Most cities have a parade. I’m not sure which city you live near, but Columbus, Ohio has their annual Italian festival Columbus Day weekend:
http://www.columbusitalianfestival.com/
Columbus, Georgia has a relay race:
The District of Columbia has a performance by the Marine Corps Band and a wreath laying by the Spanish and Italian Embassies at the Christopher Columbus fountain.
:smack: I’d heard of that, but I never connected it to Columbus Day.
Have you ever thought that if you have to stand for slavery and genocide in order to annoy your political rivals, that you may not be the good guy in this story?
You could do worse and oftentimes have.
I’ve suggested before that it should be New World Day. That’s the part that’s worth “celebrating” (if you can even call it that). The point is that this is the time when the New World (essentially the Western Hemisphere) was discovered.
And, yes, it was discovered then. You still discover things that other people discovered before you, if they didn’t tell you about it first. The fact that the Natives and the Vikings discovered it too isn’t what matters.
Columbus’s voyage did set off an exploration of the New World that directly leads us to where we are today. I just say we need not celebrate the man.
Washington’s Birthday is different. He had a lot of good qualities. The slave thing is unfortunate, but not out of step with the times. And he did free them upon his death. There is cause to celebrate him as a person. Though I’d be fine if it was just changed to Presidents Day.
Not just Boston proper but the surrounding cities and towns. I grew up in one of them and there was some conflict (most of it not too mean spirited) on Columbus and St. Paddy’s day. From what I heard from older kids and adults it wasn’t that many years earlier the conflicts could turn nasty.
As to Boston proper today, which is where I live, there’s no need for even discussion much less conflict, except maybe among a few pols, as neither the North End nor Southie are dominated by the ethnic groups traditionally associated with them (Italian and Irish, needless to say); nor Eastie, nor Charlestown. It’s a city of million dollar plus condos and homes, now even in Codman Square, and the newbie population is almost entirely out of state and often not American at all, of but I digress. :o
John
I work on Columbus Day, so I have no “Columbus Day weekend.” (As a long-time unbeliever, “Merry Christmas” doesn’t bother me at all. Most of the people getting aggressive about the greeting are philosophical descendants of the blue-nosed Puritans who outlawed the celebration in the first place.)
There’s a small Columbus statue across from the Italian Cultural & Community Center; the City declined putting it in a more prominent place. (The organization’s website doesn’t mention any special Columbus celebrations. Next weekend’s Festival is mostly devoted to food. Yum.) No parades that I know of–Houston’s Italian-American community is small & dispersed. (One particular Italian neighborhood was destroyed years ago by freeway construction; everybody moved to nicer homes in different suburbs.)
El Dia de la Raza is a more thoughtful way to commemorate the joining of the Old World with the New.
Heh. You know, it’s interesting: someone made the argument that anyone we choose to celebrate with their own holiday will presumably fall short of the ideals cherished by future society – which, yeah, we can mitigate somewhat with a “Presidents Day” or a “Veterans Day” or a “Memorial Day” when we’re not just going for full-on blandness by simply ‘ushering in the new year’ or ‘giving thanks at a banquet’ or whatever.
But just to go full Godwin for a moment, can’t we use that effect against itself a little? Like, okay, grant for the sake of argument that folks are maybe going to feel a bit worse about Lincoln every year for the racist sentiments he expressed – but so long as we’re celebrating him for freeing slaves out from under folks who held worse views, don’t his opponents get worse and worse every year likewise?
Or, as I hinted above: we’re all civilized people who hate Hitler, right? And so we’re cool with sending our kids to Frankin Delano Roosevelt High School, and using dimes with FDR on 'em, and there are streets named after the guy and statues to him and so on. And if, in years to come, future generations see him as worse than we do – well, then, hey, how much worse is Hitler going to look? So even as FDR loses points for having been FDR, he gains points as Hitler loses them!
You say that most cities have parades(Portland doesn’t)…but the three examples you managed to dig up are from cities named after him.
Well, duh-what do you expect?
Here’s my point of view: Columbus Day is pretty much a defunct holiday. Very few people commemorate the day at all, and those who do pretty much boil down to some Italian-American communities, the Knights of Columbus, and the OP going out of his way to annoy coworkers or whomever. In terms of public participation, Halloween would make a more reasonable holiday.
Roughly 13 percent of employers close on Columbus Day, which is the lowest rate for any Federal holiday. In comparison, twice as many businesses and offices close on Good Friday and the day before Christmas Eve, and a full 71 percent of employers close on the day after Thanksgiving, neither of which is a Federal holiday. Apparently fewer than half of states now close offices for Columbus Day. Plus, having schools closed for Columbus Day, but businesses open, on a holiday makes little sense, since there’s a heck of a lot of Americans who then have to take leave from work to watch after kids for a holiday that basically nobody cares about. So, we’re paying a small but widely spread economic cost for something that basically is important to very, very few people.
We also have all sorts of days and commemorations in the United States that do not involve government offices and banks closing for business. From Easter to Halloween to Arbor Day, there’s literally nothing stopping people from holding commemorations for things that aren’t holidays.
And just to put this in a quantitative context, what appears to be the largest commemoration of Columbus Day is the parade in New York City, where the crowds seem to be in the 35,000 range. Well, 150,000 people make it out to the St Patrick’s Day parade; 80,000 to the Puerto Rican Day parade, and geez – the Pride Day Parade in New York dwarfs them all. I’m certain that if you compare Columbus Day events across the country, you’ll find non-holiday related observations that have vastly more public participation.
Whether or not Columbus is a hero or a villain is an interesting debate, but we can solve this issue without having to adjudicate the historical figure on his merits. The fact is that Columbus Day has no relevance to this country at large. Let’s find some other observation that’s more worthy of a public holiday, and shuffle the calendar around some. Election Day may be a good candidate, for example. Heck, we could probably make Fat Tuesday a national holiday and get more people participating in some kind of observation of the day.
So notwithstanding that the OP’s main interest seems to be using Christopher Columbus to offend people he doesn’t like, with little other purpose, and notwithstanding other upstanding people (I believe such as Bricker, who as I recall may be active in the Knights of Columbus) who have genuine affinity for commemorating the day, basically nobody cares about Columbus Day. Let’s get rid of it.
Lord Feldon said he lived outside a city named for Columbus that didn’t do anything for the holiday.but didn’t say what city. So I found three of the biggest cities named after him in the hope I’d get the right one.
[QUOTE=Ravenman;19682232
So notwithstanding that the OP’s main interest seems to be using Christopher Columbus to offend people he doesn’t like, with little other purpose, and notwithstanding other upstanding people (I believe such as Bricker, who as I recall may be active in the Knights of Columbus) who have genuine affinity for commemorating the day, basically nobody cares about Columbus Day. [/QUOTE]
You recall correctly!
(Past Grand Knight, Former District Deputy, and Past Faithful Navigator)
However, there’s no question that Columbus himself established the trade in Indian slaves to Europe, the effective slavery of the native population in Hispaniola, and the system of tribute in gold that he so hypocritically condemns Boabadilla for.
From Admiral of the Ocean Sea (published in 1942, so long before the era of political correctness), one of most authoritative biographies of Columbus, by Samuel Elliot Morrison, who for the most part was an admirer of Columbus (p. 486):
Columbus had suggested instituting a slave trade for Caribs, the enemies of the Tainos. When Ferdinand and Isabela told him not to do so, Columbus proceeded to enslave the Tainos themselves. contravening their orders:
The following is a summary of pp. 491-493 in Admiral of the Ocean Sea:
In 1495, about 1500 captive Indians were brought to Isabela, the town Columbus had founded. About 500, the “best males and females,” were loaded on caravels for shipment to Spain. Columbus told the settlers they could help themselves to as many as they liked of those who were left. After this about 400 remained and were allowed to leave. Many of them were women with babies at the breast, who were so terrified of being captured again they abandoned their infants on the ground and fled. About two hundred of the captives sent to Spain died on the voyage, and were thrown into the sea. Most of the rest died after reaching Spain, so the trade turned out not to be very profitable.
Columbus then instituted a brutal system of tribute in gold or cotton which the Indians were obligated to pay. The tribute was almost impossible to pay even with brutal labor, so many Indians fled to the mountains where they died of starvation or took poison to end their misery. Morrison says “So the policy and acts of Columbus for which he alone was responsible began the depopulation of the terrestrial paradise* that was Hispaniola in 1492.”
*by Columbus’s own description.
The excuse is made that Columbus was just a man of his time, but the fact of the matter is that he was recognized as being unusually greedy, brutal, and heartless even by his contemporaries. He was also a hypocrite who piously trumpeted his Christian faith while promoting the most ghastly atrocities, as well as being a pathological liar (which even a cursory familiarity with his journals will confirm). You can quibble about exactly how old the women were who were enslaved and raped under the system Columbus initiated, but there can be little question that such rapes took place under Columbus’ rule and Columbus did nothing to discourage them.
Actually, so far as I can follow the language there, he does not set out what exactly he’s referring to with this “horrid state of affairs”. It isn’t clear that he isn’t just talking about what he’s talking about in those first two paragraphs; certainly, he speaks about the events described therein with references to Hell, and to his own deliverance from the same in the name of God, and his own behaviour in the matter as held back only by his own honour and and desires for justice. Whereas he describes the subject of slavery of children quite matter-of-factly; people are looking for girls, 9-10 year old expecially are valued, but all fetch a good price.
It’s far from a smoking gun, and you are correct that Columbus is not writing with approval for the practice there. But, by far, his invective, his fear, and his definitions of evil are not applied to the matter of child slavery. We cannot read his opposition to the practice therein.
And as a general point, my post from before still stands; providing additional quotes doesn’t make an inaccurate claim about your original quotes accurate.
As has been noted, what you characterize as Columbus’s “denial” was not a denial of de Cueno’s account, but an accusation against Bobadilla. Given that Columbus also blamed Bobadilla for other practices he himself instituted, his claimed opposition to the trade in young girls needs to be taken with a mountain of salt.
What we can say about de Cueno’s account is that it is entirely consistent with Columbus’s character and actions as established in many other contemporary accounts. Columbus gave many female Indian captives to male colonists to “do with as they will.” The idea that many of them would not have been subject to forced sex is not credible. There is no evidence that Columbus was opposed to this practice or sought to stop it. He only complained about it after he had been deposed and Bobadilla took over.
Was de Cueno’s account true? It can’t be definitively proven, but based on Columbus’s other actions there is no reason to believe it isn’t. Did Columbus allow and abet the mass rape of Indian women on the part of Spanish colonists when he was in charge of the colony? Almost certainly.
As to your general point – true enough. I was stymied by the need to transcribe paper-source text and did not provide enough to make my point. And frankly, the loquacious style of his writing makes the task even harder.
So I am happy to leave it here–you agree he’s not writing with approval, which was the original implication of the reference to the letter.
No kidding. I’m sure writing like that looks very nice collected in a big tome in cursive, but as for reading for comprehension, not so great.
To be clear, are we talking about the letter** iiandyiii** references, or the letter you reference?
To give background to the whole controversy between Columbus and Bobadilla, Bobadilla had been sent out by the Spanish crown to investigate complaints by the colonists against Columbus as a governor. Bobadilla gathered evidence documenting Columbus’s abuses against the colonists, including punishments by cutting off ears or noses, cutting out tongues, and even selling them into slavery. He didn’t care much about abuses of the Indians. On the basis of these complaints, he clapped Columbus and his brothers in irons and shipped them back to Spain, and replaced him as governor.
So Bobadilla had a vested interest in painting Columbus as a tyrant and a monster. At the same time, Columbus had a vested interest in doing the same to Bobadilla. Neither account can be considered to be objective or really reliable.
However, it’s at least the case that many of the colonists hated Columbus and were willing to testify against him. It’s of interest that Columbus was accused of not only of extreme cruelty to the Indians, but also against his own people.
No, but Bobadilla as you noted was dispatched precisely because of complaints ( i.e. he did not originate them ) and had already been granted the governorship before he arrived. Further he assembled a document with 23 interviews ( purportedly including some pro-Columbus individuals who essentially supported the overall narrative ) to back up his subsequent actions. So it wasn’t quite a “he said-she said.”
He did have a vested interest, but he also had the stronger case just based on preponderance of evidence.
Right. There’s also the fact that Bobadilla’s findings are consistent with the picture of Columbus given by independent sources like Las Casas. I can’t think of another Spanish governor who was accused of such atrocities against colonists.
In the event, the Spanish monarchs found the accusations credible enough that they forbade Columbus from ever returning to Hispaniola. Although based on his track record as a discoverer they gave him ships for his fourth voyage they told him not to visit Hispaniola. When he tried to anyway, he was turned away. And when he was shipwrecked in Jamaica and managed to send word to Hispaniola, no one was willing to go rescue him. His deputy had to hire a ship to bring him back.