THE MYTH OF COLUMBUS AND THE 'DISCOVERY' OF AMERICA
The
story of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) and his arrival in the
Americas holds a pivotal place in an American foundational mythology
that stages the 'discovery' and the subsequent settlement and
colonization of the 'new world' in prophetic ways as an
inevitable step forward in the course of human progress that
eventually would lead to the founding of the USA and to US-American
westward expansion, its 'manifest destiny.'
Columbus Day today (oct 14) is still a national holiday despite persistent objections to his idealization and glorification. Until 1923 his profile was on the five-dollar bill.
15th-16th Century : the discovery
The first source was the letters Columbus wrote to describe the Americas.
"Hispaniola is a marvel," he writes, "[i]t has [...] fine, large flowing rivers," "mountains and peaks [...] most beautiful," "trees of endless varieties, so high that they seem to touch the sky [...] covered with blossoms, some with fruits," "honey, many kinds of birds, and a great variety of fruits;" the earth is "rich and fertile".
Tasks and questions : First impressions concerning the place? Importance of religion?
Christopher Columbus, Genoese explorer, discovering America, 12 May 1492 (1590). Artist: Theodor de Bry
Tasks : Representation of the Europeans vs the native population? Polarization? Intention?
Just like in Columbus's description of the 'new world' inhabitants, there is a clear dichotomy of us (the Europeans) vs. them (the Native population) at work - both groups are portrayed as fundamentally and irreconcilably different from each other. This extreme polarization is another ingredient in the rhetoric of otherness that produces unbridgeable difference, introduces a steep hierarchy between 'us' and 'them,' and thus legitimizes asymmetrical power relations. Thus, the Natives are described as 'children of nature' by Columbus, naked, instinctive, trusting, generous, gullible, and ignorant. By inference, Columbus and his men are superior in every way. They represent culture and thus refinement and progress against the backdrop of the Natives' 'natural state' - in terms of their clothes, their religion (Christianity), and their technology; and they violently demonstrate their assumed superiority: Columbus takes possession of the islands and of the Natives, implying that he is authorized to do so at his will. He fleshes out the culture/nature divide between Europeans and the indigenous population.
18th century : Columbus as a « usable past »
It is in the last decades of the 18th century that the specifically North American myth of Columbus comes into existence.
In the context of the American anti-colonial movement directed against the British Crown shortly before, during, and particularly after the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), the cultural work of American public intellectuals, writers and poets was to colonize the past in order to invent a meaningful beginning, and they did so by making the figure of Columbus part of their own colonial and postcolonial legacy.
Many public figures and writers gathered around Columbus as a historical persona to affirm North American independence, and they represented him as a figure of national consensus exemplifying American national virtues and an American national character avant la lettre.
Columbus and George Washington - commander-in-chief of the revolutionary troops and first President of the United States are paired for patriotic purposes This tandem of two foundational figures is forcefully evident in highly symbolic practices of naming in the early republic: the US capital is named "Washington," whereas the government district, ceded by Virginia and Maryland in 1791, is named "District of Columbia."
First of all, Columbus was a convenient historical figure for the simple reason that he was not British and thus not implicated in British colonialism; the notion of Columbus as a Founding Father establishes a non-English patrimony for the United State.
Second, the writers of the American revolutionary era sympathized with Columbus's dependency on monarchical good will and clearly cast him as an anti-monarchical, almost revolutionary figure; they established a somewhat skewed analogy between Columbus's suffering under the yoke of greedy monarchs who did not appreciate his genius and the fate of North American colonists under the rule of George III. The events of the age of 'discovery' are cast in a typological manner and become symbolic of the revolutionary period .
Third, Columbus's quest for a "passage to India" can be seen as prefiguring American westward expansion - with the aim to found "a mighty nation reaching from coast to coast". He "became the very embodiment of an American pathfinder".
Fourth, it is argued that Columbus's willpower and stamina in the face of sheer insurmountable obstacles embodied the highest degree of individualism - a core American virtue in early discourses of the republic - which "makes Columbus an American by temperament".
Fifth, the sense of providence that surrounds Columbus in historical sources can be attributed to both religious as well as secular designs
The 19th-century : the Americanization of Columbus, an Italian sailor.
Columbus
also quickly advanced to become an American icon in visual culture,
and his landing in the Americas became a powerful "image of
American genesis"
John Vanderlyn's painting The Landing of Columbus at the Island of
Guanahaní, West Indies,
(1846). This painting is displayed in the rotunda of the United States Capitol
Tasks and questions : How propagandizing is it? Which message? Hierarchy? The place the painting is set?
Disregarding historical evidence, Christopher Columbus was elevated to a homo americanus; he was depicted as a good colonist, a scientist, scholar, and humanist, as a profoundly religious man, as an Enlightenment figure ahead of Enlightenment, and thus as a tragic figure.
The adoption of Columbus as a foundational figure in American national discourses of the late 18th and early 19th centuries had reflected little on a number of aspects that now surfaced: that he was an Italian sailing for the Spanish Crown, that he did not actually land in North America but in the Caribbean, and that he was Catholic.
Why did Americans become aware of these facts regarding Columbus's 'discovery' now, one hundred years after they had made him their national hero?
In
the 19th century, the USA was receiving millions of immigrants from
Europe - the so-called first wave of immigrants from Northern and
Western Europe in the 1840s and 1850s, and the so-called second wave
of immigrants mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe in the 1870s
and the following decades: "From 1880 to 1924, some four million
immigrants from southern Italy came to America, joining an earlier
group of Italian immigrants, mainly from the northern peninsula" .
In response to the large numbers of newly arriving immigrants, the
American-born population often reacted with anxiety and hostility.
The last decades of the 19th century have often been characterized as
a period of extreme xenophobia, racism, and nativism, a specifically
American term to describe the phenomenon of "intense opposition to
an internal minority on the grounds of its foreign (i.e.
'un-American') connections". Many social and political groups
formed to protect what they considered to be a distinctively American
way of life. John Higham discerned three major themes in American
nativism: anti-Catholicism, antiradicalism, and racial nativism based
on an Anglo-Saxon tradition and the assumption of Anglo-Saxon
superiority in the United States. In this logic, immigrants from
different parts of Europe - particularly those from Catholic
countries - were viewed with distrust and skepticism, a reaction
that often caused massive discrimination and sometimes even physical
violence. The heated debate around the dangers of 'foreign
infiltration' culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924, which put
a stop to mass immigration to the United States.
This nativist intellectual climate affected the attitude toward Christopher Columbus as a national hero. Although Columbus may have been a somewhat exceptional figure, his enterprise lacked sustainability, and his 'discovery' was a "blunder" - shortcomings that are also attributed to the 'nature' of Italians. 19Th-century. American stereotypes concerning Italian immigrants cast them as innately criminal, lazy, unfit for democracy, and, as one Secret Service report has it, "a menace to the country".
By Reverend Branford Clarke, from "Klansmen: Guardians of Liberty," 1926.
Task : put the document into perspective
What had made Christopher Columbus attractive in the founding phase of the US - that he was not British - now made him suspect. Of course, these new voices in American historical scholarship did not completely debunk the Columbus myth it continues to have a firm place in popular discourses of commemoration and other forms of public and popular culture
The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 (originally scheduled for 1892) in Chicago was a grandiose event.
Task : symbols? Progress and civilization?
Late 19th-century onward : appropriation and rejection of Columbus
Since
the late 19th century, the myth of Columbus and the 'discovery'
of America thus has no longer functioned as an unequivocal universal
national myth but is enlisted in new minority discourses by Jewish,
Italian, and Irish immigrants to America who claim him as their
foundational figure.
It comes as no surprise in this context that the 1892 commemoration of Columbus's 'discovery' is clearly accentuated by Italian Americans, who celebrate Christopher Columbus as their ancestral figure. After all, he was a native of Genoa and sailed for the Genoese fleet before he went to Portugal, and later to Spain. On the occasion, the Italian Americans of New York City erected a 75feet high marble statue by Gaetano Russo with an inscription that is supposed to remind all Americans of Columbus's achievements:
TO
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS THE ITALIANS RESIDENT IN AMERICA, SCOFFED AT BEFORE, DURING THE VOYAGE, MENACED, AFTER IT, CHAINED, AS GENEROUS AS OPPRESSED,
TO THE WORLD, HE GAVE A WORLD. JOY AND GLORY NEVER UTTERED A MORE THRILLING CALL THAN THAT WHICH RESOUNDED FROM THE CONQUERED OCEAN IN SIGHT OF THE FIRST AMERICAN ISLAND LAND! LAND!
Task : make the purpose explicit. Historical contextualisation.
Today, in New York City alone there are eleven memorials to Christopher Columbus, ranging from the marble statue in Central Park to less extravagant pieces in Brooklyn and the Bronx, many of which are part of Italian American institutions and/or were commissioned by Italian American organizations.
Literature and film are two prime media in which the claim to Columbus's legacy has not only been contested but in which the very idea of 'discovery' has also been outright refuted. For many Native Americans, Columbus's arrival in the Americas marks the beginning of colonialism, genocide, rape, slavery, expropriation and displacement, as well as cultural death. Columbus stands at the beginning of a new and for many inhabitants of the Americas deadly era.
In Native American poetry, Jimmie Durham in his poem "Columbus Day" (1983) addresses the Native American experience in the American school system :
In school I was taught the names
Columbus, Cortez, and Pizarro and
A dozen other filthy murderers.
A bloodline all the way to General Miles,
Daniel Boone and General Eisenhower.
No one mentioned the names
Of even a few of the victims.
But don't you remember Chaske, whose spine
Was crushed so quickly by Mr. Pizarro's boot?
What words did he cry into the dust?
What was the familiar name
Of that young girl who danced so gracefully
That everyone in the village sang with her--
Before Cortez' sword hacked off her arms
As she protested the burning of her sweetheart?
That young man's name was Many Deeds,
And he had been a leader of a band of fighters
Called the Redstick Hummingbirds, who slowed
The march of Cortez' army with only a few
Spears and stones which now lay still
In the mountains and remember.
Greenrock Woman was the name
Of that old lady who walked right up
And spat in Columbus' face. We
Must remember that, and remember
Laughing Otter the Taino who tried to stop
Columbus and was taken away as a slave.
We never saw him again.
In school I learned of heroic discoveries
Made by liars and crooks. The courage
Of millions of sweet and true people
Was not commemorated.
Let us then declare a holiday
For ourselves, and make a parade that begins
With Columbus' victims and continues
Even to our grandchildren who will be named
In their honor.
Because isn't it true that even the summer
Grass here in this land whispers those names,
And every creek has accepted the responsibility
Of singing those names? And nothing can stop
The wind from howling those names around
The corners of the school.
Why else would the birds sing
So much sweeter here than in other lands?
Tasks and questions : what's new here in the description of Christopher Columbus? Account for it. Analyse the narrative techniques.
Tasks and questions : Interpret the title. Contextualise the books.
This perspective refuses to subscribe to the view that the history of the Americas only begins with European knowledge of the continent and thus constitutes another critique of Eurocentric historiography and the doctrine of discovery. With all these revisionist publications drawing attention to the fact that Columbus was complicit in introducing a discourse of violent ethnocentricity to the Americas, it comes as no surprise that the public festivities to commemorate the Quincentenary were controversial.
Rather than affirming the Columbian legacy of the United States in a patriotic spirit, as had been done in both the 1792 and 1892 celebrations, the 1992 commemorations clearly also belonged to those who were victimized by this legacy; thus, the event introduced a new kind of national memorial culture and a new kind of critical patriotism.
On the occasion of the Columbus Day festivities, October 12, 1992, poster art, cartoons, buttons, and pamphlets reinforced the Native American perspective and protest with epigrams such as "Discover Columbus's Legacy: 500 Years of Racism, Oppression & Stolen Land," "Wanted for Genocide: Christopher Columbus," and "Columbus: Savage"
The counter-festivities of groups such as AIM (American Indian Movement) or the Indians of All Tribes have effectively changed the meaning and perception of Columbus Day within the national imaginary, a change that is also beginning to trickle down through the different levels of educational institutions.
Task : Contextualise this vandalism.
To reconstruct the genesis - the making and unmaking - of the Columbus myth is also to acknowledge that, after all, the narrative of past events can only be told in many different versions. There is a sense of inscrutability and a certain amount of contingency to processes of cultural mobility like those that fashioned Columbus - him, and not others - first into an American icon, and then refashioned him into a villain. Today, we are left with a somewhat uneasy coexistence of multiple 'Columbuses' both heroic and shameful and alternatively American, Spanish, Jewish, Italian American, part-Native, Catholic, etc. The myth of Columbus and the controversy surrounding it reveal ideological conflicts at the heart of American scholarly and popular historiography. Whether this shows that the project 'America' is still evolving and unfinished