Abstract
This thesis analyzes depictions of America and the construction of Dutch identity in Dutch public debates between 1919 and 1989. It focuses on debates on media, for the twentieth century not only was ‘the American century’, but also a media century—both were intertwined. I describe how the Dutch responded to
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cinema (1919-1939), portable radio (1950-1969), and television quizzes (1950-1989). By looking into public debates on media, this dissertation pinpoints how contemporaries expressed ideas about a supposed Dutch identity and to what degree they used America as an ‘Other’ in the process. In doing so, it shows that current debates on Dutch national character have a long history. The same goes for contemporary fears that are voiced when novel media are launched. I used digitized newspapers to analyze public debates on the aforementioned media. I applied computational techniques and methods to explore how they can further historical research. The research shows how tools like n-gram viewers, topic modeling, and linguistic analyses contribute to exploring vast textual corpora. On top of that, these techniques and methods occasionally led to novel insights. In short, caveats such as sub-optimal OCR notwithstanding, this thesis provides ample evidence that cultural historians who work with large corpora would be ill-advised not to use computational tools and techniques—ideally in combination with ‘traditional’ methods. The public debates on cinema, portable radio, and the television quiz point to three principal conclusions. First, Dutch responses to each medium were exceptionally uniform. The press and other contemporaries constructed images of America, Americans, and of a Dutch identity irrespective of their ideological background; a shared, national discourse existed, which transcended societal differences resulting from pillarization. Secondly, even though anti-Americanism was voiced less frequently and intensely after the Second World War, stereotypes of ‘the’ Americans as a money-driven, superficial, and naive people persisted. These clearly demarcated ideas of America helped the Dutch to construct an image of themselves as modest, moderate, convivial (gezellige) people. Until the 1960s, that is. Around then, these characteristics gave way to ‘American’ features such as hedonism—displayed by portable radio listeners and the din they caused—and uncontrolled materialism—represented by television quizzes. The press presented these changes as evidence of a changing society and Dutch mentality. Apparently, the Dutch were becoming like Americans—or rather, like the image of ‘the’ Americans that the Dutch press had constructed since at least 1919. The press, in line with the resistance it put up towards America (in particular in the interwar years) and facets of modernization (in all periods which this research focused on), fiercely denounced these developments. Thirdly, the Dutch had difficulty coming to terms with modernization, a process that each medium epitomized as well as spurred. The introduction and growing popularity of each medium caused a rupture: it led to changing values and a new mentality. As such it posed a threat to Dutch national identity. Hence, in all three eras, contemporaries—above all the press—propagated controlled modernization.
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