Reel History 1.5: Columbus and early Americana

In the last entry, two movies were watched- 1492: The Conquest of Paradise and the 1949 biopic Christopher Columbus- and the conclusion was reached that movies are scared to take the awful side of Columbus and put it in context because he's an official founding father. 1492 portrayed him as a forward thinking idealist and tragic figure, while Columbus took the straightforward and simple way, something old biopics like to do. The American people love the idea of him, but academics, what with paying attention to their ivory towers and monocles, feel differently. The former feels odd, seeing as Columbus never set foot in the United States proper, but whatever.

I ended off with this quote from Felipe Arnesto of History Today, where he says:

Columbus remained a model for nineteenth-century Americans, engaged in a project for taming their own wilderness. Washington Irving's perniciously influential History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus of 1828 – which spread a lot of nonsense including the ever-popular folly that Columbus was derided for claiming that the world was round – appealed unashamedly to Americans' self-image as promoters of civilisation.

I thought it was interesting that the popularity of Columbus comes from early post-Revolutionary propaganda and has essentially stuck around. Michael Kammen, in his Mystic Chords of Memory explains that "repudiation of the past left Americans of the young republic without a firm foundation on which to base a shared sense of their social selves." In the entry for A History of the Life and Voyage of Christopher Columbus, the aforementioned 'perniciously influential' Washington Irving biography, Wikipedia quotes an article by John Hazlett entitled "Literary Nationalism and Ambivalence in Washington Irving's The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus", which in turn says that Irving "...saw American history as a useful means of establishing patriotism in his readers, and while his language tended to be more general, his avowed intention toward Columbus was thoroughly nationalist." And Irving wasn't the first- examples like Philip Freneau's The Pictures of Columbus from 1774 and Joel Barltow's The Vision of Columbus from 1787 precede it by decades. A whole host of influential American literary superstars used the idea of Columbus to separate themselves from their British past and construct a new mythology for themselves.

One remarkable example is from Phillis Wheatley, the first African-American poet; her use of the term 'Columbia' in her poem 'His Excellency George Washington' from 1775 became a popular name for the whole United States, personifying the country as a female. It also means 'Land of Columbus', severing whatever colloquial monikers it had and successfully creating a new identity. The first verse:

Celestial choir, enthron'd in realms of light,
Columbia's scenes of glorious toils I write.
While freedom's cause her anxious breast alarms,
She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms.
See mother earth her offspring's fate bemoan,
And nations gaze at scenes before unknown;
See the bright beams of heaven's revolving light
Involved in sorrows and the veil of night!

Let's not forget the place names: the District of Columbia, where the capital resides; King's College became Columbia University in 1784; and Columbus, Ohio, founded in 1812- these are just a few of the major ones. 

Images of Columbus are found in many government buildings. Some examples: The Landing of Columbus, a painting in the Capitol Rotunda, Washington, D.C, commissioned 1836/1837 and placed in the building in 1847; the Library of Congress has a statue by Paul Wayne Bartlett of him- both it and the painting are two of a dozen images of Columbus in the Capitol complex; and in the California State Capitol in Sacramento a statue by Larkin Mead was placed in 1874, showing Columbus with Queen Isabella of Spain.

And just like in 1992, early Americans celebrated the achievements of Columbus on major anniversaries. In 1792, on the 300th anniversary, the first statue of Columbus was erected in Baltimore; for the 400th anniversary, celebrations lasted all year, with Italian Americans raising enough funds to set up a giant monument to Columbus in Central Park.

Columbus is just so ingrained in American culture it's not hard to understand why the movies chose to soften his character- that's how tradition has it, and you don't mess with an American hero.

The Landing of Columbus

NEXT TIME: 1607 and the first permanent English settlement in the United States, and two contrasting tellings of the Pocahantas story

Monument information taken from http://columbus.vanderkrogt.net/