Street name data is from OpenStreetMap, the largest crowdsourced geographic database. For more than 100 years, Luigi Persico’s “Discovery of America” prominently adorned the Capitol steps alongside Horatio Greenough’s “Rescue.” Both depicted White men as superior and Native Americans as weaker and more vulnerable. One of the first campaigns to remove colonialist statues played out on the east side of the U.S. His reputation shifted as more voices spoke to what his image represented to them: colonialism, slavery and genocide. (Library of Congress)Īs homages to Columbus spread more rapidly in the 20th century, movements to counter them gained momentum. Wells, abolitionist Frederick Douglass and others called Columbus’s legacy into question. ) RIGHT: A protest booklet by journalist Ida B. LEFT: Simon Pokagon, a Native American who wrote about the exploitation at the Chicago World's Fair. “That’s what we’re proud of.”Ī protest booklet by journalist Ida B. “His bravery and his spirit of adventure and also his strong faith in God,” she said. They continue to provide financial support for many of the Columbus monuments, some of which were erected as early as the mid-19th century and others as recently as 2000.įor Nido, president of the Waterbury chapter of Italian American service organization Unico, these statues now represent traits she says these organizations are justified in commemorating. These groups still wield significant influence and boast membership numbers in the millions. By then, Italians were the largest immigrant group in the country. Roosevelt to proclaim Columbus Day a national holiday. In 1937, the Knights of Columbus successfully lobbied President Franklin D. Italian American and Catholic civic organizations such as the Knights of Columbus and Unico National played a key role in advancing this narrative. Knights of Columbus members during a Columbus Day ceremony in Washington in 2004. The feeling among Italian Americans was: “If you want to celebrate him as part of a national symbolism, then you also need to recognize us.” “They created this version of the seafaring adventurer who is Catholic like they are and who was there first,” Paul said. An elite group of immigrants used the myth of Columbus to “create a sense of entitlement and empowerment,” said Paul, which ultimately helped them assimilate into the mainstream Anglo-Saxon culture. Once again, Columbus served as a figure of convenience, someone already enshrined in American culture whom Italians and Catholics could claim as their own. Half a century earlier, Irish-Catholic immigrants had endured a similar plight. Characterized as “Mediterranean,” they were seen as inferior to their northern European counterparts. Anti-immigrant sentiment was widespread, and Italians were met with violence and racism. (AP)Ĭolumbus’s role in American history shifted in the late 19th century as more than 18 million immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe - nearly a quarter of them from Italy. Soon Columbus’s likeness and namesake multiplied across the American frontier.Ī crowd of about 1,000 people gathered around the Columbus statue at Columbus Circle in New York City in 1933. Politicians lauded Columbus for his supposed “discovery” of America, and Columbia became an informal way to refer to the new country, popularized by poets of the time. Like the colonists, Columbus had also suffered under a monarchy and - most importantly - he wasn’t British. As revolutionaries plotted their independence, they needed a historical figurehead - a hero who could embody American idealism and unite the young country.Ĭolumbus was a figure of convenience, said Heike Paul, an American studies professor at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Explore the data Columbus as a shifting symbolĪlthough he never set foot in the continental United States, Columbus is the third most memorialized person in the country, behind Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, according to an audit from Monument Lab.īut it wasn’t until nearly 300 years after his death that Columbus became an American symbol.
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