The dozens of American cities, counties, and institutions that are named after Columbus (and his literary equivalent Columbia) represent the privileged role that Christopher Columbus has played in American civic life. Columbus was America’s first frontiersman, a hero who had left the comforts of Europe to search for a fresh start in a new world. Early Americans cheered him as an enlightened champion of science who criticized obscurantist European ideas.
Washington Irving popularized this interpretation of Columbus in his History of the Life and Voyages of Columbus, published in 1837. In Irving’s hands, Columbus became a man of science who liberated himself from the shackles of medieval and Catholic Europe to shape a progressive and Protestant America. Much of Irving’s biography of Columbus is pure fiction, but his book defined Columbus for nineteenth century Americans.
Irving’s most enduring myth was the false assertion that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella believed that the earth was flat. The geographers and astronomers that the royal couple consulted knew the earth was spherical, and they correctly estimated that Japan was 12,000 miles from Spain, not 3,000 miles, as Columbus calculated. Samuel Eliot Morison’s 1940 biography of Columbus called Irving’s story “misleading and mischievous.” Morison wrote, “The sphericity of the globe was not in question. The issue was the width of the ocean; and therein the opposition was right.” Fortunately for Columbus, the Bahamas lie where he thought he would find Japan.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Italian Americans adopted Columbus as an immigrant hero whose fame could boost their status in their new country. In 1882, the Knights of Columbus was founded to promote immigrant and Catholic interests. In 1892, at the time of Columbus’s quadricentennial, American Catholics proposed that Columbus be canonized as a saint.
As Columbus became an Italian Catholic hero, American nativists and conservative Protestants found in the Vikings a racial and religious alternative to Columbus. Nativists began to incorporate Viking representations in art and architecture, and they erected statues of Viking heroes in town squares. In 1891, Marie A. Brown wrote The Icelandic Discoverers of America to attack Columbus’s ascendancy and to protect Americans from “the foulest tyrant the world has ever had, the Roman Catholic Power.” In 1893, The New York Times quoted the baptist preacher R. S. MacArthur calling Columbus “cruel, and guilty of many crimes.”
By Columbus’s quincentennial in 1992, American politics had realigned so completely that Columbus had become a hero to nativist and conservative Christians and villain to progressives. For multiculturalists, Columbus was a European imperialist whose journeys led to epidemics and genocide. In Denver, where Columbus Day was first observed, activists poured blood on the statue of Columbus. In New York City, council members demanded that the City remove statues of Columbus from public spaces.
Today, Columbus is either a saint who represents all that is noble in America or an avaricious tyrant who incited genocide. Our polarized opinions would have had a familiar feel to Columbus. He returned from his first voyage a national hero. He returned from his third voyage disgraced and in chains, his governorship of Hispaniola usurped by the ruthless Francisco de Bobadilla.
Columbus’s reputation was so damaged by Bobadilla’s reports of Columbus’s mismanagement of Hispaniola that Ferdinand and Isabella stripped Columbus of his claims on the islands that he discovered. Then, the wily cartographer Amerigo Vespucci convinced mapmakers that he, rather than Columbus, had discovered the New World, and they gave Amerigo’s name to the continent. In Europe, the centenary of Columbus’s first voyage to America passed without celebration.
Columbus spent his final years fruitlessly attempting to reclaim his property, titles, and reputation. Columbus’s chronicler, Bartolomé de las Casas wrote, “The man who had, by his own efforts, discovered another world greater than the one we know before and far more blessed, departed this life . . . dispossessed and stripped of the position and honors he had earned by his tireless and heroic efforts.”
Columbus’s discovery unleashed insatiable passions for gold and for empire building. For better and for worse, this event transformed the medieval world into the modern world. Columbus and his legacy are full of contradictions. He will continue to elude us.