On June 9, in New Haven’s Wooster Square Park, the city will accept a monument that will replace the larger-than-life statute of Christopher Columbus, there since 1892. The methodical process of choosing the replacement, which involved almost four years of communal study and diverse citizen participation, was led by Italian Americans tempered by New Haven’s singularly formed history.
The monument selected is a life-sized representation of the only people who ever really mattered: four members of an Italian family, newly arrived, neatly dressed, with a suitcase nearby. The father holds his young son, who is pointing toward an aspirational future of freedom and citizenship. The mother has her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. A book is in the young girl’s hand, a crucifix around her neck. Both parents will soon confront the insidious prejudice known in New Haven, especially from Yale University, and from elsewhere in America directed against them, their children, and the community they sought to responsibly define.
These immigrants understood repression. They were brutally ruled for centuries by the Spanish empire — the same empire for whom Columbus sailed in 1492 — from Naples south to Sicily. Spanish and Catholic colonization and confiscated gold in its “New World” had financed their repression. They successfully rebelled against it in 1860. Almost immediately, they were subjected to the condescension of the invading northern region’s government and military, which surpassed the Spanish in cruelty and greed in establishing “Italy” as a nation and brought many from the southern region to New Haven.
The sculptor, Marc-Anthony Massaro, engraved on the monument’s base plaque, in Italian: “Indicando la via al futuro” (Pointing the Way to the Future). The 1892 pedestal, constructed by the neighborhood’s craftsmen, now forms the family monument’s backdrop. Its plaque reads: “On the grounds where the statue of Christopher Columbus once stood, this sculpture is dedicated to honor all who have occupied the land on which it stands. It serves as a powerful symbol of resilience, determination, and the strength of the human spirit.”
The monument and inscriptions reflect the imperatives of freedom they sought, citizenship as they defined it, and ending generations of repression. Those imperatives, they understood, were never shared by the government of Italy or personified in Christopher Columbus. In America, however, Columbus and his allegorical feminine spirit “Columbia” were an unassailable White Anglo-Saxon Protestant icon.
A discoverer or a repressor?
In 1800 Congress named the nation’s capital in honor of the first president and Christopher Columbus. He acquired national stature with the clamor for a World’s Fair based on the 400th anniversary of “the Founding of America.” In 1890, Congress and the President selected Chicago for the “Columbian Exposition.” With patriotic fervor, the newly written “Pledge Allegiance to the Flag” was embraced.
On July 21, 1892, President William Henry Harrison proclaimed, as “authorized and directed” by Congress, a one-time national holiday on Oct. 21, 1892 for the “observance of the discovery of America by Columbus” so that “the national flag [may] float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.”
Neither Congress nor the President mentioned Italy, Italians, or any wrongdoing directed against Italian immigrants.
Northern Italians, especially in New York City — driven, as historians Lauren Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra documented, by acceptance into Anglo Saxon business society (and later by Mussolini’s Fascism) — re-imagined Columbus from “Italy.” Irish Americans, through their New Haven-based, Catholic fraternal society, the Knights of Columbus, re-defined him as “Catholic.” Neither characteristic mattered in America’s formulation. In New Haven, the Knights were the first to propose a statue of Columbus. New Haven’s Southern Italian leadership, however, approached Columbus differently: How do we stop the prejudice and preserve the values of citizenship that matter to us?
The Oct. 21, 1892 dedication
My father’s parents, from Atrani, south of Naples, along with the grandparents of those Italian Americans who led the new effort, were likely there on Oct. 21, 1892, the day the Columbus statue was dedicated as a gift to New Haven. Paul Russo, a respected, traveled, and informed leader, and the first Italian American to graduate from Yale Law School, took to the podium.
Russo was born in Basilicata, southeast of Naples, in 1859, at the beginning of the uprising begun in Sicily that defeated the Spanish empire. In October 1860, the northern army crushed that expected freedom, burned villages, murdered residents, extracted gold, destroyed infrastructure, and imposed confiscatory taxes. Gallant women and men took up arms against them.
Within a generation, millions of southern families — unable to speak English, skills in hand, head, and heart — undertook the perilous journey across the Mediterranean and Atlantic in steerage, battling against unsanitary conditions, disease, contaminated food, and the pain of leaving family behind. These women and men needed no model for courage or risk-taking in a journey longer in distance than Columbus undertook for reasons wholly antithetical to their own. Paul Russo had been among those Southern Italians. He had no illusions about Columbus, and it’s reflected in what he said that day.
Russo began not with reference to Columbus, nor did he refer to Columbus, throughout his presentation, as held in reverence, or as courageous explorer, discoverer of America, or as a Catholic crusader. Those attributes had been embraced ten days earlier, on Oct. 11, by the Knights of Columbus and Anglo-Saxon dignitaries in a grand ceremony on the New Haven Green. Russo began instead with a declaration of the immigrant community’s purpose in making the gift: “The Italians of this beautiful city are proud of their adopted home and interested in no small way in its advancement and prosperity.”
They already gave civic life to what sociologist Phyllis Williams described as “a compelling obligation” to the poor — personified by Mother Mary Cabrini — through the formation of societies that provided education, loans, guidance, and food. To protect those values from intrusion, the Italian community, Russo continued, sought “to indicate in a modest manner” our “patriotism…affection and esteem for this great republic, and for this city.” In nickels and dimes — as they later did for the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti in the 1920s, and sponsored speakers in opposition to Mussolini’s Fascism — the Italian immigrants (less than 4,000 resided in New Haven) took responsibility for defining this gift.
Russo also expressed the reality that tempered their effort: “Notwithstanding…their trials and severe hardships, and their present surroundings, they have endeavored to become law abiding and worthy citizens.”
By October 1892, Italian immigrants were being lynched and their neighborhoods burned throughout America. In March 1891, 11 Italian immigrants and citizens were lynched in New Orleans. The Italian government, led by Northerners, intervened then, predictably, backed away. Theodore Roosevelt said the lynching was “a rather good thing.”
The New York Times was harsher against the victims. The New Haven Register wrote that the “best elements in town” had lynched “murderers.” New Haven’s Southern Italian societies expressed outrage. It didn’t matter. Northern Italians, seeking Anglo-Saxon identity, added the stigma of race. Professor Richard Gambino described it: “The Northerners, together with the Italian Government, convinced American officials that there were two distinct groups of Italians…two different ‘races.’” American immigration officials categorized Southerners separately — my mother and her parents among them. Christopher Columbus, from Genoa in 1492 was, acceptably, from the Northern Race.
That prejudice continued after 1892, known by today’s Italian American leaders, including this author: Yale’s effort to allow immigration only by Northern Italians; Yale president James Angell’s 1933 call for an “Armenian massacre confined to the New Haven District,” and Yale’s eugenic model for fascist and Hitler-driven antisemitic laws, Romani persecution, and death to those mentally and physically challenged; Yale’s Institute of Human Relations, which hired Northern Italians to survey the “hereditary” defects in New Haven’s Southern Italians; and Dean Wilbur Cross who, as Connecticut’s governor, considered these immigrants genetically “unfit” and, under law, worthy of sterilization.
The Institute still stands. A yearly award is given in Cross’s honor. Yale also was the land acquisition beneficiary of so-called “urban renewal” in the 1960s, while the city government focused neighborhood destruction on Italian-American Wooster Square. And the exploitive, self-centered movie making bane of Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese ensured the fullest affirmation of bigotry in New Haven.
Paul Russo concluded his presentation with an admonishing expectation that further relegated Columbus into an ancillary, conditional vehicle to attain an unconditional vital imperative. “May you never have cause to regret our entrance into your midst,” he said. “May this enduring structure of bronze and stone indicate and incite a desire for art and science in the hearts and minds of those that follow us…. May it serve to eliminate the distinction between Italians and Americans, merging our race differences in the American citizen, working and striving for common goodness and common purpose.”
The lesson, in time, was understood. Columbus had failed to meet our ancestor’s imperative. In decades of otherwise joyful celebrations, Columbus rarely was mentioned. This family monument, chosen collectively by an engaged ethnic and racially thoughtful community and city, gave that unconditional vital imperative its rightful permanence through the only people who ever really mattered.
Neil Thomas Proto has taught at Yale and Georgetown’s McCourt Public Policy School, and is the author of “Fearless, A. Bartlett Giamatti and the Battle for Fairness in America (2019).” He was born in New Haven, and, at the request of Mayor Justin Elicker, served as counselor and historical advisor to the Wooster Square Monument Committee. This article does not reflect the views of the Wooster Square Monument Committee, its members, or any public official.