The Abraham Kuyper Political Cartoon Collection

Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) is best known for his strong leadership of the major center-right, protestant political party of the Netherlands from 1879 to 1920. He served as prime minister of the country from 1901 to 1905. Kuyper was also a Dutch Reformed minister, a newspaper editor, a university professor, and a social activist. He used all these platforms to become the foremost Calvinist intellectual and proponent in the Netherlands during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Kuyper was home-schooled by his father, also a Dutch Reformed pastor, in various towns in the Netherlands before going to high school and then university at Leiden. After serving as minister for several congregations in the late 1860s, he settled in Amsterdam and wrote for and soon edited a Sunday paper, De Heraut, which advocated on behalf of orthodoxy in the Dutch Reformed Church (and after 1886, outside it). Soon after, he founded and edited a daily, De Standaard, to discuss national and world news from a Protestant perspective. After dabbling in politics (including a few years in parliament) and leading a movement in support of greater public funding for religious schools, Kuyper founded the Free University in Amsterdam in 1880, where he served as professor of theology.

In the meantime, he founded the Anti-Revolutionary Party in 1879, which sought to expand government assistance to religious institutions and to govern from the perspective of conservative Protestantism. He returned to parliament in 1894 on a campaign to expand suffrage—either to all adult males or male heads of households. He won reelection and his party won a plurality in 1901, allowing him to form a cabinet with coalition partners. He assumed the position of prime minister with the home affairs portfolio. Under his leadership, laws improving working conditions for laborers were proposed, and for some industries, approved. He was criticized, however, for unsympathetically putting down a large 1903 railway strike. Kuyper also finally realized his longtime goal of providing additional financing to religious schools.

His party was defeated in polls in 1905, and Kuyper left parliament for a grand tour of the Mediterranean. His health was fading, and though he was elected to parliament again in 1908, he was not able to accomplish as much as he had in his prime. He survived allegations in 1909 that he had received a bribe while home minister; the investigative committee declared him innocent. He chaired a committee that wrote a Dutch orthography, and he served on the 1910-1912 committee that proposed constitutional change. He died in 1920 at age 73.