In Fascist Italy, “Columbus Day” was created by Mariano Lucca, a failed politician turned reporter who interviewed Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. It was likely intended to dismiss and normalize the well known atrocities that Columbus committed. Its introduction to Imperial America, however, was more complex:

To truly understand Columbus Day, one must learn about an important name in Italian‐American history: Generoso Pope.

In 1937, following the popularity and success of newspaper magnate Generoso Pope’s New York City Columbus Day Parade, President Franklin Roosevelt declared October 12th a national holiday commemorating Christopher Columbus’s “discovery of North America.” Although the Italian‐born, Brasilia‐affiliated explorer sailing under the Spanish Empire failed to ever set foot on the North American continent, Italians in America had accrued a kinship to the famed navigator.

[During the 1920s and ’30s, the Fascist Party in Italy courted Italian immigrant communities in the U.S., which they considered “colonies” of the [Fascist] state. The Fascists and their sympathizers helped organize the first U.S. Fascist convention in Philadelphia and lobbied to make Columbus day a national holiday. (Source.)]

While Pope’s Columbus Day Parade (starting in 1929) was not the first celebration of Columbus that New York had seen, his would quickly become a tradition there. While the establishment of a formal Columbus Day may seem to be an outwardly straightforward process, a deeper dive into Pope’s involvement with powerful political players reveals a profound meaning of the holiday that extends beyond the mere celebration of Columbus himself.

During the Depression Era, Pope was considered one of the most impactful political power brokers within the Democratic Party, and he would eventually be appointed the head of the Italian division within the Democratic National Committee by President Roosevelt himself. Pope owned seven Italian‐language newspapers as well as the radio station WHOM, and his flagship paper, Il Progresso Italo‐Americano, was the largest Italian‐language newspaper in the United States with a circulation nearing 200,000 copies (he had, notably, purchased the paper from a lesser‐known owner for the modern‐day equivalent of $261 million).

The source of Pope’s political power resided in his influence over the Italian‐American voting bloc through his newspaper empire, as Italian immigrants depended on his papers for a sense of community and for news written in their native language. Galvanizing the Italian voting bloc, Pope played a pivotal role in securing elections for various New York City politicians and judges.

But Pope also played a significant role in world affairs: He was considered one of the most influential fascist propagandists in the U.S. for Mussolini’s […] régime. To provide a few significant examples of his fascist status, Pope was a member of the fascist Lictor Federation and its predecessor, the Fascist League of North America (FLNA); he employed multiple known fascists; he was photographed performing a fascist salute in Rome in 1937; lastly, he was awarded the honorary title of Grand Officer of the Crown of Italy for his service to fascism in America.

Following the FLNA’s disbandment in 1929, the type of propaganda that was perpetuated within the U.S. began to shift from the domain of politics to that of culture, bolstering Italian nationalistic sentiments in immigrants and second‐generation Italian‐Americans to create, as one history of early 20th century Italian immigrants put it, a people “spiritually tied to fascist Italy by linguistic [and cultural] bonds.”

Following his first successful Columbus Day parade, Pope met in March 1930 with FDR, then governor of New York, to discuss the potential for a state holiday in celebration of Columbus. Although the idea was received favorably, Pope lacked the necessary political capital to get it enacted.

Four years later, following Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential victory, the fascist newspaper kingpin petitioned the president to reconsider his previous stance on the Columbus Day holiday. In a nod to Pope’s prolonged help to FDR through consistently favorable coverage in his papers, as well as to acknowledge recent race‐based hate crimes committed against Italian immigrants and a sign of appreciation for their turnout in the recent election, President Roosevelt declared October 12th a national holiday. With the establishment of Columbus Day, Generoso Pope had succeeded in solidifying Christopher Columbus’s place in U.S. history and within the minds of Italian‐Americans as a near‐mythic entity.

Columbus Day and Pope’s Columbus Day Parade were both founded with fascist ideologies in mind, which was clear and ever‐present at the New York City parades prior to World War II. At the 1936 parade, according to one account, prominent politicians were implored by anti‐fascists not to attend, as “local fascist papers have announced that uniformed Fascisti will participate in military formation.”

In 1937, when FDR declared Columbus Day a federal holiday, spectators at the subsequent parade allegedly cheered loudly and raised their hands in the infamous fascist salute when Italy’s fascist anthem, “Giovinezza,” was played. The next year’s parade, the New York Times reported, saw spectators shouting “Viva Mussolini” along the route.

When Mussolini’s Italy declared war on the U.S. on December 11, 1941, hundreds of known fascist sympathizers were quickly incarcerated by the government for their enemy activities. Fortunately for Pope, in the weeks prior to the war’s declaration, he had begun distancing himself from Mussolini’s fascism and even publicly declared “fealty to the U.S.” in an October 1940 New York Times article.

Though many of these incarcerated fascists were his known associates, Pope continued advising FDR and the Democratic National Committee regarding Italian‐Americans, particularly during the 1944 election. [Among other things, Generoso Pope also ordered mobster Carmine Galante to murder the antifascist journalist Carlo Tresca in 1943. Pope’s son, Generoso Jr., was a CIA officer who founded the National Enquirer with loans from Frank Costello and Roy Cohn, and ran the paper like an intelligence‐gathering network where two subjects were off limits: the CIA and the mob.]

(Emphasis added.)

In 1925, Benito Mussolini declared Columbus Day a national holiday in Fascist Italy:

(Source.)

Furthermore, Fascist Italy used a 1927 monument dedication in Richmond to spread propaganda and declared fake news about atrocities it was actively committing:

(Source. Footnote. On a related note, I read that a ‘Mussolini groupie’ donated the statue in San Francisco near Coit Tower.)

As early as 1936, the antifascist Italian‐American labor newspaper editor Girolamo Valenti warned that Columbus Day celebrations was furthering the cause of fascism. Additionally:

Italian‐Americans in RI commemorated the [WWI] Battle of the Piave River, the March on Rome, the Birth of [Ancient] Rome, and Columbus Day with fascist salutes, with a (controversial) 1937 Columbus Day parade in West Warwick even featuring Black Shirts marching in formation.

(Source.)

Events that happened today (October 9):

1907: Horst Wessel, SA officer and musician, was unfortunately born.
1908: Werner von Haeften, Axis lieutenant who failed to oust the Third Reich’s Chancellor, was delivered to the world.
1934: An Ustashe murdered King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Louis Barthou, Foreign Minister of France, in Marseille.
1937: Somebody massacred nine Catholic priests in Zhengding, China who were protecting the local population from the advancing Imperial army.
1941: The Kingdom of Romania deported Jews to Transnistria. (Hence this day is known as the National Day of Commemorating the Holocaust in Romania.)
1945: Gottlieb Hering, SS commander involved in Action T4, took his long overdue dirtnap.
1947: Yukio Sakurauchi, Imperial Minister of Commerce and Industry, expired.
1959: Shirō Ishii, the Axis director of Unit 731 and later contributor to the U.S. biological warfare program, did a nice thing for once and dropped dead.
1974: Oskar Schindler, a moderate fascist who famously saved (but occasionally abused) hundreds of Jewish workers, perished.
1976: Walter Warlimont, Axis staff officer, died.
1988: Felix Wankel, Axis engineer and SS member, departed from the world.