One day in early 1975, New York City aged nearly 50 years.
Then-Mayor Abe Beame signed a City Council bill backdating the founding year on the city flag to 1625, when the first Dutch colonial settlers erected a fort in a fledgling company trading post called New Amsterdam at the southern end of Manhattan.
The bill stripped from the British the distinction of having established America’s largest and most important city, as it expunged the flag’s previous date of 1664, the year English forces took over the settlement at the muzzle of a cannon.
So, with the stroke of the London-born Beame’s pen, New York became the oldest city in America, surpassing Boston, founded in 1630, and Philadelphia, founded in 1682.
More to the point, the change to the historical record signaled that New York’s cosmopolitan character derives not from the British imperial crown, but from socially liberal Dutch Holland. New Netherlands’ transactional business-minded culture, multi-ethnic population, religious tolerance, linguistic twists, geography and architecture are all baked in.
Because New York City’s 400th anniversary in 2025 is approaching, the city has an opportunity to celebrate its history with a huge outdoor party, along with educational events like the recent New-York Historical Society exhibit on New Amsterdam.
Dangled before New Yorkers by Mayor Adams early this year in his State of the City address, such a commemoration would hold particular relevance since polls suggest many Americans (predominantly supporters of Donald Trump) believe the U.S. is a Christian nation — forgetting perhaps that it consisted, from the beginning, of immigrants from around the globe.
In ol’ New Amsterdam, 18 different languages could be heard, and an array of religious practices were freely exercised, although only members of the Dutch Reformed Church were permitted to worship outside their homes in the initial years.
In addition to Hollanders were Belgium Walloons, Germans, Scandinavians and Africans — both free and enslaved — working, and drinking, themselves to exhaustion or trading for lucrative beaver pelts or bear skins with the area’s indigenous tribes. Given the trading port’s focus on profits and growth, people of different stripes found ways to get along with one another, and the colonial directors were lenient with lawbreakers.
Far to the north of tiny New Amsterdam, by contrast, the English Puritans or Pilgrims were burning Quakers at the stake, as Council President Paul O’Dwyer said during the debate over the bill, of which he was the main sponsor.
While we remember the seventh and final director-general of the Dutch holding, Peter Stuyvesant, as stubborn and punitive, he yielded to a statement from Quakers seeking the right to openly practice their religion. This, the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657, helped infuse religious freedom throughout the colonies, creating a path toward the codification of individual rights in the Declaration of Independence at the start of the War of Independence.
O’Dwyer grew up in the rural west of Ireland when his countrymen waged their own war of independence after WWI against British colonial misrule. He was known around New York as both a champion of underdogs and an Anglophobe. But in this unusual legislative debate, he stressed the importance of giving weight to democratic liberties in the tradition of New York’s original forebears from the Netherlands.
Though he’d go on to write, in the 1980s, that the Dutch, French, British and Spanish all carried to the Americas “their national rivalries, perpetuating their racial and religious hatreds,” and he scorned New Amsterdam’s third director Peter Minuit for laying claim to the wilds of Manhattan for a supposed $24 in goods or guilders, he did not highlight the famous swindling of the native tribes or their subsequent decimation in the legislative debate.
When, in the end, it was O’Dwyer’s turn to speak at the Jan. 8 bill-signing ceremony at City Hall, he understood that Beame had more pressing matters on his mind, most notably the city’s mounting debts and the worries of the banking community. But the mayor had already determined that approving the bill would be no more expensive than the cost of printing a new series of city flags for parades and inaugurals.
He left it to the white-maned O’Dwyer to explain the reason for the date change.
“There is more to New York than large buildings, and there is more to New York than financial institutions,” the council president said in his Irish brogue. “…[T]here is a history – and there is a soul.”
Polner and Tubridy are the authors of “An Irish Passion for Justice: The Life of Rebel New York Attorney Paul O’Dwyer,” published by Cornell University Press/Three Hills.