Columbus, Go Home

A Century Ago, Christopher Columbus inspired what was arguably the greatest party ever thrown on this continent, the most visionary of all world's fairs, Chicago's World Columbian Exposition, which raised a gleaming White City on the shore line of Lake Michigan. Even the guarded and ironic Henry Adams said this vision had battered his defenses and left him "crushed flat" by revelations: "Chicago was the first expression of American thought as a unity." All that to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the Americas.

One might have predicted an even grander bash for the 500th anniversary—that nice round number, half a millennium. A decade ago, Chicago itself was getting ready to repeat the fabled exposition, or even to top it.

But there was trouble from the outset. Environmentalists did not want any further tampering with Lake Michigan's shore line. Communities quickly mobilized to prevent incursions into their settled patterns. Much had changed in the intervening century—a fact made evident in the person of Mayor Harold Washington. A black man presiding over a new White City—that was something the planners of the Columbian Exposition, for all their visionary gifts, could never have foreseen. Mayor Washington had constituencies quite different from those addressed by Mayor Carter Harrison in the 1890s. The White City had been thrown up by the civic muscle and boundless money of the Gilded Age. Chicago's millionaires had income from rail, grain and livestock deals that were hardly disturbed by Chicago's cyclonic Great Fire of 1871.

But there was trouble from the outset. Environmentalists did not want any further tampering with Lake Michigan's shore line. Communities quickly mobilized to prevent incursions into their settled patterns. Much had changed in the intervening century—a fact made evident in the person of Mayor Harold Washington. A black man presiding over a new White City—that was something the planners of the Columbian Exposition, for all their visionary gifts, could never have foreseen. Mayor Washington had constituencies quite different from those addressed by Mayor Carter Harrison in the 1890s. The White City had been thrown up by the civic muscle and boundless money of the Gilded Age. Chicago's millionaires had income from rail, grain and livestock deals that were hardly disturbed by Chicago's cyclonic Great Fire of 1871.

But in the 1980s, planning for a new fair required government money at all levels, and competitors for that money thought there were better uses for it than in throwing a large party on the lake front. Some $10,000,000 was allotted to the planning and selling of the fair, but community groups opposed it every step of the way. This kind of democratic obstructionism was not a problem for the top-down planners of the past.

The objections were not only practical but ideological. Poor Mayor Washington found it hard enough to be civil to Columbus on the annual October holiday, Columbus having been targeted for criticism by black activists. He might not have been the actual discoverer of America, but he certainly was the first European to enslave people in this hemisphere. What would the protests be like if the city began years of construction and disruption to honor a man whose glory had gone under a cloud since the day when his statue drove a white chariot over the White City?

Early in the 1980s, defenders of the fair could brush aside such protests as eccentric. But one of the most ardent lobbyists for the Chicago expo of 1992 now tells me she is glad it failed. The doubts about Columbus have been deepening, country by country, all around the world. Mexico and Spain and the Caribbean countries now have their own activist critics. To some of these, Columbus is not only a slave driver but also the initiator of a holocaust. (Perhaps 8,000,000 native Americans died in the course of Spain's 16th Century conquest of Latin America—most of them from diseases introduced by the conquerors.)

The darkening of Columbus' image is indicated in a touchiness to the language now used by his students. His is no longer an act of discovery but an encounter between different cultures. He no longer finds Indians but native Americans. The quincentenary of his arrival cannot be a celebration but an observance. When the Federal commission called it a jubilee, native-American activist Russell Means objected to the verbal echo of jubilation—and the commission said it meant jubilee in the Biblical sense, as a time of reflection and atonement (Leviticus 25:9-54). Every related exhibit or ceremony is being patrolled by linguistic police. What Theodore Roosevelt described (in four volumes) as The Winning of the West was—as the Smithsonian Institution recently reminded people in a controversial exhibit of Western art—the losing of the American West by its original owners.

For some, this abject need to find the politically correct terminology is more than a nuisance. It is a surrender. Columbus, they say, need not crawl. They remind us that all native Americans were not angels. Many of them fought alongside the Spaniards to defeat their indigenous oppressors. The Aztecs practiced human sacrifice. Columbus brought more than germs to the New World and took back more than gold. To people like Lynne Cheney, handing out grants at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Columbus revisionism picks up where the Vietnam syndrome left off—Columbus is the Lieutenant William Calley of a larger-scale My Lai in America. The anti-Columbians are treated as part of Jeane Kirkpatrick's "blame America first" brigade.

The 1990s certainly do represent a backing away from the 1890s. In that sense, the two Columbian events bracket an era, the American Century. From the Columbian Exposition to the failed Chicago fair, one can trace a decline in both national confidence and self-centeredness.

In 1892, the United States was on the verge of its plunge into imperialism. The conquests of Hawaii, Cuba and the Philippines were about to occur. Millennial apprehensions and the depression of the early 1890s gave way to the optimism of William McKinley's and Theodore Roosevelt's Presidencies. It was this new confidence that impressed Henry Adams, himself an imperialist and a celebrant of war. The White City of the exp o was gestating, without knowing it, the great white fleet of Theodore Roosevelt. It was at a conference during the Chicago fair that Frederick Jackson Turner announced the closing of the American frontier; but the drives into the Caribbean and the Pacific replaced the conquest of native Americans with that of what Rudyard Kipling called other "lesser breeds without the law." This was an overtly racist development. Theodore Roosevelt preached the rescue of Pacific islanders from "Chinafication." Roosevelt's history of the Indians' conquest proclaimed the victory of sturdier blood. The Indians did not even deserve the title connected with their own continent. Roosevelt regularly wrote sentences like, "The Spaniards of Louisiana pursued as a settled policy this plan of inciting the Indians to war against the Americans." The Spaniards, who were here before the British Protestants, are not allowed to be Americans, any more than are the continent's original possessors.

Visitors to the Columbian Exposition would have found signs of racist attitudes everywhere. The city had performances of minstrel shows and "Buffalo Bill" Cody's Wild West Show during the fair, which showed how inferior blacks and Indians were treated by their white lords. What seems funny, in retrospect, was the recruiting of Columbus for this effort. He was, after all, a leader of the Spanish and not an American in Roosevelt's sense—certainly not English-speaking and certainly not Protestant. He was a spokesperson for things Roosevelt considered almost as despicable as the inferior races of the Orient. Columbus, a Catholic and a bit of a mystic, was an enthusiastic supporter of a regime that had just established the Inquisition, seen the election of a Spanish Pope named Borja (Borgia in Italy), expelled Jews, crushed Moslems and was planning to revive a Crusade to conquer Jerusalem. Why was this fellow, of all people, standing on top of the White City of good WASP values?

Columbus had arrived there by a long process of distortion and misreading, symbolized by the popularity in the United States of Washington Irving's biography of the man. Irving, who wrote his book in Spain, had a hearty distaste for the Catholic Church, and he cast Columbus as a secular opponent of ecclesiastical superstition. Here was born the idea that Church officials opposed the voyage of Columbus because they thought the earth was flat. (Irving thought Columbus' journey over the Atlantic somehow demonstrated the sphericity of the earth—an empirical feat not accomplished until Magellan's circumnavigation.) Actually, in Columbus' day, no one of any importance thought the earth was flat. Irving just seized a dramatic way of separating Columbus from his Church.

The real argument Columbus had with the Spanish committee was not over the shape of the earth but over its size. Columbus thought he could reach Cipango (Japan), his real goal, because he underestimated the size of the globe. He told the commission of his sponsors he could sail 2764 miles from the Canaries and arrive at the Orient. That would be a heroic endeavor even if he were right. Luckily for Columbus, there was an unknown land mass less than a third of the way to his target. But for this unforeseeable fact, he was wrong on every significant point he urged on the scholars. And he was not speaking for modern science but out of a medieval mélange of pagan prophecy and Biblical myth (mainly from the apocryphal Second Book of Esdras). What's more, his discoveries drove him further back into myth, rather than out into New World views. His third voyage took him (he thought) to the site of the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis.

The secularization of Columbus involved a de-Hispanifying, since Spain (continued on page 114)Columbus, Go Home(continued from page 108) was so clearly a center of persecuting Christianity in the age of the fanatically pious Isabella. So the followers of Irving stressed Columbus' birth in Genoa—making him the true patron of Italian immigrants to North America rather than of conquistadors in America. Columbus' Italian origin actually let Irving make him a champion of classical antiquity, as opposed to medieval superstitions. At the Chicago exposition, his 14-foot-high statue was placed in a classical four-horse chariot (a quadriga). The absurdity of this approach reached its climax in 1984, when Congress set up the original Federal commission for celebrating the quincentenary—which contained an Italian (Governor Mario Cuomo of New York) but not a single native American. The book that people relied on at this stage was no longer Washington Irving's but Samuel Eliot Morison's, which viewed Columbus as a kind of shrewd Yankee yachtsman steering by the seat of his pants and keeping his secrets to himself, like a laconic skipper out of Newport. Actually, Columbus must have been something of a genius at dead reckoning. He hit the Americas by accident the first time, but he went back, demonstrating great skill in the use of his compass and in estimates of the wind's and the current's effects on his course—not using newer instruments available to him.

The Federal commission was being set up in Washington soon after the Chicago negotiations fell through. There was no chance for community sentiment to be voiced in Reagan's capital. The first chairman of the commission, John Goudie, was a Republican fund raiser in Florida, a Cuban émigré who had made his money in the real-estate boom. Since Cuba was so much a part of the original voyages, and modern Cuba was scheduled to play an important role in the 1992 festivities, it made no sense to have an opponent of Castro in charge of coordinating United States participation with Caribbean countries. When I went to interview Goudie at his Florida office in the summer of 1990, he showed me the shelf of Columbus books from which he was doing his homework. In the line-up of a dozen or so volumes dealing with the 15th Century, there was an odd man out—a book on communism in Cuba. I asked how he expected to get along with the Cuban government, but he saw no more problem here than in dealing with the Indians who were not represented on his commission. Goudie was having a hard time learning the new language of cultural encounter. He began one sentence, "When Columbus discovered ... I mean, bumped into, America."

Goudie, short and tanned and energetic, bounced around his office showing me pictures of Columbus, books about him, photographs of his ships (caravels) being built in replica. His prize exhibit was a large caravel model made of silver. His enthusiasm for the replicas was infectious—he had raised $5,000,000 from Texaco for these ships, which were soon to be launched for a year of shakedown exercises.

"Come to Seville," he urged me with his best promoter's patter. "The king [of Spain] will be there, all the diplomatic corps; you can come to the cocktail party at our consulate. You will meet Columbus scholars from all over the world."

Since I was going to be in Europe that August, I agreed to meet him there. He told me that everything could be arranged through the commission's Washington office.

That office had a woman at the switchboard whose main duty was to inform you that everyone else was absent. The office came briefly to life when Goudie arrived to encourage Congress to sell Government coins as part of the quincentenary celebration, but handling that operation so strained the commission's resources that I could get little information about the activities in Seville. At last, one of my calls was returned. I was told there was no schedule that could be sent to me, but the launching would take place on August the third (the date Columbus left Spain in 1492) and that I could find out everything I needed at the Hotel Alfonso Trece. "Everyone will be there. It's the only decent hotel in town—the only one with a good swimming pool."

On the day before the launching, I could find no one connected with the commission present or registered at the Alfonso Trece—its strolling musicians serenaded empty tables. A newspaper noted that the public would get a chance to look at the caravels that afternoon in Huelva, Seville's port city, so my wife and I rented a car to take us the hour's drive there. A press pass let us in for a close look at the boats, scary in their authentically small scale and minimal furnishings (the originals, crammed with men and livestock, had no space for bunks or galley—one slept or cooked in any temporary niche one could clear). But still, no one from the commission could be found. After asking guards and vendors, I found that a Mr. Goudie was known to be staying in the Huelva hotel, La Luz. I tried, over and over, to call his room from the lobby; but the line was always busy. I went and knocked on his door.

Through the door, he told me he was sleeping, but I could get all the information I needed from Diana Holman back at the Alfonso Trece. Holman, a Washington, D.C., publicist, was there representing Texaco, and she turned out to be very helpful, indeed. She explained that things were all so confused at the last minute that people had been forced to converge directly on Huelva. She would take us there and back in her rented limousine.

The next day, launching day, was lighted like an overexposed movie, as Andalusia always is in summer. It was unbearably hot and the press boat soon ran out of soft drinks. It maneuvered, for the photographers, around the Spanish naval vessel where Goudie and other officials observed the scene. When the caravels moved from the wharf, shamefacedly using their motors, not their sails, private yachts and dinghies flitted about them—one filled with people dressed like Indians greeting the sailors at the wrong end of their voyage. Not everyone in the press boat made notes or took pictures. One elderly woman from Texas had a commission to make a painting of the caravels, and she was studying the ships while a friend showed around sample pictures of the woman's work—none so impressive as the happy faces she had painted on her toenails, ten little children tucked into bed where her feet should be. Another woman, far her junior, drifted about the boat, drawing stares in her scanty attire.

When an old man came up and seemed to claim possession of this young blonde, a correspondent for The Village Voice whispered to me, "Isn't that Tongsun Park?" Sure enough, it was that reputed purchaser of Congress-people from the 1970s. Soon, everyone was asking what brought him here. An American working for the Spanish government told me Park was Goudie's personal guest, one whose presence (concluded on page 190)Columbus, go home(continued from page 114) had already ruffled Spanish sensibilities. Perhaps it was just as well the king had not appeared. (Hardly anyone had, in fact.) Park, had been palmed off on us reporters when it was made clear that he would be an embarrassment on the officials' boat. So he was sequestered, incongruously, in a pack of publicists.

The caravels crawled from Huelva to nearby Palos, the actual site of Columbus' embarkation. (Palos is too silted up to use as a launching area.) When the press boat docked, we were loaded into buses that had nonfunctioning air conditioners and taken to La Rábida, the monastery where Columbus had received much aid and instruction (his patrons, as well as his opponents, were mostly clerics). The talk of Tongsun Park went on as people tried to rehydrate around the refreshment table.

My wife and I were supposed to rejoin Holman and her limousine at La Luz, but when we got there, she asked us to wait in the lobby bar. Park and his popsy were already seated in that jammed and sweltering bar—clearly in exile from upstairs, where white-uniformed naval officers bustled.

With her harried efficiency, Holman crisscrossed the lobby, moving coolly through the humidity, whispering at intervals with Park. He soon disappeared into what we had begun to think of as our limousine and was whisked away, no more to be seen—not that night at the consulate, not beside the Alfonso pool (which was decorated with his popsy). Holman had found us another ride, with the American photographer who had recorded the day's activities for Texaco.

The contract Goudie had drawn up between Texaco and the Spanish government sprang leaks and sank overnight. The Spanish claimed (though Texaco denied) that Goudie gave away rights they would never have granted—e.g., to have the ships fly the Texaco pennant across the Atlantic and into all the ports they would visit. Texaco said it had not been indemnified by private insurers of the ships. When Texaco refused to make its next payment, the commission could not meet its $600,000 in debts to Spain. The commission fell behind on its office rent. The House Census Subcommittee called in the General Accounting Office to audit the commission's books. The investigators found an incredible mess. As they later reported, "the commission kept four sets of books that contained conflicting financial information." A friend of Goudie's had been given the contract for the commission's glossy magazine, Five Hundred. The auditors reported 27 specific irregularities. The subcommittee called in the GAO's criminal investigators, and Goudie was scheduled to testify about his time in office at a November hearing—a session at which the chairman, Thomas Sawyer of Ohio, promised "bizarre" revelations.

Meanwhile, Goudie's private affairs were catching up with him. Florida had lifted his real-estate license for misappropriation of escrow funds ($10,000 of which had been used for Republican Party activities). He was found to be in contempt of court for failing to turn over financial documents. He had not filed income-tax returns for 1986 and 1987. In December 1990, after six years of bungled preparations, Goudie resigned, leaving a discredited and debt-ridden commission behind. The only thing he had really raised money for—the caravels' trip from Spain to the Americas—was now called off.

George Bush called in a friend and former campaign assistant of Jim Baker's, Frank Donatelli, to straighten things out. Donatelli's only connection with Columbus is that he is of Italian descent. But he was the executive director of Young Americans for Freedom in the early 1970s, and he followed Baker into Reagan's White House as the conservative on Baker's staff who was meant to temper charges of Baker's "pragmatism."

Donatelli tried to straighten out the caravel situation. Texaco would not step back into that tangle, but Spain agreed to assume control of the American tour—now reduced from 50 to 18 cities, after a belated departure of the ships in October 1991. This would not leave much time for visiting the Caribbean—the caravels will stay in Puerto Rico until the new year and then will begin their spring tour of the East Coast.

Donatelli also brought the first native American to the commission board—Bill Ray of the Native American Advisory Committee, an early critic of the commission for doing such things as naming its educational grants Columbus Scholarships rather than 1992 Scholarships. The commission claims a new sensitivity to its critics, though it still has on its board Lynne Cheney, who has blocked grants from the NEH to projects not sufficiently reverent to Columbus. The commission remains a product of the Reagan era. Its belated need to raise funds quickly makes it, more than ever, geared to wooing rich people.

The commemoration of Columbus in 1893 redefined the nation. It not only reflected but helped determine the national condition. The same is true of the 1992 observances. The unity that Henry Adams found in Chicago is nowhere evident in this year's activities. Most people blame this on the protesters, on multiculturalism, on the pressure for politically correct attitudes and on the resentment expressed toward Columbus as a "dead white male" speaking only for the colonial and exploitive elements of American history. But the blindness and ineptitude of the Reagan years is also a part of this story. The Administration that threw the most lavish parties for itself—Inaugurations given for and by fat cats—was unable to muster a unifying vision for public affairs, for uniting the various parts of the nation.

This is an era that heralds a new world order to follow the Cold War. In the Cold War, emphasis on the superpower conflict fostered neglect of the Third World at a time when anticolonialism had remade half of the globe and created new nations, new peoples, new troubles and opportunities in regions crucial to the future.

The civil rights movement reflected African experiences. The indigenous peoples' movement led to things like the altered celebration of Australia's quadricentennial in 1977. Most of the world is nonwhite. Yet America, as Senator Paul Simon points out, is growing ever more monolingual, self-absorbed, unaware of what is going on in the Third World. Those who were surprised by or resentful of the new attitudes toward Columbus resemble the Lone Ranger when he tells Tonto, "We're surrounded." A number of Americans, and not only native Americans, were saying, "What do you mean we, white man?" This is not, after all, something that came up all of a sudden. The National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches both warned against any triumphant celebration of the quincentenary. The House of Representatives' resolution for striking commemorative coins required that they celebrate "the discovery of America." Those who think any departure from the bogus, old Columbus of the Washington Irving myth is an internal problem of the United States, a part of the Vietnam syndrome, are proof that blindness to the rest of the world is a requirement made by some forms of patriotism. For the rest of us, the discovery of America is something that is an ongoing task and surprise and blessing. It involves the rediscovery of the world.

the 500th anniversary of the european discovery of america was supposed to be a bash. It's turning out to be a bashing

"Columbus must have been a genius at dead reckoning. He hit the Americas by accident the first time."

"America is growing ever more self-absorbed, unaware of what is going on in the Third World."