Happy Belated [15th-Century European Dude] Day
The Bad History Behind U.S. Celebrations of Columbus
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Now that Columbus Day is over, and nobody will be fighting about it until next year, I thought I’d briefly explore some of the Bad History behind that embattled and defended holiday. I don’t like naming national holidays for people, events, and movements anyway, but Columbus Day has always been an especially strange one—unique, really—and if it’s on its way out, I can’t imagine anyone truly feeling that we’ll lose anything. Defenses of keeping Columbus Day rest on culture-war agendas, not on arguments about historical importance; they seem as uniquely lame as the holiday itself is uniquely weird.
For one thing, it just seems wildly absurd, on general principles, for anyone to want to celebrate, as if it were an unalloyed good, the earth-shaking moment when Europeans first began claiming and establishing imperial title in the Western Hemisphere. The rank inappropriateness of expressing public delight in that pivotal historical moment stems largely from the almost incommensurable degrees of human suffering that ensued, eagerly perpetrated by people like Columbus himself, and more importantly by the big forces behind him. That history, with its many backgrounds and ramifications, should of course be studied and publicly discussed, but celebrating it resembles celebrating something on the magnitude of achieving nuclear fission in the laboratory. Stunning, impossible to imagine not forever existing in human affairs, badly needing to be accepted and dealt with rationally, impossible to deal with rationally—the only proper approach might be what people must mean when they talk about the fear of God.
Or the torture of Prometheus. Or terror and pity. It’s right to be impressed, putting it mildly, if not necessarily by a Genoese navigator’s accidentally bumping into North America, then by the titanic meaning of that moment for everyone alive ever since. But a high five for western civ and a day of goofing off seem, in realistic context, embarrassing at best.
From another point of view, the holiday is absurd because it’s a United States holiday. Other countries, in this hemisphere and in Europe, have their versions of Columbus Day, but for us it reflects some especially Bad History, because the man never set foot in what became the U.S. and had nothing to do with creating it. Sooner or later somebody from Europe was going to bump into North America and start getting ideas. The effort to associate U.S. national origins with the person who actually did it relies on looking through the wrong end of the history telescope.
Leaving aside, for these purposes, the Italian American lobby that wanted a federal holiday, leaving aside the strange history of the female figure Columbia—I’m old enough to remember some of her last gasps—and sticking with the vibe I recall from my elementary-school days, the Columbus thing went like this. Since everything that ever happened leads up to the creation of the United States, it becomes incumbent upon the history student to work backward and learn how that amazing event occurred. When you do, you find yourself at the moment when Europeans didn’t just “discover” the Americas, but started moving in and taking over, and that started, I was taught, with Columbus, and what it really, importantly, essentially started—colonies—would become the United States, which is why we’re studying it.
In real life, as many people know, a lot more imperial action occurred, more quickly, south of what would much later, and for a lot of oddball reasons, become the U.S. When I was a kid, that didn’t matter: Columbus’s job, assigned by history, was to discover the New World so we could study a set of thirteen of the straggly-ass British Atlantic colonies, and what the U.S. ended up with, in the second half of the 20th century, was a national holiday dedicated to some 15th-century European dude who had nothing to do with founding the U.S.
That’s why “but where do you draw the line?” defenses of Columbus Day seem so silly. Sure, many founding Americans engaged in atrocities too; the founding itself can be seen as predicated on certain atrocities. But those are our atrocities; they actually helped create our country. We don’t give federal holidays to other Renaissance-Europe randos, just Columbus. Even Renaissance-Europe non-randos are excluded: Queen Elizabeth I actually did colonize Virginia, which actually did develop into a part of the United States, and retains its name to this day, which is a name for her, but does she get a holiday?
The line of official American thought around Columbus adds up to no thought at all, and the holiday’s wrongs are supposed to be rectified, or at least addressed, by simply switching the holiday over to Indigenous People’s Day, thus retaining our evidently all-important leaf-blowing long weekend while turning the tables on Columbus and his ilk and centering, as they say, the oppressed instead of the oppressor. We’ll have to see what that ends up really meaning. When it comes to U.S. national holidays, incoherence and unintended consequences always rule.
Further Reading
Good stuff here on female personifications of America, including “Columbia.”
Some startling background to the first Columbus Day.
The Doctrine of Discovery does tie the U.S. back to Columbus. Here’s the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court, delivered by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2005, in City of Sherrill vs. Oneida Indians, denying the Oneida a return of land and citing the doctrine in a footnote. As Ginsburg put it, “Finally, this Court has recognized the impracticability of returning to Indian control land that generations earlier passed into numerous private hands.”