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Others, however, will opt for Oct. 9 to celebrate something else: Leif Erikson Day, a celebration of the Viking explorer credited with reaching the continent around the year 1000, nearly 500 years before Columbus did.
But, while it may sound only fair to share the credit for exploration, the movement to recognize Erikson also has a dark back story, as Leif Erikson Day’s history is connected to nativist backlash against immigration to the United States. At one point, for some people, the debate over who really “discovered” America came down to one question: who was whiter?
But interest in that history really spiked after the publication of the provocatively titled 1874 book America Not Discovered By Columbus by Rasmus B. Anderson, the founder of the Scandinavian studies program at the University of Wisconsin.
Anderson’s account detailed “the first expedition to New England” in the year 1000 and described Leif Erikson as “the first pale-faced man” and “first white man who turned the bow of his ship towards the west for the purpose of finding America.” He claimed American democracy descended from Norsemen’s system of government, of “free people” whose “rulers were elected by the people in convention assembled.” Furthermore, he made a case that Americans whose ancestors came from the U.K. actually had Viking blood too, due to earlier Norse invasions of Britain. Anderson also claimed that Leif Erikson’s brother Thorvald was slaughtered by the indigenous people and buried with two crosses, and that his “skeleton in armor” was later uncovered in Massachusetts.
He ginned up this story to make it seem as if the Vikings had been the victims of Native American violence, argues JoAnne Mancini, author of the 2002 journal article “Discovering Viking America.” This alternate discovery narrative could serve as “a salve to Americans’ and particularly New Englanders’ increasingly guilty conscience about the treatment of Native Americans” in the late 19th century, and a way for “Scandinavian newcomers to the West” to feel better about their own personal “complicity in the brutal conquest of Indian lands.”
Anderson’s book initially wasn’t well-known outside of academia, but would become better known to a mass audience when he was one of the passengers aboard a replica of a Viking ship that sailed from Norway to Chicago in a publicity stunt at the 1893 World’s Fair — also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition — in a stunt meant to distract attention from the festivities marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival. The ship’s “welcome to the U.S. was so lavishly staged by the Norwegian Society of Brooklyn that six of her crew, including Captain Magnus Anderssen, ended up in Brooklyn’s Butler Street police court charged with being drunk and disorderly,” as TIME later recapped the event in 1950.
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