Columbus Day was the original woke holiday

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Columbus Day was the original woke holiday

Matthew Yglesias

7 - 9 minutes

Today is a federal holiday, so I’m not going to do a full column, but I did want to share a couple of reminders and make some observations about the day now known as Indigenous People’s Day in the District of Columbia.

First, on Thursday at 8:30 p.m. Eastern, we are going to have the second meeting of the Slow Boring Book Club. We’ll be joined by author Brad DeLong to discuss his new book “Slouching Towards Utopia,” with an audience Q&A to follow. Subscribers can register here. In that regard, it’s probably worth mentioning that the audio and transcript of our previous book club event with Leah Boustan discussing her book “Streets of Gold” is available here. The Utopia book event will also be recorded, posted, and transcribed later for those who can’t make it.

Second, I wanted to remind everyone that I’m back to podcasting! I’m doing a new show called “Bad Takes,” produced by Grid and co-hosted by their executive editor Laura McGann. You can subscribe here or check out our latest episode.

Onward to Christopher Columbus!

I think the most interesting thing about this controversy is that unlike the veneration of George Washington or even Thomas Jefferson, it’s actually not true that Columbus has been consistently held up as an American hero. In the 16th through 18th centuries, England and the Netherlands were frequently at geopolitical odds with Spain, and the Spanish Habsburgs were the main enemies of Protestants everywhere. During this period, the view took hold that the Spanish conquest of the New World was a brutal and exploitative affair and that the main people involved in it, very much including Columbus, were bad people.

There’s a historiographical tradition that calls this anti-Spanish view a “Black Legend” and insists either that the Spanish were better than their critics say or else that all the other colonial powers were equally bad. These debates get very complicated, and there are a lot of nuances.

A take like the famous “Reversal of Fortune” theory in development economics from Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson is making a more nuanced claim than “the Spanish were uniquely bad.” But on another level, they are in fact backing up — with modern quantitative methods — something similar to the main thrust of the so-called Black Legend: that the Spanish approach to colonialism involved, on average, worse institutions than the British. The nuance from the “Reversal” view is that the British colonizers were not more moral; rather, the Spanish got here first and grabbed most of the most productive natural resources. Where natural resources were abundant, colonizers (including the British in their Caribbean possessions) set up “extractive” institutions rather than inclusive ones. But in the long run, extractive institutions lead to worse economic performance.

The distinction from the Black Legend view is important here, though, because the old anti-Spanish narrative was very bound up in broader Protestant tropes about how Catholics are bad, which of course became a very contentious issue as large numbers of Catholics immigrated to the United States. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson are saying something closer to colonialism is bad, and it happens to have been Catholic powers that colonized much of the New World. But for most of American history, the reputation of Spanish colonizers was specifically tied up with sentiments about Catholicism.

From the beginning, there was a bit of a Columbian exception to the generally negative view of the Spanish conquistadors. You can see that in the federal district’s name, District of Columbia, as well as Columbia University in New York and various towns named Columbia.

But “Columbia” as a concept in the United States was much less closely identified with Christopher Columbus than you might think. Instead, there was a character — Columbia — who was understood to be a personification of the United States. But Columbia was not Columbus; among other things, she’s a woman. Here’s a political cartoon from the Kansas-Nebraska debate showing Uncle Sam and Columbia teaming up to scold Stephen Douglas.

Of course you could use this iconography to make whatever kind of point you wanted. Here in 1869, Thomas Nast deploys Columbia to make a “woke” argument about the nature of the United States, depicting her co-hosting a Thanksgiving dinner with Uncle Sam with a diverse group of guests including freedmen, Native Americans, and immigrants from various parts of the world. Portraits of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses Grant look on the happy crowd and the cartoon urges “come one come all” at a time before the Chinese Exclusion Act when the United States had essentially open borders.

But even here, when Nast very much is addressing the immigration issue and the diversification of the United States, Columbia is not Columbus — she’s a female symbol of the nation.

Obviously, she had something to do with Christopher Columbus — that’s where the name comes from — but the tendency toward abstraction underscores the legacy of discomfort with Columbus’ specific conduct and the general track record of Spain in the New World. He was an iconic figure, but not necessarily one who one wanted to scrutinize.

This started to change as a result of American Catholic activism. Catholics have been present in the United States since the founding, but most Americans conceptualized the country in Protestant terms.

As Catholic immigration grew, Catholics began to organize for the purposes of self-help and to combat discrimination. Seeking to demonstrate that they rightfully belonged as members of the nation, one of the main Catholic organizations named itself the Knights of Columbus. There weren’t a lot of major Catholic figures in the political history of the United States, but there was this affiliation between the nation and Christopher Columbus, so they picked him as a symbol.

Then in 1891, shortly after the founding of the Knights of Columbus, there was a vicious lynching of Italian-Americans in New Orleans.

The following year was the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage, and Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation declaring a one-off Columbus Day celebration as part of a post-lynching drive to make gestures of inclusion toward Catholic Americans in general and Italian-Americans in particular. Columbus’ whole subsequent rise over the next several decades until the 1934 declaration of Columbus Day as a federal holiday was part of this reconceptualization of him as a figure in Italian-American history rather than as a Spanish conquistador.

This, of course, never made a ton of sense; he was from Genoa in an era that long predated the existence of an Italian nation. His native language was a Ligurian dialect closer to French than standard Italian or the Southern Italian dialects spoken by most immigrants to the United States. And his voyages had nothing to do with the later waves of Italian immigration to North America.

But that’s the point: symbols are about symbolism, not about historical detail. The idea of Columbus Day was to create a gesture of inclusion for Italian Americans, not actually to celebrate the life and times of Christopher Columbus. The contemporary idea of an Indigenous People’s Day is very much in that spirit. But the most important thing is not the symbolism, it’s the fact that Italian-Americans were in fact fully incorporated into mainstream American life. Native Americans, by contrast, continue to have material living standards that are far below average for the United States. And what we do to improve that, more than any symbolic gesture we make, is what’s going to really matter.