Today is Columbus Day, I wanted to reflect on how this federal holiday came to fruition and why we need to get rid of it immediately. I am not going through step by step of Columbus’s different journeys because many of you may know it by now; I’m mainly going to talk about how Columbus Day was implemented. If you are not familiar with Columbus's trips, watch this short video which does a great job talking about Columbus’s journey.
While I think this video does an excellent job depicting what happened during the many travels of Columbus, most of the first-hand accounts are way more gruesome than in the cartoon, though. The best account of Columbus’s atrocities come from friar Bartolomé de las Casas in his book called “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,” where he talks about the enslavement of the natives and raping of native children. The death toll goes from 100,000 to 3,000,000 people in Hispaniola, mostly due to disease under Columbus' reign. There is even evidence that Columbus brought some African slaves with him on this journey.
How did this get swept under the rug all these years? Why do we celebrate this monster? Spoiler alert: it has to do with a group created in the late 19th century called the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternity service organization (which will be further discussed later).
Columbus Day has been celebrated since 1792 in America. It was more a celebration of escaping the feudalist society of the old world and European kings and queens to the creation of an enlightened republic. Very much like an Independence Day from the liberation of the old world of medieval Europe. This celebration shifted when Catholic Italian immigrants started coming to America, facing discrimination. They wanted to gather together for a celebration that brought immigrants together and helped identify themselves as Americans.
In a White Anglo-Saxon Protest (WASP) society that sees it's heroes as John Winthrop, John Smith, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln, there was not a better person to identify with immigrants than the Italian "explorer" Christopher Columbus. They didn’t know anything about the atrocities that Columbus committed they didn’t have access to this information. Many didn’t even know that Columbus encountered Indians or actually landed in the Bahamas, not the United States. Most historians didn’t even think about this, because they didn’t have access to primary documents of the atrocities. They also didn’t want to seem unpatriotic to their country by criticizing Columbus.
Once again we see that Howard Zinn, my favorite historian, was the first one to say that Christopher Columbus was a mass murderer. Zinn devotes his first chapter of "A People's History of the United States" to Columbus’ encounter with the Arawak tribe, changing the way this expedition is taught in schools forever.
This brings me back to the Knights of Columbus, who are known for lobbying laws that uphold the Catholic Church's positions on public policy and social issues (today, it's mainly anti-gay rights and anti-abortion issues). In the early 20th century, the Knights of Columbus went across the country trying to make Columbus Day a ceremonial holiday in the states, but their primary goal was to make it a federal holiday. They pushed hard to then finally get into contact with a first generation Italian immigrant named Generoso Pope, who was a famous businessman in charge of big Italian newspapers across America, a Mussolini supporter and Tammany Hall insider. Pope was key to getting Italians to vote Democratic across the country due to his influence with the papers.
In 1934, The Knights of Columbus and Generoso Pope went to Franklin Delano Roosevelt after helping win his first term as president, asking him to make Columbus Day into a federal holiday. For Roosevelt to win a second term he knew he had to win the Italian/Catholic vote. FDR understood that this was a political move, and decided to sign off on it.
It’s not like George Washington signed it into law because he admired Christopher Columbus. No, it was a political move and because of that political move Democrats won over the Italian/Catholic vote for years from FDR to LBJ. So here is my question — why are we celebrating a political favor? It's funny, as an Italian American myself, when you ask someone to name a famous Italian-Americans, they come up with gangsters like Lucky Luciano, Al Capone, or Angelo Bruno or actors who have played gangsters like De Niro, Pesci, or Pacino. So, of course, the Italian we named the federal holiday after killed more people then probably all those real life and fake gangsters combined; congrats America!
How about we bring attention to Italian-Americans that actually brought social change; Mario Savio, a famous civil rights activist, Ferdinand Pecora, a famous lawyer who prosecuted the bankers after the 1929 crash, William Paca, the only Declaration of Independence signer with Italian blood, Francis Vigo, a Revolutionary War spy, Philip Mazzei, an Italian who influenced Jefferson, Angela Bambace, a woman who fought for women workers' rights after hundreds of Italian-American women died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. I mean, Vince Lombardi for crying out loud; anyone but Columbus!
He didn't discover anything; he was a power hungry rapist criminal and should be taught in history classes as such. As a future historian, I try to categorize people by what they did to improve to society and balance that out with the negative impacts they had on society, along with accessing the circumstances of the situations they are in. When I assess Columbus, there is only one positive thing you can think of: the discovery of gold and other goods in the Americas with the creation of a trade called “the Columbian Exchange,” making Europe one of the richest societies in human history. But he could not have done it without the natives which he took advantage of.
Columbus would have died if the Natives didn’t help him in Hispaniola, just like every other “explorer” that came to America. At least when the Founders of America created the country, they had documents that would eventually push for secular liberal thinking of having a vision of “all men are created equal", that we could as a society expand upon. Many even tried to get rid of slavery, thinking that it was evil, but a necessary evil. Columbus just thought it was necessary; he had no empathy what so ever for these people.
Reflect on this — Columbus was sentenced to jail time for the crimes he committed against the settlers and the natives of Hispaniola from the orders of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. A country who was in the process of the Spanish Inquisition, in which people were being exiled or killed for not converting to Catholicism. Some even think that Columbus was Jewish and, to save his skin, took this trip. His biggest funders were actually two Jewish Converso’s, Louis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez, not the king and queen.
I think that in the end, we must change the federal holiday to Indigenous People’s Day, to help heal the wounds of the past and to remember the clash of civilizations, not bury it by praising Columbus. Again, we should still learn about Columbus but, just like Confederate generals, we should not be worshiping him. We are better than this.
