Italian Americans did not embrace Columbus because they loved him. They embraced him because the country would not let them in any other way.
That is the deal at the heart of the holiday, and it explains why so much of modern Italian American identity, when it is not decolonized, reads as two ingredients blended together: an invented legend and a set of fascist talking points. The legend was fabricated for admission. The talking points were added later by a regime that needed the same symbol for its own reasons. Both are still doing work today.
The Mob and the Apology
Between 1880 and 1924, more than four million Italians arrived in the United States. They were told they were not white enough. They were hated for their Catholic faith and sometimes killed for it. In March 1891 a mob broke into the Orleans Parish Prison in New Orleans and murdered 11 Italian immigrants after acquittals and a mistrial in the case over the death of a police chief. It remains the largest single mass lynching in US history.
President Benjamin Harrison answered with a 25,000 dollar indemnity to Italy and a Columbus proclamation in 1892. The state had failed to protect these people, so it handed them a hero instead. A community that had just been lynched was invited to celebrate a man whose own career was tribute, enslavement, and a demographic collapse. That is the shape of the trade, and it has not changed in well over a century.
The Machine
The hero was already waiting. The Knights of Columbus was founded in New Haven in 1882 by Father Michael McGivney as a mutual benefit society for working-class and immigrant Catholics, and it was named for Columbus on purpose. Membership offered what the order's own historians describe as respectability and a claim to full citizenship. Columbus was ideal because he was Catholic and, in the Protestant imagination, already American. He was a founding father who happened to share your church.
The assimilation machine was not subtle. Columbus Day as a national observance was built through the National Public School Celebration of 1892, and it arrived carrying the Pledge of Allegiance. Francis Bellamy wrote the pledge for that celebration, pitched it to school officials and Congress, and got Harrison to bless a program that put the flag and the recitation at the center of the day. On October 21, 1892, tens of thousands of schoolchildren recited it together. A holiday for an explorer doubled as a loyalty oath for the children of immigrants.
The Line Worth Crossing
The stakes were legal, not only social. Naturalization law restricted citizenship to "free white persons," and courts spent decades deciding whether Italians qualified. Some Southern Italians were denied on racial grounds. Others were granted. Whiteness was a gray zone, and the homes, the parades, and the statues were how a people argued its way across the line.
Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz counted roughly 150 Columbus statues in the country as of 2020, most of them gifts from the Knights of Columbus and Italian communities. She puts the meaning plainly: for groups once seen as outsiders, Columbus was an avenue to acceptance, a path to whiteness. The Nation's version is blunter still, that Italians mythologized a genocidal explorer to gain access to American whiteness.
None of this required ignorance. It required a trade. The publishers, bankers, and community intermediaries who organized it knew what they were selling. Angelo Noce pushed Colorado into the first state Columbus Day in 1907. Carlo Barsotti raised money from working-class immigrants for New York's Columbus monument in 1892. Both were building a pan-Italian identity that smoothed over the dialects, the regions, and the poverty of the south, then selling it upward to a Protestant elite. Columbus was the product. The people at the bottom paid for the pedestal while the lynchings went into the drawer.
The Fascist Layer and Its Residue
By the time the fascists arrived, the template was set. Mussolini proclaimed Columbus Day in Italy in 1925 and turned the navigator into a slogan for national greatness, folded into the fascist litany of Italian virtues later carved atop the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome. In the United States, Generoso Pope, publisher of the largest Italian-language newspaper in the country, was a fascist propagandist and a member of the Lictor Federation, lobbied for the holiday, and was photographed giving the fascist salute in Rome in 1937. The pro-fascist Columbus Day League and Order Sons of Italy pushed alongside him. Roosevelt issued the first Columbus Day proclamation in 1934, under a resolution Congress passed that year. The day became a federal holiday only in 1968, taking effect in 1971.
The holiday was never purely a fascist project, and honesty requires saying so. Anti-fascist Italian American leaders backed it too, wanting recognition rather than a salute to Il Duce. Fascists and anti-fascists pushed the same day from opposite motives.
But the residue did not wash off. A Columbus statue in Miami was sculpted by one of Mussolini's bodyguards, which tells you every generation has found a use for the man. The organizations that defend the statues today still sell a version of the story in which Columbus is brave, the voyage is courageous, and the criticism is a hateful attack. That is not history. It is the same sales pitch, restocked.
What makes the argument honest rather than cheap is that Italian Americans have always been split on this. Some defend the monuments as symbols of ethnic pride and assimilation. Others, in Philadelphia and New York and San Jose, have testified for removal, in solidarity with Black and Indigenous movements. The people most attached to Columbus are being asked to sit down and let the rest of us, including a great many Italian Americans, tell a truer story.
Sidebar: The Real Migrant Story Is Older Than "Italian American"
The label "Italian American" is a twentieth-century invention. Migration itself is not.
- The first people to reach the Americas crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia between roughly 24,000 and 21,000 years ago and spread south over the following millennia. Every later arrival is a footnote to that.
- Norse sailors reached L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland around 1000 CE, five centuries before Columbus.
- Polynesian voyagers reached the Americas too, most likely the South American coast, though the genetic dating puts their contact somewhere between roughly 1150 and 1430 CE, after the Norse rather than before.
- Enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia in 1619, against their will, at the start of the system that built the country's wealth. English settlers founded Jamestown in 1607, the Dutch founded New Netherland in 1624.
- The first recorded Italian settler, Pietro Cesare Alberti of Venice, arrived in Dutch New Amsterdam in June 1635, just eleven years after the Dutch founded the colony. He lived under Dutch authority. He was not an "Italian American." No such thing existed.
The point is not a scoreboard. It is that the migrant, the traveler, and the displaced person are the human condition, and the ethnic brands we fight over are recent and thin. Columbus was not the first migrant to this hemisphere and he was not the last. He was simply the one a propaganda machine could sell.
The Mutual Aid They Actually Built
The Columbus story leaves out the best thing the immigrants made for themselves. A community that had just been lynched in New Orleans, or was locked out of the trades in South Philadelphia, did not wait for anyone to rescue it. It organized. Historian Michael L. Mullan's study of Abruzzo and Philadelphia documents how the rural poor of central and southern Italy carried a working tradition of self-help across the Atlantic: the società di mutuo soccorso, workers' mutual benefit associations, democratically run, with elected officers, open books, and monthly meetings where the finances were read aloud.
In South Philadelphia the community founded La Società Unione Abruzzese in 1893, which offered health and death benefits along with a place to belong. The Abruzzo Union's Sala Abruzzese at 721 Carpenter Street was somewhere to read a newspaper and talk with people from home. The neighborhood banks did the rest: Banca Pasquale on South Tenth Street, the Banca Abruzzi at Seventh and Carpenter, the Banca dell'Aquila opened in the late 1890s, all of them wiring money back to families in Italy, writing letters in English, arranging steamship tickets, and helping people with their citizenship papers. Within a few blocks you could find a pharmacy, a tailor, an olive-oil shop, a funeral parlor, and an employment office. It was a functioning urban village, built from the bottom up by people usually described as having arrived with nothing but their labor.
This matters because the oldest slur against southern Italians, that they were clannish and incapable of civic life, collapses the moment you open a minute book. Mullan's argument is that these were not primitive arrangements but an advanced network of associations, orphanages, day-care centers, schools, and shelters, an ethic of communal responsibility the emigrants brought with them rather than learned here. Historians had long questioned whether southern Italy's peasants and artisans had the initiative and the communal spirit to build anything at all; the minute books answer the question against the doubters.
But the same institutions that gave the community its spine also drew a line across it. The Philadelphia societies were essentially workers' health insurance, and like any insurer they rationed care. New members waited, usually about six months, before benefits began. Sick pay was capped so no one could draw it indefinitely. Applicants had to pass a physical, and the rules shut out pre-existing sickness. That gate did not arrive with the American city; it traveled from Abruzzo. As early as 1880, in a hill town that sent its people to Philadelphia, the Spoltore Workers Society of Mutual Aid paid out for sickness or disability only when it was "not caused by vice or bad personal habits or a pre-existing sickness."
Read the clause closely. The community defined who counted, and by its own rules the chronically ill, the disabled, and the mentally ill were not part of the deal. The society existed to keep its members on their feet and off the parish rolls, and that mission quietly required members who could stand. Mullan observes that a voluntary association can be understood as a form of social exclusion, a closure around the markers that define the group. The health rules are that insight made concrete: to protect the abled, the sick were moved outside the circle, and it was all done in the language of brotherhood.
It was not an Abruzzo peculiarity. In 1892 the Connecticut Bureau of Labor Statistics found that these societies followed what it called an "invariable rule": no benefits "for any sickness or other disability originating from intemperance, vicious or immoral conduct." A disability was paid for, or refused, according to whether the member could be judged blameless. Illness had to pass a character test, which is another way of saying the sick were sorted into the deserving and the rest, and the sorting protected the society's finances and its respectability at the expense of the people least able to absorb the loss.
The Same Line, Written Into Law
The societies were not the hardest gate in the country. They were enforcing a worthiness test the state was enforcing too, with the force of law behind it. Since 1882, federal immigration law had barred the "convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge." In 1891 Congress swapped "unable" for "likely," so a person could be refused over a future that had not happened yet. The 1903 law barred epileptics. The 1907 law barred "imbeciles" and the "feebleminded," and excluded anyone with a "mental or physical defect" of a kind that "may affect the ability of such alien to earn a living," with inspectors instructed to exclude "any mental abnormality whatever." The question was never what a person had. It was what a person might cost.
Ellis Island made the test a few seconds of looking. Inspectors read scalp, face, neck, hands, gait, and general condition, and chalked a verdict on the shoulder: a letter for a suspected problem, an X inside a circle for definite signs of mental defect. First- and second-class passengers were largely waved through on their wealth; the people in steerage were the ones pulled aside, and suspicion could mean being handed a wooden jigsaw. Officials used the Feature Profile Test to judge mental capacity, and a person who could not assemble it correctly could be turned back as feebleminded. The arithmetic says what the machinery was for: among the people turned away, the share rejected on medical grounds rose from 2 percent in 1898 to 57 percent in 1913 and 69 percent in 1915.
Pennsylvania ran the same logic indoors. The state opened Pennhurst in November 1908 as the Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic, and in 1913 a commission of the legislature declared the people held there unfit for citizenship and a menace to the peace, and recommended permanent custodial care. The state's own sterilization bill, an "Act for the Prevention of Idiocy," was vetoed by Governor Samuel W. Pennypacker in 1905, on the ground that to permit the operation "would be to inflict cruelty upon a helpless class in the community which the state has undertaken to protect." The bill passed the Senate in 1921 and was vetoed again. The surgeries went ahead anyway: roughly 270 sterilizations were performed in Pennsylvania institutions without any legal authority between 1905 and 1931. When the Supreme Court blessed the practice in Buck v. Bell in 1927 with a line about three generations of imbeciles being enough, it was ratifying something the country had already been doing.
This is not a reason to sneer at the mutual aid societies. They were the finest thing the community made, and they did for their members what the state would not do. It is a reason to tell the truth about them, because the honest version carries the same lesson as the Columbus myth, in miniature: a community survives by drawing a line, then builds a story that hides the line. The legend of the selfless brotherhood serves the people inside the circle the way the legend of the brave explorer serves the people pushing to get in. And the line was not a stray cruelty of hard times. The law still permits it: a fraternal benefit society can provide for most of its members and leave some out, so long as the criteria for excluding them are "reasonable," which is the law's word for worthiness. Disability advocates have a phrase for the thing worth building instead, a refusal to leave each other behind. That is what decolonizing our own experience asks of us: to hold both facts at once, the real institutions our ancestors built and the people those institutions left outside the door, and to stop drawing circles that need someone standing outside them.
Remember the Roots, Not the Myth
If the goal is to honor where we came from, Columbus is the wrong end of the story. He belongs to the monarchs and financiers who dispatched him, the same imperial powers that kept southern Italians in feudal poverty and pushed them onto boats in the first place. To celebrate him is to celebrate the people our own ancestors fled.
The better move is already underway. Berkeley replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day in 1992. Cities and states have followed. Congress has not, and in March 2026 a replica of the Baltimore statue toppled in 2020 was installed on the White House grounds, on loan from an Italian American organization and with the administration's blessing, so the fight is not settled.
Replace the day. Keep the pride. The grandparents who left Calabria and Sicily and Naples did not need a fabricated hero to matter, and their descendants do not either. The most respectful way to remember them is to remember them honestly: as migrants in a long line of migrants, and to decolonize the American story they were told to join. That means naming what Columbus did, returning the day to the people he helped dispossess, and building an Italian American identity out of the actual, complicated lives of our ancestors instead of a statue's bronze face.
The deal was always the problem. Admission, bought with a myth, is still a myth. Real roots are sturdier than that, and they do not require us to lie.
A note on process: Thaura, an independent AI assistant, was used for research assistance and source checking; every claim was verified against the cited sources.
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