The Incredible Irony Of MAGA's Columbus Day Obsession

It literally only exists because people were horrible to immigrants.

Oct 13, 2025

If you are reading this, odds are you know that Christopher Columbus was a pretty horrid person. We’ve all been over it 10,000 times, and if somehow you do not know, that information is pretty widely available.

Now, he was a real person who existed, but he’s also a very convenient myth that has long been used to symbolize whatever it is people need him to symbolize at that time. During the Enlightenment, despite his being at least a publicly practicing Catholic (there’s some evidence to suggest he was actually at least ethnically Jewish), the barbarous Columbus was recast a symbol of intellectualism, reason and scientific progress. This myth was solidified in the minds of most people after Washington Irving’s biography of Columbus included the apocryphal story that the purpose of his big trip was to prove to all of the backwards religious people that the earth was not flat, when no one at that time believed the earth was flat. Hell, there are probably more people who believe that now than there were then.

A large part of the reason we celebrate Columbus Day is because Italian immigrants were horribly mistreated, frequently with the excuse of protecting a WASPy American identity or crime prevention. Sound a little bit familiar? They started promoting the idea of celebrating Columbus as a way to assert their right to be here and their history in this country. They created, in a way, their own mythology of the man.

It didn’t become a national holiday, however, until a bunch of Real Americans went a little too far in New Orleans in 1891 and went and lynched 11 Sicilians in the largest recorded mass lynching in American history. The people of New Orleans believed that “the mafia” had killed police chief David Hennessy (who, oddly enough, actually did kill the New Orleans Chief of Detectives — his rival Thomas Devereaux — and was found not guilty by reason of self defense a decade prior). They were outraged when nine of the 19 Sicilians indicted for his murder were found innocent, due to the fact that they had alibis and there was no evidence beyond the fact that before he died, Chief Hennessy said “It was the dagoes,” although when asked if he knew which “dagoes,” he said he didn’t recognize them.

After Hennessy was killed, the city reacted by just beating the shit out of hundreds of immigrants and throwing them in jail, rather arbitrarily.

New Orleans Times-Democrat:

During the day, the patrol van was just answering calls and bringing in its loads of suspects. The little jail was crowded with Sicilians, whose low, receding foreheads, repulsive countenances and slovenly attire proclaimed their brutal nature.

After the acquittals, the most prominent, well-respected men in the community subsequently took out an ad in all the local papers advertising a “mass meeting” at Clay Statue about what actions to take to “remedy the failure of justice,” and to “come prepared for action.” Historically, when people had meetings at Clay Statue, violence was going to be on the table, so people knew what was going on.

The fact is, most Americans reacted to this exactly the way MAGA has reacted to ICE’s mistreatment and abuse of immigrants today. They justified it. The more proper among them, the Henry Cabot Lodges and what have you, would say they didn’t love the way it was done, but that something had to be, what with how terrible and criminally inclined those Italians were.

The New York Times wrote:

Nor can there be any doubt that the mob’s victims were desperate ruffians and murderers. These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cutthroat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are to us a pest without mitigations. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they. Our own murderers are men of feeling and nobility compared to them. These men of the Mafia killed Chief Hennessy in circumstances of peculiar atrocity. That assassination as a menace to the peace and good order of the city of New-Orleans and to every one of its inhabitants.

Even future President Teddy Roosevelt described it as “rather a good thing.”

This was the general feeling across the United States until the Italian government stepped in and started a diplomatic crisis, starting with pulling their ambassador from the United States. While none of the murderers were ever prosecuted, the United States did pay $25,000 in reparations to the families of the victims — which would be about $900,000 today — and, ultimately, created the holiday of Columbus Day.

Columbus isn’t the only part of history that gets muddled. I’m often put in an awkward situation when people tell me, “You know, Italians were not always white.” This is not true, and it’s not true about the Irish, either. We were always white, and the problem with that narrative is that it casts us as a group that pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and attained whiteness through assimilation and hard work. That may be partly true (the assimilation part), but that would not have happened if we were not white to begin with. “Hard work” would not have been as likely to make us money had we not been white to begin with.

I don’t think those $25,000 reparations would have happened either. I certainly doubt that any of the approximately 4,743 Black people who were lynched between 1882 and 1968 were paid $25,000 by the US government.

The reason I take so much issue with this narrative is because it actually tells far too pretty a story about American bigotry and discrimination. It suggests that, on some level, those who hated us were fair-minded and willing to accept us as part of their group as long as we proved ourselves worthy, and that other groups could have done this as well, but failed. That is not the story.

The story is that we came over, and Americans did what they did every time a new ethnic group has shown up here. They wailed and cried about how we were going to destroy their precious monoculture, how we were all criminals, political radicals and terrorists, that we were strange and superstitious and could never be real Americans because of our great loyalty to the pope and the fact that we lived in neighborhoods full of other Italians and didn’t give up our culture entirely. That we were poor and dirty and not to be trusted.

The primary factor in our assimilation was the mere fact that we lost our accents and (mostly) moved to the suburbs. We were able to do this, because while there was prejudice, there was no systemic racism perpetrated against us. There were no laws barring us from marrying other white people, there were no laws determining where we could sit or go to the bathroom or swim or do anything. As much as American men hated to see women swooning over “pink powder puff” Valentino, a dang foreigner who failed to represent the traditional masculinity of a Douglas Fairbanks, the Hays code did not prohibit him from kissing Anglo-Saxon ladies onscreen. These things, ultimately, are what mattered. The fact that there were people who did not consider us white (and still are a lot of people who do not consider us white) did not matter as much as that did.

Because what these people really fear, above all, are those who are different and those who are poor. Hell, if you’ll notice, we’re still really the only white ethnic group that people mock or have any remaining prejudices about, and that is because many of us have hung on to our culture as much as we have. It’s always the fear of what is different.

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I’d like to know exactly who it is that MAGA Americans think they would be in this scenario. Frankly, it’s a little surprising that they would want to celebrate a holiday that is technically rooted in trying to make up for having been horrible and violent to immigrants. A holiday that was campaigned for largely because people were so desperate to stop being treated the way they are treating modern-day immigrants to our country.

Donald Trump can say that he wants to celebrate Columbus Day because he “loves Italians,” but it’s clear that what he and the rest of MAGAland want out of Columbus Day is to see a genocidal maniac venerated and whitewashed, for everyone to pretend he didn’t do what we know damn well he did. To see him become a hero in spite of having massacred and enslaved native populations, sold nine- and 10-year-old girls into sex slavery, of having tortured the hell out of his own people, and of having not been so much a “product of his time” and “just a guy who did what explorers did,” as someone who horrified practically every person he ever came in contact with who would later write about him.

This is what they are all hoping will happen to them once they are dead and gone. But the only way to truly ensure one will not be remembered for doing horrific things is by not doing them in the first place.

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