When I was a youngster, we always celebrated Columbus Day at school, and we were told a simple story that mentioned only the good things about Columbus' voyage to the Americas. Now, there is another simple story that mentions only the bad things.
Last week, on the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landing, there were undoubtedly many fewer classroom celebrations than there used to be. Many people had been told that October 12 should be a day of shame rather than rejoicing, and many teachers probably hesitated to mark the day because they feared that anything they did would be controversial.
That's too bad. The "discovery" of America and its settlement by Europeans was not simply the glorious adventure it was once pictured to be. But neither was it an act of genocide or ecocide. Our ideal is that people should live together in peace and harmony, but history shows us that few societies have ever lived up to it -- and that goes for the Incas and Aztecs and other indigenous peoples of the Americas, as well as for the Europeans who conquered them.
In "The Columbus Controversy" (American Educator, Spring 1992), Stephan Thernstrom, a historian at Harvard, says that descriptions of the European conquest of the Americas in black-and-white terms are no more reliable than Stalinist histories of the U.S. And he sets out to redress the balance by answering six basic questions about the conquest.
1. Who came first? Was it really Columbus or was it one of the many other candidates who have been put forward? As Thernstrom points out, this doesn't matter because it was Columbus' voyage that made the difference: "Unlike the voyages of his predecessors, real and imagined, his voyage set in motion a process of enormous historical change" in Europe as well as America.
2. Were the Europeans discoverers or invaders? Thernstrom readily admits that "invader" is a more accurate description. But if we insist that the conquest of the Western Hemisphere was an act of irredeemable evil, we have to say the same thing about the Norman conquest of England or the expansion of the Islamic empire. Whether we like it or not, Thernstrom says, much of history "is the story of what the strong have done to the weak -- and of shifts in the bases of power that undermine the position of the once-strong and lead to their decline and fall." And it's not as though the inhabitants of the Americas didn't do the same kinds of things to each other -- their history also features wars and the brutal subjugation of conquered peoples. So, Thernstrom says, there is simply no basis for seeing "the clash between the Indians and the invading Europeans in stark good and evil terms -- the peaceful innocents versus the murderous and avaricious Spaniards."
3. How many natives were there? Historians used to think the Americas were sparsely populated before the Europeans arrived, but some now believe that as many as 100 million people lived here - a third more than lived in Europe at the time. This makes the loss of life among the inhabitants in the years following 1492 even more shocking. The population dropped by at least one third and perhaps as much as 90 percent. This is not because the Europeans were mass murderers -- though they were cruel enough -- but because the inhabitants lacked immunity to the diseases that the Europeans unknowingly brought with them: Smallpox, typhoid fever, mumps, measles and whooping cough were deadly to people who had never been exposed to them. But though this was an incredible tragedy, it was not genocide. The invaders, as Thernstrom says, "can hardly be blamed for not knowing what medical science would discover about disease centuries later."
4. How were a few hundred invaders able to conquer these millions of people? Firearms, as Thernstrom points out, were not enough to compensate for the difference in numbers, but the rapid spread of disease demoralized the natives -- especially since the Europeans did not fall ill themselves. Moreover, the conquered people within those societies were ready to help the Europeans, supposing -- mistakenly as it turned out -- that they were liberators.
5. Was Columbus responsible for slavery? The need for labor in North America gave slave traders a whole new market, but slavery, and even enslaving Africans, had been going on for centuries. Furthermore, while 12 million Africans were being shipped as slaves to the Americas, 14 million were being shipped eastward, mostly to Islamic countries. But if the Christian West did not invent slavery, it did originate the idea that slavery was immoral and must be abolished.
6. Was Columbus guilty of ecocide? Thernstrom says there is little basis for asserting that native societies lived in harmony with nature while the European invaders violated it. Small, primitive societies did little to alter nature, but the large, highly developed societies like the Incas' built cities and roads, just like their European counterparts.
The people who want to replace the fairy tales about our past with balanced history are doing us all a service. But much of the anti-Columbus sentiment we've been hearing is something quite different. It owes more to political correctness that wishes to find only evil in our European heritage than to a desire to set the record straight. Real history is more complicated than that, as Thernstrom' s article shows us.
An earlier version of "The Columbus Controversy" appeared in The American School Board Journal (October 1991).