Thread by @davidfrum

Do reread @YAppelbaum on Columbus Day

theatlantic.com/national/archi…

"After an 1891 lynching of Italians in New Orleans ... Italians quickly adopted Columbus as a shield against the ethnic, racial, and religious discrimination they faced in their adoptive country." 1/x

@YAppelbaum Now some follow-up thoughts of my own, posted for Americans from a Spanish time zone (rather appropriate for the day, actually) ... 2/x

@YAppelbaum Columbus has been rather downgraded in 21st century America from the high esteem he held in the late 19th architecture.org/learn/resource… and early to middle 20th centuries pulitzer.org/winners/samuel… 3/x

@YAppelbaum In some ways, this is a reversion to the mean. Columbus was not a big hero in early America either: too Spanish, too Catholic. There's no town named for him in Massachusetts eg. 4/x

@YAppelbaum No Columbus, Virginia, either - and when Richmond Italian-Americans proposed to raise a statue to Columbus in the 1920s, it was refused a place on Monument Avenue and relegated to a distant park instead. 5/x

@YAppelbaum Columbus began to rise in estimation only in the early republic. King's College NY was renamed for him after the revolution. So was the District of the new US capital. In early 1800s, Joel Barlow aspired to write an American Aeneid based on Columbus. gutenberg.org/files/8683/868… 6/x

@YAppelbaum Barlow's 1807 opening lines:

@YAppelbaum But the man who most indelibly inscribed Columbus on the American mental map was Washington Irving, in his "biography" (if that's the write word) published in 1828 after a sojourn in Spain. 8/x

@YAppelbaum Irving never fretted over-much about such things as "facts" and "accuracy." It was Irving for example who invented the outrageous lie that Columbus met resistance only because his contemporaries thought the world was flat.

9/x

@YAppelbaum Even now, centuries later, you still meet people who believe Washington Irving's invention- including eg the local guide who showed me the tomb of Columbus that now rests in the cathedral in Seville. 10/x

@YAppelbaum Of course the Portuguese who rejected Columbus knew the earth was round! They also knew that their 1,000 ton carracks could not carry enough food or water to travel westward without stopping until they reached the Indies. Columbus' plan was founded on bad math. 11/x

@YAppelbaum And there was no reasoning with Columbus! He was dogmatic, overbearing, refused to listen to more expert navigators. If he hadn't bumped into the Caribbean islands first, his crews would have died of thirst less than halfway to their destination. 12/x

@YAppelbaum By the time the Castilians figured out what had happened in 1492, the Portuguese had already reached India, smashed the Venetian spice monopoly, and founded a trading empire of their own. (Columbus himself of course never accepted that he had not reached India.) 13/x

@YAppelbaum But Columbus did set in motion the creation of a Castilian empire on the American mainland. The founders of New England and Virginia held *very* negative views of that Castilian empire - and thus of Columbus. 14/x

@YAppelbaum Now here we are in 2021, revolving back to an updated version of the anti-Columbus views of pre-republican America. 15/x

@YAppelbaum As I observe this and similar rotations, the same thought always entertains me: you can bet your bottom peseta that many of the most passionately held progressive views of today will seem as ludicrous and wrong in 100 years time as those of 100 years ago seem to many today. END