These melting pot moments have a really important place in American history overall. Immigrating a little after, but also around the same time as the Irish, were the Italians. But there was a huge backlash (as there always seems to be) against immigrants in America. “For most of American history, anyone not Anglo-Saxon fell somewhere on a descending scale of human ‘pollution.’ […] … the immigrants arriving from southern and eastern Europe, the ‘scum and offscouring,’ as a former Virginia governor put it, newcomers who purportedly brought crime and disease and polluted the bloodlines of America’s original white stock.”1
“In 1891, a mob of about 20,000 New Orleans residents lynch 11 Italian Americans who have been incarcerated in a New Orleans jail. And when that happens, there’s actually an outcry from the Italian ambassador to America and from the Italian government. And in office at the time is Benjamin Harrison.”2 Harrison ends up hosting the original Columbus Day as a one-off. But after this, there is a “continuing recurrence of local celebrations of Columbus is in the early 20th century”, but “the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, especially in the North really hits Catholic communities very hard, Catholic and immigrant communities. Because the KKK in the 1920s focuses on immigrants as well as on Black Americans and on bootleggers, by the way as well.”3
It will be Franklin Delano Roosevelt that institutes Columbus Day as a national holiday (not a federal holiday) in 1934. The Knights of Columbus “increasingly begin to pressure the federal government to go ahead and recognize the importance of Italian Americans and Catholic Americans in society.”4 And Roosevelt, being from New York, and trying to firm up his hold on politics at the time, declares October 12th to be that national holiday.
To continue reading, please head over to my Substack newsletter, Foxtrot Firefly’s Research Report, where you can subscribe to get updates in your inbox!
Where Did Columbus Day Come From?