The first national Columbus Day grew out of a backdrop of violence. In March 1891, a jury in New Orleans acquitted six Italian immigrants charged with the murder of the local police chief. Rumors spread that jurors had been bribed by powerful Italian families coming to be known as the Mafia.
The next morning, thousands of people — many of them leading citizens of the Crescent City — descended on Orleans Parish Prison, where the six Italian defendants and 13 other Italian suspects were being held.
“ 'Bring ‘em out, we’ll kill ‘em,’ came the cry from a thousand throats,” the New Orleans Times-Democrat reported. A group of armed men broke into the prison and shot nine of the defendants dead, one falling with 42 bullets in his body, the paper said. The mob took two others to the city square, when one man was hanged on a lamp post and another on a tree.
The article ran under the headline “Avenged.” At a time of widespread discrimination against Italian immigrants, many news reports followed the theme that the killings were justified. The Associated Press said of the killers: “It was not an unruly midnight mob. It was simply a sullen determined body of citizens who took into their own hands what justice had ignominiously failed to do.”
The New York Times wrote that “while every good citizen” would agree that “this affair is to be deplored, it would be difficult to find any individual who would confess that privately he deplores it very much.” U.S. Civil Service Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter to his sister, said of the revengeful violence, “Personally, I think it a rather good thing.”
But Italian Americans and leaders of the kingdom of Italy were outraged. Italy broke off diplomatic relations and recalled its ambassador from Washington. The Harrison administration in turn removed the U.S. legation from Rome. There was even talk of war.
Harrison remained silent on the matter until his December message to Congress, when he called the murders “a most deplorable and discreditable incident” and an “offense against law and humanity.” The next April, he agreed to Italy’s demands to pay an indemnity to survivors of three victims who were citizens of Italy.
Secretary of State James Blaine, in a telegram to Italian officials about “the lamentable massacre at New Orleans,” said that at the president’s instruction, the U.S. government would pay a total indemnity of $25,000 — equal to about $760,000 today.