Elizabeth L. Bradley

This is a fascinating study of a single icon, the Knickerbocker, from its inception to present day. As someone who grew up on Long Island, seeing the name "Knickerbocker" brought forth an odd, vague complex of associations: there's the basketball team, the NY Knicks, and wasn't there a beer? And didn't it have something to do with very old New York families, or the Dutch, or the Hudson Valley?

The first appearance of the Knickerbocker was for me the best story: Washington Irving used a hoax to launch his book, "A History of New York". In 1809, Irving sent notices to papers like the New York reporting the disappearance from his hotel of "small, elderly gentleman", dressed in an old black cloak and cocked hat, who "may not be in his right mind". Not particularly different from today's local TV news alert for a drifting elder who might have Alzheimer's, is it? In this case, however, given that the man never turned up, the hotel was forced to sell the copies of his book, left in his room, to pay his bill: that book was the History, and that man was Diedrich Knickerbocker. The History, like Diedrich and the hotel stay, was a fiction, but as Bradley explains, it filled a particular cultural void at that time, and has been adapted to many other purposes over two centuries.

When Dutch New Amsterdam was taken over by the British and made New York, the records of the original colony were not preserved, and the colonists were scattered. After the War of Independence, New York City rose in importance, but this history left New York without the pedigree of other cities like Boston or Philadelphia: who were the First Families of New York and what was life like in "old New York (Amsterdam)"? Washington Irving provided answers in his History, and even if fiction, that book provided a nostalgia which was rapidly adopted, and the Knickerbocker became an idea deeply embedded in New York City culture.

The single thread of the Knickerbocker idea is followed through New York history, and that icon is reshaped by political, literary and commercial forces into whatever the times demand. The Knickerbocker is an allusion to a simpler, more solid past when New York seems to be changing too quickly. It has racial overtones when there is anxiety at the increasingly diverse city population. It confers a status independent of wealth, when new wealth is re-shaping New York society. It becomes a symbol for the new Greater New York when the five boroughs unite.

Even FDR used the Knickerbocker politically; after all, he was a Roosevelt (a Dutch name, the second one to be President). His New Deal programs would transform the city, and these were not always universally embraced, but of course a true Knickerbocker would know what was right for New York.

Bakeries, steamships, hotels, and especially beer all have used the Knickerbocker to sell their products and services, and to some extent, continue to do so today. It is a symbol for a Tradition, a certain quality, a continuity. It doesn't really matter if it began as a hoax. New York City owns the Knickerbocker now, and it will mean whatever it needs to mean.… (mehr)