My alma mater has scrapped Columbus Day. This October 12, the university will celebrate “Fall Weekend” instead. The move comes after the school’s Undergraduate Council of Students passed a resolution stating that “Columbus Day is often celebrated in a historically inaccurate manner and does not recognize the negative legacies of Christopher Columbus” and should therefore stop recognizing the holiday. The faculty then approved of the measure on April 8.
First Things has addressed the historical legacy of Christopher Columbus on several occasions. An excerpt from Robert Royal’s 1999 “Columbus and the Beginning of the World”:
But whatever our sense of the future, the Columbus discoveries and the European intellectual and religious developments that lay behind them are today at best taken for granted, at worst viewed as the beginning of a sinister Western hegemony over man and nature. The last five centuries, of course, offer the usual human spectacle of great glories mixed with grim atrocities. But we cannot evaluate the voyages of discovery properly—much less the fifteenth–century culture from which they sprang—without gratitude for what they achieved or understanding of their human dimensions. In the fifteenth century, the discoveries were rightly regarded as close to a miracle, especially given the way the century had begun . . . . .
In recent years, of course, Columbus’ standing as hero has come under severe assault. He and the culture he represented have been castigated for initiating the modern cultural dominance of Europe and every subsequent world evil: colonialism, slavery, cultural imperialism, environmental damage, and religious bigotry. There is a kernel of truth in these charges, but obviously to equate a single individual or a complex entity like a culture with what are currently judged to be the negative dimensions of the emergence of an interconnected human world is to do great historical injustice to both individuals and ideas.
Readers may also be interested in a book review by Robert Royal titled “1492 and All That” as well as Dinesh D’Souza’s ” The Crimes of Christopher Columbus .
