Back in the mid-1980s, when the Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission named San Francisco its host city, everyone was thinking big.
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The commission, which was created by Congress, expected to funnel between ”$10,000 and a couple hundred thousand dollars” to San Francisco`s fundraising trough for a splashy series of events, said Jim Kuhn, the group`s executive director.
Instead, the commission has been mired in allegations of mismanagement and hasn`t raised a dime for the host city`s events. In turn, the San Francisco quincentenary commmission has languished, reduced from what was proposed as an $8 million planning group to a volunteer staff of two with a budget of zero.
The replicas of Columbus` ships, the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, once scheduled to sail under the Golden Gate Bridge on Oct. 12, aren`t coming because there is no money to foot the bill. The slew of Tall Ships aren`t going to sail in either. Only one, the Portuguese ship Sagres II, will be berthed at Fisherman`s Wharf.
”The failure of the Jubilee Commission was the failure of everybody, the failure of the entire program of the quincentenary,” said Rafael Mazarrasa, president of the Spain `92 Foundation, the Spanish group that hopes to build business ties to the U.S. through the quincentenary.
”They were supposed to take the lead, to somehow put forward a philosophy on the quincentenary,” Mazarrasa said. ”That hasn`t been done at all.” Last year, the foundation took over control of the Columbus ship replicas from the U.S. commission.
The U.S. Jubilee Commission has had several setbacks. Congressional allegations of mismanagement led to the resignation of its first chairman, John Goudie.
Then Texaco, which had promised $5 million for the quincentenary, withdrew $4.7 million of its pledge, Kuhn said. Other sponsors have not stepped in.
And Columbus` boosters have been thrown on the defensive by those who challenge the merit of his achievements, not to mention the facts of what he accomplished.
For starters, Columbus never landed in America; the closest he got was islands in the Caribbean. And many dispute that he was the first European to land in the New World, including William Fowler, professor of history at Northeastern University in Boston, and others who maintain the Vikings came first.
And some scholars say Columbus was not the first to prove the world is round. Educated people had known that for centuries, said Jack Weatherford, an anthropologist at Macalester College in St. Paul.
Protests from Native Americans also have muted the public`s enthusiasm for the quincentenary, said Chris Peters, a member of the Yurok Karuk nation and executive director of the Seventh Generation Fund, a foundation that distributes money to grass-roots Native American groups.
Early protests, he said, ”took the wind right out of the Columbus Day sails . . . The quincentenary was going to be the event of the year and possibly the decade. It`s not going to be.”
The U.S. commission`s new chairman, Frank Donatelli, disagrees. Hundreds of quincentenary events are under way at museums and universities, he said, a fitting commemoration for what he called ”the most important development in the history of the world since the birth of Christ.”
On Oct. 12, the replicas of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria will land somewhere on the East Coast at a port not yet determined, according to the Spain `92 Foundation. In San Francisco the Italian-American community will play host to its annual Queen Isabella pageant and Native American groups will hold a sunrise vigil at Alcatraz Island.