In late August, at the first New York City Democratic mayoral primary debate, the WCBS reporter Marcia Kramer asked Mayor Bill de Blasio for his opinion on the statue of Christopher Columbus that stands in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. De Blasio, who was expecting the question, visibly tensed. The Mayor had recently announced that New York City would conduct a “ninety-day review of all symbols of hate on city property.” He said that statues of Columbus—whose campaign as an explorer for the Spanish government introduced violent colonialism to the New World—would fall under review. The comment was met with classic New York City-style outrage, especially among de Blasio’s fellow Italian-Americans, some of whom have adopted Columbus as an icon of ethnic identity.
De Blasio formed his eighteen-person commission in August, four days after the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where members of the alt-right rallied to protest calls to remove a monument to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee from the city’s Emancipation Park. That sickening spectacle, and President Trump’s despicably equivocal response, stoked a national reckoning with public monuments, and what they reveal of the citizenry’s mangled character. Many cities attempted to contain the heightened debate, rapidly appointing commissions tasked with evaluating their local monuments. Activists in Durham, North Carolina, took matters into their own hands, toppling a Confederate statue downtown. The city of Baltimore removed all four of its Confederate monuments under the cover of night.
In New York, plaques dedicated to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were removed from a Catholic church in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, but the debate has extended well beyond monuments to the Confederacy. The tomb of Ulysses S. Grant, who was anti-Semitic, has been called into question. The City Council speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, who is on de Blasio’s commission, publicly called for the removal of an East Harlem statue of J. Marion Sims, the “father of gynecology,” who mutilated enslaved black women while conducting experiments. The monument shows Sims in a doctor’s coat, gesturing benevolently. “We must send a definitive message that the despicable acts of James Marion Sims are repugnant and reprehensible,” she said. A few days later, someone spray-painted the word “racist” on the statue’s back.
Protests against the veneration of Christopher Columbus are as much a tradition as the federal holiday itself. In recent years, several cities—most recently Los Angeles—have replaced his holiday with “Indigenous Peoples Day.” (The second annual Anti-Columbus Day Tour, organized by young indigenous people living in New York City, will take place today.) De Blasio’s cautious stance at the debate, and his recent willingness to question the ethics of statues of Columbus, is in tune with the shifting national attitude toward the Genovese explorer. “I don’t think it makes sense for me to opine on issue by issue,” he responded. He sought, instead, to rely on “objective and smart processes” of evaluation. Meanwhile, his opponent in the primary debate, Sal Albanese, the bellicose former councilman who mounted a symbolic campaign against Mayor Rudy Giuliani, in 1997, and who won 0.9 per cent of the primary vote when he challenged de Blasio, in 2013, jumped in, excitedly. “I don’t need a commission to tell me that the Christopher Columbus statue should not come down,” he said. He added that, as someone who had been born in Italy, he understood that Columbus was critical to the formation of Italian-American identity.
That conviction may be authentic, but it is based in parochial revisionism. What Albanese was celebrating was not Columbus the explorer, whose logbooks famously showed that his fleet never touched the shores of what would become the United States. Instead, it is the figure who, as the American Revolution neared, in the eighteenth century, was remade into an icon of the Republic. Centuries after Columbus’s rapacious journey, his dormant name was revitalized. A goddess of liberty, called Columbia, was developed to personify America; Phyllis Wheatley, an enslaved woman, wrote of Columbia’s “outstretch’d arms” in her poetry to George Washington. In the same spirit, New York City’s King’s College was rechristened Columbia University, in 1784, and South Carolina’s capital was changed to Columbia, in 1786. According to the Library of Congress, Europeans of the time thought that Philip Phile’s “Hail, Columbia” was America’s anthem.
In the eighteen-fifties, with waves of Italian immigrants arriving in New York, unofficial Columbus Day gatherings began taking place in Little Italy and other Italian enclaves. A parade marched through the city in 1866. By the turn of the century, there was an effort under way, sponsored by Tammany Hall, to instate an official annual celebration. Columbus became the original Italian-American, the platonic ideal of the immigrant, a broker of nationalism and racial transcendence for an immigrant community fighting for respect, and for its life. (In 1890, eleven Italian men were lynched in Louisiana, in a bout of nativist hysteria over the death of a police chief.) Decades later, the Italian-language newspaper Il Progresso gathered the funds to erect a statue in the rotary that Frederick Law Olmsted had designed as a prelude to Central Park. Gaetano Russo’s marble figuration went up in 1892, the fourth centennial of Columbus’s New World voyage. The Times reported of the parade held that year, “The column of men in uniforms seldom seen above Bleecker Street marched up between the rows of brownstone houses to the lively music of the Italian national air.”
By the early twentieth century, more than a million people of Italian descent lived in the city. Even within Italian-American groups, which were accruing local power, there was discord about the significance of Columbus. In the thirties, many protested the parade after Mussolini sympathizers conducted Fascist displays at Columbus Circle. Still, Columbian iconography spread through the boroughs. There’s the avenue that runs along Manhattan’s Upper West Side. City parks host at least five statues. I went to a predominantly Italian-American Catholic middle school, in Marine Park, Brooklyn; one teacher encouraged us to pray that the Vatican would finally initiate Columbus’s canonization. The Catholic diocese, which maintains influence over many immigrant populations, holds Masses each year on Columbus Day in the explorer’s honor. (As Archbishop Timothy Dolan said in his homily in 2009, “Keep in mind that, for Columbus, his voyage of discovery was a work of evangelization.”) Columbus, and the ritualistic enshrinements of his image, has evolved into the ultimate symbol of Italian-American identity. “Christopher,” a famously overwrought episode of “The Sopranos,” about a Native American protest of the holiday, drew a picture of deep-seated Italian-American pride that proceeded from a kernel of truth.
To some Italian-Americans, de Blasio’s dispassionate response to the question of the Columbus monument seemed tinged with betrayal. When the Mayor was younger, he petitioned the courts to allow him to take his mother’s Italian surname; now some deemed him a “fake Italian.” He beat Albanese in the primary by a gaping margin, but not before his Republican opponent, Nicole Malliotakis, harangued him, suggesting that he go back to using his birth name, Warren Wilhelm, “because he obviously doesn’t have the heart and soul of an Italian.” Two of the city’s Columbus statues were vandalized. Soon after, State Senator Diane Savino, of Staten Island, said, “That statue in Columbus Circle does not represent the explorer. It represents the experience of the Italian immigrant community who came here.” Fifty-four organizations and affinity groups recently gathered to express their desire that the statue remain. De Blasio was disinvited from a Columbus Day parade in the Bronx. Groups vowed to boycott his annual reception at Gracie Mansion.
The Italian-American condition in New York City has changed, drastically, since 1892. Once a commemoration of immigrant struggle, the Columbus Day parade has become a showcase of power. George Pataki, Antonin Scalia, Mario Cuomo, and Rudy Giuliani have all been grand marshals in parades past. Today de Blasio marched, as he has in the past. It’s only a matter of time before New York renames the holiday, but it seems unlikely that the Mayor’s commission will recommend the removal of the Columbus Circle statue, which acts as a structural heart of the city’s grid. Besides, the commission has softened its language, stating that it would “develop guidelines on how the city should address monuments seen as oppressive and inconsistent with the values of New York City.” Even so, as the parade lurched toward Columbus Circle, he was booed by the crowd.
