1492 Vs. 1892 Vs. 1992

By GARRY WILLS

The year 1492 was Spain's annus mirabilis, a year of marvels. A Spanish Pope was elected that year, a Borja from Catalonia. (He was called Borgia in Italy, where the Two Sicilies already had Spanish rulers.) King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who had just united their kingdoms, drove the Moors from the Spanish peninsula by a military victory at Granada. Spain's Jews were expelled in the same year, solidifying the Inquisition's power.

Columbus was part of all this. He would supply the Spanish Pope with information that led to the partition of the New World into Spanish and Portuguese spheres in 1493. He was with his monarchs at Granada to celebrate the Moorish victory, and he saw the last Jews depart from Seville harbors the day before he set out on his first journey west. He viewed this concatenation of events as a sign of the world's fulfillment, and predicted that the gold he brought back would finance an ultimate Crusade to reclaim the Holy Land.

Spain was establishing what historian J.H. Plumb calls "the greatest empire since antiquity." This modern empire was built, as Plumb also notes, on the basis of medieval theology. Yet much of Europe and most of the New World would become the domain of Charles V, and then of Philip III, making the next hundred years the Spanish Century.

The year 1892 was an annus mirabilis in the U.S. The best symbol of that was Chicago, a city leveled by fire as recently as 1871 but subsequently bristling with the continent's first cluster of skyscrapers. For the 1893 World's Fair that became known as the World's Columbian Exposition, Daniel Burnham and a panel of America's greatest architects created a gleaming new Exposition city on Lake Michigan. Henry Adams, arriving in the private train car of a Pennsylvania Senator, was struck with a vision of a new America; he returned alone to spend two weeks studying the event, "more surprising, as it was, than anything else on the continent." He consciously imitated Edward Gibbon on the steps of the Expo's Administration Building -- but where Gibbon, sitting on the steps of Rome's Aracoeli church, had a vision of the falling Roman Empire, Adams saw a rising empire. Another visitor to the fair, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, delivered a famous paper there, saying that the internal frontier was closed; but America would, by the end of the decade, add to its dominion Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa and Wake Island, while occupying Cuba. The American Century had begun.

The Columbus honored in Chicago bore little resemblance to the medieval wizard of Spain's inquisitorial empire. That ancient mariner was now conceived to be a champion of Anglo-Saxon (Protestant) values. The Spaniards had taken guns and the catechism abroad. America, said Mark Twain, took guns and the King James Bible to the Philippines, and President McKinley said he would make the island inhabitants good Christians. For the Chicago fair, sculptor Daniel Chester French, creator of American icons like the seated Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, fashioned a 14-ft. statue of Columbus driving an imperial chariot.

As we approach 1992, it promises to be an annus not so mirabilis for America -- a strange thing, since we are reaching the end of that American Century launched on the last major Columbian centenary. During the past hundred years, America has exercised a global authority not even Henry Adams could have foreseen. Yet we seem not in the celebrating mood. Chicago turned down the honor of mounting another Columbian Exposition. Our federal commission on the quincentennial floundered in scandal and ineptitude during the six years John Goudie presided over it. The Columbus now being described is a rather bedraggled figure, a symbol of empire in a postcolonial age, when most of the world is celebrating the breakup of empires, not their inception. The facts ! about Columbus always mattered less, to his admirers, than the uses he could be put to. Those uses have, by now, drastically shrunk.

For three imperial moments, then, we have had three different Columbuses -- each telling us something about a different age. Only our third period is a postimperial moment. We Americans have been able to rejoice at the collapse of the Soviet empire. But we were mild (to say the least) in our celebrations as European colonial systems dissolved over the last half of the century, creating a whole map of new nations in a Third World that contains most of the globe's population.

Ironically, 1992 may turn out to be an annus mirabilis for Europe, once the center of colonial empires. The new freedoms in Eastern Europe, the easing of hostile pressures from the Soviet bloc and the European Community's economic integration in 1992 may bring life back to the source of Western energy. The E.C. itself comes from a realization that these old countries must cope with postimperial realities. If there is a new world order, this realism should be its basis.

Multiculturalism is not a plot of some left-wing professors in the U.S.; it is the most obvious of global facts, in a world where the "natives" are telling Columbus how to behave, rather than the reverse. That, oddly, is a cause for celebration. The next century will not be America's to call its own -- or any other single nation's. We are all in one boat together, and Columbus must travel with us now as a fellow passenger, no longer the skipper.