Americana: A Windblown Leif

On a wall in East Boston, one embittered Italian-American scrawled-'Leif Ericsson is a fink." In other cities across the U.S., indignant sons of Italy and politicians eager for their votes, reacted in like manner to word that Yale University had acquired a medieval map containing additional evidence that Leif Ericsson, riding the wild Atlantic winds reached the North American shore about the year 1000 (TIME, Oct. 15). Though Leif's landing is hardly news in scholarly circles, Yale's just-before-Columbus Day announcement stirred a storm of popular protest strong enough to have blown his longships all the way back to Norway.

In Chicago, Columbus Day Parade Chairman Victor Arrigo denounced the Yale map as a "Communist plot." New Jersey's Republican Senator Clifford Case, on hand for Newark's parade curtly dismissed Ericsson as "just an upstart." Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Michael Musmanno, author of The Story of the Italians in America charged that the Yalemen "have gone into the moss-covered kitchen of rumor and, on the broken-down stove of wild speculation, fueled by ethnic prejudices have warmed over the stale cabbage of Leifs discovery of America." In the House, New York Democrat Benjamin Rosenthal introduced a bill to make Columbus Day a national legal holiday.

Yale to the Wall. Nowhere did Genoa's most famous son have such impassioned defenders as in New York City, which at last count boasted 858,601 citizens of Italian descent but only 36,794 Norwegian-Americans. Yale-educated Congressman John Lindsay Republican candidate for mayor, made it sound as if Columbia had been his alma mater all along. "Saying that Columbus did not discover America," declared Lindsay, "is as silly as saying DiMaggio doesn't know anything about baseball or that Toscanini and Caruso were not great musicians." Governor Nelson Rockefeller, whose son, Steven, has a Norwegian wife, at first voyaged rather bravely into the controversy: "As far as the impact of Columbus' voyage is concerned, he discovered America." Later he carefully added that he did not mean to take anything away from the Vikings Why, said he, "I have a Viking daughter-in-law myself."

Speaking for irate Italians everywhere, John N. (for Napoleon) La Corte, general director of the Italian Historical Society of America, warned directly: We are going to put Yale against the wall. La Corte threatened to enlist the National Geographic Society in support of Columbus, but dropped the idea when he learned it was the Geographic that sponsored the 1963 excavation of a Scandinavian village in Newfoundland that dates from about 1000 A.D.