National Review Online
Monday, October 13, 2025
We applaud the Trump White House for its resounding
proclamation on the occasion of Columbus Day, a full-throated endorsement of
the holiday and a “pledge to reclaim [Columbus’s] extraordinary legacy of
faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have
sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory.”
The White House correctly celebrates the noble courage,
entrepreneurial ambition, religious zeal, and daring that impelled figures like
Christopher Columbus to take on treacherous global journeys in the Age of
Exploration. These early settlements ensured the triumph of Western
civilization in the Western hemisphere, bringing the legacy of ancient Greece,
Rome, and Jerusalem to the lands from Ivujivik, Quebec, to Tierra del Fuego,
from Manhattan Island to the Aleutians.
Columbus Day was founded as a conscious way of
integrating a great wave of Italian immigrants and their American descendants
into the American story. It acknowledged that in many ways the settlement of
these lands was not only a product of the English genius and the Enlightenment
but also a whole-of-civilization effort from Europe.
The Biden White House justified the conflation of
Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day as an attempt at “healing the wrongs
of the past” while also still acknowledging the courage of Italians. This was
boneheaded and wrong for several reasons. The great tragedy that befell native
peoples in the Americas after the Columbian exchange was largely accidental,
and biologically inevitable. An advanced civilization brought its germs to
these shores. It was primarily plague and illness, not the politics or malice
of settler colonialism that put native culture and society in peril. The
technological superiority of the European cultures also immediately sent the
surviving natives into a period of great cultural crisis and adaptation.
While there is much to lament in the history that passed
between Americans and the native population of the American continent, and much
also to celebrate, paving over Columbus Day with an Indigenous People’s Day
sent a specific message against European exploration, settlement, and
missionary work. It is part and parcel of a view that ultimately regrets the
founding of the first European settlements in America, and even the government
of America itself. It also reduces the complex and sometimes inspiring stories
of America’s native peoples into one flattened tale of oppression and
victimhood, which is insulting. Native peoples deserve better.
We celebrate Columbus Day because we are grateful for
what has been built here, and what could only have been built here by the waves
of European settlers who came to this land to spread the Gospel, practice
religion freely, find trading routes, and start great commercial endeavors.
This great inheritance is what caused G. K. Chesterton to recognize America as
having the “soul of a church,” while the rest of the world marvels at our
enterprising ambition. “I have come to believe that this is a mighty continent
which was hitherto unknown,” Columbus recorded in his journal. In those words
was not just the truth of the day but a prophecy.
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