Guido Calabresi has respectfully rejected the suggestion that a statue in his honor be erected to replace that of Christopher Columbus in Wooster Square Park.
Calabresi, the former dean of the Yale Law School and a senior U.S. Circuit judge of the U.S Court of Appeals (he has strong New Haven connections) contacted me after he read my July 14 column, headlined: “Who replaces Columbus? Da Vinci? Calabresi?” (Two people who had emailed me really did “nominate” Calabresi.)
Calabresi acknowledged the headline was “a dazzler.” But he added: “The notion of my replacing Columbus made me laugh. It was lovely of those two to suggest it, but come now.”
Calabresi said he could support another reader’s idea for a statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian general and patriot. Calabresi noted Garibaldi “wanted to join the North in the Civil War and was probably a better general than most of (Abraham) Lincoln’s early ones.”
Calabresi also seconded a reader’s suggestion that the park host a statue of Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect and inventor. Calabresi described him as “truly an amazing genius, and gay to boot.”
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Regarding Garibaldi and da Vinci, Calabresi said: “So what if they had nothing to do with New Haven; Columbus never planted elms either.”
Calabresi added: “My beloved wife of 59 years (Anne Calabresi), who started LEAP, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, the Sunrise Café, etc. and had a lot to do with getting the fountain on the New Haven Green, likes the idea of a fountain because it would remind her of all the beautiful fountains in Italy.”
My wife fielded a phone call from another person with a statue suggestion. The caller identified herself only as “an Italian from New Haven.” Her idea: the Italian merchant and explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
She noted America is named after Vespucci. Indeed, if you noodle around on the Internet you will quickly learn that Vespucci gained stature because he was the first person to recognize that North America and South America are distinct continents. Before Vespucci’s discovery, other explorers — including Columbus — thought the New World was part of Asia.
“Vespucci figured out that Columbus was wrong,” said the Italian from New Haven. She added that Leif Erikson, the Norse explorer from Iceland, is thought to be the first European to have set foot on continental North America. And he did it 500 years before Columbus set sail.
In case you missed it on our letters to the editor page July 21, Filip Dul of Bethany recommended that Enrico Fermi get the statue honor. “He was an Italian physicist who immigrated to the U.S. during World War II and became a naturalized citizen,” Dul wrote. “He won a Nobel prize and has a subatomic particle named after him. He’s an amazing example of an immigrant who found his place in a new country and changed the world for the better.”
Yes, but check out this next one; my email box yielded a well-researched suggestion from James Penna. He began by saying, “Even though many of your readers disagreed with your suggestion of (a statue for) Frank and Filomena Pepe, give yourself credit for starting the conversation.”
“Here’s one more suggestion which may prove to be more disagreeable than yours: a statue of an American Civil War Union soldier, along with a 1860s British Navy seaman,” Penna said. “Crazy? Let me explain.”
Penna noted our public statues are generally supposed to be reserved for heroes. “The Pepes and many of your readers’ suggestions meet this criterion. However, we should try to lift the bar higher, especially since we are replacing Columbus.”
Penna noted this: “Our society abhors the institute of slavery, and the Columbus statue was taken down, in part, because people believe he may have enslaved native people.”
Penna listed these terrible statistics: “It has been estimated that for the 10 million African slaves of just the Atlantic slave trade, as many as another five million Africans died between the tribal war/raids that captured the slaves and the journey to the west African slave ports.”
“Anyone who risked their life to end slavery, especially without a corresponding direct gain, is in my opinion a hero,” Penna stated. “The United States’ abolishment of slavery does not even come close to occurring without the two million American Civil War Union soldiers.” He said at least 360,000 of them died during that war.
Then Penna got to his pitch for the second figure on that statue: “But while the sacrifices of the Union soldier ended U.S. slavery, by far most African slaves went to areas outside the U.S. That’s where the British Navy seamen come in.”
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“During the mid-to-latter half of the 19th century the British waged a dangerous and sustained naval war to stop not only the Atlantic slave trade in western Africa but also the brutal Arab slave trade in eastern Africa, and slavery in other parts of the world,” Penna said. “They eventually convinced other western nations, including the U.S., to help them in this endeavor. The British and the other western nations prevailed and stopped the African slave trade on the seas.”
Penna quoted historian William Lecky: “The unweary, unostentatious and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations.”
Penna asked: “If the Union soldiers and British seamen don’t stand up at this point in history to redefine slavery as a moral issue and fight against it, then who was going to end it? How? When?”
“Clearly their efforts directly freed millions of African slaves and undoubtedly saved millions more from being captured as slaves, and millions more from dying in the process,” Penna said.
Penna had the perfect sign-off to his long message: “I now have a serious hankering for a piping hot Pepe’s sausage pizza!”
Contact Randall Beach at 203-865-8139 or randall.beach@hearstmediact.com.
https://www.ctinsider.com/news/nhregister/article/Randall-Beach-That-new-statue-in-New-Haven-15441158.php
2020-07-29 12:00:00Z
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