The War on History

The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past

Jarrett Stepman

• Publisher: Regnery Gateway
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781621578093
• eBook ISBN: 9781621579076
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The War on Our History Confederate memorials toppled... Columbus statues attacked with red paint. They started with slave-owning Confederate generals, but they're not stopping there. The vandals are only pretending to care about the character of particular American heroes. In reality, they hate what those heroes represent: the truths asserted in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Constitution. And they are bent on taking America down and replacing our free society with a socialist utopia. All that stands in their way is Americans' reverence for our history of freedom. Which is why that history simply has to go. Now, Jarrett Stepman, editor at The Daily Signal and host of Right Side of History, exposes the true aims of the war on our history:

• The war on America: World history is full of conquests and suffering indigenous peoples. Why target Christopher Columbus? What they really want to tear down is America.
• The war on Thanksgiving: World history is full of colonists. Why target the Pilgrims? What they really want to tear down is American freedom and prosperity.
• The war on the Founding: World history is full of slavery. Why target Thomas Jefferson? What they really want to tear down are the rights endowed by our Creator.
• The war on the common man: World history is full of victorious generals and populist politicians. Why target Andrew Jackson? What they really want to tear down is democracy.
• The war on the South: World history is full of civil strife. Why target Confederate heroes like Robert E. Lee? What they really want to tear down is respect for America's past and the reconciliation that renewed our Union.
• The war on patriotism: World history is full of national pride. Why target Teddy Roosevelt? What they really want to tear down is the idea of American greatness.
• The war on the American century: World history is full of bloody wars. What they really want to tear down is America's defeat of totalitarianism.

If America is to survive this assault, we must rally to the defense of our illustrious history. The War on History is the battle plan.

CHAPTER 1 The War on America

Christopher Columbus.…is justly admired as a brilliant navigator, a fearless man of action, a visionary who opened the eyes of an older world to an entirely new one. Above all, he personifies a view of the world that many see as quintessentially American: not merely optimistic, but scornful of the very notion of despair.

—Ronald Reagan, Columbus Day, 1981¹

A well-crafted bronze statue of Christopher Columbus, hand on the helm, sword at his waist, looks out over Columbus Square in Queens, New York. The statue, next to the Astoria Boulevard subway station, was created by Italian sculptor Angelo Racioppi, funded in part by a local Italian heritage organization interested in preserving the Italian-born Columbus’ legacy, and put in place in 1941. It depicts Columbus as a dashing figure with a defiant look in his eyes and a daring zeal in his posture. Curiously, a plaque on the monument says it was dedicated in 1937. It turns out the statue had been hidden in a basement for a few years in the dark days of the World War II scrap metal shortage and during some local political squabbling.² But the city unveiled it on Columbus Day, 1941, at an event that was attended by over five thousand people, including New York Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, who shared Columbus’s Italian heritage.³

Though the Depression-era Italian-American community in New York City was poor, they nevertheless thought it appropriate to sacrifice for the legacy of Columbus, whom they considered a great man. The marker with the misleading “1937” date lays out what this community and so many other Americans believed for centuries: “But for Columbus, there would be no America.”

Past Americans found a way to expand their heroic pantheon, to include more heroes instead of tearing down others. This, in fact, is why many Columbus statues were erected in the first place. In the first half of the twentieth century, American citizens were eager to celebrate a man who not only undeniably contributed to the eventual creation of our country but also was a particular source of pride for assimilating Italian-Americans, who had been on the receiving end of discrimination for a generation. Erecting new statues of Christopher Columbus did not necessitate bulldozing statues of, for instance, Samuel B. Morse, whose image still stands in Central Park. Like Columbus, the famed inventor of the telegraph changed the world. Unfortunately, he also wrote angry, nativist screeds against Catholic immigrants. Nobody called for his statue to be removed and replaced with the one of Columbus. America had room for many heroes. It was a more tolerant age.

Much has changed in just over half a century. The city of San Jose, California, recently decided that any public display of pride in Christopher Columbus is simply unacceptable. Egged on by the San Jose Brown Berets, a radical Chicano ethno-nationalist group, the San Jose City Council voted in early 2018 to remove Columbus’s statue from city hall. The statue had been placed there by an Italian heritage organization in 1958. According to a local news report, the statue was set to come down because “activists repeatedly denounced the explorer, whose conquests in the Caribbean led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people, and declared him not statue-worthy.”⁴

Like New York in the 1930s, San Jose in 2018 had a mayor of Italian heritage, but this one wasn’t keen on the most famous Italian in world history. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, who said that he believed his own grandfather had contributed to the construction of the statue, meekly condoned the decision, saying, “Columbus never landed in the Alviso Marina. So there is no policy basis for keeping a statue of somebody who was not from San Jose in City Hall.” Perhaps the state of Washington should abandon its name because George Washington never set foot there. It is particularly sad that a city with a Spanish name, a direct product of the Spanish colonization of the New World, finds its own origins worthy of destruction.

At the time of the city council’s decision, not a single local museum would take the statue.⁵ To add to the absurdity, a statue to the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl stands nearby in downtown San Jose. The snake-shaped statue, which locals have long complained about as an eyesore, was allegedly placed there for the sake of “cultural balance.”⁶ Even if one believes that Columbus was a brutal, genocidal monster, there is a bizarre double standard at work in taking down his statue for that reason while keeping a tribute to the religion of the Aztecs, who subjugated local tribes in Central America and used their members as human sacrifices hundreds of years before Columbus and the Spanish arrived in the Americas.

San Jose is just one of many cities that have done their best to erase Columbus and any recognition of his exploits and contributions to our civilization. Even New York, the city that once worked so hard to hand out tributes to Columbus, is now getting rid of its accolades for the explorer.

“Don’t honor genocide, take it down.” These were the words scrawled across the stone base of the Queens Columbus monument in 2017. What was once a symbol of a community’s love and pride had, little more than a half-century later, been marked as a symbol of hate by another mayor of Italian heritage and targeted for unlawful vandalism. The Queens monument was one of numerous Columbus statues defaced and vandalized in the region after New York Mayor Bill de Blasio created a commission to review all “symbols of hate” in the city, including the famed fourteen-foot Columbus statue atop the seventy-six-foot column in his namesake Columbus Circle.⁷ The monument’s size and public prominence and an around-the-clock armed guard likely saved it serious attacks in 2017, though one vandal was able to splash nail polish on the hands of a Columbus figure at the monument’s base.⁸ Lesser-known statues weren’t so lucky. Numerous other tributes to Columbus around the city have been defaced, and all are facing harsh public criticism.

A two-foot-tall Columbus sculpture in Columbus Memorial Park in Yonkers was beheaded and smashed with a blunt instrument and its shattered remains strewn about the area.⁹ A more-than-century-old statue in Central Park was covered in paint. The vandals wrote, “Hate will not be tolerated” and “#Something’s coming” and covered the statue’s hands with red paint. These incidents were not limited to New York.

Two statues in Connecticut were splashed with red paint on the same night, just before Columbus Day.¹⁰ The oldest Columbus monument in the country and perhaps the world—constructed over two centuries ago—was bludgeoned and damaged at a park in Baltimore, Maryland.¹¹ The brazen vandals even proudly posted a video of the incident on YouTube.

“Christopher Columbus symbolizes the initial invasion of European capitalism into the Western Hemisphere,” said the film’s narrator. “Columbus initiated a centuries-old wave of terrorism, murder, genocide, rape, slavery, ecological degradation, and capitalist exploitation of labor in the Americas. That Columbian wave of destruction continues on the backs of Indigenous, African-Americans, and Brown people.”¹²

Besides the protest of a few concerned citizens and Italian heritage groups upset with the obliteration of history, there has been little public defense of the explorer, nor widespread calls to restore his reputation. Native American advocacy organizations and left-wing activists, armed with the works of revisionist historians, have been more or less successful in selling their view of Columbus as a genocidal monster to the American public. The narrative that Columbus was an evil monster, worthy only of scorn, has become a mundane truth to many Americans.

It’s a stunning fall from grace for a great American hero. Columbus’s remarkable westward journey from Europe to the New World is being consigned to the dustbin of history. This all happened within a generation. But why?

Replacing Columbus Day

The first serious modern challenge to the Columbus legacy began in 1970s with the calls to end the observance of Columbus Day, officially established as a national holiday by Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt in 1937, or to replace it with “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” The push began in Berkeley, California, a city well known for its radical politics, in the run-up to the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s voyage. The Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission was planning for replicas of Columbus-era ships to sail into San Francisco Bay,¹³ but local activists and Bay Area leaders flew into a rage and worked to eradicate the Columbus holiday before the ships were set to show up in port. Berkeley Mayor Loni Hancock called celebrations of Columbus “Eurocentric” and claimed that they ignored the “brutal realities of the colonization of indigenous peoples.”¹⁴ The ships never arrived, and the Berkeley City Council replaced Columbus Day in 1992. Since then, Berkeley has been joined by Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, and numerous other cities across the country in avoiding Columbus Day celebrations or commemorations.¹⁵

At first, the movement to wipe out Columbus seemed to be limited only to small, radically liberal urban enclaves, but it has grown in scope, and, like so many progressive efforts, it was injected with a new vigor after the election of President Donald Trump. Big cities and a number of smaller localities have successfully purged Columbus by official means, but the pace of the war on Columbus has been too slow for some. As we have seen, public declarations against Columbus statues have encouraged radical groups and individuals to take to vandalism in New York and elsewhere.

Still, there have been “54 counties, districts, cities, incorporated towns, boroughs, villages and census designated places” named after Columbus in the United States alone.¹⁶ This list, of course, includes the District of Columbia, the US capital city. While it might seem reasonable to most Americans to celebrate both Columbus and American Indians, this compromise is entirely unacceptable to the anti-Columbus crusaders. Chrissie Castro, for instance, vice chairwoman of the Los Angeles City-County Native American Indian Commission, said, after her city decided to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, that simply celebrating two separate holidays wasn’t good enough. It was more important to “dismantle a state-sponsored celebration of genocide of indigenous peoples,” and having an Indigenous Peoples’ celebration on any other day would be a “further injustice.”¹⁷

What is never explained is why so-called indigenous peoples are worthy of celebration if Columbus is not. Pre-Columbian civilizations from Mexico to Peru were nearly all responsible for brutal violence on a large scale long before Columbus arrived on the shores of the New World—including human sacrifices, even of children, sometimes by tearing out the victim’s still-beating heart.¹⁸

Why is Columbus beyond the pale when the indigenous people who committed such atrocities on a wide scale are worthy of celebration? What crimes did Columbus commit that are so heinous that they justify toppling his statues from our monuments and his heroism from our history?

While there were Columbus detractors almost from the moment he set foot in the Americas, until recently, the misdeeds he was accused of tended to be seen in the broader context of his times. While the Discoverer of America had flaws and while the discovery of America undoubtedly brought terrible suffering to indigenous peoples, Columbus was still a great man, worthy of praise for his enterprise and courage and for his unique role in the spread of Western civilization to the Western hemisphere.

To comprehend the complete reputational reversal, it is important to understand the esteem he once had, not just in the United States, but throughout the Americas. In an earlier time, the life and achievements of Columbus were discussed in almost every classroom, his exploits celebrated all over the world. From the Founding generation onward, Americans paid special tribute to Columbus as the original American: a symbol of the transition from Old World to New World. The United States, in its infancy, was searching for heroes distinct from those of Great Britain and Europe. They rediscovered Columbus and paid homage to the fact that his discoveries made possible the bold new nation that bloomed in 1776.

A Hero for the New World

In 1787, American writer and poet Joel Barlow wrote patriotic verse about Columbus to celebrate his new country’s connection to the famed explorer. Barlow eventually expanded his Vision of Columbus into the epic—and many say turgid—book of poems titled The Columbiad. In the intervening years, Barlow’s verse has been written off by literary critics, but in his day, these patriotic poems sold fantastically well and were more or less well received by the American public.

A more impressive accolade than Barlow’s was written by Phillis Wheatley, a fourteen-year-old black poet and former slave. In 1775, in a poem addressed to George Washington, she referred to “Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils” and Columbia’s triumph over the British.

Washington loved the ode and made it public, bringing her work instant fame. The “Columbia” of Wheatley’s poem was an allegorical figure representing the United States, guiding Washington and the revolutionary patriots to victory over the British.¹⁹ The subject and Washington’s enjoyment of Wheatley’s poem created an explosion of interest in Columbus. “Soon Columbia and Columbus were appearing in songs, poems, and essays in newspapers around the colonies.…” Edward Burmila, a professor at Bradley University explains. “Columbus went from a minor figure in the history of European exploration to an American hero almost overnight.”²⁰ In Columbus, Americans had found a man who could represent a new nation whose people were trying to draw sharp distinctions between America and the Old World—Europe, and especially Great Britain.

Barlow, Wheatley, and countless others contributed to the widespread embrace of Columbus, but no one did more to cement the Italian explorer’s place in the American hall of heroes than Washington Irving, one of the great American writers in the early days of the Republic. When he traveled to Spain in 1826, Irving was given a chance to translate the newly published journals of Columbus into English.²¹ The journals were somewhat technical, but Irving was convinced by a friend that he should write a popular book about the explorer.²² The result ended up being one of the proudest achievements of Irving’s illustrious career.²³ He believed he had faithfully presented a thoroughly American hero to the world in a light never seen before. The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus deservedly became the definitive account of Columbus for generations.

The Return of Old Prejudice

While most nineteenth-century Americans had warm feelings toward Columbus, he had his critics even then. Criticism of the Discoverer of America sprang primarily from two sources: left-wing ideological movements and ethno-nationalist anti-Italian sentiment. Some of the most savage attacks on Columbus came from Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, the founders of Communism, whose broadsides against the Italian explorer would be echoed by Marxist historian Howard Zinn a century later.²⁴ Lamenting Columbus’s discovery of America as the birth of capitalism, Engels identified Columbus’s colonization of the New World as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The War on America
• Chapter 2: The War on Thanksgiving
• Chapter 3: The War on the Founding
• Chapter 4: The War on the Common Man
• Chapter 5: The War on the Union
• Chapter 6: The War on Patriotism
• Chapter 7: The War on the American Century
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright