The courage, perseverance and spiritual fervor of Christopher Columbus

POST-GAZETTE - Res Publica
The courage, perseverance and spiritual fervor of Christopher Columbus
by David Trumbull - September 30, 2016

"The governor shall annually issue a proclamation setting apart the month of October as Italian-American Heritage Month, in recognition of the significant contributions Italian-Americans have made to the commonwealth and to the United States and recommending that said month be observed in an appropriate manner by the people. After consultation with Italian-American groups, the governor may include in the proclamation such contributions as he shall see fit." --Mass. Gen. Laws, Chapter 6, Section 15EEEE.

"The governor shall annually issue a proclamation setting apart the second Monday in October as Columbus Day and recommending that it be observed by the people, with appropriate exercises in the schools and otherwise, to the end that the memory of the courage, perseverance and spiritual fervor of Christopher Columbus, discoverer of America, may be perpetuated." --Mass. Gen. Laws, Chapter 6, Section 12V. (Emphasis added.)

It is fitting that we celebrate Italian heritage during the month in which we commemorate Columbus. Columbus sailed under the Spanish flag, but he was a native of, and learned his craft in, the Italian peninsula. His historic voyages opened communication, commerce, and migration between the Old World of Europe and the New World of the Americas. Columbus' voyages of discovery led directly to Spanish settlements. The New World that became, with time, the many nations of South, Central and North America and the islands of the Caribbean began with Columbus. The United States, today a sea-to-sea continental nation with citizens and residents whose ancestors lived in every corner of the globe, likewise traces her beginnings to Columbus, a man of Italian birth and heritage.

That America owes her very existence to Columbus was recognized early in the history of our republic. As early as 1738 "Columbia" had entered the English tongue as a name for the 13 British colonies in North America that became our original 13 States. When our Constitution went into effect in 1789 it provided that the seat of the federal government would be a "district" apart from any individual state or states. That district was named, appropriately, the District of Columbia and our national capitol remains Washington, D.C. However, over time, attitudes changed.

By the 1820s, with the rise of immigration, especially German and Irish Catholics, native-born Americans --Protestant English, Scots and Ulstermen -- found Columbus an increasingly embarrassing hero. He was an Italian employed by the Spanish -- Southern Europeans considered "dirty" and "stupid" races in the thrall of a superstitious church. The drive to recognize Columbus with a national holiday was largely the effort of a Catholic fraternal organization, the Knights of Columbus. The most organized and vocal opponent of the K of C was the Ku Klux Klan. The arguments around the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery -- that he enslaved and killed indigenous Americans when he wasn't busy forcing them to convert to the Catholic Church -- were the same charges we heard at the 500th anniversary in 1992 and continue to hear. When you hear them, consider the original source.

Fly Me To The Moon

Res Publica
Fly Me To The Moon
by David Trumbull -- October 12, 2012

Fifteen years ago, on October 16, 1997, the Jupiter 2 spacecraft left earth carrying the Robison family and two other men (one of whom was an unintended traveler) to colonize a planet of the nearby star Alpha Centauri. Well, at least in the Columbia Broadcasting System's television series, Lost in Space, that is what happened! In September of 2015, just three years from now, Lost in Space itself will be 50 years old! Wow, was my childhood that long ago?

As a boy, I watched every space travel television show and movie I could find. We lived, for several months, in Coco, Florida (near Coco Beach where another space-age TV show, I Dream of Jeannie, was set) and watched the rocket launches from our backyard. In my lifetime I saw America put a man on the moon, just as President Kennedy had committed us to do. In fact, we put a total of twelve men on the moon and got each one safely back. As a boy, in the late 1960s, I would have been dismayed to learn that as a man, in my 50s, I should live on in an America that has not put a man on the moon since Apollo 17, forty years ago this December -- we don't even try anymore.

Over 500 years later, Christopher Columbus' 1492 voyage of discovery still stands as the beginning of mankind's last colonization of a new world. What of my boyhood expectations of routine space travel and folks living on other worlds? Over luncheon this week with some pretty bright people, including the son of a mechanical engineer who built equipment for National Aeronautics and Space Administration ("NASA") missions of the 1960s, I asked, Did we simply lose the resolve to colonized space? Or was the science fiction of the 1960s unrealistic as to the prospects for colonization? The opinion, at the table, was that space colonization will be much, much harder than popularly imagined in my youth. In other words, Columbus' feat of opening of a new world for colonization will not be matched any time soon.

Today, if Americans fly to the moon and learn what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars, it will be merely in flights of fancy, inspired by Bart Howard's 1954 song -- probably as sung and swung by Italian-American crooner, Frank Sinatra.