Exploring the Glorification of Columbus Day and Overlooked Historical Truths

1. Introduction

Throughout many societies, mythical cultural narratives maintain moral orders of human existence. Generally, these morals attempt to define human action based on where the collective culture places itself within universal depravity or consummation, craftsmanship or miracle, and suspension of disbelief or wisdom of the spirit. Columbus Day happens to be one of those myth-inducing holidays in the United States.

Still, despite this glorification of Columbus, many buried truths exist that many education systems perpetuate and will continue to perpetuate with the perpetuation of this holiday that ironically no one truly knows about up until this point. Share or don't share this with anyone, but ironically history is full of such truths, many of which find themselves reduced to microhistories within the discipline, never to be discovered except through deep digging and hard work that very few individuals in the world set themselves up to endure from an intellectual and emotional perspective. But multiple true and often undiscerning histories make the fabric of not only societies, in which the powerful casually glide through, nor the histories that are ignored by many scholars. A study of these two truths forms one Gnostic examination of humanity, of power, and long obscured and defamed vulnerability.

1.1. Background of Columbus Day

Columbus Day has been celebrated in the United States since the early 18th century, but it did not become a designated national holiday until 1937. The path to Columbus Day's establishment was not a swift or easy one. The holiday took many decades, and even centuries, of political campaigning and various historical developments before it was eventually established. The idea of setting aside time to celebrate Christopher Columbus has been a part of colonial and early American life, dating back to Columbus' own lifetime. At the time of his three voyages, Columbus was celebrated both throughout the Spanish Empire and in his home country.

Over the centuries, Columbus became remembered as the discoverer of America. This tie between Columbus and the New World, which Columbus himself never visited and did not know to exist, began with the publication of Christopher Columbus' letters discussing his voyages. The journeys to find trade routes to the Far East and to prove the world was round were historical moments of significance to world history. They brought Europe and the Americas into contact for the first time. In honor of these accomplishments, October 12 was celebrated in many cities and towns as early as the 18th century. Celebrations in the 19th century were on the local and state levels and would occur on the actual anniversary of Columbus' first voyage, October 12. A leader of the Knights of Columbus, James M. Farrell, used the 400th anniversary as an opportunity to encourage President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to have the U.S. recognize Columbus Day as a nationwide holiday. The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternity founded in 1882 that took Columbus as their patron, was instrumental in persuading Congress to set aside the day for the commemoration of Columbus in 1907.

1.2. Purpose and Scope of the Study

Purpose of the Study

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived in the Western Hemisphere. The arrival of Europeans was followed by the colonization and exploitation of the Native American population, contributing to the widespread diseases that almost exterminated indigenous peoples and an era of forced labor and genocide. Until today, there still exists a critical cultural mainstream view that sees the arrival of Columbus as a symbol of progress and a new direction. This project aims to observe the background of the main day of commemoration and the observations that arise with disclosures, truth, and facts that have been ignored.

Objective of the Study and Limitations

The main purpose of this research is to focus primarily on the following two themes: to study the outstanding problems that have been deliberately concealed and to encourage people to turn a critical eye on the national day glorification ceremony. On the day Columbus' name is celebrated, various activities may reflect past character types. This research will also explore the two strands of ethics and politics on the day through selective interviews and societal perspectives, with particular emphasis on Native American communities. In addition, it is stated that the indigenous traditions of ethnic culture are an essential contribution to the identity of any country and also highlight the responsibility to monitor ethnic speaking nations. It will include a study of how the day is celebrated, as it is conducted by a variety of different groups. The study of the economic and trade movements related to this event also revealed the challenges and changes surrounding the Columbus Day parade. While the proposed date of celebration is subjective and varies for a wide range of purposes, the day represents a significant and potentially consistent occurrence that should accompany the truth.

2. The Glorification of Columbus

For millions of Americans and others around the globe, the very mention of Christopher Columbus calls to mind the beginning of a historical journey of discovery, adventure, and personal heroism set against the backdrop of majestic Spanish ships riding confidently across a vast, unknown blue sea on a journey to a "new world." The image of Columbus unfurls a multiplicity of different and yet interwoven narratives, all of which celebrate and glorify him and his achievement. Columbus is an iconic figure emblematic of American history and Western tradition. When thinking of Columbus, one does not associate those accomplishments with other descriptions such as fraud, enslavement, and genocide, although they certainly are. In another vein of Columbus glorification, ushers for the 1968 Columbus Day football game, wearing little triangular hats and knickers, danced into the stadium while music blared. Columbus certainly adds pizzazz to history.

For those to whom he is revered, Columbus represents national identity and culture. Most white Americans thus have been taught to glorify Columbus through the media and, perhaps more importantly, via popular entertainment. For many immigrants of Italian descent, this change was due to the fact that Columbus had become the Italian hero of choice. By 1989, a six-question survey given to elementary students in an upstate New York public school district resulted in responses such as, "We celebrate Columbus Day as a day of discovery," "to celebrate the discovery and landing of a great Italian in America," "he found out that the world was round by finding us," "Columbus was trying to make a new route to India," "A caravel is a boat that Columbus used to discover us," and the like. Clearly, the students were not referring to the Bill of Rights or the Emancipation Proclamation.

2.1. Origins of Columbus Day

As conversations surrounding Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the myths of Christopher Columbus resurface, understanding the historical background behind Columbus Day has become steadily more important. The majority of American federal holidays originated between the late 19th century and mid-20th century. This period was identified by both Americans at the time and by modern-day historians as being a formative period in the construction of American nationalism. Most European Americans, who made up the majority of the population, were from a host of different European immigrant communities. It was prior to the imposition of English as a mandatory language in public schools and in the years following the U.S. Civil War. In this context, Americans were actively engaged in creating a 'national' identity to serve as a cohesive bond for a diverse population. The era that preceded Columbus Day as a federal holiday in the United States was one marked by significant social and political strife in the country, ranging from a national competition in the 'race to occupy the western territory in North America' to Jim Crow laws that segregated Black Americans and the repression of labor organizing activities following a proposal for an eight-hour workday. These are perhaps some of the most important legacies of the first federal proclamation of Columbus’s arrival to the Western Hemisphere. However, the banality of the first federal Columbus Day leaves a lasting legacy on our remembrance of colonialism and racial oppression in a positive celebration of recognition. This text seeks to provide an overview of the first official Columbus Day and the forgotten origins of a holiday we have now come to know as both long-revered and as a whitewashed celebration of historical colonialism and violence.

2.2. Columbus in American Culture

Columbus in American Culture

Throughout American culture, representations of Columbus have appeared in a variety of mediums including books, textbooks, films, statues, paintings, plays, cartoons, and other works of art. These portrayals have played a role in establishing, promoting, and legendizing the historical figure of Columbus. Popular images of Columbus frequently cast him in a place of honor, informed by themes of bravery, vision, and discovery. Reflecting this, literally hundreds of locations in the United States are named in his honor. Children in elementary and secondary schools have learned and recited versions of "Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492" for over one hundred years.

The dominant pop culture portrayals of Columbus, for the most part, approach him from the positive perspective of a courageous explorer and forward thinker. Yet, these images and the qualities they impute to Columbus often stand in marked contrast to his place within the original literature and Caribbean colony documents or the perspective of indigenous peoples. Mainstream culture and marginalized group perspectives coexist and conflict. Rather than simply reviling Columbus, this essay inquires as to how the contradictory images of Columbus can clarify the function of history in American society, rather than simply condemning him to put Europeans and their descendants in a more negative light.

3. Overlooked Historical Truths

One of the most abiding and reproduced images of history is the figure of Christopher Columbus, gazing out at an unknown ocean in mingled hope and fear in order to liberate what would become the Americas. In many cases, Columbus is glorified as a hero and an explorer; his first voyage even founded a national holiday in the United States, a place of about 22 million indigenous people who are, despite being the original inhabitants of this land, considered 'foreign' to a first-person narrative of the historical founding figure of the United States. Columbus’s few voyages initiated a complex network of colonization that, cumulatively, produced an estimated 54 million colonizers and settlers in the Americas by 1650. Much of the discourse around Columbus perpetuates this very origin story of the Americas, but the historical truths of these few voyages have been frequently overlooked. The collective memories of indigenous people throughout the Americas offer an indelible challenge to this perspective.

A recent reconfiguration of Columbus is informed by these silenced indigenous histories, one in which the blood and violence of his voyage and ostensible discovery are not just equivocated, but placed at the center of his enterprise: Columbus began a violent process of displacement and dispossession, first of Taíno beans—told initially as a conspiracy theory known to the Admiral, well before they touched actual Taíno hands—and then Taíno lives that would signal a broader assault on indigenous peoples. A violent legacy of rape, murder, destitution, disease, and loss raised a nearly inclusive indigenous howl in the 1990s, at which time Columbus came to be seriously revisited. This legacy marked the real birth of an American millennium and continues to be essential in understanding how colonization affected and contoured the history up to the present day.

3.1. Indigenous Perspectives

Directly impacted by the violence and dispossession that came, directly or indirectly, as a result of expeditions, indigenous peoples have known these events by other names. For them, the European arrival on these shores that initiated the transfer of populations and inventory of sundries, including notions and instruments of music, was actually an invasion. Indigenous people on the lands now called the Americas lived with their diverse histories, languages, political and social orders, cultures, knowledge systems, and ecological adaptations. In an increasingly circular route, geographically and historically, they first encountered those of later expeditions. For many communities, contact with Europeans would be catastrophic. For others, like the Haudenosaunee in what is now New York State, first contacts led to beneficial alliances.

In my classes, we look in some depth at these rich and varied historic and cultural contexts, as a counterpoint to the spectacular images of historical periodization and heroic adventure that have tended to dominate both older and contemporary accounts. When we do have occasion to follow these expeditions, we also trace the descent of what has been brought into being in the years that followed. This includes the limitations and even displacements of the European traditions that were sponsored on the historical consciousness of the Americas. The perspective of indigenous peoples—on their local ground, and in larger representative and social movements—is central because more can be observed in their chronicle of resistance, resilience, and adaptation. Agencies to call attention to continuing native presence and sovereignty, the ways indigenous peoples have made life strategies even in the vortex of colonization, including the determination to act in the cause for historical truth and exercise for historical justice, from which we might most fully understand the meaning of these events.

3.2. Impact on Indigenous Populations

There are numerous historical references to the diseases brought by Columbus and his crew wherever they set foot on native shores. This change on a microbiological level is perhaps the most visible consequence of Columbus’s contact. Along with disease, violence became another immediate impact as chroniclers recorded Columbus’s men slicing body parts off indigenous Cubans and Caribbean Arawaks to test the sharpness of their blades. Though Columbus himself is not remembered for such horrors, other of his men certainly were and, if nothing else, silence in the face of such a situation is tacit approval. This violence eventually led to displacement and the unceremonious removal of land from indigenous control. In fact, the Taino and later the Arawak were forced from their villages and compelled to endure a life of slavery, dismantling their societies on a collective level.

In each colonial encounter across the Americas, indigenous societies were uprooted and changed. The local appropriation of indigenous landscape is also a trend recognized across the New World, one enhanced by the aggressive land-hungry colonizers who engaged in a massive, active alteration in native land use. The indigenous societies encountered in the New World were organized into complex political states, provided agricultural resources, and possessed thousands of years of cultural history. In other words, the settlers did not colonize an empty land but rather an established indigenous world. When consulted for 'their side of the story,' native people have spoken of the loss of their homelands, the imposition of laws, the cutting off of their hair, and their children. Perhaps the most important thing a 'Pro-Columbus' article could accomplish is to build an understanding of these impacts and incorporate them into the official narrative of Columbus Day.

4. Reevaluating Columbus Day

Calls for critical reevaluation and rethinking of Columbus Day have grown in recent years. While many people still celebrate Columbus Day as a source of nativist pride, abundance, and opportunity, the complexities of his legacy have become more widespread. Each autumn, various grassroots movements aim to alter the focus of the holiday towards the genocidal aspects of Christopher Columbus's western voyage. They have proposed renaming the holiday. Methods include official legislative action and popular cultural celebrations. This critique of Columbus Day is especially popular among Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and has attracted considerable public attention in recent years. Many cities throughout the United States have considered and implemented alternatives to the holiday.

The Columbus Day holiday is currently considered to be a day to reflect upon the heritage of the country's culture. However, the day has become much more than a day of citywide appreciation for what has made the country great. Among Native Americans, a day of reflection has become a day of mourning for the future that died the day Columbus Day was established. The legacy of Columbus Day can be seen as an example of the importance of mundane and, in some cases, minor events such as shifts in politics, public policy, or legislation. Columbus Day illustrates the affective power of public memory and, more importantly, public activism. By examining the evolution of the day through the lens of public memory, we can engage with a dynamic social process consistently reshaped over and over again by people and events in existing society. In fundamentally reshaping public memory, there is the power to not only change an assigned yet official national character but our own individual social characters as well. In doing so, this transformation provides for the potential for social healing and change. The changes in Columbus's meaning during the recent and early 20th century may be indicative of the changes necessary in Americans' interpretations of their national memory and, most importantly, of the future, such as relevant events in Iraq, the war on terror, civil liberty abrogation, and the potential for imperialism.

4.1. Calls for Reexamination

Overwhelmingly, modern discourse on Columbus Day has focused on reassessment, public calls for reexamination, or having the date removed from the calendar entirely. Just a few of the campaigns and initiatives seeking to abolish Columbus Day include various movements advocating for change. Since 1991, the best-known revolt against Columbus Day has been the transformation of the second Monday of October into “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” as is done in over four dozen U.S. cities today. In Columbus’s hometown of Genoa, Italy, there have been ongoing public discussions in the city council about whether they wish to remain associated with the man whose discovery led to the Atlantic slave trade. Moreover, nearly one-third of states now do not recognize the federal date.

Indeed, plans to “de-Columbusify” the holiday in the U.S. have cultural currency. Various newspapers’ op-ed sections annually discuss the idea of replacing Columbus Day or chide the public for doing so. Inevitable as well are the resistance articles lamenting the end of the day as insignificant. Overall, the momentum for change comes from broader alterations in historical images taking place nationwide. Since World War II, U.S. historians began revising white conqueror narratives, but it took until the late 20th century for the topic to receive substantial media attention after multicultural activists strenuously pressed for it. By the 1990s, when significant public protests became a mass adoptee, newspapers and magazines were more than ready to publish “undiscovered” notions about the explorer who never found anything significant. The critical approach to history later filtered into popular culture. The quincentenary in 1983 and 1992 interested filmmakers, authors, and cartoonists like never before — a process reflecting the broader societal concern.

4.2. Alternative Perspectives

One perspective is that not all Americans see Columbus Day as a time for grandeur. Instead, it is a harsh awakening each year to learn that the violent history of the 'discovery' is unacknowledged, and the colonization and genocide of their ancestors is celebrated annually. There are many racialized communities who would rather mourn their losses and celebrate indigenous resiliency.

An alternative to celebrating Columbus is a sit-in, an educational event, and a moment of silence near the Columbus memorial in Washington Square Park in Lawrence, Kansas. This is seen as a moment to talk about and learn from one another, a time to pause in peace and listen to the tribes' quiet laments knowing that out of the cloak of tears arise the descendants of this hidden history… With that, they celebrate every single indigenous individual who, through their beautiful qualities, is the strongest example of resistance, survival, and immutability that this world has ever known. By giving homage to indigenous resistance, the community makes visible the historically invisible and are part of a growing national effort to reclaim the story of Columbus. They celebrate the various tribal nations and engage in an intercultural dialogue aimed at showing that Indian heritage and struggles have a place in this world.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

In this study, reflecting on the glorification of Columbus Day and the forgotten truths of history is the main premise. The findings from the exploratory content analysis suggest that the defense of Columbus Day continues to be employed for symbolic affirmation of national identity, while within these arguments is a more nuanced consideration beyond the narratives. Academics imply that an honest examination of history requires the ability to consider multiple truths, particularly regarding complex figures such as Columbus, who occupies varying and contradictory positions in history, dependent on perspective. The focus of this study has been seeking out underlying conflict and resolution not being explicitly identified. Such reflection has implications for today, stirring thoughts about the ways in which the glorification of Columbus Day continues to impact society. Looking at the narratives provides momentum to develop a series of conversations, particularly regarding the need for dialogue about history, memory, and cultural identity, as well as examining the actions taken to bring greater cultural awareness and sensitivity. Future research might explore whether certain processes of understanding and acceptance are occurring first and foremost, and then other attempts at reconciliation follow in its wake. Future studies could also look at the extent of colonial-focused erasure in historical narratives presenting a dominant perspective. It is becoming increasingly clear that cultural silencing about issues related to lost or oppressed subcultures exists in teacher preparation classes and textbooks simply because certain knowledge is not already in place. Such erasures would be more obvious if the crises of indigenous or Latino education were reconsidered. Education reform that requires students to meet varying content standards that challenge points of view is only one way of amplifying heterogeneous young voices positioned to challenge the one historic narrative fact everyone seems to agree upon: history is written by the victors. Thus, education reform is required to include more diversity from which point of view historical content is brought to school children. This holds the potential to challenge the hegemonic versions of truth which past and current society has chosen to accept and glorify as fact. Given the overall findings and considerations, it is possible to envision a more critical socio-historical perspective wherein the complexities of history are brought to the fore in any discussion in order to provide hope and healing toward a possible reconciliation.