![]() Viking motifs began to pop up in architecture, purported Viking artifacts were duly unearthed, and a general craze ensued. "At a moment of increasing fear that the nation was committing race suicide," explains historian Joanne Mancini, "the thought of Viking ghosts roaming the streets of a city increasingly filled with Irish, Italian, and Jewish hordes must have been comforting to an Anglo-Saxon elite." ![]() If America did not, after all, owe its existence to an Italian Catholic, then there would be no need to accept his modern compatriots. The exploits of the great Viking explorer, recorded in Icelandic sagas, were already being promoted by Norwegian immigrants, eager to find acceptance of their own. They cast about for a racially acceptable discoverer of the New World, and found him in Leif Erikson. Instead of accepting Italians, many nativists chose to reject Columbus. How could a nation, they asked, reject the compatriots of its own discoverer? They promoted a narrative of national origins that traced back beyond Plymouth or Jamestown, all the way to San Salvador. Italians quickly adopted Columbus as a shield against the ethnic, racial, and religious discrimination they faced in their adoptive country. After an 1891 lynching of Italians in New Orleans, a New York Times editorial proclaimed Sicilians "a pest without mitigation," adding, for good measure, that "our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they." They were often portrayed as primitive, violent, and unassimilable, and their Catholicism brought them in for further abuse. Many Americans believed Italians to be racially inferior, their difference made visible by their "swarthy" or "brown" skins. It was a far cry from the treatment they themselves received. Italian-Americans, arriving in large numbers in the late nineteenth century, took note of the reverence which their famous countryman enjoyed. ![]() ![]() Americans represented their nation as a woman named Columbia, adopted Hail, Columbia! as an unofficial anthem, and located their capitol in the District of Columbia. His name, rendered as Columbia, became a byword for the United States. In the early American republic, Columbus provided a convenient means for the new nation to differentiate itself from the old world. Christopher Columbus has been, from the first, a powerful symbol of American nationalism. ![]()
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