In 1912, Italian immigrants were still fighting to be accepted as Americans. Only twenty-one years earlier, a mob in New Orleans had broken into a jail and lynched eleven Sicilians. One of the figures Italian communities enlisted in their claim to belonging had died four centuries earlier: Christopher Columbus.

The choice was less obvious than it now seems. Columbus sailed for Spain, landed in the

Caribbean and never really set foot in what became the United States. But Americans had

already written him into their origin story. Columbia became a poetic name for the country and gave the District of Columbia its name. The Genoese navigator had been turned into an

American founder.

That reinvention made him useful to Italian immigrants. They did not have to ask the country to admire an unfamiliar Italian hero. They could point out that one of its existing heroes was Italian and Catholic. If Columbus belonged near the beginning of American history, perhaps they did too.

Catholic groups made that argument visible in Washington. The Knights of Columbus, founded largely by Irish immigrants, lobbied Congress for a memorial. Congress supplied $100,000. At its dedication outside Union Station in June 1912, the Italian ambassador unveiled the statue, President Taft spoke and Italian societies joined thousands marching through the capital.

The monument greeted people arriving by train with Columbus facing forward from a ship. Its design also shows what the national myth left out. An Indigenous face is carved below him as the vessel’s figurehead. Columbus did not discover an empty world; his voyages opened an era of European conquest, and he enslaved Indigenous people in the Caribbean.

Italian immigrants claimed Columbus as one of their own because they were trying to become American themselves. More than a century later, the fountain still preserves that effort in stone; Columbus stands at the capital’s gateway as an American hero, while an Indigenous face is built into the ship beneath him.