Columbus: Iberian Developments & US Ideologies

Americanizing Columbus

• Mahmood Mamdani pinpoints 1492 as the genesis of the modern nation-state due to ethnic cleansing by the Castilian monarchy and overseas colonization in the Americas.
• Modern colonialism didn't begin in the 18th-century; European colonialism and the modern state were co-constituted.

"Discovery" and the Cult of Columbus

• The Spanish monarchs hired a Genoese sailor shortly after entering Granada, promising a western route to India
• Columbus did not arrive at India, but rather an island in the Bahamas
• The indigenous population told Columbus of two large continents with cities and millions of acres of farmland.
• Christendom mercenaries, skeptical at first, reached Central America during later voyages
• A Spanish army would control the region two decades later, destroying Tenochtitlán (most populated city at the time)
• The "discovery" on October 12, 1492 represents the symbol of infamy, domination, slavery, and genocide for Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and their descendants
• Michel-Rolph Trouillot indicates that calling the initial European invasions of inhabited lands "discovery" represents a Eurocentric viewpoint.
• Five years after ratifying the Constitution, the first official celebration of Columbus in the United States occurred.
• The first public monument to Columbus in North America was an obelisk that was built in Baltimore in 1792

Columbus Day

• Despite naming Gran Colombia after Columbus, Bolivarian revolutionaries did not formally commemorate Columbus until the 1920s
• President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared Columbus Day an official federal holiday in 1937 because of pressure from the Knights of Columbus.
• Claudia Bushman posits that the cult of Columbus developed because it avoided the British origins of the United States and situated it with the first founder of the Americas.
• "Columbia", the land of Columbus, was preferred to "Columbus".
• Founded in 1754 as King's College, Columbia College was renamed in 1784 after independence
• The nation's capital got the name District of Columbia
• In 1777, poet Philip Freneau gave the name "Columbia, America" to what became the United States of America
• Others believed that the thirteen colonies should go by the name of Columbia.
• South Carolina made its capital Columbia
• In early American textbooks from the 1700s, Columbus initiated American history, omitting anything about the Indians
• Cristobal Colon was being repurposed as the founder of the United States, hence the name was anglicized to Christopher Columbus.
• Thomas Hart Benton, a US senator from Missouri, told Congress in 1846 that the war was a continuation of Columbus's concept, who gave the United States its real path of empire
• According to Benton, the advent of the "White race" on the west coast would give the United States an "American Road to India"

Manifest destiny

• A mural which was installed in US Capitol Building in 1861 titled Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way symbolized continental imperialism with a idea called manifest destiny .
• Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, the muralist, supported the European radical revolutions of 1848 and created Washington Crossing the Delaware to inspire revolutionists by the US War of Independence.
• The United States' mythical founding as a white republic was founded on ethnic cleansing and white supremacy
• History courses incorporated into US school curriculums in the early nineteenth century presenting Columbus as an ancestor.
• With the rising presence of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States including millions of Italian and Irish immigrants, Columbus gained a renewed significance
• Columbus acquired a lobby due to ethnicity, a necessity for public success in US culture
• There were very few Italian Americans and Spaniards in the United States in 1866, but they nonetheless celebrated October 12 as Columbus Day which spread to other cities, the real push for Columbus came from Irish Americans and the Roman Catholic Church, with the establishment of the Knights of Columbus in 1882.

The Knights of Columbus and Americanization

• The Knights of Columbus were established on February 7, 1882 by 60 young Catholic men in the basement of St. Mary's Church
• Father McGivney originally proposed Columbus as the organization's patron
• James T. Mullen suggested the full name Knights of Columbus to highlight the order's ritualist character.
• The Knights founding was largely an Irish American Catholic undertaking, even though Italian immigrants joined later in the century
• The Catholics of New Haven chose Columbus because he was already associated with the United States and removed them from the nativism stigma.
• Father Michael McGivney died eight years after beginning the Knights of Columbus and Pope Francis beatified McGivney in October 2020, highlighting the Vatican's continued backing for its fifteenth-century doctrine of discovery
• The Knights of Columbus were located in every state and grew over Canada, México, and the Philippines and became the biggest body of Catholic laymen in the world
• By embracing Columbus as their patron, this small group of Irish American Catholics of New Haven displayed their pride in America's Catholic heritage, evoking the aura of Catholicity and affirming the 'discovery' of America as a Catholic event.
• The society's ceremonials taught initiates lessons of Columbianism: a strong bond to faith and faith against its enemies, and to proclaim loyalty to Catholicism and the flag.

Columbus in the White City

• By 1892, over twenty monuments to Columbus had been built in cities across the United States.
• Cities started observing Columbus Day in the 1860s.
• There were local festivities throughout 1892 that culminated in a Columbus extravaganza in Chicago.
• The World's Fair Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which launched in 1890 close to the time of the US Seventh Calvary's bloody massacre of hundreds of Lakota refugees at Wounded Knee, marked the event as a colonial genocidal victory.
• The fair site in South Chicago was called the "White City".
• At the carnivalesque midway of the White City was the Ferris wheel, which was invented for the occasion
• The historian Frederick Jackson Turner gave his thesis, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History".
• Without referencing the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, Turner chose the year as the demarcation of the end of the frontier
• As a way of honoring Columbus, both Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland urged using the pledge.
• The intent was to promote patriotism by raising the flag and repeating the pledge in every school.
• On October 21, 1892, Bellamy got twelve million schoolchildren around the country to simultaneously salute the flag and say the pledge.
• "One nation under God" was added to Bellamy's pledge in 1954 after intensive lobbying from the Knights of Columbus.
• Frederick Douglass was castigating the organizers by claiming that his race was made to be misrepresented by the "barbaric customs" of "African savages brought to act the monkey", present at the fair representing the government of Haiti

Indigenizing Italians

• They were met with a lot of insults in newspapers and publications, considered impure due to period of the pseudo race theory of eugenics
• Their children were sometimes denied entry to schools, adults were barred from public venues and labor unions.
• In 1912, Italian migrants were discussed by the US House Committee on Immigration on if they should be called as "full-blooded Caucasians,"
• Employers preferred Slovaks and Poles with lighter skin even though those who were educated and talented could not get any positions except manual labor.
• Columbus monuments, together with the Irish and the Knights of Columbus, were installed which succeeded in getting the seventy-six-foot Columbus Monument installed in the center of Columbus Circle in New York in 1892.
• The Knights lobbied state legislatures to make October 12 a formal holiday, and they had succeeded in fourteen states by 1912.
• Franklin Roosevelt was convinced by the Knights to make it a federal holiday.
• Immigrants found attachment to Columbus as a path to acceptance.
• Historian Danielle Battisti illustrates how casting Columbus as "the first immigrant" rewrote history.
• Based on Columbus, the origin story was utilized to great effect by Italian Americans while campaigning to overturn immigration law after the first founder of the United States- served to connect being Catholic.
• "Whiteness" stood among the most significant things one could possess.

Central and Eastern European Immigrants

• Immigrants found attachment to Columbus as a path to acceptance.
• Historian Danielle Battisti illustrates how casting Columbus as "the first immigrant" rewrote history.
• Based on Columbus, the origin story was utilized to great effect by Italian Americans while campaigning to overturn immigration law after the first founder of the United States- served to connect being Catholic.
• "Whiteness" stood among the most significant things one could possess.