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The Lost Holiday

by Christian Huebner 

Last week our country celebrated Columbus Day.

You might have missed it. Chances are, unless you punch a time card for the government or you were really hoping to get a letter from your Aunt Susie last Monday, you weren’t even aware that this was a holiday.

It’s not unusual for federal holidays to get lost in the shuffle – Flag Day (June 14) and George Washington’s Birthday (third Monday in February), come readily (or rather, not-so-readily) to mind. Few holidays are in such sorry shape, however, as Columbus Day.

The problem is the topic.  Columbus has become an awkward man to account for. At best he is afforded gentle neglect, as when we pass by the weathered bronze monuments on so many town squares and smile at the patriotism of an earlier era, without being stirred ourselves. At worst, Columbus is openly reviled as the primogenitor of a brutish, nasty and short-tempered European plague that ravaged two continents and their peaceful aboriginal peoples, aided along by guns, germs and steel, as well as the pretext of an imperialistic religion.

This latter view is the more common today.  Run a quick Google search on the holiday and you’ll find that just under the Wikipedia biography are blogs devoted to “Why I Hate Columbus,” and ruminations on Columbus as the founder of international sex trafficking.

It is an odd and perhaps inevitable point when a culture gains enough prosperity and security to have the time to turn a disgusted eye toward its own foundations.  And of course, for those who will read the history of the Columbian Exchange with loathing, there is plenty of material to work from. I wasn’t there, but the accounts of man’s cruelty to man, even when claiming glorious motives, seem perfectly plausible—especially when one looks around at our own, supposedly more enlightened age.

And yet, we do our forebears a disservice when we scoff too quickly.  Not only that, we cheat ourselves of something, too. In the age when those old statues were still being erected, Columbus gave our nation’s people an ennobling sense of heroism at the heart of our founding.

I was reminded of this two summers ago, leaving the Navy Memorial metro station in Washington, D.C.  Etched into the granite tunnel there, I noticed three gold-embossed stanzas from a poem, the “Prayer of Columbus,” by Walt Whitman.  In his introduction to the poem, Whitman tells us to imagine an old, shipwrecked Columbus pacing the beach at the end of his life, giving an account of himself to his Maker:
 
All my emprises have been fill’d with Thee,
My speculations, plans, begun and carried on in thoughts of Thee,
Sailing the deep or journeying the land for Thee;
Intents, purports, aspirations mine – leaving results to Thee.

O I am sure they really came from Thee!
The urge, the ardor, the unconquerable will,
The potent, felt, interior command, stronger than words,
A message from the Heavens, whispering to me even in sleep,
These sped me on.

By me, and these, the work so far accomplish’d, (for what has been has been;)
By me Earth’s elder, cloy’d and stifled lands, uncloy’d, unloos’d;
By me the hemispheres rounded and tied – the unknown to the known.

Frankly, I was caught off-balance to see this side of Columbus adorning a modern government works project. But I was also deeply thankful, to the bureaucrat who planned the tunnel, to Whitman who wrote the words and to Columbus who lived the life that inspired them. 

All of us living today in the two Americas have adopted the Columbian enterprise.  To trace our project back to a great soul, its urge, its ardor, its unconquerable will, laid at the altar of Heaven despite its imperfections, ennobles us.  It’s like discovering that, long ago, the builder of one’s home filled the cornerstone with silver treasure. 

Whitman’s poem ends with Columbus in a dying vision:

And these things I see suddenly – what mean they?
As if some miracle, some hand divine unseal'd my eyes,
Shadowy, vast shapes, smile through the air and sky,
And on the distant waves sail countless ships,
And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me.
 
Five-hundred and seventeen years – and one week – later, I’ll join that salute.  Happy belated Columbus Day.

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)