...John Pintard and Washington Irving
also promoted another patron saint for Tammany Hall and for America. Christopher
Columbus. Now there’s a Thanksgiving football for ya. Columbus. Pintard
literally wanted to canonize him. A little later Irving wrote a multivolume
hagiography that helped cement the explorer’s huge place in America’s celestial
firmament. He was mythologized. He was presented much in the same spirit as one
might glorify Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, with a martyrdom
narrative about how he pursued his vision in spite of the doubts of all others.
The reality is that in 1492 most educated people including the rulers of
countries knew that the world was spherical and thus it was theoretically
possible to get to Asia by going west. What was not known was what hazards lay
along the way. There could have been dragons. So someone had to go and
literally test the waters. Turned out to be Columbus. His willingness to head
into a hostile unknown made him easy for writers and politicians to associate
with all those who were continuing to explore the western wilderness in the 19th century. And the fact that he was Italian, not English, made him a special hero
to immigrants.
Today Columbus is widely thought of as an architect of
genocide and harbinger of the end of indigenous rule of the American continent,
a man who killed, tortured and enslaved thousands. If you haven’t gotten the
memo about that, look it up. It is documented and settled history. But at the
time of which I speak, the 19th century, it was not widely known and
if it were, many would not have cared. And so Columbus was widely honored.
King’s College became Columbia University. The brand new American capital was
placed in the District of Columbia. Later came Columbus Circle, Columbus
Avenue, Columbus Ohio, the Knights of Columbus. This all climaxed with the
World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, a huge world’s fair intended to
commemorate the 400th anniversary of 1492. It was at that fair that
historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the American frontier was now
closed, as the native American tribes had all been defeated.
In
1992 on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage, I wrote a
satirical burlesque about that problematic pioneer. It earned me a McDowell
Fellowship but I didn’t get to produce it until a decade later in 2002 in a
pop-up venue right on 42nd Street. This was thanks to the generosity of a member a
New York real estate dynasty whose name I won’t say but begins with D, and
whose uncle once put on a woman’s dress and chopped somebody’s head off, then
confessed to it on national television while urinating. The more things change
the more they stay the same. It was thrilling to be in this venue, right on the
Deuce, down the block and across the street from where Hubert’s Dime Museum had
closed three decades earlier, ending a style of showmanship that had been a New
York City staple since the time of P.T. Barnum.
Mine was a Swiftian satire on revisionist history in
which Columbus was a woman who spoke with a vaudeville Italian dialect
patterned after Chico Marx. I conceived of it as a drag role, but in the end it
was played by a woman, a former member of Charles Ludlam’s RidiculousTheatrical Company, whose father was a famous realist painter from Pittsburgh,
and a friend of Andy Warhol’s. But I digress. You have to if you want to
name-drop with my career. Anyway back when it was still Fort Duquesne,
Pittsburgh had been ground zero for the French and Indian War, which as we’ve
said, vanquished the fromage-o-philes from our continent, the first
prerequisite for opening up the west for American expansion. Everything in
America can be tied to the native inhabitants of this continent. It’s an
enlightening exercise. You should try it some time. At any rate, I wrote my
play to mark the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage, just
as I wrote the current piece to observe the 400th anniversary of the so-called
First Thanksgiving. And I learned to peg things to major anniversaries by being
the p.r. man for the New-York Historical Society.
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