Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 22, 1992 TAG: 9203220252
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HUGH A. MULLIGAN AP SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Hail Columbia! Or, to hell with Columbus? What a difference a century makes.
One hundred years ago the World Columbia Exposition in Chicago celebrated the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America with the world's first and still largest Ferris wheel, Ottmar Mergenthaler's newest linotype, the latest model Pullman cars, a daring, multicultural hootch-kootchy by Little Egypt and President Grover Cleveland throwing a switch to illuminate the 660-acre fairgrounds with more electricity than was consumed in the rest of the Windy City.
The recently formed Knights of Columbus, already numbering in the hundreds of thousands, petitioned the Vatican to canonize Christopher Columbus as a saint whose avowed aim on four daring voyages was to "convert the heathen Indians to our Holy Faith" and bring back enough gold to finance delivery of the Holy Land from the infidels.
In the newly laid out Columbus Circle, New York's large Italian immigrant community, under the initia- tive of Il Progresso, the country's first Italian daily newspaper, raised a 77-foot granite column, ornamented with bronze prows evoking history's three most famous caravels and topped with a marble statue of the Genoese admiral who spoke little Italian. A few blocks away at Carnegie Hall, Antonin Dvorak, the Czech composer who was all the rage that season, waved a baton over his Symphony No. 9 in E Minor. Based in part on Negro spirituals and Indian chants, his composition was christened "From the New World" in homage to Columbus.
Another tall monument to the explorer went up in front of Union Station in Washington, D.C., amid oratory regreting that the nation had been named for "that thief" and "pickle-dealer" Amerigo Vespucci, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once called the rival Florentine navigator whose name adorns a pair of continents because a German atlas printer was turned on by his highly imaginative reports of naked, sexually insatiable Indian maidens.
Two state capitals and several hundred cities, counties, towns and villages named for Columbus across the country, indeed throughout the world from the Galapagos to Colombo in Ceylon, observed Oct. 12 with festivals, parades, floats, banquets. That was the day he first set foot on Guanahani - Gull Dung Island, as the Carib Indians called the landfall he renamed San Salvador.
El Salvador and Costa Rica based their currency on a silver coin, the colon, in tribute to his name in Spanish, Cristobal Colon, which soon adorned cities at opposite ends of the Panama Canal.
In art, architecture and archaeology pre-Columbian drew the line between the old new world and the new new world more lastingly than the line Pope Alexander VI drew to adjudicate the rival colonial claims of Spain and Portugal.
But today, only a century later, Columbus' reputation is on the rocks, shipping water like his flagship the Santa Maria did when it foundered on that jagged coral reef off Haiti.
South Dakota became the first state to drop Columbus Day as a national holiday and replace it with a Native American Day.
Berkeley, Calif., not only renamed Oct. 12 Indigenous People's Day, but set aside all of 1992 to honor what Mayor Loni Hancock called "societies and philosophies that flourished long before Columbus arrived and still flourish."
Chicago, a century later, wanted no part of another Columbian exposition, so the 1992 world's fair wound up in Seville, Spain.
In Haiti, descendants of African slaves dislodged Columbus from his pedestal and dumped him in the sea, the way crowds in the Baltic republics were dethroning Lenin.
Columbus, 500 years after dropping anchor at some still disputed point in the Bahamas, took his hardest hit from the U.S. National Council of Churches. The guiding body of 32 Protestant denominations passed a resolution declaring 1992 "a year of reflection and penance" for what it termed an "invasion" that "resulted in church-supported racism . . . genocide, slavery, ecocide and exploitation of the wealth of the land."
George Tinker, a theologian of Osage blood who proposed the resolution, declared that "from an American Indian perspective celebrating the Columbus quincentenary is in fact celebrating Indian genocide. Indian people like to remind white Americans that the only thing Columbus discovered was that he was lost."
In Quito, Ecuador, 400 delegates from 120 Indian nations voted "emphatic rejection" of the quincentennial, vowing to continue "500 years of Indian resistance."
The Episcopal Council of Indian Ministries has scheduled an "alternate" celebration at Washington's National Cathedral on Oct. 12 to "mark 500 years of cultural survival."
"A funny thing happened on the way to the quincentennial observation of America's `discovery,"' wrote historian Gary Wills. "Columbus got mugged. This time the Indians were waiting for him."
Multicultural academics and revisionist historians retelling the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the discovered continue to chip away at the Columbus legend by defining exploration as exploitation.
In his best seller "The Conquest of Paradise," social historian Kirkpatrick Sale presents Columbus as a rapacious intruder on Bahamian natives dwelling like Jean Jacques Rousseau's Noble Savage in an idyllic state of nature.
"It's almost obscene," remarks debunking Columbus biographer Hans Koning, "to celebrate a man who was really from an Indian point of view worse than Attila the Hun."
Jews around the world see scant reason to celebrate the quincentennial because on the same morning tide of Aug. 3, 1492, that carried Columbus' three caravels out to sea also rode hundreds of ships freighted with a human cargo of hapless Jews being expelled from Spain by the Inquisition for refusing baptism.
Feminists fault Columbus for failing to take any women along on any of his four voyages and for allowing his crew to have their way with the comely Indian maidens, which brought the scourge of syphilis to Europe.
Because interpreter Luis de Torres imitated two natives lighting up hand-wrapped panatelas, Columbus five centuries later is in chains to the clean air lobby for spreading the vile habit of smoking.
Before disappearing in a Bermuda triangle sided by Native American activists, environmentalists and the multiculturalists, the Admiral of the Oceans Seas found some defenders. Pope John Paul II called for "a new evangelization" to mark the 500th anniversary of the first priests arriving in the New World with Columbus. Because of his "genius, tenacity and faith" the pontiff wrote in a letter to Latin American clergy, "populations in the New World were able to open themselves to the preaching of the Gospel."
While confessing that "as a church we often have been insensitive to the treatment of our North American brothers and sisters and have at times reflected the racism of the dominant culture," the U.S. Catholic bishops rejected portraying the arrival of missionaries "as a totally negative experience in which only violence and exploitation of the native peoples were present." In a pastoral letter they contended that "from the earliest days missionaries exercised a humanizing presence in the midst of colonization," learning the language and customs of the tribes, bringing the first schools and hospitals. The bishops, however, adopted the wordage of revisionist historians in characterizing the Columbus visit as "encounter," rather than a "discovery."
"Columbus Was NOT Eichmann," allowed New York Times editorial writer Karl Meyer in a mildly defensive piece that argued "`cruelty was then the common currency of power among European and indeed among less-than-noble high Indian civilizations." But this was damning faint praise for a historical figure hailed only a half century before by Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison as having done "more to direct the course of history than any individual since Caesar Augustus." Italian historian Paolo Emilio Taviani went him one better by concluding Columbus "changed the world more than any man since Jesus Christ."
Although there was no talk this time around of canonizing him, the Knights of Columbus drew their ceremonial swords in their patron's defense. Spokesman Russell Shaw viewed the academic and literary wave of Columbus bashing as a reinvention of the "Black Legend" propagated by Thomas Gage "an apostate priest turned Puritan propagandist who stirred up 17th-century Englishmen with tales of Spanish mistreatment of the Indians." He blamed "much of the current invective aimed at Columbus" on "extremist multiculturism's pent-up fury toward Western values, particularly those of a religious nature."
Ignoring the criticism, Spain is celebrating the quincentennial by hosting the 1992 summer Olympics in Barcelona, proclaiming Madrid the "Cultural Capital of Europe" and preparing for an invasion by 18 million tourists to the Expo '92 in Seville, where Columbus recruited most of his crew. Pavilions of 94 nations, including the world's largest wooden building from Japan, an 80-foot Swiss tower made entirely of paper and a 60-ton Antarctic iceberg imported by Chile, stress the theme: "The Age of Discoveries."
Columbus, Ohio, the world's largest city named for the admiral, has a replica of the Santa Maria moored downtown in the Scioto River.
There is no shortage of post-Columbian schlock, ranging from tacky T-shirts and souvenir Spanish wine skins to Royal Doulton's $89 toby mug, with a navigation chart protruding from the explorer's ear for a handle, and a commemorative cut glass Waterford globe retailing at $2,295.
In his lifetime, Columbus rose and fell on waves of popularity and contempt. His near mutinous crew denounced him as "a mad man . . . a fool . . . a fanatic and . . . that foreigner."
When he returned in triumph from what he thought was Asia, their Most Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella called for a stool, so he could sit in their royal presence, and accorded him the rare honor of having the court food taster check his plate for poison at the gala banquet where the queen's chapel choir sang a Te Deum.
He came home from that disastrous third voyage in chains. At school his children were taunted as "sons of the admiral of the mosquitos."
Columbus came to the end of his days gouty and impoverished, riding from palace to government ministry on muleback like a prototype Don Quixote in vain quest of his promised share of the American trade. Isabella was dead. Ferdinand couldn't care less.
In the following century his fame was eclipsed by the voyages of Vespucci, da Gama, Magellan, and those gold-greedy conquistadors, Cortes and Pizarro, won far more royal favor by ripping off the Aztecs and the Incas.
The 1692 bicentennial of his arrival passed with no recorded celebrations of Columbus Day in the colonies. He had become a footnote in history. But five years later Chief Justice Samuel Sewell of Massachusetts stirred some interest by suggesting in a popular book that the continent ought rightfully to have been named for him.
Then, at his tricentennial, a new nation eager to cut the bonds with King George III enshrined Columbus as an icon of courage, self-reliance and victory over royal cunning and neglect. Phillis Wheatley, the black slave poet, was the first to hail the navigator by the mythic name "Columbia." By 1792, the nation's capital was designated the District of Columbia, and King's College in New York had been renamed Columbia. Pioneers rolling their wagons west across an expanding America dotted the landscape with rivers, valleys, peaks and new settlements named for Columbus or his poetic variant, the way he annointed Caribbean islands with the names of saints.
Idolizing Columbus reached its peak at the Chicago exhibition of 1893, which opened a year late because bad weather and congressional dalliance over naming a host city delayed erecting all the marvels of progress attributed to his adventurous spirit.
Ridiculed abroad as "Porkopolis," Chicago was determined to show it epitomized America's emergence as a cultural power with artistic re-creations of Roman temples, Gothic cathedrals, Palladian villas and French chateaux towered over by George Ferris's wonder. His 265-foot-high, moving mechanical marvel, which orbited 320 passengers in 32 enclosed cars above the midway, with splendid views of Lake Michigan, was designed to outdazzle the tower raised by Gustave Eiffel in Paris four years before.
A generation reared to worship the peerless mariner portrayed in McGuffey's Eclectic Readers eagerly embraced the industrial and cultural progress personified by Columbia bicycles, Columbia gramophones, Columbia ropes and twines, Colombian coffee and Columbus corsets and foundations.
That was only 100 years ago. Alas and ahoy, each century seems to discover a different historical Columbus, viewing his greatness or guilt with the 20-20 vision of hindsight through lenses finely ground down by the prevailing political and moral sensitivities.
by CNB