C.W. Goodyear is the author of “President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier.”
By C.W. Goodyear
These are important conversations, but they’ll likely overlook an important bit of history — because Columbus Day’s origins are much bloodier and more complicated than many realize. Its modern place as a national holiday is essentially an accident — an unexpected result of toxic immigration politics of the Gilded Age, racial violence in the South and the actions of a mostly forgotten president.
The story begins in Louisiana. As Richard Gambino chronicled in his excellent book “Vendetta,” a volley of shotgun fire cut down New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy on Oct. 15, 1890. Mortally wounded, Hennessy was asked for the identity of his assailants. His reply was a racial slur for Italian Americans.
Italian immigrants were having a rough go of it in late 19th-century America. Many had reached the United States following the Civil War — fleeing instability at home and seeking opportunity on this side of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, their eagerness to work, readiness to accept low pay and strong cultural cohesion (especially on matters of family, faith and language) stirred resentment among Americans already here.
In New Orleans, these tensions were exacerbated by a spike in crime that was blamed on Italians bringing their supposed “Mafioso” culture to America. Hatred for the immigrants practically became official city policy; as the mayor said on the record to reporters, Italians in New Orleans lacked “honor, truth, pride, religion, or any quality that goes to make a good citizen. … Except the Poles we know of no other nationality which is [as] objectionable as a people.”
And so, Hennessy’s assassination catalyzed an awful cycle of ethnic violence in New Orleans. Taking the cue of their chief’s dying words, police fanned out under orders to “arrest every Italian you come across.” But subsequent mistrials and acquittals of apprehended suspects prompted thousands of frustrated citizens to break into the city jail on the morning of March 14, 1891, and kill every Italian they could find. Bodies dangled from French Quarter lampposts by the afternoon. The murders would be described by Gambino and other historians as “the largest lynching in American history.”
Much of America reacted with approval. This sentiment was echoed coast-to-coast by what Gambino estimated to be half of America’s newspapers, including this one. The Post described the lynching as “the people’s justice, swift and sure, visited upon those whom the jury [in New Orleans] had neglected to punish.”
The American public’s gleeful response to the bloodshed, combined with widespread nationwide discrimination against Italians and Louisiana’s refusal to prosecute the mob led to a full-fledged diplomatic crisis. Italy’s ambassador was recalled from the United States. Rumors of war floated around both Washington and Rome.
Enter Benjamin Harrison, a man who embodied the stereotype of a Gilded Age president (that is, bearded, Midwestern and unfairly forgotten). Privately appalled by his country’s anti-immigrant politics, outraged by Louisiana’s inability to hold the mob accountable and desperate to patch things up with Italy, Harrison took a remarkably bold course of action.
First, he unilaterally used White House funds to pay apology money to the families of the lynching’s victims — a politically unpopular move that enraged Congress, which even attempted to censure the president over the gesture.
Second, Harrison noticed that the upcoming date of Oct. 21, 1892, would be the 400th anniversary of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus landing in the New World. It was a unique and convenient opportunity to publicly acknowledge the place of Italians in American history — and deliver an implicit civics lesson to racists across the country. An executive proclamation soon went out from the White House that declared the anniversary “a general holiday for the people of the United States. On that day let the people, so far as possible, cease from toil and devote themselves to such exercises as may best express honor to the discoverer and their appreciation of the great achievements of the four completed centuries of American life.”
The anniversary of Columbus reaching the New World had been honored before in local communities. But on Oct. 21, 1892, the entire nation celebrated the holiday for the first time — and during it, in cities and on parade routes throughout the country (even in New Orleans), the Italian flag flew proudly beside the American one.
All this suggests that Columbus was an almost coincidental part of the first federal observation of Columbus Day. In 1892, Harrison just needed an Italian (any Italian) to demonstrate that nationality’s entitlement to a place in American history and society. The subsequent lionization of Columbus himself over the years is something of a fluke — a collateral effect of one president’s attempts to fight anti-immigrant sentiment.
Moreover, Harrison didn’t intend for the federal observance of Columbus Day to become an annual, nationwide song and dance. It was meant to be a one-off. But, over time, the scale of the holiday also ballooned into something it was not originally intended to be: a yearly celebration of a man whose flaws have become only harder for the public to ignore.
Finally, the case demonstrates how anti-immigrant rhetoric in the United States rhymes through the ages: What was said about Italians in the 19th century has been repeated for every subsequent nationality reaching our shores. But it is also fascinating how a holiday that was popularized, in part, to atone for America’s past crimes against one group of people is now being reevaluated for how it neglects those committed against another.
