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In 1777, American poet Philip Freneau personified his country as "Columbia, America as sometimes so called from Columbus, the first discoverer." In 1846, shortly after the declaration of war with Mexico, Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton told his Senate colleagues of "the grand idea of Columbus" who in "going west to Asia" provided America with her true course of empire, a predestined "American Road to India." In 1882, Thomas Cummings said to fellow members of the newly formed Knights of Columbus, "Under the inspiration of Him whose name we bear, and with the story of Columbus's life as exemplified in our beautiful ritual, we have the broadest kind of basis for patriotism and true love of country."(1)
Christopher Columbus has proven to be a malleable and durable American symbol. He has been interpreted and reinterpreted as we have constructed and reconstructed our own national character. He was ignored in the colonial era: "The year 1692 passed without a single word or deed of recorded commemoration."(2) Americans first discovered the discoverer during their quest for independence and nationhood; successive generations molded Columbus into a multipurpose American hero, a national symbol to be used variously in the quest for a collective identity.
This process in the public (rather than the professional) American history of Columbus can be traced over three chronological periods: first, Columbus as a feminine, classical deity, Columbia, an allegorical figure symbolizing liberty and progress; second, the masculine, fifteenth-century European, Columbus, who sanctioned nineteenth-century American Manifest Destiny and western expansionism; and third, Columbus as the major symbol of Columbianism, a late nineteenth-century form of patriotic Americanism that involved cultural and political hegemony and various ethnic and religious identities.(3)
Between the tercentenary of the Columbian landfall in 1792 and the World's Columbian Exposition of 1892-1893, Americans configured and contested Columbus differently as a national symbol. During this period a substantial material culture universe of Columbiana surfaced in American painting and philately, monuments and sculpture, civic iconography and national coinage, pageants and plays. In the postbellum United States Columbus became a multiple (at times a split) personality. Evidence of this last transformation is the simultaneous use of Columbus as a model for the country's largest religious fraternal association, as a symbol for an annual ethnic festival that...