Restoring the reputation of Christopher Columbus

October 13, 2003, By Michael Neal

A teacher at my son's high school compares Christopher Columbus to Adolf Hitler. An anthropologist at Macalester College writes that Columbus "launched one of the greatest waves of genocide known in history." In Denver, a group called Transform Columbus Day protests an annual parade held in Columbus' honor, saying the event is "hateful and divisive."

Revisionist history is flourishing. Sadly, children are hearing a biased story about the explorer whose "discovery" of America we supposedly celebrate today.

Here are the facts. Adolf Hitler is responsible for a modern-day war that caused 61 million deaths. Within three years after Columbus landed at Hispaniola on Oct. 13, 1492, about one-third of the native population, estimated at 300,000, were dead from disease or violence. Using worst-case statistics, some experts speculate that 5 million
Native Americans were killed in the Caribbean from 1492 to 1502.

It is ludicrous to compare Columbus, the NASA astronaut of his age, to a man who tried to wipe Jews off the face of the earth. It is irresponsible for historians to apply their contemporary values to Columbus' acts of conquest. He was not the first to engage in imperialistic aggression. He was simply the first European to do so in the Americas. Up until that moment in history, empire-building through battle was the story of the globe. Consider the Mongols, the Turks, the Huns, the Muslim expansionists, the Christian Crusaders who came before Columbus. Even in America, imperial aggression was commonplace. The Aztecs of central Mexico expanded territory and power by vanquishing adjacent empires through intimidation and human sacrifice until the time of Spanish colonization. During a single festival month at the end of the 15th century, the Aztecs killed 100,000 slaves and prisoners of war. Columbus' own words make clear: His plan wasn't to conduct ethnic cleansing as some now describe it. His plan was to find a trade route to the Asia-India corridor. To the day he died, he insisted he had found it and "never changed his mind," writes the historian William Manchester.

In "Columbus and the Age of Discovery," the fabulous book that accompanied a PBS documentary series by the same name, Zvi Dor-Ner writes, "Christopher Columbus changed the world. He took his world, the world of the late Middle Ages, and set it on its way to becoming the place we inhabit today." That's the historic context students need to hear, not derogatory statements likening his achievement to the Holocaust.

In the book "Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong?" published by the Fordham Institute, the authors argue that politically-correct educators, and the students they train, no longer seek to impart knowledge but redress political grievances via the curriculum. That explains the effort to associate Columbus with one of the world's most infamous villains. Destroy his reputation and the foundation for the American story crumbles. "A classroom focus upon content-based history education is, in the minds of the theorists, woefully inadequate," write James Leming, Lucien Ellington and Kathleen Porter. "They advocate using the public school classroom as a forum to promote the notion that there must be redress now for injustices that whites perpetrated, in some cases, centuries ago." As a history teacher myself, I find the Columbus story more mesmerizing than any Indiana Jones tale and am saddened that some teachers would gloss over it rather than wade into the controversy. On a recent test, here's what one of my eighth-grade students said about Columbus: "Christopher Columbus' discovery changed the course of history forever. Not only was it the discovery of an unknown world, it started the end and beginning of many civilizations. The Columbian Exchange spread animals, plants but also disease. The diseases, like mumps, measles, chicken pox and typhus, killed off a huge number of native Americans. When the Spanish started to settle America, they began to ship over Africans as slaves because the natives, who had served as slaves, were dying out."

In a nutshell, that's why we celebrate Columbus Day. Not because he was a perfect man who respected the rights of indigenous peoples, but because -- warts and all -- he changed the course of history forever.

Neal is a teacher at St. Richard's School in Indianapolis and adjunct scholar and columnist for the Indiana Policy Review Foundation.

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