With the official Columbus Day proclamation from the White House crudely attacking “radical extremists” this year (and “left-wing arsonists” last year) for viewing Christopher Columbus critically, one might assume that the fight over the Italian explorer’s legacy is something new. But Columbus has been satirized and savaged on the American stage for generations. Yes, it’s just been in the last few years that dozens of Christopher Columbus statues were removed (a nation-wide surge that was central in the staged reading earlier this year of Amanda Lacson’s “Columbus: Our Idiot Hero,” in which “Cris” in the afterlife is forced to confront the harm he caused before all his monuments disappear.) But no less a revered American dramatist than Eugene O’Neill wrote a scorching dramatic portrait in 1925, a dozen years before Columbus Day even became an official annual federal holiday, now celebrated on the second Monday of October (i.e. today.)

The first plays about Columbus were straightforward: Felix Lope de Vega’s “El Nuevo de Mundo” debuted in the 1500s, and the first to be staged in America itself, Thomas Morton’s “Columbus, or The Discovery of America. A Historical Play,” was staged in 1794. But John Brougham toured America in 1858 with a show whose satirical intent is evident in its lengthy title: “Columbus el Filibustero!! A New and Audaciously Original Historica-Plagiaristic, Ante-National, Pre-Patriotic, and Omni-Local Confusion of Circumstances, Running Through Two Acts and Four Centuries”

In 1893, timed to the anniversary of Columbus’s expedition to the New World, a Broadway musical that ran for 400 performances entitled “1492 Up to Date or Very Near It” had him cavorting with chorus girls in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, while back in Spain, the royal family that paid his way has gone broke, because King Ferdinand has gone out for too many nights on the town. As if to give the queen equal time, the 1927 Broadway play by Lawton Campbell entitled “Immoral Isabella?” depicts an oversexed Queen Isabella taking the younger adventurer as her lover, and when her husband won’t sponsor his trip to the New World, she pawns her royal jewels to finance the trip. Another satire, “Christopher Comes Across” by Hawthorne Hurst, ran on Broadway in 1932.

O’Neill’s play “The Fountain” depicted Columbus as arrogant and greedy (“I need the power that wealth can give. I need it for God’s glory…”), as he leads a second voyage to the New World that brings disaster to the native population.

That has been largely the take since, at least for works staged somewhere other than elementary schools. The 500th anniversary of the expeditions in 1992 saw several such works, most prominently “The Voyage,” an opera with music by Philip Glass and text by David Henry Hwang, at the Metropolitan Opera. “Terra Incognita,” by Maria Irene Fornes, at INTAR Hispanic Arts Center, was set in a cafe in Palos, Spain, the city from which Columbus sailed. “Christopher Columbus: The New World Order,” by Peter Schumann, the head of Bread and Puppet Theater, was reviewed as “a brutal tale of conquest, destruction and oppression.”

In “The Thanksgiving Play,” which debuted in 2028 and ran on Broadway in 2023, playwright Larissa FastHorse restored a largely satirical take on Christopher Columbus and Columbus Day, although one that draws blood:

Jaxton, a high school drama teacher, attacks his Italian-American colleague Caden, for being   “one of Christopher Columbus’ bros.”
“I’m not related to Columbus.”
“But you have the awareness that your people started the slavery and genocide of millions.”
“That’s not all Columbus did.”
“We uplift the celebration of Native American Heritage Month, and Columbus Day inches a little closer to oblivion.”
“Well, Columbus Day is actually a celebration of the contributions of Italians to….”
“Then why not Mussolini Day?”

I think it important to respond to this glib dialogue with some history, which given what’s happening in the country at the moment, could count as ironic.  According to Britannica, “the direct impetus for declaring the anniversary of Columbus’s arrival a national holiday was the mass lynching of 11 Italian Americans in New Orleans in 1891. One of the largest lynchings in U.S. history, it occurred during a time of widespread anti-immigrant and anti-Italian sentiment in the country…The event threatened diplomatic relations between Italy and the United States, and, to appease the Italian government, U.S. Pres. Benjamin Harrison proclaimed the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival a national holiday in 1892, intending it to be a one-time celebration.”