Shove the Rain Dances and War Cries, It’s Columbus Day
They have celebrated the blunt, overpowering truth that this valiant, lion-hearted navigator for the first time connected the Old World with the New. We try to prove that the Vikings were in America long before Columbus, or that others preceded him, but what Columbus discovered spread through Europe. Columbus opened the New World to the Old.
It is the first of the four voyages of Christopher Columbus, the one making landfall after a five-week voyage on the Bahamian island of San Salvador, on October 12, 1492, that we celebrate in the United States as Columbus Day. On that voyage, Columbus subsequently sailed his three ships south to explore Cuba, Hispaniola, and much else. On three subsequent voyages, each two to three years long, involving two shipwrecks, endless pirate attacks, mutiny, and plain confounding navigation problems, Columbus did not set foot on the mainland we call the Americas.
On his first voyage, he may have had access to an ancient Viking map that showed the Antilles; he seems to have made a beeline for that spot. It was there that he encountered his first native Americans, the Caribs. To quote the New York Times review of Laurence Bergreen’s monumental Columbus: The Four Voyages:
The most feared people in the Antilles were the “Caribs”…sadistic cannibals who traveled in dugout canoes from island to island in search of fresh meat. “They eat human flesh and children and castrated men whom they keep and fatten like capons,” one European wrote. “They are called cannibals.”
This was not a rarity. Two other notable explorers of the Americas, Juan Diaz de Solis and Giovanni da Verrazano, were eaten by native Americans. For Columbus, in 1492, as for Americans up to the middle of the 19th century, enslavement of what were seen as primitive peoples was a fact of life; he did not seem to question it. And yet, he made a distinction, at least in this case, recommending that the Caribs be taken into slavery, but other tribes, which he observed to be gentle, peaceful, and friendly, be converted to Christianity.
Columbus was thoughtful. He also was a pitiless slave master, rapacious plunderer, Christianizing messiah, brutal leader, and near to delusional in some of his views. He never in his lifetime tumbled to the fact that he had failed to arrive in the Orient, coined the enduring mistaken term “Indian,” and he sailed for years around the islands and the coast of central America looking for Japan, which he remained certain must be there. I believe I have said, already, that he never set foot on mainland America. Neither, for that matter, did Amerigo Vespucci, who did make voyages, as did Columbus, but not to mainland America, which is named for him.
But, then, for the centuries that Columbus has been lionized, beginning in colonial times in North America, and throughout Central and South America, no one has celebrated that he trod on mainland America. They have celebrated the blunt, overpowering truth that this valiant, lion-hearted navigator for the first time connected the Old World with the New. We try to prove that the Vikings were in America long before Columbus, or that others preceded him, but what Columbus discovered spread through Europe. Columbus opened the New World to the Old.
The allegation that Columbus’s transgressions have been overlooked is laughable.
Have generations, in their haste to valorize this achievement, the most important of the entire European Age of Exploration, simply overlooked the brutal leader with his predilection to kill, torture, or enslave those he viewed as deserving no more? The allegation that Columbus’s transgressions have been overlooked is laughable. Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, who financed his voyages, had him arrested and brought back to Spain in chains on charges that he mistreated Spanish colonists of Hispaniola. Historians allege that the charges may have been trumped up or exaggerated by Columbus’s enemies—he was hugely envied for his successes—but from day one, as it were, his possible transgressions were scrutinized.
In spite of them, he has been celebrated through the Americas in dozens of ways, with holidays from Columbus Day to Dia de la Raza in Central America to Dia de las Americas. And what has been celebrated is the larger-than-life explorer who risked his life over and over again, and made the New World real to the Old.
All this, long known—but now dismissed in the interests of promoting other causes and agendas—has taken on personal meaning for me this year. My alma mater, Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, scored a story in the New York Times on February 3 for renaming the federal holiday celebrated in the United States since 1937 “Indigenous People’s Day” (IDP). The Brown faculty voted this:
“…to show support for Native Americans on our campus and beyond, and to celebrate Native American culture and history,” Thomas Roberts, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, said…
I am truly sad to say that Brown University, an Ivy League college of great distinction, from which I graduated in 1966, has become a vanguard of politically correct wackiness. It was not so in my day. Liberal, yes, but often in the better tradition of liberalism that emphasized the role of reason in man’s affairs.
Brown did not invent the “Indigenous People’s Day” perversion. Starting with Berkeley, California, and moving on to several states, IPD has gained some momentum. The debate itself over Columbus Day is now one of the bitter battlegrounds of historical research.
The persistence of those debates, and, in fact, the bitterness, correlate well with the incoherence of the entire argument. It makes no sense to replace Columbus Day, which celebrates the opening of the New World to the Old, with Indigenous People’s Day, which celebrates…what?
The persistence of those debates, and, in fact, the bitterness, correlate well with the incoherence of the entire argument. It makes no sense to replace Columbus Day, which celebrates the opening of the New World to the Old, with IPD, which celebrates…what? If it honors the culture and history of the tribes that settled North America before Europeans arrived, then it is not comparable with Columbus Day. One does not replace the other. Pick another date for IPD.
Of course, that entirely ignores the ideological agenda of those who agitate for the replacement of Columbus Day with IPD. They assert that the arrival of Columbus and European civilization launched the exploitation, enslavement, and genocide of what Columbus dubbed the “Indians.” The charge of “genocide” is grotesquely distorted by some of the worst scholarship in recent history.
Historians set the stage for this by means of a vigorous bidding war. Best estimates made before the allegation of genocide arose were that at its population peak there were a million or so Native Americans north of Mexico. As “genocide” became the issue, the estimates soared to five million, 12 million, 18 million… This laid the foundation for labeling what happened to the natives as the worst genocide ever committed and a “holocaust” to dwarf Nazi Germany.
Whatever size the population, at least 70 percent and up to 90 percent of deaths resulted from diseases brought by Europeans, above all, smallpox. Genocide? The argument, apart from citing one poorly documented alleged attempt to infect hostile tribes by spiking blankets with smallpox, is simply that all deaths the Europeans caused were genocidal.
Without doubt, arrival of Europeans in North America, upon which I will focus, here, began a long process of conflict and cooperation, treaty agreements and wars, unstoppable European expansion and bitter armed resistance of tribes, technological dominance of the advanced European culture over primitive tribal culture, and, most tragically and devastatingly, the introduction of new diseases from Europe to which the native population had no immunity and succumbed in virulent epidemics.
It is established that by 1900 there were fewer than 250,000 Native Americans in United States territory. If we take as our estimate of the original native population one made in 1928, long before the genocide craze, then that population declined from 1,152,950 at the time the Europeans arrived to 250,000 some 400 years later—a loss of 850,000.
That was the cost of the European settlement of North America and it was borne by natives. So what was the benefit? To put the matter most boldly—but, I think, to identify its pivotal historical essence—there is this statement by Dr. Michael Berliner, who is quoted as saying that Europeans brought to the New World
…reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, and productive achievement” where there was “primitivism, mysticism, and collectivism” in economic arrangements…
And cannibalism, torture as routine for dealing with those outside the tribe, incessant wars of conquest over other tribes, slavery, and human sacrifice. Also, zero progress in science, including medicine, and near zero progress in technology.
Does that matter? No. Not when we are discussing recommendations for mandated national holidays and that one replace another. We can celebrate native American tribal culture as the first to settle the huge North American continent and create a spectrum of variations from the agricultural—to the splendid if murderous light cavalry of the Comanche—to the elaborate structures and settled ways of the Pueblos. We can celebrate all that, even recognizing the “sadistic cannibalism” of the Caribs, the routine infliction of torture, and the murderous conquest of tribe by tribe.
Similarly, we can celebrate Columbus Day as marking the opening of the New World to the Old, altering history in unimaginably far-reaching ways for the human race. Even if Columbus combined brilliant navigation and courage with behavior condemned as atrocious by his peers.
In conclusion, it makes no sense to replace Columbus Day with IPD unless you are promoting the view that European settlement should be viewed as evil, not celebrated, and that tribal culture should be valorized. And that is dead wrong, I think, and worse than wrong. In the perspective of history, unfailingly harsh when one culture and society are displacing others, the European settlement of the Americas represented an enormously beneficial, decisive stride for the human race. Just contrast the Carib culture with the U.S. Constitution.
But why should governments dictate what we celebrate, usually by enforcing the closing of businesses, government offices, and public institutions such as schools? Of course, whatever government is in power tends to use national holidays to reinforce the prevailing slant on history. That was true in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and is true today in the People’s Republic of China. And in the United States, too. Labor Day, Martin Luther King Day, even Veteran’s Day and Christmas Day, all promote the political agendas of specific groups. If Columbus Day is replaced by IPD as an official national holiday, it will be merely politics.
Brown University’s embracing IPD, entirely a matter of campus politics, is Brown’s business. Too bad it grotesquely degrades standards of scholarship but Brown already has been driven down that dim path.
The administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt created Columbus Day to garner support of the Knights of Columbus. Let us choose our own heroes, celebrations, and days to close our businesses. In that sense, at least, Brown University’s embracing IPD, entirely a matter of campus politics, is Brown’s business. Too bad it grotesquely degrades standards of scholarship but Brown already has been driven down that dim path by the clamor of political correctness.
Despite this nasty little victory, I believe that Brown’s Native American students and their faculty collaborators, who should know better, are wasting their war cries and rain dances. As long as American civilization still lifts its beacon to the world, the world should not forget that one hard man, brilliant and courageous, flawed and limited, linked the most advanced human civilization of its time—one applying reason to philosophy, science, technology, humanism, and exciting new ideas of human rights and political freedom—with two continents that were then among the most primitive on earth, but charged with unlimited potential for human progress and greatness.
About the Author: Walter Donway
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