This Week in History: An immodest proposal
- ANTONE PIERUCCI
- Posted On
Every year in October, Americans of Italian ancestry gear up to do battle. It’s part of a decades-long war to ensure the recognition of and respect for the integral role Italian Americans have played in this country.
As a proud Italian American, or IA, myself, I can bear witness to the atrocious and dehumanizing stereotyping of my people. We don’t all have family spaghetti recipes, or like cannolis or speak with our hands. We are more than the sum of those stereotypes.
Like most immigrant groups in the United States, we IAs are proud of our heritage. As Natale Marcone, the president of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, once said at a rally in 1971: “Go home, but never forget, be proud to be an Italian all the time!”
Like a clarion call, Mr. Marcone’s words rang out through our community. And we’ve never forgotten to be proud of being Italian, ever.
Marcone and the founder of the organization, Joseph Colombo Sr., were trailblazers in the fight for IA equality.
As is often the case in the history of oppression, our primary oppressors at the time were goonies of the federal government – the Federal Bureau of Italian-American-Oppression, or F.B.I. (the A.O. was silent).
For decades, the FBI perpetuated the most heinous of all stereotypes: that all IAs are mobsters. They rounded up innocent IA businessmen and harassed IA communities with impunity.
Seeing what they were doing to his people, and becoming a target of their unlawful attentions himself, Mr. Colombo created the Italian-American Civil Rights League as a means of highlighting the plight of IAs.
For that, the FBI arrested him.
Well, sort of. The FBI claimed that Colombo was the leader (or Don) of a family of mobsters. They said that he himself had ordered several high-profile assassinations that left bloody bodies scattered throughout New York City in the 1960s. So what if they had his underlings on recordings admitting to as much? We all know the FBI has long had the technology to alter tapes (Watergate, anyone?).
Fugetta bout it!
It’s that sort of harassment that we IAs used to face every day of our lives. Back in the day, it was “mafia this” and “mobster that” and “where’d you bury the bodies” and all that nonsense. Really, can anyone be sure that there ever really was a mob to begin with? There’s an actual government conspiracy theory for you.
It’s been quite some time since innocent IAs were accosted on the street by men in black. But the anti-Italian forces in this country have conspired to create another libelous attack on our legacy. They’ve grown smarter over the years, preferring a sneak attack over a frontal assault. This time, they’ve come after our greatest icon: Christopher Columbus.
Last fall the attacks reached a crescendo. Thugs spray-painted the word “murderer” on a statue of the great explorer in Binghampton, N.Y. Another statue of Columbus was beheaded in Columbus Memorial Park in Yonkers. And in Minneapolis, a petition was circulated to replace the Columbus statue at the State Capitol in St. Paul with one of the pop star Prince.
Apparently, there is a segment of our country that claims we as a nation should not celebrate a mass murderer; a cruel, rapacious man who not only brought about the downfall of millions of people by his very discovery, but also saw to the killing of thousands himself. Sounds like an FBIAO conspiracy to me, one led no doubt by Comey.
But for the sake of argument, and lest anyone call IAs contrary, let’s just assume that those slanderous, unfounded, libelous claims on our hero are true.
Let me therefore offer up an alternative to Columbus; a man who, if it’s even possible, is more iconically Italian American than Columbus, certainly a man who is less susceptible to government-funded protests.
His name is Amerigo Vespucci.
Born the son of a humble Italian notary in 1451, Amerigo received a superb education as a child and when he grew up, he began working for the Medici Bank (the Medici of Florence were another saintly family of honest, hard-working Italians who have since been unfairly labelled dictators by pernicious historians).
Amerigo eventually became associated with the outfitting of ships, funded by the city of Florence. We know, for instance, that he helped prepare the ships for Christopher Columbus’ second and third voyages.
After years of seeing others setting sail over the distant horizon, Amerigo himself joined in on the explorations of foreign lands. We don’t know for certain the details of his early career as an explorer, but a few surviving documents tell us for certain that he was a navigator for a 1499-1500 expedition to the New World. Like his fellow Italian, Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci’s expedition was funded by the Spanish, but let’s not get bogged down in details.
During his 1499-1500 expedition, Amerigo discovered the mouth of the Amazon River. When he returned to the Old World, he got funds from Portugal to make a second journey, again to what we now know as the coast of South America, near Brazil.
Sure, at the time Amerigo thought he was sailing along a route to Asia, but by his third voyage, in 1501-1502, he realized that the lands he had been mapping were not near Asia, but were instead part of a New World.
In April of 1507 (possibly around April 20, but we don’t know for certain), the scholar Martin Waldseemüller published a pamphlet of Amerigo’s journeys and suggested to posterity that the new lands the great Italian had found be named after their discoverer: America.
You see, our country’s very name comes from an Italian. Take that, Comey.
While I in no way give credence to the mud slung at Christopher Columbus, I think we all can avoid conflict by replacing statues of Columbus with Amerigo – a man both IAs and everyone else can admire.
Of course, the relentless work of the FBIAO has already begun to gather lies about Amerigo Vespucci.
Their agents in academia have claimed that Amerigo usurped the merits of others, and that he really didn’t discover those routes himself. Preposterous, of course, but we must keep soldiering on with the knowledge that truth will win out eventually.
In the meantime, I trust the IA community will take into serious consideration my modest proposal.
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.