Jonathan P. Baird

The only good thing I would say about Columbus Day is that as a federal worker it provided me a three day weekend. To the extent I had thought about it, I have considered the holiday a big mistake. If there is going to be a commemoration, the replacement, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, is vastly preferable. Although we as a nation have continually dishonored and mistreated Native Americans, they are our true founders.

Still, the presidential proclamation issued by the White House on October 9 came as a surprise. In the proclamation, Trump laid it on thick. Christopher Columbus became “the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth”. Trump went on to say Columbus “was guided by a noble mission to discover a new trade route to Asia, bring glory to Spain and spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands”.

This idealized image and glorification has no basis in the historical record. Columbus never set foot in America. In 1492, he first landed in the Bahamas and then two months later on the island of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti). Sailing off to points unknown was risky. I would concede that.

What Columbus wanted the most was gold which was becoming the new standard of wealth. After extensive finagling, he had persuaded the King and Queen of Spain to finance his expedition with three ships. The deal Columbus worked was that he could take 10% of the profit if he brought back gold and spices. He would also become governor of the new-found land and he would obtain a new title, Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

Columbus returned to Spain with indigenous slaves and gold. By exaggerating the gold potential, he again persuaded the Spanish Crown to finance a return journey to the Caribbean in 1493, this time with 17 ships. In the second trip, Columbus did not find gold but he went from island to island collecting slaves. He rounded up 1500 Arawak Indians. Of that 1500, he picked 500 of the fittest to take back to Spain for sale. Of that 500, 200 died on the trip back to Spain. The motive behind these voyages was pure greed. They were about as noble as Trump building a golf course in Qatar.

Columbus made two more expeditions first to Venezuela in 1498 and then to the coast of Central America in 1502. The other source of information we have is Bartolome de Las Casas, who transcribed Columbus’s journal and who wrote a multivolume History of the Indies. Las Casas wrote:

“Endless testimonies…prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives…But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy: small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then..The admiral, it is true was blind as to those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians.”

The presidential proclamation talks of gallantry but is devoid of any specificity. The great explorer reflected an imperialist mentality attuned to the Doctrine of Discovery. Under the Doctrine of Discovery, Christian explorers believed they had a divine right and calling to lay claim to territories uninhabited by Christians.

Dehumanization of Native Americans is implicit in the presidential proclamation. It indulges white Christian nationalist fantasy predisposed to seeing Columbus as an adventurous hero entering a vacant wilderness. Those who were displaced, enslaved or killed do not register in this mythology.

It may be that the Columbus myth appealed to early Americans because they were making voyages across the ocean parallel to what Columbus did. Possibly settlers to America saw themselves in him. Still you have to ask: how can you be the person who discovered America when you never landed there? Also an estimated 50 to 60 million Native American people already lived there.

White supremacy is foundational to the Columbus myth. The justification for our settler colonialism was that the “savages” had to be conquered. Somehow the fact that Columbus ushered in a genocide against Native Americans gets overlooked. It is estimated that tens of million indigenous people died in the Americas within the first 100 years of European colonization.

One oddity of the presidential proclamation is the touting of Columbus for spreading the gospel of Jesus. It is entirely contrary to the First Amendment admonition that government should play no role in establishing any religion. Considering how much Columbus trafficked in slavery, seeing him as spreading any religion is ludicrous.

Trump and other partisans of the holiday have tried to play the honoring Italian-American card. They have played to traditionalist Italian-Americans who are clinging to the old myth but there are far better ways to honor Italian-Americans. It would be better to have a holiday honoring Joe Dimaggio than Christopher Columbus.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson has written about the origin of the Columbus Day holiday. FDR proclaimed Columbus Day a federal holiday in 1934. She wrote that he was trying to solidify a new Democratic coalition that included Italian-Americans. The Ku Klux Klan had been very strong in 1920’s America and had been attacking Blacks, Jews, and Catholics. Ironically, the origin of the federal holiday was an effort to move beyond racism.

Like other Trump initiatives, the presidential proclamation is an effort to turn back the clock to a time before the Civil Rights movement so that we unlearn lessons we have learned over the last 75 years. If there is ever going to be acknowledgement of our sins and any effort toward rectification, honoring Indigenous Peoples’ Day, not Columbus Day, is one small step forward.