When it came time for my Fifth Grade class to sing, the teacher (of every subject) would blow into a two-inch-in-diameter pitch pipe to key the class to the first note of the selected song. Then, in all dissonance, we would break out into, “In fourteen hundred ninety-two/Columbus sailed the ocean blue….”
I belatedly learn that the tune was “In 1492,” by Peter van der Krogt, with the delightfully childish fifth stanza, “Ninety sailors were on board/ Some men worked while others snored.” The final stanza is historically irrefutable: “The first American? No, not quite./ But Columbus was brave, and he was bright.”
On April 8, 2009, in dissonance of a purposively different nature, the Brown University faculty voted that the squires of College Hill, above Providence, shall hereafter know “Columbus Day Weekend” as “Fall Weekend.” Undergraduates, three-quarters of whom were said to agree with the vote, won’t skip skipping class. But they will blow their own note into the pitch pipe, however weakly and hypocritically.
“In 1492″ and the Brown faculty are linked more deeply than by the Columbus myth. They are two sides of bad historiography, and the one completely explains the other.
Unto the 1970′s, the history American children were raised on was what is generically called “cherry-tree history.” This is the disputed but never completely refuted story that boy George Washington was so preternaturally honest that he accepted presumably corporal punishment rather than lie to his father about chopping down a favored cherry tree. Ours is not the only country that instructs its children in the exemplary behavior of its national heroes when they were children.
Columbus in actuality was an itinerant Genoese navigator (Cristoffa Corumbo in his native tongue), born 325 years before the U.S. Declaration of Independence. He had seen Ireland (Galway) and the Azores, and was past 40 when he persuaded Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to bankroll four voyages to a new world he did not at first accept as such. He was a daring adventurer — in my reading no more brutal a commander than his contemporaries, or his patrons. He was returned from his third voyage in chains to be tried (and pardoned by his patrons) for acts of brutality as governor of Hispaniola. Without doubt, his voyages led to a murderous, exploitative Spanish occupation of the Americas in the centuries after his death in 1505.
Columbus’s personal persistence, defiant calculations and naïve miscalculations make a good story. But there were many other adventurers, and Bartholomew Gosnold, Hendrik Hudson or Pere Marquette would have served to personify the discovery of the territory of United States. But from the beginning of the republic every generation has somewhat queerly insisted on putting Cristoffo Corombo first in the chronological line of Founding Fathers.
When modern Italy came into existence 361 years after Columbus’s death, Italian-Americans soon re-appropriated him as their symbolic patron — their St. Patrick. Insecure in their acceptance as Americans, they latched onto the ready hero who would not have thought of himself as “Italian.”
History is written to be revised. In my lifetime, Washington, the Adamses, Lincoln and Harry Truman have risen, while Jefferson, Jackson and Wilson have dropped a bit. But these scholarly re-visitations are nothing like the effort to debunk Columbus.
Partly this is because the Columbus story has always been more of a myth than that of the true Founding Fathers. The best biography of Columbus, Samuel Eliot Morison’s 1942 “Admiral of The Ocean Sea,” was openly heroic — Morison himself sailed the route of Columbus’s first voyage. (Morison also used the word “genocide” to describe the fate of the Arawak Indians Columbus first encountered.)
What we see today at Brown University and elsewhere is not a reexamination of Columbus — which we should welcome — it is a reaction to the fact that Columbus has been written into the American songbook — sometimes literally. It is Columbus, the adopted symbol of American destiny, whom those who regard themselves as too sophisticated for the low emotion of patriotism, feel compelled to debunk. Had Columbus not become such a symbol he would be less than Bartholomew Gosnold to them.
The first chapter of Howard Zinn’s 1999 “A People’s History of the United States” presents this view on its own terms. Professor Zinn is an articulate Marxist, who sees the pre-Columbian Indian as living in sexual equality in a pre-private-property state of pure communism, which was brutally overthrown by Columbus and his American successors.”The pretense,” he writes, “is that there really is such a thing as ‘the United States,’ subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests.”
In this view, the target is not Columbus, it is the republic, sarcastically described; and the favorite is not the living Indian, as is pretended. For on the federally recognized, legally communal Indian Reservation of 2009, the 500-year flood has not raised, and probably shall not raise, a Barrack Obama.
David A. Mittell, Jr. is a Boston-based syndicated columnist.
