Kuyper approached the 1901 elections with high hopes and a touch of anxiety. His hopes were grounded in the disarray on the Liberal side, as he reminded the Antirevolutionary Party convention that April. If “the Christian part of the nation” simply held together rather than rupturing over its divisions as it had in 1897, then their natural majority across the country would assert itself at the polls come June. That prospect, naturally, provoked as great a joy in the ranks as fear on the other side.
Deeper down, the prospect posed a real challenge for a group accustomed to being outsiders. Kuyper’s keynote address thus kicked off the campaign on three notes at once. One was boilerplate campaign rhetoric: “the very same Calvinistic principles” that “once made our country strong and great” would provide direction into a glorious future. At the same time he reassured the opposition that “on that decisive day in June, however intense the struggle has been, we shall greet our opponents not as enemies but as fellow citizens.” The greatest challenge would be for his followers to prove their ability to govern, “not as a closed-off group, not as a coterie [his epithet for the Liberals], neither as a self-seeking caste,” but with the same sensibility that had always marked their personal and family conduct — as “citizens of our country, seeking the best for our fatherland.”
Kuyper’s prediction was correct. The religious coalition (Kuyper’s followers along with a more conservative Protestant mélange led by Lohman and a substantial bloc of Roman Catholics) swept to a 58-42 majority in the Lower House of the States-General, a ten-seat swing away from a Liberal government that was indeed divided and worn out. Kuyper was also correct in noting that victory came from suppressing in-house hostilities toward Catholicism that had cost his coalition dearly in 1897. He was further correct in anticipating that the responsibility of governance entailed a steep learning curve for the coalition. If anything, Kuyper underestimated how steep that curve would be, not least for himself. His convention speech was also, if understandably, less than candid in acknowledging the remarkable run of legislation passed under the previous decade of Liberal rule, a legacy that constricted some of his own room for maneuver. Finally, and characteristically, Kuyper overestimated the power of “principle” to command history. Instead, events — some predictable, some unforeseen — created much of the agenda and the most serious challenges of his term in office. Half of Kuyper’s hopes would be frustrated. But the other half would be achieved, and the momentum he began, eventually harnessed by his successors and opponents alike, made Kuyper’s term mark a genuine new era in Dutch political history.
The Liberal Legacy
By almost every measure Dutch society in 1901 was in better shape than it had been in 1891, when Kuyper had delivered his speech on the social crisis. Severe flu epidemics still struck every winter in the early 1890s, and Friesland’s “starving time” went on for a few more years. But by 1895 the economic depression that had ravaged Dutch agriculture for twenty years was over and a new twenty-year period of strong, steady growth was at hand. Real wages rose thirty percent from 1892 through 1900 while food prices dropped, yielding better nutrition across the board. The Netherlands’ population increased thirty percent from 1890 to 1910 as death rates resumed their downward trend and birth rates stayed high. In part this was a function of rising rates of marriage and at a younger average age, pleasant data for Kuyper’s social ideals. Equally good news was a sharp decrease in rates of alcohol consumption, which would continue through World War I. Kuyper — and a great many others, from all political persuasions — could also applaud a remarkable spread of Dutch savings banks: between 1880 and 1900 the number of accounts increased sixteen-fold, the value of deposits even more.
To some extent these trends simply made up for the hard times of the 1880s. But they were also the harvest of the country’s substantial investments in education via the laws of 1857 and 1878, which were now supplying improved human capital to sustain economic growth. In fact, by the time Kuyper’s cabinet took charge, the Dutch economy was undergoing a “radical structural transformation” marked by real industrialization, continued innovation in agriculture, and sharply increased levels of trade. Dutch international commerce rose faster than world averages even in this late summer of globalization prior to World War I. The colonial trade particularly soared, not least with the end of the Aceh War in 1904, doubling its share of the national income between 1890 and 1913. Icons of the new order appeared everywhere, from the founding of Philips Electric in 1891 to the country’s first women’s suffrage union in 1898 to the First International Peace Conference, which met at The Hague in 1899. Delegates there could see rails being laid for the new electric trams, and the automobile had already debuted there a few years earlier. Both were dwarfed by the explosion of the Netherlands’ bicycle culture, which dated from this time.
These developments instilled a mood of confidence as well as an economic cushion that gave Kuyper’s government room to innovate. Similar circumstances made this a great progressive moment around the world, not just in Europe and the United States but in South America, Japan, and China. Different countries (and different movements within countries) defined “progress” differently, of course, and arrived at different outcomes. For instance, one month into Kuyper’s term Theodore Roosevelt became president of the United States, beginning twenty years of reformist administrations there. By contrast, as Kuyper left office in June 1905, Czar Nicholas II was scrambling to save Russia from further revolution by promising concessions toward representative government. For all their differences, however, progressive movements shared three motifs. All yearned for a fresh form of politics to replace decrepit regimes. All felt liberated from the dead hand of laissez-faire orthodoxy to intervene in the economy — at least to blunt the hardest edges of the new industrial order, at most to move toward real “democracy” in economic as well as political life. And all anticipated that these changes would unleash a new personal vitality that would lead (one more crucial assumption) to a more harmonious society. Kuyper shared every one of these hopes.
The Netherlands’ revival was a trend he inherited, however. The turnaround began under three Liberal cabinets in the 1890s, whose policies redesigned the landscape he would inherit. Even though some of this legislation ironically fated these to be their last years of undivided rule, the Liberal record of accomplishment would be hard for anyone to match, much less a theologically trained leader of a new-style politics and an under-experienced party. The first breakthrough came in the taxation reforms instituted by Minister of Finance Nicolaas Pierson, a former bank executive and economics professor.* Most of the country’s public revenue still came from excise taxes on consumption, a highly regressive system that drained cash from the countryside and left the rich virtually untouched. Pierson’s bill taxed interest on investment and business profits, the precursor of an eventual income tax. A few years later inheritance taxes were raised, and the burden and arbitrary character of local taxes were reduced. The goal was not full equity, much less income redistribution, but greater efficiency and more revenue. That is, the bill represented fiscal modernization of the classic-liberal sort that, over time, irresistibly approached Pierson’s own progressive-liberal ideal.
If tax policy exposed the fault-line at the heart of Liberalism, the rift was exacerbated by Tak van Poortvliet’s franchise proposal in 1893. Indeed, for most of the 1890s, divisions within and alliances across parties were more common than solidarity in any group; the Kuyper-Lohman fight was mirrored among Liberals, Socialists, and Roman Catholics. It was left to the hard-bitten utilitarian Sam van Houten to offer the compromise of 1896 that effectively removed the franchise issue from national politics for the next twenty years despite opposition to it, left and right. Catholics along with Lohman’s conservative Calvinists liked Van Houten’s proposal only a little more than Tak’s. Kuyper lampooned it for being a cloth too big to serve as the conservatives’ napkin but too small to cover a democratic table. Even so, the Liberals would discover that, with forty percent of the electorate now being working class and with rising incomes steadily qualifying more and more people to vote, the new law doomed their hold on power.
But one last Liberal cabinet, this time led by Pierson himself, fashioned their lasting legacy. They established a national health service with inspectors to enforce uniform codes, and set basic housing standards that municipalities had to meet. With Kuyper’s support they eliminated the option of purchasing exemptions from the military draft and instituted Chambers of Labor to represent workers’ needs. They fixed eleven hours as the maximum workday and moved toward compulsory arbitration in lieu of strikes. There followed another set of bills that Kuyper opposed. By a one-vote margin, after some of the most intense debates in Dutch parliamentary history, the Lower House made elementary education compulsory for all children. Kuyper objected that the lack of enough Christian schools to serve orthodox parents’ demands would effectively force their children into secular education. In the courts, juvenile law started moving from punishment to education in dealing with youthful infractions — eroding the moral basis of social order, Kuyper complained.
Finally, a bill was passed requiring industrial workers to carry accident insurance coordinated by a single government bank. Kuyper accepted the compulsory provision but wanted it extended to all workers, and wanted it provided by local cooperatives on an industry- or company-wide basis. His year-long quest to thus incorporate his localist-communal social philosophy was conducted in collaboration with the chief counsel of a leading Dutch railroad firm, who wanted a voluntary and individualistic system for purely financial reasons. The contradiction was no worse than Lohman and the Roman Catholics working with the anticlerical Van Houten in slowing democratization, but it signaled a collusion that the “red Kuyper” would have resisted. For the Liberals’ part, the Industrial Accidents bill was the one piece of a comprehensive package of social legislation that they could maneuver through Parliament. Nonetheless, it “began to prepare the foundations for the modern Dutch welfare state,” and it required the support of Antirevolutionary MPs to pass. Adding this to the Chambers of Labor, which Kuyper had long endorsed, the Pierson administration launched the state model that Kuyper’s Antirevolutionary successors would extend, and that would become full-fledged after World War II. A pattern was set that Kuyper only half liked, but could not in any case undo.
It was against the backdrop of this record, and even more the high expectations of his followers, that Kuyper formed his cabinet in July 1901. He went on retreat to the Hotel Métropole in Brussels to compile a wish list, then spent a month trying to make it come true. It proved to be a more difficult project than he anticipated. For one, Queen Wilhelmina was loathe to appoint him to head the cabinet. She shared the royal family’s suspicion that this “agitator” was a republican at heart, and she had not forgotten his absence from her coronation (during his trip to America) or his putative slurs upon her father. She resented the condescension she perceived in his attitude toward her as a youth (she was but twenty years old) and as a woman. Faced with no alternative, she hailed him to the palace to set some bounds on his administration. There would be strict neutrality with respect to the South African War, lest British naval protection of the East Indies be jeopardized. The pacification of Aceh would go forward, as would reform of the army. And there would be no repeating of a previous instance in which he published Her Majesty’s confidential remarks in his newspaper.
The next challenge lay in the Antirevolutionaries’ lack of a deep bench. As an upstart movement, they had few members with government experience and relatively few with the state-certified university degree required for office. Just as much, Kuyper’s personality worked against him. The one previous Antirevolutionary head of cabinet, Aeneas Mackay, turned down his offer of the crucial ministry of Domestic Affairs; so did Lohman. They remembered Kuyper’s criticism too well to countenance a close working relationship with him or shared responsibility for his actions.
More disappointing was Theo Heemskerk’s decline of the post. Himself son of a prime minister, Kuyper’s aide in the panel-incident at the start of the Doleantie, and chair of the great 1897 fête in Kuyper’s honor, Heemskerk seemed destined to be Kuyper’s eventual successor. Now pressed hard to join the cabinet, Heemskerk kept hedging, pleading devotion to his post on the Amsterdam city council. Kuyper stressed the priority of the national level. When that did not avail, he invoked providence: “There is no one else. So you can see for yourself God’s hand in this and may not toy with our country’s future.” Finally, guilt: “It will be your responsibility before God and man when people hear: ‘He sacrificed the whole Christian cause of people and nation to be an alderman.’ Wouldn’t you regret this the rest of your life, and wouldn’t it become a burden on your conscience that you could never remove?” Nothing worked, however, for Heemskerk was hearing an overruling voice. His wife, a Polish émigré of aristocratic connections, wired Heemskerk from her Swiss vacation: “Kuyper is a liar; the best men forsake him, and you want to stoop to that? It would be madness. I will not go to The Hague under such circumstances.”
This was more than a personal setback. With Heemskerk unavailable, Kuyper had to give up his plan to split off from Domestic Affairs a new department of Labor that he would lead himself. He had to take over the old department as it was, diffusing his focus. One structural change he did execute was to become permanent chair of the cabinet, a role that had previously rotated from one minister to the other over the course of the term. Future leaders followed this precedent, making Kuyper functionally the Netherlands’ first “prime minister.”* For now Kuyper towered over his colleagues, with the exception of two Roman Catholics, J. W. Bergansius at War and Johannes Loeff at Justice. Both of these men, Bergansius especially, had ample experience, good working relationships with both Kuyper and the queen, and a technical command in their departments that won everybody’s respect. Bergansius finally carried out the modernization of the army that had been stalled (mostly by his fellow Catholics) ever since the Franco-Prussian War. Loeff’s presence gave Catholics assurance of equitable enforcement of the laws and laid the groundwork for future social legislation. But another Roman Catholic, J. J. Harte van Tecklenburg, proved a weak hand at Finance, particularly in light of the Liberals’ strong record there. Some eminent Catholics warned Kuyper that Harte was “lethargic” and “pedantic.” In fact, only in 1904 did he come up with new revenue sources (tariff increases) to finance the cabinet’s efforts to promote temperance, child protection, and army reform while simultaneously slashing the lottery and the state income it represented.
Weak figures on the Protestant side included two “men with double names” whose pedigree proved to be greater than their talent. T. A. J. van Asch van Wijck assumed Colonial Affairs with some experience in Surinam but not in the crucial East Indies. His death the next year allowed Kuyper to introduce the younger Alexander W. F. Idenburg to what proved to be a stellar career in the upper echelons of Dutch government, proof of the democratic potential upon which Kuyper had wagered his party. Idenburg looked especially strong compared to the new minister of Foreign Affairs, Robert Melvil, Baron van Lynden, from the old Utrecht elite. Melvil van Lynden administered the Permanent Court of Arbitration newly founded on Carnegie money at The Hague, but he was respected neither by the Dutch diplomatic corps (never having served abroad himself) nor by the queen. Paying more attention to the perquisites than to the business of office, he made one error after another until finally being dismissed in 1904. The ARP’s thin ranks told here more than anywhere else.
This was particularly unfortunate, since the first piece of unfinished business that Kuyper inherited was the South African War. He had thundered for the Boer cause in Parliament and De Standaard during the Liberals’ last term, being especially critical of then-Foreign Minister W. H. de Beaufort’s reticence on the issue. Beaufort was the epitome of what Kuyper disliked in Dutch government — a snob, a classic free-market Liberal, and a derisive opponent of religious politics in general and of Kuyper in particular. It was painful for Kuyper, then, to have to accede to the official neutralist posture respecting South Africa. His response was to make this an “active” rather than a passive neutrality of the Beaufort type. In the two weeks after Christmas 1901, Kuyper undertook a mission to Paris and London to offer the Dutch as an intermediary in negotiations between Britain and the Boer republics. The British cabinet, supporting General Kitchener, replied that they would treat only with the Boers’ military command, on the pretext that they were fighting an insurrection, not invading a nation. Kuyper returned home claiming to have made the Netherlands a player again on the global scene. In fact, just as Melvil van Lynden worried, the British took his efforts to signal that the Dutch had given up on a Boer victory.
In domestic affairs, meanwhile, Kuyper had to implement all the recently passed Liberal laws on accident insurance and compulsory education. As these were expansive ventures in uncharted territory, they took up a great deal of energy and revenue. But his own dreams of social legislation were even larger. Accident insurance should be extended to all (not just industrial) workers, and to their dependents, too. Old-age pensions were even more urgent. Both of these, however, depended upon health insurance, which Kuyper proposed to make compulsory for all. Replicating the Antirevolutionaries’ venerable slogan about education, he wanted private insurance to be the norm, with a public option as backup. Kuyper thus offered a complex bill that was an organic whole for an organic society, architectonic in scale, thick with technical details, and markedly different from the classic-liberal, progressive-liberal, and socialist options that were typically on offer. As such, the draft ran into opposition from all sides in Parliament, as well as legal objections from royal councilors and the courts. In the end Kuyper decided to defer this agenda to the second term that he anticipated winning in 1905.
The Prime Minister Gives a Political Education
Beyond policy, Kuyper early on faced any number of questions about the character and legitimacy of a religiously-defined coalition running a modern state. Here the professor could play from his strengths; he turned Parliament’s question-hour into something of a seminar in applied political philosophy. Separation of church and state? No one had advocated that earlier or more consistently than I, Kuyper replied, citations from Ons Program at the ready. But that did not, could not, mean a separation of religion from politics. Beginning with a quotation from Goethe in the original German, Kuyper offered a disquisition deploying Luther, Calvin, Kant, and the German Idealists to the effect that, as religion and politics both involved fundamental convictions, they necessarily bore implications for each other. But that did not mean a lockstep theocracy, Kuyper continued. No religion prescribes a fixed line of civil policy, least of all Dutch Calvinism. Hollanders have always treasured two things, he maintained: “first religion, and second negotiation. . . . And I not only prefer but positively hope that these two will never depart from our nation, for it would be miserable to surrender either one. Hold both fast, and the land will prosper.”
Kuyper had to return to this point whenever a bill seemed to deviate from his platform or the coalition showed internal disagreements. He had to be more concrete and pragmatic in the Chamber than in the lecture hall or editorial office, as indeed he had already been as an opposition leader during the Pierson administration. “Homogeneity in politics cannot mean and never has meant that the members of a political party come to the same conclusion on every point,” he pointed out. “There is not a single political party in this country that does not adjust its principles to circumstances and does not find a degree of difference among its members as to the application of principles.” See the Liberals on this, the Socialists on that, and our dearly departed Conservatives over there. As to the charge that my reasonable discourse in this House belies what I said in the press or at party rallies? Surely his audience understood: “we all speak high Dutch in the Chamber, low Dutch at the polls.”
The particular partners in this coalition puzzled those who still could not fathom a “monster alliance” between Dort and Rome. What the two shared was more important than their theological differences for political purposes, Kuyper explained. All the secular parties, however personally devout some of their members might be, appealed to strictly human capacities for political guidance, while Catholics and Protestants agreed that, human nature being fallen, the aid of divine revelation was necessary in public as well as private matters. But did not such a broad commonality, the opposition wondered, amount to the very “Christianity beyond theological differences” that his party adamantly rejected for the nation’s schools? No, just the opposite, Kuyper replied. Faith in politics works by “the formula of a Christianity beneath differences in belief.” That is, we start from the top with “the powerful work of the church,” which effects an alteration in hearts and homes, from which we hope “a precipitate of the life of faith” will seep “down deeply” into public life.
A Socialist MP countered that such a filtered Christianity amounted to a simple extension of the Golden Rule, which was the aim of his party, too. We do all wish to love our neighbors as ourselves, Kuyper agreed, but the religious parties obeyed this rule out of “the first and great commandment: You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind, with all your strength.” Thus, our differences with the Honorable Member are not that, as a Socialist, he is a radical, for we too want to get down to radix, the roots of things, Kuyper declared. Nor is it that he is a democrat, for we too have always been democrats — Christian Democrats arrayed alongside Social- and Liberal-Democrats. Rather, the difference lies ultimately in worldview, whereupon Kuyper quoted long sections of Marx and his revisionist disciple Eduard Bernstein to conclude that the Social Democrats’ agenda inescapably rested on its materialist philosophical foundations, whereas Christian Democrats necessarily put “spiritual” forces first. Why then not imitate Gladstone? asked an exasperated Liberal; he was surely spiritual enough and moral to a fault but never theologized his politics. Because, Kuyper mourned, precisely that lack of attention to first principles left Gladstone’s party prone to the imperialist perversions that overtook it once he retired. Gladstone the Christian could not be an imperialist, but his party, not being explicitly Christian, could, and had, to the grave harm of all Europe.
Ethical Hopes, Violent Means
Such repartee eventually gave way to concrete business. In early 1903 a wildcat railroad strike broke out, frightening conservatives with the specter of anarchy and provoking Kuyper to forceful countermeasures. In early 1904 the thirty-year war in Aceh came to an end thanks to a military surge that raised protests back home about brutality to non-combatants. Two core Antirevolutionary promises thus came into question: a harmonious resolution of the social question and an “ethical” colonial policy. Idenburg helped Kuyper meet the latter challenge; Lohman did not serve him as well on the former.
The Antirevolutionary program had been one of the first to demand radical reforms in the already once-reformed East Indies regime, but by the time Kuyper took office the sentiment had become widespread. In 1899 the Liberal journal De Gids published a definitive article on the “debt of honor” that the Dutch owed the Indies, while the Socialists regularly recited the depredations wrought there by wide-open capitalism. Kuyper agreed with that charge but thought the previous state-monopoly to have been no better and the Socialists’ “materialist” nostrums quite inadequate. Before any reform could be implemented, however, the last rebellious holdouts in Aceh had to be pacified. This was an ongoing policy specified by royal command, and it was agreed to by all parties, including, reluctantly, the head of the Socialist caucus in Parliament. Given his erstwhile antiwar stance, Kuyper counted it as one of those necessary adjustments to reality he had mentioned in question-time. “Pacification” meant eradicating guerrilla resistance in the interior, and it proceeded by a five-month campaign that left nearly 3,000 locals dead, over a third of them women and children. It was a Catholic MP who led the protest on the floor of Parliament. From the other side of the coalition, Idenburg and Lohman defended “our small band of heroes.”
Idenburg wrought such redemption out of the situation as he could by mixing official Antirevolutionary prescriptions with the fruits of twenty years’ experience in the East Indies. He also had a supple, realistic personality that was — quite better than Kuyper’s — suited for deal-making. The “debt of honor” that the Dutch owed the colonies required, first, an interest-free loan of 30 million guilders ($12 million U.S., later raised substantially) for infrastructure improvement. Economic exploitation would be repaid by long-term economic development. But Kuyper had always insisted that the Dutch needed to invest in the moral well-being of the Indonesians as well, accelerating their cultural development along authentic native lines so as to prepare for eventual independence. The paradox of paternalism and indigenization evident here was compounded by Kuyper’s insistence that the Christian interest in the colonies be promoted in the face of its majority-Muslim population. Idenburg resolved the issue with a classic Antirevolutionary separation of public and private duties. The Netherlands, “Christian nation” though it was, had no right to proselytize for the faith in the Indies, he repeated, while prudence cautioned against needlessly provoking Muslim resistance. The government could and should, however, give full attention to religious and cultural factors instead of focusing solely on the bottom line, and in that context it was obliged to create an even playing field for Christian witness. Yet that witness would remain exclusively with non-governmental agencies in such promising endeavors as schools and medical missions.
On top of that, and typical of progressive regimes around the world, the Kuyper cabinet promoted good government for the colonies as a value in its own right. Idenburg insisted on strict and transparent accounting in colonial affairs. He commissioned a systematic investigation into the well-being of the Indonesian lower classes, a longstanding demand of Dutch progressives which turned out to be just as long in the fulfillment; the survey was published in thirty-five volumes between 1904 and 1918. He also ordered an investigation of the coolie-labor system, much to the planters’ dismay, and found the results so appalling that he suppressed publication of the data, releasing only the executive summary. He added an Antirevolutionary decentralizing twist in granting greater self-governance to local communities. The cabinet left hanging, however, the question of opening the ranks of colony-wide administration to native applicants.
All in all, Kuyper could count colonial policy as a solid success. It followed his old principles while gaining support from other parties. It focused and accelerated existing momentum into an enduring policy formula.
His response to the railroad strike, by contrast, provoked enormous dissonance, even though most parties agreed that action had to be taken. The event still ranks as the largest civil disturbance in Dutch history. The trouble began with a walkout by Amsterdam dockworkers in January 1903 in protest against dangerous working conditions and the employers’ refusal to recognize their union. By month’s end the action had spread to the railroads, bringing much of the nation to a halt. In early February the government called out the militia at Amsterdam and a few other critical junctions, only to see the companies accede to the strikers’ terms. This quick triumph rekindled an old debate in socialist ranks. The political wing, under the lead of Pieter J. Troelstra, wanted to protect the workers’ gains in Parliament. The anarchist side, inspired by Kuyper’s one-time co-belligerent Domela Nieuwenhuis, disparaged such reform Marxism in favor of a general strike. Domela, with his messianic streak, envisioned a spontaneous eruption of revolutionary consciousness from the collective soul of the oppressed, to demolish the old order at one stroke. Demonstrations to that end, however uncalculated, should be ventured as signs of the new day.
That prospect, as well as the troubling implications of the strike just past, prompted the cabinet to introduce a package of three bills in late February. The first repeated Kuyper’s (and Justice Minister Loeff’s) response in the first instance that an independent commission be formed to investigate labor conditions and recommend such reforms as were needed. The second empowered the government to nationalize public utilities like the railroads in future emergencies and provide substitute workers (likely the military) to operate them. The third declared strikes undertaken for political as opposed to economic purposes to be “criminal” and therefore punishable by law. Troelstra denounced the measures as a declaration of “class war”; Kuyper answered that the public interest required protection against any attempted “seizure” of “the ship of state” by a particular faction.
As the debate in the States General ran on into April, the anarchists upped the ante by calling a general strike. But the response was anything but general, for not only the religious unions but the political socialists doubted the wisdom of the action. Troelstra tried to intervene to “de-escalate” the situation, but the strike dissipated on its own. Thousands of workers lost their jobs, and Kuyper’s legislation passed handily. But his image underwent a facelift in the process. Kuyper the social reformer disappeared from view, replaced by the moralizing authoritarian.
Kuyper always did have potential for the latter image. Establishing fixed authority was the starting point of both his social theory and political program, and he sounded the theme explicitly in floor debate during the April general strike. The immediate problem at hand, he asserted, involved a small band of dedicated revolutionaries who aimed “to overthrow authority and to put in its place another authority, that of the workers.” Back of that lay a meta-ethical issue involving the fundamental character of the country. All societies exist by virtue of a moral bond, Kuyper declared, a commitment to shared rules and concepts. The anarchists’ action broke that covenant and so posed a problem not just for Christians but “for anyone who still holds to our national concepts of justice and morality.”
But Kuyper took pains to avoid the authoritarian label. He invoked examples far and near to support a premise which historians of different stripes have tended to uphold — that any non-socialist party in any industrialized country would have taken similar action to his, or worse. Kuyper cited some of these “great disasters”: the bloody clashes between Carnegie’s private army and striking steelworkers near Pittsburgh in 1892, the Pullman strike that was suppressed by the U.S. National Guard in 1894, the riots and repression closer at hand in Germany, France, and Belgium. By such measure, he argued, to merely call up the militia as he had was a modest measure and, as it turned out, a sound preventive. Finally, he reiterated his party’s defense of the right to strike over economic grievances; so the cabinet had demonstrated during the textile strike at Enschede the year before and, indeed, during the initial dock strike in Amsterdam.
Off the record, Kuyper could have claimed even more. The minutes of cabinet deliberations and his personal correspondence indicate that he and Loeff shared a policy of investigation and mediation even after the dock strike spread to the railroads. At that juncture, however, Loeff fell ill and Kuyper turned to Lohman for advice. Lohman lived up to his reputation in advocating sharp, repressive action. He underscored the threat to general order that the strike posed and deftly appealed to Kuyper’s self-conception. The better elements of the nation were deeply worried by the strike, he wrote Kuyper, and that fear would spread down the ranks with untold consequences unless a strong and decisive leader took action. The relief so wrought would more than atone for any grief from the opposition. Kuyper did not need Lohman or anyone else to invent this line of thought for him, nor was he inclined to modulate a hard line once he had embarked upon it.
As time went on he defended his policy more sharply, particularly in exchanges with Troelstra. The latter was particularly outraged by Kuyper’s characterization of the strike as “criminal,” and vented his ire every time the issue came up again. Just as regularly Kuyper replied with a long review of events, delivered in didactic tones. When Troelstra, as a good Marxist, declared that “objective history” would in the long run mark the episode as a defeat for “black reaction,” Kuyper replied that no such objectivity was possible, especially regarding such hotly contested events: “I think it’s better if we let this fantasy rest.” Still, he allowed that Troelstra’s yearnings evinced some “noble tendencies that are moving him to cleanse himself of the heaviest guilt that can perhaps lie upon a political leader.” “What hypocrisy!” Troelstra injected. The chair called him to order, but this particular bit of Kuyper moralizing he never forgot.
Education and Equity
The moderate opposition was happy to let the cabinet fight with the Socialists over the railroad strike, but their turn came next. First, as minister of Domestic Affairs Kuyper controlled many appointments, including mayors, school inspectors, university professors and trustees, and judges. He had long complained about a Liberal monopoly in this domain and set out to right the balance via affirmative action. That is, without lowering quality, he aimed to raise the proportion of Calvinist and Roman Catholic appointees to approximate their share of the Dutch population. He was particularly sensitive that officials fit the local religious landscape of their posting. This angered Liberals in Parliament and the press, for their pattern of privilege was indeed under attack. The newcomers could not be qualified, old Liberals like Beaufort sniffed; they were new men, not the best men. Kuyper’s appointments especially cut against the grain in four provinces, where one-third of his nominees were installed over the objection of the royal commissioner.* For the upper echelons he typically had to draw from the old Réveil aristocracy as the only candidates with the required schooling. This obstacle he hoped to remove by gaining state certification for private university degrees.
This provision, which would redound to the immediate benefit of the Free University, was part of a broad slate of educational reforms that Kuyper offered, but the most controversial part by far. It is important, therefore, to cover the rest of the package lest it be lost in the shouting, especially since these provisions held real significance for the nation’s future. First of all, Kuyper pushed for greater equity in the funding of elementary education. Religious schools were still receiving only 44 percent of the public schools’ per-student subsidy; that now rose to nearly 50 percent. While full equalization only arrived in 1917, the Christian schools’ share of national enrollments climbed 25 percent already from 1905 to 1910, right after Kuyper’s term. The bill addressed general quality too, lowering class sizes while raising teacher salaries and pensions. Moreover, on the motion of a Liberal Democrat, the cabinet convened an Integration Commission to systematically study all phases and levels of Dutch education; its product (1910) remains a landmark.
Thirdly, against objections that this measure should wait until the integration study was completed, Kuyper pushed to dramatically improve Dutch technical and vocational education. His bill provided night schools for working adults, upgraded the Polytechnical School at Delft to an Institute with university status, and chartered new schools for commercial, agricultural, and industrial education, open also to women. Cynics called this camouflage for his more divisive university bill, but Dutch arrears in this domain had long been a concern of his, and he had facts and figures from Germany, Belgium, and the United States at hand to show the gap to be widening over time. Such education was also a matter of class equity — and no little part of his answer to class conflict. While Liberal Democrats promoted these measures, the classic Liberals with their bourgeois bias had always neglected them, as Kuyper had decried already in his 1891 speech on the social crisis. He was therefore happy to claim the interest of the whole nation as well as of his own socially-rising constituency in upgrading education for the next half-century the way Thorbecke had for the previous one.
Still, it was state certification of private university degrees that drew the greatest attention, and rightly so. This bill amounted to the ultimate test of Kuyper’s original project and the pluralistic vision behind it. Accordingly, on February 24 and 25, 1904, Kuyper delivered a 25,000-word Gladstonian oration on the structure and calling of the university, on the Netherlands’ thin supply of higher education relative to their neighbors’, and on the warrant for acknowledging and equitably accommodating religious differences at the level of formal state policy. His tone was conciliatory, appealing to the common good. Would not the whole nation profit if people of “Christian life-conviction do better than heretofore in their endeavors in the scholarly domain”? Would not civility be improved if we grant equal respect across the religious gaps that divide us? He argued from the history of Dutch higher education, including Thorbecke’s mandating “free” education in 1848; from his own experience as a university founder; and from the inescapable role of “worldview” in shaping instruction and research.
The last assertion provoked all manner of resistance. The philosophical education Kuyper had given his newspaper readers over the years he now condensed into a few parliamentary sessions, in a sophisticated give-and-take rarely matched in those halls. To a query about what Calvinistic chemistry would look like, he answered with long citations from Kant on the organic interpenetration of all the sciences within a framework of organizing principles. Such a paradigm is necessarily interpretive, he continued; witness the current hegemony across the curriculum exercised by evolutionary biology. Not just the Free University but public universities too operated within the controls of one worldview or another. The mantra that higher education served to purge students of inherited doctrine so as to turn them loose for “free choice” was both psychologically false and (given the fads of student life) behaviorally unlikely. But would not systematic worldviews squelch free investigation? No, Kuyper replied; Hugo de Vries was free to pursue his breakthroughs in genetics (published 1901-3) but neither he nor his students ought to be in thrall to the materialist dogmas of Ernst Haeckel (published 1899). As to the integrity and quality of religious education, Kuyper assured the body “from experience” that the Free University was no “drill school” graduating “dressed-up parrots,” but had to be twice as good as the competition to earn half the respect. Finally, if they remembered their history they would recognize that every argument against his bill had been raised a quarter-century ago against Christian lower education; as those fears had not materialized, perhaps the honorable members could be guided by experience instead of inherited dogma.
The Liberals were not amused at their shibboleth being turned against them, nor convinced by Kuyper’s cannonade of arguments. Interestingly, until the railroad strike the Socialists had endorsed equal funding for all elementary schools, not least to quell a possible rupture over religion in the ranks of labor. But Liberal ascendancy had pivoted on the premise of “neutral” public schools raising a “responsible citizenry” by the dictates of “reason,” and Kuyper’s bill struck at that notion substantively and symbolically. It augured to them a dramatically different, and not improved, country — indeed, a future full of peril. Their defeat on a party-line vote (56-41) in the Lower House thus left them leaning on the bare majority they still held in the Upper House. That body duly vetoed the bill on July 14 (Bastille Day, it was noted), only to be dissolved the next week by the queen’s hand but at Kuyper’s initiative. This was a constitutional but highly unusual step, and it caused uproar in the opposition press. Predictably, the special elections returned a religious majority to the Upper House, which then approved the bill in September; it became law the following May. That conclusion and the steps Kuyper took to reach it alienated the Liberals as much as his redress of the railroad strike had the Socialists. The next elections were just a month away.
Cultivating the Spirit
Remarkably, at this acme of his public life Kuyper also produced some of his most memorable meditations, a series that ran in De Heraut between October 1902 and January 1904 and was collected as the first volume of To Be Near Unto God. The intensity of his public role might have had a reflex effect in Kuyper’s private life. He had to give up his other familiar outlets, the theological podium at the Free University and eventually his editorial page in De Standaard. His personal voice was thus channeled into the Sunday devotional column, making it something of the premier’s spiritual journal.
These particular reflections also showed what Christian mysticism can look like with a Reformed slant. The very day that Kuyper won the 1901 elections he sent his publisher the manuscript of Drie Kleine Vossen, the “three little foxes” that threatened the vineyard of God’s church (Song of Solomon 2:15). These were intellectualism, mysticism, and “practicalism”: head, heart, and hand; reason, emotion, and will — each good in itself, Kuyper said, each damaging if exercised in isolation. In Near Unto God that balance shifted. The now-former professor gave the head least regard, and the current prime minister treated the hand of practice with marked ambivalence. The mystical heart took the lead.
Kuyper’s series built through three parts: thirteen meditations on scriptural images of God (10-22), twenty on the ways that we come to know God (23-42), and fourteen more (43-56) that oscillated between Christ as the crux of all these insights and the revelatory significance of the saint’s affliction. Each meditation was an excursion on a biblical text; Kuyper as ever held Scripture high and binding. But each was concerned to translate the Word into experience, the soul’s experience. “All religion is personal at the core,” Kuyper declared; “the powers of the kingdom communicate themselves to you in the inner man.” Amid the hubbub of modern life, even a prime minister’s life, it was essential to delve down to the internal, to leave material forms for the spiritual plane and there conduct one’s business with the Lord. That business might be terrifying, Kuyper warned, for holy Majesty brooks no human imposition, not from the unwashed sinner and especially not from the presumptuous saint. Yet it was business that had to be done if one wished to have any claim on being a Christian — particularly if one wanted to be busy as a Christian in the world. The “highest” appropriation of the divine comes from “a hidden walk with God himself,” said Kuyper, and “the influence that goes out from this hidden walk far excels all others at strengthening our heart.”
Near Unto God exercises a venerable theme in Reformed spirituality: the absolute chasm dividing God, eternity, and the demands of pure religion from the realm of humanity, time, and our best efforts; the sole sufficiency of Christ’s work in bridging that gap; and the earnest, faltering, yet persistent effort of the believer to appropriate that work, to rest in it, glory in it, cry over it, and yearn for its experiential return once he had, inevitably, fallen again from the ideal. Kuyper’s readers would have been familiar with the pattern from Pilgrim’s Progress, and as in that classic, there is in the first volume of Near Unto God virtually no place for the institutional church. Nor does the Holy Spirit appear — not even in Kuyper’s meditation on the Trinitarian Name!* Kuyper’s searcher is the solitary individual mystically engrafted into the hidden transactions between Father and Son.
On the other hand, Kuyper was less judgmental than Bunyan. Near Unto God gives scant attention to the sins of the world, more to the religious futility of earnest ethical striving, and most to the lassitude of the righteous. How very few even among the devout give sufficient attention to God, Kuyper mourned. How very great, accordingly, were the patience of God and the mercies of Christ. One fraught but telling way to God is through experience of His forgiveness, he noted. It was Paul the persecutor who burned with greatest enthusiasm for God’s love, just as it was the prostitute anointing Christ’s feet who rendered an enduring model of “tender faithfulness.”
As in much mystical reflection, Kuyper explicated the spiritual quest through material images from Scripture. Just as the Son is the supreme image of God among the human race, so is the sun in the astronomical domain; both bring warmth, color, and light. In the animal kingdom God is best signified by wings, which provide both protection and transcendence; in the atmospheric world by the wind, high, spontaneous, and free; among human works, by the temple, the wind’s opposite — set, stable, and protective. The Christian life properly oscillates between these poles, Kuyper wrote; likewise, between sunrise and sunset and around the four seasons of the year. Finally, Kuyper echoed the old passion of Dutch pietism to “rightly divide the Word” by speaking to the exact state of each reader’s heart. Sorrow for sin declines along three distinct stages, he averred. The responses of the nominal and genuine believer to unanswered prayer are “altogether different.” The return of the saint is to be clearly distinguished from the conversion of the sinner. Jesus had a reason for turning the Old Testament’s three- into a four-fold love of God — with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and in just that order.
At the center of the series stand Kuyper’s meditations on the will (29-34) and love (35-42) as a two-fold path to the knowledge of — not just obedience to — God. Signaling a turn from the systematic intellect he had stressed for thirty years, and with an uncanny echo of the educational philosophy that John Dewey was publishing at the same moment, Kuyper insisted that when it came to knowing God, Christians could learn only by doing. More practical circumstances were in play as well. Kuyper’s meditations on knowing God via the will (that is, action) appeared during June and early July of 1903, as Parliament wrapped up a stormy six months of dealing with the railroad strike. The series on love followed immediately and carried over into September, when the next session of Parliament opened with the queen’s Throne-Address (drafted by Kuyper) which, again, labeled the strike “criminal.” In other words, Kuyper wrote these particular meditations during, after, and in anticipation of further harsh confrontations with Troelstra on the floor of the Lower House. What did it mean to “love” in these circumstances? It meant everything, Kuyper said; it was proof of the Christian’s pudding. “He that loveth not knoweth not God” read the title of his September 6 meditation. Kuyper took it straight to the top: “the world-riddle and the riddle of our soul ever and always comes down to this one thing: Is there grace, forgiveness and perfect reconciliation for me?” The answer was severe: complete forgiveness from God expects pure love from us, “that deepest love which makes you forgive from the heart those that have wronged you. Only he who so loves, knows God.” So Kuyper had to forgive Pieter Jelles Troelstra, who had and would utter all sorts of maledictions upon his policy and character. Moreover, this “must be an honest forgiveness, without any reservation. Not one single seed of anger or bitterness must remain in you.” How is this “almost incomprehensible, and yet absolutely necessary” love attained? Only by the grace that enables us to see in our erstwhile enemy the image of God still there, just as God saw it in us when working out our redemption. “Thereby alone,” Kuyper concluded, “is the Gospel your salvation.”
Kuyper admitted that this might sound like “works righteousness” to traditional Calvinistic ears; likewise with the touchy subject of the freedom of the will. Just as the Reformed fathers discussed the will as they understood it in their time, he reminded his readers, so we must develop their thinking in light of our own. The nineteenth century just past had been preeminently an age of the will, exaggerated to a fault by everyone from German philosophers to captains of industry. Yet this emphasis had to be redeemed, not quashed, for the will was a democratic faculty fit for the new twentieth century, as the intellect was not. Religiously speaking, the will is “the urgency of the soul itself,” the faculty of “that living soul-knowledge of your God, which itself is eternal life.” Willpower was essential for an embattled Christian politician, too. Two days before his harshest exchange with Troelstra (30 June 1903), Kuyper’s meditation in De Heraut compared the irresolute man who is blown about helplessly by “tide and wind” with “the helmsman” who, directed by the divine Captain on the bridge, holds firm the tiller, also of the ship of state. “Such is the man of character, the man with will-perception and will-power, who does not drift but steers,” Kuyper declared. And what is “this continuous process of being ever more nearly transformed after the Image of God” but the will of God entering “ever more deeply into us”?
“What hypocrisy!” Troelstra thundered at Kuyper two days later. What self-righteousness might I have exhibited, Kuyper seems to have wondered to himself, for his next column meditated upon Romans 7:15: “what I would do, that do I not; but what I hate, that I do.” “There is something bold, something brutal, in this will-life of our times,” he reflected. That something made Paul’s stark paradox all the more necessary for the believer to mind: we draw near unto God mostly by our failed attempts to live up to our stellar ideals. The next meditation in the series captured Kuyper in a morning-after mood, in one of his most poignant moments. The reflection was entitled “Not as I Will,” quoting Jesus at Gethsemane and casting the Christian life as the way of the cross. In times of overconfidence, Kuyper began, we see ourselves at “the center of things . . . [with God] there to make us happy.” It is “our honor” we have in view — or fighting boldly for God’s honor, he might have added. Inevitably, we run into grief and conflict and so fall into lethargy or even depression: “you become suddenly aware that this great God pays no attention to you, that He does not measure or direct the course of things according to your desire.” The lesson he had learned at the cataracts of Switzerland after his nervous breakdown now returned: “God’s reality, His Majesty which utterly overwhelms you” holds a plan of salvation which is not of, by, and for human beings, but of the Lord alone. Only when our soul “abandons the theory of Job’s friends and, like Job, receives the answer from God Himself out of the whirlwind” do we learn that “His counsel and plan are as high as heaven and consequently exceed our comprehension.” It is thus not ours to seek “the verification of His counsel but to enter into the life of it,” be it through joy or sorrow. Therein lies “our honor and the self-exaltation of our soul.”
The sorrow would descend soon enough.
*Several other Liberal leaders also had formal training in economics, a crucial asset at this juncture and one typical of progressive movements around the world.
*The title was not officially used until 1945.
*Constitutionally, the provincial commissioner answered to the queen and possessed advisory but not veto power on these posts.