The Dilemmas of Christian Democracy
Kuyper staged a dramatic return to public life after his Mediterranean tour. The venue was no less than the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and the performance was another of his classic orations, this time commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Dutch poet William Bilderdijk. The reception was rapturous. The best Dutch cartoonist of the day, Albert Hahn, satirized it as the triumph of an ancient conqueror in modern guise, the returning hero borne off on the shoulders of the democratic throng. That image held several layers of irony, not the least being that Hahn, a devout socialist, was a great fan of the masses. Yet in this instance, by his standards, they seemed unaccountably misguided. For his part Kuyper had just delivered a substantial scholarly address that ran in print to forty-three pages of text with another thirty-seven of notes — an odd occasion for popular acclaim. Finally, as Hahn’s caption quipped (“How Bilderdijk was celebrated at the Concertgebouw”), Kuyper’s treatment of the poet contained a fair bit of self-projection. What neither Hahn nor his subject knew was that on the Concertgebouw stage that night the last act of Kuyper’s career was inaugurated, with a clear preview of the plot to come.
Kuyper gave his audience the Calvinistic and fiercely Orangist Bilderdijk they expected but also turned him into an avatar of his own program. Bilderdijk was an organic thinker, sweeping away the “cobwebs” of dry Enlightenment rationalism. He was a Romantic genius, reviving the national soul from the torpor of French occupation. Bilderdijk had created a “worldview,” Kuyper claimed, and its ontology and epistemology resembled his own. Especially apropos was Kuyper’s invocation, in his very opening line, of Bilderdijk’s chosen symbol, the matador. Here was a ceaseless fighter, striving not against flesh and blood but against demonic forces that threatened the undoing of peoples and nations. That struggle, suffered life-long, made Bilderdijk less than a pleasant character, Kuyper granted. As with Edmund Burke, a hero in one of Kuyper’s earliest orations, his years increased in bitter complaint. But all this had to be forgiven, and not only because such was the nature of genius. Rather, Bilderdijk, returning from exile, had “called back our Netherlandic folk from the shadow of death into the sunshine of life.” Should a like “day of wrath” ever descend again, Kuyper prayed, may the Netherlands again be rescued by a new Bilderdijk.
That Kuyper’s speech announced his own return from exile precisely one hundred years after Bilderdijk’s was obvious to friend and foe that night. Its hints about the future are more evident in retrospect. From here on out Kuyper would consistently criticize the modern disease of “individualism,” and his own demands, like the poet’s, would grow more insistent. Wrangling and insult increasingly attended him. He fell out with “intellectuals,” particularly fellow Christian intellectuals. His political challenge was equal to Bilderdijk’s but from the opposite direction. Whereas the poet had scorned everything associated with “progress” and popular rule, Kuyper had to wrestle with the dynamics of democracy achieved: with socialists to the Left, with Christian Democrats he had inspired, most of all with the transition from charisma to routine typical of modern mass movements. Those were the external challenges. The personal one was to become reconciled to the inevitable decay of his powers. That reconciliation came very late.
Arguments in the Party
Back in harness, Kuyper faced the consequences of his decision to bolt the country the year before. Three Antirevolutionary MPs had offered him their seats after the 1905 elections so that he could continue in Parliament, but he had demurred. Nor did he resume his post as party chairman until September 1907. That was only three months before Theo Heemskerk (who led the ARP’s caucus in his stead) inadvertently set off the collapse of the minority Liberal government with a speech against its defense budget. The queen then asked Heemskerk to form an emergency cabinet from the religious parties. Kuyper objected to this course on several grounds — that Heemskerk had not consulted him as party chairman, that he had cooperated with the Social Democrats in toppling the Liberals, that the new cabinet’s minority status would force it into too many compromises. Better to have let the Liberals continue to decay in power so that the religious coalition could score a more resounding success in the next elections, he argued.
That strategy was defensible, but the complaint about aligning with the Left was not, as Kuyper had done the same in the franchise battles of the 1890s. He admitted to a friend that “there is something personally difficult in all this. . . . After the way I was run off like a scoundrel in 1905, I had quietly hoped for a rehabilitation. Instead of that” Heemskerk’s moves amounted to “another push down.” Kuyper believed that Heemskerk had plotted the Liberals’ demise in advance. He was grieved, if hardly surprised, to learn that the queen had rejected out of hand Heemskerk’s recommendation that Kuyper form the emergency cabinet, or that Lohman had endorsed her decision. Most of all, he could not separate issues of personality, policy, and power in this episode, or later. The result was an unnecessarily rocky road for his party over the next ten years, and the loss of friends, colleagues, and something of his own reputation in the process.
Contrary to Kuyper’s fears, the religious coalition had its best election ever in 1909, sweeping to a 60-40 majority in the Lower House. The Antirevolutionary members of the cabinet now composed a solid collection of talent and vision. Alexander Idenburg, Kuyper’s best friend these years, came back from Surinam to be colonial secretary. In 1911 another acolyte, Hendrik Colijn, became minister of defense based on twenty years’ experience in the East Indies. Heemskerk, in charge of domestic affairs, hoped to engineer an overhaul of the constitution to resolve the perennial issues of education and the franchise. Aritius S. Talma as secretary of agriculture, trade, and industry would literally give his life to promoting the package of social legislation left over from Kuyper’s term. Originally a minister in the national Reformed church, more recently the leader of the labor-left in the ARP, Talma was a more knowledgeable and experienced version of the red Kuyper of the 1890s.
The whole cast Kuyper could have justly claimed as the mature fruit of his inspiration. Instead, back in the Lower House (since 1908), in his editorials, and at the head of the party Central Committee, he raised questions and voiced doubts. First these were quiet and in-house, but by the end of 1911 he was speaking out in Parliament and in 1912 he went national with a hundred-page pamphlet. The tide crested in 1915 with a long series of editorials in De Standaard diagnosing what had gone wrong with the Heemskerk regime (it was roundly defeated at the 1913 polls), followed by a battle of pamphlets in which Heemskerk and his friends fought back.
Kuyper’s complaints ranged from substance to strategy to tactics and tone. He argued that Heemskerk should have approached constitutional reform one piece at a time rather than trying for a comprehensive deal. He argued just the opposite about Talma’s decision to break up Kuyper’s old social-welfare package into a series of discrete proposals. He most belabored Jan Hendrik de Waal Malefijt (who took over the colonial desk when Idenburg became governor-general of the East Indies) for not promoting publicly funded Christian education there on the model that the ARP advocated for the Netherlands.
Each of these complaints was contestable. Constitutionally, there would be no settlement on education without a deal on the franchise. Talma had seen Kuyper’s package of social law bog down precisely because of its scale and complexity. As for the colonies, Idenburg himself wrote Kuyper that religious education there was a far more complicated matter than it was back home. On the other hand, Kuyper could accurately contend that the five-plus years of the Heemskerk administration produced less than hoped for, certainly less than its large majority augured. Constitutional revision was left for the succeeding administration. Talma’s bills were obstructed, pruned, or killed one at a time, not least by opposition from conservative religious quarters. The acts that did get passed received their enabling legislation only in 1919 (disability and old-age insurance) and 1930 (health insurance). Finally, more critics than Kuyper found Heemskerk weak on some points of leadership; he was an uninspiring speaker who preferred conciliation to hard bargaining.
For Kuyper the latter trait betrayed a deficiency of principle. Heemskerk with his “happy Christianity” was too quick to forget the ultimate issues hiding in prosaic legislation, too prone to trim the cause of the Lord for the sake of parliamentary etiquette. Kuyper advocated the opposite tack at the 1909 party convention, when he resurrected unapologetically his theme from the previous campaign. Christ said he came not to bring peace but the sword, he reminded the delegates, so his disciples were called to “a battle of principles” to see whether “the course of our governmental policies will be set by the will of man or the will of God.” Nor was the antithesis a formula for political failure. On the contrary: “The Antithesis is the cement of the Coalition. Whoever weakens or obscures it at the same time weakens the cooperation of the Christian parties” and thus opens the way — the only way — for the secular parties to triumph. Four years later, in the wake of Heemskerk’s defeat, Kuyper concluded that his cabinet had done just that. Compromising on substance only encouraged the opposition to hold out for more while deflating the zeal of the faithful.
The moral of the story seemed to be that an unrelenting focus on first principles was as good for business as it was for the Lord. But was it so? And was the business at hand getting elected or governing? The first is a perennial question for Christians in public life as the second is for any political party. For pioneers of Christian democracy like Kuyper, the two dawned together as a new and perplexing challenge. Having low tolerance for perplexity, Kuyper instinctively moved toward ideological purity.
It was to his credit, then, that on the campaign trail in good years (1909) and bad (1913) he reminded his listeners of the hard realities of the governing process. To get elected at all, he repeated, we must ally with Christian conservatives to our right and Roman Catholics whom many in the audience still regarded as dangerous. If political friends expected some horse-trading in setting legislative priorities, how much more cluttered would the process inevitably become in maneuvers against the opposition?
Kuyper did empathize with the frustration of the zealots in the crowd. He evoked the noble isolation of Groen van Prinsterer and the freedom it permitted for boldly pronouncing high ideals; were it up to me, Kuyper mused, I would spend my last days in an all-out “guerrilla” campaign. Nonetheless, God having ordained different circumstances, he called his followers to the patience and prudence of responsible governance. Nor as an anti-revolutionary party could they proceed by demolishing the house of state and starting over; we “must build upon what Liberalism has bequeathed us, in its rococo style.” That made it all the more necessary to set forth ultimate goals clearly, emphatically, repeatedly, lest they be lost in the dim halls of legislation. For Kuyper, aiming high was necessary to keep up morale in the ranks so as to generate the power needed to bargain from strength in Parliament.
From Heemskerk’s point of view, the first problem in this formula was that Kuyper did not trust anyone else to conduct that bargaining; thus, what had been “necessary negotiation” in 1902 became “feckless compromise” in 1912. Secondly, one could not simply turn the rhetorical spigot on and off at will. The parties all had overlapping, not discrete, communication webs, and what one overheard from other sides tended either to alienate the peers one had to negotiate with in Parliament or to disappoint the voters who had been conditioned to expect a steady diet of red meat. Heemskerk opted to speak in a single calm voice, counting on the trust of the faithful to remain firm. That precluded (glancing at Kuyper) the cultivation of distrust by party officials. This was the voice of a lawyer used to managing things one step at a time. Others pointed out some harder dilemmas. Said Anne Anema, a new professor at the Free University, the masses “in normal times are conservative, in extraordinary times are revolutionary, but are never moderately progressive. . . . [Yet] such a moderately progressive politics is exactly what our society needs.” What then remained for Kuyper, a radical for gradual change, an orator of extremity in the cause of preservation?
The most serious challenge of all was set forth by Kuyper’s friend Idenburg while the Heemskerk regime was still in office: “Great principles these days awaken no enthusiasm,” just as you complain, he wrote Kuyper. “The fault for that is not only that Heemskerk doesn’t give great principial orations. . . . It is in my opinion the consequence that today, more than thirty years ago, material questions are calling for a solution. . . . [Such] points naturally have some connection with higher (or deeper) life-principles, but not so directly, not so clearly, not so precisely.” Educating one’s children in the fear of the Lord was for Christian parents a clear command of Scripture and conscience. But the question of mandatory disability insurance had no such forthright mandate, and thus found Christians on different sides of the issue. Where then the “antithesis”? And how could so technical an issue awaken the “holy enthusiasm” Kuyper longed for, especially when it became the unholy object of self-seeking politics? Kuyper’s opponents in the party put the point more bluntly: “The time of first principles, the time of naïve faith in the virtually unlimited power of the idea appears, in this country, to be over.” If so, Kuyper was, too.
The contretemps over the Heemskerk cabinet bore ironic resemblances to Kuyper’s fight with Lohman twenty years earlier. Once again Kuyper was complaining that party MPs were too clubby and autonomous, and once again he tried to assert control via command of the party apparatus. Yet Kuyper’s defeat of the elite back then had opened the way for a generation of “new men” who included the very challengers he now faced. Unquestioned loyalists like Colijn and Idenburg were part of that cohort, as were neutral parties like Talma, but the dissenters represented the cream of the crop no less than they did. Heemskerk and Simon de Vries, an MP during Kuyper’s cabinet and a future minister of finance, were not just political leaders but curators of the Free University. Anema was a successor to Lohman on the law faculty; there Herman Bavinck was establishing his own aura and agenda in Kuyper’s place on the theology faculty. The university’s first economist, Pieter A. Diepenhorst, also served, Kuyper-like, on the Amsterdam city council and as editor-in-chief of a new antirevolutionary newspaper, De Rotterdammer, an outlet for those alienated from De Standaard. An independent cultural journal, Ons Tijdschrift, had emerged too, as the organ of a still younger generation reared in the movement but now chafing at its segmentation and isolation. They particularly faulted Kuyper’s aesthetic judgment, believing that new modernist styles warranted at least more serious consideration. These two groups represented the “individualists” that Kuyper now increasingly sniped at for defying party discipline, the “intellectuals” who puzzled the rank and file with political nuance and demoralized them with non-representational art. For these reasons, although they were more progressive than Kuyper and certainly not rich like Lohman, the three professors along with Heemskerk and De Vries became known as the “Five Gentlemen.” Kuyper cast himself once more as the man of the people — now de kleine luyden, the “little people.”
He set out on a reform program of his own. The first phase was physical. Beginning in 1911 he took his summer vacations at the internationally renowned Weissen Hirsch sanatorium of Heinrich Lahmann, outside Dresden. That first summer he was drubbed so mercilessly with physical- and hydro-therapies that he wondered, he later wrote Idenburg, whether a seventy-three-year-old should be trying such a regimen. Yet once back home he found himself feeling better than he had in ten years. His chronic throat and sinus ailments had responded wonderfully to Herr Lahmann’s “daily infusions.” From similar treatment and/or his new vegetarian diet the constipation “that has bothered me so endlessly now doesn’t give me the slightest trouble. My sleep is better, my sciatica is diminished.” His heartbeat was once more “normal, regular, and strong.” Even his hearing, which had been steadily deteriorating, seemed to have responded positively to the good doctor’s ministrations. As it happened, this proved a fleeting hope, as did his visit to the Parisian inventor of a new “hearing-restoration machine.” He could still carry on ordinary conversation but, unable to follow live debate in a large hall, Kuyper gave up his seat in the Lower House in 1912. The Upper House served better.
Reinvigorating the party was the next task, and to that end Kuyper at this late date added a new line to his theoretical wares. Next to the revolutionary track of “Calvinism and Constitutional Liberties” and the complex social array of “Sphere Sovereignty,” he now championed the organic bond between charismatic leadership and the popular will. He laid out the theory in a Standaard series in 1908, just as the Heemskerk administration got underway, and he drew off the contemporary fascination with instinct and social psychology. If his argument clearly aimed to leverage his own position in the party, it also addressed the live question in political and social theory being asked by the likes of Max Weber and Georges Sorel. How could modern social movements escape the paradox that the institutionalization necessary for long-term survival threatened the very inspiration that gave rise to them in the first place? More generally, where was the place for spirit and passion amid the iron routines of modern life? Kuyper had sounded this worry already in his first major address, “Uniformity, the Curse of Modern Life.” Now he came back to it forty years later in “Our Instinctive Life.”
Kuyper began his account by extolling the instinctive powers of the animal world. This was his fable of the bees — more accurately, of the spiders, for whom he showed a fascination comparable to Jonathan Edwards’s two hundred years before. The wisdom of the insects partakes of the wisdom of God, he began. Even more so does the practical intelligence of ordinary people. In marked contrast to the raptures about frontline scholarship proclaimed in “Sphere Sovereignty,” Kuyper now characterized knowledge gained by “reflection” to be artificial and fleeting. The “perfect” knowledge Paul foresaw in the next world (1 Corinthians 13:12) would be “spontaneous, immediate, and completed at once” — closer to the wisdom of everyday life than to the book learning of academics. Yet these were now scheming to recast party operations in their mode, Kuyper complained. In fact, the younger generation was proposing to make policy formation more collaborative via discussion clubs, so that the means as well as the ends of party initiatives would be democratic. They also urged that the trained competence of lawyers and social scientists bear more weight in devising legislation than the generalizations of the clergy.
These proposals Kuyper proceeded to scotch. There are three kinds of people in the world, he declared: the large mass of folk who live by practical wisdom, a few genuine scholars whose all-absorbing studies take them to the depths of things, and then the jabbering class of the superficially learned, who were textbook-trained in secondhand knowledge but lacking the virtues of the other two groups. The professionals most likely to escape this hazard, to bring “the instinctive and the reflective life into a higher synthesis,” Kuyper ventured, were precisely the clergy, whose hard study for the pulpit alternated with parish rounds that kept them in daily touch with ordinary folk. The derivative “amphibians” now contesting for party leadership knew not the real life of those they invited to the policy table; otherwise they would know how mistaken their suggestions must be. Within their own sphere of intuitional knowledge, Kuyper declared, commoners neither could nor wished to take part in policy formation. When faced with competing proposals, the role of “the non-learned public” was “to use its own instinctive life as touchstone and for the rest to rely on its leaders.”
Kuyper granted that some institutionalization was necessary in his movement but worried about the tendency toward “spiritual decline and emotional impoverishment” that came with the process. His favorite solution was the mass meetings he had built into party operations from the start. There the bonds of trust between leaders and followers were not just formally ratified but made heartfelt. There a village delegate realized that he was part of a vibrant, national movement. A written statement of principles became a living conviction; a campaign platform became the staircase to a better tomorrow. Most of all, the keynote address wove together policy, social studies, political theory, and tactical considerations into an inspiring statement that accorded precisely with what the rank and file “instinctively felt in essence.” That leadership common people valued far more than a spot on a study committee.
Such drama was also essential to modern politics, Kuyper continued. Over the long years in power or out, a party “must have the means — as the psychology of the crowd demands — to convert sober realism into enthusiasm, cool calculation into holy passion. . . . It is by virtue of the power and animation that radiates from [our] national meetings that we have become who we are.” Kuyper sealed the point on a biblical note: while the technical expertise offered by his rivals was like the armor of Saul, the intuitive bond connecting the leader with the faithful was the stone of David that fells the giant. One can almost hear the ovation arising from his readers around the nation. Yet Kuyper’s quotation of “the psychology of the crowd” indicated some non-biblical sources behind his insights as well. Just as “Calvinism and Constitutional Liberties” had recourse to French resistance theorists, “Our Instinctive Life” appealed to a French authority, Gustav Le Bon, a pioneer in the study of social psychology. Le Bon was most famous for showing how a crowd could become a being in itself with will of its own that swept up those of its individual members. That conclusion aptly served Le Bon’s hostility to the French revolutionary tradition, a conviction he shared with Kuyper. He came there from the other side of the antithesis, however: Le Bon was anticlerical, anti-democratic, and a ruthless social Darwinian. His work fit with its leftist counterpart, Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1908), and the pioneering analysis of the “oligarchic tendencies in modern group life” (1911) by German sociologist Robert Michels as attempts to explain a perceived malaise afflicting democratic movements at the very peak of the Progressive tide. Whatever their diagnoses, all three turned for a prescription toward a cult of radical charisma which, after World War I, would find a home in fascism. Contrary to accusations by some later critics, there is nothing in Kuyper or his following that indicates he would have ever taken that turn. It is more to the point to see him, at an advanced age, recognizing the urgency of the problem and trying to tap his long experience for a solution.
The Personal Factor
Kuyper’s proposal was personally strategic in that, as one scholar notes, the quadrennial convention operated as his private “applause machine,” just as the party’s Central Committee did little more than rubber-stamp his edicts. That level of power invited a proportionate level of scrutiny, however, and there Kuyper stumbled twice. The second occasion was simply an embarrassment. On September 21, 1911, Reuters reported that Kuyper had been arrested for “pacing back and forth stark naked” before an open window in his room at the Hotel Métropole in Brussels. The Dutch press and at least one German daily picked up the story, and the socialist Het Volk rode it into the ground. Kuyper himself hastened to explain: he was following the mandate of Dr. Lahmann to exercise naked every day to respire the whole body, had not realized that his fourth-floor room was visible to the street, and in any case had not (as Reuters reported) been marched to police headquarters under arrest, much less been led there (as caricatured by Albert Hahn) covered with only a strategically held Bible and a top-hat. Rather, the police had notified the hotel manager, who had reported to Kuyper, who had quickly pulled the drapes, while a lawyer handled things at the station. Yet the story stung, for ridicule is the hardest opposition to overcome. Even Kuyper’s own followers must have recalled how often he had held up the “naked crazies” among sixteenth-century Anabaptists as proof of their delusions.
Unfortunately, the Brussels episode came atop a more serious scandal that embroiled Kuyper in 1909. In late June of that year, just after the general elections, Het Volk ran the accusations of a Haarlem lawyer that Kuyper, while prime minister, had nominated an Amsterdam businessman for an official decoration in exchange for a gift to the ARP’s coffers. The deal was then repeated, the story continued, on behalf of the businessman’s brother. Moreover, both transactions had been mediated by a young woman, one Mathilde Westmeijer, who, though Roman Catholic by background, was an official agent of the ARP and on the businessman’s payroll besides. Kuyper responded to the allegations after an official investigation had been enjoined. He had indeed recommended the brothers for official honors, he said, but in recognition of the usual voluntary service of national significance; there was no connection between decoration and donation. Kuyper fumed as Troelstra demanded that Parliament conduct a formal inquest, and he was only partly mollified when the special committee that was empanelled found him not guilty without declaring him fully innocent. There was no “conclusive evidence” that warranted criminal charges, the investigators determined, nor any “reason to doubt” the testimony provided by the principals as to their motives and conduct. The committee did raise its collective eyebrows at the “zealous interventions” of the comely Ms. Westmeijer, and noted that one of the two brothers had rendered no national service meriting a medal. That nomination having expired with the end of Kuyper’s cabinet, however, it remained technically a private affair. Kuyper himself admitted that his simultaneous functions as prime minister and party treasurer were not well advised, and tried to end the matter on a pious note: “Sackcloth does not disgrace its wearer.”
Campaign financing would only grow as a problem for democracies in the future, but with the “decoration affair” Kuyper’s prospects for a return to high office were finished. “It was a gripping moment,” wrote one reporter, that followed the pronouncement Troelstra delivered from his parliamentary desk:
“You know as well as we on this side of the House, gentlemen of the Right, that the political career of Dr. Kuyper (the speaker said it slowly, and paused a moment) is over.” Dead silence reigned in the House for a few moments after these words . . . the death they announced [was] not a glorious fall in battle but the sad demise in a mud-puddle of one of the greatest political figures the Netherlands has ever known.
Things got worse because of Kuyper’s combative personality. Always harder on friends than on opponents, he continued to manifest his passion for control. Alexander Idenburg became the keenest observer of the syndrome as he maintained a correspondence with all sides in the party’s quarrels from his safe distance in the East Indies. He rendered his judgments in letters to his wife who, having returned to The Hague for health reasons, lived only a few minutes’ walk from everyone involved. Having read their private complaints and then their battling pamphlets, Idenburg concluded that there was plenty of blame to go around. Heemskerk and company had not accorded Kuyper the respect due to the party’s elder statesman. After all, he had built the party from the ground up and knew something about strategy and operations. He possessed a willpower and breadth of vision that they could well emulate. “No one else but he could have accomplished” what Kuyper did, Idenburg reflected, for the cause had demanded “not only someone of great knowledge and great competence, of extraordinary talent as a thinker and writer and speaker, but also someone with an iron will, with a thick skin, and with a rock-hard head.” Moreover, though Idenburg was too charitable to say it, Heemskerk’s complaints could whine on at tedious length.
All that said, though, Idenburg found Kuyper sadly wrong on a whole list of matters. He was wrong to go public with internal party affairs: that, too, emboldened the opposition and deflated the faithful. Nor was the party chief any less touchy than Heemskerk on protocol and pride. Both forgot the Lord’s cause, which was the main point, Idenburg lamented; for such an end these highly visible, professedly Christian leaders ought to be able to submerge their personal feelings. Kuyper might rightly expect gratitude and respect in party circles as his “moral right” but not to dictate “practical arrangements.” But as Idenburg noted more than once, Kuyper could hardly distinguish between himself, the party, and the Lord’s will. Disagreements on policy he immediately took as personal opposition and thus drove off those who were needed to serve as his conscience now and his successors later. Kuyper had “disciples but no colleagues,” Idenburg put it, “sheep but no watch-dogs.”
If these were “the defects of his virtues,” other traits were just defects. “Kuyper is rough and coarse, no gentleman”; his “deficiency in good taste” often made “working with him so difficult.” No doubt Kuyper had heard the snobs in The Hague whisper this point often enough, but to Idenburg the trouble was more a matter of personality than of social class: “The great difficulty with Kuyper is that his feelings are developed in such imbalance. Very highly strung (over-strung, I would say) when it comes to himself; under-developed when it comes to others.” Finally, Kuyper “knows so little of life as it actually is outside his own circle of converted Christians,” yet insisted on delivering the last word on everything foreign and domestic in the name of the Lord. The upshot was something “extraordinarily tragic,” Idenburg concluded: “that a man who has done so much, and so much good, should toward the end of his life by his character-traits place himself outside the circle of those who have been formed by him, and thereby lose his power and influence.”
These being the sentiments of Kuyper’s truest friend, those of the Five Gentlemen can easily be imagined. Their alienation was ominous for the party as the question of Kuyper’s successor became urgent. Talma had been the one most likely to push through the social program, but he died in 1916, only fifty-two years old, from overwork in the Heemskerk cabinet. Idenburg was burnt out by his prolonged stay in the East Indies (extended even further by the outbreak of World War I), where every year of service took two years off most lives.
In that vacuum the star of Hendrik Colijn steadily rose. Son of a Christian Reformed polder farmer, Colijn, like Idenburg, was schooled not at the Free University but at a military academy. Unlike Idenburg, for Colijn the defining moment was not a conversion to Kuyper’s ethical policy for colonial development but leadership in the Dutch army’s suppression of the Aceh insurgency. That completed, Colijn seized the commercial openings that pacification made possible, particularly the matter of oil leases. The ambitions of Shell and Standard Oil were a bane of Idenburg’s existence as governor-general, but not for his junior partner. Colijn was “a man of big things,” Idenburg wrote Kuyper. “He sees all salvation in great capitalistic enterprises and naturally does not say that he disregards how the natives are treated but is too fearful of what he calls ethical busyness.”
Once back in the Netherlands, Colijn again moved from public office (minister of war in the Heemskerk cabinet) to commercial reward as director of a major Dutch oil firm, the Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij. Idenburg worried about his grasp of Antirevolutionary theory, which “stands opposed to exploitation of the colonies by the motherland but also — and no less — against exploitation by private parties. Colijn, I fear, does not keep the latter fully in view.” As for his Calvinism, Colijn’s experiences in reducing guerrilla warfare had left him fixated on order, with less regard for matters of justice. Yet he impressed Kuyper as a capable executive if somewhat raw in manner, and he steadfastly took Kuyper’s side in intra-party quarrels. Even more, he had funds at hand to see the cause through wartime financial exigencies. Still, Kuyper found the source of that wealth dubious. “He is living very close to Mammon,” Kuyper wrote Idenburg in 1915. “May the Lord preserve him.” By 1919 Colijn would be living in London, at the heart, if not of Mammon, of the postwar British Empire with its new Middle Eastern “mandates,” working for Royal Dutch Shell, which had merged with his old company. Kuyper was left oscillating between gratitude and doubt. “Colijn is outstanding,” he assured Idenburg. “I appreciate him more and more, even though he has still too little eye for spiritual things.”
Problems in the party were oddly mirrored in Kuyper’s own family. By the time he returned from the Mediterranean in 1906, three of his surviving children were married and all seven seemed to be embarked on their careers. His oldest son and daughter hewed close to the paternal track: Herman was professor of theology at the Free University; Henriëtte was a force in the national Reformed young ladies’ society and her father’s amanuensis. Two of the middle children had moved a little further away. Johanna was a nurse who served some time abroad in Java and for the Red Cross during the first Balkan War (1912-13). Abraham Jr. was in the first decade of a thirty-year pastorate in Rotterdam, publishing some books and articles on the side. Guillaume, the youngest surviving son, was an officer in the Dutch infantry. The problems lay with the second-born son, Jan Frederik, named after Kuyper’s father, and Catharina, born in 1876 during his recuperation abroad.
“Freddy” put maximum distance between himself and his father. After finishing dental studies at the University of Michigan, he settled in the East Indies, where he serviced the Dutch elite, enjoyed the tropical breezes, and followed his philosophical inquiries into the courts of theosophy. Kuyper had been earnestly interrogating Fred over his state of soul from his eighteenth year on: “Meet with the Lord your God every day, dear boy! . . . Delve down into your heart and ask, what bond ties my heart to Jesus? Lord, is there such a bond?” Decades later he lamented in one letter to Idenburg after another that such prayers had proven unavailing. “[H]is soul sleeps . . . in Theosophical dreams,” Kuyper said of “my poor Frederik.” He thinks he has no need of a Redeemer. “The only one of my children. The others are so rich a blessing to me in their faith, but here I stand powerless.” From his side, Fred’s surviving correspondence shows warm solicitude, especially at election time. In 1905 he offered a prayer of his own for Kuyper: “I would love to see you spend your future years in peace and easier affairs. You have battled your whole life and undergone much strife”; have accomplished enough for “at least three lives; have experienced success almost exclusively in all your ventures; have reached the highest rung on the ladder. Let it go, then, dear Father.” A few years later, during the Heemskerk difficulties, he asked, “Why actually do you live in Holland? Foreign terrain is so very much less cramped. I find my countrymen so often small-minded and childish. Why don’t you spend the last years of your life in Brussels or Paris?” Nor was Fred incapable of deep feeling. Returning to the Indies via Switzerland in 1912, he dropped Kuyper a postcard: “Today I visited Mother’s grave . . . also the room where Mother died. It was truly an emotional day for me. I had a very painful night.”
Painful too, he feared, his father would find the letter with which he finally responded to Kuyper’s religious queries. “I appreciate it that you . . . asked about the state of my soul. I feel that you as a Christian must be unhappy about it. . . . [Yet] dear father, it is my settled conviction” that the question of why we have come into the world and what might or might not happen to us after death “lies beyond my ken to fathom.” It was all he could do to understand man’s brief intermediate period on earth and to conduct himself with integrity. That included avoiding “dogmatic certainty and strife” about unknowable things. It entailed a respect for religion in general for its “positive effects on the conduct of life,” and appreciation for select features of particular world religions. But “the only reverence that I can feel without shame for a Higher Power is in a clear conscience and the honorable self-knowledge that I grasp nothing, can grasp nothing, have grasped nothing” final as yet here on earth. People will say that I’m an unbeliever, he continued, but don’t you think my honest and considered conclusion is better than that of thousands who simply go through the motions because it’s the proper thing to do? “I hope from the heart that you will take this real look into my inner life for what it is,” Fred concluded. But Kuyper kept to his old hope. He wrote Idenburg, “I keep praying.”
He was much more directive with his youngest daughter, Catharina. Cato or “Too” had a hard time finding her vocation, shifting between education and nursing, and adding in the periodic convalescences characteristic of her time and social class. This frustrated Kuyper and even more her oldest sister, Henriëtte. An organizer and aspiring author like her father, the significantly nicknamed “Harry” was not averse to pointing out Too’s perceived deficiencies. When Too received one such rebuke by mail while staying with the Idenburgs in the East Indies, she cut off correspondence with her sister. Kuyper asked her hosts to intervene. Too had the same “psychosis” from which “my dear wife suffered so bitterly from her sixteenth year on,” Kuyper revealed to Idenburg; she turned every admonition into a complaint, then aired them ceaselessly outside the family. Kuyper did not note at this point the other relevant resemblance, of Henriëtte to himself, nor the coincidence that his Jo’s alleged complaints started with his own campaign to make her over from a teenager into a consort worthy of a dominie. He theologized the problem instead, and at the deepest levels. Running beneath the sisters’ spat were “demonic actions,” he discerned. Too’s traits were precisely those “on which Satan throws himself and which he misuses to bind the soul.” I’ve been warning both sisters on the matter, he assured Idenburg, “and I can happily say that Harry feels herself fully at fault and has thanked me for opening her eyes to this demonic danger.” Yet when similarly confronted, Too “did not answer me directly but went to talk about it with your wife. That’s what her mother always did too. Always dragging things out of the house.”
Idenburg was too kind to ask Kuyper whether, as to talking out of school, the pot was not calling the kettle black. He did tell him that dear Harry was not quite the saint Kuyper took her to be. When Mrs. Idenburg wrote her suggesting that the Golden Rule might well apply to the sisters’ spat, “your oldest daughter” replied with “a series of complaints about Too,” including dread at her imminent return home. “On the whole,” he warned Kuyper, “I got the impression that not love for her sister . . . but pursuit of her rights and interest stands first in [her] heart.” He thought the two simply had profound personality differences and would probably benefit by living apart for a while. Kuyper took that to be a last option, something of a surrender to sin, and later reported that all three sisters were living happily together under the paternal roof. Yet Too not-so-mysteriously came down with “heart ailments” while taking nurse’s training during World War I, and went to live with the Warfields in Princeton.
Sex and Suffrage
His trials at home mirroring those in the party, it was fitting that the last new policy issue to engage Kuyper’s attention was women’s suffrage. The broader franchise for which he fought so hard in the 1890s he continued to advocate against the remaining conservatives in the party as the issue returned to the fore. For the radicals in the secular parties, however, “universal” voting rights meant women too, and there Kuyper drew the line.
On the campaign trail in 1913 he reminded the faithful why. The party program from the start had called for an “organic,” “household” franchise, not the “mechanistic” individualism that the radicals espoused. Thus women who headed a home — widows with children as well as single women living on their own — might properly vote, be it that those two circumstances were equally lamentable. But on the fundamental point there could be no compromise. Kuyper thundered: the “holy order of God” rested upon the “principial difference between man and woman.” To defy that was to assault the family itself. Women’s suffrage would bring in its wake widespread birth control and easy divorce. We have heard it urged “that every post in life be opened to women,” he lamented to the comrades; “it’s even been suggested that the Amazon be revived, and anyone who will not let her have the vote is called a tyrant in his male egotism.”
Kuyper’s patriarchy was so pronounced that it needs some contextual qualification. For one, virtually all Dutch political parties of the time, the radicals as well as the religious, saw women’s role — even in public life — as maternal. For some it was an antidote to the worrisome individualism that they too saw on the rise in the new century. Leading feminists early on pushed the domestic argument for the vote: women being so vital at home, how could the household of the state thrive without their input? Socialists wanted special provisions for women in and outside of the labor force on the premise that women’s well-being made for a happy home, and a happy home humanized the worker’s life. Without love and beauty, all was drudgery — a sentiment that Kuyper applied to the rich and middling classes as well. Furthermore, Kuyper praised the female leadership he met on his American tour. In contrast to the two options of “fashion-plate” or “household drudge” that Europe offered women, he enthused that American women demonstrated high levels of knowledge, education, organizational acumen, and civic engagement, all without compromising their morals or demanding public office. Kuyper had in mind the wives and daughters of the Protestant professional class who in fact did provide much of the cultural and social-service leadership in cities such as he visited. They would also prove to be the bedrock of the women’s suffrage movement as it bloomed there soon after his trip. In short, women’s suffrage caught Kuyper, along with many of his contemporaries, on the logic of their espoused virtues.
His solution was also common — the ideology of “separate spheres,” which postulated differences in essence, hence in character, capabilities, and proper roles, between the two sexes. His distinctive contribution was to suffuse the notion with religion and emotion. The softer side of his rhetoric came out in Women of the Bible, a collection of eighty Heraut meditations published in 1897, and The Woman’s Place of Honor, a seventy-page Standaard series that appeared in the thick of the franchise debates in 1914. In the first, Kuyper graded his subjects by their relative devotion to God as that registered in their (un)willingness to accept their role in service to others. Their place on the pedestal in his 1914 tract stemmed, predictably, from women’s tender nature, which made it prudent as well as principled that they avoid the rigors of public life. Homemaking in the fullest sense of that term, with its power over the character-formation of children and the socialization of husbands, was women’s natural vocation and a delight to all who had the proper heart. As for public affairs, cultural leadership on the American model was fine. So was a professional career for single women so long as it fit feminine qualities — for instance, education, philanthropy, and female specialties in medicine.
Feminism proper brought out his harsher tones. His argument stands forth most baldly in two chapters Kuyper devoted to the subject in Pro Rege, amid his broader treatment of the family as the first sphere in the order of creation. The Christian family, in Kuyper’s treatment, was distinguished by the redemption wrought upon its myriad interrelationships by God’s re-creation of all things in Christ. With respect to household staff, for instance, that entailed master and mistress establishing such an order of “right and equity” that the servants gave thanks for being in a Christian household. With respect to the nurture of children, the burden of proof again fell entirely on the ones in power. The first duty of fathers as head of the household was not to abuse their authority; the second was to provide for the holistic formation of the child. The wise father shared authority with his wife; in fact, she had a “sovereignty” of her own in the “mixed sphere” of the household. These injunctions followed after arguments of a very different temper, however. The goal for the family might be Christ’s re-creative work, but the functional norm for gender relations was purely natural, with not a word of Jesus’ own teaching or example. Instead, the biblical figures looming behind Kuyper’s words on this topic were Samson and Delilah. God ordained males for strength, females for beauty, he said; man sinned as oppressor, woman as seductress. That contest was no contest, however; women won. There was a “magnetic power,” an “irresistible magnetic power,” in female charms that bent men to her will. So also there was a depth in her depravity quite below his: “The woman who sins sinks much deeper than does the man. She stands for nothing. Unrighteousness seizes her as a life-rule.” Not alone but also not least among the male commentators of his time, Kuyper was profoundly anxious about the power of female sexuality.
What might Christ’s redemption spell in this context? First, there was the common grace of the family itself, which Kuyper introduced as an institution to channel sexuality. Within the family, secondly, King Jesus had ordained strong lines of authority via the order of creation: God over man, man over woman. Thirdly, Kuyper dealt out a large dose of the muscular Christianity dear to late Victorians. He protested popular art’s feminization of Jesus, insisting that Jesus wanted men to be manlier. There being no words in Scripture to that effect, Kuyper appealed instead to the “rich development of the human race,” which could go forward only by robust counterbalances between binary opposites. Just here lay the perversity of feminism, he concluded. Feminism was “nothing but an attempt to retard, falsify, and bastardize” a creaturely given, a “fixed ordinance” of God. “The feminist wants to be a man, but cannot and never will be,” just as the fop, her only equal in shame, was a male who did not want to be a man. So unnatural were a feminist’s aspirations that other forces, male forces, must have provoked them. The “chief cause of feminism,” Kuyper declared, was that “so many men remain unmarried,” courtesy of the fallen women who provided them cheap sexual services. Following close behind were “the scandalous means that men find” to exercise birth control, thwarting women’s maternal instinct. The whole feminist agenda thus stemmed from the rising tide of single, childless women who needed careers to fill their lives; none of this would have happened “but that the egotism of man makes it necessary.” One wonders what Kuyper’s three adult daughters, all unmarried, thought of these words, particularly in light of his having scared off at least one eligible young man “with views on Too.” Or his three married sons who, making the demographic turn, produced but seven children among them, one less than Kuyper had on his own.
Whatever their thoughts on feminism, the ARP was divided on women’s suffrage. Herman Bavinck, for one, was enthusiastic for broadening gender qualifications (less so than Kuyper on class). In any case the issue went into an omnibus “pacification” process run by the cabinet that succeeded Heemskerk’s. Its prime minister, center-liberal Pieter Cort van der Linden, came into office committed to resolving the issues of franchise and education that had dogged Dutch politics for forty years. When World War I broke out, the matter became urgent out of fears that the Netherlands’ neutrality abroad would prove fragile without greater solidarity at home. In the bargain, the radical parties gave up their demand for women’s suffrage and the Christian parties backed off their demand that religious education be “the rule” in the nation and secular schools a “supplement.” The revised constitution in 1917 granted all Dutch schools equal state funding and all adult males the right to vote.
An equally momentous change, proportionate representation, passed with virtually no discussion. Henceforth, the States General would be elected not by districts but according to each party’s share of the national vote. This really was the death warrant for the Liberals, who lost twenty-five of their forty seats in the next election. It was an aid to the ARP, which had lost out under the old system both in 1905 and 1913. It rewarded Roman Catholics even more; accustomed to getting one-quarter of the seats but having a third of the population, they held a permanent plurality in Parliament.
The greatest beneficiaries of all were political parties themselves. No longer the Liberals’ ideal of an educated man as elector and elected but a disciplined organization of national scope was the key player in Dutch politics. This was Kuyper’s original intention, his pioneering construction, and now his final triumph. With that, his party acceded to the inevitable arrival of women’s suffrage in 1921. Without condoning it in principle, Kuyper’s successors assured women they would not sin in going to the polls. In fact, it was their duty — so that the party did not lose ground to its rivals.
Even before the pacification, the aging warrior offered several initiatives to help ready the party for the new day. He thought that the social question should headline the new agenda, so he proposed another Christian Social Congress to rekindle the devotion of the faithful, as in 1891. The outbreak of war postponed that meeting until 1919, under others’ leadership. Likewise, it was commonly complained that the party had not engaged in any significant discussion of its principles since 1901. Kuyper tried to address that with an updated version of Ons Program, published in two volumes in 1916 and 1917 as Antirevolutionaire Staatkunde. Yet the work was most notable for its pace of production, not its content. As his publisher later recounted it, the then seventy-eight-year-old Kuyper met with him in 1915 to discuss the project. After deciding its purpose and general outline, the two discussed a delivery date. The publisher watched Kuyper pencil out some quick calculations: the number of pages the book would encompass (some 1,400), the length of handwritten text that entailed, the number of words he could write per week, and the bottom line that, deo volente, he would have it done by the end of 1916. He did, on New Year’s Eve. This story reveals a marvel of discipline. It also betokens, as did the published text, an absence of the fresh thinking needed to meet the dramatically new circumstances spelled by total war abroad, pacification at home, and the rise of the new world order that Kuyper had espied in Pro Rege. It was hardly Kuyper’s fault; this was properly the job of a generation still younger than his critics’. By the same token, the work could not have its intended effect.
The one reform that did occur came in practical organization, Kuyper’s old strong suit. The party’s local chapters were strengthened, a new provincial layer of coordination introduced, lines of communication between these and headquarters made more clear and constant, and the first full-time staff hired. The perennial question of whether the chair of the Central Committee or of the parliamentary caucus was to head the party was left hanging. It was thus with old ideas, updated machinery, and the pressing question of succession that the Antirevolutionary Party faced the end of the world as they knew it.