Scorned Columbus
Steve: A front-page story in the October 12, 2025, New York Times led with a startling statistic: more than 30 monuments to Christopher Columbus were taken down in 2020. Its author shared snippets of a Columbus statue in Richmond, Virginia, that is now in a Sons of Italy Lodge in New York, another marble statue in Boston that was beheaded in 2020 and now stands among religious statues at a nearby church, and in Baltimore another was dumped in the Inner Harbor.
Italian Americans in the late 19th century saw Columbus as a symbol of pride. President Benjamin Harrison oversaw a massive celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage where he “discovered” America. This was strongly encouraged by Italian Americans who were subject to widespread prejudice and more than four million Italians entered the United States from 1880 to 1914. Within Italian Americans, dark skinned southern Italians from Southern Italy were discriminated against by Northern Italians and making the second Monday in October the federal holiday Columbus Day helped, in some ways, destigmatize Italians among Americans.
Yet the New York Times itself contributed to the discrimination, publishing a story in 1880 that described immigrants, including Italians, as “links in a descending chain of evolution,” with an 1882 editorial stating, “There has never been since New York was founded so low and ignorant a class among the immigrants who poured in here as the Southern Italians who have been crowding our docks during the past year.”
Much of the spirit in erecting these monuments in the late 19th to early 20th centuries was aimed at providing pride to Italians – then a group discriminated against – yet these statues of Columbus were toppled in 2020 during and in the aftermath of racial justice protests after the murder of George Floyd.
[The U.S. Mint’s 1992 Christopher Columbus Quincentenary gold $5 half eagle features a side profile of Christopher Columbus on the obverse. The reverse features the crest of the Admiral of the Oceans, an honor that was bestowed upon Columbus, and a map overlapping the western Old World with the date 1492. Image courtesy U.S. Mint.]
Italian American groups have helped bring the statues back, typically to less public places, though President Trump has included Columbus on a list of figures in his proposed Garden of American Heroes. When he signed a proclamation for Columbus Day, President Trump wrote, “Before our very eyes, left-wing radicals toppled his statues, vandalized his monuments, tarnished his character, and sought to exile him from our public spaces.”
Growing up in public schools in Michigan, I never thought of Columbus as a contested figure. We were taught the narrative similar to “in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America,” leaving out the impact of his arrival on Native Americans and his role in the slave trade.
Still, the broader narrative of the resurrection of Columbus as a historical figure, and his relatively recent downfall is particularly interesting. Even in 1992 when the U.S. Mint created a 3-coin Christopher Columbus Quincentenary, there was little commentary that this wasn’t a subject worthy of celebration.
Dennis: does Columbus remain a figure worthy of celebration?
Dennis: The U.S. Mint’s 1992 Christopher Columbus Quincentenary coins were popular. Collectors bought more than 1.1 million of them in total (all denominations and formats). As a benchmark, they also illustrate the steadily declining importance of numismatic commemorative coins as a mainstream way to celebrate national heroes, events, organizations, and anniversaries. Twenty years after the Columbus coins were issued, Americans bought only one-fifth as many of the 2011 U.S. Army commemorative half dollars . . . one-third as many silver dollars . . . and one-fourth as many $5 gold coins. Ten years after that, the Mint struggled to sell 40,000 National Purple Heart Hall of Honor half dollars—less than eight percent of the mintage of the Quincentenary halves.
Commemorative coins are a bust in the 2020s. So . . . how else do we recognize and celebrate national significance? Books are one way. Dozens of updated editions and completely new books on Christopher Columbus have been published since the late 1980s and early 1990s. They include academic studies, biographies, historical fiction, and children’s books. Some take the traditional view of Columbus as a heroic figure. Others reflect ongoing scrutiny of his life and its impact, especially from a Native American, rather than European, perspective. I just checked Amazon and I see almost 100 current books on Columbus.
[1892-1893 World’s Columbian Exposition Half Dollar. To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ journey west and raise funds for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. When the Columbian Exposition closed, over three million Columbian half dollars remained unsold. The Treasury Department initially offered the coins for sale at face value but eventually placed many in circulation and melted the rest. Circulated Columbian half dollars are considered very common.]
Movies and television are other popular media we use to celebrate heroes. Two major releases came out in 1992—Ridley Scott’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and John Glen’s Christopher Columbus: The Discovery. Since then, many documentaries and TV series have been produced, as well as shorter YouTube videos and other opinion pieces. This is how a lot of people consume and relate to history today.
What about statues and similar monuments? It’s a shame to think of that one being dumped in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Fans will appreciate that the Trump administration in October 2025 said that a replica of it (made of crushed marble and mixed resin) will be erected at the White House. But do people really engage with statues in public spaces? The White House gets about a million visitors a year, so maybe the great explorer will get some publicity there—if he’s displayed prominently and not tucked away in a corner of the Presidential Ballroom.
I do think that Christopher Columbus is worthy of celebration. We shouldn’t sweep negative parts of our history under the rug, but we should show some grace, weigh the good and the bad, and give their due to important historical figures. Sadly, it seems the only time Americans think about Columbus these days is in elementary school, and on Columbus Day—which is known equally as a shopping holiday, when retailers deep-discount their patio furniture and other summer inventory. Even on Columbus Day many people don’t think about Columbus, and are surprised on the second Monday in October when they can’t mail letters and their banks are closed. At the most dizzying height of Columbus-mania, both of the big films that came out in 1992 were box-office flops.
I was careful, in the first paragraph of this reply, to say that numismatic commemorative coins have been declining in importance. The Mint makes a distinction between numismatic coins and circulating coins. Hybrid coins that we might call “circulating commemoratives,” like the recent American Women quarters, are minted and distributed by the hundreds of millions and seen by nearly every citizen. Christopher Columbus should be so lucky! Maybe a new circulating quarter dollar would return him to some semblance of his old glory.
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Hello! And welcome to the ANA’s blog series, “Collecting Friends.”
We decided to approach this much like a conversation between friends. One of us starts with a topic, then the other responds. Simple as that. Along those lines, we’ll keep the tone conversational as much as possible.
We both write about coins professionally, and will keep our relative style guides in our writing. For Dennis, former Publisher at Whitman Publishing, that means capitalizing “Proof” and italicizing Red Book and never saying anything bad about Ken Bressett, who’s awesome anyway.
For Steve, who’s written with Coin World for 15 years, it means Winged Liberty Head dime instead of “Mercury” dime, and similar nuances and oddities. And, it means writing A Guide Book of United States Coins (better known as the “Red Book”).
Both of us started collecting when we were little, introduced to coins by a chance encounter with an old coin that sparked our curiosity. One of Steve’s interests is coin valuation, and he gravitates towards the intersection of art and coins. Dennis enjoys medals and world coins, and studying modern U.S. coins in the context of older series, what came before.
We met in 2012 at the American Numismatic Association World’s Fair of Money in Philadelphia at an event hosted by the Austrian Mint where there was both a Ben Franklin and a Betsy Ross impersonator. We’ve become great friends in the past decade. We even were appointed together to sit on the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee starting in 2016, but Steve resigned soon after he was appointed to accept a full-time job at the Treasury Department while Dennis was re-appointed in 2020.
We taught a course together on numismatic publishing and writing a few years ago at the Summer Seminar, and while life has gotten in the way of us teaching another class, we jumped at our friend Caleb’s suggestion that we write a column. We hope you enjoy it!
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