You Can't Understand America Without Understanding New York - Russell Shorto

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1:22You know, when Mike Bloomberg was running the city, I sat on his financial services advisory board, and he once said to me, Anthony, it's not a city, it's an emerging nation. It's not a city, it's a laboratory experiment for diversity. Many of these traits, commerce, pluralism, ambition, pragmatism, they were all there, right? New York is just living out its original DNA. Is that fair to say? I think so, yeah. It's like the acorn in the oak tree. You looked at New Amsterdam, what it looked like. You know, it's this tiny little kind of wild west town with a couple of windmills and these rickety buildings and things.

1:53It bears no resemblance to New York City, but the genetic material was there. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is Russell Shurdo. He is a historian, journalist, and a best-selling author. It's not just this book, but other books. But the one we're going to be talking about today is Taking Manhattan, the Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America. What a great book. And of course, she wrote Island at the Center of the World, which if you ask my mom, Russell, This is the island at the center of the world. Okay. She, everything about New York.

2:30And of course I'm a big time New Yorker. I never left this. Don't ever expect to leave. I have no Florida real estate. And, uh, and you give me a lot of reasons to love this city, but what a great origin story. Now you've spent most of your career, uh, studying the origins of America, particularly through the lens of New York. But before we get to the book, can you tell us a little bit about your background and what drew you to this sort of history? Sure. Well, first, thanks for having me on the show. And I share your mom's enthusiasm for the island center of the world, as do Nick's fans currently.

3:07So how did I get into this? I was living in New York City. This is going back 20 some years. And I lived in East Village. My daughter was a toddler. The nearest place for me to take her that she could run around and play was the churchyard of St. Mark's in the Bowery, which is at 10th Street and 2nd Avenue. And Peter Stuyvesant's tomb is there. He was built, that was once his family chapel. And there's a monument to him. And I knew New York had once been New Amsterdam. I knew it was founded by the Dutch. And I knew Peter Stuyvesant was the head of it. And I knew he had my information at the time, but I was intrigued and I'm drawn to origin stories.

3:57And so I asked friends who were historians of New York, you know, what can I, where can I go? And they bewildered and intrigued me that they, one after another, said, I don't know the Dutch period. until eventually somebody pointed me to a man named Charles Goering, who since 1974 had been translating and publishing the 12 ,000 pages of records of the Dutch settlement of Manhattan. And I had a series of phone calls with him. He was in Albany at the State Library. And then he invited me up for his annual conference, And I met all these people who were working in this field and eventually just hatched the idea that, you know, you could tell the story of American origins just as easily and just as legitimately focusing on lower Manhattan as you could from, you know, focusing on the Puritans and the pilgrims and the English story.

5:04I mean, listen, it's fascinating. We still see remnants of the Dutch culture here in Amsterdam Avenue or Stuyvesant Town and the different things. There's a debate going on in my family, and I'm hoping that you could settle it for me, that the word Yankee itself is actually derived from the old Dutch, that this was Jean-Cas, which literally meant John Cheese. And it was a nickname needling the Dutch as cheese eaters. And then it sort of got twisted into the vernacular of English into Yankee as opposed to Jan Kas. Is that a true story or is that mythological? Nobody knows. That's the short answer.

5:51But a lot of people, that's in sort of folk memory. But a lot of other things. See, Russell, I'm not going to win my bet now, okay? I mean, because nobody does know. You come to me for the truth. But a lot of other things, you know, you mentioned place names. Brooklyn was originally Broekalen, named after a Dutch city. Staten Island was named after the Staten General, the governing body of the Netherlands. Bushwick was once Bosweik. Flatbush was once Flakobos. These are all Dutch names. Coney Island was named for the Conies. That's the Dutch word for rabbits. There was once a lot of rabbits there.

6:36So, you know, these inheritances go on and on. The American Santa Claus comes from Sinterklaas, the Dutch version. And that came about in the 1700s when you had all these now English families in New York. And their children kind of were jealous of the Dutch children who got presents from Sinterklaas. So, you know, all these inheritances, you can track them. And Jan Case is maybe one of those. It's really fascinating. So I want to go back. We're going to go back to 1664. Tell us about that. It's not a conquest, as you describe in the book, right? It's more of an invention, if you will, right? When did it crystallize that this story had more to it than what maybe I learned about in the second or third grade?

7:27So this book, Taking Manhattan, is about, it's a kind of sequel to, you mentioned my earlier book, The Island at the Center of the World. The earlier book tells the story of the Dutch colony, which existed for 40 years. So the colony was called New Netherland, and it was very extensive. It covered much of New York and New Jersey, some of Connecticut and Pennsylvania, went down to Delaware. And the capital of New Amsterdam was at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. And as I laid out in that earlier book, it was quite consequential. And in shorthand terms, what the Dutch did was they pioneered at this time in the 1600s pluralism and with that religious tolerance.

8:13So because you tolerate different religions, you have people speaking different languages and so on. And they pioneered capitalism, what we would call capitalism. The word didn't exist at the time, but they had in the Netherlands, they were seafaring people. And so they sent these ships out across the world to colonize distant places. And they asked themselves, how do we spread around risk in these very hazardous undertakings? So they come up with the idea of shares of stock and then of a stock exchange where you can swap these things. So all of this, this pluralism, this multi-ethnic community and this kind of engine, economic engine, get transferred to the tip of Manhattan Island.

8:59And that is what powers this colony in this little city for this 40 year period. And by the end of it, by 1664, England had, throughout this period, England was developing colonies in New England, mostly by Puritans. And they had settlements in Maryland and Virginia. And by now, the English are deciding, they're trying to play catch up. The Dutch have this global empire. They've, this tiny country has built, you know, they're probably the most powerful nation in the world for a period of time. The English are envious and the English want this colony. So that's the showdown that happens in this book, Taking Manhattan.

9:44So you have the Dutch in their fort at the tip of the island, which, and by the way, New Amsterdam was what is now the financial district. And the wall that they built at the northern boundary of their town became Wall Street. So it's easy to kind of envision if you have a sense of the financial district. So the Dutch are in their fort with their cannons pointed out in the harbor. This English squadron sails into the harbor, four ships packed with sailors, soldiers, weapons, gunpowder, and they've got their cannons pointed at the Dutch. And that sets up this what is go what is surely going to be this violent showdown between these two very prominent European powers that are vying for control of these these kinds of lands all over the world.

10:36What happened, though, what what you know, when I wrote the earlier book, what intrigued me and stayed in the back of my mind and, you know, had conversations with a lot of people who work in this field was why didn't it get violent? Why did they what did they do? What happened? Because the Dutch, you know, the old story was that the Dutch just rolled over. They were weak. And, you know, but we now know, thanks to the aforementioned 12000 pages of records, they had this very vibrant colony. colony. They were sending traders, were sending ships to South America, to the Caribbean. They were tough people.

11:12They didn't just roll over. So what happened? That's what this book is about. It explores what is behind this showdown between the English and the Dutch. Thank you for tuning in to Open Book. And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot more coming and now back to the show well listen it's a fascinating story i i read the first book it's got to be 20 years what came out in 04 one of that but it's got to be 20 yeah it's got to be it's got to be 20 plus years ago but go back for us for a moment because you know i remember the book the island the deep water port of new york harbor transforms the economy of the north Northeast and the North American continent.

12:05I mean, Philadelphia was one of the centers, but it really gravitates to New York because of the geographical aspects of New York. So tell us about that, if you don't mind, Debbie, because you did write a lot about that 20 years ago. The geography was really important. And the Dutch, wherever they went in the world, water was your highway. That's how you got around. So they looked at the world in terms of waterways. And they understood very quickly that you have this world-class harbor and you've got this river, the Hudson River, that cuts up into the northward, into the continent. And then it intersects with the Mohawk River, which goes all the way to the Great Lakes.

12:50So they, you know, this is in the 1600s, but they were already dreaming of how do we access this continent? You know, we don't have highways. How do we get there? That's how they thought ultimately they were going to get there. And when people in the colony were writing to the home country saying, look, you have to send more support to us. You have to send soldiers. You have to send, you know, we need to reinforce this settlement. This is what they had in mind, that ultimately they could exploit this whole continent. And had they been successful in that, obviously, you know, you and I would be speaking Dutch right now.

13:26But that didn't happen. And so geography was one part of it. And the other part, as I said a couple of minutes ago, was what the Dutch brought, this trading sensibility and this relative openness, relative tolerance, willingness to kind of learn different languages and in order to get ahead. So that's what sets up this showdown. And that's what when Richard Nichols, who is the head of the English expedition that comes sailing into the harbor to take over this colony, he doesn't, I think, understand what all this is because this was new stuff. At the time, the idea was intolerance was common sense.

14:14To try to tolerate different people of different religions, religion was very divisive. You didn't do that. What you wanted was one people speaking one language and worshipping one religion. But yet here were the Dutch in the home country and also on Manhattan turning that on its head and having this incredibly vibrant society. So you have that and you have this mix of people and you have this new economic system at work. He didn't know how it worked or why it worked, but he wanted it. And that's the key to what ultimately happened. Because he comes to decide that what he needs is not just the geography, not just this rock sitting in the harbor.

14:55He needs the secret sauce that is in the minds of this mixed community. I call this community Dutch, but famously at one point there's 18 languages being spoken. So it's this hurly-burly kind of place. He doesn't get it, but he wants to keep that. He wants to preserve it. So he doesn't want to open fire. He wants to appease. First of all, I didn't know Richard Nichols, and I was very impressed with it. There's not a lot of detailed information on him, but I was very impressed with your journalism here. You're a great author, but you also got a little bit of investigative journalist streak to your personality in terms of understanding who these people are.

15:35But I want to go to that makeup of New York. We're talking about immigrants. We're talking about refugees. We're talking about people of different faiths. Okay. How unusual was that in the 17th century to have that sort of complexion of people in the same area? Yeah, it was unusual in Spain, in France, in England. Intolerance was official policy. And for example, English travelers visiting Amsterdam would remark on seeing people with turbans and different skin color. And, you know, this was just really strange at the time. And and yet that's what the Dutch realized. There was something there. And they didn't do this out of, you know, it wasn't like celebrating diversity or anything like that.

16:29They made money off it. It was practical. It was pragmatic. And it was also the case that they were, you know, they're this tiny nation, which is there's no hills, there's no mountains, there's no natural barriers. People from elsewhere would, when they were fleeing religious war and things, they came there and they settled. So they made this diversity work for them. But to me, it's just New York is still that. No, exactly. I mean, that's the irony of it is they started it. They put a little seed together and this is it. You know, this is the land of opportunity for so many different people. You know, when Mike Bloomberg was running the city, I sat on his financial services advisory board and he once said to me, Anthony, it's not a city.

17:15It's an emerging nation. It's not a city. It's a laboratory experiment for diversity. and you make such a great case for it in the book that, you know, many of these traits, okay, I'm going to read some of them to you, okay, commerce, pluralism, ambition, pragmatism, they were all there, right? New York is just living out its original DNA. Is that fair to say? I think so, yeah. It's like the acorn in the oak tree. You know, if you look at New Amsterdam, what it looked like. You know, it's this tiny little kind of Wild West town with a couple of windmills and these rickety buildings and things.

17:54It bears no resemblance to New York City, but the genetic material was there. And that's what attracted Nichols. And that's why, you know, he, as you said, he doesn't get credit. In histories of New York, he'll get a sentence or two. He's the guy that took New Amsterdam from the Dutch and named it New York. But he also became the first governor. He appreciated, he saw what was vital there, and he worked really hard to nurture it, to encourage it. And that then sets in motion. You know, you've got over the next decades and the next century, you've got other immigrant groups continuing to come to New York because that had worked at the beginning.

18:39You know, it's a good segue because you've got all of this diversity, all this inclusion coming into this great new city. But the island itself is actually, it derives the word Manhattan, doesn't it derive from the Native Americans? And yet there's irony there because a lot of Native Americans were displaced. There was a rise of slavery and we had to contend with all of that. So reconcile that for us because there's some paradoxes, aren't there? We've got this inclusive place, lots of diversity, lots of dialects, lots of religion, religious freedom. And yet sort of the native peoples and the early roots of slavery are also being sowed at the same time and pushing out the native people, I should say.

19:34Yeah, if you're doing history, if you're dealing with history, and you're not struggling with paradoxes, then you're not doing it right. Because human nature, human societies, if it's all this was a land of heroes, then there's something wrong with the picture. So the Dutch pioneered tolerance, toleration, but that you have to qualify that because how tolerant can you ultimately be if you have slavery? I mean, it's just, and how tolerant are you if you are in the process of dispossessing Native people of their territory? So those things are part of the picture. How tolerant are you? You know, Peter Stuyvesant, one of the most famous documents from the period is the Flushing Remonstrance, which is a little story in which Peter Stuyvesant, the leader of the Dutch colony.

20:33there are there's a group among this diversity of the population there are English settlers so within the Dutch colony you have English settlers and one of the English communities was the town of Flushing which became originally was Flissingen the Dutch name was Flissingen and a group of English Quakers wanted to settle there and Stuyvesant didn't want that because he He didn't like religious diversity, actually, even though that was part of the national policy, because it made his life difficult. You know, religion is divisive. So he tried to bar them from settling. And the English leaders of the community write him this letter basically saying, look, your own Dutch laws say we have to allow these people to settle.

21:23So you've got this. That's basically a civil rights story. And you've got several of those kinds of civil rights stories playing out within this colony. The story of slavery is a complicated one, but a really interesting one at this time, because this is before the kind of slavery we tend to think of when we think of, you know, the plantations in the South, in the American South, that kind of thing. They were making it up. The Dutch and other Europeans were making it up as they went. their models seem to include the Bible and ancient Rome. In both of those, you had slavery. In neither one of those, interestingly, was it race-based.

22:06You were enslaved if your town was conquered. And in neither one of them, was it a permanent institution? You could get out of slavery too. And in New Amsterdam, there are a number of instances when enslaved people petition for their freedom. They go to court and they say, we've done our time. We think we should be free. And they are given their freedom along with land, not because the West India Company, which runs the colony, thinks that they deserve it or whatever, but because they need to support themselves somehow. So it's a complicated story, which makes it, from my perspective, that much more interesting.

22:49It's like we have these neat categories of what slavery is. Well, not everywhere, not everywhere, and not at every time. Well, you listen, you have a beautiful writing style and it comes across as a real narrative history. I thought you and your publisher, it's my own editorialism, I thought your cover was brilliant because when I saw the cover in the bookstore, I said, wait a minute, this looks like Island at the Center of the World. And I realized it was you. And I was like, you know, so it was a really good addendum. It was very smart to make the books look like compendiums of each other. But when I step back and think about the two books, I'm thinking liberalism, tolerance, capitalism.

23:34This seems like they're all tangled up at the same root in both books or part of both stories. So I guess I'm wondering as a fellow writer, is that something that you set out? Was that your thesis in the beginning? or was this a revelation that came from your historical research and as you were weaving the story together? Yeah, well, you just said it, weaving a story. I think of myself primarily as a storyteller. And so my interest was, okay, what is the story of New York's roots and who, you know, do we have enough information on the people who established it to tell a big, full, rich, complicated story.

24:17And once I met Charlie Gehring, who by the way, retired last year after 51 years as translator, once I met him and here was these thousands of pages of records, it's like, yes, we have the material. So, okay, now let's dive in and try to figure out what the story is. And then lo and behold, it becomes this kind of, it wasn't, they started something and then they erased the page and started over again when the English took over. The English, in fact, took something and said, all right, now we are going to slowly begin to modify it. And then it slowly, after 1664, after it is renamed as New York, it slowly becomes part of this growing British empire and benefits from that.

25:04New York City is this satellite to London as London is expanding and partakes of all of the darkness of that story, of the British Empire, of exploitation and colonialism. And New York is enriched thereby. I mean, it's fascinating. This is a big hypothetical. Richard Nichols and Peter Stuyvesant, I've magically brought them back to life, Russell, and they're here with us. and you've given them a tour of the island of Manhattan, what do you think they would be thinking today? I think they would find it, you know, unfathomable. But I think, you know, what was most interesting in taking Manhattan to me is that they got their guns pointed at each other, and this is a two-week period where they're sending messengers on boats between the ships and the fort as they try to work this out.

26:06And it's so interesting that these two personalities, that's what it came down to. You know, we think of history as inevitable, but it's not. It comes down to individual people making decisions. You yourself have made some very consequential decisions in this historical period that we're living in right now. And here are these two people. And they decided, you know what, for the sake of this community, these people on the ground and our future, we're going to we're not going to fight. We're going to create a kind of merger of Englishness and Dutchness. And so to bring them forward, you know, a few centuries and have them and basically say, this is what this is what you did.

26:51Yeah, I would love to I would love to walk around. Well, I mean, I'm in my office. I'm in that. and I'm just looking up at the, I'm in the canyon here, sir. You know, I'm looking up at these skyscrapers. I just find it so fascinating. And you write with such great detail. It's a phenomenal book. We're down to the last couple of minutes. And so what we do is my producers and I come up with five words. We pluck them from your book. I'm going to say the word and I want you to give me a sentence or two, something that comes to mind when I say the word. If I say the word empire to you, what do you say?

27:27British empire, Dutch empire, economic empire. It involves slavery and exploitation. And at the same time, it also involves a lot of forces that today we depend on. We still depend on. So it's a paradoxical term. Say the word Manhattan. At the place where we got wood for making bows, that was the original meaning. That was the native meaning. Amazing. Okay. Say the word America. That's a loaded term, isn't it? You know, what I think of when you say that is I go by, you know, I go for a walk in my town. I live in Maryland and somebody has an American flag out. And I think two houses might have American flags out side by side.

28:18And they may mean entirely different things from one another. And that's the paradox of America right now. It's a mosaic of a society, you know, I mean, and that's totally true. All right. Ready? We're down to the last two. I say the words New Amsterdam. You say what? I think of the new in the old. Old Amsterdam was right now. I'm going to do a plug for myself. I have curated an exhibition at the New York Historical on the Upper West Side called Old Masters, New Amsterdam. We brought 60 Dutch Old Master paintings, including by Rembrandt and his contemporaries. And the idea was that through them, we can get a window into what New Amsterdam looked like.

29:04So these Old Master paintings of ordinary people, of street scenes, of market scenes, inside taverns. So go there between now and the end of August and you get a sense of New Amsterdam. Okay. All right. I've got to give you the last word. And my last two words are New York. Knicks. It's interesting, right? Yeah. That's something that Stuyvesant and Nichols wouldn't have thought of either. When I hear the words New York and New Amsterdam, I think Frank Sinatra. The song goes a lot better with the word New York in it as opposed to New Amsterdam. but that's the that's true you know but this is the uh my home and my love and i really appreciate you writing about it uh ladies and gentlemen russell shorto the title of the book is taking manhattan the extraordinary events that created new york but also shaped america and let me tell you sir it's brilliant writing uh you deserve to be a best-selling author and thank you so much for coming on the show thanks anthony it's been a pleasure

30:18Thank you.