Leiden vs America's President

Frank Vermeulen
NRC-Handelsblad, 14 Dec 2000

Translated by Dr. Jeremy Bangs, with his comments in brackets

Jeremy Bangs ticks with his cane against a spot with recently mortared new bricks in the rugged remains of what was once the Church of Our Lady (Vrouwekerk). Because of the rain, he's pulled his cap, - Kruimeltje style, - far down over his forehead. [Kruimeltje is the hero of a recent children's movie of an old book; Kruimeltje wore a large flat cap.] "The new masonry is a part of the propaganda of the town of Leiden." Only a light accent betrays his American origin.

Historian Bangs is involved in a tough fight with the Leiden governors. Or rather, with the local division of the P.v.d.A. [Partij van de Arbeid = Labour Party], which remains very powerful and which he consistently calls the Contractors' Party [Partij van de Aannemers]. "Except for the 'Bioscience Park', Leiden doesn't have any industry," says Bangs, "so to create some employment the local P.v.d.A. continually thinks up demolition and construction projects for the town's contractors."

At stake in the conflict according to Bangs is: preservation of the historic heritage of the Pilgrim Fathers. That is the famous group of colonists, who for religious reasons fled England in the beginning of the 17th century and via hospitable Leiden ended up in the New World. There in the 19th century they acquired mythic proportions as Founders of the Nation.

Dr. Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs is director of The Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, a rather grand name for the one-room display of Pilgrim paraphernalia in a centuries-old house in the Beschuitsteeg, at the foot of the Hooglandse Kerk. Three years ago the micromuseum opened and in the mean time, according to Bangs, there have been 8,000 visitors, about half of them from America.

Here in the misty rain of a grey December day, a messy wall stands in a tiny square behind the Haarlemmerstraat, the shopping promenade of Leiden. Heroic history seems very far away. According to Bangs, the Pilgrims, or in any case some of them, attended this church. And they weren't the least among them: Philip de la Noye is supposed to have been one of them, and he was the ancestor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For Americans, especially those with White Anglo- Saxon Protestant background looking for their roots, this unsympathetic place has special significance.

Leiden's town council decided six years ago to demolish the remains, which were built up a bit some time as an anti-parking measure. Area residents and a local organization that campaigns for protection of Leiden monuments blocked that in the courts. This case, which Bangs has joined, has reached the Council of State in the meantime, which has to issue a decision one of these days.

How historic is the spot? The new work on the masonry in the wall serves in Bangs' opinion only to convince the judges that what's in question is a young ruin produced by the town. But, - and he points to the heaped up, bowed pavement, - the real foundations of the church are really present, just hidden away under the ground. Moreover, a fragment of a side wall of the church is visible in the adjacent branch of the clothing store of Hennes & Maurits. "When I had just come to the Netherlands in 1970, I made photos here [actually in 1980]; the entire wall still stood there then," says Bangs with an accusing undertone in his voice.

Bangs sees the destruction of the Vrouwekerk ruin as a part of an ambitious plan to revitalize the old inner city. Two years ago the P.v.d.A. launched the so- called Aalmarkt Project between Oude Rijn [Stille Rijn] and Breestraat: a shopping center with V.&D. [a department store], Albert Heijn [groceries], and Peek & Cloppenburg [clothing] as major attractions. In that territory, however, stands the wing of the former hospital where one of the Pilgrims, Myles Standish, was a patient. Bangs has therefore also labelled it a Pilgrim heritage area. Because the town of Leiden, and particularly the formerly responsible P.v.d.A.-alderman Tjeerd van Rij, didn't give a hoot, Bangs launched support among Pilgrim descendants in the U.S. via internet. The consequent response, and threat of a consumer strike in America, resulted last summer in the fact that Ahold, which besides owning Albert Heijn also possesses a series of store chains in the U.S., gingerly pulled out of the project. Bangs has now turned his attention to Fortis Bank and ABN-AMRO, involved in the project and big in the U.S. He shows a letter to Fortis, where once again a consumer strike is threatened.

Fortis Investors Inc. P.O.Box 64284 St. Paul, MN 55164 financial@us.fortis.com

ABN AMRO Incorporated 208 South LaSalle Street Chicago, Illinois 60604 (312) 855-7600

Former alderman Tjeerd van Rij (he resigned last May because of another issue) views Bangs as a trouble maker. "It's lovely that he is concerned about our cultural heritage. He just shouldn't be trumpetting untruths around." According to Van Rij, the Vrouwekerk was scarcely used by the Pilgrims.

And he rejects the argument against the Aalmarkt Plan because a Pilgrim was a patient in the hospital. "I consider it pedantic of those Americans that they are getting in the way because of that one Pilgrim. As a governor of Leiden I had to weigh that interest off against the interests of thousands of Leiden's modern-day residents."

The American ambassador in The Netherlands, Cynthia Schneider, doesn't, however, regard Bangs as a troublemaker at all. She sees the Pilgrim locations identified by him as important cultural historical places. "Are we supposed to prove how many Pilgrims went to church in the Vrouwekerk? Ludicrous. The governors of Leiden are very disrespectful."

Now that the federal Supreme Court in Washington has named George W. Bush to be the new president, Schneider, as a Clinton appointee, will be leaving the field soon. But the town government of Leiden gets another powerful opponent. When it became clear that Bush, also a Pilgrim descendant, will become president, Bangs got on the phone: "Leiden can make its breast wet. Now I have Bush as a supporter." It sounded serious.

[Serious or not, I didn't say that; and I have no idea what the meaning is, of the sentence "Leiden kan zijn borst nat maken," which obviously makes no sense when translated literally. All I said was that to demolish the only monument in the country that has a direct connection with George Bush, besides Ulysses Grant and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, may not be the best way to promote tourism in the Bush era.]