Fighting a South African War in the American Midwest: Dutch-Americans and the Demonization of the British during the Second Boer War

At the turn of the twentieth century, war dispatches in Dutch-language newspapers throughout the Midwest offered weekly reminders that their church was under attack. While most Americans basked in the victory of the U.S. over Spain, a constellation of rural Dutch-American communities fretted over a different conflict in South Africa, pleading with U.S. officials to intervene and raising funds in their local congregations to help with the war effort. With rapt attention, they watched the Second Boer War unfold, cheering on their co-religionists, the insurgent Boers and vilifying their foes, the imperialistic British.

Often perceived as isolated, rural Dutch-American communities in Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin diligently followed foreign affairs and during the Second Boer War, fostered some of the fiercest opposition to the British outside of South Africa. Linked by adherence to Dutch Reformed Protestantism, Dutch-Americans rallied all of the spiritual, financial, and political heft they could muster to oppose the enemy of all members of the Dutch Reformed tradition, even unsuccessfully pressing both McKinley and Roosevelt to intercede on behalf of the Boers.

This paper examines how the faith of Dutch-American communities in the American Midwest resulted in powerful feelings of antipathy for the British during the Second Boer War. These Dutch-Americans scoffed at their foes, casting into doubt the legitimacy of British Christianity. They described the conflict as a war between the righteous and moral Boers and the cruel and faithless British. Although the history of the Boers and Dutch-Americans diverged when they left the Netherlands in the early 1800s, neither time nor space diminished a fierce kinship anchored by their faith. Using these communities as an example, this paper demonstrates the power of a shared faith tradition to unite communities against a common enemy, even when they had shared little contact in nearly a century.