Thursday, October 23, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Backstory: Hello, Columbus

By Michael Green

Last week, this column's regular reader--thank you, fan--found an error. Lord Bryce didn't say power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. Lord Acton did.

I was wrong--not the first time or the last. Admitting error never is fun. For some, it seems impossible.

Recently, in UNLV's newspaper, the Rebel Yell, student Alexander Marriott defended Christopher Columbus. He points out, correctly, that if Columbus hadn't bumped into the Americas, the United States might not have developed as it has, with freedom and prosperity.

But Marriott waded into deeper water. He decried the myth "that the legacy of Columbus was one of death and destruction." Most Native Americans died of disease, he wrote. They "were largely primitive Stone Age-level savages" and the Aztecs and Incas built, in quotes, "civilizations" with "irrationality, human sacrifice and brutal primitivism."

To paraphrase another exemplar of our civilization, Bart Simpson, many at UNLV had a cow. Copies of the Yell disappeared, apparently thrown out by students incensed that a newspaper would print what they considered racist drivel.

Meanwhile, the Review-Journal reprinted a version of Marriott's comments, along with Editor Thomas Mitchell's Sunday column "on the newspaper's functions and role in the community," as the R-J calls it. His function and role was to attack a UNLV forum on journalism, which questioned the very notion that newspapers need to make money, as "a cell meeting of the Young Marxist-Leninist League." Since "the institution of the mass media is preaching capitalism, what institution had shaped the ideas in that room?" Mitchell asked. "I reached the conclusion that students are not learning about the founding principles of democracy, free markets, competition and the marketplace of ideas. Instead, they appear to be getting a heavy dose of the three R's: rapine, repression and robber barons."

At least I am not alone in being wrong. So is everyone else mentioned above.

While right in deeming the attacks on Columbus overdone, Marriott errs. Columbus didn't exactly create a wonderful civilization--not because our civilization isn't wonderful (some of it is good, some bad), but because he had little to do with it. He was what he was: an explorer.

Did Columbus commit genocide? That would put him in league with Hitler, hardly a reasonable comparison. Columbus's admiring biographer, Samuel Eliot Morison, wrote in a textbook that "Indians who refused to work were either slaughtered or shipped home to be sold as slaves." Howard Zinn, the Marxist scholar who has done much to bring Columbus'--and other mortals'--sins to public attention, quoted Columbus: "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold." Thousands died--of disease, enslavement or violence, by Columbus and other explorers.

In Columbus' time, slavery was common. That didn't make it right, but it means Columbus can't be judged simply by modern standards. He was neither the heroic figure Marriott and his defenders make him out to be nor the genocidal maniac his critics see.

That's history, folks. Historians are supposed to make judgments based on what we know of the individual and her or his circumstances.

Journalists do that, too. Mitchell ardently defends the First Amendment, and I honor him for it, although I suspect that neither of us would be expected to try to destroy it. This wasn't the first time the R-J or the Yell printed something controversial and won't be the last. Nor is it the first or last time copies of the Yell disappeared over a controversy. Whenever that happens, it's wrong. And those guilty of it have no interest in what Mitchell correctly calls "the marketplace of ideas."

But Mitchell hasn't been to the market for a while, either. To accuse those who teach of trying to promote an ideology isn't wrong, but it certainly is myopic--and insulting, not just to us, but to himself.

Ben Bradlee, who edited the Washington Post, a newspaper some consider capable, once wrote a simple sentence that spoke volumes: "Editors choose." So do columnists, reporters, historians and people at the supermarket surrounded by different kinds of peanut butter. So do school districts that traditionally chose history textbooks that preached our national greatness and now often choose books that try so hard to include everyone and everything good or bad that the life is bleached out of them.

Colleges--their professors and students--should traffic in the marketplace of ideas, welcoming all points of view when expressed intelligently and respectfully. Those who sound wrong and disrespectful also have the right to their views--and shouldn't be surprised when they are attacked or blame it on a communist cabal.

My classes emphasize different events and ideas than other classes--and vice versa. Professors, being in most cases members of the human race, happen to be individuals. But most of us who teach try to present as many sides of an issue as possible for our students to learn the facts and form opinions--to discuss democracy and free markets, but also rapine, repression and robber barons. Sometimes, we succeed. Sometimes, as the controversy over Columbus shows, we fail. We certainly do it better than some newspapers.

Some of us forget: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely--in print or in the classroom. I came up with the second part of that sentence. The first part? As with Columbus, we're back where we started.