The holiday reveals many of the most troubling excesses of identity politics.
Honor to my Italian-American mother’s memory—her maiden name was Guida, and her parents were immigrants from southern Italy who never learned to speak English. Yet I won’t be observing Columbus Day this coming Monday. In fact, my interest in it faded long ago. Once a symbol of Italian-American pride and the Genoese navigator credited with “discovering” the New World, for many years the day has come to stand for the more negative sides of identity politics, on both its supporters and its critics.
Whatever purposes it may have served politically and culturally in the past, Columbus Day now serves as an annual stage for grievances about real or imagined slights spanning generations, even centuries. We should reduce that tendency in today’s America—especially from groups that are prospering, like Italian Americans—while also acknowledging our failures, past and present, to live up to ideals of pluralism, tolerance, and unity.
As you may recall, in 2021 President Joe Biden didn’t exactly erase or downgrade Columbus Day, but he did declare Indigenous Peoples Day to be observed on the same date, “giving the federal holiday celebrating Christopher Columbus a more pronounced emphasis on honoring Native peoples.” Last year, President Donald Trump criticized the “left-wing arsonists” who highlight the explorer’s brutal historical record and issued a White House statement declaring, “our Nation will now abide by a simple truth: Christopher Columbus was a true American hero.”
If this all sounds like familiar TV satire or a popular meme, that’s because The Sopranos mined it for all it was worth during its 1999–2007 run. As I noted upon the death of series star James Gandolfini in 2013, the entire show can be read profitably as a meditation on the end of ethnic America, at least as ethnicity was understood in the 20th century. The mob boss at the center of the drama, Tony Soprano, understands better than anyone that the narratives that worked for his grandparents, his parents, and his own generation no longer make sense in a country that has moved beyond rigid, essentialist notions of race and ethnicity. The arc of The Sopranos spans from the moment the census first introduced a multiracial category to the election of the nation’s first Black president.
The Sopranos’ interest in post-racial identity explicitly intersects with Columbus Day celebrations and protests in a fourth-season episode (2002), which presents a surprisingly funny yet deeply probing look at Italian-American identity.
In one scene, the gangster Tony Soprano and his wife Carmela confront their son A.J., who is quoting from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States:
Carmela: His history teacher, Mr. Cushman, is telling your son that if Columbus were alive today, he’d be on trial for crimes against humanity, like Milosevic in Europe.
Tony: Your teacher said that?
A.J.: It’s not just my teacher. It’s the truth. It’s in my history book.
Tony: So you actually read a book, and it’s nonsense… He discovered America, that is what he did. He was a brave Italian explorer, and in this house Christopher Columbus is a hero. End of story.
Yet the plot quickly becomes even more tangled. Tony and his associates come to learn of a Columbus Day protest organized by Native Americans, which spurs anger and confusion alike. Furio—a member of Tony’s crew who is actually from Naples—asks a sequence of questions that reveal the tensions inside the discussion.
Furio: I thought Columbus was the hero of America.
Ralphie: It’s these Indians and the commie scum. They want to paint Columbus as a slave trader rather than an explorer…
Silvio: …Let me tell you what this is. It’s anti-Italian discrimination. Columbus Day is a day of Italian pride. It’s our holiday, and they want to take it away.
Furio: To hell with them! But I never did like Columbus much anyway. In Naples, a lot of people aren’t thrilled with him either, since he came from Genoa….The north always had the money and the power. They punished the south for centuries. Even today, they sniff at us, like we’re peasants (spits). I hate the north!
Silvio organizes what becomes a violent counterprotest that he ends up missing because he’s playing blackjack at an Indian casino, of all places. “I would’ve been there, but I forgot this was a Monday,” he offers as a weak excuse, and then has a revealing exchange about Italian-American identity with Tony.
Silvio: [Italian] people suffered.
Tony: Did they? Maybe the feds had it worse?
Silvio: My grandparents were spat on for being from Calabria.
Tony: Let me ask you this: all the good things you’ve got in life—did they come from Calabria? Did they come to you because you’re Calabrese? The answer is no… You didn’t get all this stuff because you’re Italian. You got it because you’re you—because you’re smart, because you’re whatever you are. Where does our self-esteem come from? It isn’t from Columbus or The Godfather or Chef Boyardee.
Silvio: We still have to tiptoe around the Indians, though, don’t we? We can’t name our teams the Braves or the Tomahawks…
It’s true that the origins of Columbus Day as a national holiday are steeped in some of the most ugly facets of American racism. The earliest local celebrations in the United States date to the 18th century, and they paid little attention to Columbus’s ethnicity or religion. Italians were few in the country at the time, and Columbus’s Catholic Spain—one of the great rivals of Protestant Britain in settling the New World—complicated things, even though Trump’s proclamation implied otherwise. When Washington Irving published his popular, influential, and largely fictionalized biography of Columbus in 1828, he cast the European navigator as a Yankee entrepreneur who had to persuade Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain that the world was round (a theory that had already been well accepted). Irving’s portrayal somehow made Columbus—who never set foot in what would become the United States—into an archetypal American figure.
The first federal observance of Columbus Day appeared in 1892, but as a one-off celebration proclaimed by President Benjamin Harrison in part to please the growing number of Italians who began arriving in large numbers a decade earlier (in total, about 4 million Italians would migrate to the U.S. between 1880 and 1920). In New Orleans in 1891, the Irish police chief was killed, and 11 Italians were charged with the crime. Although none were convicted, all were killed in what was, up to that point, the largest mass lynching in American history. Harrison condemned the violence when it occurred, and it clearly influenced his Columbus Day proclamation, which also coincided with the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s landing at San Salvador.
For decades, anti-Italian sentiment in the United States was widespread and unashamed. In the wake of the New Orleans lynching, The New York Times ran an editorial calling the victims “sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins… [who] are to us a pest without mitigation.” Although he would later condemn lynching, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to his sister about the New Orleans violence, calling it a “good thing.” And as Daniel Okrent details in 2019’s The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America, Roosevelt also labeled Italians as “the most fecund and the least desirable population of Europe.” Immigration restrictionists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries would routinely describe Italians—especially those from the southern regions—as carriers of a “spiritual hookworm,” believed to possess inherently criminal traits, and as polluters of America’s gene pool. The first person prosecuted under New York’s early gun-control statute, The Sullivan Act, was of Italian descent, and roughly 70 percent of those charged under the law in its initial years bore Italian surnames. In 1924, restrictionists prevailed, enacting highly restrictive immigration laws that closed the door to newcomers from certain countries. In the decade preceding the Johnson-Rereed Act, roughly 200,000 Italians moved to America each year; after the act, that figure plunged to about 4,000 annually.
In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, spurred by groups like the Knights of Columbus and advocates such as Generoso Pope of National Enquirer, issued two proclamations establishing Columbus Day as an annual observance, and it became an official federal holiday in 1968 with strong support from Lyndon Johnson. Today, somewhat less than 5 percent of Americans identify as Italian, which in no way assigns anyone a second-class status or outsider label. That is progress we should recognize and welcome, rather than keep alive by leaning on our ancestors’ pain to claim ongoing victimhood.
We would be better off as a country by rejecting the mindset deftly satirized in The Sopranos a quarter of a century ago, by resisting the passive-aggressive posture of this administration, or by rejecting the ideological rigidity of that era’s leaders. Instead, we could treat ethnic pride not as a zero-sum game but as material for shaping the next great fusion of American identity—a broader melting pot that grows larger and more inclusive with every new addition. Writing in Reason on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first contact with the New World, the celebrated Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa (1936–2025) argued that mestizaje, the mixing of races and cultures, is the essence of the modern world and irreversible. It does not spell the erasure of any culture but its continuation. Regardless of lineage, he argued, we are all “the children of Columbus,” which, ironically, might suggest we should rethink Columbus Day itself in its current form.
