Cabot Day instead of Columbus Day

OTL Columbus Day originated among Italian-Americans who wanted to emphasize the role Italians played in American history and to show that Italian-Americans were just as American as any other ethnic group. Is it possible that John Cabot could have been chosen instead? Or was he too obscure during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?
 
Yeah, justified or otherwise, I think Columbus is far more of an iconic figure than Cabot, probably because he was the first European(culturally speaking) to land in the Americas(even though Cabot actually made it to the area that today constitutes the USA). So, Italians promoting Cabot as a cultural hero would likely have been greeted with a collective "Huh?" from the general population.
 
FWIW, my hometown has this park, right in the heart of Little Italy. I'd be surprised, however, if the percentage of Edmontonians who recognize the name would make it very far into the double digits. Even among the ones who would know "John Cabot", there probably would be quite a few who wouldn't connect it with the name of the park. (For the record, I think the park had been operating under that name for a couple of decades before I knew who it was referring to.)
 
Columbus was an important American figure ever since independence to a degree at which Cabot could not hope to match.
 
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