Their goal was achieved in 1937, under the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for whom Catholics tended to vote.

There was a lot of broader Catholic-American support. The movement for Columbus Day was not strictly or even mainly Italian American, contrary to stereotypes.

It was at the beginning of intense immigration from foreign-seeming Catholic populations in Southern and Eastern Europe as well as flows from the Philippines, joining considerable Irish, Latinx, German and French Catholics already here and still coming. forces had largely completed the military conquest of Native Peoples in the lower 48 states. This was a time when Indigenous populations in the United States were reaching their catastrophic nadir, and when U.S. We can use that date as a convenient indicator of when some Catholics became keenly interested in Columbus as their symbol for belonging in America. The Knights of Columbus, the Roman Catholic-American fraternal organization, was founded in 1882. Members of a religious minority-19th-century Roman Catholics-in the face of palpable anti-Catholic sentiment, seized on Columbus as they staked out a claim to belonging. It remains an expression of the desires of late 19th century American Catholics, most of them immigrants or the children of immigrants, for an honorable place in the American past. Part of the reason we have this holiday is quite understandable.

Of all these folks whom we commemorate, Columbus alone was not in any way of “The People of the United States.” So it’s a good question, objectively, as to how he received a holiday in his honor in this nation-to which he did not belong. Ten of them are clearly dates of commemoration-we remember together as a nation: Martin Luther King Jr., presidents Lincoln and Washington, those who died in war, the meaning of independence, those who labor, the ending of slavery and Columbus. With the addition of Juneteenth this year, there are now 12 federal holidays in the United States.

He said it’s time to end the holiday and to take seriously the full humanity of Indigenous people. Gregory Dowd, the Helen Hornbeck Tanner Collegiate Professor of History and American Culture, is an expert on Native American and early American history.

Craig alanson columbus day series