What is Columbus Day?

It's interesting watching people talk about Columbus Day.

Where I came from, Columbus Day really had very little to do with "discovering America". It has to do with Italian American ethnic pride.

The first time we had a national Columbus Day was in 1892. It wasn't the 400th anniversary that did made it a thing. A dozen Italian immigrants had been lynched in the deep south. The 14 March 1891 New Orleans lynchings.

It became a regular national observance after the lobbying of the Knights of Columbus. The primary lobbyist was Generoso Pope, a successful business who ran major Italian language newspapers in America. Congress passed a statute requesting the president to acknowledge 12 October as Columbus day. Part of the Congressional statute includes an invitation for everyone to invite everyone to celebrate the discovery of America. Clearly its discovery by an Italian. FDR made it so.

When I was a kid, in 1966, an Italian American, Mariano Lucca, lead the National Columbus Day Committee which lobbied to make it a federal holiday, not just a national observance. And so LBJ made it so.

Of course at the local organic level, Columbus and the discovery of the new world was celebrated as a matter of Italian pride since the 18th century in the Americas. San Francisco has the longest continuous Italian-American community and they have been celebrating with a parade and other festivities since 1886.

Makes me miss home.

I have yet to see one post about Italians or Italian Americans. They did this thing and made the holiday possible.

This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »

bijouxbroussard · F

Yes, that’s what I recall from growing up in a largely Italian-American neighborhood. I got pushed around for expressing the opinions that:
A. You can’t "discover" a land already inhabited by people.
B. There’s no evidence Columbus ever set foot in what is now the U.S.
Later, of course, Native groups rallied to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day. The Italian-Americans pushed back, and so here we acknowledge both.

CopperCicada · M

@bijouxbroussard I am not exactly a fan of Columbus. I think his record stands. It is just interesting to me how the meanings of these celebrations change.

If it wasn't for Italian-American ethnic pride mixing with patriotism, the holiday wouldn't exist. It's really not part of our cultural identity.

I can't but have some sympathy for the Italian-American push to create a patriotic Italian hero given Italians being interred in camps in WW2. This internment made no distinction between pro-fascist and anti-fascist, and between short term visitors and those who had immigrated around the turn of the century but who had not been naturalized.

fun4us2b · M

@CopperCicada @bijouxbroussard You can be a fan of Columbus's - firstly, he was primarily a navigator who was given a crew of criminals that were in a constant state of mutiny looking for people and places to rape and pillage, and he was brought back to Spain in shackles and spent the period between the 3rd and 4th voyages in prison. When he returned to Hispaniola he wasn't allowed to land and was stuck on Panama for a few years...no, he never set foot in North America - what he did do was using his navigating skills normalize the passage between Europe and the Caribbean. His crew was responsible for the murders and displacement and that is why the whole region including Mexico now speaks Spanish - Back to Columbus, he and is brother were constantly under threat from his crew, and disrespected by his sponsoring government, except Queen Isabella, and when she died, he was toast, ended up impoverished living in a little shack as all his prior "rewards" were taken from him...so he was a bit of an anomaly - but certainly not the plunderer people say he was.

bijouxbroussard · F

@CopperCicada Our country did some ridiculous things. While placing Japanese-Americans in internment camps (a concentration camp by any other name), as well as German-and Italian-Americans in smaller numbers, they were bringing actual former Nazis here to further their science programs.

German- and Italian-Americans were likewise incarcerated under order No. 9066, but to a lesser degree than the Japanese. About 11,500 Germans and 1,881 Italians were interned across the country. But it wasn’t enough for the U.S. government to illegally imprison Germans living in the United States. America trolled Latin American countries, scarfed up German nationals living peacefully across Central and South America, and plopped them into U.S. prison camps.

Most of those imprisoned were held for the duration of the war. After their release, they returned to find their homes and businesses ransacked, destroyed or stolen from them. A number of Japanese farmers returned to California only to discover white Americans had taken over their farms and refused to give them back.

Dino11 · M

@bijouxbroussard My dentist is one of those that came from one of internment camps near Livingston. Berkley graduate, Harvard graduate school, Still has his feet on the ground. His family didn't let that bigoted wartime over-reaction ruin them, they forged ahead like all of us have had to,
under demeaning conditions.