In killing Columbus Day and replacing it with the hastily contrived Italian Heritage Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, the New York City Department of Education sent a message to the scions of Italy: Drop dead.

Imagine the howls of indignation if the DOE similarly demeaned St. Patrick’s Day, Puerto Rican festivities, Greek Independence Day or the Salute to Israel. In addition to denigrating Italian-Americans, the nation’s largest school district has diminished the educational process.

Columbus Day is not a feast day celebrating a happy-go-lucky sausage-and-pepper proletariat. No, the federal holiday honoring the Admiral of the Ocean Sea commemorates a journey of epic historical significance.

By sailing across the wine-dark Atlantic — toward an undiscovered country — Cristoforo Colombo bettered the fate of this pale blue dot.

At the signing ceremony for the Columbus Day proclamation on Oct. 3, 1988, President Ronald Reagan lauded Cristoforo Colombo as “the inventor of the American Dream.”

Yes, Columbus served the venal Spanish Crown. No, he did not engage in hemispheric genocide. Nor did he initiate the African slave trade. Moreover, Columbus never personally owned slaves.

While no historian will ever equate him with St. Francis of Assisi, Cristoforo Colombo is neither Hernán Cortés nor Andrew Jackson. And he is no Robert E. Lee.

In Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem, anthropologist Carol Delaney — a professor emerita at Stanford University and a research scholar at Brown University — cites Robert H. Fuson, a noted translator of Cristoforo’s diary: “All through the log, Columbus expresses nothing but love and admiration for the Indians. His affection for the young chief in Haiti [Guacanagari], and vice versa, is one of the most touching stories of love, trust and understanding between men of different races and cultures to come out of this period in history.”

As an Italian sailing for Spain, Columbus crossed swords with envious political rivals. Conflicts with the indigenous peoples did occur. However, much of the misrule and mayhem in Spain’s New World possessions took place during the governorships of Francisco Roldán, Nicolás de Ovando, and Francisco de Bobadilla.

Moreover, the New World was not a Garden of Eden. Carib cannibalism led to the death of another Italian explorer, Giovanni da Verrazzano. Child sacrifice and ritualistic brutality against women were of part of both the Aztec and Mayan cultures. In North America, the Mohawks were known as “man eaters” by the Algonquins.

Then there’s the enslavement of Blacks by Native Americans.

In a 2018 speech, Paul Chaat Smith, a Comanche and the associate curator of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, underscored how the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw and Seminole tribes “were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized Black codes, immediately reestablished slavery when they arrived in Indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, crushed slave rebellions and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.”

According to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst historian Barbara Krauthamer in Black Slaves, Indian Masters: “Indians bought, sold, owned and exploited Black people’s labor and reproduction for economic and social gain.”

What truly rankles some anti-Columbus agitators, it seems, is the Great Navigator’s Italianness. The ancestral roots of Italo-Americans can be traced to the land John Milton hailed as “the seat of civilization.” And Cristoforo Colombo was a product of the selfsame Italian Renaissance that produced Leonardo da Vinci, Paolo Toscanelli, Sandro Botticelli, Lorenzo de Medici and Amerigo Vespucci — America’s namesake.

According to astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, Cristoforo Colombo’s enterprise “was the most significant event to happen in our species.” For the first time in 10,000 years, “We have rejoined two branches of the human species.”

In the words of French poet Paul Claudel, Columbus was “the enlarger of the world.” His epochal journey ushered in the Age of Exploration. Along with his uncanny seamanship, indomitable will and vision, Columbus brought the gifts of the Italians to the Americas — capitalism, the rule of law, the arts, modern science and humanism.

Ultimately, as Delaney noted, Columbus’s central mission was to regain the Holy Sepulcher. According to Taviani: “It was new, revived by the psychological trauma of the fall of Constantinople, the capital — along with Rome — of Christianity.”  The Admiral of the Ocean Sea’s raison d’être revolved around “bringing the world back to the unity it had under the Roman eagle and which continued under the conversion to Christianity.”

Cristoforo Colombo was an exemplar of the Italian Renaissance.

“Without the Italian Renaissance,” Taviani wrote, “there would have been no modern age. Christopher Columbus symbolizes the creative genius of Italy shaping the beginning of the modern age.”

And without Columbus, there would be no United States of America, the republic that Abraham Lincoln lauded as “the last best hope of Earth.” -RAI

[Published in the NY Daily News, 11 October 2021]