In my City College of NY senior year undergraduate course on American Political Thought, taught by the admirable Professor George McKenna, our final assignment was to write a utopian version of America as it "could and should be." My academic effort leaned more towards the "should" than the "could." None of what I imagined has come to pass, and 54 years later even I would want to retract many of my utopian proposals in light of subsequent American experience and more mature reflection. That said, one of the relatively minor features of my 1972 utopia was America's national holiday Continental Day, October 12.
In the real world, then and now, that is the federal and state holiday Columbus Day. The choice of that day was, of course, a nod to my Italian-American heritage, of which I was particularly conscious at that particular time when "unmeltable ethnics"* were being celebrated. It also represented - as the celebration of Columbus Day itself has historically represented - an alternative to the country's otherwise predominantly Protestant founding story, a wholesome reminder that groups other than English Protestants were also involved in exploring, settling, and immigrating to this continent, and accordingly have as clear a claim as they to be here.
Of course, since then, there has been increasing recognition that Columbus' encounter with the "New World" - while an event of monumental world-historical significance with an array of complex consequences for the rest of the world, which would obviously not otherwise exist in its present form - admittedly also entailed catastrophic consequences for many of the original populations of the Americas. There are, therefore, multiple significations to Columbus Day, all of which deserve to be studied, discussed, and debated. Among them, however, also remains its abiding significance as a constitutive building block of an alternative to the prevalent WASP-centric account of the American founding, and its special significance for the celebration of Italian-American identity.
In 1901, the infamous Edward Alsworth Ross, future President of the American Sociological Association, popularized the white-supremacist term "race suicide" (an obvious forerunner of contemporary right-wing worries about a "Great Replacement"). Ross warned "That the Mediterranean people are morally below the races of Northern Europe is as certain as any historical fact." Likewise, after the notorious lynching of 11 Sicilians by a New Orleans mob, The New York Times wrote about "sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins." Such elite bigotry eventually led to the 1924 law which severely restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe. If only, such horrible history were all just ancient history, rather than a perennial problem embedded deeply within our society's story even now!
Of course, the claim that Columbus "discovered" America was always appropriately disputed by others who highlighted the activities of earlier explorers - e.g. Leif Erikson - not to mention that the continent was already populated prior to Columbus' arrival. The historical significance of Columbus lies not so much in his being the "first" European to land here, which he manifestly was not, but that his voyages made a difference in ways that those of previous explorers had not, and that his arrival began the period of sustained European colonization of this continent - the encuentro between the "Old" and the "New" worlds. Religiously, it also marked the beginning of a sustained effort by Christian Europeans to evangelize the indigenous peoples of this continent. That this continent is now what it is, a mixture of people from all parts of the world, a reality celebrated by some, while lamented by others who have a narrower notion of America, is the long-term legacy of what began on this day in 1492.
How all this happened - how the encuentro between peoples was also a collision with frightful consequences for many, a cause of great suffering among the indigenous peoples, and the occasion of many injustices perpetrated against them - all this has likewise long been recognized. Indeed Columbus himself was faulted for some of his own behavior even in his own lifetime. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) was famously a passionate defender of the indigenous peoples, whose sufferings at the hands of Spanish conquistadores he documented as he traveled back and forth between America and the Spanish Court exposing and condemning the crimes he had witnessed against the native peoples. It is a regrettably modern moral conceit to think that only our contemporaries can recognize the moral failings and sins which we as a society have benefited from.
Acknowledging that the colonization of this continent and the evangelization of its inhabitants were carried out by sinners does not negate the historical significance of the encounter between the "Old" and "New" worlds, which made possible the one world which we now inhabit. There is no "right side of history." There is only history, with its inevitable mix of good and bad. Whether our ancestors came 500 years ago or are recent immigrants, their immigration and therefore our very existence as their descendants are all consequences of the actions and accomplishments of those Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English explorers, settlers, and missionaries who followed the path opened up for them by Columbus. It atones for no ancient evil and does no present-day service to pretend otherwise.
(Photo: The Statue of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle, New York City)
* Cf. Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972).
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