The Statue of Liberty illuminating the world, to give the colossus its full name, is one of the icons of the United States and a symbol of the idea that it is a nation of immigrants.
Located at the entrance to New York, the 151.1-foot (93-meter) robed woman represents the Roman goddess of liberty, Libertas.
He holds a torch in his right hand above his crowned head, and a tablet in his left hand, inscribed with the date, in Roman numerals, July 4, 1776, the day the US adopted the Declaration of Independence.
Under his feet, a broken chain commemorating the abolition of slavery at the end of the American Civil War.
It was assembled at the end of the 19th century and from that moment it became the first thing millions of immigrants saw when they arrived in New York with the hope of finding a new life.
She same is an immigrant.
It was born in Paris and arrived shipped in 214 separate boxes, as a gift from the French to the Americans, a token of friendship forged in the fire of twin revolutions.
Without funds
In the summer of 1885, the Statue of Liberty was in New York in pieces, waiting to be assembled.
Conceived by French thinker and politician Eduardo Laboulaye, designed by sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, and built under the supervision of Gustave Eiffel, it was a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States.
The French raised the money to pay for the sculpture through private collections; the government was not involved.
But the deal was that the US would provide the granite pedestal on which it would stand, which would cost $250,000 dollars (about $7.5 millions from today).
A group called the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty took it upon themselves to raise the money, but fell short by more than a third.
With no funding from the city or the federal government, New York nearly missed out on Lady Liberty.
But when it seemed he had run out of options, renowned publisher Joseph Pulitzer decided to launch a campaign in his newspaper The New York World.
The campaign raised money from more than 160,000 donors, including children, businessmen, street sweepers and politicians, and although more than three-quarters of the donations were for less than a dollar, it was a triumph.
The statue was eventually installed on Bedloe’s Island (as it was called until 1956 when it changed its name to Liberty Island), an abandoned military base off the coast of New Jersey.
US President Grover Cleveland presided over the ceremony on October 28, 1886, saying that “a stream of light will run through the darkness of man’s ignorance and oppression until Liberty enlightens the world.”
But he didn’t say anything about immigration.
Several years would pass before the Statue of Liberty became “the mother of exiles”, although it had already been called that in the poem that would be the germ of that transformation.
“The New Colossus”
Poet Emma Lazarus was a Jew whose ancestors had fled Spain and Portugal due to the Inquisition and came to the US in the 18th century.
In 1883 he was asked to write a poem to help raise money for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
He initially refused saying that he did not write poems on demand.
But Lazarus was very involved in helping the Jews who came fleeing anti-Semitism, and a friend convinced her by telling her to do it for the refugees, because they would be the ones who would see the statue when they arrived.
This is how “The New Colossus” was born.
Not like the silver giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs stretching from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed sunset gates will stand
A powerful woman with a torch, whose flame is
The light of the prisoners and his name is
The mother of exiles. Her hand as a beacon
Shine in welcome to the whole world. Her docile eyes command
The windy bay framed by the twin cities.
“ohLands of old keep your pompous stories!” she exclaims
With silent lips “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The despised of your congested shores.
Send me these, the dispossessed, trash of the storm.
I raise my lamp beside the golden gate“.
The poem did its job but then fell into oblivion, while the statue faded into irrelevance.
not so bright
The gift from France turned out to be somewhat cumbersome.
When the use of Bedloe Island for the statue was authorized, former President Ulysses Grant specified that it would be a lighthouse.
That would give it a purpose and therefore merit government funding.
Shortly after the unveiling, President Cleveland directed that the Statue of Liberty be “immediately placed under the care and supervision of the Lighthouse Board and that, hereafter, said Board I kept her like a beacon“.
The idea was to illuminate it with the relatively new invention of the electric light, and the plan of the project engineer was not only to put lights on the torch but also on the feet, to completely cover it with light at night, something that would be impressive at that time. .
However, doing so was extremely complicated and very expensive.
The engineers never managed to light it up enough to serve any purpose properly.
Adding insult to injury, it became clear over time that Bedloe’s Island was too far inland to make a good position for a lighthouse.
On the other hand, it was not a success as a recreational attraction either.
The copper giant was still reddish brown; It would not be until 1906 that it would acquire that striking green product of oxidation.
From a distance, when the light allowed it, it could be admired as a monument or criticized as a work of art, depending on taste.
But visiting it was a disaster, as an 1895 New York Times editorial noted, detailing its state of neglect, “a lamentable situation” that needed to be corrected lest it become “a reproach to a nation and a insult to another.”
Today it is difficult to think that it did not become what it is, but who knows what its fate would have been without a campaign to revive the work of Lazarus, carried out 14 years after his death in 1887.
the new purpose
Georgina Schuyler, a composer, philanthropist, art patron, social activist, columnist, and friend of Lazarus, stumbled across the poem “The New Colossus” in 1901.
In it it was obvious that, although the original purpose of the statue was to symbolize freedom, its proximity to Ellis Island lent itself to a reinterpretation as a symbol of welcome for immigrants arriving there, just as Lazarus had described it.
She thought that the best way to honor her friend’s work was to inscribe her words on the pedestal of the statue that inspired it.
But, according to Smithsonian magazine, that was not all.
Schuyler, a committed progressive, was alarmed by the continued rise in anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant fervor over the past two decades in the US, and anticipated that the problems would worsen.
As a member of an in-laws family and interested in historic preservation since her teens, he well understood the power of a monument as a platform for an enduring political messagewrites Elizabeth Stone of Fordham University.
What better home for the sonnet of Lazarus than a huge statue in need of purpose?
It took two years to achieve, but on May 5, 1903, the poem engraved on a plaque was affixed to the pedestal of “Lady Liberty,” marking the beginning of its reimagining as a symbol of a hospitable America.
The process took time, but as the New York author Paul Auster wrote, everything changed.
“The gigantic effigy of Bartholdi was originally conceived as a monument to the principles of international republicanism.
“But The New Colossus reinvented the purpose of the statue, turning Libertad into a welcoming mother, a symbol of hope for the world’s marginalized and oppressed.”
The poem became one of the most quoted in the world.
Showeverheto reality -lmany increase– has often not lived up to the words of Lazarus.
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