Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664-1730.

Joyce Goodfriend's new book, Before the Melting Pot, as its title indicates, continues the discussion started by Thomas Archdeacon, John Murrin, and others about the role of ethnicity in New York history during the colonial period. The issue is no longer whether ethnicity was a factor prior to the nineteenth century. That has been well established. It is how ethnicity was a factor.

Goodfriend makes four main points. First, the history of New York City "cannot be understood without recognizing the enduring impact of the Dutch on society and culture." Second, the concept of "Anglicization" is "limited in its explanatory power," because it focuses exclusively on Dutch assimilation and ignores the other side of the coin, what Murrin has termed "Batavianization," i.e., the accompanying acculturation of some of the English to Dutch culture. Third, any discussion of New York City's colonial society must take into account its African-American population. And fourth, because religion was "the central expression of culture in New York City" during the colonial period, one must consider the relationship between ethnic identity and religious identity.

Based on her 1975 doctoral dissertation, Goodfriend's book takes issue with Archdeacon's thesis that the late seventeenth century saw the decline of Dutch influence and the rise of English and French Huguenot dominance. This loss of power, according to Archdeacon, prompted the Dutch residents of New York to support Leisler's Rebellion in 1689. Using different indices of relative economic and political power from Archdeacon, Goodfriend comes to the opposite conclusion: that there was "a remarkably equitable division of resources among New York's major ethnic groups." She notes that political office holding was distributed roughly in proportion to the relative size of the city's three major ethnic groups (Dutch, English, and French). The Dutch, she claims, maintained political power at the local level, dominating important municipal offices between 1708 and 1730. Also, she argues, the Dutch kept the same level of involvement in commerce and continued to dominate the productive trades.

Her main thesis is that a better concept than Anglicization for explaining New York City's brand of pluralism is the concept of "ethnicization," drawn from recent interpretations of nineteenth-century immigration history. New York's colonial ethnic groups, especially the Dutch, English, and French, reacted to each other's presence in the late seventeenth century by developing self-conscious ethnic identities, expressed in their language, religion, marriage patterns, and charitable practices. Unlike nineteenth-century immigrant groups, the Dutch in late seventeenth-century New York City were second- and third-generation descendants of the settlers in New Amsterdam and were a majority, not a minority, of the city's population. During the late seventeenth century, the Dutch Reformed Church "redefined itself along ethnic lines." An overwhelming number of the communicants in the Reformed church in 1686 were Dutch, and a majority of the Dutch population of New York City was affiliated with the church. Women were the mainstay of the church, with sixty-two percent of the communicants being female. A majority of English men married outside their ethnic group, mostly marrying Dutch women. However, a majority of Dutch women married Dutch men. Those Dutch women who married English men still remained within the Reformed church, even if their husbands didn't.

There was "a parallel process of ethnicization" among the English, the French, and African-Americans. The French and the English established their own ethnic churches with the founding of the Huguenot church in 1688 and Trinity Church in 1697. There developed a pattern of charitable giving to one's own ethnic group. The only churches that didn't fit this ethnic mold were the Quakers, the Jews, and Lutherans. Among New York City's ethnically diverse African-American population, there developed a Creole culture that fused elements of European and African cultures.

However, Goodfriend argues, the "tenuous equilibrium" of this pluralistic society began to fracture in the years between 1700 and 1730 as the Dutch and French in New York City began to speak the English language, attend each other's churches, and live in English style buildings. Three-quarters of the third-generation Dutch men continued to marry Dutch women, which Goodfriend interprets as "the continuing salience of ethnic identity in the private life of Dutch New Yorkers." But after 1730, while women continued to be the mainstay of the Reformed church, a significant number of Dutch New Yorkers began to attend the city's Anglican church. At the same time the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts made an effort to convert blacks to Christianity. Between 1705 and 1723, Elias Neau's Anglican school for Negroes in New York City accelerated the acculturation of New York City's blacks to English culture. By 1730 the majority of the Huguenots in the city no longer worshipped at the French church.

Goodfriend's exhaustive research and the soon-to-be published book by David Narrett on Dutch inheritance patterns in New York City clearly indicate that some basic structural changes were taking place during the early eighteenth century. But was it the final victory of English culture - Anglicization postponed three decades? Or was it something else? Goodfriend's argument about the shortcomings of Anglicization as an explanatory concept for the late seventeenth century might as well be made for the early eighteenth. The adoption of English inheritance patterns, English architecture, and the English language does not necessarily mean the disappearance of the Dutch as an ethnic group. Rather it represents the emergence of a new kind of Dutch-American ethnicity. Again, recent interpretations of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnicity provide the insight that ethnicity is dynamic. New forms of ethnicity emerge; groups and individuals can change their ethnic identities.

Notwithstanding her resorting in the end to the Anglicization model, Joyce Goodfriend's book advances the discussion of the meaning of pluralism in colonial America through a deft integration of ethnic history, African-American history, and women's history in a non-ideological manner.