World News – United States – Columbus Day and the Immigrant Nation

In 1891, a mob broke into a New Orleans jail and lynched eleven men who had just been found not guilty of murder It’s not an unfamiliar story in the Jim Crow South, except that the eleven victims were not African-Americans They were Italian immigrants, part of an American population that had been the target of discrimination since arriving on our shores in large numbers since the 1870sYet, a year later, Italian-Americans themselves had found a role model and symbol to identify with and assert their determination to succeed in America despite the odds.

That symbol was Christopher Columbus, and the day chosen to commemorate what Italian Americans contributed to their adopted country was October 12, the traditional date of Columbus’ arrival in North America (FDR a was the first president to recognize this date as Columbus Day)

Today we are in the midst of a tidal wave of sweeping attacks on Columbus and Columbus Day While some cities like Baltimore have torn statues to the Genoa-born sailor and explorer, other cities and states have passed legislation to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples Day

In the growing shadow of the cancellation culture, we must renew our understanding of the real significance of Columbus Day for those who raised the first statue to the Italian explorer at Columbus Circle in New York CityNo one needs to exonerate Columbus and his Spanish payers for the wrong they inflicted on Native Americans over five hundred years agoWe need to make sure this is a tribute to one of America’s largest and most hard-working immigrant communities, whose story is truly America’s story as nation of immigrants

For more than a century, Christopher Columbus was a hero to Italian Americans not because he was an imperialist and racist, but because they considered the admiral of the seas of the ocean, born in Genoa, as someone who had used his daring and talent to sail into the unknown across a great ocean, to find a land completely unknown to Europeans; a land full of dangers and hardships, but also of possibilities to create a new and better life for those who came to its shores – as well as for emigrants fleeing an impoverished and overpopulated Italy

Unfortunately, these early immigrants found a country that did not want it They were discriminated against not only because they were Roman Catholics like the Irish or the Poles, who also suffered attacks by nativists for religious reasons A series of racist patrician theorists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard have portrayed Italians as racially backward and incapable of becoming « real » Americans. They have become prime targets for restrictive immigration legislation, along with Hungarians, Slavs and Jews in Poland and Russia – restrictions that resulted in the 1924 law imposing immigration quotas for these supposed « undesirables » »

But by then Italian immigrants already made up nearly 10% of America’s foreign-born population, even facing discrimination and exclusion as harmful illegal aliens (the derogatory term wop acronym for “undocumented”), they worked tirelessly in our factories, mines and sweat shops, and crammed into residential neighborhoods in cities like New York San Francisco, Baltimore and Chicago. They transformed the clothing industry and created a host of small businesses, while steadily climbing the social ladder of success until Italian-American politicians like New York City mayors Fiorello LaGuardia and Rudy Guiliani; businessmen like Amadeo Giannini who created Bank of America
BAC
so that Italian Americans can benefit from the banking services that other financial companies deny them; and sports figures like Joe DiMaggio and Rocky Graziano, have been fully accepted as part of the American cultural landscape – just as spaghetti, pizza and cappuccinos have become staples of the American diet

In response to discrimination and stigma, Italian Americans made Christopher Columbus the focal point of their efforts for inclusion in wider American society, just one year after the New Orleans lynching , New York’s Italian-American community raised $ 20,000 for a statue of Columbus The nation was celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s epic journey in 1892, and organizers saw the opportunity to raise the profile of Italian-Americans everywhere parks in New York wanted the statue to be stored in Little Italy in Harlem, but Italian-American leaders fought for a more prominent place The statue was erected on what has become Columbus Circle, the same position it occupies today ‘hui

For over a hundred years this statue and others like it have been symbols of Italy’s pride and achievement in the face of enormous hardship Far from being a celebration of white colonialism, Columbus Day is about inclusiveness and our nation of immigrants, which is why we must all treat the statue of Columbus and Columbus Day as a national gift rather than a national disgrace

I am Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and Director of the Quantum Alliance Initiative, and co-author of « Quantum Computing: How To Address the National Security

I am Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and Director of the Quantum Alliance Initiative, and co-author of “Quantum Computing: How To Address the National Security Risk” (Hudson Institute, August 2018)
I am also the Pulitzer Prize finalist author of nine books, including Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (2012); 1917: Lenin, Wilson and the birth of the new world disorder (2017); and New York Times bestseller How The Scots Invented the Modern World (2001)

Indigenous Peoples Day, Columbus Day, Christopher Columbus, Indigenous Peoples