The Origins of Columbus Day
The violence perpetrated by its namesake is well known. The violence that led to its creation, less so.
That Christopher Columbus, in whose honor I have the day off, is a controversial figure is of no news to OTB readers. But the historian C.W. Goodyear provides a backstory on how the holiday came to be that, somehow, I had been unaware of.
WaPo, “Born in another ugly era, Columbus Day is an accident of history.”
The story begins in Louisiana. As Richard Gambino chronicled in his excellent book “Vendetta,” a volley of shotgun fire cut down New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy on Oct. 15, 1890. Mortally wounded, Hennessy was asked for the identity of his assailants. His reply was a racial slur for Italian Americans.
Italian immigrants were having a rough go of it in late 19th-century America. Many had reached the United States following the Civil War — fleeing instability at home and seeking opportunity on this side of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, their eagerness to work, readiness to accept low pay and strong cultural cohesion (especially on matters of family, faith and language) stirred resentment among Americans already here.
In New Orleans, these tensions were exacerbated by a spike in crime that was blamed on Italians bringing their supposed “Mafioso” culture to America. Hatred for the immigrants practically became official city policy; as the mayor said on the record to reporters, Italians in New Orleans lacked “honor, truth, pride, religion, or any quality that goes to make a good citizen. … Except the Poles we know of no other nationality which is [as] objectionable as a people.”
And so, Hennessy’s assassination catalyzed an awful cycle of ethnic violence in New Orleans. Taking the cue of their chief’s dying words, police fanned out under orders to “arrest every Italian you come across.” But subsequent mistrials and acquittals of apprehended suspects prompted thousands of frustrated citizens to break into the city jail on the morning of March 14, 1891, and kill every Italian they could find. Bodies dangled from French Quarter lampposts by the afternoon. The murders would be described by Gambino and other historians as “the largest lynching in American history.”
Much of America reacted with approval. This sentiment was echoed coast-to-coast by what Gambino estimated to be half of America’s newspapers, including this one. The Post described the lynching as “the people’s justice, swift and sure, visited upon those whom the jury [in New Orleans] had neglected to punish.”
The American public’s gleeful response to the bloodshed, combined with widespread nationwide discrimination against Italians and Louisiana’s refusal to prosecute the mob led to a full-fledged diplomatic crisis. Italy’s ambassador was recalled from the United States. Rumors of war floated around both Washington and Rome.
Enter Benjamin Harrison, a man who embodied the stereotype of a Gilded Age president (that is, bearded, Midwestern and unfairly forgotten). Privately appalled by his country’s anti-immigrant politics, outraged by Louisiana’s inability to hold the mob accountable and desperate to patch things up with Italy, Harrison took a remarkably bold course of action.
First, he unilaterally used White House funds to pay apology money to the families of the lynching’s victims — a politically unpopular move that enraged Congress, which even attempted to censure the president over the gesture.
Second, Harrison noticed that the upcoming date of Oct. 21, 1892, would be the 400th anniversary of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus landing in the New World. It was a unique and convenient opportunity to publicly acknowledge the place of Italians in American history — and deliver an implicit civics lesson to racists across the country. An executive proclamation soon went out from the White House that declared the anniversary “a general holiday for the people of the United States. On that day let the people, so far as possible, cease from toil and devote themselves to such exercises as may best express honor to the discoverer and their appreciation of the great achievements of the four completed centuries of American life.”
The anniversary of Columbus reaching the New World had been honored before in local communities. But on Oct. 21, 1892, the entire nation celebrated the holiday for the first time — and during it, in cities and on parade routes throughout the country (even in New Orleans), the Italian flag flew proudly beside the American one.
All this suggests that Columbus was an almost coincidental part of the first federal observation of Columbus Day. In 1892, Harrison just needed an Italian (any Italian) to demonstrate that nationality’s entitlement to a place in American history and society. The subsequent lionization of Columbus himself over the years is something of a fluke — a collateral effect of one president’s attempts to fight anti-immigrant sentiment.
Moreover, Harrison didn’t intend for the federal observance of Columbus Day to become an annual, nationwide song and dance. It was meant to be a one-off. But, over time, the scale of the holiday also ballooned into something it was not originally intended to be: a yearly celebration of a man whose flaws have become only harder for the public to ignore.
I knew, of course, that Italians had long seen Columbus Day as a celebration of their heritage and that early generations of Italian immigrants (like the Irish, Poles, and others who we have long come to seen as merely “white”) had faced horrible discrimination. But somehow, I had no idea at all that there was a massacre in New Orleans, much less a major diplomatic incident surrounding it.
Interesting–thanks for posting. I was unaware as well.
But, man, the description of anti-Italian violence sounds uncomfortably familiar.
And this sounds like the promises made by Trump within the last week:
@Steven L. Taylor: Yep. Cooke alludes to this as well, albeit subtly:
Beni Adam, Beni Adam. Humans are humans.
If I were to translate Tunisian current dictator’s rhetoric about sub-Saharan migrants you could rather easily put it into Trump’s mouth.
And equally other cases… European (even internal sub-Saharan)… a sad tribal-chimp-band heritage commonality
We always need somebody to be the despised, denigrated, oppressed “other.” My (Italian) grandfather apparently* had a saying, “Neapolitans, Sicilians, it’s all the same.” (He was a Tuscano, not the same thing at all.)
*My grandmother told me the saying, I’d seen a recording of Neapolitan folk songs and asked if that might make a good present for him. She told me his “axiom” and said that he’d never listen to the songs of “those people.”
Except the Poles we know of no other nationality which is [as] objectionable as a people.”
As someone of half Polish and half Italian heritage, I guess I was fated to be the person I am.
¡Jesu cristo!
To think we could unite in hatred and persecution of infectious pathogens with a clear conscience, and to greatly improve the world in the process.
@Thomm: 3/4 Italian and 1/4 Polish but with a BIG Polish last name.
I grew up in the New Jersey suburbs of NYC. I believe my grandmother was the child of Italian immigrants, first living in Jersey City and then moving north from there. When I shared with her I was considering Duke for undergrad, she responded, “The Rebels will hate your Catholic blood.” Of note, no one in our family lived in America prior to the turn of the 20th century. And yet that was her very sincerely felt sentiment about such matters.
@Kazzy: as someone who moved from the Jersey shore to Appalachian VA, the burial site of Lee and Jackson on top of that….she ain’t wrong.
@Thomm: Suffice it to say, I did not in fact go to Duke but rather a Jesuit institution in the northeast.
Happy First Illegal Immigrants Day!
@Kathy:
I think it was Krugman who made that point by semi-seriously proposing we should do a really convincing fake alien invasion so the world could unite against the return of the aliens. Maybe robots will emerge as a maligned “other” that won’t mind and liberals won’t feel guilty about.