Little League Sponsorship Letter: Fill & Download for Free

My mother had a part-time job as a church secretary during the late 60s and early 70s, and was tasked with creating the weekly programs handed out at the services on Sundays. The bulletins were printed on 8.5x11 paper that was ordered from religious supply companies, and had a nice 5 x 8 color image printed on one side so that when they were folded in half the program would have an attractive cover image. To populate the inside of the program Mom would type a mimeograph stencil, which looked like this (only shorter, for letter sized pages)....and then she would run the program paper through the mimeograph machine, which looked like this:She would have to type it in a landscape orientation, of course, so that the text inside the folded program would be readable, so she had a typewriter with an extra wide carriage. Mimeograph stencils were just that, stencils, a translucent waxy top page over an opaque backing that provided stability for typing or freehand drawing with a stylus. The typewriter key or stylus onto the stencil would carve away enough of the waxy coating that ink could penetrate those areas when the stencil was stretched over the drum of the mimeograph machine. When you made a mistake typing on a stencil, you painted over the error with a clear liquid that filled in the gaps of the waxy coating, and after it dried you could make your correction. Mimeographs typically printed with black ink and should not be confused with ditto machines, which printed in purple. Ditto machines, which looked like this...were a little simpler and cheaper to operate, and were used by teachers to create classroom materials all through my public school education, from 1962-1973. Ditto masters were thick white glossy top sheets attached to thick purple backing sheets. When you wrote or typed on a ditto master the purple ink on the inside of the backing sheet would adhere to the back of the white top sheet. If you made a mistake you could use thin paper tape to cover it on the back of the white top sheet and type or write over it again, or you could use a single edge razor blade to shave the mistake off the back of the white top sheet, then type or write over it.I myself got my first full-time corporate office job about ten years later, in 1979, at Major League Baseball, and worked there for ten years, during which time I used a lot of other technology that is now mostly unheard of.I remember using the fax precursor that was called a Qwip machine.There was an 11" long rotating drum that opened up slightly so a standard US sheet of 8.5" x 11" paper could be clamped into it lengthwise. It was attached to an acoustic coupler designed to hold an old Western Electric style telephone handset, which was also attached to the device.If you wanted to send a facsimile copy of a document to someone else you would pick up the handset attached to your Qwip machine and call the phone number associated with the Qwip handset on the other end. If they didn't answer, you were out of luck. If they did answer you would tell them you had a document to send and how many pages it was. You would ask them if they preferred six minutes per page (standard resolution, which was still pretty grainy) or three minutes per page (grainier yet). You would then clamp your original onto the drum of your unit while on the other end the recipient would clamp into his or her drum a sheet of special thick glossy thermal paper. Once the papers were clamped in you would confirm by voice that the other side was ready and then each of you would put your handsets into the acoustic couplers. The sender's machine would begin to whine, the recipient's would whine in return (like the old dialup modem handshakes), and the transmission would begin. On the sender's end a stylus/needle would scan the original document from top to bottom as it rotated on the drum, looking for text or other dark pixels to transmit. On the recipient's end the stylus/needle would literally burn the image received into the thermal paper, which would emit a distinctive odor.After the page finished both humans would pick up their handsets out of their acoustic couplers and discuss the quality of the transmission. "Did it come through OK?" If not, they might re-send it. If it did, then they would repeat the process for Page 2, if there was a Page 2. And Page 3, and onward, always doing the voice check between pages.When Federal Express first started up, in addition to their air courier services, they had a near-monopoly on the first generation of plain paper fax machines. It was possible to take a thick document to a Federal Express office and have it transmitted within minutes to another Federal Express office hundreds or thousands of miles away, where the intended recipient could come and pick it up (or have Federal Express deliver it to them). As the prices of plain paper fax machines came down and more offices had them, this part of Federal Express' business evaporated, and today very few people remember it. (I remember sending at least one document this way.)When I went to work for the American League in 1980 I was given an office that included a Western Union TWX machine (close cousin of the better known Telex machines).You could dial up another TWX machine directly or you could use a paper tape with one or more stored addresses on it to contact other TWX users (in my case, the other MLB offices and clubs). You could type your message live or record your message on paper tape (which was quicker and allowed correction of errors). I learned to cut and read paper tapes. I could look at a paper tape and tell you if it was an address tape or a message tape, and if it was an American League address tape or an all-clubs message tape (this was more trivial than it sounds: not only was the all-clubs tape twice as long, it began with ATL BRAVES instead of ORIOLES BAL and so just by looking at a few lines of the tape I could easily tell the difference).The one in my office had a clear plastic foam-dampened hood over it, similar to the one in this image, which was intended to reduce the noisiness when the device was operating.It was basically useless and I always referred to it as the "Cone of Silence" for that reason.My job with the American League included daily waiver transactions and publication of a daily bulletin. During spring training I used the TWX machine (because the clubs carried their TWX machines with them to Florida and Arizona), but during the rest of the year I did this using an IBM Mag Card 1 terminal, basically a hopped-up Selectric, and pre-stored my content on reusable 50-line magnetic cards that fed into a reader attached to the typewriter.By 1986 when I was out of law school and working in the MLB Commissioner's Office, we had a sponsorship deal with IBM and there was some kind of mainframe in an air-conditioned room. The secretaries all had terminals on their desks, where they used word processing software to prepare our correspondence, contracts, etc. I startled my secretary Eileen by asking her to teach me how to do basic word processing / editing tasks on her terminal, but I found it very useful. She left at 5:30 and I was routinely there for at least another hour or two (and the Federal Express office a block away was open till 8). I could often get documents done, printed, and out the door instead of waiting for her to come in and follow my handwritten edits in the morning.I did use a Dictaphone during this period of my life, mostly for correspondence and to go through a to-do list of things I wanted Eileen to help me accomplish the next day. She came in at 8:30 and I came in at 9:30, so she could get a good head start on me this way. Usually I would do this in the evenings. I would speak into a little handheld unit that contained a microcassette, and leave the cassette in my outbox. Eileen would then play it back on a unit that looked like this (note the foot pedal, so Eileen could play/pause with her foot, keeping both hands on the keyboard typing):In 1989 I went to work for an agency called ProServ that represented athletes. At ProServ I had access to a Dictaphone but again found that the professional staff had no access to computers or other technology. The secretaries and assistants did have terminals where they did word processing and had a primitive form of email or IM that communicated only among terminal owners. I found this out because several of them got in trouble for sending some very mocking messages about the corporate leadership, not knowing that anyone else could see them.Within a year or three I had a Macintosh at home and began agitating at the office for a computer that would allow me to do more work hands-on, editing my own documents instead of marking them up with ink and waiting for an assistant to do it. No lawyer or professional at ProServ had ever had a computer on his or her desk, but after a little while they relented, and my modern era of office work began.

This was a really long time ago, before probably half of Quora's users were born! So I'm honored that anyone is interested.TL;DR some cool stuffI was one of the first two hires in the MLB executive development program. The idea was to take a couple of recent college graduates and put them into a rotation among all the MLB offices in NYC, exposing them to all the various aspects of the work. There was no formal career path laid out; the idea was that if we were good, we'd meet so many people that someone would hire us at some point.There were five different MLB offices in New York at the time, located in five different buildings, in addition to the Yankees and the Mets:Commissioner's Office, 75 Rockefeller PlazaAmerican League, 280 Park AvenueNational League, 1 Rockefeller PlazaMLB Player Relations Committee, 1270 6th AvenueMLB Promotion Corporation, 1212 6th AvenueThe offices all consolidated into two floors at 350 Park Avenue in about 1983, and have since moved to several floors at 245 Park. (This was a big deal, considering the history. The American League was headquartered in Boston when Joe Cronin was league president, then moved to NYC in 1974 when Lee MacPhail was hired away from the Yankees to succeed him. Before Cronin the league was headquartered in Chicago. The National League was headquartered in San Francisco until about 1976 when it moved kicking and screaming to NYC. Previously it was headquartered in Cincinnati.)I showed up on the first day and met my new colleague, the other hire, Drew Sheinman. We spent the morning together in the Commissioner's Office, doing paperwork and being introduced to people. We were taken out to lunch and after lunch I was taken around the corner to 1270 6th Avenue, where for the next 15 months I worked on MLB's labor issues from the owners' side, while Drew did some different assignments relating to marketing stuff.My new boss was a guy named Ray Grebey. The owners had hired Ray away from General Electric because they felt the Players Association was getting the best of them and Ray had a reputation as a hardass. He was, as far as I can tell, a real hardliner in negotiations, but he was generally good to me, although very demanding. The PRC's longtime lawyer was a guy named Barry Rona. Barry was profane and hilarious and brilliant and taught me a huge amount about collective bargaining. My first assignment was to create a kind of spreadsheet of all of the Major League clubs' guaranteed salary obligations, including all guaranteed deferred compensation, out into the future (the timeline ran from 1979 to about 2030, if I recall correctly). So, beginning with the Atlanta Braves, I read through every major league contract, broke down its guaranteed components, and record them on my spreadsheets. This was before Excel, of course, so I did it all on ledger paper and by hand, adding the columns with a printing calculator and erasing and recalculating every time I got additional information.I also assisted with research for various salary arbitrations and with preparations for the 1980 collective bargaining cycle, where a strike was looming because the owners felt they should be entitled to receive some kind of professional player compensation (not just draft picks or cash) when they lost a player to free agency. Although the 1980 strike was averted by the stratagem of empaneling a clubs-players "study committee" to address the issue of professional player compensation, the strike did occur in 1981 when (unsurprisingly) the committee failed to come up with any kind of useful solution.After 15 months in one place I was ready for some of that broader exposure that had been promised to me. I had a brief stint in the Commissioner's Office but I was soon sent out to Shea Stadium to work in the Mets' promotions department for a few weeks. The Mets really sucked in those days and one of their gimmicks to get fannies in the seats was that they always had a live National Anthem performer. It was my job to wrangle these people from the moment of their arrival until I saw them to a box seat after their performance. During this time I heard some very unusual performances of the anthem. The Mets' Old Timers' Day also fell during my tenure at Shea, and I was assigned to carry out a plan that involved putting Duke Snider into a sedan chair and carrying him out onto the field. Of course the Mets did not own a sedan chair, so I was told to go around to all the antiques galleries in Manhattan until I could find one and persuade the gallery owner to lend it to the Mets for free. I was also to do this without a business card, as MLB had not seen fit to give them to us. When I reflect on this I'm still a little amazed that I found an antique sedan chair at a gallery in the east 50s that agreed to let the Mets send a truck to pick the thing up. My job then was - without using pins or any tape on the gilt wood trim - to cover the upholstered front, sides, and back of the chair with Mets blue crepe paper (using double sided tape sticking only to the upholstery, not the gilt wood). Enormous Mets logo stickers were then affixed to the crepe paper on the sides of the chair. I only wish I had a picture of it to show you. I later found out that nobody had told Duke Snider in advance what the plan was and he thought it was bullshit, but after a few minutes they got him calmed down and he did go through with it.Greatest moment at the Mets: I was sitting in the press room eating dinner with a couple of club officials and with Lou Brock, who had participated in some kind of pre-game ceremony, watching the game on closed circuit TV. In the first inning of the game Lee Mazzilli reached base, then was thrown out trying to steal second. We all looked at Lou. He leaned toward the TV monitor and watched closely as the TV feed showed us three or four angles on the attempted steal. Finally after a few seconds he leaned back in his chair. We all looked at each other and waited for Lou to speak. The greatest base stealer of all time was going to give us his analysis. Finally he spoke. "He got a bad jump."My next gig was at the Promotion Corporation. It was late in the season and we were preparing for the World Series. The Expos were still in contention and so we had to prepare bilingual copy for the WS program. We sent out all the articles to be professionally translated but my five+ years of French came in handy for the copy-editing. (Fun fact: French translates 20% longer than the original English.)During this time I realized I needed to get serious about a permanent job and luckily the American League wanted to hire me. Their Manager of Waivers and Player Records was leaving permanently to have a baby and so I was hired to replace her.For just over five years I kept all the rosters in the AL. I published the daily waiver bulletin, tracked waiver requests, optional and outright assignments, disabled list placements, contract signings, designations for assignment, all that stuff. I interpreted and enforced the Major League Rules. I talked to most of the general managers in the league at least once or twice a week, and gave advice on how to structure their transactions. This was a really fun job. I just don't have words for how much fun it was. I reported directly to the league president and kept him abreast of whatever pending transactions rose to the level of something he needed to know about. The tech underpinning this job was a TWX machine and a timeshare dialup account on a Honeywell mainframe computer somewhere in Minnesota, accessed via an IBM Mag Card 1 Selectric terminal. Every day I would dial in at 2 pm to pick up waiver requests and claims, then at 2:30 to advise the clubs of the outcome of their waiver requests, then before 4:30 to publish the day's waiver bulletin listing waiver requests, transactions, and any announcements. I would format it on a mag card (or more than one - the mag cards had 50 lines apiece), or, if it wasn't too long, I'd just dial in and type it live. The clubs knew that they could dial in starting at 4:30 to pick the bulletin up. During spring training the clubs unhooked their TWX machines, packed them up, and took them to Florida or Arizona, and I published the daily waiver bulletins via TWX. I learned how to read, cut, and edit the paper tapes the TWX machine used.During this period I went to law school at night over at Fordham, in the Lincoln Center area of Manhattan. I started class at 6 pm, typically four nights per week, and got out at 8:45 (occasionally at 9:30). Every night I would go home, eat something, get in bed with the reading for the next evening's classes, and then crash. During my lunch hour I'd eat while looking over that day's reading again, then leave at about 5:15 and head over to class. During this time I also gained about 40 pounds I never managed to lose.After I got out of law school I sat and passed the NY Bar and then I got a huge break.MLB had a new commissioner, Peter Ueberroth, and Peter decided to create a second Assistant General Counsel position for me in his office. So for the next three and a half years I read and gave advice on stadium leases, concessions agreements, and broadcasting agreements, but mainly I drafted and negotiated a huge number of licensing/merchandising and sponsorship agreements. I actually lawyered Nike's first MLB license agreement from the MLB side, back in 1987 (then I lawyered the next one perhaps twelve years later from the Nike side).This was a lot of fun because the licensing and merchandising work was a blast. I loved working with the licensees to bring their products to reality. And I loved the sample sales more than I can ever say. I also did anticounterfeiting work. I sent C&D letters and hung out in unmarked vans in the Shea Stadium parking lot with an armload of John Doe seizure orders to pick up counterfeit t-shirts. I went on a raid with the FBI. Stephanie V's answer to How does the FBI decide what to investigate?There's an interview with me in this book, published just before I left MLB... and it was excerpted in this issue of Sports Illustrated:One other thing I did that was worth mentioning: I represented MLB to a committee called the Joint Sports Claimants. The Joint Sports Claimants were parties to a multilateral multiyear settlement with MPAA and some other parties to allocate distant signal royalties awarded by the Copyright Royalty Tribunal, i.e. copyright royalties paid by cable systems that picked up distant over-the-air stations who had especially interesting programming, the vast majority of which was movies or sports. The Joint Sports Claimants were MLB, NBA, NHL, NCAA, and for a few years a professional soccer league. (The NFL was not a part of it because unlike the rest of us their games were all on network TV and so their copyright royalties were all already accounted for.) It would have cost so much to litigate the percentages every year that we just agreed among ourselves how we would allocate the monies the CRT spat out. The CRT would send the single largest claimant, the MPAA, a check and the MPAA would keep their share and dole out the rest of our shares. The Joint Sports Claimants meetings were occasionally very interesting and often challenging because of the internal politics of our group. From time to time I was called upon to engage in shuttle diplomacy when Party X would threaten to leave because they thought Party Y was getting too much money, but Party Z could not be persuaded.Overall my time in baseball was mostly a lot of fun. I'd be happy to answer additional questions in the comments (if anyone is still reading)... %^>

Ah yes. It’s that time of year when people start talking about Christopher Columbus again isn’t it?Here’s the thing: when people condemn Christopher Columbus for his atrocities, they aren’t doing so on an anachronistic basis. Columbus was widely recognized as a bad dude within his own lifetime and by his own people. In fact, he was so notoriously brutal during his time as governor of Hispaniola that he was actually removed from his position by the Spanish crown.The dark side of Christopher ColumbusThe main reason why Columbus is so controversial is primarily because of his brutal and sadistic mistreatment of the native peoples of the land he explored. Many people are vaguely aware that Columbus did some bad things, but few are aware just how horrifying some of the things he did really were. We will start at the beginning, with the mildly depraved and work our way up to the downright appalling. Columbus himself describes his first experience with the native Taíno people on San Salvador in a letter written to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1493 on his way back to Spain from his first voyage:“They have no iron or steel, nor any weapons; nor are they fit thereunto; not because they be not a well-formed people and of fair stature, but that they are most wondrously timorous… such they are, incurably timid… They are artless and generous with what they have, to such a degree as noone would believe but him who had seen it. Of anything they have, if it be asked for, they never say no, but do rather invite the person to accept it, and show as much lovingness as though they would give their hearts……Their Highnesses may see that I shall give them as much gold as they may need, with very little aid which their Highnesses will give me; spices and cotton at once, as much as their Highnesses will order to be shipped, and as much as they shall order to be shipped of mastic… and aloe-wood as much as they shall order to be shipped; and slaves as many as they shall order to be shipped.”In other words, no sooner had Columbus finished praising the natives for their generosity than he was already beginning to think of ways to capture them to bring them back to Europe as slaves. In his journal, he wrote, “…the people here are simple in warlike matters… I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men and govern them as I pleased.”These tyrannical aspirations would soon be fulfilled. For the time being, however, Columbus was forced to settle for merely capturing the natives and selling them into slavery. On his first voyage, Columbus captured twenty-five Lucayo people to bring back to Europe to sell into slavery; all but seven of them died of disease on the voyage back across the Atlantic. Capturing slaves and selling them in Europe became a major objective for all of Columbus’s future voyages.To this end, Columbus and his men ultimately played a pivotal role in establishing the trans-Atlantic slave trade. American historian James W. Loewen states, “Columbus not only sent the first slaves across the Atlantic, he probably sent more slaves – about five thousand – than any other individual… other nations rushed to emulate Columbus.”ABOVE: Imaginative portrayal of the landing of Christopher Columbus on San Salvador on 12 October 1492, painted in 1847 by the American Neoclassical painter John VanderlynFor his second voyage, which set out from Cádiz, Spain on September 24, 1493, Columbus was given seventeen ships and over 12,000 men. His primary objective for this voyage was to establish permanent colonies in the New World in the name of Spain. His crew included soldiers, farmers, priests, and others from a diverse array of occupations. On November 3, Columbus and his men spotted the island of Dominica and then Marie-Galante. They journeyed north through the Lesser Antilles, the Virgin Islands, past Puerto Rico, and back to Hispaniola, which he had visited on his first voyage.Michele da Cuneo, a childhood friend of Columbus who accompanied him on his second voyage, proudly describes how Columbus gave him a native woman as a sex slave, who was at first unwilling to let him ravish her, but he tortured her until she agreed to let him do whatever he wanted to her:“While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral [i.e. Columbus] gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked—as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. But—to cut a long story short—I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought that she had been brought up in a school for whores.”If you think that is horrifying already, just wait; things get way, way worse. In a letter written in around 1500 to Doña Juana de la Torre, the sister of one of his leading crew members on his second voyage, Columbus himself boasts in his own words of one of the ways in which he made money on his recent third voyage, in which he had continued exploring part of the Caribbean and begun exploring the northeast coast of South America. Columbus writes, as translated by George F. Barwick:“Now that so much gold is found, a dispute arises as to which brings more profit, whether to go about robbing or to go to the mines. A hundred castenelloes are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand.”That is right. Apparently Columbus was not just a sex trafficker, but a child sex trafficker.Christopher Columbus was not only brutal in his enslavement of native peoples; he was also cruel to his own Spanish subjects. A forty-eight-page report written by Francisco de Bobadilla, Columbus’s successor as the governor of the colony of Hispaniola, contains eyewitness testimony from twenty-three of Columbus’s Spanish subjects on his behavior during his seven-year governance of the colony. The report describes in horrifying detail how he frequently employed maiming and mutilation as punishments, even for minor offenses.For example, the report states that Christopher Columbus once punished a man for stealing a piece of corn by having the man’s nose and ears sliced off and selling him into slavery. When a woman showed the audacity to insinuate that Columbus might be of lowly birth, his brother Bartolomeo had her paraded through the streets naked and then had her tongue cut out. Christopher praised Bartolomeo for “defending the family.” When the native subjects rebelled against him, Columbus brutally massacred them and had their bloody and dismembered corpses paraded through the streets to discourage future revolts.Things ultimately ended badly for Christopher Columbus and his brothers’ rule of Hispaniola. In August 1498, his subjects rebelled; they were incensed at the discovery that the New World was not overflowing with mountains of gold, as Columbus had deceitfully promised them to convince them to come with him. Meanwhile, sailors and colonists who had returned to Spain were lobbying the king and queen to have Columbus removed from power, telling them of his disgraceful mismanagement and tyranny. Columbus responded to this situation by having some of the rebel colonists hanged.Meanwhile, Columbus was beginning to attract criticism from some Catholic clergy. You see, the church in those days prohibited Christians from being taken as slaves and, if a slave converted to Christianity, he or she was required to be set free. According to some critics, Columbus wanted to capture as many slaves as possible to make as much money for himself as he could, so he was deliberately avoiding converting native peoples to Christianity so that he could sell them into slavery.In 1500, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain sent emissaries to remove Columbus from his position as governor of Hispaniola, arrest him and his brothers, and bring them back to Spain. Columbus and his brothers were thrown in prison, where they stayed for six weeks until King Ferdinand ordered them to be released. The king and queen met with the Columbus brothers shortly thereafter and agreed to fund Columbus’s fourth and final voyage, but they refused to reinstate him as governor of Hispaniola.Apart from the report from Francisco de Bobadilla, even more horrifying information about Columbus’s mistreatment of native peoples comes from the book A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, written in around 1542 by Bartolomé de las Casas (lived c. 1484 – 1566), an early colonist in the Americas whose father had been one of Columbus’s crew members on his second voyage. Las Casas was a passionate defender of the native peoples and fierce advocate for their rights and human dignity.In his book, Las Casas claims that, at one point, after Columbus’s slave workers quickly began to die at an exponential rate due to mistreatment and disease, Columbus himself issued a decree that every native over the age of thirteen was required to supply him with one hawk’s bell full of gold powder every three months. Those who brought the proper amount of gold were given copper tokens to wear around their necks. If any Spaniard caught a native without a visible copper token, he was required to chop the native’s hands off and leave him to die of blood loss.ABOVE: The Spanish colonist Bartolomé de las Casas provides us with horrifying, although possibly exaggerated, accounts of Columbus’s alleged cruelty to the native Taíno people of the Caribbean.To be clear, Bartolomé de las Casas was not an unbiased reporter, since he had a polemical agenda to portray current Spanish policies towards the natives as cruel and inhumane and thereby prove the need for drastic reform. Many historians believe that many of his accounts of the cruelty of Spanish colonists are probably somewhat exaggerated, but much of what he tells us about Columbus squares well with what we know about Columbus’s cruelty from other sources (particularly with his apparent fondness for dismembering people).Christopher Columbus’s dark legacyIf the things Columbus himself did were not horrible enough, his legacy was even worse. Bartolomé de las Casas gives extensive accounts of the brutality of the Spanish colonists in the Caribbean who followed in Columbus’s footsteps. The following passage is just a brief representative example:“They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual’s head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers’ breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders into a river, shouting, ‘Wriggle, you little perisher.'”Las Casas filled his entire book with reports just like this one. Once again, while these lavish descriptions are probably greatly exaggerated, they do reflect the grim reality that the colonists generally had very few reservations about maiming and killing the native inhabitants of the lands they were colonizing.Meanwhile, the first European colonists in the Americas brought with them the same diseases from the Old World that had ravished the population of Europe for over the past two millennia: smallpox, typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever, pertussis, and dozens of others. Most Europeans by the 1500s had evolved at least some level of protective immunity to these diseases, because everyone who was especially vulnerable to them had already been killed in massive pandemics such as the Antonine Plague (165–180 AD), the Plague of Justinian (541–542 AD), and the Black Death (1347–1351), each of which is thought to have killed roughly between 30–60% of Europe total population, as well as in smaller, local epidemics.All these diseases, however, were completely foreign to the New World and the native peoples had no immunity to any of them. As a result of all these diseases being introduced at once, the native Americans almost immediately began to drop like flies. The diseases rapidly spread across the Americas in a matter of just a few years to all parts of the continents, including ones Europeans had no idea even existed, killing millions of people as they went.The sheer levels of death and disease can hardly even be fathomed by people today. By 1600, just over a century after Columbus’s arrival, the indigenous population of the Americas had plummeted by perhaps as much as 90% in some areas, a death toll that far exceeds that of any other pandemic in all of human history. To exaggerate only a little bit, by the time the bulk of English settlers began to arrive in the future United States in the late 1600s, the Americas were like a post-apocalyptic world.ABOVE: Illustration from the Florentine Codex (compiled between 1555–1576), showing Nahua people of modern-day Mexico suffering and dying of smallpox during the era of the Spanish conquestOf course, no one could have possibly known what devastating effect that European diseases would have on the native population beforehand. Certainly neither Columbus nor anyone else had any idea what massive death and devastation that his colonies and the ones following immediately afterwards would cause. Nonetheless, in hindsight, knowing what we do now about the carnage and death left behind by the introduction of European diseases should give us serious doubts about wanting to celebrate the man who inadvertently started it all.ObjectionsI have heard a lot of objections and excuses for why, in spite of all the awful things Columbus did, it is still appropriate that we should honor him. Here is a sound debunking of a just a few:“Well, Columbus may have been a bit of a jerk, but we should still honor him for all the good he did.”First of all, “kind of a jerk” is a serious understatement when describing a man who captured and sold thousands of people into slavery and routinely had his subjects dismembered and executed in horrifying ways as punishments for relatively minor crimes. Second of all, accidentally stumbling across the Americas does not make up for the hundreds of people he sold into slavery, mutilated, and/or killed.“Well, the native Americans killed each other and engaged in behavior equally as savage as what Columbus did, so why are we blaming him?”It is true that many of the native peoples Columbus encountered were violent towards each other, but that does not in any way excuse what he did to them. Whether one person’s actions are morally justifiable is not determined in relation to other people’s actions. Furthermore, different native tribes in the Caribbean had different cultures and some were generally more peaceful than others, so we cannot generalize that they were all violent.“Columbus was a product of his times and, those days, everyone was brutally sadistic.”I agree that we should judge historical figures by the standards of their own times rather than anachronistically imposing modern conventions on them, but, in this case, it is abundantly clear that people in Columbus’s time knew full well that the way he was behaving was tyrannical and wrong. That is why his Spanish subjects rebelled against him, why the king and queen removed him from his position as governor, and why Bartolomé de las Casas railed against him for his mistreatment of the natives.“Sure, Columbus did some bad things, but George Washington owned slaves, so are you going to say we should stop celebrating George Washington’s Birthday (which is also a federal holiday)?”The problem here is that, yes, George Washington owned slaves, but he also played a pivotal role in helping the United States win and retain its independence and in shaping our country’s constitution and the presidency. There are plenty of good things Washington did that we can justly honor him for. With Columbus, on the other hand, the only thing he did for our country was the result of a ridiculous mistake that he never even admitted. That is not even mentioning the fact that Columbus actually never set foot on any part of the land that would later become the mainland United States, since his explorations were confined to the Caribbean and South America.ABOVE: Map of all four of Christopher Columbus’s voyages. He never actually set foot on any part of the land that would later become the mainland United States.The origins of Columbus DayAt this point, you all may be wondering, “How did we even start honoring this man to begin with?” This is actually a very interesting question, because, during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in the British colonies that would later become the United States, Columbus was not generally seen as particularly important in the history of North America.Columbus was not totally obscure in colonial America; plenty of people during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had heard of him. Nonetheless, the Italian explorer John Cabot (lived c. 1450 – c. 1500), who sailed under the sponsorship of King Henry VII of England, was honored as the true discoverer of America, because he explored the northeast coast of North America in 1497, which made him the first European known at the time to have explored any part of mainland North America.Then the Revolutionary War changed everything. The American patriots fighting for independence from the British crown needed a historical figure to rally behind as their hero. This hero needed to be stubborn, persistent, a rebel with a cause, and, above all, he needed to be someone who was neither British nor in league with the British. Christopher Columbus, an Italian employed by the Spanish Crown, fit the bill. That is how our nation’s capital, the District of Columbia, was named after him.The publication of Washington Irving’s A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in January 1828 popularized the already growing fame of Christopher Columbus in the United States. Irving transformed Columbus from a small-time explorer with a legacy championed by a small, but growing, number of prominent devotees into a full-fledged national hero—a lover of adventure and exploration and the ideal paragon of the American spirit. The true, historical Columbus was forgotten, supplanted almost entirely by Irving’s glamorized idol.In the late nineteenth century, when Italian Catholic immigrants came over to the United States in large numbers, they were widely hated by the Anglo-American Protestants who were already living here. Italian-Americans were mostly confined to lower-paying jobs involving difficult manual labor and they often lived in unsatisfactory parts of cities and towns. They were widely seen as lazy and unprofitable members of society. Their Catholicism in particular was widely seen as a dangerous threat to the national security of the United States.Many Americans believed that Catholics were incapable of loyalty to their new country, since they maintained a higher loyalty to the Pope in Rome. In effort to show that Italians had made important contributions to American society, Italian immigrants seized Christopher Columbus as their patron. For instance, they held a massive celebration on October 12, 1866 in New York City in honor of Columbus’s first voyage. In 1882, the Irish-American Catholic priest Michael J. McGivney founded a Catholic fraternal organization in New Haven, Connecticut, called the “Knights of Columbus.”Columbus’s popularity, however, received a massive boost in 1893 when President Rutherford B. Hayes advocated that every American should celebrate October 12 of that year as the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in San Salvador. It was as part of this nation-wide celebration of Columbus that the socialist activist Francis Bellamy wrote the original version of the Pledge of Allegiance. This pledge was recited by students all across the country for the first time in honor of Columbus. This cemented Columbus’s already existing associations with patriotism and the American spirit in the minds of an entire generation of schoolchildren. That same year, the city of Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, a world’s fair in honor of Columbus’s supposed “discovery” of the “New World.”Columbus Day was first declared a state holiday in Colorado in 1905 and it became a statutory holiday in 1907. In 1934, the Knights of Columbus and the Italian-American community of New York City, led by the businessman and newspaper magnate Generoso Pope, lobbied extensively for Congress to pass a bill requesting the president to make an annual declaration of October 12th as Columbus Day. Congress passed the bill in April and it was signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.The bill signed by President Roosevelt did not make Columbus Day a federal holiday, but, in 1966, an Italian-American named Mariano A. Lucca began lobbying to make it one. These efforts resulted in success and, in 1968, Columbus Day became an official federal holiday.ABOVE: Advertisement for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois in 1893, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in San Salvador. The exposition was a massive boost to Columbus’s popularity.In the years since then, however, many Americans have increasingly come to recognize the terrible effects that our ancestors’ colonization had on the indigenous peoples of this continent. Starting in the 1960s, when the rights of native Americans received invigorated attention, Christopher Columbus’s reputation has steadily declined. Yet, astonishingly, a poll from October of 2017 year shows that 58% of Americans support Columbus Day as a federal holiday, which is 8% more than supported it in 2015.Make no mistake: Columbus was a tremendously historically significant individual and I am not in any way suggesting that we should wipe him out of the history books. We should continue to teach students about him and what he did, but we need to let go of the myths. We should teach Columbus for what he was: a largely incompetent fortune-seeker who just got plain lucky.Above all, it is absolutely baffling why we still have a federal holiday in honor of him, especially when the only two other people who share that honor are George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. (Technically, George Washington’s Birthday is usually replaced with Presidents’ Day, in honor of all presidents past and present, but it is still officially listed as a federal holiday under the name “George Washington’s Birthday.”) I completely understand the desire to honor Italian Americans and the contributions they have made to our country, but we can do that without honoring a man whose actions ought to be morally appalling to any reasonable human being.Some have proposed that Columbus Day be replaced with a generic holiday honoring Italian Americans and their contributions to American culture. I have no problem with this idea. We could create essentially an Italian version of Saint Patrick’s Day. On the other hand, if Italian Americans still want a famous Italian historical figure to celebrate, there are literally thousands of famous Italians who have made invaluable contributions to modern society and who never committed any moral atrocities on the scale of those committed by Columbus (eg. Giovanni Boccaccio, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, etc.).There have been countless Italian and Italian American writers, philosophers, scientists, artists, social reformers, and others who are a thousand times more worthy to be celebrated than Christopher Columbus. You can really just take your pick which one(s) you want to celebrate. Just preferably do not pick someone who raped, pillaged, enslaved, mutilated, and murdered hundreds of people. That should be fairly simple.(NOTE: This answer is mostly an excerpt from a much longer and more detailed article I originally published on my website on 12 October 2018. Here is a link to the full, original article.)