"In fiction, the principles are given, to find the facts: in history, the facts are given, to find the principles; and the writer who does not explain the phenomena as well as state them performs only one half of his office."
Thomas Babington Macaulay, "History," Edinburgh Review, 1828
Every year, as Columbus Day rolls around, it seems that the critique of the explorer and reluctance to celebrate his holiday grow. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, though if carried to an extreme, it can lead to a rather impoverished understanding of what is in fact a very complex history. It's a complex historiography, too: appraisals of Columbus's actions and importance have fluctuated. His elevation to true heroic status is a relatively recent development. What is more, even in that phase, not all biographies were hagiographies.
A mid-century modern German Columbus bio
It therefore seems a good moment to recall one of the more intriguing
books on Columbus, today largely forgotten. In 1929, German novelist and
journalist Jakob Wassermann (1873-1934) published his Christopher Columbus: the Don Quixote of the Seas [thus, the English translation; the German original uses: Ocean], the result of more than two decades of attempting to penetrate the mind and character of the explorer.
In developing his portrait, Wassermann assiduously studied all the contemporaneous published sources. The opening of the book is a subtle meditation on the challenge of taking the historical past on its own terms. As he explains, our natural instinct is to impute to the character all the traits and accomplishments that become visible only in retrospect, when he has achieved fame--whereas he can in fact only be understood through the constraints of his own time and existence. Fame, Wassermann said, is "a process of crystallization," in which much "dross" is necessarily removed. He also likened judgments on historical persons and epochs to badly worn old coins, whose value we only rarely pause to investigate.
The age is revealed to the reader in all its splendor and horror
Jakob Wassermann frequently stresses the fact that we of today are quite unable to conceive how great the Genoan's imagination must have been, how enormous the courage which enabled this man and his companions to venture out into dreadfully mysterious wastes of the sea with a few ships and inadequate instruments. Whether his character study of that extraordinary man, a study based on modern psychological methods, is even approximately accurate, Wassermann modestly points out, it is impossible to determine. But from the description given by this expert prober of souls the reader gains a clear picture of Columbus. He must have borne a close relation to Don Quixote -- a magnificently imaginative dreamer and yet narrow-minded, stubborn and quarrelsome, absolutely unshakeable in his pursuit of his life's aim, but often losing in a moment because of the disagreeable traits of his character, everything he had gained. Thus Jakob Wassermann describes him, not as an unsullied hero and a martyr to his great idea, but as a human being with all the failings of humankind, with all the narrowness and lack of understanding of his age; and this, coupled with his immortal deeds, brings him closer to us. The age is revealed to the reader in all its splendor and horror, in its mad desire for gold, in its childlike piety and the terrible but also childish cruelty which enabled its people to massacre a nation as a boy pulls off the legs of a frog.
Not so dumb, then, after all.
The book does not seem to be in print or available online in the 1930 English translation, so you'll have to inquire at a good library. If you read German, it's not only in print, but also available online via Spiegel. Check it out.
Update, Oct. 27: belatedly came across this from John Patrick Leary's Tumblr, which chronicles and dissects the language of inequality. In this one, he describes the anachronistic appropriation of Columbus:
Happy Imperialist #Leadership Day from the Keywords #Team!
This Columbus Day offers some of the less historically (to say nothing of morally) inclined out there to draw fatuous links between the contemporary cult of entrepeneurship and the legacy of Christopher Columbus’ conquest—err, acquisition—of America some 500 years ago. (read the rest)
This year, the United States celebrated the legal Columbus Day (Monday) holiday on October 8, but the historical date of the holiday—corresponding to the explorer's first sighting of land in the "New World"—occurred on October 12, an occasion first marked in 1792.
It's the familiar Romantic scene from old engravings and textbooks (perhaps no longer familiar to the current generation), based on the 1847 "Landing of Columbus" in the US Capitol by John Vanderlyn: European arrivistes (illegal immigrants?) variously grateful or militant, kneel or exult, as indigenous Caribbean Americans (left foreground; background) are torn between cowering and curiosity. And the small crosses on the banners in the center have vanished (though the coat of arms on Columbus's remains). Whether reflecting the pragmatic needs of the engraver's burin or some more deliberate decision, the resultant horizontal lines at least implicitly suggest the flag of the new American nation.
This postage stamp, retrieved from my childhood collection, has had a rough time of things since it was first issued. Thankfully, though, what is a bane to the collector can be grist for the mill of the cultural historian. As if an omen, a seemingly unnecessary and heavy, cloud-like blot of ink from the cancellation (could the letters at left represent Springfield, betokening my future New England life?) neatly and nearly obliterates the figure of the heroic explorer. At some point (presumably since then), the stamp acquired a crease and tear that cut him in half and seem, like a lightning bolt, to pierce his vitals. Today, that stamp looks fussy and outdated, in more ways than one.
It could all be a metaphor for the fate of poor Cristoforo Colombo himself since that apogee of his reputation.
Pity him—and the hapless Italian-Americans, too. Already back at the time of the great Columbian Exposition of 1893, the assault of the Scandinavian-Americans from my native Midwest had begun, for the latter provocatively sailed a replica Viking ship up to the fairgrounds in Chicago. (In our day, it poses a challenging problem of historic preservation. 1, 2.) 75 years later, as chance would have it, Leif Erikson had earned his own postage stamp, after it became clear that Columbus had not been the first European to reach the New World. (And he in any case of course never set foot on the North American continent, whose existence he was not even aware of.)
For a while, the theory that Columbus was a Jew was in vogue in some circles, but by the time the 500th anniversary of his first voyage rolled around, in 1992, when he was increasingly associated only with conquest, forced conversion, enslavement and genocide, rather than "discovery" and heroism, no one in America of any ethnicity seemed particularly eager to claim him. He had become, in the phrase just coming (back) into vogue in that decade, "politically incorrect." (1, 2, 3, 4)
from my office door: humorous take on Columbus as villain, 1992
Anyway, as Newsweek noted in its coverage of the non-celebration in that anniversary year, the fellow who popularized the original "Jewish" theory was a Spanish fascist of the Franco era, and among the "evidence" he cited was Columbus's love of gold. Nuff said. A far more sophisticated variant of that theory (which has its own more respectable antecedents) based on putative further evidence has resurfaced in the last few years, but emphasizing Columbus's alleged desire to find a refuge for "his" persecuted "people," and thus giving his ventures a political-moral motive in keeping with modern sensibilities rather than emphasizing the traditional "discovery" in the service of empire. (e.g. 1, 2, 3)..
It is always fascinating to sit on the elevated shores of historical scholarship and watch the shifting tides of opinion ebb and flow. As I teach my students, history, like literary criticism, is a science of evolving interpretation. And because so many individuals and communities have a stake in it, the historical discipline tells us as much about ourselves as about the past. History, as we nowadays understand it, is about scholarship (as objective as we can make it, though recognizing the unavoidable limits of our necessarily limited perspectives), but also about public consciousness and the inevitable appropriation of the past for present purposes. Thus the rise of fashionable "memory" studies alongside history as such. Not surprisingly, Columbus looked very different to the Americans of 1492, 1792, 1892, and 1992.
Regardless of political persuasion, most historians nowadays would
agree: whereas previous generations tended to venerate Columbus by
accentuating the "modern" as well as the positive (and we do not wish to
take away from his navigational skill and courage), we nowadays tend to
see him (like some other figures of that "Renaissance"—or as we more
commonly say in the profession—"early modern era") as more complex: more
medieval and more transitional, less "modern": less the bold
rationalist admiral of the ocean sea, and more the mystic and crusader.
I'll list just one example from this year's more substantive political controversies:
This past January, almost exactly 20 years after its publication, Tucson schools banned the book I co-edited with Bob Peterson, Rethinking Columbus.
It was one of a number of books adopted by Tucson's celebrated Mexican
American Studies program—a program long targeted by conservative Arizona
politicians.
The school district sought to crush the Mexican
American Studies program; our book itself was not the target, it just
got caught in the crushing. Nonetheless, Tucson's—and Arizona's—attack on Mexican American Studies and Rethinking Columbus shares a common root: the attempt to silence stories that unsettle today’s unequal power arrangements.
For years, I opened my 11th grade U.S. history classes by asking
students, "What's the name of that guy they say discovered America?" A
few students might object to the word "discover," but they all knew the
fellow I was talking about. "Christopher Columbus!" several called out
in unison.
"Right. So who did he find when he came here?" I
asked. Usually, a few students would say "Indians," but I asked them to
be specific: "Which nationality? What are their names?"
Silence.
In more than 30 years of teaching U.S. history and guest teaching in
others' classes, I've never had a single student say "Taínos." So I ask
them to think about that fact. "How do we explain that? We all know the
name of the man who came here from Europe, but none of us knows the name
of the people who were here first—and there were hundreds of thousands,
if not millions, of them. Why haven't you heard of them?"
This
ignorance is an artifact of historical silencing—rendering invisible the
lives and stories of entire peoples. It's what educators began
addressing in earnest 20 years ago, during plans for the 500th
anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas, which at the time the
Chicago Tribune boasted would be "the most stupendous
international celebration in the history of notable celebrations."
Native American and social justice activists, along with educators of
conscience, pledged to interrupt the festivities.
In an interview with Barbara Miner, included in Rethinking Columbus,
Suzan Shown Harjo of the Morning Star Institute, who is Creek and
Cheyenne, said: "As Native American peoples in this red quarter of
Mother Earth, we have no reason to celebrate an invasion that caused the
demise of so many of our people, and is still causing destruction
today." After all, Columbus did not merely "discover," he took over. He
kidnapped Taínos, enslaved them—"Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity
go on sending all the slaves that can be sold," Columbus wrote—and
"punished" them by ordering that their hands be cut off or that they be
chased down by vicious attack dogs, if they failed to deliver the quota
of gold that Columbus demanded. One eyewitness accompanying Columbus
wrote that it "did them great damage, for a dog is the equal of 10 men
against the Indians."
(Arizona's policies in areas ranging from border enforcement to education have raised charges of bias against legal immigrants and other members of the Latino@ population. The Amherst Select Board in 2010 approved a boycott of Arizona based on its in our view discriminatory immigration law.)
As in past years, students at Hampshire College vented their rage against Columbus by reducing the above argument to provocative but ultimately simplistic (and of course harmless) denunciations:
Fuck Columbus, Celebrate Indigenous Resistance
Columbus Slavery
Columbus Genocide
(and once more, for good measure) Fuck Columbus, Celebrate Indigenous Resistance
Bill Bigelow's point is well taken, but the reductionist chalk slogans on sidewalks cannot capture the complexity of either his critique or Columbus's achievement and legacy, which were necessarily more mixed and nuanced. The so-called "discovery" was fraught with moral shortcomings and consequences, short-term and long-term, of which we are nowadays all too aware. At the same time, it was of epochal significance on a historical, cultural, and even biological level. It is not simple to separate the two categories.
Already back in the 1970s, for example, in the great novel, Terra Nostra, the celebrated Mexican author and diplomat Carlos Fuentes argued that Latin America could not be made whole until it fully acknowledged its Spanish as well as indigenous roots: or, as he put it, erected a monument to Cortes as well as Montezuma. He and Octavio Paz managed, controversially, to come together on that general point on the occasion of the 1992 anniversary.
Visitors who ascend the scaffolding enclosing the monument can thus behold it at eye-level rather than from 70 feet below. (The scaffolding also serves a practical purpose: when the exhibit
closes, conservation of the monument, at a cost of one million dollars,
will begin.) Nishi's purpose, he said, involved art, as such, rather than history and politics:
"It's not my intention to say something about Columbus; rather, I want
to change the sculpture from public sculpture into a completely
different thing," Nishi said.
Others saw it differently. I was surprised (though perhaps I should not have been) to see that an Italian-American organization, rather than applauding the attention (not to mention, the originality of the artistic conception), chose to criticize the installation:
Rosario Iaconis, chairman of the Italic Institute of America, commented on the project before it opened.
"Columbus was a man of
the Renaissance, an exemplar of that civilization. This, is foolishness.
This is not art. If it's his particular vision, it's a skewed vision,
so I, again with due respect to Mr. Nishi, I think he stumbled on his
project.
“Why did they have to choose such a beautiful and symbolic landmark
for such a trivializing display and then obfuscate its absurdity by
calling it 'art'?” asked Andre’ DiMino, president of the One Voice Coalition, an Italian-American non-profit dedicated to combating discrimination within the community.
“It just adds insult to injury to cover it up on Columbus Day – a day of national pride,” he said.
While the Consul General of Italy is personally interested in this
exhibition, she understands that some people won’t embrace it.
“It's normal,” said Natalia Quintavalle. “It happens every time when
you have a sort of expression of contemporary art like that which
intervenes on something old which represents much for Italians and
Italian Americans in New York."
Others argue that from a civic participation point of view the exhibit is out of character artistically with the area.
“Covering it up entirely obscures it from people walking by who wish
to see it on the street,” said Frank Vernuccio, a board member of the
Enrico Fermi Cultural Committee, a Bronx non-profit that promotes
Italian culture. Vernuccio does not intend to visit the exhibit and he
encourages the city to take it down as soon as possible.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg disagrees with the objections. “You can't see
it from the street and here you can get your eyes 10 inches away,” he
said at the opening preview in September. “We would have had to cover it
to do the restoration anyways.”
It's somehow fitting: even on a purely aesthetic plane, a reminder of the earlier veneration of Columbus cannot escape controversy—even if it now comes from his admirers.
* * *
Resources
The result of the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the Americas, as brutal and thorough as they were, was not a matter of the mere obliteration of one culture and "imposition" of another. One way to experience and understand the resultant fusion of indigenous and European cultures is through the music. Herewith a small selection:
