Why rescuing Christopher Columbus redeems America, too

Sometimes Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again. 

Back in 2020, during the spasm of violence associated with Black Lives Matter in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, vandals in Baltimore, Md., tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus. 

They shattered the figure of the iconic explorer and tossed the pieces into Inner Harbor, including the severed head. 

That seemed to bring to a decisive end a statue that had stood in Baltimore since 1984. 

This act of iconoclasm, though, has a happy ending.

A replica of that very same statue now stands in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, courtesy of a White House committed to the memory of the great navigator. 

The assailed Baltimore statue found a friend in a local artist and fisherman named Tilghman Hemsley.

He got divers to fish out the pieces, and then his son, Will Hemsley, set about creating a replica, a painstaking and expensive effort. 

Columbus is worth it.

His statues have been a frequent target of protesters and his honorary day has been downgraded to a shotgun marriage with Indigenous People’s Day, a faux holiday meant as a rebuke to Columbus and all his works. 

The famous explorer is hardly the monster of the left’s imagining.

There’s no doubt that he was flawed and a product of his time, a 15th century that was red in tooth and claw. 

Columbus was wrong on a very fundamental question, thinking until the end that he’d discovered Asia, when he hadn’t come close.

He enslaved natives and could be highhanded, although he wasn’t exceptionally cruel by the standards of the day.

The devastation of native populations was a terrible tragedy owing to the spread of disease, not deliberate policy.  

His worst failing was that he was an abysmal administrator.

At one point, Columbus was sent by back to Spain in chains to answer for his misgovernance. 

The other side of the ledger is truly epic, and deserves to be honored in lore.

How many people have played a central role in knitting together two hemispheres, and doing it at considerable personal risk?

What Columbus pulled off was the equivalent, in today’s terms, of traveling to Mars in a couple of jerry-rigged spacecraft, without proper navigation or any sense of what might await on the Red Planet. 

Right before Columbus made landfall during his first voyage, the crew of the Santa Maria was ready to mutiny; he came close to having to turn around.

Eventually the Santa Maria ran aground and had to be abandoned.

Columbus left several dozen sailors at a settlement called La Navidad, which was duly wiped out (this was not a forgiving environment).

Columbus barely made it back to Europe.

Repeatedly hit by brutal storms, he tossed a bottle overboard with a description of what he had discovered in case he didn’t make it. 

His feats of navigation and exploration were extraordinary; he, and other explorers of his era, catalyzed advances in map-making and geography; and he made an outsized contribution to forging the Atlantic bridge between Europe and the Americas that was one of the keys to the creation of the modern world. 

The marine historian Lincoln Paine writes, “This era was unprecedented not only because extraordinary floods of people, ideas, and material wealth, as well as flora, fauna, and pathogens, were unleashed around the world, but because Europeans were for the first time in the vanguard of world change.”

It is this epochal development — considered a disaster by the woke left — that is at the root of the campaign to dethrone, and even decapitate, Christopher Columbus.  

Since the inception of cities, there have been statues to honor heroes and to establish the values and history that define a place.

These choices are fraught with meaning — the public display of a historical figure in marble isn’t merely a decorative element in a park or traffic circle, but a statement about who we are. 

This is why the restoration of the Columbus status is so gratifying.

In this instance, an act of destruction carried out by revolutionaries seeking to change our public landscape and the story we tell about ourselves has been resisted and reversed.

For now, Christopher Columbus is together again — and honored on the White House grounds. 

X: @RichLowry