Connecticut’s Columbus

by Rafaele Fierro

On a bristling October day in 1914, a skirmish broke out in New Haven’s Wooster Square. Italians celebrating Columbus Day decided to raise the Italian flag above the American flag. Officer John B. Roach came onto the scene and insisted that the flags be reversed. Pushing and shoving ensued. Angry demonstrations threatened the celebration. Ultimately, New Haven’s Italian leaders relented and had the flags switched because they did not want the clash to mar the joyous occasion.

The event lives on in the annals of Connecticut ethnic history nearly a century later. The intense drama reflected the all too familiar conflict between Italians and local law enforcement in the early twentieth century that only the most sacred of Italian-American holidays could mute.

Connecticut’s Italians and police officers clashed with greater frequency at the height of Italian immigration. More than 2 million entered the nation between 1900 and 1910. Like an unexpected blizzard in the dead of winter, the sudden presence of so many Italians occasioned disruption and consternation. Connecticut’s Italian immigration increased proportionally as did the Yankee reaction to it. That Italians numbered more than 56,000 (second only to the Irish) alarmed the nutmeg state’s long-time inhabitants.

Italians generally came from some of the most depressed villages in southern Italy. Peasants there they became impoverished urban dwellers here, a fact that contributed to their station as troublesome and criminal.

Their new and hostile environment made them clamor for a hero who could instill pride in their ethnic heritage in communities across Connecticut. In particular, the small but vociferous and influential Italian middle class raised Columbus as a patron saint binding Italians from every village in Italy together under one nationalistic umbrella across the Atlantic.

The states Italian newspapers—New Haven’s Il Corriere di Connecticut, La Tribuna di Hartford, and Waterbury’s Il Sole chief among them—ran annual front page stories replete with giant images of the explorer throughout the month of October. Statues were built in his honor in every Italian quarter throughout Connecticut. Dante, Michelangelo, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and other great Italians were no match for the revered discoverer of America. Columbus bequeathed to Americans their own history.

Connecticut’s Italians needed Columbus badly. He stood, more than 400 years after his death, as their knight in shining armor who belied the constant reportage of Italian poverty, misdeeds, and crime. The state’s Italians may have been mired in poverty, but they were rich in history. When Italian men were hanged at the Connecticut State Prison, Italians could look the other way and turn to Columbus for comfort. And when newspapers wrote about police officers breaking up a fight between two drunken Italians in some city street, the Italian community served up Columbus as an elixir who discovered America and made the great national experiment possible.

It should come as no surprise then that Italians immersed themselves in Columbus Day celebrations. In New Haven, the Columbus Day Committee represented more than one-third the total Italian population of the city, according to the New Haven Times Leader. Connecticut’s Italian associations formed similar committees all over the state. Occasionally Italian church leaders would assist in the organization of Columbus Day events. Positive community activity no doubt impressed Yankees who would too often focus on the dark side of the Italian experience. No wonder the Times leader, for one, stated the following in 1914: “Let us all be Columbus men on the day devoted to the memory of that daring and persevering man. We shall owe that much honor to the memory of the great discoverer.” Such a statement reveals that Columbus succeeded in tempering the negative Yankee attitude toward Italians.

It would take time before Connecticut Italians overcame the initial years of tumult. Columbus helped them along the way, and has he did they assisted him in rising to national prominence, a reflection of the acceptance Italians enjoyed throughout the state and the nation as time passed. In 1937, Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed October 12 as “Columbus Day,” contemporaneously with Connecticut’s newspapers honoring the famed explorer in both Italian and English. More than a generation later, in 1971, Richard Nixon declared the second Monday in October a national holiday.

Indeed, by the early 1970s the descendants of Italian immigrants were reinvigorated with ethnic pride, which prompted Nixon to issue his declaration. In Connecticut, Italian festas began in earnest. “Kiss me, I’m Italian” buttons became popular and Ella Grasso became governor. The surge in Italian pride occurred in large measure as a response to the newest immigrants who had just come from Latin America. Witnessing the dawn of a new era, the state’s Italians tried to distinguish themselves at every turn from the most recent arrivals tagged as the latest undesirables.

Ironically, the Italian ascendancy occurred just as a new generation had begun to call into question the worthiness of Columbus’ status as “the Discoverer.” These critics claimed that the 15th century explorer had made victims of the ancestors who were now journeying to the United States.

Today, Columbus finds himself at a similar crossroads in which Connecticut Italians found themselves 100 years ago. A national holiday in his honor continues and as recently as 2008 Italians all over the state celebrated the second Monday in October. But vast amounts of scholarship have set out to prove the explorer a murderer, rapist, and pillager, not unlike the labels conferred upon Connecticut Italians in 1914. Whether he is worthy or not, however, Connecticut’s Italians no longer need to glorify Christopher Columbus because they have secured a positive place in Connecticut history independent of his fame.