Classroom Battlegrounds: Rediscovering Columbus Day

The oxidized forehead of the Christopher Columbus statue in front of Columbus, Ohio's city hall, precisely marks the culture wars timeline.

The statue was dedicated in 1955, before "100,000 grateful Americans," as its plaque records. In that simpler post-War era when history belonged comfortably to well-to-do white males, the American capital city which bore the name of the famed explorer would never have considered "deconstructing" a gift statue of the famed explorer which had been bestowed to it by his native Genoa.

Words of gratitude recited at the 1955 ceremony by Columbus' mayor at the time, M.E. Sensenbrenner, and inscribed on the statue's base, convey today an acutely ironic comment on the relative strengths of political correctness and holiday tradition. Sensenbrenner swore by the Columbus statue in 1955: "We shall ever cherish and be guided by its meaning."

Thirty-three years later, a few years ahead of the 500th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the New World, the city of Columbus invested in a renovation of the statue, this time recording various platitudes and sponsorship attributions less conspicuously, on a small plaque pasted on the side of the explorer's robe.

The statue has quite evidently been in moral quarantine ever since then. Scorched by the summer sun and soaked by the 250-day-a-year rains, the oddly oxidized, balding forehead of this Columbus statue symbolizes something more than bad Ohio weather, or parsimony in municipal spending on public works. It represents a democratic civic culture which has become awkwardly embarrassed about what was inside the heads of its founding patrons.
 
Since 1988-1989, when the Berlin wall toppled and Soviet Communism expired, nobody in the city has wanted to touch the statue of its namesake. Winning the Cold War, it appears, had its terms, and one of them was a reluctance to hear anything more about where American democracy came from. Then, unexpectedly, a second and much bigger Columbus statue appeared on the city's horizon.

In the final days of Soviet Communism, a Moscow-based sculptor named Zurab Tsereteli completed a gargantuan tribute to Columbus and his voyage to the New World. Mr. Tsereteli reportedly "liked to make big art," and his project won support from local authorities, because his foundries kept people employed, and had already produced an exhaustive supply of very large Lenin sculptures. Some towns in Florida were briefly considered as possible homes for his Columbus statue, which was 311 feet high (six feet taller than the Statue of Liberty) and weighed 500 tons, but at the time of the 500th anniversary of the 1492 exploration, the most sustained discussion about the fate of the statue took place in Ohio's capital city, on the grounds that the other major capital city in America which bore the explorer's name, Washington D.C., already had enough statues of its own.

The statue was to be placed on the Scioto River, alongside the life-size replica of Columbus' flagship, the Santa Maria, and its Ohio backers argued that it would become a landmark in the city's skyline, like Seattle's Space Needle, and the arch in St. Louis. The problem, of course, was that by 1992 key aspects of Columbus' adventure to prove that the world was round had, in cultural terms, gone flat. In a 1993 report, The New York Times cited an activist from Columbus Ohio's Native American Indian Center, who complained that to "the Native American people, Christopher Columbus represents 500 years of genocide." In Ohio's capital, opponents of the statue dubbed it "Chris Kong."

The peregrination of the 14-foot head, and of the other Brobdingnagian body parts, of this second Columbus statue is yet a bigger symbol of the ambivalence felt in contemporary multi-cultural society about traditional symbols of New World spirit.

Calling his statue the "Birth of the New World," the indefatigable Tsereteli chiseled out a sales pitch in 1997, at an Organization of American States meeting held on the 50th anniversary of the Rio Treaty. Within months a new taker materialized, Catano, in Puerto Rico, whose anthem makes reference to Columbus and the charmed land he espied.

The Mayor of Catano, a retired policeman named Edwin Rivera-Sierra, announced in 1998 that a private group had raised about $3 million to bring the Birth of the New World to an appropriate spot in his city, overlooking San Juan Harbor. By reclaiming an icon of American democracy, the Mayor of Catano, whose nickname was "Switchblade," harbored an agenda of carving out a new place for Puerto Rico on the political map of the United States, and the globe. "This will not only put us on the map of the United States, this will put us on the map of the world," Rivera-Sierra told the Miami Herald in 1998, in an interview about his plan to unfurl a 300 foot statue in a city where, according to the 1990 Census, half of the residents lived below the poverty line. 

At some expense, "Switchblade" managed to transport "Chris Kong" from Russia to Puerto Rico, but the statue's 2700 bronze pieces have for the past decade reportedly remained unpacked and scattered around Catano. The internet rumor mill indicates that this huge monument to huge anxieties about Columbus left by the 1990s culture wars could yet end up in Mayaguez, where it would be erected in time for the 2010 Central American and Caribbean Games.

In effect, on this Columbus Day weekend, in Columbus Ohio, I found the opposite of Chris Kong. There was monumental silence about Christopher Columbus.

We live these days in a world where a newly diversified way of perceiving society and politics is rapidly lionizing as orthodoxy, where a black President of the United States can win a Nobel Peace Prize after he has barely opened his mouth. And we live in a world where today's big winners are yesterday's worst victims, where the theoretical, and occasionally sanctimonious, discourse about reclaiming history from the clutches of well-to-do white males which academics have developed for the past two decades is, astonishingly, vivified and vindicated in new reports about how the roots of the First Lady of the United States can be incontrovertibly traced to the traumatic rape of an enslaved woman. And this is a country where the culture wars have killed Columbus Day, and yet where the memories and meanings associated with 1492 are, like the 300 foot statue, far too large too hide in scattered boxes.

A country which can no longer be said to have been discovered by Christopher Columbus has yet to discover a new way to talk about what in the world the Genoese explorer did. Columbus Day in 21st century America is an awkward exercise of homage to the missing colossal statue of Chris Kong, as though the entire country has become Fay Wray, not knowing on October 12th whether it should shriek, or cuddle up to the beast.

1492, of course, has its own set of connotations for the Jews, since we were victimized by a set of circumstances antecedent to Columbus' voyage, in the inquisitorial and enthused European culture which spawned the search for a New World. For the past two decades Native American and African American spokesmen have deconstructed the traditional Columbus Day narrative, proposing an alternative timeline whereby 1492 sets in motion half a millennium of enslavement and genocide; in contrast, Jewish commentators have for many decades placed the Columbus saga not necessarily at the start of a new narrative, but as a step in an ongoing process of immigration and resettlement, expulsion and persecution, extermination and re-birth.

Indeed, Jews have long entertained unverifiable notions that Columbus was, in various senses, looking out for us, but this largely positive association with the story of the "discovery" of the New World is not what attracted my attention to the uncomfortable ambivalence which characterizes 21st century observance of Columbus Day in the US. Instead, from the Israeli point of view, the intriguing point is the way ambiguity about democratic founding narratives can be re-cast in revitalizing political cultures.

Probably unfairly, and certainly anachronistically, late 20th century thinkers and critics in America thrashed the story of Columbus' explorations. They did so in the spirit of multi-cultural diversity; and, from both sides of the political aisle, American commentators today must agree that the country which is developing in the Obama era appears to be practicing what it preaches about finding room at the table for history's victims. Few today in America would argue that by bashing away at the founding myth of Columbus' voyage as a freedom narrative, the country's liberal-left intelligentsia has made it a weaker place.

Probably unfairly, and certainly anachronistically, late 20th century post-Zionists in Israel thrashed the story of the country's 1948 war. Rather than viewing it as a narrative of Jewish heroism and re-birth, they analyzed the Independence War within a counter-narrative of colonialism. We do not have to push this analogy toward an overly benign account of the motivations of the post-Zionists - their intentions were, and remain, varied. But it is, I believe, important to understand recent critical assessments of Israel's founding as part of a global trend of anxiety about democratic heritage. Perhaps it is useful to us in Israel to view the American situation as an illustration that ambivalence about founding narratives is not necessarily a strategic weakness. The truth in America today it is right before the eyes. The demise of an old orthodoxy about freedom and the discovery of America is giving way to a new orthodoxy about diversity and the re-discovery of history's hidden heroes, and the country is finding a way to live with that.

As is happening in various Israeli contexts, civil religion in 21st century America is becoming ethnic and privatized.

In Columbus, on Columbus Day weekend this year, I visited the Santa Maria replica on the Scioto River. Just a few young families were there on a pleasant autumn Sunday, to hear a guide tell a few stories about the way the ship's crew sealed up leaks and used the rudder. I asked the supervisor of the replica project about what has gone on in recent years on Columbus Day; he referred to some protests staged by minority coalition groups around the reproduced ship, and up the street in front of the balding City Hall statue. And he groused a little about city officials who basically oppose the replica project, viewing it as a symbol of 500 years of enslavement or genocide. 

Statues and ships replicating the old ideology of the explorer as a symbol of national unity no longer being the place to be on Columbus Day, I traveled up High Street in Columbus to the Italian Village, where the real party was going on.

The website for the Columbus Day Italian Festival conveyed the sententious residue of the culture wars, proclaiming that "Columbus was not a perfect person by any means, and was a person of many flaws. But neither was he a genocidal mass murderer."

Such ambivalence certainly sounds distasteful, but once Columbus Day is shed of its universal pretensions, and deconstructed in the spirit of diversity to say that 1492 has to mean many different things to many different peoples, the 21st century character of the holiday was be discovered somewhere in the pizza and cannoli of the Italian Festival. Local high schools, mostly parochial Catholic institutions it appeared, staged a marching band contest. I happily watched them, learned how to play Bocce, ordered a pepperoni calzone, and noticed just before the last bite that the meat was missing, as though some deity of ethnicized political correctness had enforced, in my case, kashrut.

It was then I decided that instead of writing a piece as a shriek about what the multiculturalists have done to Christopher Columbus, I ought to cuddle up to the fact that the explorer of 1492 is rightfully being rediscovered under the banner of diversity, precisely by the groups which want him. The application of this privatized holiday rule globally means that civil religion, in Israel as well, will never be the same.   

Matt Silver is the AICE/Schusterman Visiting Israeli Scholar teaching at Ohio State University for the 2009-10 academic year.