Every Christopher Columbus story is a myth. Including the one you like.

A version of this story was published in The Record July 10, 2020.

It is possible, right now, to walk into the lobby of the Trump International Hotel at Columbus Circle in New York City. The path is mostly blocked by metal barricades, dozens of police cars, and a pink Fun-Time ice cream truck. But there is a break in the barricades. If you resemble the sort of person whose credit card limit can handle $360 – the cheapest price for a mid-week room in mid-August – you can go.

Across the traffic circle, things get harder. There the statue dedicated to Christopher Columbus is protected by three rings of metal barricades. Police guard all three entrances to the park. No one can get in. No exceptions.

This is remarkable. Trump, a son of New York, is alive. Columbus, dead now 514 years, never touched the continent of North America. Both men are revered as self-made heroes who upended convention. Both are hated as symbols of terror and white supremacy. Yet Columbus, who died in humiliation and failure, receives tighter police protection than a 44-story hotel belonging to the world’s most powerful man.

Of course we know why. For all of Trump's recent racist outbursts -- defending Confederate generals who attacked the United States to maintain slavery, accusing Barrack Obama of "treason," describing COVID-19 as "kung flu" -- no one is suggesting the President's hotels should be torn down. 

Meanwhile, statues of Christopher Columbus are coming down all across the country. In Boston and Connecticut in recent weeks, Columbus statues were beheaded. A statue in Baltimore was toppled, dragged to the shoreline and tossed in the harbor; protesters in Richmond, VA., carried an eight-foot Columbus statue 200 yards, set it on fire, then threw it into a lake. Elected officials in Trenton, Newark, Bridgeport and Columbus, Ohio, preemptively removed their Columbus statues, while New York Mayor Bill de Blasio increased police protection for the city’s Columbus monuments.

“I understand the feelings about Christopher Columbus and some of his acts, which nobody would support,” Cuomo said at a press conference on June 11. "But the statue has come to represent and signify appreciation for the Italian American contribution to New York. For that reason, I support it."

Why? Because myth is more powerful than men. And the greatest myth ever told about Christopher Columbus was the one Columbus wrote himself.

“We’re always telling new myths about Columbus,” said Steven Hackel, who studies early American history at the University of California, Riverside. “We do it because we like to find people who represent the best in us.”

 The O.G. fabulist

 For centuries after his death, Christopher Columbus was a nobody. A cipher. The journal he kept of his first transatlantic voyage was lost in 1504. Scholars now are confident he was born to a Catholic family in a village outside Genoa, in what is now Italy, said Kris Lane, a Latin American history professor at Tulane University.

Even this basic fact took centuries to confirm. And it’s contested by legions of armchair historians who claim Columbus was Spanish, Sardinian, Portuguese and/or Jewish.

“I don’t think we’ll ever know who the real Columbus is because we don’t have a complete record,” said Philip Goduti, a history professor at Quinnipiac University. “That’s why he’s shrouded in myth.”

From accounts by his friends, and a biography by his son Hernando, we get a reasonably reliable sketch. Like most Genoese merchant sailors of his generation, Columbus desired money, status and power. The son of a weaver, he married a woman from an impoverished but noble family. He believed a Medieval myth that he could conquer new lands, win Jerusalem for the Christians, and restore Jesus Christ to rule the righteous on Earth for a thousand years.

“If I believe my actions in my own lifetime might be able to transform cosmic history, that’s a pretty big deal,” Lane said. “Today we would look at that and say: That’s bonkers! How egotistical! You? What’s so special about you?”

The yarns Columbus wove about his first voyage to the Caribbean were fittingly grandiose. In a letter to the Spanish monarchs, Columbus said he found “not an island, but a continent, a province of Cathay,” another name for China. He named all the islands he saw, including one that “abounds in various kinds of species, gold and metals.”

This was a lie. Columbus never saw evidence of abundant gold during his four transatlantic trips, nor any other metals. In the same letter, Columbus created the original myth of Christopher Columbus as Europe’s greatest creator of wealth and savior of souls.

“(L)et us be glad not only for the exaltation of our faith, but also for the increase of temporal prosperity, in which not only Spain, but all Christendom is about to share,” Columbus wrote.

“He makes his myth immediately,” Lane said. “He’s a self-dramatizer. He’s a salesman.”

From the start, then, Columbian history was revisionist history. Scouts on his first voyage believed they’d never seen China, a view soon adopted by educated people across Europe. Humiliated, Columbus spent his final years in a provincial Spanish town, writing books accusing the Spanish crown of stealing wealth from his voyages. He died neither rich nor celebrated, suffering fevers and bleeding eyes, caused either by intestinal infections or sexually transmitted disease.

“It ended badly” for Columbus, Lane said.

A hero is made

The first people to spiff Columbus up were French Catholics in the 18th and 19th Centuries, who viewed Columbus as an evangelist like John the Baptist, according to the historian and author Laurence Bergreen. Next came George Washington. For the Founding Fathers, Columbus solidified America’s ancient connection to Europe. Conveniently, Columbus wasn’t born in any of the countries then squabbling over America’s fate. 

“The Founding Fathers wanted a heroic precursor,” Lane said. “Columbus could be tied to the Italian renaissance – even if he wasn’t a renaissance figure – and he was neutral because he wasn’t British, French or Spanish.”

Helping matters, little was known about Columbus beyond his death in shame.

“His downfall is central to the myth that he was ahead of his time,” Lane said. “They could cast him as a misunderstood hero.”

With Washington’s blessing, the young nation’s capital was built in a district named for Columbus.  “That’s revisionist history,” said John Kane, an activist, radio host and member of the Mohawk tribe. “He’s a guy who never set foot on U.S. territory.”

This Columbus myth lasted until 1893, when the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago announced America’s arrival as a world power. In the fair’s revised telling, Columbus embodied a nation where a poor man bestowed with genius, hard work and a rebellious streak could escape the bonds of Europe, aim his nose west, and conquer the world.

The real Columbus probably was brave, and an able navigator, writes Bergreen. He was no rebel, however, and maybe not the sharpest sword in the scabbard. Like most educated Europeans, Columbus believed the Earth was round. Unlike his contemporaries, he believed the globe was so small, he could sail around it.

He was wrong, and lucky. Were it not for stumbling upon inhabited islands – where he stole whatever food he couldn’t beg – Columbus would have starved to death at sea.

“What does it mean to be an American? What do we expect America to be?” said Goduti. “He changes because we change.”

When rich Protestant Americans recast Columbus as their hero, poor Catholic Americans seized the opportunity. In 1891, a mob in New Orleans lynched 11 Italian men. Across the country, Italian and Irish immigrants were forced to live in squalor, denied jobs and the right to buy land. To help immigrant families, Father Michael McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus in 1882. The fraternal society grew as a network of lodges in Irish and Italian ghettoes. Many lodges erected statues of Columbus as a political statement.  

“It served as an opportunity to celebrate our ancestors,” said Robert Ferrito, president of the National Commission for Social Justice, a wing of the Knights of Columbus dedicated to political action and preserving Columbus statues.

One problem: Christopher Columbus wasn’t Italian. Italy didn’t exist. If asked his nationality, Columbus would have named the city-state of Genoa.

“I think Italian Americans were drawn to him because, in the 19th Century, he represented exploration and hard work,” said Goduti, whose grandmother emigrated from Italy. “Columbus represented the way Italian Americans wanted to be seen.”

Six revisions down. One to go.

For centuries, people claimed power by building Columbus up. In the 1970s, people claimed power by tearing Columbus down. Rich white American men recently had spent a few years carpet bombing poor people in Vietnam. They started an illegal war in Cambodia. At home they used discriminatory laws and terrorist violence to oppress generations of non-white people.

What better way to address the immoral leaders of a nation than to expose the immoral man they claimed for a hero? The seminal work in this latest Columbus myth was A People’s History of the United States, a book by Boston University historian Howard Zinn that documented thousands of moments in when America’s rich white leaders exploited poor people for power and profit.

Zinn got a lot of stuff about Columbus right, Goduti and Lane said. Columbus kidnapped the first group of indigenous people he met. He boasted of profitable trade in sex slaves as young as 9. He kidnapped 1,500 people, then shipped a third of them to Spain. Two hundred died en route.

“The important thing is that people like Zinn promote discussion of these symbols,” Goduti said.

Zinn also got stuff wrong, said Lane and Goduti. Zinn’s book describes Spanish soldiers chopping off the hands of indigenous people who failed to mine gold. To escape torture, tens of thousands of people committed suicide. Some murdered their own babies.

But when these atrocities happened, Columbus was off sailing. Zinn, who died in 2010, knew this, Lane said. Zinn attributed the horrors to Columbus anyway, Lane said, because turning Columbus from an enslaver and accidental killer into a mass murderer makes for a better myth.

“Cutting off hands? That was after Columbus. We know that,” Lane said. “Zinn has become an authority, for better or worse. If your aim is to get peoples’ attention, Zinn got it. If your goal is to tell the truth, then Zinn’s not the source you want.” 

The truth (No, really.)

Here, then, is an abridged stab at the truth. Christopher Columbus was a weird, complex dude. He could be kind, like when he forbade his men from trading worthless shards of glass to indigenous people in exchange for food. He could be cruel, writing in a letter: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

Does the statue in Columbus Circle symbolize America’s freedom of opportunity? Does it symbolize America’s racist inhumanity?

Yes.

“Whichever Columbus you want,” Lane said, “you’ll find him.”