Christopher Columbus - White Heroic Hero and Founder of the Feast of Gilded Age America

With all this talk of revisionist history and taking this or that statue down and that monument moved because it no longer survives purity testing on the PC(Policing) Left, may I propose that Christopher Columbus as an Italian symbol is largely an American Public Relations feat achieved around 1892 and after, and it covers many areas. 

In my own research of Gilded Age New York, regarding the rich Irish of the times in that city, I ran into this Columbus as a brave European Hero to discover and convert the savages theme. That the Italian Italians in Italy have a lot more choice when it comes to national heroes. That freshly arrived immigrants from Italy to America were already bombarded with a packaged PR "White" hero, that they could hardly refuse, and supported with statues from Italy for Columbus Circle built with subscription funds supposedly from the Italian masses like the "World's" subscription of pennies to build a base for Lady Liberty etc.  

That reading Wikipedia now one would not know that the public partyline on all that does not mention how the World's Fair in Chicago - the "White City" of cutting edge electricity housed in plaster Roman temples around a lake on Lake Michigan and called the "Columbian Exposition" after whoever Columbus was(?) - was much more than any volunteer Italian immigrant efforts of the time in that matter. 

This packaged white European myth was continued with the years with the occasional dream of Countess Annie Leary and her friend Hetty Green "the Witch of Wall Street" and the richest woman in the world when she died with 50 plus million dollars in 1916 from a lifetime of tightly managing her Quaker pennies from a lifetime of eating her own ---- , these stories fed to papers by Leary and Green, like to the NYT for fill more than for true fulfillment lent itself to the importance of a guy like the pirate from Spain ... that a proposed international college on top of a hill in Staten Island with the largest statue of the world of Christopher Columbus never got built - a proposed pet project of these two old crony rich ladies. 

One that a philanthropist like Countess Leary was never that rich as Hetty but gave more like ten million in her lifetime to Catholic Charities, one of them the Italian immigrants in the lower east side and Greenwich village, operating soup kitchens, a settlement house, schools, and the Italian parish of Our Lady of Pompei, single handedly in many times, the RC AD of NYC with its Irish Hierarchy looking the other way regarding Italian immigrant welfare and the Vatican who did notice and rewarded her on two successive occasions by two successive popes - with the title of Papal Countess - 

Countess Leary, the only R.C. on "the" Mrs. Astor's 400 society list along with her brother - Annie's late unmarried banker brother the source of her philanthropy to the tune of an estimated 7 to 20 million - Arthur Leary being a lifelong friend from childhood of "the" Mr. Astor married to "the" Mrs. Astor btw. 


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