Redeeming Columbus Day

Redeeming Columbus Day

Over the past two decades or so, we have witnessed a concerted effort by the woke educational and cultural establishment to reject traditional holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, or the 4^thof July, and rewrite American history as a simplistic horror story of evil imperialist oppression. One of the worst-affected historical episodes in this regard is the European discovery of the New World.

Until recently, young children in America were taught to revere Christopher Columbus’s persistence and courage, which ultimately brought Western civilization to the Western hemisphere and led to the most successful experiment in human governance that the United States embodies.

Now, however, Columbus is “widely considered to be a despoiler of paradise, an enslaver, and a genocidal maniac.” Of course, the European explorers and settlers of the New World were not blameless, but the good they did and the values they introduced far outweighed their flaws. They are falsely accused of genocide, which was never their policy or intention. While there were violent conflicts between the settlers and some tribes, most of the casualties perished from lack of immunity to European diseases.

Primary sources are more reliable than secondary accounts, and in Columbus’s case, much can be gleaned from the diary of his first voyage, which he presented to the Spanish Queen Isabel upon his return. The diary, whose original has been lost, is preserved in a detailed digest by the historian Bartolomé de las Casas and is further clarified through various manuscripts containing significant correspondence related to the voyage.

When Columbus reached an island of the Bahamas, he and his sailors met the Taino tribe. His Journal recounts his desire to “form great friendship:”

[Knowing] that they were a people who could be more easily freed and converted to our holy faith by love than by force, [I] gave to some of them red caps, and glass beads to put round their necks, and many other things of little value, which gave them great pleasure, and made them so much our friends that it was a marvel to see. They afterwards came to the ship’s boats where we were, swimming and bringing us parrots, cotton threads in skeins, darts, and many other things; and we exchanged them for other things that we gave them, such as glass beads and small bells. In fine, they took all and gave what they had with good will.

Columbus later comments that the Taino were peaceful and “neither carr[ied] nor kn[e]w anything of arms.” Noticing that some of them were injured, he discovered that the wounds had been inflicted by violent tribes on other islands, such as the Caribs, who terrorized and enslaved their peaceful neighbors.

American Historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who received a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Columbus, described the Caribs as cannibals who considered babies “a particularly toothsome morsel.” Leftist academics have tried to refute the accounts of cannibalism and human sacrifice that some tribes engaged in, but the historical and archaeological evidence belies their efforts.

Columbus Day was first celebrated by President Benjamin Harrison as a one-time event to commemorate the 400^th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery, to show goodwill toward immigrants of Italian origin, especially after 11 of them were brutally lynched in New Orleans in 1891 — an event that The New York Times commended.

In 1937, FRD made it an annual federal holiday, and we should keep it that way. It is a celebration of the human spirit, which conquers the unknown in courageous exploration. It is also a recognition of bringing Western tradition to the New World, which has undoubtedly benefited, as a resounding net positive, from its universally humane values.

Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.

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