Maybe it’s neither. Columbus was brave and daring, and did things that were important to world history. But he wasn’t heroic in the sense of displaying great moral qualities. Courage, while generally a good character trait, isn’t necessarily heroic or even highly honorable and praiseworthy unless it’s deployed in certain kinds of actions or causes.
But he also wasn’t especially villainous in the sense of displaying particular evil qualities. His arrival in the Americas caused a great deal of death to American Indians, chiefly from disease. And it caused the subjugation and literal or virtual enslavement of the Indians. But this didn’t stem from Columbus’s being an unusually evil person. It stemmed from the brutality of the time, coupled with the contact between one culture that was much more powerful than another (and that carried many communicable diseases to which members of the other culture lacked resistance).
I’m inclined to say that we shouldn’t celebrate Columbus Day, precisely because such national celebrations should be focused on honoring people who did things that were both especially important and especially honorable (such as veterans, President Washington, or Martin Luther King, Jr.) and not just on people who did things that were especially important. This might conceivably include not-necessarily-good people who did things that were unambiguously good. But European expansion into the Americas alone, important as it obviously has been (especially to the U.S. and to Hispanic culture, but also to the rest of the world) doesn’t qualify as the sort of good that needs to be celebrated this way. And that’s especially so given that it caused — even if largely inadvertently on Columbus’s part — tremendous though unfortunately historically not uncommon tragedy.
Yet we should abandon the holiday not because it is somehow offensive to American Indians, but because it is not consistent with what should be our own standards for honoring people — honoring people with honorable characters and honorable accomplishments, and not just important people. We can consider Columbus to be important and noteworthy the way that Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great or other great men were important and noteworthy, without either honoring him with a holiday or condemning him as a historically villain. In fact, I think it’s the excessiveness of the condemnation of Columbus (and the focus on the offense to particular groups) that pushes many people to defend Columbus Day.
For a similar post I wrote some years ago about Crusaders as a high school team name (especially at Catholic schools), see here.
SuperSkeptic says:
Maybe it’s neither. Columbus was brave and daring, and did things that were important to world history. But he wasn’t heroic in the sense of displaying great moral qualities. Courage, while generally a good character trait, isn’t necessarily heroic or even highly honorable and praiseworthy unless it’s deployed in certain kinds of actions or causes.
Ditto for the astronauts. But, that’s all tied up in yucky nationalism.
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October 12, 2009, 4:29 pmEugene Volokh says:
I think that extreme courage in pursuing greater knowledge for mankind might well qualify as heroic. Extreme courage in pursuing conquests that would enrich your king and your nation, and pursuing vast wealth for yourself, does not strike me as heroic, at least when one is looking back on this from today.
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October 12, 2009, 4:37 pmJohnF says:
Let’s not forget that Columbus gave the first teeth to an early form of Kelo!
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October 12, 2009, 4:37 pmSeaDrive says:
As a Connecticut resident of northern European stock, I would say it’s more an outlet for Italian ethnic pride than anything to do with the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.
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October 12, 2009, 4:38 pmsecond history says:
Of course, as libertarians in the 15th century we would oppose such a voyage because it entailed spending of government money.
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October 12, 2009, 4:42 pmMichael Alexander says:
I would add that national celebrations should be focused on American nationals. Christopher Columbus was not an American.
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October 12, 2009, 4:42 pmyao says:
EV: “n fact, I think it’s the excessiveness of the condemnation of Columbus (and the focus on the offense to particular groups) that pushes many people to defend Columbus Day.”
My impression is that for many Italian-Americans, particularly in the northeast, Columbus Day is their version of St. Patrick’s Day — an annual event celebrating their ethnic heritage. Consequently, there are a significant number of people who might take umbrage if the federal holiday were to be eliminated. What politician wants to stir up that kind of trouble?
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October 12, 2009, 4:42 pmWidmerpool says:
I believe that this holiday also had its roots in being a de-facto celebration of Italian heritage. This is probably not a great reason for its continued observance, but the holiday did serve an important function of instilling pride in Italian-Americans back when they were looked upon as alien undesirables. Of course, the Irish were viewed in the same manner and they didn’t get a federal holiday–not as good at lobbying, I guess.
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October 12, 2009, 4:45 pmyankee says:
His arrival in the Americas didn’t just “cause” the subjugation and enslavement of the Taino and other Caribbean peoples: subjugation and enslavement were policies that he personally instituted as governor. He was not unusually evil; he could not have done what he did without the support and endorsement of others. But as far as I am concerned the fact that the Spanish and Italian cultures of the time espoused evil values is not much of an excuse.
And don’t forget that the whole premise of his voyage was to steal wealth belonging to others, which is exactly what he did as soon as he arrived.
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October 12, 2009, 4:45 pmSuperSkeptic says:
There’s a good episode of The Soprano’s to this effect, recently re-aired, no doubt, to coincide with today’s events.
St. Patrick, I think, would qualify as a hero, however, under Professor Volokh’s rubric (mine as well).
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October 12, 2009, 4:47 pmRichard Riley says:
Matt Yglesias has a good post today pointing out that (per SeaDrive above) Columbus Day is a fairly sizeable holiday in places with big Italian-American communities and also in places with lots of federal employees, but in other places it is basically a regular work day except with the banks closed and no mail.
My perception is that MLK Day started as a fairly minor holiday of the Columbus Day variety and has evolved into a much more important holiday. But at this point I don’t think we’re going to see Columbus Day morph into anything more than it is now.
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October 12, 2009, 4:48 pmDotar Sojat says:
Very sensible post.
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October 12, 2009, 4:50 pmRowerinVA says:
Is it really seen as honoring Columbus, the man, or is it seen as a more general celebration of the founding of the New World — the event that, more than any other, stands in as day one of the events that created the USA?
I’ve always understood Columbus Day to be a celebration of that latter, and a recognition that despite all the terrible events that happened in the interim — to Indians, to Africans, and certainly to and among Europeans — the end result, meaning (primarily) modern American society and its accomplishments, is worth it. Sort of a national moment of “Sure, we wish a lot of things had been done differently along the way, but we’re darned happy with the final result.”
A sense of pride in the modern Americas, and a recognition that the Columbian Europe-meets-America moment was a history changing event, does not in any way require us to ignore the suffering of any group along the way.
To focus on Columbus the man, rather than the day as a symbol, is to miss the point. If you are going to criticize Columbus Day, criticize it for what it’s really representing, not for anything specifically to do with some dead fellow named Cristoforo.
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October 12, 2009, 4:57 pmFrederick Davies says:
Not that I like the man too much, but sometimes the Mayor of London has a way of telling the truth...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/6238077/Moctezuma-When-one-civilisation-deserves-its-bloody-nose-from-another.html
You say that Columbus didn’t do anything honorable, only memorable. Well, he helped destroy pure evil, isn’t that honorable?
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October 12, 2009, 5:11 pmJacob T. Levy says:
Columbus’ arrest and imprisonment for torture by the Spanish authorities, and his attendant removal from any authority to govern Spanish colonists, suggest that he wasn’t *simply* caught up in the ethical standards of his day. The reaction to de las Casas’ writings and eyewitness accounts within a generation also suggests that it wasn’t just a problem of the era.
Neither was Columbus’ policy that Taino had to produce gold in tribute on a regular basis or have their hands hacked off and be left to bleed to death standard operating practice even of the era.
And Columbus’ arrival in the Americas preceded the enslavement and massacres of Indians *by his own orders and under his own command,* not just through the subsequent dominoes of history.
Any first European contact might have had dominoes-responsibility for subsequent domination of one world by another and for death by contagious disease. But Columbus had direct responsibility for atrocities, against Spaniards and Indians alike, that were not characteristic of the era.
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October 12, 2009, 5:12 pmSeamus says:
Then we ought to be celebrating Cortez Day, not Columbus Day.
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October 12, 2009, 5:14 pmSplunge says:
But he wasn’t heroic in the sense of displaying great moral qualities.
Give me a break. It seems simply to be the epitome of Western 21st century narcissism that we glide to these easy fatuously simple pronunciamentos about what is “moral” and what is not. What is ironic is that we unconciously duplicate the exact same smug judgment the upper class of Columbus’ times would have readily issued: what is “moral” is what advances our values, or supports our arguments of the moment, and what is “immoral” is that which does not. Feh.
Besides, Washington had Major Andre cruelly hanged, Martin Luther King was not very nice to women, and Lincoln, with his George Bush-like insistence on staying the course and even surging in the face of appalling loss of life in Virginia, would never ever have won the Nobel Peace Prize were it offered in his day. If we were to womanishly refuse to celebrate the accomplishment of anyone who didn’t qualify as “moral” (according to the whims and fashions of the moment, that is), then we’d be reduced to Mother’s Day, maybe. Even Christmas wouldn’t qualify, since Christ angrily drove the money-changers — just trying to make a living! — from the temple, and will come in the end to send all the goats to eternal fire. No Mother Teresa he.
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October 12, 2009, 5:16 pmBob from Ohio says:
I second RowerinVA on this. We are celebrating (or use to) the United States and the good it has done, not a mere explorer.
People who oppose Columbus Day are ashamed of their heritage.
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October 12, 2009, 5:18 pmloki13 says:
The Italian-Americans made Congress an offer they couldn’t refuse?
*ducks*
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October 12, 2009, 5:20 pmRPT says:
Sounds neither leader deserves a holiday. However, Columbus did profess to follow a belief system the principles of which (if not consistently honored) clearly condemned his actions. Does that make his responsibility greater?
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October 12, 2009, 5:26 pmA. Zarkov says:
Hero.
I cannot think of any event more significant in the last millennium than the discovery of the New World. If Columbus was not a heroic explorer than who in the 15th Century qualified as such? It’s unfortunate that today so many people today to attack him for not conforming their notions of what makes someone heroic. This is the legacy of the 1960s.
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October 12, 2009, 5:30 pmSeamus says:
It wasn’t cruel. It was what you did with spies, and what spies expected to happen to them if they got caught. It may be tragic to Andre (and Nathan Hale) got hanged, but no one can say they were treated unjustly. That’s not the case with the Taino Indians who were killed or enslaved just because Columbus wanted to rule them. Even in his day, people (well, Christians, anyway–the Muslims had a different view) knew that you couldn’t just make war on people, killing them or reducing them to slavery, for the sake of conquering them.
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October 12, 2009, 5:36 pmSeamus says:
*that* Andre (and Nathan Hale)
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October 12, 2009, 5:37 pmtamerlane says:
Samuel Elliot Morrison has written two biographies of Columbus and several additional texts on the early European explorations of America that contain extended descriptions of Columbus’s four voyages and the events that surround them. Before condemning or praising Columbus an English-speaking person should at least have passing familiarity with these.
Perhaps Columbus’s greatest fault is one shared with many posters on this site (myself included): intellectual arrogance. He remained convinced his entire life, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the accepted calculations of earth’s circumference current at his time were too large by a factor of two or three when they were actually quite accurate. This is why he thought a trip westward to Asia would be relatively easy.
That said, he was a superb seaman and navigator. He risked everything and suffered unspeakable hardships and disappointments to prove his theories. Most of what is held against him today is based largely on the testimony of political enemies. His discoveries helped cause the cradle for the political ideas many of us on this site hold dear.
I cannot think of a skilled and heroic man of Columbus’s caliber who has had the overall positive impact on human civilization that he has. The man deserves his day.
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October 12, 2009, 5:39 pmsubpatre says:
Eugene — An aspect you overlook is the New World; literally a new beginning.
Without the Americas, there would be no possibility of a Bill of Rights, no chance to claim that ‘all are created equal’, and no attempt at a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Columbus serves as a proxy for all that; and that deserves a day of celebration.
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October 12, 2009, 5:42 pmj says:
“Columbus Day” is just the metonym for “Discovery of America” day. Nobody really sits back and analyzes and reflects on the life of Columbus. Serious ivy-tower disconnect from reality here.
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October 12, 2009, 5:47 pmG says:
“brave and daring”
but not
“displaying great moral qualities”
Joshua but not Moses, and that’s a problem? Is the standard, no hero, unless a prophet too? “No king of England, if not king of France.”
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October 12, 2009, 5:49 pmyankee says:
And no deaths of tens of millions from plague; no genocidal warfare against those who survived; no capture and enslavement of ten million Africans; and so forth. If Columbus is to be credited with all the good things that happened in the Americas after his arrival, even hundreds of years after his death, he must get the blame for the bad ones as well.
I also thought we celebrated “all men are created equal,” etc. on July 4th. And we also celebrate various aspects of the same on January 19, February 16, the last Monday in May, and November 11.
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October 12, 2009, 5:52 pmRandy says:
Zarkov: “I cannot think of any event more significant in the last millennium than the discovery of the New World.”
Then we should be celebrating Native American Day, since these people discovered the NW thousands of years before Columbus. Or, if you want to narrow it down to white men, then we should be celebrating Leif Erikson Day, since he found the NW centuries before Columbus. And those are just the documented ones! There are theories on the Knights Templars and other groups who came to these shores long before Columbus.
IT was the Knights of Columbu (Surprise!) who lobbied for Chris back in the 1930s to counter perceived anti-catholicisim in the US.
” If Columbus was not a heroic explorer than who in the 15th Century qualified as such?”
Magellen. Vasco de Gama. The Prince of Portugal who pushed for exploration. They all deserve the title ‘heroic explorer’ at least as much as Columbus.
“t’s unfortunate that today so many people today to attack him for not conforming their notions of what makes someone heroic.”
I find it refreshing. And it isn’t a legacy of the 1960s, but the 1490s, as Queen Isabella had him in chains for his treatment of the indians.
I think that it is important and serves history well to fully examine the man (any historical figure, actually) and his deeds. To hold onto a cartoon view of people that they are all good or all bad is silly and inaccurate. Put all the facts on the table, and let others judge the man, if they are so inclined. Me, I’m not celebrating Columbus Day with anything other than a nap.
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October 12, 2009, 5:52 pmLe Messurier says:
With the way history is taught in our “enlightened” 21st century, having a holiday is the only way our kids will even get a clue about our country’s past.
Splunge has it right: “Give me a break”. The idea of eliminating Columbus Day as a holiday is soooooo PC and analogous to trying to pick up a turd by the clean end.
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October 12, 2009, 5:52 pmA.S. says:
“national celebrations should be focused on honoring people who did things that were both especially important and especially honorable (such as veterans, President Washington, or Martin Luther King, Jr.)”
President Washington was a slaveowner, til the day he died. In fact, he increased his slaveholdings through his life. So by Prof. Volokh’s own standards, Washington should not qualify as especially honorable.
Moreover, the American Revolution itself was brutal. If Columbus’s treatment of the Indians disqualifies him as “honorable”, why does not Washington’s leadership in the Revolution likewise disqualify him?
(Not to mention that the American Revolution itself was of dubious moral character — the grievances of the colonials were hardly sufficient to justify starting a brutal war.)
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October 12, 2009, 5:57 pmDave N says:
I think it is the height of arrogance to judge a 15th century man by 21st century standards.
That said, I agree the holiday doesn’t make much sense except in the context of being a kind of “American Heritage Day” or an “Italian-American Day.”
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October 12, 2009, 5:59 pmMark Buehner says:
Would we stop honoring Buzz Aldrin if someday an extraterrestrial internment camp was set up on the moon?
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October 12, 2009, 6:04 pmMike Licht says:
Today is “Native American Day” in South Dakota.
Discovered: New painting of Columbus.
See: http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/columbus-day/
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October 12, 2009, 6:07 pmKenB says:
An interesting perspective.
As to adverse effects suffered by the Indians, someone else would have crossed the oceans soon enough had Columbus not done so. And if you are willing to assume that, for some reason, Europeans would never have crossed the oceans, sooner or later, the Aztecs or Incas or a successor civilization would have crossed the other way. Indian contact with European diseases was inevitable. Acting as though Columbus was somehow personally culpable is nonsense.
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October 12, 2009, 6:11 pmJacob T. Levy says:
“I think it is the height of arrogance to judge a 15th century man by 21st century standards.”
Several people on the thread have said something like this. Others of us keep repeating that Columbus was judged to have committed serious moral wrongs by his contemporaries and near-contemporaries. Those in the first group never seem to mention the evidence adduced by the second group: his arrest, imprisonment, and removal from office; the reactions when detailed accounts of his voyages and rule were published in Spain.
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October 12, 2009, 6:14 pmRandy says:
“Without the Americas, there would be no possibility of a Bill of Rights, no chance to claim that ‘all are created equal‘, and no attempt at a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Ironically, at least some native americans actually did believe that all were created equal, and that government was by local chiefs. Perhaps we should credit the natives for this as at least as much as we credit the immigrants who came here?
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October 12, 2009, 6:20 pmA.S. says:
“Those in the first group never seem to mention the evidence adduced by the second group: his arrest, imprisonment, and removal from office”
He seems to have been acquitted by Ferdinand and Isabella. Well, at least according to the prime authority of everything: wikipedia.
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October 12, 2009, 6:21 pmRandy says:
KenB: “Acting as though Columbus was somehow personally culpable is nonsense.”
I agree he should not be personally culpable for the transmitting of various diseases that killed off so many indians. But neither should he be credited with creating political systems or granting rights centuries after his death.
He was a great man, but deeply flawed. He accomplished quite a bit, some of which was good, some of which was bad, even by the standards of his own day. There is no question he is a major historical figure, but again, let’s see him warts and all. I would apply that to all historical figures, male and female, so that I can figure out for myself whether I wish to celebrate their lives or not.
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October 12, 2009, 6:25 pmyankee says:
I agree that Columbus wasn’t personally culpable for diseases. Nor does he deserve any of the credit for the Bill of Rights, etc., as others on this board have claimed.
Columbus was responsible for was what he personally did: start an exploratory voyage for the purpose of stealing others’ wealth, and then variously rob, subjugate, enslave, and slaughter the people he found.
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October 12, 2009, 6:26 pmrichard says:
Uh, doesn’t that assume that all the “people” are of European heritage. As someone who is half Russian Jew, one eighth American Indian and some English-German-Scots_Irish, not celebrating Columbus Day is an affirmation of my heritage.
Good post, Professor Volokh.
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October 12, 2009, 6:31 pmloki13 says:
In 1492,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue...
It’s funny that these debates always come down to the same people.
Group1: Columbus did a lot of bad things, and maybe a day to honor him isn’t such a good idea.
Group2: I’m not going to let you multicultural PC police tell me what to do! Trying to put the white man down... If it was good enough for me growing up, it’s good enough for forever. Trudging 10 miles to school, both ways uphill.
I don’t care much. I like holidays. I can think of better people/events than Columbus to honor. But I also don’t think it’s the end of civilization if he’s honored– it could be worse; it could be Pizarro.
Now– I could get behind an Alexander Hamilton day.
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October 12, 2009, 6:32 pmtamerlane says:
My reading of Samuel Elliot Morrison’s biographical works on Columbus — pretty much the standard, secondary historical analysis in the English language — is that most of Columbus’s bad press is due to testimony against him by men who were well-known to be his political enemies in Hispaniola and Spain. Another poster has pointed out that most of this testimony was ultimately dismissed by the Spanish court. I suspect that a lot of the cant against Columbus on this site is based on PC high school and college textbooks or Zinn-type American history texts.
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October 12, 2009, 6:41 pmHouston Lawyer says:
All I get for Columbus day is lighter traffic. I think I may have had that day as an official holiday back in grade school, but not since.
Few people have had as much effect on the history of the world. I’d bet that many of those who vilify him here wear Che t-shirts.
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October 12, 2009, 6:46 pmMark Field says:
‘Fess up, Prof. V: what size do you wear?
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October 12, 2009, 6:51 pmPJens says:
Our nation does not need to recognize Christopher Columbus, or his adventures with a national holiday. History book acknowledgment and Wikipedia entries are good enough. Hero or villain may be a valid question, but really, is the man and his adventures really worth giving the US Postal Service (et al) a day off?
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October 12, 2009, 6:51 pmyankee says:
I don’t wear a Che t-shirt, and never have. Nor should we be giving holidays to everyone who’s had a major effect on the history of the world: otherwise Stalin and Mao would get holidays as well.
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October 12, 2009, 6:58 pmBlargh says:
Columbus in his own ship’s logs discussed the suitability for slavery of the very first natives he ever met. Heroic stuff!
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October 12, 2009, 7:06 pmChrisTS says:
Splunge:
womanishly refuse Really? womanishly?
How manish of you.
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October 12, 2009, 7:06 pmgeokstr says:
Even contemporary ones? I thought that Obama was without fault (except for his nicotine habit.)
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October 12, 2009, 7:08 pmBlargh says:
I think by womanishly he means “according to the whims and fashions of the moment, that is”. It’s true — men aren’t swayed by fashions or trends — and women are so darned flighty!
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October 12, 2009, 7:13 pmA. Zarkov says:
The pre-Bronze-Age aborigines that occupied the North American continent did not “discover” it. They migrated there over a period of perhaps thousands of years. A discovery is a discrete event in time.
The Viking exploration certainly counts as a discovery, but it came to nothing and was abandoned. Moreover, it doesn’t matter if some Otto Schmidlap found somehow his way to North America and we don’t know about it.
Magellan was not a contemporary explorer to Columbus. He was only 12 when Columbus came to the new world.
The imprisonment of Columbus for malfeasance as governor is certainly troubling, but I have not studied this enough to decide if there was substance to the accusations.
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October 12, 2009, 7:25 pmJacob T. Levy says:
I’d bet that many of those who vilify him here wear Che t-shirts.
Certainly not me. I don’t much like mass murderers.
The standard right-leaning complaint is: “you lefties only dislike mass murderers selectively; Stalin, Mao, and Che were mass murderers, too!” And of course they were.
Anyone want to bet how a comparison of the number of people who died as a result of Che-ordered violence and the number of people who died as a result of Columbus-ordered violence would turn out?
Probably the bloodiest episode of Che’s life:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara#cite_note-84:
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October 12, 2009, 7:26 pmBlargh says:
But, it seems to me that there are 2 facets to the hero/villain question. 1) Did Columbus do a bunch of horrible things (torture, maim, and slaughter native americans); and 2) should those acts be excused or at least diminished because they were par for the course, morally speaking, in his day (e.g. “it’s the height of arrogance to apply 21st century morals to 15th century people)?
If you want to argue that Columbus didn’t actually do bad things (#1), okay, fine. But some posters have made the claim that it’s arrogant or wrong-headed to apply our morals (#2) to Columbus because in his cultural context it wasn’t all that bad (relativists!). In support of this, they say: he was convicted by his political enemies, who basically committed perjury. But this fact, even if true, doesn’t support the “moral context” argument because he couldn’t have been (falsely) convicted of bad acts unless people actually thought those acts were wrong!
So condemnation of Columbus’ terrible treatment of native Americans and rejection of the “It stemmed from the brutality of the time” argument isn’t a product of Zinn/PC-ism, whatever that is, but of just plain logic (even if badly written).
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October 12, 2009, 7:26 pmFederal Farmer says:
I’m a proponent of a national holiday celebrating the contributions of Native Americans to the USA and the world. From agricultural products and techniques that fed the world to a system of government that inspired the USA.
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October 12, 2009, 7:27 pmrichard says:
The standard right-leaning complaint is: “you lefties only dislike mass murderers selectively; Stalin, Mao, and Che were mass murderers, too!” And of course they were.
As were many of the heroes of the right — Pinochet, Franco, etc. I’m no apologist for Che but he killed many fewer people than Pinochet.
Plus Che has nothing to do with this conversation (other than a typically right wing comment that anybody who would criticize Columbus must be wearing a Che shirt)
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October 12, 2009, 7:33 pmtjbbpgobIII says:
“His arrival in the Americas caused a great deal of death to American Indians”; I doubt Columbus ever saw an American Indian as he never set foot on the soil of the United States. The thing about his voyage is he was trying to find a route to India to get away from the scorge we face today, Islam. That makes him a hero and great explorer to me. I am of Irish decent by the way.
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October 12, 2009, 7:36 pmBlargh says:
“The Americas” != the United States
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October 12, 2009, 7:40 pmSandy MacHoots says:
I don’t care much about Columbus Day, except that I’d prefer to see government workers in the office more often.
But Prof. Volokh’s post on “Crusaders” is dead wrong. I’m not sure what his credentials are for expiating on the Church’s teachings, but it is clearly the case that the Crusaders were, at the Church’s urging, trying to reconquer areas that had been Christian for hundreds of years. The Crusdades were nothing more than a failed counterattack in a centuries-long Muslim conquest of Christian lands. They were the moral equivalent of the disastrous Dieppe raid in WWII — an attempt to liberate a captive population from a foreign conqueror.
Unlike Protestantism, Catholic thought does not condemn war as an absolute evil. A just war is not a “necessary evil,” it is a positive good. A soldier who fights in a just war is carrying out God’s will just as much as a monk ministering to the sick. Islam would continue on the attack for another five hundred years, with millions of Christians being killed in the process. The argument that it was somehow un-Christian to resist the invaders is simply not in accord with Catholic thought.
The great heroes of the West are those who stood up against the Muslim onslaught and preserved European civilization — men like Godfrey of Bouillon, Jean de Vallette, Pelayo of Asturias, Don John of Austria, King John III Sobieski. I’d be proud to have my kids play for the Crusaders, and would only hope they showed the same courage and commitment to their faith that men like Godfrey did.
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October 12, 2009, 7:47 pmRPT says:
“I’d bet that many of those who vilify him here wear Che t-shirts.”
The only Che I know is my former pastor, and he is Korean.
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October 12, 2009, 7:49 pmChrisTS says:
And I think you give him more credit than he deserves. :-)
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October 12, 2009, 7:51 pmRPT says:
Hardly necessary. Use standards articulated in the First Century A.D. You can find them in most bookstores and many hotel rooms.
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October 12, 2009, 7:54 pmBrian Garst says:
Good heavens, why?
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October 12, 2009, 7:54 pmChrisTS says:
richard:
I think the problem is irrationalism,a flaw to which folks all over the political are susceptible. It often takes the form of:
“I have nothing of substance to say, but since you are against something I am for, I am going to accuse you of being for something I am against! So there.”
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October 12, 2009, 7:58 pmPerseus says:
How womanish of you to express your resentment like that.
“In respect to our foreign politics the views of these gentlemen are in my judgment equally unsound & dangerous. They have a womanish attachment to France and a womanish resentment against Great Britain.”–Alexander Hamilton
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October 12, 2009, 8:01 pmChrisTS says:
This is all a joke, yes? That Columbus never set foot in the USA, which did not exist at the time? That he was trying to escape the scourge of Islam? That we are trying to escape the same scourge? Funny, right?
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October 12, 2009, 8:03 pmBart DePalma says:
Professor Volokh:
What is wrong with doing well by doing good? ;^)
The historical reality is that Kings were the only folks who financed exploration and they did so to make money. It does not seem fair to deny Columbus’ accomplishment because of this 15th century fact of life.
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October 12, 2009, 8:51 pmbailey says:
Wow, a 15th century explorer didn’t possess the heightened moral standards of a far leftist of the 21th century-what a shock that is. Why didn’t he know back then that the West was the source of all evil? I wonder what Indian tribes did when they wanted to move into an adjoining tribes area?
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October 12, 2009, 9:05 pmBlargh says:
Bailey, did Columbus not commit horrible acts incidental to his conquest? As he says in his own journals of the time, it would have taken only 50 men or so to subjugate the whole area — so why chop off hands for underproducing workers?
Or do you think 15th century morals were so radically different from ours; in which case why was he tried and imprisoned for these actions? If he didn’t actually do them, isn’t the fact of his trial still proof that 15th-century’ers shared some of our 21st century morals?
Also, you say that Columbus is being criticized for not having “leftist” morals. Can we all assume then that your non-leftist morals include cutting off the limbs of unproductive workers, slavery and genocide as being morally good? Thanks for clearing that up.
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October 12, 2009, 9:33 pmBob from Ohio says:
Not at all. It is our American heritage I am talking about. The ancestors of Americans come from every habitable area.
They drove them off of course, or took their women or made them slaves.
Or if Aztecs, they killed them in horrible ways.
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October 12, 2009, 9:35 pmLeo Marvin says:
That explains why I had nothing good to say about Obama winning the Nobel until I read the comments here.
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October 12, 2009, 9:40 pmRandy says:
Zarkov: “The pre-Bronze-Age aborigines that occupied the North American continent did not “discover” it. They migrated there over a period of perhaps thousands of years. A discovery is a discrete event in time.”
Okay. So they never discovered America. They just showed up and populated it.
“The Viking exploration certainly counts as a discovery, but it came to nothing and was abandoned.”
But if the Vikings had made it into something and stayed, like the native americans, then it *would* have counted? But it doesn’t count for the NA, because they didn’t ‘discover’ America?
But you specifically stated that we Columbus was ‘heroic’ and thereby implied that was enough to celebrate him. Why do you assume that Lief Erikson wasn’t at least as heroic? So what if his discovery came to nothing in the long run — it doesn’t diminish his extraordinary accomplishment.
And none of these feats are worthy of celebration? And you still hold to the position that Columbus was the first person to discover America? I grant he accomplished a lot, but he certainly was NOT the first to discover it, despite your semantic gyrations.
“Magellan was not a contemporary explorer to Columbus. He was only 12 when Columbus came to the new world.”
You specifically stated whether anyone from the 15th century was worthy of celebration as a great explorer. If you want to amend that to whether anyone else in the world was a great explorer in the last decade of the 15th century, then perhaps you have a case.
Basically, you are arbitrarily rigging the game so that only one person in the world qualifies. Sort of like saying only bald, blue-eyed athletes who weigh between 250 and 255 pounds and are between 160 and 165 cm are eligible to compete in the javelin throw, and surprise! The one person you had in mind is the only qualified guy to enter and win.
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October 12, 2009, 9:50 pmRandy says:
“Wow, a 15th century explorer didn’t possess the heightened moral standards of a far leftist of the 21th century-what a shock that is. Why didn’t he know back then that the West was the source of all evil?”
I don’t know whether to be amused or shocked at such ignorance. No one here has doubted that Columbus accomplished great things and took enormous risks. But some people have gone further to point out that he did some bad things as well. However, just by pointing out a flaw, and suddenly that make us evil leftists who hate the west?
Please — it would be nice to show a bit of intelligence around here. Or get a thicker skin.
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October 12, 2009, 9:56 pmlucklucky says:
Just shows how narcissist is the current American culture.
First of all without the Columbus and other knowledge steps all this purifying narcissism starting with Eugene would never be so enlightened to spit in the Past. They will be still in the past probably since the knowledge driving like the Columbus trip wasn’t there in other civilizations.
America was made from European Civilization of that times, it wasn’t Indians,Mayans or any other.
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October 12, 2009, 10:12 pmbailey says:
You’re right, R. Those leftists who bray about Columbus’ evil just want to have a nice even handed portrayal of history. Is the cannibalism of some early american tribes discussed in much depth these days? How about mass sacrifice and slavery of the morallly superior native?
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October 12, 2009, 10:22 pmRicardo says:
Columbus Day is the celebration by Americans of an Italian explorer financed by the Spanish Crown to find a supposedly shorter ocean-based path to Asia but instead wound up on the island of Hispaniola, which is today home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Columbus never set foot on what later became the U.S. and his most direct legacy is a series of exploitative colonies that evolved into failed or barely functional states in Latin America.
If you want to celebrate freedom, democracy, the Bill of Rights and the like, there are surely more appropriate heroes to choose.
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October 12, 2009, 11:27 pmyankee says:
When we have a holiday for some Aztec emperor, let me know.
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October 12, 2009, 11:28 pmFormer Chicagoan says:
How come the same people who excuse murders, burglars and rapists as victims who were born into broken homes, don’t allow a similar excuse to white men who changed the world like Washington and Columbus who were born into a slave-holding world?
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October 12, 2009, 11:29 pmMichael Haas says:
For Columbus it may have been, ‘Veni Vidi Vici!’ In that, he presaged our forefathers for whom it was the shorter ‘Veni Vidi.’ Yet we celebrate the holiday because we also have have come to be here. Whatever else Columbus did, and we would not or should not do the rest of what he did, his ‘Veni’ preceded ours and we celebrate our having a homeland; Columbus Day celebrates our ‘Veni’ with him.
As for the issue of the ‘Crusaders,’ I’m inclined to think if you really saw what was going on, you’d be happy it wasn’t the ‘Teutonic Knights’ and leave it at that. The only crusade they are fighting is probably against sexual immorality and wearing dirty uniforms. OTOH, team names could use some freshening up. ‘Trotskyites’ might be a humorous social reform ideal for instance.
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October 12, 2009, 11:52 pmgeokstr says:
According to wikipedia, hardly a repository of rightwing revisionist history, a total of 3,200 deaths were attributed to Pinochet. What’s that — a couple minutes work for the left’s heroes?
Oh, and don’t bother quoting what wikipedia has to say about the number of “tortured”, “imprisoned”, etc under Pinochet. Given that the deaths under Mao, Stalin and other architects of the workers’ paradises totalled about 100 million, it is likely that the numbers merely tortured and imprisoned were as proportional to those killed as they were under Pinochet.
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October 12, 2009, 11:57 pm11-B/20.B4 says:
Veterans don’t display civilian mores. We sever ourselves from society in order to protect it. “Morality” is a luxury of those not getting shot at. Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, but morality is the last refuge of a coward. By your standards, we should eliminate Veteran’s day and Memorial day, because the US military gunned down indians, slaughtered civilians at Mai Lai and firebombed Dresden.
Not arguing the Columbus point as such, just saying, you’re contrasting him with vets? Civilians don’t get to sit in judgement on the morality of military matters.
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October 13, 2009, 12:11 amRicardo says:
In other words, a similar death toll to that of Che Guevara. Thanks for clearing that up!
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October 13, 2009, 12:12 amRicardo says:
By your standards, we should eliminate Veteran’s day and Memorial day, because the US military gunned down indians, slaughtered civilians at Mai Lai and firebombed Dresden.
Are those incidents, in your opinion, ones that come first to mind when someone asks you what it means to be proud to be an American? When someone asks you about the debt owed to veterans, is the first thing that comes to mind the awesome debt owed to the perpetrators of the Mai Lai massacre?
These certainly aren’t the first things that come to my mind when I think of U.S. military operations or of Veterans Day but to each his own, I suppose.
Civilians don’t get to sit in judgement on the morality of military matters.
Queue the Jack Nicholson “A Few Good Men” speech in 3, 2, 1...
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October 13, 2009, 12:20 amRandy says:
lucky: “First of all without the Columbus and other knowledge steps all this purifying narcissism starting with Eugene would never be so enlightened to spit in the Past.”
So pointing out the flaws in a man is now ‘spitting in the past?” Are you really going to suggest that there are some people who are above any criticism at all? Or that their accomplishments exempt them from any further exploration of the truth of their actions?
Former Chicagoan: “How come the same people who excuse murders, burglars and rapists as victims who were born into broken homes, don’t allow a similar excuse to white men who changed the world like Washington and Columbus who were born into a slave-holding world?”
I don’t know, because I haven’t met any. I haven’t seen a single person on this post excuse any murder, burglars or rapists. But perhaps I overlooked some — if so, please identify who has.
“How about mass sacrifice and slavery of the morallly superior native?”
Good straw man argument! Please identify where anyone, me or otherwise, has stated that the native Americans were morally superior. Or even where anyone implied such.
The topic here is Columbus and his actions, achievements, flaws, greatness, greed, the whole kit and kaboodle. If you want to talk about Che, Stalin, Pinochet, or other people, please go ahead, but they obviously have nothing to do with this. And further, no one has yet argued that Columbus didn’t have these flaws — rather, they attack anyone for bringing it up. And when the attacks don’t work, they attack as say, haha, you leftists love Stalin in an attempt to shut down the argument. So we are anti-American, we spit in the past, we love to kill innocents, and so on. Anything other than actually discuss Christopher Columbus’ deeds.
I guess sometimes, the truth is so inconvenient, it’s better to smear one’s opponents than actually discuss an issue.
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October 13, 2009, 12:29 am11-B/20.B4 says:
I’m speaking to the OP’s contrast of the fact that Columbus was rather unsavory in some respects with his use of the military as a contrast. He claims that Columbus lacks some sort of great moral character, which precludes his position in a holiday. I merely point out that his contrast of the military, while appreciated, is not entirely different.
I’m proud to be an American because I’ve been virtually everywhere else, from Papua New Guinea to Russia to Afghanistan, and this country is better, hands down, in spite of its flaws.
I’m proud to be a veteran because we know what is required to maintain that superiority. If you think war is something you can govern with the principles you learned from Disney films and church, please check yourself.
Americans really need to learn to climb off the moral high horse. You are not blameless. Just because you order your killing done through elections and taxes doesn’t make you some sort of Ghandi-like paragon of virtue. And that’s not a bad thing, just recognize it for what it is.
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October 13, 2009, 2:49 amii says:
There’s no reason to nationally celebrate only Americans who have achieved morally good deeds, while ignoring “especially important” (as Prof. Volokh profoundly understates it) historical figures who were morally repugnant. When those “especially important” figures, and their actions, so profoundly affect the existence of our country, and have embedded themselves so deeply in our national consciousness, more so than any other single event in our history as a country, with the exception of the Revolution (our celebration of which will no doubt be cast off as an arrogant showing of misplaced pride, once Columbus Day is dead and buried) the burden of proof that we should not celebrate it formally with a holiday of some sort certainly requires more evidence than “but people died!” As if anybody marvels at the deaths and suffering of a handful of people lost in the shadow of the towering titan of discovery for which those events merely serve as arcane details.
The fact of the matter is, Columbus and his discovery was not merely “especially important”. It was, instead, arguably the single most important event in the history of humanity. Start at day one, end at today, and you will be hard pressed to come up with an event that is clearly more important. The invention of the printing press is perhaps the only event that could even rival the significance of Western Europe discovering America (and I’d be delighted to see a Federal Holiday devoted to Johannes Gutenberg). Surely this utmost in uniqueness and historical importance deserves national celebration in the very centerpiece of WHY it’s so significant. The sheer magnitude of Columbus’ discovery, which changed everything, and had a ripple effect that will be felt for millenia to come, surely outweighs (with all due respect to those who suffered) the relatively historically insignificant suffering that accompanied the discovery.
And save the ‘but what about the Indians and Vikings’ talk. The importance of Columbus’ discovery in particular is that it brought the new world to the attention of those who would proceed to colonize it and turn it into the eventual focal point of world affairs. The Indians did not do that. The Vikings did not do that. Any other group that may have discovered this landmass did not do that. Merely finding land we didn’t know existed is not the point, and is not, and never has been, the reason for the celebration. It’s celebrating a birthday of sorts — the birth of the most significant change in human history; the dawn of a new epoch that has produced substantially more good than bad, and will likely continue to for ages. To trivialize this as merely “especially important”, and therefore no more worthy of celebration than the existence of Julius Caesar is preposterous.
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October 13, 2009, 3:03 amCalifornio says:
Columbus day? Maybe in the eastern United States. I am in favor of Cortes day. Heroic? Sure, he overthrew a militaristic dictatorship based upon superstition and outdated traditions and replaced it with Spanish colonial rule and the Spanish variant of Roman Catholicism, so.... um.... Well, it worked out ok for my family, until we were overthrown by foreign invaders with superior military skills — but when they did it to us it was WRONG!
P.S. — do you think those who advocate a “re-conquista” really really know what they are talking about and what result they’d get? Cortes Day could educate them!
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October 13, 2009, 3:52 ambrent says:
I am against Columbus Day mostly because I was thwarted in a check-cashing errand.
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October 13, 2009, 4:06 amGuillermo Vincenzo di Paolo says:
OK, the fact that I’m obviously Irish allows me to speak ex cathedra on this topic — listen up you idiots! First, Columbus was not primarily Italian, or a politician and certainly not a bureaucrat or statesman.
What was he? A sailor, amigo mio. And in that category he is clearly unequalled. Why? Consider for a moment his, yes, courage. What did he order his crew to do? Sail off the chart! That’s right — at some point they got to the edge of whatever they used for charts (maps to you landlubbers) and simply kept going! No bouys to mark the way, no chart, assuredly no GPS.
Ah, yes, the stars...they had “celestial navigation” tools and a quadrant (predecessor to sextant) to measure the horizon and figure out where they were. Well, yeah. And what did those stars tell em? You just sailed off the chart, Bozo. Big help there. And, footnote perhaps, but the damn north star, she moved. Huh? This was the first time European sailors had sailed far enuf out from the Med to notice that the North Star, she no where she spostabee. This scared the bejesus out of the crew and they threatened mutiny. Enter our hero with threats of beheading...yup, management 101 15th century style. Laugh if you will, but notice...you live in the place he “discovered.” In reality, his celestial efforts were pretty wild in outcomes but, hey, he was just gettin started.
Leaving all this serious stuff aside, it is also worth noting that Christophoro and his brother Bartholomew were the great cartographers of their day. They spent years on the islands to the north of Spain mapping the wind patterns which always blew ships attempting to sail north and west back to shore. Imagine winds blowing in a pattern from about 11 0’clock to 3 0’clock, clockwise in movement.
Now, go down the Canary Islands, from whence our “hero” departed for, yeah, The New World. In your pathetic little mind’s eye, imagine winds blowing in a continuing clockwise motion but from like 4 0’clock to 8 o’clock. Yup, that’s right...it’s the equivalent of sailing downhill. That’s how he got out of Dodge (i.e., Espanola). The return trip. Good for you...that’s right, came home on the 9 o’clock to 2 o’clock special, again sailing down hill. One smart cookie!
So he figured out the winds, and the stars (sorta) and also found this big piece of dirt we now live on. Lots of folks took pipe between then and now, pinning that on him alone is arbitrary. Was it a disaster for the native population? Plainly. Did it have any significance for world history? Yeah, the release of a highly educated European population on a land mass divorced from the politics of the Old World had a massive impact on history, and denying it is simply political correctness run amok.
It is not particularly important that he had no appreciaton of what he had done. If intentions are determinative, it bears recalling that he “intended” to go to India, as a way of saving money in the time it took to return spices to Europe from the East. He sailed west only because the Portugese, sailing east, had already made it around the Cape of Good Hope and were zeroing in on the spice business. He was trying to outdo them. I think he succeeded. At a price, yes. But he succeeded nonetheless. Take it from an Irishman!
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October 13, 2009, 9:30 amDavid McCourt says:
“Yet we should abandon the holiday not because it is somehow offensive to American Indians, but because it is not consistent with what should be our own standards for honoring people — honoring people with honorable characters and honorable accomplishments, and not just important people.”
I am amazed that these words could be written, without irony, let alone guffaws, in the same week that Obama has received Scandanavian canonization.
If we are to start repealing honors we can begin much closer to home, with much less significant figures and with much punier accomplishments, than with Columbus and the European discovery of the western hemisphere.
And the words “not because it is somehow offensive to American Indians” induce the same reaction as Obama’s oft repeated “it’s not about me.” Of course it’s about him, just as the anti-Columbus movement is about placating the “Native Americans.”
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October 13, 2009, 9:44 amSara says:
Splunge: “womanishly.” Ugh!
As to the day, I think of it as ‘history day’ — the good and the bad. In that sense, it is ‘right and good that we do this.’
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October 13, 2009, 9:53 amBill Mill says:
You don’t get to passivize brutality by attributing it to time; it belongs to the world of men.
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October 13, 2009, 10:03 amsbron says:
The increasing opposition to Columbus day is part of the rise of indigeno-nationalism in South America (Bolivia and Venezuela represented by Morales and Chavez) extending to Mexico and the Raza-Aztlan movement in the Southwest US. Note that Bolivia is almost to the point of civil war, with the indigenos pitted against mestizos. Ironically, the mestizos in Bolivia are called “Blancos”.
Both Boris Johnson and those citing the enslavement and mass murder of American indigenous peoples are citing true facts. However, if the indigenos wish to reclaim their homeland from the “Anglos”, they would be more effective by developing superior technology and economic/cultural systems, like the European conquerors before.
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October 13, 2009, 10:07 amWm Tanksley says:
No historical figure is without dark moments. Christopher Columbus may have sullied the Harry Potter series, but at least he gave us Goonies.
Wait, what?
–Wm
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October 13, 2009, 10:37 amMark Field says:
How come the same people who want to lynch accused murderers, rapists, and burglars are so eager to let Columbus off the hook for his crimes?
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October 13, 2009, 10:47 ammidasear says:
/shrug
The Portugese discovered Brazil 8 years later, completely by accident, as part of their effort to navigate around Africa. The truth is that after Henry the Navigator, the discovery of the Americas by Western Civilization was pretty much inevitable. Columbus, admittedly an amazing character, probably sped things up by a decade or three, but he was not indispensable to the result.
Arguably, Columbus discovered America on behalf of the worst possible royal family, at the worst possible time, and landed at one of the worst possible places. He was coming from Spain at the tail end of the Reconquista, a grab bag of nations filled with armed men facing unemployment. It was governed by a royal family strapped for cash and particularly zealous in its willingness to war against and persecute heathens. And Columbus managed to find an island where gold was lying around on the ground, encouraging immediate and aggressive follow-up by the Crown.
As for how the purported misdeeds of Columbus were viewed in his era, the Spanish crown felt compelled to put him on trial. These were, quite literally, the same people who expelled the Moors and Jews from Spain, and founded the Spanish Inquisition. By THEIR standards, Columbus went too far...
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October 13, 2009, 11:05 amDavid McCourt says:
I am in favor of keeping Columbus day as an occasion to mark and celebrate the European origins of the civilization that exists on this continent. However, I would not be opposed to temporarily removing it, and replacing it, for the next 20 years or so, or as long as it takes to defeat the Islamicists, with a commemoration on October 7 of the Battle of Lepanto.
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October 13, 2009, 11:18 ambpbatista says:
The 15th Century was a brutal time — in Europe and the Americas. But don’t sugar coat the Indians either. They weren’t paragons of morality either — the Aztecs and Incas built their empires on conquest and stealing wealth from neighboring peoples. The Indians were cannibals and/or practiced human sacrifice. They were also — technologically — still living in the Stone Age. European civilization was simply more advanced and won out. If the roles had been reversed, I doubt that the Aztecs would have had any scruples about conquering and plundering the Spanish.
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October 13, 2009, 11:36 amKen Arromdee says:
I don’t know, I thought the discovery of fire was pretty important in the history of humanity.
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October 13, 2009, 12:14 pmDavid McCourt says:
And the discovery of the wheel was important, and the domestication of draft animals, and the creation of a written language.
Of course, none of those things had been achieved by the rich civilization that Columbus encountered.
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October 13, 2009, 12:26 pmyankee says:
So what? Columbus didn’t conquer the Aztecs or the Incas. He conquered the Taino, who practiced neither cannibalism nor human sacrifice. Upon encountering them, he immediately attempted to steal their gold and use them as slave labor. Human sacrifice might be relevant if we had a holiday for Cortés, but we don’t.
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October 13, 2009, 1:01 pmFederal Farmer says:
To be fair, the Americans didn’t have a plethora of draft animals to work with. Also, in the case of South and Central America, the terrain was not suitable for wheeled vehicles.
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October 13, 2009, 1:24 pmyankee says:
Indeed they had not. So what?
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October 13, 2009, 1:44 pmBlargh says:
You’re right — it’s no big deal for inferior civilizations to be snuffed out. How’s that little mustache looking these days David?
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October 13, 2009, 1:46 pmCJColucci says:
Is the cannibalism of some early american tribes discussed in much depth these days? How about mass sacrifice and slavery of the morallly superior native?
Well, I learned about it in grade school. Not “in depth,” of course, because nobody learns much of anything in depth, but I did learn about it. Not that the cannibalism and cutting out of hearts put me off of fantasizing about my then-new classmate Aida Rodriguez, recently arrived from Mexico.
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October 13, 2009, 1:49 pmChrisTS says:
Thank god I wasn’t drinking anything this time. Snort.
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October 13, 2009, 1:51 pmSShiell says:
Once again revisionism regarding history strikes again. Pure and simple — Columbus was a man of his time. It was a time where slavery was the norm. It was a time where the subjugation of infereior races was the norm. Who decided who was the inferior? Might makes right was the norm. It was a time where people were judged more from the pulpit than from the bar. It was a time of the Inquisition and all of the implied evil of that establishment. But were any of these horrors judged as such in that time?
Columbus did something unique. Not from an altruistic sense of love for his fellow man but for the chance of glory and wealth — both of which were necessary in order to raise himself and his family from the grip of poverty and fealty to others. And he did so at a time when a common man could not easily raise himself up in the social classes of the day. In other words, he did so in a society completely unknown to us in our age.
Whether his accomplishment rises to the level of being worthy of an American holiday, I cannot say. There are probably more important causes to celebrate than Columbus — let the country decide as a whole. But I do know I do not want to judge a man based upon the moral standards of today for one simple reason — I do not want to be judged in the years to come based upon the moral standards of a society unknown to me, today.
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October 13, 2009, 2:04 pmDavid McCourt says:
I think you may be being more than fair, Federal Farmer. The Western Hemisphere had at the least bison, reindeer, and llamas. Animals similar (or in the case of Scandanavian reindeer, identical) to these, water buffalo, yaks, oxen, camels — elephants! — were widely domesticated by Europeans and Asians thousands of years before 1492. And while the terrain in North America is perfect for the use of such animals, there also are tens of millions of suitable acres in the South American pampas.
All that was missing was a human culture that could conceive of and carry out such a project.
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October 13, 2009, 2:05 pmChrisTS says:
You do realize that Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas — not the United States? Not even Northern America?
And, by the way, in The Americas, a great many people have some indian or Mayan ancestry.
If we want to have a holiday to celebrate our national origins, why not Jamestown Day or, as the first Jamestown did not work out all that well, Plymouth Rock Day? Too dull? ‘Mayflower Day’ would be nice.
I don’t care about having Columbus Day one way or the other, beyond a certain inconvenience. My only question is why is it a national holiday (beyond the appeal to Italian Americans). It really has very little to do with our nation.
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October 13, 2009, 2:07 pmChrisTS says:
Perseus:
Not sure why you quoted Hamilton. Certainly, that he or anyone else used the term ‘womanish’ to insult his opponents does not make me happier with Splunge’s use of it to insult someone.
I chose ‘manish’ precisely to show how stupid, offensive, and irrelevant use of such terms is.
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October 13, 2009, 2:10 pmDavid McCourt says:
“Little mustache”? That kind of reflexive comment displays a failure of imagination almost as bad as the failure to conceive of a wheel.
The plain fact is that any primitive stone age cultures, even ones as obsessed with warfare as most of the American Indian cultures, were going to lose in any encounter with a dramatically more advanced civilization, whether it was Indian, Chinese, Arab or European. That encounter with one of the above was only a matter of time.
I for one am glad that it was the Europeans who came to these shores and made the contributions they did to the nations that inhabit this hemisphere.
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October 13, 2009, 2:22 pmFederal Farmer says:
The contributions were two-way. The Americas provided crops and crop techniques that helped end massive starvation in Europe. The Iroquois Nation system of government influenced that of the United States and eventually the (free) world. I’d like a day celebrating these and other important contributions.
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October 13, 2009, 2:27 pmDavid McCourt says:
“The Iroquois Nation system of government influenced that of the United States and eventually the (free) world.”
I’m afraid this is a myth. As historian Jack Rackove, good liberal that he is, says: “The voluminous records we have for the constitutional debates of the late 1780s contain no significant references to the Iroquois. . . . All the key political concepts that were the stuff of American political discourse before the Revolution and after, had obvious European antecedents and referents: bicameralism, separation of powers, confederations, and the like.”
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October 13, 2009, 2:41 pmyankee says:
You say “were going to lose” as though warfare were the only alternative. Ever heard of people engaging in peaceful relationships where they engage in trade for mutual gain? If only there were a name for such a system ...
Regardless of how “obsessed with warfare” other cultures were or weren’t, the Taino certainly were not. There is no dispute about who initiated hostilities in that case: it was Columbus.
Under your theory, the initiation of force against some individuals is justified by the evils of other individuals thousands of miles away, solely because they’re all “Indians.” There is a word for that view as well.
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October 13, 2009, 2:41 pmDavid McCourt says:
I’m “justfying” nothing. I’m not sitting in some confessional, with History kneeling there, on the other side of the screen, seeking absolution. I’m just saying that a celebration of the European historical roots of our country does not need to justify, or atone for, all that passed before, any more than that a celebration by the French of France needs to justify what the Franks did to the Celtic inhabitants whom they displaced, or whether the predecessors of those predecessors did in the last of the Neanderthal in some cave near the Lot Valley.
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October 13, 2009, 2:59 pmyankee says:
Nothing like changing the subject. We are talking about Columbus Day, not “European historical roots of the United States” day.
Indeed, I find it telling that changing the subject has been the principal strategy of the Columbus apologists here. They talk about the supposed other beliefs of his critics, about the evils of peoples Columbus never came anywhere near, and about the development of freedom in a continent Columbus never set foot on. Anything to avoid the fact that Columbus was a looter of the first order.
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October 13, 2009, 3:11 pmDavid McCourt says:
I’m not changing the subject. Columbus Day is a celebration of the discovery, and ultimately, the settlement, of America by the Europeans. Could they have called it Henry Hudson Day, or Mayflower Day, instead? Sure, but they were reaching out to the Italian-Americans who wished to celebrate their compatriot’s achievement.
And because Columbus Day is about the founding of what became the United States, it is important for some people to find a great crime at the heart of that founding. Would these criticisms be any different if it were Mayflower Day we were celebrating, and Columbus and the peaceable Taino made no appearance in the story, being replaced by the far from peaceable tribes of the northeast? I very much doubt it.
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October 13, 2009, 3:22 pmloki13 says:
I’m just going to throw this out there to all the people who have said things along the lines of, well, look at mnost of David McCourt’s writings.
Please read 1491. It’s a very good book. I read it when it came out and it has a lotof analysis of recent archaelogical finds about what pre-European civilization was really like in the Americas. It wasn’t a land without domestication or any writing, as David McCourt so blithely puts it. Anyway, it’s a great read, and shows you how little we knew of that time, and how much (and how quickly) we are learning about it.
Again, I am all for days off. The more the better. I’m not sure I understand the reflexive positions people go into. Perhaps instead of Columbus day, we could have America Day, where we celebrate everything about America, except with less beer and fireworks than the 4th of July. The contributions that everyone brought in– from the Native Americans, to the Europeans, to the successive waves of immigrants... the things that have made America great.
Is that too much?
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October 13, 2009, 3:55 pmbpbatista says:
I know — Let’s change it to “Amerigo Vespucci Day.” That will keep the dagos happy and appease the Lefties.
(by the way, I’m one of the dagos who would stay happy ;-)
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October 13, 2009, 3:57 pmFederal Farmer says:
I read and liked 1491. I can get behind a common holiday, maybe Immigration Day, to celebrate all of the contributions of all of the immigrants from the ‘original’ Native Americans to current day. I think it would be less offensive to just create a new holiday rather than replace an existing one.
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October 13, 2009, 3:58 pmMark Field says:
Bison and reindeer were available in South America? Central America? Mexico? Who knew!
Llamas were found in Mexico and North America?
Llamas, of course, were domesticated by the Incas.
I guess I don’t see the point of the argument in any event. The societies we’re discussing were widely separate and distinct. There’s no more point in comparing them than there is in comparing the French in 1492 to the Kalmyks.
Lastly, the existence of similar species is irrelevant in the absence of evidence that they can be domesticated. Even closely related species — say, dogs and wolves — can differ substantially in this regard.
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October 13, 2009, 4:08 pmLeo Marvin says:
The plain fact is that pubescent girls will be targeted by sexual predators. I for one am glad when a rapist at least has some talent to compensate for his depravity.
So what do you say we replace Valentine’s Day with Polanski Day?
Wait. You mean we can appreciate Chinatown without celebrating the miscreant who made it?
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October 13, 2009, 4:29 pmDavid McCourt says:
When you are reading 1491, Charles Mann’s account of the numerous Venices and Florences that dotted the new world countryside, you might keep in mind that it was journalist Mr. Mann who historian Jack Rackove was criticizing for trotting out “the tired and dubious argument about the purported Iroquois influence on the Constitution, and the more general proposition that important elements of Euro-American democratic culture have origins in ‘the democratic, informal brashness of American Indian culture.’” Perhaps 1491 is better; perhaps not.
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October 13, 2009, 5:09 pmJoe says:
The full title is Before 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus.
The author replies to criticism cited of one aspect of the book here. An op-ed by Mann on the subject also can be accessed there.
Rakove (sic) has this somewhat distasteful sounding comment:
“Mann is a journalist, so we can expect the work to be something of a synthesis that won’t tell historians much that they do not already know.”
Surely a “journalist” could not tell historians anything they would not already know! Given various “historians” have a mixed record on this front, this is debatable.
I am not familiar with the book, so do not know what this particular journalist brought. But, journalists have every ability to do serious research in this area that might actually teach historians something.
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October 13, 2009, 6:36 pmJoe says:
Sorry ... Rakove for some reason put “before” in the title even though the op-ed he replies to notes:
Charles C. Mann is the author of the forthcoming “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.”
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October 13, 2009, 6:43 pmRicardo says:
The Maya had written language. And as someone else already pointed out, just about all the animals that would have been candidates as good draft animals died out at the end of the last Ice Age — probably they were killed off by the humans who had just arrived from Siberia. Without draft animals, wheels aren’t nearly as useful.
Native Americans did domesticate what has become one of the staple foods of the world, corn. This was much more complicated and difficult to achieve than the domestication of wheat because the wild variety of corn is so different from the variety the Spaniards would have encountered when they first made contact.
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October 13, 2009, 9:53 pmRicardo says:
From the authority on everything: “However, elephants have never been truly domesticated: the male elephant in his periodic condition of musth is dangerous and difficult to control. Therefore elephants used by humans have typically been female, war elephants being an exception, however: as female elephants in battle will run from a male, only males could be used in war. It is generally more economical to capture wild young elephants and tame them than breeding them in captivity.”
Oddly, the Wikipedia article describes elephants as “domesticated” in other parts of the article but this seems a semantic quibble. My understanding has always been that domestication implies selective breeding. You certainly don’t get to claim one civilization is superior to another simply because its native land is naturally blessed with unusually docile animals who haven’t (yet) been killed off.
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October 13, 2009, 10:03 pmDavidicus says:
All you folks touting the moral superiority of the “native” americans (as if there were any such thing) and lamenting the coming of the evil Europeans should get off your computers, give away all of your material possessions, go live in a tepee, refuse all medical care, refuse to have anything to do with electricity, automobiles, television, and go out and look for some deer to kill with a stone-tipped arrow and some fellow “natives” to capture to skin alive to propitiate your gods–otherwise you’re a bunch of hypocrites who should STFU, IMHO
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October 14, 2009, 8:07 pmBusiness Services Virtual Office says:
For me he is a hero. What a question ? Why you asked like this?
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October 15, 2009, 4:04 amwkwillis says:
If you want to know if Columbus was an evil, murdering, thieving, rapist, you could read his log book. Copies are available on Amazon.
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October 15, 2009, 6:17 amJoe says:
Bottom line, as others note, Columbus wasn’t the first person to find America (not the U.S. ... better to honor Cabot or something there; he’s even Italian!) or even sail there (the Vikings did that centuries before).
Other European sailors took similar risks, including chartering unknown territory. And, he didn’t even think he was taking as much of risk, given his calculations were wrong. Plus, even compared to others at the time, he was something of a dubious character.
When he did discover Hispaniola, Europeans had the wherewithal to defeat the locals and colonize. That’s the big deal. And, on that front, others did a better job than Columbus.
So, it seems irregular to celebrate him alone in this context.
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October 15, 2009, 11:40 amEAM says:
A couple of things to consider.
The Spaniards (Colon included) were very superstitious, and they truly believed that that the Indian had no soul and couldn’t therefore be baptised. De las Casas argued otherwise, and his best witness was none other than Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, who had wandered among the natives for all those years. But that was 25 years after Colon, so he would have treated the Indians as if they were sub-human.
Second, there is good evidence that the disease that killed so many in Mexico via two or three great plagues was not a European import, but rather an indigenous hanta virus. “Cocoliztli” — a rodent born hemorrhagic fevers brought about by drought and the deplorable conditions the Europeans forced the native population to live under.
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October 15, 2009, 8:50 pmJoe says:
“superstitious”
does that mean “racist?”
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October 15, 2009, 9:49 pmDavid McCourt says:
“You certainly don’t get to claim one civilization is superior to another simply because its native land is naturally blessed with unusually docile animals who haven’t (yet) been killed off.”
That’s the first, and probably the last, time I will hear Indian elephants described as “unusually docile.”
Ricardo, your comments seem to be quibbles that do not go anywhere near challenging what I think is inescapable: that American Indian culture, aside from being enmeshed in endemic warfare, was several millennia behind the other major world civilizations at the time of the discovery by Columbus. I do not say this to condone or approve what happened to these people; nobody consulted me. But it does help explain what happened.
The Maya alone in the western hemisphere had a fully written language. The others, in 1492 — some 5,000 after the Egyptians — did not.
Lack of suitable raw material doesn’t fully explain the lack of domesticated draft animals in the western hemisphere. If the Finns and Lapps and Siberians could domesticate the reindeer, why couldn’t American Indian culture do the same (contrary to what one poster suggested, North American reindeer — – caribou — and European reindeer are the same species). Llamas were used in Peru, but not dispersed by trade to other regions of the Americas where they would be useful, as were horses, oxen, buffalo, etc., in Europe and Asia. And what of the American Bison? If the Indians and Burmese could make use of the Indian Elephant, why were Bison never harnessed for use in North America?
And the wheel? And what about that basic building block of civilization, metal working? Tne Indians of North America were still searching for stones to fashion into arrowheads many centuries after their counterparts in Europe and Asia had experienced a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age.
These are all side issues to what is obvious: apart from the architectural achievements of the Incas and Aztecs, which seem, like the Egyptians’, to have been centered on tombs (and places for human sacrifice), American Indian cultures have no achievements in a host of fields — art, music, literature, drama, politics, philosophy, astronomy, science, engineering, metallurgy, medicine, road or bridge building, shipping, exploration, trade, commerce, business, education, economics, war-making, or any other aspect of what we used, unblushingly, to call civilization — that stand comparison with those of the Babylonian, Hebrew, Persian, Greek, Hellenistic or Roman civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near East, or with the Indian, Chinese or Japanese cultures, or with the western or Byzantrine Europeans in the centuries before the discovery.
So reluctant are some to make any relative judgments about cultures in our multicultural age that this conclusion, plain as a wardrobe though it is, has other posters trotting out their “facist” and “racist” innuendo.
I believe in the metaphysical equality of individual persons, but that cannot blind one to the immense disparity in civilizations.
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October 16, 2009, 12:44 amEAM says:
Main Entry: su·per·sti·tion
Pronunciation: \ˌsü-pər-ˈsti-shən\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English supersticion, from Anglo-French, from Latin superstition-, superstitio, from superstit-, superstes standing over (as witness or survivor), from super– + stare to stand — more at stand
Date: 13th century
1 a : a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation b : an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition
2 : a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary
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October 16, 2009, 4:32 pm