Recently, CNN’s Jim Acosta got into a verbal spat with White House aide Stephen Miller. Acosta accused the Trump administration of violating the spirit embodied by the final lines of the poem The New Colossus (see below) written by Emma Lazarus and inscribed on a tablet at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Miller countered that the statue originally had nothing to do with immigration and that the poem was added decades later.
Surprisingly, both men were correct. Initially, the statue had nothing to do with immigration ... and then it had everything to do with it.
In the late 1860s, French sculptor Frederick August Bartholdi designed a massive lighthouse statue of a robed Egyptian woman – perhaps a belly dancer – holding a torch to be situated at the northern end of the just completed, French-built, Suez Canal.
When Egyptian officials rejected the idea, Bartholdi and several friends re-conceived the project in the form of “Lady Liberty” based on a Roman goddess, with broken shackles at her feet symbolizing the abolition of American slavery.
Making the statue a gift to be located in New York harbor would, they hoped, enhance Franco-American friendship. The project’s boosters included Ferdinand de Lesseps, French diplomat and developer of the Suez Canal, who sought U.S. support for a scheme to build a canal across Panama. (Unfortunately for de Lesseps, he eventually got his wish. The French project proved a fiasco.)
In the early 1870s, Bartholdi sculpted the statue’s head and torch-bearing arm. To attract additional funding, he exhibited the pieces in Europe and in the United States. The disembodied arm appeared in New York’s Madison Square from 1876-82, but generated only modest public interest. The New York and federal governments donated a vacant harbor island for the project but refused to pay for the massive stone pedestal the gifted statue would rest upon.
Charity fundraisers, such as one in 1883 to which amateur poet Emma Lazarus contributed her sonnet, The New Colossus (she called the statue “Mother of Exiles”) also came up short. Satirists suggested financing the pedestal by selling advertising space on the statue to liquor and cigarette companies.
Newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer promoted an early version of a “go fund me” campaign that by 1885 raised enough cash through small donations to construct the pedestal. The hollow copper statue, supported by an armature designed by Gustave Eiffel, of Tower fame, reached New York in 1886 and took its place atop the pedestal. Because its torch and harbor location technically made it an aid to navigation, the U.S. Lighthouse Service managed the site, which became part of the National Park system in 1933.
Although Lady Liberty gained the most notoriety, the French government financed several quarter-size versions it sent around the world as symbols of imperial glory and power. One arrived in Hanoi in the newly conquered colony of French Indochina. Vietnamese nationalists destroyed it in 1945 amidst their struggle to gain independence.
Massive waves of Eastern and Southern European immigrants began arriving in New York around the same time as the statue. Pushed out by clashing nationalisms, economic dislocation from global trade, and religious persecution, millions of Italians, Poles, Slavs and Eastern European Jews sought refuge in the United States.
The arrivals included single men, families and many unaccompanied minors. Between 1886 and the early 1920s, Lady Liberty’s uplifted torch provided the first glimpse of the United States shared among the more than 20 million immigrants sailing to the processing center on Ellis Island. For them and their descendants, the statue embodied America’s welcome.
Before Lazarus’ sonnet became associated with the statue, another writer, Thomas Baily Aldrich, also invoked Lady Liberty as a potent symbol. His 1895 screed, Unguarded Gates, invoked the statue as a guardian against foreign assault. Aldrich wrote “wide open and unguarded stand our gates / and through them press a wild motley throng / Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes / ... bringing with them unknown gods and rites ... accents of malice alien to our air / ... O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well to leave the gates unguarded?”
In 1903, perhaps to counter Aldrich, friends of Lazarus (she died young, in 1887), placed a bronze tablet with the words of her poem within the statue’s pedestal. But as the 20th century unfolded, Aldrich’s alarms found growing acceptance. Restrictive measures had begun with Chinese exclusion, then with barriers to Japanese migration, followed by literacy tests. World War I halted most trans-Atlantic migration between 1914 and 1918.
Immigration opponents like the prominent writer and eugenicist Madison Grant used the hiatus to warn in his 1916 book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” that “Nordic” America faced “invasion” by racially inferior criminals, revolutionaries and degenerates. Adolf Hitler later called Grant’s work his “bible.” After peace brought a renewed exodus from Eastern and Southern Europe, Congress enacted rigid quotas in 1921 and 1924 that effectively blocked immigration from anywhere outside northwestern Europe.
With only small changes, these “paper walls” remained in place until 1965. Then, as a Great Society reform, Congress enacted a new immigration law that abolished most ethnic and racial quotas. Signing the bill as he stood before the Statue of Liberty, President Lyndon Johnson re-kindled the promise embodied in Lazarus’ words:
Give me your tired, and your poor
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, the tempest tossed, to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
