Why I Choose to Celebrate Columbus Day

If more Americans knew about the origins of Columbus Day, they wouldn’t be rushing to remove his statues from our public spaces or to erase him from our history books. That’s why I’ve decided to celebrate Columbus Day, not only on October 9^th, the day set aside on the calendar this year—but for the entire month.

Most Americans—including Italian Americans—don’t know the backstory about Columbus Day, which became a national holiday in 1937. On October 13, 1892, President Benjamin Harrison intended Columbus Day as a one-time celebration to appease the Italian government, which threatened to break off diplomatic ties with us and go to war after the brutal lynchings of 11 Italian Americans in New Orleans on March 14, 1891. Read about the history here.

At the time, anti-immigrant sentiment was rising, and some in Congress wanted to oust Harrison for his decision. For the first time, the American press also introduced the word “mafia” into the American vocabulary, which colored the views of many Americans, who began to see all Italian immigrants as mafiosi. That, in turn, set off a chain reaction of prejudice that persisted for decades. In the early 1980s, the first question one of my new colleagues in the Capitol Hill offices of a Midwestern Senator I had just joined asked if my father was “in the Mafia.”

The Italian explorer’s role in American history is fast becoming erased as the movement to remove his statues continues to accelerate. At least 40 statues of Columbus have been removed since 2018, according to an analysis by The Washington Post and MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

I cannot discount or minimize the atrocities Columbus committed against native peoples in Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, but the recent decisions of a dozen or more states to celebrate only the contributions of indigenous people on Columbus Day fails to look at all of the story about America’s founding. Indigenous peoples lived here long before our ancestors arrived, but Columbus opened up the Americas to European exploration and colonization. Both are irrefutable parts of our history.

I hope that the leaders of Columbus, Ohio, who recently received $2 million from the Mellon Foundation for their “Reimagining Columbus Initiative,” will balance both sides of the story as they consider how to “recast” him and his contributions. And I hope they will take his statue out of storage, where it’s been since 2021.

Columbus is still the discoverer who deserves to be recognized for his contributions to America; ironically, the controversy over the role he played has forced us to look at all of our history. I would call that an accomplishment worth celebrating this Columbus Day.