Columbus Day: The U.S. Holiday Instituted to Fight Prejudice

Today is Columbus Day 2023. It’s a day to celebrate Christopher Columbus, who made the United States possible by discovering the “New World,” and a holiday specifically founded in the best American spirit to combat prejudice and champion equal rights.

But Joe Biden, starting in 2021, recognized the October holiday as “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” instead. I don’t in the least object to having a holiday to celebrate Native American Indians (although it seems reductionist to lump dozens of very different tribes from across the continent together), as long as it’s not co-opted by leftists to spew anti-American propaganda. But trying to supplant Columbus Day is not only a Marxist erasure of history, it totally misses the history of Columbus Day as a holiday to fight ethnic discrimination.

In 1891, 11 Sicilian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans. It wasn’t the first or last such event, unfortunately. Italian Americans at the time were major targets of discrimination from some Anglo-Americans, and, in 1892, President Benjamin Harrison established a federal holiday to remind Americans that we owed a great deal to one Italian in particular: Christopher Columbus. Below is from Harrison’s proclamation:

Now, therefore, I, Benjamin Harrison, President of the United States of America, in pursuance of the aforesaid joint resolution, do hereby appoint Friday, October 21, 1892, the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus, as 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.

Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment. The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools be made by the people the center of the day’s demonstration. Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.

In the churches and in the other places of assembly of the people let there be expressions of gratitude to Divine Providence for the devout faith of the discoverer and for the divine care and guidance which has directed our history and so abundantly blessed our people.

It is significant that Harrison specifically emphasized the importance of educating youth in “patriotic duties.”  Our school system now treats patriotism as a vice or an outright sin—hatred of our country and Marxist revision of our history are what is now taught in our schools. That should change.

Christopher Columbus himself has been falsely maligned too often. Like all humans, he made mistakes (including not always keeping a close watch on subordinates). It was only natural that, as an adventurous man, he had great ambitions for himself and that he wanted to be prosperous and to make his mark on history. But there’s a lot of history we don’t learn about him. For instance, he generally had “benign” relations with natives, and he was welcomed by one tribe of natives with the request that he help them defeat another tribe of cannibals. Columbus did enslave and send the cannibals to Spain, but with the express intention of having them educated, civilized, hopefully converted to Christianity, and sent back to their homes. Even when it came to cannibals and enemies, Columbus could see the good in his fellow men.

Related: America Wakes Up to Woke

So today we celebrate Columbus Day, a holiday established to remember a man without whom the U.S. would never have existed, and a holiday to champion the founding American principle that all men are created equal.