[NOTE: This is a somewhat-edited version of a previous post.]
The stock of Christopher Columbus has fallen in recent years as a result of the general campaign on the part of the left by figures such as Howard Zinn to emphasize the bad in American history and to elevate native Americans as uniformly good in comparison, as well as specific campaigns to make people more aware of the bad things white people of yore such as Columbus actually did. There was a Marxian slant because Columbus was also considered the man who brought capitalistic greed to this hemisphere.
The Columbus Day battle is also—although most people may not realize this—a struggle between two ethnic identity groups: native Americans and Italians, the latter being the people who spearheaded so much of the recognition of Columbus in this country in the first place. And the Ku Klux Klan had a role, as well.
You can read some of this Columbus Day history in this National Review article in which Jennifer C. Braceras describes the situation [emphasis mine]:
Here, in the United States, the anti-Columbus movement was sparked by white supremacists nearly 100 years ago. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan promoted negative characterizations of Columbus in order to vilify Catholics and immigrants, many of whom celebrated Columbus not only as a source of ethnic and religious pride but also as a symbol of the free and diverse society that resulted from the European presence here. The Klan tried to prevent the erection of monuments to the Great Navigator, burned crosses in opposition to efforts to honor him, and argued that commemorations of his voyage were part of a papal plot. Rather than honor a Catholic explorer from the Mediterranean, Klansmen proposed honoring the Norseman Leif Eriksson as discoverer of the New World and a symbol of white pride.
It’s not just the left that can play the identity game, or get incensed about statues:
In the 1920s, from coast to coast, members of the Ku Klux Klan opposed Columbus. In Richmond, they tried to stop the erection of a Columbus monument. In Pennsylvania, they burned fiery crosses to threaten those celebrating Columbus. The Klan newspaper, The American Standard, attacked honoring Columbus – on the basis that a holiday for him was some sort of papal plot.
The Klan was no fan of Columbus. He stood athwart their nativist desire for a country pure in its Anglo-Saxon and Protestant origins.
What Americans have forgotten is that white supremacy has historically sought not only the denigration of African-Americans and Jews but also of Catholics – and among them Hispanics – ascribing to the latter all manner of harmful stereotypes as brutal criminals and sexual predators. This narrative is known throughout the Spanish-speaking world and in academic circles as the “Black Legend.”
Historian Philip Wayne Powell wrote of this smear campaign: “The basic premise of the Black Legend is that Spaniards have shown themselves, historically, to be uniquely cruel, bigoted, tyrannical, obscurantist, lazy, fanatical, greedy, and treacherous; that is, that they differ so much from other peoples in these traits that Spaniards and Spanish history must be viewed and understood in terms not ordinarily used in describing and interpreting other peoples.”…
In the rush to judge and deface, few remember that it was Spain that forbade slavery of most Native Americans and made them Spanish citizens. Fewer still remember that Columbus seems to have faced arrest by his fellow explorers for punishing – even executing – those who had abused Native Americans. And almost no one recalls that it was not Columbus but the exaggerating zealot Bartolome De Las Casas, who is most often cited in smearing Spanish exploration and with it Columbus, who was the one who proposed African slavery for the New World.
When I first wrote a draft for this post, I hadn’t yet seen those articles I just quoted and I was doing my own research on Columbus. My goal was to determine (as best I could) the truth about what Columbus actually had done. I encountered the confusing information these quotes allude to—tales of Columbus’ devotion to slavery and his stand against it, discussions of whether the natives Columbus brought back to Spain were actually slaves or not, talk of the vicious violence of Columbus’ men and the reasons they gave for whatever violence did occur.
I also could not help but note that most of the tales of the awfulness of Columbus and the Spaniards came from one person, the aforementioned Bartolome de las Casas. Reading some excerpts from his work, I felt the buzz of possible propaganda. For example, just about everyone has agreed that a great deal of native American suffering was the result of the diseases that came from the European contact and for which the natives had no natural defenses; this is really not disputed. But de las Casas doesn’t seem to even mention it in passages where it would have been highly appropriate to have done so.
I refer to quotes such as this:
Among reasons for this criticism [of Columbus] is the treatment and disappearance of the native Taino people of Hispaniola, where Columbus began a rudimentary tribute system for gold and cotton. The people disappeared rapidly after contact with the Spanish because of overwork and the first pandemic of European diseases, which struck Hispaniola after 1519. De las Casas records that when he first came to Hispaniola in 1508, “there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it….”
‘War slavery, and the mines”—shouldn’t “disease” or “pestilence” be in there somewhere, too? And it also occurred to me that de las Casas, as a one-time supporter of slavery in the Americas, may have been writing to try to frantically expiate his own feelings of guilt. So I independently came to the conclusion that de las Casas might have been the Howard Zinn of his day, only with a different philosophy and different motives. And, since de las Casas appears to be practically the only chronicler of what happened between the Spaniards (plus the Italian Columbus) and the natives—except the Spanish themselves—I found it impossible to tell who was telling the truth and who either lying or exaggerating.
For each side, a certain amount of self-interest seems to have been involved. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in-between? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time.
At the time all of this happened, slavery was common all over the world, to different degrees and with different details. Columbus’ opening up of the New World to the Old enabled slavery to traverse oceans, which was a great evil. But even many of the indigenous people in the Americas whom Columbus had “discovered” (although apparently not the specific cultures he personally encountered there) had the practice of enslaving people they captured in war.
Note also this observation on the Arawaks, made by Columbus, writing in his journal on October 12, 1492 (the first Columbus Day, as it were) [emphasis mine]:
Many of the men I have seen have scars on their bodies, and when I made signs to them to find out how this happened, they indicated that people from other nearby islands come to San Salvador to capture them; they defend themselves the best they can. I believe that people from the mainland come here to take them as slaves. They ought to make good and skilled servants, for they repeat very quickly whatever we say to them. I think they can very easily be made Christians, for they seem to have no religion. If it pleases our Lord, I will take six of them to Your Highnesses when I depart, in order that they may learn our language.”
When trying to determine the truth of what actually happened between Columbus and the natives, one thing is certain: it ended up with a lot of death and destruction for the natives, and many of the early Spanish didn’t exactly flourish in the New World themselves although they did significantly better. Also from Wiki [emphasis mine]:
The native Taino people of the island were systematically enslaved via the encomienda system implemented by Columbus, which resembled a feudal system in Medieval Europe. Disease played a significant role in the destruction of the natives. Indirect evidence suggests that some serious illness may have arrived with the 1500 colonists who accompanied Columbus’s second expedition in 1493. And by the end of 1494, disease and famine had claimed two-thirds of the Spanish settlers. When the first pandemic finally struck in 1519 it wiped out much of the remaining native population.
If the encomienda system did in fact resemble feudalism in Europe, then the Spaniards only did to the Tainos what Europe’s elite did and were still doing to its peasants at the time, and although that is bondage it’s not slavery.
Now for a little more about the “Black Legend“:
A testimony of the time accuses Columbus of brutality against the natives and forced labor. Las Casas, son of the merchant Pedro de las Casas who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, described Columbus’s treatment of the natives in his History of the Indies. The writings of Las Casas are seen by some historians as exaggerated and biased. Their anti-Spanish sentiment was used by writers of Spain’s rivals as a convenient basis for the Black Legend historiography. They were already used in Flemish anti-Spanish propaganda during the Eighty Years’ War. Today the degree to which Las Casas’s descriptions of Spanish colonization represent a reasonable or wildly exaggerated picture is still debated among some scholars. For example, historian Lewis Hanke considers Las Casas to have exaggerated the atrocities in his accounts and thereby contributed to the Black Legend propaganda. Historian Benjamin Keen on the other hand found them likely to be more or less accurate. In Charles Gibson’s 1964 monograph The Aztecs under Spanish Rule, the first comprehensive study of the documentary sources of relations between Indians and Spaniards in New Spain (colonial Mexico), he concludes that the Black Legend builds upon the record of deliberate sadism. It flourishes in an atmosphere of indignation which removes the issue from the category of objective understanding. It is insufficient in its understanding of institutions of colonial history.”
This historical ill-treatment of Amerindians, common in many European colonies in the Americas, was used as propaganda in works of competing European powers to create slander and animosity against the Spanish Empire. The work of Las Casas was first cited in English with the 1583 publication The Spanish Colonie, or Brief Chronicle of the Actes and Gestes of the Spaniards in the West Indies, at a time when England was preparing for war against Spain in the Netherlands. The biased use of such works, including the distortion or exaggeration of their contents, is part of the anti-Spanish historical propaganda or Black Legend.
From the perspective of history and the colonization of the Americas, all European powers that colonized the Americas, such as England, Portugal, the Netherlands and others, were guilty of the ill-treatment of indigenous peoples.
One of my favorite phrases in the above quote is “removes the issue from the category of objective understanding.” This issue has certainly been “removed”—at least for now—from the category of my objective understanding, except that I am firmly convinced that each side was motivated greatly by the need to create effective propaganda in what I think can be rightly called a case of competing “narratives.”
Or, as Allan Bloom once put it many decades ago:
You know, we’ve all read history. Everybody, you know, world history, and weren’t all past ages maaaad? There were slaves, there were kings – I don’t think there’s a single student who reads the history of England and doesn’t say that that was crazy. You know “that’s wonderful, you gotta know history, and be open to things and so on,” but they’re not open to those things because they know that that was crazy. I mean, the latest transformation of history is as a history of the enslavement of women, which means to say that it was all crazy – up till now.
Our historical knowledge is really a history which praises, ends up praising, ourselves – how much wiser [voice drips with sarcasm] we are, how we have seen through the errors of the past. Hegel already knew this danger of history, of the historical human being, when he said that every German gymnasium professor teaches that Alexander the Great conquered the world because he had a pathological love of power. And the proof that the teacher does not have a pathological love of power is that he has not conquered the world. [laughter] We have set up standards of normalcy while speaking of cultural relativism, but there is no question that we think we understand what cultures are, and what kind of mistakes they make.
Happy Columbus Day!
