The Statue of Liberty Was a Gift About Liberty, and the Poem Came Later

The most famous poem about immigration in American history was not, when it was written, about immigration, and it was not on the statue for seventeen years after the statue was dedicated. Both facts are easy to check. Neither is in the speech you heard in school.

I love the Statue of Liberty. I mean that without irony, and I say it up front because the next few sections take a popular story and correct it, and the correction is not a complaint about the lady in the harbor. It is a defense of her. She was built to say something specific, and the specific thing is bigger and older than the slogan we hung around her neck.

The idea came from France, and it was about republics

Start in France in the 1860s. The country was governed by Napoleon III, an emperor, and a circle of French liberals admired the American republic as a rebuke to him. Their intellectual leader was Édouard de Laboulaye, a jurist and historian who had written about the American Constitution and who was a great admirer of the American experiment. The commonly told story, which the National Park Service treats as legend, is that around 1865, at a dinner near Versailles, Laboulaye floated the idea of a joint monument to mark the coming centennial of American independence, a gift from the French people to the American people, in honor of the friendship between the two countries and of liberty.

The sculptor who took up the idea was Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. He gave the work its formal name, La Liberté éclairant le monde, "Liberty Enlightening the World." Read the name slowly. The subject is a goddess-like figure of Liberty, a Roman idea borrowed by republicans for centuries. The action is "enlightening," holding up a torch. The audience is "the world." There is no mention of ships, passengers, or the poor. The monument's meaning, as its makers described it, was republican liberty as a light for all nations, and the shared history of France and America, since France had helped the American colonists win the war that made the republic.

Look at the statue and you can see the design speaking for itself. She holds a tablet in her left hand, inscribed with the date of the Declaration of Independence: July 4, 1776, in Roman numerals, JULY IV MDCCLXXVI. The tablet is a book of law, and the date is the founding of a republic on the principle that, in Jefferson's words, all men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. At her feet lie broken shackles, and the work's best interpreters say they stand for the end of tyranny, and, after the Civil War, for the abolition of slavery. The seven rays of her crown are usually read as the seven seas and seven continents. None of it concerns a ticket window at Ellis Island, which did not yet exist.

Who paid, and who built what

The deal, as the planners arranged it, was that the French would raise money for the statue and the Americans would pay for the pedestal. French donors, through a committee and a public lottery, covered the cost of the copper figure, which was assembled in Paris with an internal iron framework designed by the engineer Gustave Eiffel. The Americans were responsible for the base, and the base was a problem.

The pedestal fund ran short. The architect Richard Morris Hunt had designed a substantial granite pedestal, and by 1884, when the statue was complete in France, the American committee was struggling to find the money. Fund-raising events were organized to close the gap, and one of them, in 1883, was an exhibition and auction of art and literary manuscripts in New York for the benefit of the pedestal fund. The organizers asked writers to contribute original works.

One of the writers who gave a work was Emma Lazarus, a poet from a prominent New York Jewish family, who was already known as a champion of Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms in Russia. She wrote a sonnet for the auction, and she called it "The New Colossus." Newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer later used his paper, the World, to press a public campaign that raised the balance of the pedestal money from many small donors in 1885, and the pedestal was finished in April 1886.

The poem, read closely

Let me quote the part everyone remembers, because it is in the public domain and it is lovely:

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Lazarus was making a contrast, and the opening of the sonnet shows it. The poem begins by dismissing the old Colossus of Rhodes, "the brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to land," in favor of a new and gentler figure: a "mighty woman with a torch," whom the poem calls "Mother of Exiles." The new Colossus does not conquer. She welcomes. The poem's famous last lines are spoken in her voice, and they are a direct reply to "ancient lands" and their "storied pomp."

It is a gorgeous piece of writing, and nothing I say here changes that. But look at what kind of document it is. It is a sonnet. It is a poem written by a private citizen for a fund-raising auction, in a voice of imagination, spoken by a statue. It is not a law, a treaty, a presidential statement or a resolution of Congress. It does not describe the immigration rules of 1883, which were not what the poem wished for. And in the year she wrote it, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had been on the books for a year.

The statue was dedicated, and the poem was forgotten

The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886, on what was then called Bedloe's Island, in a ceremony presided over by President Grover Cleveland. Bartholdi was there, and the harbor was full of ships. The speeches that day, as far as the historical record shows, were about liberty, about the friendship of France and America, and about the progress of republican government. The sonnet was not read. Emma Lazarus lived to see it only briefly: she died in November 1887, a year after the dedication, at the age of thirty-eight. The poem had been used for the auction and then more or less put away.

It came back in a modest way. Friends of the late poet, notably a woman named Georgina Schuyler, revived interest in it, and in 1903 a bronze plaque bearing the sonnet was mounted inside the pedestal, on an interior wall of the base. That is the date the poem became attached to the statue: 1903. The text was not carved on the outside. It was not on the statue the day she was unveiled, it was not there for most of the generation that crossed the harbor under her torch, and it was a fitting honor that somebody decided to add later.

As the twentieth century went on, the poem did the work that great poems do. Teachers memorized it, speechwriters quoted it, and its closing lines became, for many Americans, the meaning of the statue. By the time of the First World War and after, the monument was widely thought of as a symbol of immigration. In truth, there is a sort of coincidence in that: the statue's location in New York Harbor put her at the first sight many arriving ships had of America, and that fact of geography made the sonnet seem as if it had been written for the harbor. The statue became an image of arrival because of where she stood.

What this means, argued in order

Now the claim and its steps.

The claim: A poem can inspire a country without setting its policy, and the Statue of Liberty's meaning is wider than its slogan.

1. The statue was commissioned and named for liberty, not for immigration. Its own title, "Liberty Enlightening the World," its tablet bearing the date of the Declaration, and its broken shackles all point to republican liberty as a principle. The founders of the project said what the monument was for.
2. The sonnet was an occasional poem, not an enactment. Emma Lazarus wrote it for a charity auction, and its voice is the statue's voice in a poem. The Constitution gives the power to set immigration policy to Congress (Article I, Section 8, "To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization"), and a sonnet on a plaque is not an exercise of it.
3. The poem was added later, by admirers, in 1903. That does not diminish it. It shows that its authority as the "meaning" of the statue is a matter of tradition and affection, which are fine things, and not of original intent.
4. The law of the day did not match the poem. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was in force when Lazarus wrote and when the statue was dedicated. The story of that law and the Court's reasoning is in The Chinese Exclusion Case and How the Court Found a Sovereign Power to Exclude. The federal inspection regime of 1891 followed, with exclusion grounds that Ellis Island enforced. The nation of the poem and the nation of the statute were not the same nation, and the poem knew it. Its power comes partly from being an ideal that rebukes the reality.
5. An ideal is not a policy. It is perfectly consistent to admire a poem about welcome and to want an orderly, enforced immigration law. The same person can hold both, and most Americans do.

The best objection, stated fairly

Here is the strongest answer from the other side, and I'd like to give it room. It runs: "You are right on the dates, and you are still missing the point. Symbols mean what a people decides they mean. The Liberty Bell was cast for a statehouse and became the emblem of abolition and then of independence. If a century of Americans decided the Statue stands for welcome, then that is what it stands for, whatever Bartholdi intended. And the welcome is not a trivial part of the American creed. The country did take in millions. It was good for them and good for us."

I accept most of that. A symbol does grow in meaning, and I am not asking anyone to uninstall the sonnet from their hearts. The country did welcome millions, and I am proud of it, and the history in My Great-Grandparents Came Without Papers, the Family Story Argument Answered tells how that welcome was run through a real inspection system. My point is narrower. A symbol's meaning can be rich and still not be a legal command. When a politician says "the Statue of Liberty says we must admit everyone," he is using the poem as if it were the Constitution. It is not, and the lady herself, holding a book of law and a torch, would be the first to say which one is binding.

There is a second answer, the practical one. Even if you grant the poem its full moral weight, it speaks of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, which describes people in need, not every person who might wish to come. A country can honor that spirit with a refugee program, an asylum system and a generous legal immigration policy, and still insist that those programs have rules. In fact the rules are what make generosity sustainable. See The Refugee Act of 1980 Explained, and the Promise It Actually Made for how Congress turned that sentiment into a statute.

The other lamp: liberty itself

I would like to end this body of the argument somewhere different, and I think it is where the statue herself would end it. The meaning the makers gave her is, in its way, a grander thing than the poem.

Laboulaye and Bartholdi were not thinking about a harbor. They were thinking about a republic: a country governed by its own people under law, where rights come from the Creator and not from a king. That is what the torch lights. Washington's Farewell Address of 1796 says, "The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations." The statue stands for that name and for that idea, and the idea is available to anyone who understands and accepts it, in whatever year he arrives and by whatever lawful door.

That is the case for a welcoming nation that is also a nation of laws: the same torch lights both. Liberty requires law, and law requires a people who decide who joins them. The Constitution says it in its first sentence: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union... secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Notice the phrase "ourselves and our Posterity." The Blessings of Liberty were secured for a people, a particular people who would pass the republic on to their children. That people has always been open to newcomers who would join it in good faith, and it has always had the right, and the duty, to say how.

A word about how to talk about it

Last, a practical note for family dinners and comment sections. When someone quotes the poem at you as a conversation-ender, do not reply with a sneer. Reply with a question: "Which part of the Statue of Liberty do you think is the law?" It is a polite question, and it has a good answer on both sides. You can then talk about the real subject, which is what the country's immigration law should say, and who in a republic gets to decide.

And if you want to honor the poem fully, read all fourteen lines, not just the last five. The opening lines are about the difference between a conquering power and a welcoming one. That is a poem about American character, and I would not trade it for any slogan.

The case in brief

1. The Statue of Liberty was a French gift, conceived by Laboulaye and sculpted by Bartholdi as "Liberty Enlightening the World," a monument to republican liberty and to the friendship of France and America, dedicated October 28, 1886.
2. Emma Lazarus wrote "The New Colossus" in 1883 for an auction to raise money for the pedestal, and the sonnet was mounted on a plaque inside the pedestal only in 1903.
3. The poem became the statue's meaning through tradition and affection, and its welcome was an ideal that rebuked the immigration law of its day, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
4. Immigration policy is set by Congress under Article I, Section 8, and a poem, however moving, is not an exercise of that power.
5. A nation can honor the poem's spirit through generous legal immigration, refugee and asylum programs and still enforce the rules that make them possible.

What you can do: read the full text of "The New Colossus" and then read Article I, Section 8 on the Constitution page, and decide for yourself which one writes the law.