The Lynching That Gave Us Columbus Day
In Mark Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, published in 1894, a telegram from the fictional town of Dawson’s Landing is printed in a newspaper in St. Louis. It reads: “Judge Driscoll, an old and respected citizen, was assassinated here about midnight by a profligate Italian nobleman or barber, on account of a quarrel growing out of the recent election. The assassin will probably be lynched.”
Hatred for Italians in the United States was such that Twain could blithely predict an extrajudicial killing of an Italian accused of murder as the outcome more likely than a trial by jury. Twain was not being provocative: he was inspired by true events. On March 14, 1891, eleven Italians were lynched in New Orleans. It was the largest mass lynching in the American South. It took place the day after nine of the men had been acquitted in the trial of the murder of the New Orleans police chief David Hennessy. (Two of the lynching victims were not on trial for any crime.) Newspapers, after the deed, reported with delight that “a wild mob numbered by the thousands avenge[d] the murder of Chief Hennessy,” informing the public that “the wretched Sicilian band [had been] butchered.”[1]
The men were not a “band” of anything. They were working-class immigrants. They were employed as dockworkers, cobblers, fruit vendors, and tinsmiths. One was a laborer on a plantation. They were ordinary immigrants who had arrived in the United States to build a better life for themselves and their families.
Salacious newspaper accounts, however, vilified them as monsters worthy of mob violence. Newspaper stories echoed the mainstream belief that Italians were savages. Protestant Americans believed the Italians were natural-born criminals who were more loyal to the Pope than to the United States. Protestant Americans viewed Italians — olive-skinned immigrants from Italy’s south who fled turmoil after the unification of Italy (the Risorgimento) in 1871 — as worthy of being lynched with impunity as if they were African Americans.[2] It was during this hostile climate that a new word was introduced into American English. It remains associated with Italians and Italian Americans to this day: “Mafia.”[3]
Twain’s novel dispenses with legal niceties in the nonchalant expectation that an Italian accused of a crime would be lynched.
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Forty percent of all the people who have been lynched in the United States have not been blacks.[4] This explains the approval the lynching of these European men in New Orleans elicited at that time. This was an era, after all, when a lynching was a public spectacle. Lynchings were often announced beforehand in local newspapers. Advertisements indicated the time and place where the public was invited to attend a rally and to join a mob. In the case of these doomed Italians, one local paper, The Times-Democrat, ran an advertisement on March 14, 1891, that read, in part, “All good citizens are invited to attend a mass meeting . . . to remedy the failure of justice.”
Newspaper editorials encouraged these killings. The Daily States advocated mob action to “remedy” the “failure” of “justice” against the Italians: “Rise, people of New Orleans! Alien hands of oath-bound assassins have set the blot of a martyr’s blood upon your vaunted civilization! Your laws, in the very Temple of Justice, have been bought off, and suborners have caused to be turned loose upon your streets the midnight murderers of David C. Hennessy, in whose premature grave the very majesty of our American law lies buried with his mangled corpse — the corpse of him who in life was the representative, the conservator of your peace and dignity.”[5]
The Italian Consul in New Orleans at the time, Pasquale Corte, was terrified: he well understood the blood of innocents tainted American culture as it forged ahead. He contacted Louisiana Governor Francis Nicholls asking for the intervention of law enforcement to prevent mob violence. Nicholls, who was scheduled to leave office the following spring, declined to take action. He told Corte that it was matter for “New Orleans city government officials.” Corte then contacted New Orleans Mayor Joseph Shakspeare. The mayor, with hours slipping by until the public “invitation” for a mob to assemble and take things into their own hands, did not meet with the Italian diplomat.[6]
Corte was dejected. He had seen this play out before. He knew that the silence of the governor and mayor would be interpreted as permission; the police would stand by and watch without intervening, complicit.[7]
Corte was right. The next morning, the “good citizens” responded to the call. Thousands assembled at the statue of Henry Clay in New Orleans near the prison, riled themselves up, and the mob rushed down the streets to lynch the men. Two days later, on March 16, 1891, the New York Times published an editorial: “The New Orleans Affair.” The northern newspaper approved: “Nor can there be any doubt that the mob’s victims were desperate ruffians and murderers. These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are to us a pest without mitigation. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they. Our own murderers are men of feeling and nobility compared to them. These men of the Mafia killed Chief Hennessy. . . . Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans to stay the issue of a new license to continue its bloody practices.”
To Corte, this was the final outrage: Italy had to respond. His patience for the lawless nature of American society had run out. Italy, on his recommendation, demanded the U.S. arrest and prosecute the mob leaders and provide compensation to the victims’ families. The administration of Benjamin Harrison refused. This was a domestic matter and had nothing to do with Italy, the White House explained. The Italian government withdrew its ambassador to Washington, D.C., in protest. The U.S. then withdrew its diplomatic representatives in Rome.
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Harrison, however, was troubled by the incident. He wanted to be remembered for rehabilitating U.S. foreign policy — especially after both the Mexican-American and Civil wars had tarnished American prestige in the world. The United States was seen as an aggressor, invading a neighbor. It was held in contempt, a nation of untamed people who had engaged in fratricide over slavery. Harrison was a man noted for his personal integrity and sense of decency, considering this was a time of scandal and unscrupulous Robber Barons and corrupt politicians. He knew that the lynching in New Orleans was morally wrong. He knew Italians faced bigotry and institutionalized discrimination. He knew they faced mob violence throughout the land. He wanted to make things right — and in the process show the world a different side of America.
He settled on two courses of action. First, he agreed to pay each family of the lynched Italians $25,000, a substantial sum in 1891.[8] Then he did something remarkable: he decided to use the office of the president to acknowledge the contributions of Italians and Italian Americans to the United States.
An American president, for the first time, would affirm officially the rightful place of Italians in the fabric of American life, turning a new page in how Protestant America saw Catholic immigrants. No longer, he wanted to make clear, could the racist editors at the New York Times approve of the lynching of anyone anywhere in the United States without rebuke.
But how could this second objective be accomplished?
He realized nothing would affirm the place of Italians better than a Presidential Proclamation to honor a prominent Italian whose contributions were unquestioned.
But who would that be?
His staff compiled a list of notable Italians: Dante Alighieri, Michelangelo Buonarotti, Christopher Columbus, Galileo Galilei, Marco Polo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Amerigo Vespucci, among other luminaries. Harrison decided on Christopher Columbus.
Why Columbus?
Look at the calendar. The year was 1892. That marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the islands that today comprise the Bahamas.
What a fortuitous coincidence for Columbus!
When Italian officials were informed of this extraordinary mea culpa from the United States, they were elated. Italy, following in the steps of France after the Civil War, announced it would give the United States a statue of Christopher Columbus to be delivered to New York for this celebratory occasion.
Italian Americans were overwhelmed. In New York, they assembled at the southwest entrance of Central Park, at the intersection of Eight Avenue, Central Park West, Broadway, and 59th Street (Central Park South) to hold rallies. This intersection was then known as “The Circle.” City officials announced that it would be renamed Columbus Circle, the place where the statue of Christopher Columbus would be placed for all time once it arrived.
This is how the New York Herald reported the unveiling of the statue on October 13, 1892: “Italians, the countrymen and descendants of Columbus, gave yesterday to the metropolis of that New World which he discovered his statue crowning a graceful and enduring monument to his memory. A vast multitude filled all the space in the great circle at Eighth avenue and Fifty-ninth street — a multitude typical in its cosmopolitan nature of the great city, and a young girl, the American daughter of Italian born parents, drew the cords that revealed the glorious work of art and sealed a new bond of friendship between the land of her ancestors and the land of her birth.”
It would have been a thrill to be in New York that day.
President Harrison’s intention was for “Columbus Day” to be a one-time holiday. There was popular acclamation for an annual observance, however. That’s why it became a national holiday: Columbus Day as a bold affirmation of the dignity of Italian identity in the United States. Over the almost thirteen decades that it has been observed, it has evolved into an expression of Italian American pride and has, really, very little to do with the man who sailed the ocean blue.
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In Pudd’nhead Wilson, two Italian brothers, Luigi and Angelo Capello, answer Widow Cooper’s advertisement offering rooms to let. They write to her explaining they are “Italians by birth” and they seek accommodations for two. When she gets the letter, Widow Cooper is thrilled; these will be her first paying lodgers. This is the exchange she has with her daughter, Rowena, when she shares the good news:
“Italians! How romantic! Just think, Ma — there’s never been one in this town, and everybody will be dying to see them, and they’re all ours! Think of that!”
“Yes, I reckon they’ll make a grand stir.”
“Oh, indeed they will. The whole town will be on its head!”
Harrison understood that bigotry is informed by ignorance; people simply fear those they do not know. That’s human nature. He also knew that institutional racism and discrimination were matters of policy, public and private alike. That’s also human nature.
And how human nature endures: Italian Americans still suffer bigotry in the United States. The sight of demonstrators attacking Christopher Columbus statues — falsely assuming the statues were raised in approval of the excesses of the colonialism European powers exacted on the indigenous peoples of this continent — is itself an act of bigotry against Italian Americans. This is the reason New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, an Italian American, is enraged over calls to take down the monument at Columbus Circle: it is a request the ignorant make.
This should not surprise, of course. Americans have always been suspicious of learning and the learned, a quiddity Richard Hofstadter documents well in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Indeed, there’s a perverse American pride in brandishing one’s ignorance: “Don’t know much about history / Don’t know much biology,” Sam Cooke sang well into the twentieth century.
A more insidious bigotry against Italians, on the other hand, is institutional. Consider the eleven Italians lynched. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, colloquially referred to as the “Lynching Museum,” has, as policy, decided to exclude any person in the United States who was lynched if that person was not an African American. When I contacted the Equal Justice Initiative on this discriminatory policy, Evan Milligan replied: “Within our Memorial and Museum, we highlight the impact of racial terror lynching on African Americans killed by groups of two or more white Americans between 1877 and 1950. We don’t claim that our spaces speak to every individual lynched on American soil, every ethnic group targeted by this violence, or even every African American targeted by racial terrorism.”[9]
This is disingenuous. If a memorial brands itself as a “national” anything it’s inconceivable that it could exclude entire categories of American citizens. If it does, then this is obfuscation. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., includes everyone. The “National Memorial for Peace and Justice,” on the other hand, is only concerned with one category of victims. In so doing, it occludes the truth, presenting the false narrative that only African Americans were lynched in the United States when the truth is that just about everyone was lynched, including white abolitionists.
The exclusion of these Italian lynching victims in a “national” museum, in 2020, is itself a form of racism. It is also evidence that institutional bigotry against Italian Americans continues.
Righting historic wrongs takes time, of course. It took New Orleans 128 years to apologize. It was only in 2019 that Mayor LaToya Cantrell issued an official Proclamation of Apology to the Italian American community: “What happened to those 11 Italians, it was wrong, and the city owes them and their descendants a formal apology. … At this late date, we cannot give justice. But we can be intentional and deliberate about what we do going forward.”[10]
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As our sensibilities have changed in the first half of the twenty-first century, esteem for Columbus has diminished. He is seen in a more critical light, one that many believe does not merit societal recognition in pubic monuments throughout the country. That’s fine. Societies evolve and they have a right to reevaluate their past.
Rather than lynching Columbus and destroying his statues, however, there’s another alternative, one that would honor Harrison’s original intentions.
Colorado approached the issue of honoring the past with contemporary sensibilities in an admirable way: Cabrini Day replaced Columbus Day. Frances Xavier Cabrini, known as Mother Cabrini, was an Italian nun sent to the United States to help Italians struggling in their adopted land. Indeed, hatred for Italians was such that Pope Leo XIII found it necessary to send them a woman who would become a saint. Suffice it to say that Mother Cabrini is credited with performing miracles in her work to mitigate bigotry against Italians and all immigrants in this country. Pope Pius XII canonized her on July 7, 1946.
That’s what it takes, it seems, to overcome racial animus in these United States: divine intervention.
This essay is for Giovanni Fortini.
[1] The Italian men lynched were Antonio Bagnetto, James Caruso, Loreto Comitis, Rocco Geraci, Joseph P. Macheca, Antonio Marchesi, Pietro Monasterio, Emmanuele Polizzi, Frank Romero, Antonio Scaffidi, and Charles Traina.
[2] As late as 1910, for instance, two Italians, accused of the murder of an accountant at a cigar company in Tampa, Florida, were lynched with no consequence for the men who carried out this murder. See Lucconi, Stefano. “Tampa’s 1910 Lynching: The Italian-American Perspective and Its Implications.” The Florida Historical Quarterly 88, no. 1 (2009): 30–53.
[3] Here are some resources: Kendall, John. “Who Killa de Chief.” Louisiana Historical Quarterly, vol. 22 (1939): 492–530; Richard Gambino. Vendetta: A True Story of the Worst Lynching in American History. New York: Doubleday, 1977; and Luciano J. Iorizzo and Salvatore Mondello. The Italian Americans. New York: Cambria Press, 1971.
[4] After African Americans, Hispanics are the group most often targeted. Chinese, Native Americans, and whites have also been lynched.
[5] Tom Smith. The Crescent City Lynchings: The Murder of Chief Hennessy, the New Orleans “Mafia” Trials, and the Parish Prison Mob. Lanham, MD: Lyons Press, 2007.
[6] Joseph Shakspeare ran for a third term in 1892, but was defeated by John Fitzpatrick, who benefited from the Italian American vote.
[7] It was not uncommon for law enforcement to participate — and direct the mob — during a lynching.
[8] The value of $25,000 in 1891 approximates $705,000 in 2020.
[9] Email communication dated August 29, 2018.
[10] “New Orleans Apologizes for the 1891 Lynching of Italian-Americans,” Brigit Katz, Smithsonianmag.com, April 15, 2019.
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