Christopher Columbus has been exposed as a very wicked person. This has led to a chorus of disparaging remarks about the national holiday in his honor. In 2014, a popular comedy news show asked, “How is this still a thing?” The show ran a short video that poked fun at the holiday as outdated and suggested that Americans should stop celebrating it. Also, numerous states have already ceased recognizing it officially. Not surprisingly, Portland, Ore., took the feel-good step of replacing Columbus Day with “Indigenous People’s Day.” Nevertheless, I celebrate Columbus Day and think Americans should continue the tradition.
There are real grounds for celebrating the man. It was no small feat of bravery and ingenuity that led Columbus to the shores of the New World. You may call his quest for riches selfish, but saying an action is “selfish” implies pettiness, and a quest around the world has nothing petty about it. Columbus’ self-interest led to a grand quest for riches. That quest, and the man who conceived it, fire the imaginations of young people, and that is a good and worthwhile thing. There is a second reason to celebrate Columbus Day, which is that Columbus is one of the more recent historical figures to be attacked by liberals.
Some enlightened minds have found a reason to loathe another folk hero. If this “uncovering” or “exposing” were something new, it might be shocking. It is now fairly common knowledge that Columbus did treat the indigenous people he encountered with great cruelty. He pressed them into service, sold them into slavery and fought them until a general submission had been achieved.
The natural response of a people should be, “How could we have been so naive? How could we have liked someone so cruel!” This response, however, is no longer natural to us because we are no longer shocked when some revered figure is attacked. Instead, the inevitable question comes up, “Why do people feel the need to destroy this or that man’s reputation? What is their purpose?”
Our folk heroes are emblems of our way of life. By our veneration of them, we take pride in our identity as Americans. Obviously, no kid in elementary school thought highly of Columbus for his cruelty, but they will begin down the path towards cynicism if they are convinced that Americans typically lie about their heroes. A cynical, if not guilty, conscience develops as a result of these exposes.
This conscience seems to be the aim of historians like Howard Zinn and the legions of propagandists who enter the lists against historical figures the typical American venerates. Perhaps they do so as a way to make room for our increasingly heterogeneous population. Maybe they really dislike American power. Maybe they just loathe the specific person they attack when they attack him.
No matter what the motive, high or low, the act draws into question the justice of American success in the world. But it is this success that has allowed for such criticisms in the first place.
This spread of guilty consciences is a training of the American spirit. Instead of learning the virtues required for adventure and self-reliance, we are to imbibe the “virtues” of self-castigation. Our new training of the spirit is not simply a matter of learning intellectual honesty. We are to learn how good it feels to be on the right side, to connect “being a just and virtuous person” with “having an enlightened opinion.”
The decided spiritual project of our time is one where we must cease feeling pleasure at the sight of our accomplishments as a people and begin feeling pleasure in pronouncing our own guilt. So celebrating Columbus Day is a way of saying, “Good riddance to all that!” The celebration is a turn away from a history of guilt towards a celebration of adventure and daring. Maybe even a celebration of the inevitable civilization of the New World by the dynamic Western man.
But maybe it is too late to do this. Maybe we are irredeemable because the exposed past is too damning. If we are persuaded by this historical narrative, we have not only lost another folk hero, but we have also lost our way. People who think America is good and our past ethical should be alarmed by these developments. Aren’t the heroes of our people who remain in esteem also guilty according to the increasingly accepted standard of what makes a good man? Which of them is without sin? What will we do without them?
Here is a new direction for our social historians. They should ask themselves, before condemning the men who gave us the New World, whether or not those men could have accomplished the civilization they did if they were not the people they were, with the vices they possessed. Would human sacrifice still be prevalent in the Southern Hemisphere of the New World today if some “hard men” hadn’t accomplished what they did? Would we have democracy in North America? Would we be in a position to judge Columbus without Columbus? Washington without Washington?
These are the questions for a new kind of history that could allow us to celebrate our folk heroes and have a barbecue and a beer in peace.
Cole Simmons is a doctorate student in politics at the University of Dallas. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
