Activist New York

Front matter

- Y 2 A - t Le ‘ x 4 . eee

Me

, Shy’

Foreword

Eric Foner

Activist New York offers vivid, eloquent evidence of the persistence and significance of political and social radicalism in New York City from the earliest days of colonial settlement to the present. Inspired by a path-breaking exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, it reminds us that the city has always been an epicenter for movements that seek to enhance freedom and equality, in numerous forms, for New York’s diverse population, and that events in the city have reverberated throughout the country. As Steven H. Jaffe notes, New York has long been the nation’s “capital city of social activism.” His account also makes clear that many of the liberties we take for granted—freedom of speech and religion; equality before the law regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity; the right to self-determination in the most intimate areas of life—would not have been achieved without activists’ efforts. Throughout our history, radical movements have challenged Americans to live up to their professed ideals and have developed penetrating critiques of social and economic inequality. They have done so in pursuit of numerous goals and using a variety of tactics. Some radical movements accept the society’s prevailing emphasis on the ideal of the free, unfettered individual and seek to eliminate obstacles to its fulfilment, or extend it to excluded groups. Others insist on the necessity of community regulation of individual action, especially of economic activity, to ensure basic economic security and opportunity for the less fortunate. Some movements take as their task uplifting the condition of a single group of Americans; others envision a Sweeping transformation of the entire social order. Occasionally radicals have resorted to violence, but most radical movements have reflected the democratic ethos of American life—they have been open rather than secretive and have relied on education, example, or “moral suasion,” rather than coercion, to achieve their goals.

As the chapters that follow reveal, while often castigated as foreign-inspired enemies of American institutions, radicals have always sprung from American culture and appealed to some of its deepest values—facts that help to explain radicalism’s survival even in the face of tenacious opposition. From 19th-century radicals who insisted that the inalienable rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence were being undermined by slavery, gender discrimination, or the industrial revolution, to 2eOth-century advocates for women’s suffrage and the empowerment of the city’s disadvantaged black and Latino populations, radicals have adapted the language of American society to their own ends. In so doing, they have not only extended the benefits of American liberty to previously excluded groups, but have given American values new meanings.

Indeed, as this book shows, many ideas assumed to be timeless features of American culture originated with radical movements. It took the efforts of minorities such as Quakers and Jews to establish a right to religious toleration in Dutch New Netherland. The idea of freedom as a universal entitlement arose not from the founding fathers, who spoke of inalienable rights but made their peace with slavery, but from abolitionists, black and white, who invented the idea of equal citizenship irrespective of race. Despite New York City’s close economic connections with the slave South before the Civil War, the Committee of Vigilance, founded by David Ruggles, helped to protect the city’s black population from an epidemic of kidnapping and in assisting fugitive slaves who came to the city established the framework for the underground railroad.

The modern idea of privacy—the extension of individual rights into the most intimate areas of personal life—arose from the efforts of feminists and gay activists to secure for all Americans control over their own persons. Our modern understanding of free expression stems not simply from the Bill of Rights, but from the struggles of the labor, birth control, and civil rights movements throughout the 20th century to overturn laws and governmental practices that restricted the dissemination of ideas deemed radical, obscene, or socially dangerous, and from those activists who courageously combated governmental thought control during the era of the Cold War and McCarthyism.

New York has also been home to a vibrant labor movement, including the artisans who playeda vital part in the run-up to American independence, early trade union leaders in the 1830s, and the young Jewish and Italian female garment workers whose “uprising of the 20,000” early inthe 20th century inspired pioneering legislation regulating conditions of labor in the city. Larger-than-life radical orators and organizers populate the book, including Emma Goldman, who addressed thousands of New Yorkers on issues ranging from anarchism to free love and the right to birth control, and Marcus Garvey, who built the largest black mass movement before the civil rights revolution. But real pride of place goes to the often anonymous radicals who pioneered social change, including most recently gay and lesbian activists of the 1960s and ’70s, and the young people of Occupy Wall Street, who put the issue of economic equality squarely on the national agenda.

Every generation of New Yorkers has witnessed the emergence of some kind of collective popular activism. Their movements have helped to make New York, and America, a freer, more equal society. The history of activism in New York City reinforces the insight of the sociologist Max Weber about how social change takes place: “What is possible would never have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible.”

“The Sailors’ Strike—Scene on Peck Slip Wharf, New York City” 1869 Unknown artist, wood engraving from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper

As seaport, commercial center, and industrial hub, New York sparked movements by working people. These men were among over 1,000 seamen who went on strike for higher pay in 1869.

Director’s Foreword 05 Whitney W. Donhauser

Foreword 07 Eric Foner Introduction 12

A City of Activists

Chapter Nine 141

ee eT)

“New York is the Battleground”:

The Campaign for Woman

Suffrage

— Battles over Sexuality and Birth Control

Endnotes 277 For Further Reading 285 Index 293 Image Credits 299 Acknowledgments 303 Midcentury Metropolis: The Sixties in New York: Urban Crisis and Revival: 1918-1960 154 1960-1973 206 1973-2011 246 Chapter Ten 159 Chapter Thirteen 211 Chapter Fifteen 251

“The New Negro”: Activist Harlem — To Drink or Not to Drink: Prohibition, Pro and Con — Defending Civil Liberties: The ACLU

Chapter Eleven 177 T R) “Artis a Weapon”: Activist Theater in the Great Depression — Confronting Fascism

Chapter Twelve 191 A Cold War: Activism and Anti

Communism in New York

— Blacklisting the Weavers

— Refusing to Hide: Anti-Civil Defense Protests

“Gay is Good”: The Rise of Gay Power

Chapter Fourteen 231 poa} “Basta Ya!”: The Young Lords and Puerto Rican Activism — From Civil Rights to Black Power — Asian American Activism

“Don’t Move! Improve!”: The New Housing Activists — “Silence = Death”: AIDS Activism

Chapter Sixteen 265 st] “We Are the 99 Percent!”: Occupying Wall Street — A New Era of Activism

Introducti A City of.

What is activism? And why has New York City played such an important role in its history?

hese two questions are the

starting point for this book and for the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibition Activist New York on which it is based.

People have defined “activism”’— a word first used in the early 20th century—in many ways. This book proposes a definition that offers a way of understanding social and political movements both past and present: Activism is what happens when ordinary people mobilize in hope of shaping their society’s future through collective public action.

That sentence helps us to grasp what connects a wide range of apparently unrelated events, efforts, and achievements, including ones that happened long before the word “activism” ever existed. The signing ofa petition urging rulers to allow religious dissenters to live in peace; secret networks to help fugitive slaves reach freedom; strikes by laborers to pressure employers to grant higher pay, shorter hours, and the right to organize; protests by African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans seeking access to economic opportunities, good health, and political power; the fight by women to obtain the vote and gain full social equality: these actions and many more count as activism, and the people who engaged in them, either briefly or over a lifetime, were and are activists.

New York City has beena special place in the history of activism, and its importance is the result of a distinctive and ever-changing mix of human factors. Those factors have included extremes of wealth and poverty as in few other places; the dynamic of diverse religious, ethnic, and racial groups competing for rights, resources, and power; and the continual mingling of newly arriving people and ideas in one of the world’s most densely crowded environments. The folksinger-activist Pete Seeger explained New York’s role as an incubator for

Hon:

Activists innovation by pointing to the power of this diversity to encourage the exchange and creation of ideas: “The extraordinary thing that cities do... is to bring together people who would not otherwise have met each other.”?

Also criticalin explaining the city’s activist history is the sheer size of New York’s population as it became the nation’s largest city (1810), the world’s largest (1925), and remained one of the top ten even when Tokyo, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and others surpassed it (1970s-90s). The rise of New York as the nation’s center of media, communications, and art is another crucial factor, enabling New Yorkers to broadcast their expressions of protest and plans for the future far beyond the city’s borders.

New York has played an especially important role in the history of leftist and liberal activism, a byproduct ofits history asasite of labor conflict, a crossroads for imported and homegrown avant-garde ideas, a laboratory for experiments in using government to tame social ills, and a battleground for the rights of women and minorities. But activists can also fight to prevent, or roll back, change instead of promoting it, and these men and women have also been part of New York’s history. Whether organizing to ’protect” Protestant society from Catholic immigrants before the Civil War, speaking and writing against the woman suffrage movement during the 1910s, or forming neighbor-

hood groups to resist the forced integration of local schools in the 1960s, conservative New Yorkers have used many ofthe Same strategies and tactics embraced by those they have opposed, though often with less visibility and public celebration. Atthe same time, New Yorkers on the political left and center have also sought to block or roll back changes they have viewed as negative (Such as overdevelopment, gentrification, and pollution) through movements to preserve landmarks, affordable housing, and a healthy urban environment.

T AM

REMENBE Mist I AM MAKING HISTORY

Marcher, Union Square March 25, 2011 Steven H. Jaffe, photograph

A long activist legacy: A marcher carries a placard during the centennial commemoration of the Triangle Factory Fire.

INTRODUCTION: A CITY OF ACTIVISTS ettled by Europeans in 1624

to earn income for Dutch investors, the town on Manhattan Island was blessed by a great natural harbor, access to rich natural resources, and the energy and ambition of generations of eager merchants, artisans, and laborers. It evolved steadily into North America’s “capital of capital,” the city where the pursuit of profit seemed more all-consuming and unashamed than anywhere else. In the 19th and early 20th centuries New Yorkers used these advantages to make their city the largest, busiest, and richest metropolis in the Western Hemisphere and then the world.

The mid-20th century saw New York attain a position as the dominant global city, then suffer a period of declining fortunes and diminished resources in the 1970s before bouncing back as an acknowledged world center of finance and innovation in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Over those centuries, as this book will show, the nature of activism changed dramatically. In colonial Dutch New Amsterdam, and then English New York, those who challenged the status quo did so by petitioning authorities for special favors, defending themselves in court, or protesting in the streets. The American Revolution, itself a long episode of radical activism, created anew language of “inalienable natural rights.” (Although in New York, as elsewhere, propertied white males initially enjoyed the lion’s share of those tights to the exclusion of women, slaves, free African Americans, and the poor.) Additional “revolutions” that were part of the city’s booming 19th-century economic growth—an explosion of mass-produced books and newspapers pouring off printing presses, an expanding school system, a vigorous and competitive party politics, and a growing labor movement—excited other New Yorkers with the possibilities of claiming the rights inscribed in the Declaration of Independence as their own.

Many prosperous 19th-century merchants, financiers, professionals, and manufacturers funneled money into crusades to reform the city and the world. But the question of money—and who controlled it—also becamea flashpoint for conflict as immigration, industrial work, and urban crowding generateda type of mass poverty never seen before in America. Tensions over divisions between wealthy, middle-class, and working-class people stimulated further efforts to reform the existing economic and political system. Inthe case of anarchist, socialist, and other left-wing activists, these tensions also inspired radical visions for overturning the system altogether and starting afresh, whether through peaceful or violent means.

Inthe 20th century the groundwork for activism shifted as some of the agendas of grassroots protesters—including demands for decent housing and protection of the safety, health, and bargaining rights of wage earners—became incorporated into the realities of the political system. In the first decades of the century Manhattan became home to the world’s most powerful and centralized business corporations. Partly in reaction to the power of expanding industrial capitalism—and then to the Depression that devastated the economy during the 1930s—New York City and State pioneered an unprecedented role for government involvement in the everyday lives of working people. This new urban liberalism satisfied some activist demands. But it also raised new expectations for further economic and political transformation, expectations that were sometimes rewarded and sometimes frustrated. In response, activists seeking new rights, freedoms, or opportunities—as well as those resisting change—found themselves trying to persuade, pressure, or fight government officials as wellas business leaders inthe city that had become the unofficial capital of the American economy.

Marcher with the American Civil Liberties Union at the Gay Pride Parade in New York City 2010

Cal Vornberger, photograph

New York’s dense variety of communities and organizations have fueled the city’s activist movements.

The American

Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), for example, founded in1920

to defend the First Amendment and other rights, went on to help gay New Yorkers fight for legal recognition and equality.

Today, in a world where media and electronic communications have become far more decentralized, New York is able to retain its wide influence. It remains a place whose sophisticated, inventive, “adgy” activists still attract attention. As has been true for generations, the very geography of the city’s public spaces—its wide and straight avenues, open parks, squares, and bridges, and symbols like the Statue of Liberty and Wall Street—provide dramatic backdrops for marches, performances, and rallies. Unlike some other major American cities,

New York affords ample elbow room in public spaces for such mass displays of popular democracy and for crowds of writers, broadcasters, and photographers to spread activist messages around the world.

Atthe same time, the city’s dense networks allow the hidden, daily work of activism to go forward. That work includes behind-the-scenes planning sessions, fundraising drives, door-to-door canvassing, mass mailings, meetings with officials, arguments with allies and rivals, hard compromises, and countless other tasks demanding energy, time, patience, dedication, and often courage. The pressures

and opportunities influencing the lives of ordinary New Yorkers continue to propel them into activism to shape the future for themselves and others. In the words of Lower East Side writer-activist Richard Kostelanetz, “inhabiting a hothouse influences receptive people to be what they’ve not been before and would not otherwise be.”@

All these patterns can be found at multiple moments in New York’s activist past. But the specifics of that history are not interchangeable any more than the lives of New Yorkers can be

Throng of women charge on New York City Hall to demand bread 1917

Central News Photo Service, photograph

New York's diversity meant that religious, ethnic, economic, and gender activism could combine in distinctive forms. Immigrant Jewish women, for instance, demonstrated against the high price of kosher meats in 1902 and rising food prices in 1917.

reduced to a two-dimensional stereotype. The experiences, emotions, frustrations, and accomplishments of different activists were profoundly shaped by the time and place they lived in and by the issues that drove them to act. Those details and those realities are what make the history of New York activism a living thing, today and into the future.

INTRODUCTION: A CITY OF ACTIVISTS

Colonial Revolutic New Yori

When the explorer Henry Hudson Salled into New York Bay in 1609, he claimed the island the Lenape people called “Mannahatta’ for the Dutch.

and mary

1624- 1783 tthe time nobody could have

predicted how important the area would someday become.

Nor could anyone have imagined that New York City would become one of history’s most influential places for imagining a better world. The process by which New York became a generator of new ideas about social and political change—a center of activism, radical ideas, and political protest—was long, unpredictable, and challenging.

The seeds of this future identity were planted as early as 1624. In that year European immigrants (Soon joined by enslaved Africans) arrived to start settling the colony the Dutch had named The Castello Plan. New The town of New Amsterdam, soon to become ; Amsterdam in 1660 New York City, was built at the tip of Manhattan New Netherland. They built 1916 Island according to Dutch traditions of architecits capital and trading center, John Wolcott Adams, drawing ture, street and canal layout, and fortification.

G

EORGE with the CITY o of NEW

Print for Caringin Bonto Mapke Printselter, tN? Eg tn S Pauls ee ee E n es

A View of Fort George with the City of New York Eighteenth-century British New York City was an from the S.W. c. 1740 ethnically diverse, politically turbulent colonial John Carwitham and Carington Bowles, color lithograph seaport.

the town of New Amsterdam, at Manhattan’s southern tip.

During 40 years of Dutch rule, the social dynamics of the place helped set the stage for what would follow. New Amsterdam was acrossroads for starkly different national, racial, and religious groups: Dutch and Walloon Calvinists, German and Scandinavian Lutherans, Sephardic Jews, English Baptists and Quakers, Africans of many nationalities and religions, and others. This diversity sometimes created tensions, as the need to encourage settlers clashed with the authorities’ desire for uniformity, and as conflicting Dutch traditions of toleration and religious orthodoxy brought people into collision. All of these factors helped to foster a distinctive culture, one in which the town’s diverse residents proved themselves skilled at challenging each other, aggressively asserting what they believed, and questioning authority, whether it was political, religious, or economic. After 1664, when an English fleet seized the colony from the Dutch and renamed it “New-York,” the city’s ethnic and religious mix grew even more complex.

British New York City became one of the most diverse places in the world, filled with English, Scottish, Irish, French Huguenot, German, Jewish, and other newcomers, along with enslaved and free people from the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, and Madagascar. As the city mushroomed from 1,500 inhabitants in 1664 to some 10,000 by the 1730s, political and social conflicts spread. New Yorkers fought over questions of trade policy, civil and religious rights, freedom of the press, inequalities between rich and poor, ethnic resentments, and access to power. The result was a city with competitive and contentious politics, home to rival political factions and parties earlier than most other places in North America.

Of course New York was not the only hotbed of debate in the British colonies. All of the larger towns, especially seaports, brought diverse people and ideas together, making them incubators of change as well. Nor was New York always more innovative or open than its sister cities. For example, while Quakers and Jews fought Dutch officials for the right to stay and worship in and around New Amsterdam in the 1650s, religious freedom was more attainable for Catholics in the Quaker city of Philadelphia: Priests were conducting public religious services there by 1707, 77 years before they won that right in New York. Inthe 1760s and 1770s, radicals protested Parliament’s taxes in every American city from Savannah, Georgia to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Bostonians rather than New Yorkers often took the lead.

Yet New York’s special character was already in play inthe colonial era. In this city more than any other, friction, open rivalry, confrontation, and a wide variety of viewpoints became the lifeblood of public affairs.

And after the Revolution—as Manhattan became the new nation’s largest, busiest, and richest metropolis, a place whose ever-increasing number and diversity of immigrants dwarfed anything seen before—New York would come into its own as the activist city.

CHAPTER ONE Let Us otay

Tne Struggle for Religious Freedom in Dutch New Netnerland

Flushing The final page of the Flushin hae monstra Remons trance bears the signatures of 30 men who refus: Lae 1657 turn away Quakers. The original document was pa Ee ned ina fire hA broke out at the New York State Toe ary in Albany in ‘HCE

On December 27, 1657, 30 men living in the Dutch village

of Flushing (in today’s Queens) began a very public act of defiance.

he colony’s governor, Petrus Stuyvesant, had barred all residents of New Netherland from opening their homes to Quakers, members of areligious group also known as the Society of Friends. The Flushing residents Signed a petition to Stuyvesant, explaining that they could not obey his order: “If any of these said persons come in love unto us, we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them.” Colonists had challenged Stuyvesant before, but rarely in so direct and confrontational a way. The petition, today known as the Flushing Remonstrance, shows how 17th-century New Yorkers disobeyed authority in order to stand up for what they believed to be right.! Stuyvesant was infuriated by the petition, calling it “mutinous and detestable.” He sent soldiers from New Amsterdam to arrest four officials of Flushing village—Tobias Feake, Edward Hart, William Noble, and Edward Farrington—and carry them off to jail in Manhattan. The governor believed that imprisoning these village leaders, all signers

Petrus (Peter) Stuyvesant undated Unknown artist, oil on wood panel

Religious dissenters faced a formidable adversary in New Netherland’s governor, Petrus Stuyvesant, who ruled the colony from Fort Amsterdam at Manhattan's tip.

of the petition, would end the religious and political disorder. He soon learned that Quakers, and those defending them, were not so easily suppressed.

The conflict over the Remonstrance was neither the first nor the last battle over religious toleration in New Netherland. Although they lost this first fight, Quakers and their sympathizers, along with other dissenters, stayed on. And they continued to make the colony the most religiously diverse place in 17th-century North America.

RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY

Just a few months earlier Flushing residents had first welcomed Quakers into their homes. This

was aradical move because in the 17th century Quakers were considered very odd, even dangerous. The Society of Friends was a small Protestant sect founded in England in the 1640s, whose members interpreted Christianity in their own radical way. They were known as Quakers because of their practice of “quaking” in spiritual ecstasy when they preached or prayed in public, a behavior that was deeply disturbing to many mainstream Protestants. Their beliefs were disturbing as well: Quakers rejected all violence and war, refusing to perform military service. They also refused to remove their hats to acknowledge the authority of government officials and wealthy gentlemen, and they even permitted women to preach. Fleeing persecution

in England, some Quakers crossed the Atlantic to North America in the 1650s.

They found an interested audience among some of the English Protestants who had settled in Dutch New Netherland. Seeking to expand the colony’s population, Dutch officials had allowed English migrants to create new farming villages in western Long Island, in today’s Brooklyn and Queens. Many

QUAAKERS VERGADERING. è Post ù wmiat aenberoolm: War ae re!

maei amin of these English colonists had originally settled in New England, but seeking to follow their own understanding of Christianity they had relocated to the Dutch colony to escape the rigid religious control of Puritan authorities in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the New Haven colony. In New Netherland some followed “Independent” preachers who depart-

ed from the beliefs and practices of conventional Puritanism. They had already created a precedent of fringe religious communities in New Netherland by the time the Quakers arrived.

In August 1657, 11 Quaker men and women from England landed in the city and began preaching loudly in the streets. Many inhabitants of New Amsterdam, Stuyvesant included, were shocked. According to the Dutch Reformed minister Johannes Megapolensis two of the young women, Dorothy Waugh and Mary Weatherhead, “began to quake... preaching and calling out in the streets that the last day was near.” They “continued to cry out and pray” even after being put in the city jail for disturbing the peace. To Governor Stuyvesant, this public ranting—by women, no less—and the refusal of the

Quakers shocked 17th-century officials and others by encouraging women to preach, as shown

in this early view of a Quaker religious meeting in England.

Quaker men to remove their hats before him were acts of gross disobedience, warning signs that the colony’s political, social, and religious order was under attack.’

Stuyvesant believed that the Quakers were “heretics, deceivers, [and] seducers” who would lead other colonists into error, sin, and disrespect for all

authority. He also believed that God would frown on—and perhaps punish—the colony for tolerating “heretics” within its boundaries. Stuyvesant was so disturbed by the Quakers that in 1659 he ordered a colony-wide day of prayer and fasting to seek God’s help in combating their “abominable Heresy.” Quaker beliefs, he concluded, were an infection that had to be stopped from spreading throughout the population.*

While some of the Quakers sailed off for the English colony of Rhode Island, others left Manhattan but remained in the area, preaching to the English settlers on Long Island. Stuyvesant soon had one of the preachers, Robert Hodgson, arrested, brought to New Amsterdam, and flogged for his refusal to perform forced labor while in jail.

LET US STAY: THE STRUGGLE FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN DUTCH NEW NETHERLAND

Nieuw Amsterdam op t Eylant Manhattans c.1700

Unknown artist,

New Amsterdam's Dutch Reformed Church (the large building at center left with a double-gabled blue roof) dominated the town's skyline as well as its official religious life.

colored engraving

The governor also reaffirmed an existing ban on all unauthorized religious gatherings, warning the colonists not to harbor any of the “erring spirits” (Quaker missionaries).®

“LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE”

The challenge for Stuyvesant was how to enforce religious uniformity and at the same time encourage New Netherland’s population growth, a balancing act that proved hard to maintain. The Dutch West India Company had learned as early as the 1620s that the way to grow the colony was to open New Netherland to an ethnically and religiously diverse array of settlers. Back at home, the Netherlands’ own booming commercial economy was creating widespread employment and prosperity, and few Dutch men and women were willing to risk a 3,600-mile ocean voyage to a distant wilderness. In order to make their investment on the banks of the Hudson River profitable, company directors needed farmers, traders, artisans, soldiers, and taxpayers—regardless of their religious

A- Hettirti B. de Kerck C. de Mintmolen D. defe Vlagge wert op gehaelt als a beliefs. This need for more settlers, along with

his own personal religious convictions, had led Stuyvesant’s predecessor, Governor Willem Kieft, to promise religious freedom to English newcomers during the 1640s. Even Stuyvesant, desperate for new settlers, asked the company directors to recruit “some homeless Polish, Lithuanian, Prussian... or Flemish farmers” for the colony in1659. By then New Netherland’s population embraced a variety

of religious beliefs, and perhaps as many as half

of the 10,000 colonists, including many of New Amsterdam’s 1,500 inhabitants, were not Dutch.®

The Dutch people’s own attitudes and religious

situation grew increasingly complex on both sides of the Atlantic. The Dutch Reformed Church was the official “public” church, enjoying a privileged status and the support of government authorities. Dutch Reformed ministers held Sunday services and conducted baptisms, marriages, and funerals in their church, the only house of worship legally permitted in New Amsterdam. But at the same time, “liberty of conscience”—the idea that residents of Dutch territory should be permitted to follow their daer Schepen in de Haven kom a Quaker in London 1656

2 E a i | The Persecution of

Early Quakers endured intolerance on both sides of

the Atlantic. Petrus Stuyvesant had Robert Hodgson flogged, a punishment also inflicted on Friends in mid-17th-century England, as shown in this print.

a n e at i So SB 5 e aga . p . ns aver ae ae i ci y F = i è, . A p James Nailor Qu r fet 2 howers on Pillry at RE eels the Han man to thé old Exchange London, Som dayes ter, Steed toothewers more on the Plor, ve at the Exchainge, an there had his Tongue Bored throug with a kot Tron, &

Stigmanized i the Forehead with the Letter:B i Decem” 17° anno Dott bgg >+-

25 LET US STAY: THE STRUGGLE FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN DUTCH NEW NETHERLAND af iO 6 Po a aii S own religious beliefs in private, without fear of persecution or expulsion—had also gained popularity. By the late 1650s the religious diversity of New Netherland resembled that of the Dutch seaport of Amsterdam, where Calvinist officials allowed Lutherans, Mennonites, Catholics, and Jews to live and hold religious services as long as they did so privately and inconspicuously. But Stuyvesant