by Peter McPherson
I KNEW Ford growing up. He and my father were friends and I saw him from time to time. I saw President Ford many times when I was working for him as Deputy Director of the Presidential Personnel. At those meetings I developed some understanding of President Ford’s decision making.
The Dutch [in Michigan] were a cultural influence since they arrived in large numbers around the turn of the century. My grandmother came from Holland about 1900 when her father came to Grand Rapids to work in the furniture factories. She married a local farmer, my grandfather, and so I was always very aware of the Dutch community, though my grandmother became a Methodist when she married. The Dutch community and their churches were not a dominate political influence in Kent county until probably the late ’50 early ‘60s.
[They tended to shy away from political involvement] for generations, but they began to get really active in the late ‘50s and into the ‘60s. I hope someone has or will do a careful study of why and how the Dutch moved into an active political role. I am talking here about their role in Kent County (Grand Rapids). In Ottawa County (the other county of Ford’s congressman district) it is my impression that the Dutch were a larger portion of the population and the Dutch were politically active much earlier.
In Kent County, as the Dutch became more prominent economically and the immigrant generations passed away, the Dutch community apparently began to feel that they could and should exercise more of a direct political role and should elect leaders from their own community to public offices like the State Senate and House. The big change was the Dutch organizing aggressively through local Dutch churches (mostly the Christian Reform Church I think) to control the primaries.
Of course it was the Republican primary that was generally important in Kent County. Jerry Ford was already in Congress before this degree of involvement by the Dutch. I am not aware of the role of the Dutch churches when Ford won the primary for Congress in 1948. Ford defeated an incumbent who I think was Dutch, Congressman Yonkman, though I never heard he was the Dutch candidate. I had the impression that Ford always had strong Dutch community support.
Copyright: The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation.
*Peter McPherson (photo, right) was a special assistant to President Gerald Ford. Ford himself was, through his mother Dorothy Gardner, a direct descendant of the Gardenier, Vanderburgh, Janszen, Van Kleeck, Ter Bosch, Buys, and Lubbertse families of Durgerdam, the Netherlands.
