Discovering Columbus -- The Changes In How We See Columbus And His Legacy Sheds As Much Light On US, As It Does On Columbus

For centuries, Christopher Columbus had a secure place in the pantheon of heroes.

The Admiral of the Ocean Seas. The Discoverer. The Navigator. He was the larger-than-life figure who braved the unknown to open up a New World.

But today, on the eve of the quincentennial of his historic landfall at San Salvador, an event that undeniably changed the world and the course of history, the popular image of Columbus is undergoing a dramatic transformation. After centuries as a mythic figure, Columbus is becoming mortal once more. He has become a less-than-perfect figure with human failings and, therefore, subject to the judgments of other mortals.

What's changed?

Certainly Columbus hasn't. He hasn't done anything in the past five centuries that could change our opinion of him. No great troves of Columbus letters have surfaced. The Columbus log from his first voyage - a holy grail for Columbus scholars - remains missing.

What has changed is us.

We, as a nation, have changed. The very make-up of the country is vastly different. The way we view our heroes has changed. The way our heroes are assessed and the people who are doing the assessing have changed.

The changes in how we see Columbus and his legacy shed as much light on us as they do on Columbus.

John Noble Wilford wrote in "The Mysterious History of Columbus: An Exploration of the Man, the Myth, the Legacy," that Columbus is "a barometer of our self-confidence and complacency, our hopes and aspirations, our faith in progress and the capacity of humans to create a more just society."

A look at the treatment of Columbus throughout history, shows that's the way it has always been.

Christopher Columbus' death on May 20, 1506, went unnoticed in much of Spain. For the next 300 years, before he made his big comeback, Columbus mostly languished in obscurity.

Why did the man who opened up another world fade so quickly? In short, events overtook him.

Like Mikhail Gorbachev, Columbus was the one destined to hold the door while others flooded in. In the end, both men were swallowed by the ensuing tide.

The world Columbus left behind had little time to mourn or honor him. New and major events were taking place in the Americas, including Cortez's spectacular conquest of the Aztec empire and Pizarro's subjugation of the Incas. They were the ones who sent back the galleons laden with gold.

Italian historian Gianni Granzotto, in his biography "Christopher Columbus: The Dream and the Obsession," said other factors contributed to Columbus' fade.

"Columbus, a moody silent man with no real ties of friendship, was never a popular figure," Granzotto wrote. "It was easier to hate him than to love him; there is no such thing as a hero that is not loved. Thus his myth crumbled fast, until it vanished altogether."

Columbus also had powerful enemies. In his later years, he fell into disfavor with King Ferdinand as he pressed for his share in the harvests from the New World. Rumors besmirched his name and belittled the significance of his journey.

The testimonies of Columbus' supporters, meanwhile, remained confined to forgotten manuscripts. No one knew of the ships' logs until the documents of an early Columbus biographer were published in the late 19th century. No one knew much about Columbus because no one knew he had written anything.

The Enlightenment, the philosophical movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that emphasized the dignity of mankind, also didn't do much for Columbus' reputation - although it did begin to bring him back from obscurity.

For many of the Enlightenment philosophers, America and the treatment of the natives represented a problem of conscience, Granzotto said.

Cornelius DePauw, a Massachusetts industrialist turned philosopher, said in 1768 - more than 200 years before the current revisionist assessment - that "the discovery of the New World has been the most disastrous event in the history of mankind."

DePauw was decrying the resurgence of slavery, a practice Columbus brought with him to the New World.

In 1792, on the 300th anniversary, the French Academy asked the question: Has the discovery of America been helpful or harmful to humankind? The winner of the essay contest concluded that America's political and economic effects on Europe were positive, but her moral effect was "dramatically destructive."

IT WAS in the newly born United States that Columbus fared best.

The new nation was hungry for heroes, and in its anti-British mood, Columbus was a convenient figure to embrace.

In the same year that the French Academy posed its question, members of the Tammany Society, also known as the Columbian Order, in New York City gathered to honor Columbus. Boston and other cities also held celebrations.

In this period, Columbus, a devout Catholic whose explorations were driven as much by a desire to find new converts as the desire to find gold, became secularized. He was transformed and transmuted into the national icon, Columbia.

The national capital was named the District of Columbia, and there were those who wanted the entire country named Columbia.

IT WAS THE START of a long love affair, during which Columbus was repeatedly reshaped to meet the needs of the times.

In 1828, Washington Irving published the first American biography of Columbus, stressing Columbus' Italian roots and the ingratitude of the Spanish monarchs.

"It was a time where heroes were much in vogue in this country, so Washington Irving depicted Columbus as the great Liberator," said Dauril Alden, a University of Washington history professor. "But it was the early national period, a time of hero-making. We had just fought and defeated the British in the War of 1812 and we were conquering the frontier."

THE TIDE AGAINST Columbus also started to turn in Europe.

Spain's Phillip VII had every document concerning Columbus' voyages and discoveries collected. This massive scholarly undertaking turned up Columbus' correspondence with the king and Queen Isabella, his reports, letters, remnants of his log, and the accounts of admiring contemporaries.

These new documents did much to dispel, once and for all, the debates about who really discovered the New World and helped to paint a more sympathetic figure.

There was support in the Catholic church to have Columbus canonized. Proponents argued that his discovery of a new world brought millions to the Christian faith.

Beatification proceedings started in 1866. Several popes over the next three decades supported the idea. But because Columbus had a mistress and had enslaved natives, hopes of his becoming the New World's first saint ultimately sank.

His star, however, continued to rise. In the United States, the millions of immigrants who came after the Civil War adopted him as an ethnic hero. Catholics who faced discrimination from Protestants chose Columbus as their hero to affirm their own Americanism.

THE WORLDWIDE ADORATION of Columbus peaked in 1892, on the 400th anniversary of his landing at San Salvador.

The biggest party was thrown in the United States, which had a yearlong commemoration. In 1893, the Columbian Exhibition and World's Fair, a jubilee supported by federal monies, was held in Chicago and attracted millions of visitors from all over the world.

"In 1892, the United States was on the verge of its plunge into imperialism," historian Garry Wills wrote. "The conquest 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."

Columbus, who expanded Spain's empire, became the national mascot and role model.

There were a few voices of dissent. In "Christopher Columbus, and How he Received and Imparted the Spirit of Discovery," Justin Winson wrote about Columbus' flaws and mistreatment of the natives. But such cries were lost amid the applause.

By this time the process of turning Columbus into a secular and non-Hispanic figure was so complete that the leaders in the United States were able to invoke him as a symbol and model for the country even as it prepared to do battle with Spain, in whose name Columbus claimed the New World.

In June 1892, Congress adopted a resolution to observe the anniversary on Oct. 21. On Sept. 30, 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared Oct. 12 as a national holiday. Most Latin American nations later followed suit.

THE HIGH REGARD for Columbus spilled over into the next century.

He entered the national consciousness through children's rhymes ("In fourteen hundred ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue . . .), fictionalized biographies and movies. He made a cameo appearance in no fewer than two George Gershwin pop standards.

Challenges to the Columbus legend usually came in the form of contradictory claims about who was the first to arrive here.

A Taiwanese professor claimed a Chinese monk set foot in America about 458 A.D. The Irish say it was St. Brendan who discovered North America. Others argued that Phoenicians, blown off course off the coast of Africa, beat Columbus.

Yet even though most historians agree that Norsemen most likely were the first Europeans, Columbus' sheen didn't dim. What made his voyage significant was that it led to a permanent linkage between the two worlds.

Today, the very question of who was first seems obsolete, as Native Americans protest the notion that an inhabited continent could be "discovered." The sensitivity to the language was an early indication in the shift in sensibilities.

As recently as a decade ago, Chicago was preparing for a sequel to the highly successful bash it threw nearly 100 years ago. But what should have been an even grander celebration on the half-millennium of Columbus' journey never quite happened. Critics took much of the wind from the sails of the planned celebration.

Blemishes in Columbus' record proved too glaring to overlook. Columbus the near-saint and liberator was soon painted as Columbus the tyrant and enslaver.

In 1990, historian Hans Koning published an article in The New York Times headlined, "Don't Celebrate 1492 - Mourn It," part of start of a rising tide of unfavorable re-examinations of Columbus' record.

In the piece, Koning attacked Columbus' record as governor of Hispaniola and the push to find the gold, which between 1492 and 1500 led to the death of half the island's native population, usually estimated from 125,000 to a half-million.

Kirkpatrick Sale, in his controversial book "The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy," placed the estimate at 8 million people - or 99 percent of the population.

Even among children's books in which Columbus maintains his heroic standing, there are hints of the disastrous aftermath of the encounter between old and new worlds.

Michael Dorris, who with his wife, novelist Louise Erdrich, last year wrote the bestselling novel "The Crown of Columbus," has also written a children's book about a brother and sister who lived on the island at the time of Columbus' arrival.

It ends with an ominous excerpt from Columbus' diary in which the explorer notes the natives he met would make good servants.

THE RUSH OF condemnations and the wide range of misdeed for which Columbus is being blamed have led to calls for a more balanced assessment.

Alden, the UW historian, is among those who say the criticisms have gone too far.

"You have to put the man in the context of his time," said Alden. "A lot of the criticism that has come out has been completely unhistorical. We need to judge Columbus by the values of his time rather than our own times, see what his options were, not the options that we wished that he had."

Dorris, who spent years researching Columbus for his novel, said he remains an enigmatic figure.

"I think it's too easy to say that one person was responsible for what happened here," said Dorris, who is a part Native American. "What was responsible was a world view that was prevalent in Europe for a long time, of being the center of the world of the universe. Columbus was an agent; he was not the initiator."

But the debate over whether he was a good guy or a bad guy obscures the real issue: What does this reassessment say about us?

A hundred years ago, Columbus was embraced by the European immigrants, especially the Italians, who viewed him as a native son, and the Irish, who wanted a Catholic hero. But the country has become even more diverse, and those from countries with histories of colonial subjugation are less likely to warm to Columbus.

That change in demographics is reflected in the change in attitude.

In the past 30 years, the voices of groups often ignored have started to be heard and recognized.

In short, the diversity that exists today - in contrast with the relative homogeneity of the country a hundred years ago - no longer allows the entire nation to agree on its heroes.

"Maybe we've begun to acknowledge our diversity with more candor," said Dorris. "It makes sense that there's a readjustment in ownership of the country. If the majority of the country no longer shares the same heritage, then it's going to evolve into something that reflects the facts."

We also have become a country less likely to adopt a single national myth.

"Some of our myths have proved to be so defective," Alden said. "I don't think Columbus works as a mythical figure. I don't think he was ever an appropriate mythical hero. He certainly is not today and I'm dubious that he will be in the future."

The way we view heroes also has changed.

"I think it's a pretty clear-eyed approach," Dorris said. "We don't as a nation necessarily think it's patriotic or feel we must be patriotic to the extent of looking blindly at people that our grade school teachers have told us were heroes. I think it's a very healthy attitude to question the authenticity of things that have been presented to you as facts because life is simply more complicated than that."

Since the quadcentennial, the United States has gone through two world wars and become the most powerful country in the world. It has also gone through trying periods of disappointment and disillusionment.

Today, few people are in the mood to party. "We live in a time of great uncertainty," said Alden. "I don't think people today are confident about anything. We're rudderless."

And although Columbus was a guiding light in the past, there are few who believe he can help us chart our current course.