By David Haldane

Oct. 21, 2024

It all seemed so simple as a child.

Growing up in Southern California of the 1950s, we eagerly looked forward to the annual observance of Columbus Day every second Monday in October. Our motives, to be sure, were not always pure: the federal holiday gave us a much-anticipated day off from school. That said, however, we also understood the day’s historic significance as intoned in the nursery rhyme that we’d recited all our lives: “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

In other words, he’d discovered America, paving the way for the fun-filled lives we were privileged to enjoy.

That event hadn’t always been celebrated in the New World. In the early days of the colonial period, Christopher Columbus was an obscure figure with a name known by few. But then, after winning its independence in 1776, the new country began defining its own roots. Eager to distance themselves from their former English masters, the infant nation’s leaders found Columbus appealing in two respects: first, he had sailed, not for England, but for Spain and, second, his name resembled that of the female figure of Britannia—i.e. Columbia—which had become an allegorical representation of freedom, purity, and the pursuit of liberty.

But it took events more than a century later to elevate America’s alleged “discovery” to the status of an annual commemorative extravaganza. Specifically, a series of violent attacks on Italians—mostly Catholic—who began immigrating to America in the 1890s. Almost immediately, the government embarked on a very public celebration of “Discoverer’s Day” commemorating the 400^th anniversary of Columbus’ landing. And because he was said to have come from Genoa, Italy—voila! –-Italian immigrants quickly became his most ardent fans. Until, by the time President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared Columbus Day a national holiday in 1937, well, it had essentially evolved into an annual celebration of Italian American pride.

Then everything changed. People got “woke” and, focusing on the realities of historic American colonialism, began viewing Christopher Columbus in a whole different light. Now, instead of the bold explorer who discovered America, he became the racist, ethnocentric, white man who appropriated Native American lands, paving the way for centuries of war, slavery, poverty and oppression.

“Nobody invited him, and we didn’t want to be discovered,” Mahtowin Munro, co-leader of a group called United American Indians of New England, recently told the Boston Globe.

Jumping on the bandwagon, President Biden three years ago became the first US head of state to rename the holiday Indigenous Peoples’ Day. “Every October,” Vice President Kamala Harris said at the time, “the United States has recognized the voyage of the European explorers who first landed on the shores of the Americas. But that is not the whole story… Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for tribal nations—perpetrating violence, stealing land and spreading disease. We must not shy away from this shameful past.”

Which is why Americans now celebrate two competing holidays each October: Columbus Day, featuring Italian Americans and others parading jubilantly wrapped in American and Italian flags, and the more somber Indigenous Peoples’ Day, recognizing the sins of the past.

This being an election year, the conflict has taken on overtly political tones. “Kamal Harris is your stereotypical leftist,” Donald Trump’s national press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement released last week on the day of the annual observance. “She… wants to cancel American traditions like Columbus Day. President Trump will make sure Christopher Columbus’ great legacy is honored and protect this holiday from radical leftists who want to erase our nation’s history…”

And now comes an entirely new wrinkle: according to DNA tests also released last week, Columbus most likely was—wait for it—a Sephardic Jew from Western Europe! Oh great, I thought, more fuel for the country’s growing wave of anti-Semitism.

Ah, but then I read the New York Post’s account of last Monday’s Manhattan Columbus Day parade and felt relieved. “We don’t care,” one woman, draped in an Italian flag, told the newspaper. “He’s always going to be Italian.”

Thank God for small favors.

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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and radio broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao, Philippines. His latest book, A Tooth in My Popsicle, is available on Amazon. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.