This Day in History: Today is Columbus Day. Christopher Columbus was once considered a hero, a visionary, but now he is often depicted as a greedy, genocidal racist and slave driver. The past 16 months have seen numerous statues of Columbus felled all over America. This modern hatred for Columbus may have started with Howard Zinn's book "The People’s History of the United States." In his chapter on Columbus, Zinn plagiarized the work of Hans Koning, whose book Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth was seen as "ham-fisted leftist propaganda with little scholarly value when it was released in the 1970s. Both books use ellipses to take passages from Columbus’ logs completely out of context to make him looking like a greedy, bloodthirsty monster. Specialists familiar with Columbus’ private writings have noted that Zinn was purposely being deceptive." Eric Striker
"Zinn’s highly selective quotations from Columbus’s log are designed to give the impression that Columbus had no concern for the Indians’ spiritual or physical well-being—that the explorer was motivated only by a 'frenzy for money.' But literally the explorer’s first concern—the hope that he expressed in the initial comment about the natives in his log—was for the Indians’ freedom and their eternal salvation: 'I want the natives to develop a friendly attitude toward us because I know that they are a people who can be made free and converted to our Holy Faith more by love than by force.'" Source
Brown University professor Carol Delaney posits that Columbus motives towards the natives was entirely Christian and Delaney is surprised by the sinister reputation he now has. Columbus, according to Delaney, was kind to Indians and hanged Spaniards who mistreated them. The vast majority of the natives who died in the years after Columbus succumbed to communicable diseases inadvertently transmitted by the Europeans rather than from any intentional act on the part of Columbus, his men or the settlers.
Before Zinn and Koning, another group hated Columbus. "In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan engaged in an assault on Italians and Catholics. The KKK opposed both Christopher Columbus and the holiday established in his honor." Source
There is also a great story of the Egg of Columbus. It is said that Christopher Columbus was told that finding a new trade route was inevitable and no great accomplishment, so he challenged his critics to make an egg stand on its tip. After his challengers gave up, Columbus does it himself by tapping the egg on the table to flatten its tip. The story is often referred to when discussing creativity, that anything can be done by anyone with the right set of skills; however, not everyone knows how to do it.
"In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it." Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
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