The Disappearance of Diedrich Knickerbocker: How Washington Irving’s Clever Hoax Named the New York Knicks

On October 26, 1809, New Yorkers opened the Evening Post to a notice titled “Distressing.”

The report lived up to its label. A “small elderly gentleman” named Knickerbocker had vanished, last seen leaving his lodgings “in an old black coat and cocked hat.” Readers were encouraged to submit tips to the newspaper office or the Independent Columbian Hotel, “[a]s there are some reasons for believing he is not entirely in his right mind, and as great anxiety is entertained about him.”

The mystery of Diedrich Knickerbocker’s disappearance played out over several issues of the Post that autumn, culminating in the publication of a book that put a young Washington Irving on the literary map. From there, the term knickerbocker came to refer to a type of person, a type of pants, and a basketball team.

Quite a legacy for old Diedrich—especially considering that he didn’t exist. 

From Bakers to Books

The Knickerbockers, however, did exist. Today’s descendants have traced the name back to Harmen Janse Knickerbocker, a 17th-century Dutch colonist residing in what’s now New York State. Harmen Janse was attached to the moniker as early as 1682, when it showed up in a land deed as kenne ker backer [PDF]. But it may not have been a moniker yet: The deed was written in Dutch by a Scotland-born secretary, and kenne ker backer could just be shoddily spelled Dutch for “known as the baker.” 

In any case, by the time Diedrich Knickerbocker “went missing” over a century later, the family had adopted it as a formal surname and settled on Knickerbocker as the spelling—making it easy enough for people to assume that Diedrich was a relative, however distant.

On November 6, the Evening Post published a letter signed by “a traveller” claiming that Diedrich had been sighted roughly a month prior near Kingsbridge in the Bronx. “He had in his hands a small bundle tied in a red bandana handkerchief; he appeared to be travelling northward, and was very much fatigued and exhausted,” the writer alleged.

The plot thickened 10 days later when the Post printed a letter from Diedrich’s very own landlord: the Independent Columbian Hotel’s Seth Handaside, who recounted finding “a very curious kind of a written book” in Diedrich’s room. If the man didn’t turn up to pay his rent, Handaside would be forced to publish the manuscript and keep the profits for himself.

He wasn’t bluffing. The November 29 issue of the Post announced that Inskeep and Bradford would soon release A History of New York, a two-volume work on the Dutch origins of the region, chronicling everything from its “discovery and settlement” to its “manners” and “customs.” The notice reiterated that the book was “found in the chamber of Diedrich Knickerbocker” and, owing to his “sudden and mysterious disappearance,” its publication would cover his debts.

When it hit shelves about a week after that—titled in full A History of New York, From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty—Diedrich Knickerbocker became a first-time book author. So did Washington Irving.

Diedrich Speaks

In early 1809, 25-year-old Washington Irving was pursuing a law career by day and secretly penning A History of New York in his spare time. He had no love for the law—later writing of his “insuperable repugnance to the study” of it—but he did have love for his fiancée, Matilda Hoffman, and had resolved to become a practicing lawyer before marrying her. Really, though, he was hoping the book would net enough acclaim to earn him “some public appointment.”

Hoffman died of tuberculosis in April of that year, cursing Irving with a grief that would never fully dissipate. But without the pressure to secure a steady income for their life together, he could now focus on writing. He had already co-published a satirical periodical titled Salmagundi (from which New York City got the nickname Gotham), and A History of New York loosely continued its mission of poking fun at New York society. This work, however, was a much deeper dive into its Dutchness—hence the creation of a fictional Dutch author in Diedrich Knickerbocker.

The book itself reinforced Knickerbocker’s existence with a preface written by Handaside discussing Knickerbocker’s tenancy, the circumstances of his disappearance, and the decision to sell his manuscript. The trickery didn’t end there: In January 1810, New York City’s American Citizen published a letter that Knickerbocker wrote to Handaside explaining his absence. He had gone to trawl some private archives in Coeymans, a town just south of Albany where officials had “banished all newspapers whatsoever, conceiving them to be mere vehicles of false politics, false morality, and false information.” (Also, he was sick for a while.) Knickerbocker finally glimpsed one of Handaside’s ads, he wrote, when a “pestilent scroll” (i.e. a newspaper) was “smuggled into the town under the specious pretext of serving as a wrapper to half a dozen pounds of sugar.”

Irving included the original newspaper ads and a mention of the January 1810 letter in subsequent editions of A History of New York, supporting everyone’s assumption that he himself orchestrated the hoax. But other people may have gotten in on the fun, too—there are two additional newspaper clippings Irving never acknowledged (that we know of). On December 14, 1809, Baltimore’s Federal Republican & Commercial Gazette printed a letter from one “Ludwick von Bynkerfeldt” attesting that, contrary to “malicious” reports, his buddy Diedrich Knickerbocker definitely did exist and had definitely authored A History of New York [PDF]. One “Christian Brinkersnuff” wrote to The American Citizen later that month to vouch for Knickerbocker, too.

In short, people were apparently doubting the book’s authorship pretty much as soon as they learned about it.

Irving’s Stuff of Legend

How Irving got outed as the author is unknown, but his original aim of leveraging literary fame into a day job makes it fairly safe to assume that he didn’t try hard (or at all) to stay anonymous. The Knickerbocker charade was likely just meant to drum up interest in the book—a goal it achieved in spades.

Irving’s two volumes teemed with riotous descriptions of New Netherland and its inhabitants, from colony director Willem Kieft as “William the Testy” to lowly militiaman Barent Dirkson sporting “something that looked like a copper kettle turned upside down on his head.” Though representations of certain Dutch figures actually parodied American leaders in Irving’s time (William the Testy, for example, caricatured Thomas Jefferson), Dutch New Yorkers didn’t all take kindly to Irving’s irreverence toward their ancestors. In February 1810, he wrote to a friend that “several genuine Dutch families … had declared utter hostility to me,” one had “threaten[ed] me with utter annihilation,” and “Several good old ladies … had almost condemned my book to the flames.” Fortunately, he managed to charm them all.

But Irving did feel bad enough for playing fast and loose with history to add an “Author’s Apology” to the 1848 edition of the book. “The main object of my work,” he wrote, “was to embody the traditions of our city in an amusing form … to clothe home scenes and places and familiar names with those imaginative and whimsical associations so seldom met with in our new country, but which live like charms and spells about the cities of the old world, binding the heart of the native inhabitant to his home.” In other words, he was trying to give New York City some good old-fashioned folklore.

Irving deemed himself successful in this respect, and Exhibit A of his triumph was right there on the cover page: Knickerbocker.

Knickerbocker Glory

Because New York congressman Herman Knickerbocker was friends with Irving, he’s sometimes cited as Diedrich Knickerbocker’s namesake (not to mention that both Diedrich and Handaside reference Diedrich’s congressman cousin). But Irving and Herman may not have met until later; and Irving’s nephew, Pierre Munroe Irving, recalled his uncle saying that “he had taken the old Dutch names at random, without intending personal allusion.”

Whatever its genesis, Knickerbocker took on a life of its own in the years following the book’s publication. New Yorkers of Dutch descent dubbed themselves “Knickerbockers” and soon started using the term for anything related to them. Irving listed “Knickerbocker societies, Knickerbocker insurance companies, Knickerbocker steamboats, Knickerbocker omnibuses, Knickerbocker bread, and Knickerbocker ice.”

Then came knickerbockers as “loose-fitting breeches, gathered in at the knee, and worn by boys, sportsmen, and others who require a freer use of their limbs,” per the Oxford English Dictionary. This sense has been pegged to two origin points, the most popular being George Cruikshank’s illustrations of baggy-breeched Dutchmen in an 1836 British edition of A History of New York. The other is The Knickerbocker, a New York literary magazine founded in the 1830s whose cover art showcased another baggy-breeched man.

In the mid-1840s, the word knickerbocker entered organized sports in a big way when New York’s Knickerbocker Base Ball Club began formal play. Though the group fizzled out within a few decades, the Big Apple hadn’t seen the last of its Knickerbocker athletes: A brand-new professional basketball team adopted the moniker in 1946.

Diedrich Knickerbocker deserves some direct credit for this. He lived on in the form of Father Knickerbocker, a colonially dressed character whom New Yorkers had embraced as a personification of the city itself. Early-20th-century newspapers covered Father Knickerbocker’s tax policies, his college football prospects, and even his breakfast habits.

According to Knicks general manager Fred Podesta, it was Father Knickerbocker who inspired the team name. Podesta, team owner Ned Irish, publicist Lester Scott, and a few other staff members each wrote their choice on a slip of paper and placed it in a hat. “[W]hen we pulled them out,” Podesta recalled, “most of them said Knickerbockers, after Father Knickerbocker, the symbol of New York City.”

It’s not the Knicks’ only Dutch link. The team colors—orange, blue, and white—hail from New York City’s official flag, designed to match the flag of the old Dutch Republic.

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