ON COLUMBUS DAY, REMEMBER HISTORY IS COMPLICATED

National Review

 

On Columbus Day, Remember History Is Complicated

By Dominic Pino

October 11, 2021 3:07 PM

 

Columbus Day, Indigenous People’s Day, National Coming Out Day — the second Monday in October is just a ridiculous political football now. Most people don’t even get off of work for it anymore, which is fine because, as Kevin Williamson says, Mondays are for working anyway.

 

There’s a kernel of truth in the anti–Columbus Day crowd’s message. Insofar as they want to fight against simplistic historical narratives, their motive is good. The problem is that they mostly just replace one simplistic historical narrative with another one.

 

Was Christopher Columbus a righteous superhuman, doing God’s work and civilizing the savages to bring freedom to the New World? No. If anyone thinks that, they’ve been sold a bill of goods.

 

Was Christopher Columbus a white supremacist who sailed to the New World to commit genocide? No. If anyone thinks that, they, too, have been sold a bill of goods.

 

Pollsters ask Americans whether they think Columbus was a hero or a villain. Columbus as a hero is a minority view these days, which is a huge change from the past. You can view someone as a hero without believing he or she is perfect, and plenty of heroes, even fictional literary ones, did bad things. Many people on the left count Franklin Roosevelt as a hero, so they are certainly capable of evaluating historical figures in a nuanced way and weighing their faults against their achievements.

 

But Columbus Day was never really about Columbus, the person, at all. Initially, it was about Columbus, the myth. It was celebrating Columbus as the personification of the Old World meeting the New World. You can see this mindset in the Columbus Fountain outside Union Station in Washington, D.C. It shows Columbus standing steadfast and gazing upward, dressed in a robe that isn’t very explorer-like, with an old man on one side of him and a Native American on the other side. Above him is the globe, guarded by eagles. The inscription reads, “To the memory of Christopher Columbus, whose high faith and indomitable courage gave to mankind a new world.”

 

It’s all a bit much, really. Columbus was courageous, no doubt about that, but it’s preposterous to say he gave mankind a new world. One man’s new world is another man’s old world, and a decent chunk of mankind was already living in the Americas when Columbus arrived. And of course, Leif Erikson had already been to Newfoundland anyway.

 

The people who built that fountain and wrote that inscription didn’t mean for it all to be taken literally about Columbus as a person. There were a few different things going on. One is that the statue is outside a transportation hub, and (to borrow some anachronistic jargon) Columbus was a major player in the transportation space in his day. Other statues in Union Station, such as Thales for electricity and Archimedes for mechanics, play on the transportation theme. Another is that the Knights of Columbus were heavily involved in the fountain’s construction and had a huge parade through the city when it was unveiled. It was a city-wide celebration for an entire weekend, and it’s safe to say your average Washingtonian wasn’t meditating on the particulars of anything Columbus did amid the ruckus.

 

The involvement of the Knights of Columbus gives another hint at what Columbus Day has actually meant to Americans. The Knights began as an organization of Catholic immigrants, many of whom faced various forms of discrimination on account of their religion and ethnicity from the Anglo-Protestant majority. They saw the mythology of Columbus as a useful way to join American society. The thought process is pretty straightforward: Columbus was a Catholic guy from Europe who got on a boat to the Americas, and we’re Catholic guys from Europe who got on boats to the Americas. They weren’t endorsing everything Columbus ever did, and they weren’t making a statement about Native Americans at all.

 

It was with those factors in the background that the modern version of Columbus Day began. On March 14, 1891, a mass lynching took place in New Orleans. All eleven victims were Italian Americans. For The Dispatch today, Chris Stirewalt explains how Columbus Day was part of the federal government’s response to that horrible act:

 

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The press coverage [of the lynching] near and far was favorable. As the Associated Press put it: “It was not an unruly midnight mob. It was simply a sullen determined body of citizens who took into their own hands what justice had ignominiously failed to do.” While white, elite America was content with the result, it created a diplomatic nightmare for then-President Benjamin Harrison. Italy was furious about the incident but he did not want to appear like he was knuckling under to foreign demands. And he was also about to begin his rematch contest against the man he defeated in 1888, former President Grover Cleveland. Both candidates would be courting Italian-American voters, who were becoming increasingly important in many swing states—Italian Americans like the businessmen who donated most of the money to build the statue in New York’s Columbus Circle in time for the 400th anniversary. Harrison needed to act to show he was not bigoted against Italians and a national holiday celebrating the great explorer was within his power.

 

The first ever national Columbus Day holiday took place on Oct. 21, 1892, less than three weeks before Election Day.  It wasn’t enough to save Harrison, but it was probably worth some votes. Most of all, it was evidence of the growing clout of Italian Americans. The president of the United States had to listen to their outrage over the murders in New Orleans.

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Columbus Day was part of the process of Italian Americans integrating into American society. The holiday was originally proclaimed at the request of nonwhite people (Italians were not considered white in the late 1800s) as part of the federal government’s reaction to awful violence perpetrated against them. Stirewalt notes, “Just as the removal of Columbus monuments is now heralded by some as a triumph for oppressed peoples, the erection of those statues once meant the same thing.”

 

New Yorkers who know Columbus Day primarily as the day that the Italians have their big parade are probably closer to the original meaning of the federal holiday than people who think it’s about white supremacy. If we’re going to have parades for anything on the second Monday in October, it should be to celebrate Italian-American heritage. But if we want this day to be about some broader historical point, it should be this: History is complicated, and simplistic narratives are probably wrong, no matter what the contents of those narratives are.