Van Houten’s Children’s Law: 1874. Generations of Dutch students will remember that combination of fact and year. After all: thanks to this law, they were now allowed to crunch facts and years, instead of working in a factory.
Coen Brummer wrote a thesis about Samuel van Houten, the liberal politician responsible for the law, for which he recently received his PhD. Sam van Houten against the rest has also been published in a trade edition, and Brummer shows in the book how Van Houten (1837-1930) transformed during his life from a left-wing liberal to a reactionary who aligned himself with fascism.
Van Houten practiced politics at a time when the Dutch state was being reshaped. Suffrage, tax obligations, freedom of education, social legislation: everything was at stake. Brummer: “Of course important things are discussed in parliament nowadays, but at the end of the nineteenth century it really mattered.”
How did Van Houten cross your path?
“I worked briefly about ten years ago Elseviers Weekly, where I compiled a book with interviews from their pre-war past. One of those conversations was with Sam van Houten. I found him an intriguing figure – also because I was politically and theoretically interested in liberalism – and quickly discovered that little had been written about him. Then I reported to the Biography Institute of the University of Groningen with the idea for a dissertation on Van Houten and his time.”
Did you know before you started this research that Van Houten had shifted from left to right?
“Yes, I had an idea of that, but not of the extremity with which it happened. People often become more conservative as they get older, but his case is especially interesting because it shows how much liberalism changed during this time.
“Van Houten claimed that he was the most consistent politician there was. That is not true, but it is true that liberalism passed him by like a kind of express train, in a movement from individualism to community thinking. The emerging socialism played an important role in this. Politicians thought: we have to change, otherwise the socialists will come to power.”
Where did Van Houten stand at the start of his political career?
“When he arrived in the House of Representatives in 1869, he was the absolute left winger of the liberals. He also sat on the far left bench and took that as an omen. He immediately came into conflict with the so-called doctrinaire liberals, the group – political parties did not yet exist – of which Johan Rudolph Thorbecke was the leader. That was the father of the Constitution of 1848, but that didn’t matter to Van Houten. It soon became clear that the Netherlands was too small for both of them.
“Van Houten went off the rails a number of times, in terms of form – he broke with the timid liberal ways – but also in terms of content. There were people who could live with his broader liberal agenda, which included a law against child labor and the introduction of an income tax. But when he glorified the Paris Commune in 1871, a short-lived revolutionary regime, it went much too far for the liberal elite. The barbarians were in power there!
“Van Houten was also one of the first outspoken advocates of New Malthusianism, the idea that you should slow down population growth with contraceptives. That did not endear him to the Christian part of the nation.”
Was his bill against child labor widely supported in society and parliament?
“There was a lot of discomfort at this time about the fact that children were working in factories, also elsewhere in Europe. That wasn’t just because it was so sad for those children. Van Houten himself, for example, was against child labor because it was unfair competition compared to adult workers. If you wanted to prevent the creation of an underclass that could barely make ends meet, you had to categorically ban that competition, he thought. That is why he, as an ordinary Member of Parliament, started working on a private member’s bill.
“He also wanted to introduce a form of compulsory education, but that went much too far for other MPs, just like a total ban on child labor. Children still had to be able to help their parents in the fields and in the cottage industries. The final law therefore only provided for a ban on factory work for children up to the age of twelve.”
In 1894 Van Houten became Minister of the Interior. His main task was to write a new Electoral Act. Was he still more radical than his colleagues?
“No, here you can clearly see the development of liberalism. In 1892, the liberal minister Tak van Poortvliet proposed a bill in which every adult man who could read and write would be given the right to vote, provided he did not receive aid for the poor. A parliamentary majority did not like that and after new elections Van Houten was allowed to try it.
“He aimed for a much more limited suffrage, for men who paid taxes or had certain diplomas. Van Houten hoped to keep universal suffrage at bay, because that would surely lead to the rule of poor workers who would take over the state treasury. He believed that such an underclass had no right to exist and wanted to solve poverty so that everyone would eventually have the right to vote within his Electoral Act.
“Van Houten refused to amend his law during the parliamentary debates, but he did not turn the tide of democratization. His opponents saw this clearly. They switched to salami tactics, taking small steps towards their goal. That worked: in 1917, when elections were last held under Van Houten’s law, more than a million men were allowed to vote, much more than the 350,000 in the first elections after the introduction of the law. In this way, support for universal suffrage also grew.”
The retired Van Houten opposed the introduction of universal suffrage and drifted towards a proto-fascist movement in the 1920s. How did that happen?
“He was not happy with mass democracy and therefore ended up in circles where, even as a nineteenth-century democrat, you should not have had much of an affair. He joined the Vaderlandsch Verbond, which held merger talks with the fascist Verbond van Actualisten. I certainly don’t want to downplay it, but during this process he left the party. So he realized that these were not his natural allies.”
Which party would Van Houten have voted for this Wednesday?
“I don’t think he would really feel at home anywhere. He was against the system with an electoral list drawn up by political parties. In this way, politicians would enter the House on the heels of a party leader without their own bond with the voters.
“Van Houten must have been a very fanatical Twitterer. He always sought contact with voters through publications, which he often published himself, and could be very sharp. That fierceness is actually the great constant in his political career: it has not diminished in sixty years.”