Every year, we hear the same recycled debate supported by the same recycled points: Christopher Columbus was an evil, greedy explorer and everything wrong with this country started with him.
To assert that Columbus was perfect is a fool’s errand because no historical figure, or present figure, is perfect, especially not when we judge someone who lived over five hundred years ago through the lens of the modern world.
But to completely condemn people of the past because they don’t fit into our pathologically altruistic, progressively myopic, self-serving, and hyper-current set of ideals by which we live, die, and judge others completely undermines the point of learning and remembering history.
History is not yours to change, or “correct,” in the recent words of the New York City Council regarding statues of figures such as Columbus. It may be yours to dislike but that’s about where it is. History is history for a reason, we can’t change it, we can only move forward. Furthermore, history is never binary. The idea that there are “good guys” and “bad guys” is just naive and frankly not grounded in reality. The reality is, no matter where you look in world history, there are often complicated reasons for why certain events unfolded the way they did and why certain people acted the way they did. We can parse clear and just motives for some parties while at the same time understanding where they had it wrong.
Columbus is no exception. As an explorer under the Spanish crown in the mid-to-late fifteenth century, we need to understand the historical context of the time. Firstly, exploration was a huge market at the time, as new trade routes were connecting parts of the world in revolutionary ways. Secondly, a large driver of the world’s development was religion. In addition to a decent paycheck and a stake for your homeland, you had the opportunity to spread your beliefs around the world, an ideal the Catholics took to the New World.
Columbus is regularly criticized for being the first domino that led to the development of the New World and ultimately, the subjugation and near-extinction of the Native Americans. The problem with this is that it undermines that the New World had already been visited by Europeans, named the Vikings under Leif Erickson, and that war had been waged between the native tribes as it were. The other problem is that it assumes this was something intrinsic to Columbus himself, that this was his mission the second he left Spain for a two-month boat ride on small exploration vessels. The reality is: whoever set foot in the New World would have begun a trade route, would have carried out the religious mission, and it would have set the New World on a path for development. Columbus, at this point, is a cheap scapegoat for a much more complex issue that was, by all logical standards, inevitable.
The other problem is that Columbus did not actually set foot in the mainland United States, or even mainland North America. He landed on an island in the Bahamas, which he thought was the West Indies. The name “Indians,” referring to Native Americans, was the product of this misunderstanding.
Those who question the fate of the New World without Columbus forget that slavery, warfare, mass illness, and every other unfortunate reality of the time existed before him and after him.
Accounts of the Spanish crown’s relations with the Natives vary, although initially, the Spaniards sought good relations with them. It wasn’t until the California Gold Rush that nationwide removal of the Native Americans became commonplace. The British were actually much more unscrupulous, generally, than the Spaniards regarding their treatment of the Natives. Because of the Anglo-centric angle on the conversation, the resistance to any honoring of Columbus is nothing even remotely new. American political allegiances from the 1800s until the early 2000s were dominated by Christian denominations. English Protestants had a distrust of Catholics and leveraged their political power against the Catholics. This is why JFK’s election in 1960 was such a landmark; it was the first time a Catholic had been elected president.
Initially started by Tammany Hall in New York City to mark the three hundredth anniversary of the historic landing that changed the course of world trade and development forever would later become an effort by President Benjamin Harrison to commemorate an 1891 New Orleans lynching that saw eleven Italian Americans killed. Harrison ordered Columbus Day as a one-time celebration of Italians, not only to placate American Italians but also ease diplomatic relations with Italy. The first statewide holiday was proclaimed by Colorado governor Jesse F. McDonald in 1905, and it was made a statutory holiday in 1907.
The ironic part is that the progressives who take such a bold stance against Columbus routinely forget that some of the earliest resistance efforts against the honoring of Columbus were started by the intensely anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan and the Women of the KKK, solely because of the increase of Catholic culture in a largely-Protestant country.
Progressives also make the mistake of thinking that “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” is a new concept. Resistance started almost immediately after the first Columbus Day celebration in 1892. Certain parts of California had replaced Columbus Day for Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 1992, the same year that the Intercontinental Gathering of Indigenous People in the Americas met in Quito, Ecuador, to mobilize against the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus Day.
Many Italian-Americans take offense to the replacement of Columbus Day, as it is still a large part of Italian-American culture today.
The reality is: while Columbus and other explorers were not perfect, the Natives were not saints either. This isn’t an excuse for genocide or subjugation of an entire continent of people, but the other reality is that the expansion of the world was conquest-based at the time. Some parts of the world, including Israel and Palestine, are still operating in this mode to some degree today. The norm then was conquest. We look at it today and we’re thankful most of the world is at least somewhat diplomatic and civilized, but that’s just not how it was back then. Additionally, most Native tribes across North America were Stone Age-level cultures by the time the Europeans arrived. Polar opposite cultures almost never mix well – even today – but putting it in perspective of the past, it was a “conquer or be conquered” mindset.
The other reality is that the Native tribes, while some had diplomatic relations, others were just as conquest-hungry as the rest of the world was. The Aztecs, whose engineering marveled the Spanish explorers when they first encountered them in the 1700s, still operated in a conquest-driven mode. Their immense and organized city of Tenochtitlan was built on subjugation of other Native tribes, which also included brutal human sacrifice.
Again, we’re not saying we’re okay with brutal, bloody conquest, but what we are saying is that everything must be fit into perspective, especially through today’s lens. We could blame so many other explorers for the acts committed against the Native population. Columbus is an easy fall guy because he’s seen as the one who kicked the first domino, a role that would have been gladly fulfilled by anyone else – and probably someone more brutal.
We also believe that the erasure of Columbus Day is a deliberate mocking of Western culture. This also waters down the existing day dedicated to the remembrance of Native Americans, the Friday after Thanksgiving, known as Native American Heritage Day, a civil holiday that was recognized in 2008 by President George W. Bush.
To those who wish to see history “corrected” by erasing aspects of our culture, the good, bad, and the ugly, we ask that the “progress” starts by erasing the Democratic Party, famously known as the party of Andrew Jackson, who through his Trail of Tears, kicked over one of the most brutal dominos in American history. The party of the KKK, the party of Jim Crow, the party of internment camps, the party of segregation should be addressed as such.
Will we go that far? It depends on what type of history we’d like to study. But at the end of the day, we’re historians, not hypocrites.
