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Upon arrival in new york in july 1931, van Loon found solace in his work. The New York Herald Tribune quoted him saying that “something in the atmosphere abroad …prevents Americans from working on subjects which they hope will interest American readers. He found that most American writers in Europe become victims of lassitude and instead of working they ‘just sit.’” And he wrote his mentor, George Burr, that he was back in New York toiling on another big project, his geography book: “Nothing remains of any real value except work. It may be a drug but it is such a pleasant drug…a drug and a companion at the same time and what else or what better arrangement has the good Lord ever offered to any of us?”1

During the 1920s the reputation of the iconoclastic journalist H.L. mencken reached its pinnacle. Perhaps for the first time in American cultural life, a critic, rather than a novelist or a poet, was the most influential American writer. Called by Walter Lippmann in 1926 “the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people,” another journalist dubbed the self-taught linguist “the nearest thing to Voltaire that America has ever produced.” Of course, there were negative opinions too. Some considered him to be “the most universally hated man in the United States” or “the Geng his Khan of the Campus.” As contemporary author Louis Kronenberger put it, “Mencken came in like a lion. [He] liked the noise and fun of battle [and] launched a massive attack on everything this country held inviolate, on most of what it held self-evident.” In any case, Mencken was a phenomenon. A recent biographer has even called him “our nay-saying Whitman” and compared Mencken’s writing in the early 1920s to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”1

Immediately after his graduation on 22 june 1905, Hendrik Willem left Ithaca to start working for the Associated Press in New York. Two days later, as he put it in a 1914 re;sume, “I sat in the backroom of the fifth floor of the Western Union Building and cut good paper into small strips and pasted the whole mess in a big book.” In his first week on the job, he was told that he would soon be transferred to Washington, D.C.1

In choosing to go to germany for his doctorate, Hendrik Willem was following a long-standing American tradition. Throughout the nineteenth century, a year or more at a German university like Leipzig, Halle, Gottingen, or Heidelberg was a sine qua non for any college graduate aspiring to obtain a first-rate professional training in the more specialized scholarly and scientific disciplines. What especially appealed American students to German universities was their specialized scholarship and the prevailing sense of academic freedom.1

“Greenwich village is a state of mind rather than a state of streets,” Ladies’ Home Journal informed its readers in 1920. The literary critic Malcolm Cowley reflecting on his own years there thought that it “was not only a place, a mood, a way of life: like all Bohemias, it was also a doctrine,” which propagated the ideas of liberty, self-expression, female equality, free love, and the intense enjoyment of life for the moment. This area of Manhattan has been called “the home of half the talent and half the eccentricity in the country,” and “the place where everything happens first.” As one Villager put it, “everything started in the Village except Prohibition.” For a good part of the twentieth century, nearly every major American writer and artist lived in the Village at one time or another. The Village, Cowley wrote, was a cheap place to live in the city where young writers hoped to be published. For those belonging to “the proletariat of the arts,” Greenwich Village was not only a cheap place to live but also the incubator for American culture and art.1

Aboard the president harding running away to europe, van Loon met Dr. Alice Bernheim, a bone specialist at New York Hospital. The well-to-do, well-bred, and happily married Alice Bernheim discovered van Looni¯s name on the passenger list, tipped the dining room steward, and was seated at his table; several hours later, they felt as if they were longtime friends. Although she was petite, not quite reaching Hendrik Willem’s chest, she could stand up to him on any subject. More important, as a sharp-witted and perceptive listener, she was exactly the right person the psychologically wounded van Loon badly needed. In Gerard Willem van Loon’s words, Alice had “just the necessary combination of worldliness, clinical detachment, and humor to make her one of the chosen few whom Hendrik needed more than they needed him.” And in the next seven years he sent her an avalanche of letters expressing his inner feelings to this woman for whom he had a deep respect.1

Even before the nieuw amsterdam had reached rotterdam, Hendrik Willem felt the shadow of the war. In an act of piracy the ship was captured by the French cruiser Savoie in the Channel and taken to Brest. There, as van Loon cabled the Associated Press, the ocean liner was “deprived [of] all foodstuffs [and a] million [and a] half silver bars for [the] Dutch government while eighthundred German [and] Austrian subjects [both] reservists and private citizens until sixty years [of] age [were] confined [to] Devils Island on French coast.” Hendrik Willem, who served as interpreter for the captain, was allowed to get ashore and quickly sent a telegram to the London bureau of the Associated Press. As the ship had been incommunicado, van Loon’s cable made headlines; one of the detained passengers was the wife of the first secretary of the U.S. embassy in Berlin, so the American government officially protested to Paris. Finally, the Nieuw Amsterdam, including the German women, was allowed to continue its trip, arriving in Rotterdam six days late.1

A ringing telephone in the middle of the night roused the peacefully sleeping van loon household in nieuw veere on 10 may 1940. Calling from New York was van Loon’s friend Elmer H. Davis, who had a daily radio program on CBS. Davis told van Loon that a few hours before German troops had invaded the Netherlands. The fragmentary news dispatches and Davis’s own unfamiliarity with the country’s geography, made him seek van Loon’help in trying to explain the situation in Holland to the American radio public. In a matter of minutes van Loon was en route to New York where in the remaining hours of the night he worked side by side with Elmer Davis in the studio.1

After they had spent christmas 1911 at sunnyside, Hendrik Willem and Eliza van Loon decided to settle in Washington, D.C. They rented a big house on Twenty-first Street and hired two servants, thereby overstretching their finances. Through Elizâs cousin Fanny Bowditch Dixwell, who was married to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the doors of the capital’s elite were opened to the van Loons, including invitations from President and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson in the White House. Hendrik Willem’s diary also records a private dinner with British Ambassador James Bryce, author of The American Commonwealth. About this visit to Lord Bryce, who served in Washington from 1907 to 1913, he wrote, “He seems to have known everybody everywhere. I do not see how he keeps his information straight—if his mind is made like his library. Such a disorder. I never saw invitations of all sorts—cards of all sorts—despatches of all sorts—everywhere. When a match was needed he rolled a piece of paper—fashion A.D. 1500—lit the cigaret and then to extinguish the paper beat it against the stones of the mantelpiece. Of course, sparks and pieces of charred paper, flew all over. But it was all very pleasant.”1

Early in january 1942, a week before van Loon’s sixtieth birthday, the New York Times reported that the works of Hendrik Willem van Loon, Thomas Mann, and Erich Maria Remarque were on a list of 120 books whose sale had been banned in the Netherlands by the Nazis. This sad news was counterbalanced by a surprise on 13 January: a cable from Alexander Loudon announcing that Queen Wilhelmina had decided to bestow on van Loon the Order of Knight of the Netherlands Lion, the highest honor he could receive from the Dutch government, in recognition of his important work since the outbreak of the war. On 14 January, the very day Hendrik Willem turned sixty, this news broke in the New York Times, which led to a stream of congratulation cables and letters, including one from Princess Juliana. Columbia University’s Professor Adriaan Barnouw was among the well-wishers, writing van Loon, “Better late than never! [It] is more than deserved.”1

In december 1935, van loon informed the national broadcasting company (NBC) that he would be stopping his radio broadcasts at the end of the year. Although he had had “a grand time” with his on-air segments, he needed to concentrate on a new book, one that he had been thinking about for the past two years. He had realized, he told his son Willem, that a writer didn’t make any reputation on small books, adding contemplatively, “I am getting old enough to think of posterity.” He was convinced that there was a need for a new magnum opus on the arts; his goal was to “try and make the average American kid see that art is something which 1) is not feminine and not quite the thing for manly little American males, and 2) is not a luxury but an absolute necessity.”1

After an uneventful atlantic crossing, Hendrik Willem van Loon arrived in New York where he stayed a few days with friends of his aunt’s. Uncle Jan and Aunt Sally accompanied him to Cornell. The train ride to the university, in upstate Ithaca, was a disappointment. “Not that I had exactly expected to see real Injuns chase our train. But I was not prepared for quite so much drabness, for quite so much that was utterly commonplace, for so much natural beauty ruthlessly spoiled by carelessness and greed,” he wrote many years later. “[N]othing to indicate that this was that New World where all men were supposed to have been born free and to enjoy an equal chance at life and happiness. Indeed, it was all very different from what good James Bryce and his American Commonwealth (duly learned by heart) had led me to expect.”1

In an article published in the december 1942 issuE of Tomorrow, van Loon had expressed his concern about the younger generation who, in his view, felt lost because the older generation had failed to teach them the importance of ideals and had not sufficiently provided them with spiritual leadership and heroes who could serve as an example. Van Loon hoped, he wrote, that “the younger generation once more be shown the road to true happiness, let them be shown that the only lasting treasures are those things we have discarded, let them once more understand that life can be the most magnificent, the most glorious of all experiences.” That conviction was an important reason for him to sign a contract with Dodd Mead to produce a number of children’s biographies of heroes, which he called the Fighters for Freedom. The series would begin with Thomas Jefferson and Simon Bolivar was to follow. 1

Van loon was an early critic of the german Fuhrer Adolf Hitler. When he was in Bad Gastein, Austria, in the summer of 1933, he bought a copy of Mein Kampf, a few months after Hitler became chancellor. “I have carefully read every word Hitler has written. I did not want to judge him on the ‘say so’ of the Jews. I wanted him to tell me his own story. That his style is abominable beyond words is neither here or there,” he wrote to his former wife Eliza. “But the contents of the book…. The most ignorant book I ever read…. And all this brutal ignorance is paraded about as if it were a new and glorious discovery. I consider the man the worst menace to the peace of the world since Napoleon.” As a result, van Loon decided “it is my duty to go back [to America] and preach an anti-Hitler campaign, not merely because he does not like the Jews, but because he is the sworn enemy of everything that alone can save our civilization…. We should not take him as a joke. He is nothing of the kind. His half-corked philosophy is eminently fit to appeal to semi-normal and sub-normal mentalities…. We have millions of them at home. Unless we fight the man from the beginning he will destroy us.”1

At the beginning of 1921, Jimmie reported in her diary that Hendrik Willem—whom she called Han—was “feeling quite rotten,” or even was “feeling like hell” and suffered from “ragged nerves” and pain in his chest. By the end of January, she was able to pen that her husband was much better now and “dressed all day,” but her diary entries in March attest to an attack of the blues. About the only bright spot was a burgeoning friendship with Sinclair Lewis, whose novel Main Street had just been published to great acclaim. That winter Sinclair Lewis and his wife, Grace Hegger Lewis, who were celebrities now, visited the van Loons a number of times. According to one of Lewis’s biographers van Loon supposedly put up a sign in his house that read, “It is forbidden to gossip over three minutes about Grace.” Lewis also introduced van Loon to his editor, Alfred Harcourt, who in 1919 had started his own publishing house. Harcourt became a lifelong friend of Hendrik Willem’s and in later years published four of his books.1

“[F]rom my tenth year on (or even earlier) i wanted more than anything else to be a very famous historian,” Hendrik Willem van Loon reflected years later. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he considered him-self to be on “pleasantly intimate terms with the Almighty” who existed in Hendrik Willem’s consciousness “in a late medieval form—a kind and very wise old gentleman, a sort of beneficent grandfather with whom I occasion-ally hold conversation and discuss my own little problems.” Often Hendrik Willem had asked God to give him an understanding of the great and mighty historical figures in the dim past. But here his “intimate terms with the Almighty” were apparently of little help, since he was pleasantly told to use his own will and brains to “find these things out” for himself. “If you knew all the answers [so God told him], I myself should become superfluous, and I have no intention whatsoever of resigning, at least not for a good many eternities to come.” And so van Loon tried to understand the past in his own way and a number of times in his life—regularly confessed in his correspondence—ound it hard not “to play Jehovah.”1