Columbus Day, 2025

The amount of propaganda these days on official government websites is astonishing. I would have only expected it from authoritarian regimes - well the US is one now.

A little background on "Columbus Day". It was not a celebration. It was basically a demand by the Italian government after 11 Italian-Americans were lynched in New Orleans, basically for being "dirty immigrants". Some things never change.

From: How Italians Became ‘White’. -- Vicious bigotry, reluctant acceptance: an American story. NYT [0]

> President Harrison would have ignored the New Orleans carnage had the victims been black. But the Italian government made that impossible. It broke off diplomatic relations and demanded an indemnity that the Harrison administration paid. Harrison even called on Congress in his 1891 State of the Union to protect foreign nationals — though not black Americans — from mob violence.

> Harrison’s Columbus Day proclamation in 1892 opened the door for Italian-Americans to write themselves into the American origin story, in a fashion that piled myth upon myth. As the historian Danielle Battisti shows in “Whom We Shall Welcome,” they rewrote history by casting Columbus as “the first immigrant” — even though he never set foot in North America and never immigrated anywhere (except possibly to Spain), and even though the United States did not exist as a nation during his 15th-century voyage.

> The New Orleans lynching solidified a defamatory view of Italians generally, and Sicilians in particular, as irredeemable criminals who represented a danger to the nation. The influential anti-immigrant racist Representative Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, soon to join the United States Senate, quickly appropriated the event. He argued that a lack of confidence in juries, not mob violence, had been the real problem in New Orleans. “Lawlessness and lynching are evil things,” he wrote, “but a popular belief that juries cannot be trusted is even worse.”

> Facts aside, Lodge argued, beliefs about immigrants were in themselves sufficient to warrant higher barriers to immigration. Congress ratified that notion during the 1920s, curtailing Italian immigration on racial grounds, even though Italians were legally white, with all of the rights whiteness entailed. Italian-Americans labored in the campaign that overturned racist immigration restrictions in 1965

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opinion/colum...

Presidential slop.