It hasn’t been a good year for Christopher Columbus. Across the country, Columbus statues have been vandalized, taken down or come under review as Americans grapple with serious racial-justice questions, including the role of monuments in creating and preserving public memory. Municipalities named for Columbus are under pressure to be renamed. The decades-long movement to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with an Indigenous Peoples’ Day has never had more support — even among Italian Americans. All this raises the question, yet again: Why are we still celebrating Columbus Day?
Part of the answer lies in the way New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D), an Italian American, reacted earlier this year when asked if he thought it was time for Columbus monuments to go. In the midst of nationwide protests focusing on Confederate and other problematic monuments, Cuomo responded “no,” reasoning that Columbus “has come to represent and signify appreciation for the Italian American contribution to New York.”
Cuomo’s remarks hit upon what has become a foundational understanding of Columbus Day. Throughout the 20th century, Columbus became associated with a sort of cultural pluralism in the United States whereby immigrant contributions were understood to enrich and ultimately remake the nation. The problem? Pluralist campaigns have historically recognized the impact and role White ethnics have had in the development of the United States, while excluding others from that triumphant narrative of the American melting pot. Perhaps no symbol illustrates pluralism’s limitations better than Columbus.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of immigrants, including 4 million Italians, poured through Ellis Island and other U.S. entry points. Those newcomers were racially, ethnically and religiously diverse. Migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America fundamentally remade the demographic and cultural composition of the nation. Then, like today, many “older stock” Americans — those White Americans whose forebears had come in earlier waves of European immigration — responded with anxiety, violence and exclusionary laws, all directed at these newcomers.
Americans also grappled with that increasing diversity by pushing a program of assimilation on newcomers, beginning in the years after World War I. In schools, workplaces, civic spaces and other sites, Southern and Eastern European immigrants and their children were told that conforming to a notion of Americanism based on Anglo-Saxon Protestant behavioral norms and values was their ticket to integration and upward mobility. Such mobility, of course, remained largely out of the reach of African Americans and other minority groups (immigrant or native-born).