Columbus Day: 1892, Not 1492 Jack Schneider 1912.Published by Bain News Service
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CHAPTER 4 Columbus Day: 1892, Not 1492 Jack Schneider 1912.Published by Bain News Service. Service. by Bain News 1912.Published Columbus Day Memorial Celebration, Union Station, Celebration, Day Memorial Columbus DC, Washington, at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggbain.11303/ Available In the summer of 1892, President Benjamin Harri- Day decree.2 These students were asked to read a series son was locked in a fi erce campaign for reelection to of documents and to place each in historical context. As a second term. On July 21, he issued a proclamation they read through the texts, students talked about what calling for a new national holiday: “Discovery Day” they thought the documents were about and any other (see Source 4.1). To be observed in schools, churches, associations that came to mind. and other places of assembly, Discovery Day honored When they reached Harrison’s “Discovery Day” Christopher Columbus as a symbol of “progress and proclamation, some students wasted no time getting enlightenment.” Over a century later, Columbus Day down to Columbus-bashing. Jacob, a high school student is one of only two American holidays (along with the in an Advanced Placement U.S. history class, began his birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) that honor an comments thus: individual. While previous generations viewed Columbus as The fi rst thing that jumps out is that Columbus is an intrepid explorer and courageous risk-taker, today’s a pioneer of “progress and enlightenment,” which historians tend to be less generous. Kirkpatrick Sale’s was certainly one way of looking at it, but from Christopher Columbus and the Conquest of Paradise de- what I’ve learned, his goals were not entirely noble. scribes Columbus’s legacy as one of violence, colonial- Just get rich, whatever. Find a way to the Indies. ism, greed, and racism. Howard Zinn, whose A People’s Show that the earth wasn’t fl at. History of the United States has sold well over a million copies, casts the mariner as a monomaniacal fi end driv- Further, Jacob complained, the document “praises Co- en by the pursuit of gold in the Indies. Not fi nding the lumbus for his devout faith.” Columbus “claimed to be a riches he sought, Zinn’s Columbus resorted to brutality true Christian, but he also captured and tortured Indians, and eventual human traffi cking, writing: “Let us in the so he wasn’t maybe as noble as this is having him be.” name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves Asked if anything else occurred to him, Jacob respond- that can be sold.”1 ed: “And the fact that it’s becoming a holiday that we’re Alas, Columbus has not fared well of late. Like the supposed to revere, that’s even worse!” rhyme about his sailing “the ocean blue” for previous Jacob’s response was common among this group of generations, historians’ bleak portrait of Columbus has bright, articulate high school students. Drawing on back- penetrated popular consciousness for ours. South Dakota ground knowledge, Jacob went right at the explorer, en- and the city of Berkeley, California even abrogated Co- gaging in what some might view as “critical thinking.” lumbus Day in the 1990s, renaming it “Native American Critical, without a doubt. Day” and “Indigenous People’s Day,” respectively. President Harrison’s proclamation, it turns out, has Given Columbus’s falling stock, it is hardly surprising little to do with 1492, or even Columbus himself. Capa- that, in a recent study we completed, high school history ble and articulate as he was, Jacob had missed the docu- students bristled when reading the original Columbus ment’s real story. 49 50 Reading Like a Historian: Teaching Literacy in Middle and High School History How Did Historians Read It? President Harrison in Context Asked what the same document was about, a group of To the historians, President Harrison’s proclamation was doctoral candidates in history saw it quite differently, cit- more about 1892 than it was about Columbus. Conse- ing such things as: quently, their questions focused on the late 19th century rather than the 15th. Why would Harrison have honored .The “expansion of the heroic pantheon to include Columbus? Did he harbor some personal affi nity for former undesirables.” the explorer? Did Harrison consider Columbus a role .A “shameless appeal to superheroes in order to model? Or was there something more to this move that gain votes in urban centers.” doesn’t immediately strike the eye? Surely, there must .“The beginning of Pan-Whiteness in post-bellum have been some reason. America.”3 The historians brainstormed what little they could remember about the era’s historical context (recall that Unlike the high school students, who alighted on none was an expert in American history). Most, in fact, Columbus’s name and never budged, the graduate stu- could remember only what they had covered in high dents viewed the document as a refl ection of identity pol- school and undergraduate survey courses. In thinking itics and good old electioneering. In fact, the historians about the United States in the 1890s, they tried to re- hardly mentioned Columbus at all. How was it that the call major events, themes, and people: the Progressive two groups saw such different things in the same text? Era, the closing of the frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner, The easy answer would be to say that the historians Populism, William Jennings Bryan, the “Cross of Gold” simply know more American history. Obviously that’s speech—the kinds of references found in any high school true, but only to a point. Having studied such topics as textbook. But as the historians continued to talk about gender relations among French colonialists and Arab na- the period, they inevitably arrived at the topic of immi- tionalists in Tunisia, the relationship between the Siege of gration. When they did, light bulbs clicked on. Paris and German unifi cation, and doctrinal schisms in At the end of the 19th century, the United States was Islam after Ali’s death, the young historians possessed no getting a makeover. Unprecedented waves of immigra- factual knowledge of this time period in American his- tion transformed the country overnight (see Source 4.4). tory that would change their readings of the text. What In the 30 years between 1880 and 1910, 18 million new- they did possess, however, was a “historical approach” to comers came to America’s shores. And they were immi- the document, an orientation to documentary evidence grants of a different breed—in the terminology of the time that almost seems like common sense to those practiced they were “Slavs,” “Alpines,” “Hebrews,” “Iberics,” or in it. This orientation unlocks a world closed to untu- “Mediterraneans.” They were from Europe, mostly, but tored readers. not the Europe most American immigrants had come While the high school students responded to the doc- from previously. They were from further east and further ument’s most pronounced feature—the polarizing fi gure of south. They were swarthy and spoke strange languages. Christopher Columbus and his changing fortunes in the They worshipped differently from the indigenous Prot- court of public opinion—the historians employed a differ- estant majority.4 ent approach. For them, reading a historical document The most numerous of these new arrivals were Cath- meant putting sources on the stand and demanding that olics. At the beginning of the 1880s, there were about they yield their truths or falsehoods. To be sure, the his- 300,000 Italians in the United States, almost all of them torians were experts at employing disciplinary canons of Catholic. By 1910 that number had reached 2 million out evidence and rules of argument. Still, nothing about their of a population of 92 million Americans. As the Italians approach was particularly complicated. In fact, some of joined the Irish American community that had formed the deepest things they did were also the most basic. during the previous three decades, urban Catholics be- Consider their opening gambit. When historians sat came a political bloc with the potential to swing elections. down with the document, their fi rst words were some- But though their numbers were strong and growing, they thing along the lines of: “Okay, it’s 1892.” remained a much-maligned minority. A simple move, really—a recognition that the Harri- Throughout the 19th century, Catholics were at- son proclamation was not a free-fl oating utterance echo- tacked as un-American “papists,” accused of being more ing from the ether. To the historians, the document was loyal to Rome than to the United States. The Know- an artifact located in a unique time and place, a moment Nothing movement that sprang up before the Civil War in history unlike any other. For them, this moment was and sent dozens of its members to Congress was founded not about 1492, or even 2002. It was about 1892. in large part in order “to resist the insidious policy of the Which immediately raises the question: What does Church of Rome and all other foreign infl uence”5 (see 1892 mean? Source 4.6). Columbus Day: 1892, Not 1492 51 Catholics faced prejudice and suspicion everywhere connection to the famous and still-beloved explorer both they went, most egregiously in schools and at the work- as a means of creating pan-Catholic unity and to show place. Opponents of Catholic immigration included how American they really were (see Sources 4.2 and 4.3). well-known fi gures like Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of In the mid-1860s New Yorkers hosted Columbus- the telegraph, and Lyman Beecher, a religious leader and themed festivities.