Last summer around 20,000 American tourists visited the Netherlands, Edward Bok wrote in 1904 in an article entitled: The mother of America. He placed this massive interest for the Netherlands in a wider perspective. That the interest in all things Dutch had developed at a mad pace in recent years had a reason. More and more Americans 'discovered' that the roots of American society were not located in Great Britain but in the Netherlands. Aspects such as the freedom of the press, the freedom to practice the religion of one's choice, the system of free public education and secret elections were seen as important criteria in this respect. These were all achievements that in the colonial period had not existed in Great Britain. That they were nevertheless introduced by British colonists was because so many of the Pilgrim Fathers, as some of the early colonists were called, had spent some time in the Netherlands. There they had become acquainted with these influential ideas which they brought with them to America. Even the most important documents from the history of the US, the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution were derived from comparable earlier Dutch documents. Furthermore, there was the entire catalogue of achievements that could be traced back directly to the institutions of the Dutch Republic, claimed Bok, who therefore in his article posed the question which should be called the mother of America: Great Britain or the Netherlands? With this he more or less followed in the footsteps of the man who some ten years before, in 1891, had stated the same thing in a lecture. That lecture was entitled The influence of the Netherlands in the making of the English commonwealth and the American Republic. The speaker, William Elliot Griffiths, published his ideas three years after his lecture in a booklet entitled: Brave little Holland and what she taught us. Bok was therefore not the first who defended this provoking claim. His influence was nevertheless a lot greater than Griffiths'.

As a seven-year-old Dutch immigrant, Edward W. Bok arrived in 1870 with his parents in New York. Six years later, in the centennial year of the United States, the family were accepted as citizens in their new homeland. By working hard and marrying well (he married the publisher's daughter) Bok became editor in chief of the leading women's magazine "Ladies' Home Journal", a position he was to fill for thirty years. He succeeded in making the magazine the largest and most important of its kind. With its circulation of more than one million copies it left its competitors far behind. In his book The Model Man, writer Hans Krabbendam describes the great influence of the journal on the education of millions of American middle class women. During this period they went through the transition from Victorian to more modern views. In that process the opinions of the editor in chief played an important role.