In April 2003, Walter Cronkite wrote: “The Foundation’s concept for the conversion of Governors Island provides a moral, philosophic and patriotic base that should considerably augment the argument to keep that invaluable heritage in the public domain.”
Composing a triangle of America's fundamental values as National Symbols in New York Harbor—Tolerance, Liberty and Welcome as embodied by Governors Island, Liberty Island and Ellis Island—by recognizing each island’s unique facet of history: the “National Heritage Triangle.”
The magnitude of the emblematic value of Governors Island as the nation’s oldest natural historic symbol is based on one’s deeper understanding of three critical historical events: the three primary European landings and settlements on the North American East coast which led to the formation of the Original Thirteen. They were: Jamestown, Virginia, 1607; New Plymouth, New England, 1620; and Nooten Eyland, New Netherland, 1624 (now Governors Island, New York).
In the discussions of "What to do with Governors Island?", all pertinent officials and nearly all legislators have denied—through silence from 1997 through 2009—the island's 1624 historic legacy which shaped and became part of our national identity (similar to express historical unconsciousness of the Holocaust but having distinct opposite effects, i. e., a new beginning with spiritual rebirth through freedom of conscience in religion versus deportation into an abyss pending death through ethnic/religious hatred.) Yet, the Governors Island landing/settlement was the best planned, the most successful one and by far the most important one of the three because it was on the place on which the first New World expression of religious tolerance took place.
As the locus of the political-cultural conception of freedom of religion and conscience—the basis of pluralism and personal freedom (= liberty) in North America—Governors Island signifies the origin of American toleration (= religious tolerance). That tolerance, as America’s ultimate value and dynamic precept, precedes liberty. It is vital in defining and defending the often generic or static notion of [personal] American freedom. Tolerance and Liberty can both be recognized visually as equal partners in the concept of freedom. We envisage doing that on the officially recognized 1624 birthplace of New York State because that place—Governors Island—connotes the womb of New York’s historic legacy and cultural identity of diversity through tolerance, New York's gift to the nation. (For historical quotes of the official instructions to the Jamestown and Governors Island settlers go to page three of the 19-page article “Governors Island, Lifeblood of American Liberty).”
• Is the UNITED STATES interested in protecting and preserving its national heritage of historic substance and of profound thematic meaning to AMERICAN freedom? Will it embrace and endorse the GOVERNORS ISLAND PRESERVATION AND EDUCATION PROJECT aimed at perpetuating the memory of a place and a history that is of the utmost importance to humanity, that may help extinguish the fires of intolerance and be remembered as a symbol of hope to the country, if not the world? Is it ready to accept the Tolerance Monument as the universal embodiment of the dynamic force of tolerance?
• Can NEW YORK STATE, or the New York Tri-State region, provide leadership in safeguarding its seventeenth-century geo-political legacy of toleration as precursor of the Constitution—culturally enduring but lost for a century by an English Act of Parliament that outlawed the Roman Catholic faith in 1691—by actively reinstating the nation's oldest natural, historic and cultural monument and turning it into an asset of 21st-century relevance?
• Will NEW YORK CITY be generous enough to integrate its most important landmark and yet unexploited national cultural asset—Governors Island—into contemporary community life, and so achieve a greater shared knowledge about the nation's past, strengthen the Tri-State's identity of tolerance as the lifeblood of American liberty, fortify New York's civic pride, and drive New York's artistic and economic vitality (sign PETITION)?
New York’s legal and political tradition of tolerance, the basis for its characteristic cultural diversity and pluralism, had its beginnings on Governors Island. That tolerance is central to the contemporary Western conception of personal freedom which can be defined in terms of the twin credos of tolerance and liberty. Its origins as an ethical force in the Western Hemisphere and as a legal and political imperative can be traced to the year 1624, in what is now the State of New York. (For third-party video CLICK on YouTube).
Tolerance is an active dynamic entailing reciprocity and reciprocal respect. Always bilaterally demanding, it forges “American” freedom by relentlessly transforming plurality into constructive pluralism as a never-finished product of American culture.
Tolerance defines and gives meaning to an otherwise undemanding “generic” or “static” freedom. It is the indispensable dynamic component of American freedom and Western civilization. Without conscious vigilance and broad awareness of that vital, fundamental notion of tolerance, there will be times when there will be no freedom in the sense that Americans recognize that term today.
Left unnurtured and unprotected, simple liberty invites and facilitates the "friends" of intolerance and extremism—complacency, carelessness, apathy, passivity and insipidness—opening the door to insidious assaults on civil liberties.
A proposed TolerancePark will halt historical amnesia and restore Governors Island to its rightful historical importance by extolling America’s vital role in advancing liberty in the world through the moral force of tolerance.
Thus, the park will provide our children with an opportunity to understand the meaning of American freedom. It will afford them a deeper appreciation of tolerance and liberty as equal partners in a pluralist society, at the very place where these notions first took root in 1624.
Tolerance builds liberty. Intolerance kills liberty. The Park will therefore preserve Governors Island's historic symbolism, be an enduring beacon for humanity and extol America's vital role in advancing liberty through the moral force of tolerance.
“Tolerance is a reciprocal dynamic. Tolerate is a one-way street.”
On June 6, 2009, President Barack H. Obama said: "As we face down the hardships and struggles of our time and arrive at that hour for which we were born, we cannot help but draw strength from those moments in history when the best among us were somehow able to swallow their fears and secure a beachhead on an unforgiving shore."
In his Inaugural Address of March 17, 2008, Governor David A. Paterson proclaimed: "Let us put personal politics, party advantage and power struggles aside, in favor of service, in the interests of the people...Let me introduce myself...I am the governor of New York State."
Earlier, at the January 1, 2007, Inaugural Address, Governor Eliot Spitzer declared “New York created the model for the kind of society that would be duplicated throughout the country and around the globe: Our state was born as an island at the center of the world (Governors Island).” (For 34-slide presentation in pdf click Governors Island Legacy, New York's Identity.)
Governors Island, Nooten Eyland (in pidgin language Nutten Island) until 1784, is the place of origin of American tolerance as the basis for cultural diversity and pluralism and, as such, it embodies a Message of Profound National Importance. Therefore, the island’s cultural and national heritage has outstanding universal value which could qualify it as a potential World Heritage Site.
Together with liberty, the notion of tolerance serves to define the cultural and juridical construct to which American personal freedom refers. In the face of intolerance, tolerance is a vigilant dynamic — it is neither uncritical acceptance, appeasement or submission, nor laxity, sloth or indifference.
Embedded in Governors Island—New York State’s legally recognized, historic birthplace—tolerance is the quintessence of New York’s cultural patrimony since 1624 (CLICK HERE for Legislative Resolutions 5476 and 2708 which recognize this heritage).
With the arrival of the first settlers to New Netherland on Governors Island in 1624, the legal and cultural traditions of the Low Lands, including the basic human virtue of toleration (= religious tolerance) as the basis for ethnic diversity, were first implanted by law upon North American soil (unlike the first landings in New England and Virginia).
This plurality, for instance, was recorded in a census of 1639 and portrayed on a Manhattan map which shows a large farm owned by America’s first Muslim planter, Antoni du Turck, a Moroccan from Fez. After sixty years as New Netherland (1614-1674), the region – now the New York Tri-State area – came under definitive English authority.
The virtuous conception of tolerance, thus introduced in the Western Hemisphere and rooted in New York State’s very birth, can be considered as New York’s first and unique contribution to American culture. Governors Island is therefore the oldest natural, primary National Symbol. Its message is America's ultimate virtue.
One hundred fifty two years later, in 1776, New York’s birthfather’s fundamental precept of political freedom (and with regard to individual freedoms, in 1791, by way of the First Amendment) was to become the crucial underpinning of the American Republic with the adoption of the "Right-of-Man-Doctrine" that formed the basis for the statement that "The United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States."
That doctrine stated, in 1776, that "whenever any form of government (the English Crown) becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government."
One hundred ninety five years prior to that Declaration of Independence, in 1581, the same doctrine was the basis for the United States of the Netherlands when it stated that "when a ruler of the people (King Philip II of Spain) does not behave thus, but on the contrary oppresses them...they may not only disallow his authority, but legally proceed to the choice of another ruler for their defense."
It was therefore no happenstance that John Adams wrote, in 1781, that "the originals of the two republics are so much alike that the history of one seems but a transcript from that of the other...the great characters the Dutch Republic exhibits...have been particularly studied, admired and imitated in EVERY American state."
Later Adams wrote: "I modestly blush for my nation when I consider the low estimation in which we have held the importance of the [Netherlands] connections with us. Their separation from England, union with France and Spain and their treaty with us was THE EVENT which ultimately turned the scale of the American Revolutionary war and produced the peace in 1783."
The analogous republics—the United States of America and the United States of the Netherlands—were not coincidental. The latter’s DNA and precepts, implanted on Governors Island in the year 1624 and the building block of America’s earliest childhood, were responsible for the traits that shaped America's like-minded personality and deeply felt commitment to political freedom and individual liberty.
The right to rebel against tyranny, the right to seek redress of grievances and freedom in religion and of the press, all can be traced to the New York Tri-State region when it was known as New Netherland with New Amsterdam (now New York City) at its center.
In summary, Governors Island—as the place of first settlement between 38 and 42 degrees latitude, sandwiched between Virginia and New England, and as the legally recognized birthplace of New York State on which the conception of toleration (= religious tolerance) as a legal-political condition was planted in 1624—is a historical archeological landmark.
For the above mentioned reasons, the island is a National Monument and a Historic National Symbol while representing the Shared Mutual Heritage of two nations.
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Only by knowing and understanding the legal implications of what happened on Governors Island in 1624 can the original and enduring cultural contribution of the first (now New York) settlers to American culture be grasped. It requires knowing and understanding the original form of government of New Netherland (later the New York Tri-State region) – so named from 1614 through 1674 – with its split existence of a North American province of the Dutch Republic starting in the year 1624 from theretofore having been only a place for private commercial interests through patents issued by the States General – the Dutch Parliament – since 1614.
Namely, codification of common law in both the States of Holland and of Zeeland took place from 1580 through 1624. Because the [Dutch] West India Company (WIC) was given, in 1621, a dual legal position as trading institute and as sovereign under the authority of the States General, New Netherland’s colonists had to swear allegiance to both the WIC and the States General. Those Holland and Zeeland ordinances, together with civil, maritime and commercial laws were placed as legal code onto the New Netherland province by the Governors Island settlers directly and through incorporation by reference pursuant to the March 1624, January 1625 and April 1625 instructions to the settlers. These instructions contained the legal-cultural code that lies at the root of the New York Tri-State traditions and, ultimately, American pluralism (diversity) and liberty through the active notion of tolerance as the basis for ethnic diversity and [American] freedom.
It were those first settlers to Governors Island in 1624 who planted the concept of toleration (= religious tolerance) as a legal right for North Americans as per explicit orders that they had been given on their departure from Europe. They had to attract, “through attitude and by example”, the natives and non-believers to God’s word “without, on the other hand, to persecute someone by reason of his religion and to leave everyone the freedom of his conscience” (via “levenshouding en voorbeeld” moesten zij “de Indianen ende andere blinde menschen tot de kennisz Godes ende synes woort sien te trecken, sonder nochtans ijemant ter oorsaecke van syne religie te vervolgen, maer een yder de vrijch[eyt] van sijn consciencie te laten”).
Those instructions derived from the founding document of the Dutch Republic, the 1579 Union of Utrecht, stating “that everyone shall remain free in religion and that no one may be persecuted or investigated because of religion” (“dat een yder particulier in sijn religie vrij sal moegen blijven ende dat men nyemant ter cause van de religie sal moegen achterhaelen ofte ondersoucken”). That statement, unique in the world at the time, became the historic underpinning for the opening of the first synagogue in the Western Hemisphere at Recife in Dutch Brazil in 1642 as well as the "official" granting of full residency for both Ashkenazim and Sephardim at New Amsterdam in 1655
The 1624 settlement completed the claim on the territory transforming it to a North American Province according to the Law of Nations: (1) Discovery in 1609 (2) Surveying and Charting from 1611-1614 and (3) taking Possession through Settlement. Some of the Governors Island settlers were geographically dispersed to the Delaware River, the Connecticut River and at the top of the Hudson River (now Albany) in order to legally delineate the claim to the “Province of New Netherland” (now the New York Tri-State region).
Of the three primary European landings/permanent settlements on the North-American East coast—Jamestown in Virginia, 1607; New Plymouth in New England, 1620; and Noten Eylant in New Netherland, 1624 (i.e., now Governors Island in the New York Tri-State)—the Governors Island settlement was the best-planned, the most successful and by far the most important one with regard to its contemporary relevance and significance for the future of our nation. Namely, the Governors Island landing introduced the political-cultural conception of freedom of religion and conscience as the basis of pluralism and liberty in North America. That latter notion is to be illustrated, again, on New York State’s very birthplace—Governors Island—in the form of a Tolerance Park project which is reflective of New York’s historic cultural identity.
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EXPLORER ADRIAEN BLOCK AND HIS CAPTAIN HENDRICK CHRISTIAENSZ WERE THE FIRST PERSONS EVER TO SURVEY AND CHART THE COAST LINE BETWEEN THE 38th AND 45th PARALLELS AND NAMED THE TERRITORY NEW NETHERLAND IN 1614. THIS MAP IS THE RESULT OF FOUR VOYAGES STARTED IN 1611.
The first recorded resident of Governors Island was Jan Rodrigues from Santo Domingo, a Latin-American of African ancestry who was the first person to summer on the island in 1613. He was employed by the private Amsterdam fur trader and explorer Adriaen Block who had hired him in the [New York] harbor in May that year and had left him behind on the island to serve as his on-the-spot factor to trade with the natives. Block was to rendezvous again with Rodrigues in December 1613. Rodrigues was a free man and served as Block’s interpreter in trade negotiations with the Hudson River Indians. Governors Island, therefore, carries a meaning of historic as well as cultural importance to the descendants of three continents: American Indians, Africans and Europeans.
Because the island was the original center for European trade with the Hudson Valley natives and the region’s historical crossroad of three cultures, a vital component of the 50-acre museum-park-to-tolerance Historic New Amsterdam will be a Tolerance Center holding a museum of human servitude with special emphasis on the Atlantic arena in the 15th through 17th centuries. The relevance of such a museum may best be underscored by the fact that, today, there are more chattel slaves in the world than ever before: between 12 to 27 million. This is in spite of the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in Article 4, that "No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms."
This Tolerance Center is envisaged to be encased by the Tolerance Monument as the park's centerpiece: a 151 ft (46 meters) high iconic emblem as symbol of hope. Because this sculpture has already been dedicated by its creator, Barnett Newman, to the memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this monument is implicitly a tribute to racial tolerance—recognizing the fact that, for the African-American segment of the population, liberty was a concept from which they were largely [legally and culturally] excluded.
Specifically, in a culturally intolerant society, the notion of [constitutional] freedom is of little consequence unless actively defended. Tolerance, therefore, precedes freedom and, yet, they are mutually dependent.
Tolerance is an active attitude prompted by recognizing the fundamental freedom of others. It is harmony in difference—an indispensable realization in a pluralistic society. The inherent significance of tolerance to freedom-for-all was only legally attained with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Successful pluralism in a free society requires broad awareness and conscious vigilance of tolerance as liberty's partner in the conception of American freedom.
In order legally to dedicate 50 acres or 30 percent of Governors Island to the Tolerance Park of Historic New Amsterdam for the benefit of future generations, State and City politicians would need to
• understand and accept the meaning of New York’s legacy to America (i.e., the entrance of the Dutch East India Company ship Half Moon into New York harbor on September 11, 1609, as the forerunner of the introduction of New York's and America’s first and only republican, non-royalist, enlightened, legal-cultural tradition in 1624);
• acknowledge New York’s cultural legacy of toleration (= religious tolerance) as the source of successful American pluralism—a legacy that endured culturally but was lost legally in 1691 by an English Act of Parliament that outlawed the Roman Catholic faith, and regained 100 years later as a Constitutional right under the Bill of Rights in 1791 following the formation of the United States of America in 1776;
• embrace New York’s priceless, thematic patrimony of tolerance as the basis for the nation’s tradition and ideal of freedom and liberty;
• unveil a national symbol that currently lies hidden—the nation’s oldest natural, historic symbol that represents a fundamental American precept;
• concede the preexistence of the historic human right of tolerance—rooted in the founding of New York—which represents the legal-cultural underpinning of the United States of America and, potentially, can have immense visibility to the world and make Governors Island a World Heritage Site;
• transform Governors Island into an enduring national icon by sponsoring a bipartisan unibill which would grant legislative approval of a project of momentous national significance which also contains a powerful message of relevance and benefit to the national good in the 21st century.
Up until now, political inertia and legislative silence have ensured the conscious obliteration of the Tri-State’s colossal seventeenth-century legacy. Because of this indifference or lack of interest and action, New York’s unique repository of knowledge about its distinctive, important early history risks to remain lost forever to America's citizens.
This passive political neglect of the national meaning of New York State’s birthplace echoes, if less dramatically, the cultural violation perpetrated by the Afghan Taliban in March 2001 when it destroyed the country’s most important Buddha statues—the world's two largest ancient, colossal Bamiyan Buddhist relics.
Legislative inaction, therefore, is equivalent to intentional political eradication of New York's most significant relic—the Western Hemisphere’s only original, historic vestige of the building block of tolerance that lies at the core of American liberty.
The ruination of that heritage would be no different from closing one's eyes to the demolition of Jamestown Settlement for the benefit of a local highway project or a Congressional decision to eliminate the day of Thanksgiving as a national holiday.
Following intense and extensive exchanges by the Foundation for Historic New Amsterdam at the federal government level under two White House administrations, fifty acres for the Education and History Project had been set aside by the federal government as a condition for nominal transfer of jurisdiction to New York State on February 1, 2003 (see Discussion Details “Moral Conscience” on bottom left).
Tacit understanding and the expectation that the New York State and City Legislatures would move to dedicate the reserved acreage to New York’s cultural patrimony (30% of the 172-acre large island) has not come to fruition as yet.
However, political acceptance of America’s ultimate virtue of tolerance (i.e., the Lifeblood of American Liberty) through legislative action is vital for the creation of the nonprofit project because State/City agencies and special and commercial (=for profit) interests might not respect the ethos of Tolerance, Liberty and Welcome that the National Heritage Triangle so clearly symbolizes.
What interests have prevented New York State Senate and Assembly members from practicing the civilities of democracy or exercising their duty, from 1998 through 2007, to restore, preserve and sustain (1) Governors Island’s momentous legacy, (2) New York State’s historic identity and (3) a fundamental American conception?
What special powers have ingratiated themselves with what legislators to deserve their attention or receive their allegiance at the expense of legislative recognition of New York State’s historic emblematic symbol?
What has been the seminal lubricant that has corroded the State’s democracy and a robust democratic process thus silencing the Legislature into inaction regarding a vision of depth and breadth for tomorrow?
Will ethical choice as yet be the guiding force for a legislative decision, in the year 2009, with respect to the efficacy and conceptual merits of the not-for-profit, self-sustaining Tolerance Park with its centerpiece "Broken-Obelisk" (CLICK HERE) as Tolerance Monument (click GovernorsIslandToleranceMonument.com)? Or will legislative silence continue to represent conscious damnation of national memory thus favoring short-term appeasement of special and narrow constituencies?
