Columbus Day Is for All Americans — Thanks to Benjamin Harrison

One of the deadliest mass lynchings in America happened at New Orleans, on March 14, 1891. A mob of thousands broke into the parish prison and killed 11 Italian and Sicilian immigrants who had been charged in the murder of the city’s police chief, David Hennessy. Some had already been acquitted, and others had not yet had their trial.A year later, acting on a joint resolution of Congress, President Harrison issued a proclamation designating October 21, 1892, “a general holiday for the people of the United States.” The date marked 400 years since the Genovese explorer, Christopher Columbus, made landfall in the West. Columbus Day was born.The president’s proclamation could have mentioned the New Orleans lynching, but it didn’t. Harrison might have established an Italian-American Day, but he made the more constructive choice to establish an American one.The proclamation declared that the day belonged to “the people of the United States,” and its lesson was American patriotism. “On that day let the people, so far as possible, cease from toil and devote themselves to such exercises as may best express honor to the discoverer and their appreciation of the great achievements of the four completed centuries of American life,” he wrote.Declaring an Italian-American Day would have supported the New Orleans mob’s contention that Italian-Americans live outside the American story. Columbus Day placed them at its origins.Not everyone was thrilled. Some Protestants objected to the proclamation’s nod to the Catholic Columbus’s “devout faith” and some nativists resented tying a national American holiday to a sailor from Italy. Harrison’s proclamation wasn’t a cure, but rather a treatment for open wounds on an American body politic roiled by ancestral and racial divisions.Then came the summer of 2020. After the death of George Floyd, statues of Christopher Columbus were defaced and toppled across the country. The Italian explorer had been turned from a symbol of pride into a symbol of shame. In the eyes of the Black Lives Matter movement, Columbus was not the founder of a great nation, but the founder of a great evil.The irony, of course, is that the movement that declared itself the enemy of racial violence was attacking the symbol of one of the best civic responses to the deadliest example of racial and ancestral violence our country has ever seen.Most lynchings in American history were perpetrated against blacks, but some 25 percent targeted other racial and ancestry groups: Chinese, Native Americans, Mexicans, Italians and Sicilians, and Jews. President Harrison’s answer to the division and hatred was to unify Americans under the banner of national, rather than sectarian, identity. BLM’s answer was to further divide.Which version of Columbus Day will we all celebrate this Monday?

Columbus Day Is for All Americans — Thanks to Benjamin Harrison

Columbus Day Is for All Americans — Thanks to Benjamin Harrison

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