-Advertiser), the Holland Sentinel (formerly the Holland
Evening Sentinel) and Holland City News. Locally published or circulated
histories of the town festivals were available in Holland (Randall Vande Water’s
Tulip Time Treasures), Pella (Muriel Kooi’s Festival), and Orange City (Arie
Vander Stoep’s History of the Orange City Tulip Festival). In addition to the
30

archival and newspaper research I have conducted, I also have taken a
historiographical approach to the materials available on these celebrations,
comparing the historical narratives presented about these festivals in local
histories, travel publications, newspapers, and residents’ memories.
My research process for this study began in the summer of 2003, when the
idea to study the Edgerton Dutch Festival first occurred to me at the annual
Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in New York.
Discussions with various individuals about the best way to undertake such a
project followed (I am particularly indebted to Thomas Postlewait, Dorry Noyes,
and Robert Schoone-Jongen for the advice offered on that count), and my archival
research began in December 2004. The bulk of my fieldwork and archival
research took place during four periods. I spent May 2005 visiting Pella and
Holland, attending their respective festivals and gathering materials, archival and
otherwise. I next spent several weeks in July 2005 in Edgerton, attending the
Dutch Festival and ransacking the Edgerton Enterprise files. I then spent one
week in October 2005 at the Pella Historical Village Archives. Finally, thanks to
the freedom afforded by a Presidential Fellowship awarded to me by The Ohio
State University, I was able to spend all of May and June 2006 revisiting Pella,
Edgerton, and Holland, as well as spending time in Orange City and Fulton.
During this period I followed up on my archival research, attended the festivals in
Orange City and Fulton, and interviewed numerous individuals in Edgerton, Pella,
Orange City, and Fulton. This research produced a spring 2004 twenty page
31

research paper on Edgerton’s Dutch Festival and a fall 2004 fifteen page
candidacy examination essay on the history of community celebrations in the
United States. And finally, I have written this dissertation.
This study is laid out as follows. Following this introductory chapter, in
chapter two I provide an overview of community celebrations in the United States
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addressing specific trends
discernible in American community celebrations and display events during this
time period, I pay special attention to the place of ethnicity and heritage within
these events. Basically, chapter two is designed to provide a brief, descriptive
overview of celebrations and festivities into which the Dutch immigrated and
eventually to which they eventually added their own contributions. Chapter three
similarly is concerned with providing a context and background for the five
celebrations I am analyzing. Whereas chapter two deals with the American
celebratory context, chapter three discusses the history of Dutch immigration to
the United States and the Dutch-American subculture that has maintained a
presence since the late 1840s. I begin by discussing the economic and social
conditions in the Netherlands which led certain groups of Netherlanders to decide
to relocate to the United States. I then describe the ways in which the early
immigration to the United States actually proceeded, paying specific attention to
how, from the very start, Dutch settlement in the United States was characterized
by an overwhelming tendency to establish somewhat isolated enclaves
characterized by the dominance of Calvinist ministers. The remainder of chapter
32

three discusses how the patterns established by the first immigrants--settlement in
enclaves, an inward focus centered on religious debate, and a concern with
education from the primary to college level--have continued to define and
influence many, if not most, Dutch-Americans to the present day. A distinct
Dutch-American community remains very much alive and well today; although
many Dutch-Americans at first glance seem to blend in to a larger WASP culture,
they in fact maintain distinct networks thanks to ties of family, faith, and
education and continue to be characterized in large part by internal religious
squabbles.
In chapter four, I begin by discussing the various rituals, festivals, public
displays and public events involving articulations of ethnicity celebrated in
Dutch-American communities before 1929, as many of the elements discernible
in these antecedents to the festivals I am considering are present in the early Tulip
festivals in Holland, Pella, and Orange City. I then proceed to investigating the
emergence of the first three Dutch-American heritage celebrations: Tulip Time in
Holland, Michigan, which began in 1929; Tulip Time in Pella, Iowa, which began
in 1935; and the Tulip Festival in Orange City, Iowa (originally called the May
Festival) which began in 1936. In looking at these three celebrations, I discuss
the various factors that may explain why these three events--once again, among
the first to use the ethnic heritage of a particular community as a way to annually
attract crowds to town--emerged when they did and why each met with immediate
and sustained success. I argue that part of the answer to this question lies in the
33

phenomenon of Hollandmania, a trend in American art and culture as described
by art historian Annette Stott during which Americans were ravenous consumers
of anything “Dutch.” All the while, I place these three festivals in the context of
American immigration, nativism, and prejudice which benefitted the Dutch
communities. Chapter four concludes with an overview of the proliferation of
Dutch-American heritage celebrations following the Second World War, paying
particular focus to the emergence of Edgerton’s Dutch Festival and Fulton’s
Dutch Days Festival. Throughout the chapter, I note important changes that have
taken place over time in each of the five celebrations I am focusing on.
In chapter five, I take up the issue of authenticity in each of the five
festivals. Each of these events (with the notable exception of Edgerton’s Dutch
Festival) has been concerned, almost since its inception, with maintaining an
“authentic” atmosphere during the festival’s proceedings, and a rhetoric of
authenticity has been prevalent in each of these festivals. A concern with
“authenticity” is evident in regards to elements such as folk dances, folk songs,
food, architecture, and especially costumes worn by townspeople during each
festival. Chapter five accordingly focuses on costumes as a case study for how
“authenticity” has been understood by each of these communities over time. In
examining the costuming practices in each community, three things become
abundantly clear: first, several levels of authenticity, or different kinds of
authenticity, are observable in each town’s costuming practices; second, what is
regarded as an “authentic” costume in each community has changed over time,
34

evolving from costumes that conformed to American expectations and stereotypes
to costumes that have been meticulously researched for historical accuracy; and
third, what counts as an authentic costume varies from town to town. The
costumes described as “authentic” in Holland, for instance, differ, sometimes
markedly, from the costumes described as “authentic” in Pella, and both of these
differ from Orange City’s “authentic” costumes. This in turn points to a certain
level of competition that exists between these various communities, not
necessarily for actual audiences, but to stage the “best” or “most authentic”
Dutch-American heritage celebration.
In chapter six, I set authenticity aside and consider other narratives,
stories, meanings, messages, images, representations, and lessons that each of
these five festivals communicate to audiences (and townspeople) in a fairly overt
manner. The first portion of the chapter looks at the various claims in press
coverage and promotional materials from each festival for the various claims
consistently advanced about what each festival means and the effects it has on its
celebrants. Having considered these overt messages about what the festival
means and does, I consider the town tours offered during the Tulip festivals in
Holland, Pella, and Orange City. These tours allow tourists to get beyond the area
of each community most of the celebration events take place in (usually the
central business district) and highlight other aspects of town tour organizers want
visitors to see. As such, these tours arguably put even more of the celebrating
community on display than other celebration elements. Although these tours
35

generally are less overt in their advancement of particular images, representations,
and narratives about the town and its celebration than press coverage and
promotional materials are, the particular sites and attractions singled out
nevertheless serve to communicate fairly evident messages about the values and
character of the towns being toured. For the most part, these messages echo or
supplement the narratives and stories communicated by press coverage and
promotional materials. I conclude chapter six by focusing on the narratives,
stories, and representations of each celebrating community contained in the
various pageants, plays, programs, parade elements, and other theatrical or
paratheatical elements present in each of these festivals over the years. Once
again, these performances, for the most part, supplement the characterizations of
the meanings and effects of each festival present in press coverage and
promotional materials. However, there are examples of these performances which
start to get at more complex issues. This is especially true of the plays of Carol
Van Klompenburg and Mary Meuzelaar that have been staged in Pella in
conjunction with Tulip Time over the last fifteen years.
In chapter seven, I focus on examples of potential and actual discord both
apparent in, and concerned with, each of the five festivals. These examples serve
to at least raise questions about, if not interrupt, the smooth narratives otherwise
presented in the materials available for each festival. I examine three types of
discord evident in the history of the five festivals. First, I consider several
examples of discord arising from simple differences of opinion among festival
36

organizers. Next, I investigate examples of discord that have resulted from
demographic changes that have taken place in Holland, Pella, and Fulton.
Specifically, I look at the ways in which the non-Dutch-American populations in
these communities have interacted, of have failed to interact, with the Dutch-
Americans. The failures of interactions are particularly interesting, in that
narratives of unity among Dutch and non-Dutch in these communities hold a
major place in each festival. Finally, I conclude chapter seven by discussing the
various ways in which religious factionalism within each town, suppressed in
“official” celebration narratives, nevertheless manages to make its way back into
each festival. Moreover, most of the people I interviewed--though initially
insisting that religious factionalism has lessened in recent years--conceded that
the religious distinctions that have historically helped define the Dutch-American
community continue to exist. Thus, more than a century and a half after the first
Dutch immigrants arrived in the United States, the religious factionalism that
drove many of the initial immigrants to the United States still makes a difference
in the Dutch-American communities they founded today.
Although this study will raise many issues and make many observations
about these five celebrations, there are three particular key arguments or themes
that will emerge. Firstly, in studying these events, I will demonstrate that
“heritage,” “ethnicity,” and “tradition,” constructed though these concepts may
be, still mean something today in the Dutch-American community. Dutch-
American identity is not, for instance, an example of what Herbert Gans calls
37

“symbolic ethnicity,” an ethnicity which is simply a matter of a display of
costumes and props. Although each of these celebrations certainly display many
costumes and props in their representations of Dutch heritage, there is, at the core
of these events and their celebrating communities, a connection between the past
and present which is not simply constructed. The actions of the founders and
early inhabitants of these Dutch-American communities established patterns of
behavior and being which still very much influence present-day residents of these
communities.
Secondly, aspects of Dutch-American heritage which still very much
influence present-day Dutch-Americans--especially Calvinist denominations
founded by Dutch immigrants and private school systems--are not the primary
objects, institutions, or people on display during the five festivals I am studying.
On the one hand, Christian denominations--particularly those, like the Dutch
immigrant Calvinist denominations--which tend to be highly cerebral in their
theology are not especially conducive to specific representation within the context
of public or display events. On the other hand, the denominations founded by
Dutch immigrants and their descendants in the United States have a history of
internal feuds, squabbles, and schisms; denominational factionalism continues to
characterize the Dutch-American community today. Accordingly--and
paradoxically--the most influential components of Dutch-American heritage in
many ways to not exhibit the type of unity each of these events is otherwise
interested in displaying. Just as the street scrubbers ceremonially scrub the streets
38

to clean the town up for visitors, narratives presented in each celebration
metaphorically “clean up” the often-contentious religious history in the staging
community. Even so, precisely because it is religion--and perhaps even religious
factionalism--which has allowed and allows heritage to remain a living thing
within Dutch-American communities, it manages to make its way into, sometimes
questioning and interrupting, the articulations of Dutch heritage--the smooth
narratives and the wooden shoes and windmills--that are consciously displayed in
these events. And perhaps because of the living, or lived, heritage within these
Dutch communities, even the representations of Dutch identity presented in each
of these celebrations that are not especially integral to Dutch-American heritage
are approached with a zeal and commitments of time, energy, and financial
resources which far outdistance any tangible economic gains these events may
bring to the celebrating communities.
Finally, comparison of these five display events reveals an undeniable
fact. Although all of these events are staged in towns which share similar ethnic
backgrounds, religious preferences, political preferences, and geographical
situations, a surprising number of differences among these events are discernible.
These differences range from the minute (such as the detail work on particular
costumes) to the much more substantial (such as Edgerton’s lack of any Dutch
dancing, Dutch food, or Dutch costumes during its Dutch Festival when the other
four festivals have a substantial amount of each of these elements). Sometimes
these differences are connected to historical, social, or demographical differences
39

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