The United States has created only a dozen federally recognized holidays (counting the quadrennial Inauguration Day). One scholar has suggested these be categorized into holidays celebrating America’s Christian and European heritage, American groups, and American individuals. It is to the last category I devote my inquiry.
Three federal holidays commemorate individuals, these being Christopher Columbus, George Washington (and now Lincoln), and Martin Luther King Jr. The first two figures have come under some scrutiny in recent years. Google ngram, which tracks appearances of keywords in printed sources over time, shows reference to “Columbus Day” declining around the turn of the century, with usage of “Indigenous People’s Day” rising around 2010. Counter-narratives malign our nation’s Founding by Washington and his fellows. MLK has encountered less criticism—perhaps because he himself symbolizes a re-Founding, although his commitment to color-blind equality runs counter to the modern-day push for equal outcomes, or equity.
Arguably, thoughtful history can vindicate Columbus. But cannot we also see the need to remember individuals who shaped our nation to understand the range of human action?
In democratic ages, where equality is central, we find even greater need to prize the action of admirable individuals, to guard against the flattening tendency of mass society—its race to the bottom in tastes and habits. As 19th century political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville notes in Volume II of his “Democracy in America,” “in ages of equality, all men are mutually independent, isolated, and weak; no one man’s will controls the movements of the crowd in any permanent way.”
Respect for individual rights, properly conceived, demands excellent exemplars, without which the individual man will have nothing to aspire to.
Some would say this is idolatrous, or improperly aristocratic. But, what is more fitting of a truly free people than remembering the great deeds to which individuals can aspire? By remembering the courage and ambitious actions through which our country was discovered and founded, we inculcate what James Madison in Federalist 57 calls “the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America—a spirit which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it.”
In a curious paradox, the prevalent conception of individuality as nothing more than limitless self-actualization deprives us of the benefit of great individuals after whom to model our endeavors, since any normative portrait of admirable action may be viewed as oppressive.
One can imagine the spirit of caution and fear that censoring acceptable heroes creates—as de Tocqueville in “Democracy in America” says, a “network of petty, complicated, detailed, and uniform rules through which even the most original minds and the most energetic of spirits cannot reach the light in order to rise above the crowd”– may stifle the innovation and free spirit which ought animate America.
By excoriating Columbus, we deprive our imaginations of an exciting, ambitious, and large image, who did in fact have much to do with our beginnings. And as a country founded—more so than evolved—we have much to learn from our beginnings (just as our theory, reliant on man’s rights inherent in the beginning in his natural state). So let us instead follow the tradition of Plutarch and celebrate the wondrous range of action to which individuals may aspire. Happy Columbus Day!