Marked was the vigor last week of the Knickerbocker aristocracy of Manhattan in observing the joyous marriage day of Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Juliana of The Netherlands.
The newsorgan of most of these aristocrats is the New York Herald Tribune. Warmly it editorialized: "There is no country in Europe where Americans feel more thoroughly at home than Holland. . . . The language barrier matters little amid such hearty friendliness and genuineness of character. . . . This ["New York] was a Dutch colony before it was British. The Dutch strain is still strong in the city and the State. As for the pilgrims of New England, they found their first refuge in Holland, the land of toleration and it was from the port of the City of Leyden— where Princess Juliana studied law—that the ship Speedwell with her historic list of passengers set sail for Southampton, where the Mayflower awaited them. . . . Lucky are the people who can look back to such a history of toleration and strength as can the Dutch!" The 300-year-old Dutch bell of Manhattan's Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas pealed for Juliana. Aboard the Dutch liner Statendam in Manhattan harbor, Knickerbocker notables toasted her name and "the truly Dutch name of President Roosevelt" at an eleven-course Dutch dinner. At the Netherlands Club in Gramercy Park, the Royal Dutch wedding caused even the most staid members to down thimbleful after thimbleful of scorching Holland gin.
Journalistically the story was that of Cinderella reversed. A Crown Princess whose reigning mother is probably Europe's wealthiest woman was about to take as her Prince Consort a pleasant young German of excellent but impecunious family who might well be called Prince Cinderellus. From the moment of his marriage, Prince Bernhard zu Lippe-Biesterfeld receives a Civil List from the Dutch Treasury of 200,000 florins yearly ($109,500).
"Boom! Boom! Boom!" More than a million people, princely and middle class, proletarian and peasant, swarmed into The Hague last week—so many that all its hotels and lodging houses could not begin to hold them. Restaurants and cafes received special permission from Her Majesty's Government to keep open clear around the clock. Ten thousand Netherlands soldiers had not so much the job of keeping order as of making sure that no gin-sipping celebrant fell into one of The Hague's canals, and none did. Piping hot Dutch chocolate, served from Army field kitchens with cake, kept the 10,000 soldiers warm, and grinning Dutch sergeants gave their men pocketfuls of sugar candy.
Prince Bernhard zu Lippe-Biesterfeld, at the time his engagement to Crown Princess Juliana was announced (TIME, Sept. 14), was a minor salaried employe of the great German chemical trust I. G. Farben-industrie Aktiengesellschaft, and a Nazi Storm Trooper. As the future Prince Consort of The Netherlands he became a naturalized Dutch subject and swore allegiance to his future mother-in-law Queen Wilhelmina (TIME, Jan. 4). This made no difference to Nazi Party fanatics who insist, "Once a German always a German!" Last week rampant Nazis were whooping against the ex-German and ex-Nazi bridegroom in almost every German newspaper.