On Columbus
Like others before them, Italians who came to America suffered from prejudice. Northern Italians had long discriminated against their impoverished Sicilians and Calabrese compatriots as too dark, too Arab or too African. (Marcello Mastroianni plays an elderly Sicilian bureaucrat visiting his adult children in the North in the 1990 film Stanno Tutti Bene. Wandering through a piazza late one evening a cop asks him for his ID. “Ah, Sicilian,” remarks the cop. “And that’s a crime now too?,” asks Mastroianni). Like Poles, Jews and Irishmen, Italians immigrated for better jobs, but the mistreatment continued here. Besides their skin color, Protestant Americans questioned their faith.
While New Yorkers might think of Mulberry Street, the post-war American south was an equally popular destination. In March 1891, New Orleans residents lynched 11 Italian immigrants. The mob was egged on by Mayor Joe Shakespeare who said the victims were “without courage, honor, truth, pride, religion, or any quality that goes to make a good citizen.” A New York Times editorial excused the crime, writing that while their action was odious “it would be difficult to find any one individual who would confess that privately he deplores it very much much.”
Revulsion at this injustice - along with some concern that Italy might declare war - led President Benjamin Harrison to declare October 12th, 1892 as the first Columbus Day holiday, honoring the “discoverer” of America. The long, slow, journey to acceptance of Italian-Americans culminated with Congressional requirements for an annual proclamation in 1934.
My father-in-law was the first member of his family born in America. They hailed from the rural, mountainous region of Abruzzese. “We didn’t even speak Italian,” he jokes. His oldest child was born on Oct 12th and doubtless it was with a mix of pride in America and Italy that he gave my brother-in-law the middle name Columbus.
Depiction of Spanish atrocities committed in the conquest of Cuba in Las Casas's "Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias"
Today the Genoese sailor is, as politically-sensitive folks like to say, “problematic.” His treatment of the indigenous people, while consistent with the standards of his time, was awful by our modern understanding. Rare were men like Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who in the early 16th century underwent a change of heart and denounced Spaniards’ unjust treatment of the Indians.
So in parallel with the removal of monuments to traitorous Confederate generals, and renaming of buildings that honored slave owners, we see a movement to repurpose Columbus Day to honor indigenous peoples. This is ahistorical and lazy, reflecting our penchant for superficial solutions to complex challenges.
One challenge is how we honor immigrant groups like Italians. Past revulsion evolving into grudging acceptance and eventually ‘a seat at the table’ is the American way, and the declaration of Columbus Day was an integral part of that process. The New York Times editorial page, reflecting this change, documents how Italians gained greater acceptance here. Families like my in-laws, fleeing Mussolini and poverty, had nothing to do with the Spanish conquistadors and to deny them the acknowledgement of a national holiday seems unjust, even if their patron was flawed.
Another challenge is acknowledging and grappling with the mistreatment (and eventual genocide) of the original inhabitants of the Americas. People who were themselves diverse, unified, fractious, and complex. If we want to focus the tragedy, maybe we could memorialize the day President Jackson abrogated treaties with the Choctaw and instigated the Trail of Tears. We could focus on Native American triumph, against long odds, by memorializing General Custer’s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. But their history should not be reduced to a day repurposed from the arrival of a European explorer who mistakenly thought he had landed in Japan, and would soon find China.
Education, as ever, is the way we best address these challenges. The elementary school I founded taught basic facts about four indigenous tribes from diverse parts of the country in kindergarten, continuing on to more complex subjects in later grades. One year we hosted a native American dance performance, and the students proudly showed off the posters they’d made to go along with the unit. The group leader, a Lakota Sioux, told me it was the first time he saw a school teaching about his tribe.
It would be nice to imagine a world so simple that it can be divided into good and bad, right and wrong. But that sort of simplicity is childish and unworthy of great people. We can, and must, do better.
