Columbus Day

Reconceiving Columbus Day

columbus day pictures
Columbus Day at Union Station: D.C. honors Columbus Day with a National Columbus Celebration Association ceremony in front of the Columbus statue at Union Station on Monday. Ambassadors of Italy, Spain and the Bahamas participated in the event, along with members of local and national clubs. (Anna Uhls/The Washington Post)

On this day in 1492, the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria landed at the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek. No? The intensity of positive and negative feelings in Colorado about Columbus Day would make you think that the seminal event had occurred here. Well, in a way, it did.

The New World was “discovered” 1,900 miles to our southeast, but the legal holiday commemorating it happened here. Colorado was the first state to make Columbus Day a legal holiday in 1907; the feds didn’t follow suit until 1971. Denver has the oldest and largest Columbus Day parade in the country. Even if Saturday’s weather chilled this year’s event, Denver’s parade has long been a magnate for pride, protest, and even dirty tricks, like this year’s hoax email that fooled some news outlets to report the parade canceled for funding issues.

I started writing about “legal” holidays on my No Funny Lawyers blog earlier this year. So far I’ve covered Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day. Columbus Day would have been easy to miss as virtually no private employers, and increasingly fewer state and local governments, recognize it. The Columbus Day Monday holiday usually doesn’t register with me until I have to figure out why there is no mail.

So if the legal holiday is a throwaway that risks going away, Denver’s Saturday parade pits culture against culture because of its Columbus focus. Columbus’s voyage was a business venture that took advantage of increasing competition and imperialistic attitudes among European nations. If this Italian had not opened the door to Europe’s colonization of the Americas, another European would have. Exploitation, slavery and disease would have followed just the same. We can’t change how cultures collided 500 years ago, but we don’t have to accept continuing collisions.

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