No American holiday is under siege as persistently as Columbus Day.
No American holiday is under siege as persistently as Columbus Day. “Indigenous People’s Day” is specifically an effort at an anti-Columbus holiday. The White House is pushing National Coming Out Day as a way of changing the subject. It is perhaps worth revisiting the two distinct reasons why we celebrate Columbus Day in the first place, and why the cultural Left hates both of them.
Some of the anti-Columbus arguments are about the man personally. He has his defenders: Garry Kasparov reminds us not to judge Columbus by the moral standards of our own time. Jarrett Stepman argues that Christopher Columbus is misunderstood, and can be defended even within the context of his own era. But in a larger sense, arguments over whether Columbus was morally good or not — by his time’s standards or ours — are beside the point. Unlike George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Martin Luther King Jr., Columbus was not an American. His voyages predate the American founding by nearly three centuries. Americans have never spent much time reflecting on the things Columbus believed in or stood for. He was celebrated not for an exemplary life but for a single extraordinary accomplishment. Historians still debate exactly what was known or believed about crossing the Atlantic in 1492; I looked last month at some new evidence on that point from the 1340s. But the voyage itself was, no matter how you slice it, a venture of breathtaking risk, courage, and skill — one that was far beyond the capabilities of the people Columbus met at the far shore. Our 21st-century age could use more of the questing spirit of that adventure.
More importantly still, what we really celebrate is the fact that Columbus’s voyage made America possible. We celebrate that everything that followed 1492 flowed from that first leap into the dark. And that is precisely why the holiday’s critics seek to attack it. To celebrate Columbus Day is to say that it is good that America was founded. Of course, many bad things as well as good can be found as a result of more than five centuries of history in the Western Hemisphere. Human history anywhere is like that, and the bringing together of different strands of humanity spread terrible diseases on top of the various crimes and atrocities. Entire peoples, such as the indigenous inhabitants of Haiti, ceased to exist. Other entire peoples, such as Hispanics and African Americans and the peoples and cultures of the Caribbean, were created where none had existed before. Yet, in the long run, the voyage of Columbus did not usher in a new age of darkness, but one of possibility, and if some of the nations of the Western Hemisphere have less to celebrate in what they have made of those possibilities, the exceptional United States has surely gifted the world much that it lacked before.
The other reason why the holiday arose in the United States was as a point of pride for Italian Americans — a way for Italians to claim their American-ness by pointing to an Italian at the very foundation of the New World. Columbus’s role as an Italian icon persists even though he sailed for Spain, and even though he was not even an “Italian” in the modern sense; Italy would not be united as a nation until 1860, and was dismissed by Metternich into the 1800s as “only a geographical expression.” Chris Stirewalt offers some background on the late-19th century Italian-American experience that led to the embrace of Columbus. Olivia Waxman, even in an anti-Columbus piece for Time that relies on hostile historians, notes that the holiday in the 1790s was a way of asserting distance from Britain, and by the 1890s:
The Irish Catholic fraternal organization the Knights of Columbus, formed in 1882, embraced the Italian immigrants, seeing them as part of a larger mission to make Catholicism more popular in an anti-Catholic country. They saw that linking Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics to a national hero like Christopher Columbus was one way to do so. For Italians, a group facing discrimination, promoting Columbus’ Italian origins was a way to “assimilate better.” . . . The Knights of Columbus started putting up statues in places with a lot of Italian immigrants, like New York City. Italian groups like the Sons of Columbus Legion lobbied state legislatures to enact a Columbus holiday. By 1912, such celebrations were held in 14 states and by 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the first federal observance of Columbus Day.
In today’s woke world, this would be described as “allyship” or “intersectional” solidarity: two disfavored immigrant groups coming together to improve their position in society by finding common ground to celebrate their heritage. Indeed, in today’s America, Hispanic Americans (many of them Catholic) are still following in the path that the Irish and the Italians traced. But the cultural Left needs to place white Catholic ethnic groups on the “oppressor” side of its Manichean ledger, so the iconography of Catholic struggles in America must be stamped out, while the legal legacy of 19th-century anti-Catholicism must be defended, in order to extirpate that cultural memory.
There is room enough in our history for remembering, just as there is room enough in our past and our future for the spirit of adventure and discovery. I’m happy that the United States of America exists. I’m happy that my fellow Catholics have, by and large, made it to the cultural mainstream. I am happy that Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue.