Holland Mania

After reading Stott's earnest, engaging study of the Dutch influence on American art, architecture and culture between 1880 and 1920, one's doubt lingers as to whether Americans' penchant for things Dutch was a ""Holland Mania,"" as she calls it, or just a cultural footnote. She traces the beginning of the phenomenon to Gilded Age barons who collected Dutch old masters. Propelled by the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (who was of Dutch descent), the availability of inexpensive reproductions of the Dutch masters and the writings of revisionist historians, many Americans, she notes, embraced Holland as an alternative to the nation's British heritage, seeing it as a fountainhead of democracy, liberty, Protestantism and such institutions as free public education, religious freedom and a written Constitution. Stott, an art historian at the University of Denver, documents the Dutch craze through popular stereotypical images of windmills, dikes and honest people wearing wooden shoes. Americans enamored of Holland built colonial Dutch-style houses, wore Dutch caps, held Dutch costume parties and consumed products ranging from Dutch Masters cigars to Old Dutch Cleanser. In 1903, Edward Bok, the Dutch-born editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, proclaimed that the interest in things Dutch was not a passing fad but ""something more intelligent and permanent."" Not quite: as Stott shows, the Dutch pastoral could not survive the political realities of WWI. 150 pictures, 46 in color. (Nov.)