Howard: Conservatives, libertarians better off leaving Columbus controversy alone

Scattered across the country in small towns and large cities are countless statues of… Scattered across the country in small towns and large cities are countless statues of Christopher Columbus.Once an Italian-American icon and renowned explorer, Columbus’s power over the American consciousness has waned in the past decades. But this year’s Columbus Day saw a resurgence in support for the largely disgraced adventurer.

Surprisingly, the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights has spearheaded this revival on the national level with an article by Tom Bowden entitled “Let’s take back Columbus Day.” In the article, Bowden writes, “By effectively abandoning Columbus Day, we’ve cheated ourselves out of an opportunity to celebrate the core values of Western Civilization: reason and individualism.”

But Bowden’s identification of Columbus as a representative of Western civilization who brought reason and individualism to the Western Hemisphere ignores the historical record.

Far from Bowden’s construction of Columbus as a Promethean figure who brought liberty and reason to the Americas, contemporary records and Columbus’s own writings depict him as a savage governor, representative of two anti-liberal pillars in Western history: fanatical Catholicism and the government of Ferdinand and Isabella.

It’s easy to put a positive spin on the grand impact of Columbus’s actions because, after all, none of us would be here today and the United States would not exist if it weren’t for Columbus’s “discovery” of the Western Hemisphere in 1492. That being said, it’s much more difficult to defend Columbus as a man rather than a historical idea because his personal conduct reveals a profound barbarism.

Not only a mariner and adventurer, Columbus was the governor of Hispaniola — modern day Haiti and Dominican Republic — where he presided over the enslavement of the indigenous people. Columbus’s treatment of the natives was so harsh that, according to Yale’s Genocide Studies Program, only 32,000, of an estimated pre-Columbian population of several hundred thousand to 1 million, survived by 1514.

Columbus’s journals reveal his intent to enslave the natives of Hispaniola when, upon observing them for the first time, he wrote, “With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”

Indeed, Columbus’s rule was considered so savage during his own time that Ferdinand and Isabella had him arrested, brought back to Spain and imprisoned. Whatever his supposed role in the expansion of Western civilization, Columbus was understood during his own time as a barbaric tyrant and his actions, as recorded by his contemporaries, reveal him as a savage man who instigated countless atrocities in the new world.

In spite of the historical record, Bowden’s defense of Columbus resonated across the country and found supporters among conservatives and libertarians everywhere. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review published an editorial entitled “Columbus Day still worth celebrating” that directly cited Bowden’s argument.

The Trib also published a glowingly pro-Columbus news article entitled “Columbus honored as brave beacon of hope for Italian-Americans,” in which Pittsburghers like Councilman Bill Peduto laud Columbus as a symbol of identity and pride in the Italian-American community and a historical figure representative of America’s immigrant spirit.

It is fascinating that support for Columbus has emerged nationally from an objectivist think-tank that’s reasoning was adopted and echoed by a local conservative publication. For some reason, elements of the libertarian Right have adopted their hemisphere’s first slave-trader as a symbol of Western civilization’s “reason and individualism.”

By picking a fight with the historians who did so much to discredit Columbus and the indigenous movements that continue to identify Columbus Day as an inappropriate celebration of genocide, conservatives and libertarians are staking out positions in a cultural struggle that should never be fought.

It puts rational, secular elements of the Right in a position where they’re defending a man whose personal record is indefensible and whose motivations were more the spread of violent Catholicism than of liberal Western civilization. The Ayn Rand Center should leave such battles to the religious Right that Ayn Rand herself so disdained and continue to do good work in the service of individual liberty rather than shoddy historical revisionism in the service of Italian-Americans.

Continue the conversation at Giles’s blog, publiusawakened.blogspot.com, or e-mail Giles at gbh4@pitt.edu.