ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S REPUBLICAN PARTY WAS not the only new political force in the decade before the Civil War. For a brief time in the mid-1850s, it shared the stage with the American or Know-Nothing Party, whose signature issue was hostility to immigrants.
Many American Party members were refugees from Lincoln’s former party, the Whigs, which had fractured and collapsed after 1852 because of its inability to take a stand on the question of slavery. The last Whig president, Millard Fillmore, was the American Party’s presidential candidate in 1856. But the passion that drove the new party was unease and anger over swelling tides of immigrants, driven here by famine, political unrest, or the search for a better life. The Antimasonic Party of the burned-over district in the 1830s had feared a fraternal organization, bound by secret oaths and practicing hidden rituals; the American Party feared boatloads of foreigners, surging onto the wharves of our ports and, seemingly, filling our cities’ slums. We, their name said, are the real Americans.
At its peak, the American Party elected fifty-four congressmen and five US senators. Although Fillmore carried only one state as its standard bearer, he took 21 percent of the popular vote.
The party withered as rapidly as it sprang up. Immigration was a big issue, slavery a far bigger one. One contemporary compared the American Party’s heyday to an infestation of locusts: “They came out of the dark ground, crawled up the sides of the trees, ate their foliage in the night, chattered with a croaking harshness, split open their backs and died.”1
But concern over immigration lived on. During his 1858 Senate campaign, Lincoln expressed a vision of all Americans united by their devotion to its founding principles. “That old Declaration of Independence” was like an “electric cord… that links the hearts of liberty-loving men together,” whether they were descended from the revolutionary generation or “men who have come from Europe.”2 This was idealistic and politic: Illinois was home to many men who had recently come from Europe (the Irish leaned Democratic, the Germans Republican). Privately, however, the Lincoln campaign worried that Irish railroad workers would ride the rails from town to town on election day, voting multiple times. Irish hearts were cordless.
The grinding tectonic plates of immigration produced an earthquake in New York City in July 1863. For three days, on the heels of the battle of Gettysburg, rioters kept the city in turmoil; order was restored only by Union troops clearing the avenues with howitzers. Hundreds of bystanders, rioters, police, and soldiers were killed. The proximate cause of the outbreak was hatred of conscription. The riot was also a class war (a rich man whose draft number came up could hire a substitute for $300). But most of the rioters were immigrant Irish, enraged at blacks (for whom the war was being fought) and their old stock upper-class sympathizers. The latter returned the hatred with interest. The “Irish anti-conscription Nigger-murdering mob,” wrote one diarist, “must be put down by heroic doses of lead and steel.”3
The Irish seemed particularly threatening because they were not only foreign but Catholic (unlike other Christian churches in America, Catholicism possessed a hierarchy headquartered abroad). They were also politically adept, trained in mass action by years of resistance to oppressive laws and landlords back home. German immigrants, equally numerous but religiously diverse and politically less active, escaped hostile notice, except when reformers tried to crack down on that cornerstone of their social life, the tavern; Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her fellow suffragists often doubled as temperance crusaders.
The flow of immigrants across the Atlantic increased and diversified as the nineteenth century went on. Irish and Germans were joined by Italians, Scandinavians, and Jews. There had been small numbers of all these ethnicities in America since colonial times. The best tavern in eighteenth-century Richmond was run by Serafina Formicola, former steward of Virginia’s last royal governor. Peter Stuyvesant’s dealings with Swedes and Jews have been mentioned. But immigration in massive numbers was new.
However unsettling their presence, immigrants were welcomed more often than not. Employers wanted their labor. Politicians wanted their votes. William Seward, Lincoln’s rival turned partner, had been a notably pro-Irish governor of New York, in favor of public money for parochial schools. Tammany Hall, an urban Democratic Party machine founded originally by Aaron Burr, became a master at attracting and holding immigrant voters. Lincolnian, and sub-Lincolnian, rhetoric smoothed the process. At Tammany’s Fourth of July celebrations, a participant reported, “As soon as the man on the platform starts off with, ‘when in the course of human events,’ word goes round that it’s the Declaration of Independence, and a mighty roar goes up. The Declaration ain’t a very short document and the crowd has heard it on every Fourth, but they give it just as fine a send-off as if it was brand new and awful excitin’.”4
Immigrants themselves took pride in their new national status and used it to impress and assist later arrivals. They memorialized their contributions to the Civil War and other milestones in American history. Far more Irish fought for the Union than fought the draft; one of their storied regiments was nicknamed “The Fighting Irish.” Italians boasted that Christopher Columbus, though he worked for Spain, came from Genoa. Ethnic social groups and aid societies tried to ease those more recently off the boat into American life.
One young member of the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society in New York City was Emma Lazarus. Her family was well established in America—Sephardic Jews who had fled Portugal in the seventeenth century for the tolerant Dutch empire. Her father, Moses, made a fortune refining sugar; helped found the Knickerbocker Club; and summered at Newport, along with Astors, Belmonts, and Vanderbilts. Emma, born in 1849, wrote poetry and journalism for publications both mainstream (Scribner’s) and Jewish (The American Hebrew) and corresponded with literary lions (Emerson, Henry James). Despite this hot-house upbringing, the woes of the world, especially of Jews less fortunate than herself, weighed on her—a burden “strangely heavy,” wrote a friend, for “the mind of a woman so young.… One never failed to bring away from a talk with her an impulse to higher things.”5
An 1882 article of hers in the New York Times, “Among the Russian Jews,” described a visit to a Jewish pauper’s refuge. The influx of poor immigrants was so great that an overflow facility had been opened on Ward’s Island in the East River, by Hell Gate. The Jews there confronted their visitor with the conundrum of identity. They were poor and unassimilated and hence potentially an embarrassment to her and her upper-crust family. Is this what I really am? But America had taken them in. This is what I am—a citizen of a saving country. “Every American,” Lazarus wrote in the Times, “must feel a thrill of pride and gratitude in the thought that this country is the refuge of the oppressed.… However wretched be the material offered to him by the refuse of other nations, he accepts it with generous hospitality.”6 He, and she, accepted it.
In 1883, Lazarus got a chance to express these sentiments again. For years a group of Frenchmen had been planning and constructing a monumental gift to America, a gigantic statue of a torchbearing goddess. Two presidents, Ulysses Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes, had formally accepted the gift during each of their terms, and the site where it would stand had been picked—Bedloe’s Island, a tiny spot in New York’s inner harbor. But the structure required an equally vast pedestal. Who would pay for it? Neither Congress nor the New York State government would vote to use public money. Private fund drives raised dribs and drabs. One money-raising scheme was to auction a leather-bound portfolio of original artwork and written items. Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Chester Alan Arthur (who was the sitting president at the time and the third president connected with the project) contributed letters. Emma Lazarus was invited to submit a poem.
The poem she wrote was a grave and passionate sonnet. Sonnets in English follow Shakespeare or Petrarch. The Shakespearean rhyme scheme, three quatrains and a couplet (4 + 4 + 4 + 2), is inherently lopsided and a high risk. The concluding couplet is either a grand slam, bringing all the preceding lines home, or a swing and a miss. The Petrarchan pattern, two interlinked quatrains and a sestet (8 + 6), allows for the possibility of a more developed, two-step argument. This was what Lazarus achieved.
The title is “The New Colossus.” The old colossus was the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the wonders of the ancient world, a bronze statue that reputedly bestrode the harbor mouth of that Greek island. (Archeologists believe it stood to one side, but that was not its posture in mythic memory.) It was built in the fourth century BC to commemorate a victory in the internecine wars that rent Alexander the Great’s empire after his death. After fifty-two years it fell in an earthquake, its ruined form impressing sightseers for centuries more until it was melted by a Muslim caliph. That colossus had also been memorialized by a poem. “To thy very self, O Sun, did the people of Dorian Rhodes raise high this colossus” when “they crowned their country with the spoils of its foes.”7 Like the new colossus, the Colossus of Rhodes was an image of national pride: pride in conquest.
Lazarus begins by rebuking the Colossus of Rhodes.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land.
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman…
“Sunset gates”? New York harbor is on our east coast. But if you are fleeing Europe, it is the edge of the western world.
On the first page of his unfinished novel, Amerika, Franz Kafka describes the mighty woman, whom he had never seen, holding a sword. Where was his editor? What she holds is a torch.
… [its] flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome. Her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
The harbor is framed by “twin cities” because New York and Brooklyn were then separate municipalities. It is bridged by “air,” not colossal legs, because the mighty woman is not marching out against the world but inviting a portion of it to come to her, here.
What portion of the world does the new colossus invite? Lazarus’s quatrains set up the statue; her sestet delivered its message.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips.
A statue cannot speak; it is not a living thing. Yet this one not only speaks; it cries out. The crying of “silent lips,” heightened by the line break, is Lazarus’s strongest writerly effect: the pressure of the message is so great it simply bursts out of her (poet and statue both). The statue’s message is what Lazarus herself had seen on Ward’s Island and written up for the Times, now recast in rhyme and meter.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send them, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
It is a coda to the Monroe Doctrine. Conquering limbs, storied pomp, and the corrupt, oppressive systems that generate them must stay away; the people they scorn and oppress may come.
This is important, but it is only half the story. The full meaning of Lazarus’s poem depends on the identity of the subject. Who is the statue? “The New Colossus” calls her “Mother of Exiles,” but she is much more than that.
The statue was offered as a binational transaction, France saluting America. But the original inspiration for the gift came from a very particular slice of the donor nation.
French attitudes toward America covered a gambit, as varied as French politics itself. Reactionaries disdained us as a toxic site of contaminating ideas; practitioners of realpolitik viewed us either as useful tools (backing the American Revolution to weaken Britain) or as rivals. Napoleon III, slipping an invading army and a monarch into Mexico while we were preoccupied by the Civil War, was both a reactionary and a would-be hemispheric competitor.
But from the American Revolution on, there were always sincere French friends of what the Marquis de Lafayette called “the most interesting of Republics,” admiring our commitment to liberty, concerning themselves with our fate, and hoping that France might emulate our example.8 Lafayette himself came to America in 1777 as a nineteen-year-old volunteer, named his youngest children Georges Washington and Virginie, and consulted with Thomas Jefferson at the dawn of the French Revolution on a French bill of rights. In the next generation, Alexis de Tocqueville toured America to study democracy in action and tried to apply what he learned as a legislator under the short-lived Second Republic.
Edouard Rene de Laboulaye, a law professor and belletrist a few years younger than Tocqueville, was a third specimen of the type, expressing his convictions in writing rather than action. As the Second Republic gave way to the Second Empire, he began a three-volume work on the political history of the United States, with the thought that foreign history would correct what domestic politics was producing. During the Civil War he published articles in French journals in support of the Union; French official policy, by contrast, was neutral, with a pull toward the Confederacy. He also wrote a fantasy novel, Paris en Amerique, in which a Yankee medium, Jonathan Dream, puts the narrator in a trance from which he wakes to find himself and his family transformed into Americans. He experiences a society free from the blemishes of the Second Empire: journalism without censorship, marriages contracted without dowries, and peaceful citizens uninterested in fighting duels (this, clearly, was America after Alexander Hamilton had been killed in one). He awakens from the trance a changed man. The Paris to which he returns, however, has not changed; he is found insane and locked up.9
For Laboulaye and other Frenchmen like him, writing and thinking about America was a safety valve and a goad, expressing hopes that were contrary to the reality of life around them, and possibly nudging their country in a better direction.
When the Civil War ended in a Union victory, Laboulaye founded an emancipation committee to raise money to help freedmen. He also expressed the hope, at an 1865 lunch in the garden of his country house, that the end of slavery in America might be commemorated by a colossal Franco-American sculpture.
The sculptor who caught Laboulaye’s enthusiasm was one of his lunch guests, a younger acquaintance, Frederic Bartholdi. He had a typical artist’s education in Paris: academic, governed by the study of models and the application of rules, embracing architecture and painting as well as sculpture. A trip to Egypt—where, unlike Rhodes, wonders of the ancient world still stood—showed him the possibilities of monumental design. The key, he wrote, was simplicity. “The details of the lines ought not to arrest the eye.… The surfaces should be broad and simple, defined by a bold and clear design, accentuated in important places.… [The work] should have a summarized character, such as one would give to a rapid sketch.”10 For the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, he proposed a lighthouse at Port Said, the northern terminus, in the form of a gigantic robed torchbearer. This orientalism was too oriental for the Khedive of Egypt, who chose instead a plain tower of reinforced concrete.
Political upheaval brought the Franco-American statue a step closer to reality. Napoleon III abandoned his Mexican puppet monarch as soon as the Civil War ended; he would challenge America behind its distracted back, not to its reunited face. In 1870, however, he plunged into a war with Prussia. His defeat was total. The struggle to replace the Second Empire was long, sometimes bloody. A socialist commune ran Paris for two months before the French army crushed it. The first postwar elections to the national legislature returned a chamber filled with monarchists, but their claimant to the throne, a great-nephew of Louis XVI, imposed an impossible condition: he would reign only under the old royalist flag. The commander of the army, himself a monarchist, remarked that if the tricolor were replaced, the guns of his soldiers would fire themselves in protest. As a result, France became a republic once more.
Laboulaye and Bartholdi revived the idea of a Franco-American monument, this time in commemoration of the friendship between the two countries (or at least between America and French republicans). The approaching centennial of the Declaration of Independence gave the project a target date and an event to celebrate. Bartholdi began work on a model of the statue and visited America to promote it. As a warm-up, he sculpted an over-life-size bronze image of Lafayette at the moment of his first landing in America. The boat on which Bartholdi’s Lafayette stands is symbolic, hardly larger than his feet. But the emotion with which he presses the hilt of his sword to his heart is very real.
The Lafayette statue was dedicated in Union Square in New York City in 1876, where it still stands; the colossal statue had years of work ahead of it yet. Pieces of it were exhibited as Bartholdi finished them—the arm and torch in Philadelphia, the head in Paris. These particular pieces were chosen for maximum public impact, since spectators could go inside them and look out. Gustave Eiffel, an engineer who was later to build a great monument of his own, was engaged to design and fabricate the statue’s armature. Outside would be a copper sheath in the form of neoclassical robes; inside would be state-of-the-art iron struts and girders.
As the French people became accustomed to their new republic, and eager to display its artistic and technological achievements to the world, they raised money for the statue rapidly. By 1881 one hundred thousand Frenchmen had given enough to complete the mammoth. In America, however, fund-raising for the pedestal lagged. The portfolio for which Emma Lazarus had written her poem raised only $1,500 at auction, half what the organizers hoped.
The project was saved by a press lord. Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who had fought for the Union in the Civil War and made a splash as a publisher in St. Louis, bought the World, a floundering New York newspaper, in 1883. He reinvented it as the modern tabloid, with smaller pages, bigger headlines, graphics, human interest, scandal, and crusades—the entire palette. One of his crusades, launched in March 1885, was to call on his readers to raise the money needed for the pedestal. “Let us not wait for the millionaires to give this money. [The statue] is not a gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America” but a gift from one people to another. “The World is the people’s paper, and it now appeals to the people to come forward.”11 Come forward they did, encouraged by the opportunity to behave better than their social betters and by the prospect of reading their names in the World, which daily listed all the new donors and the amounts of their contributions, however small. By August Pulitzer had raised $100,000, enough to give the colossus a place to stand.
The statue was dedicated on October 28, 1886, with speeches, fireworks, foghorns, and a twenty-one-gun salute, despite the rain. Grover Cleveland, the fourth president connected with the project, presided. Laboulaye was not there, having died three years earlier at age seventy-two. Neither was Emma Lazarus, who was in Europe nursing a bout of bad health. But Bartholdi was present to unveil the statue’s face. Electric light blazed from the torch and the crown, as Lazarus had written it would.
Her name was Liberty. A French prospectus of 1875 explained it clearly. America was about to celebrate “the foundation of the great Republic,” as France would recall its vital supporting role. “It is proposed to erect, as a memorial of the glorious anniversary, an exceptional monument. In the midst of the harbor of New York, upon an islet which belongs to the Union of States, in front of Long Island, where was poured out the first blood for independence, a colossal statue would rear its head.… It will represent ‘Liberty Enlightening the World.’ At night a resplendent aureole upon its brow will throw its beams far upon the vast sea.”12
All the details of this statement were carefully chosen. Bedloe’s Island, the “islet,” was owned by the federal government; calling its owner “the Union of States” recalled the victorious conclusion of the Civil War. “Long Island, where was poured out the first blood for independence” refers to the first battle of the American Revolution after independence was declared, the Battle of Long Island, fought in what is now Brooklyn in August 1776. When installed, the statue’s eyes would look across the harbor to the site, as anyone can verify by going to Prospect Park and returning its gaze. The brow bears a “resplendent aureole” because the statue is, among other things, literally a lighthouse (this feature of Bartholdi’s Suez Canal plan survived the trip to New York). But the most important light it throws out is the message of liberty, symbolized both by its torch and by its seven-rayed crown. The Colossus of Rhodes had probably worn such a crown, since that was a symbol of the sun, the god to whom it was dedicated. The new colossus radiates the endowments of nature’s God.
The prospectus did not mention it, but the statue’s left arm cradles a tablet, inscribed July IV MDCCLXXVI. At its feet lie broken chains, recalling Laboulaye’s first intention to commemorate emancipation.
Most of these details have slipped from popular memory, as they perhaps escaped notice at the time. Dedicatory rhetoric, like the spiels of park rangers, can cover too much. No one, except in circumstances requiring precision, now calls the statue Liberty Enlightening the World. But its identity and purpose survive even so. Everyone calls it the Statue of Liberty, or jocularly Lady Liberty. Bartholdi’s monumental simplicity got—and gets—the message across.
Visual gestures that imprint themselves on the mind are sometimes called “iconic.” This is not quite right. In Christian Orthodox theology, icons are subjects of meditation. Bartholdi’s statue offers food for thought, as its prospectus suggests. But it is primarily, as he wrote, a sketch: something to be recognized and understood immediately. It is a logo—the logo of liberty.
Why is this important? It corrects Lazarus calling the new colossus Mother of Exiles. So she is. But America was not the only country in the Americas to harbor exiles.
Immigrants had been coming to Latin America from around the world, not just from the colonial powers as settlers or from Africa as slaves, for decades. Their traces can be found in the names of recent regional heads of state, from Alberto Fujimori (Peru) to Dilma Rousseff (Brazil). But the southern mother of exiles was Argentina.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a flood of immigrants poured into the mouth of the Rio de la Plata from mother Spain, but also from Italy, Germany, eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Since Argentina was a much less populous country than America, the proportion of the total they represented was that much greater. In America the percentage of the population that is foreign-born has peaked several times (1870, 1890, 1910) at or just below 15 percent (today it approaches that level). In Argentina in 1914 the proportion of foreign-born was almost 30 percent.
Argentina’s immigrants became Argentinians. While John Quincy Adams’s grim judgment that Latin Americans “have not the first elements of good or free government” may not be entirely correct, or forever fated, it is the case that Argentina’s history in the twentieth century was a parade of demagogues and dictators. Argentina needed more than a Statue of Liberty; it needed the commitment to liberty that the statue expressed.
Immigrants stepping off the boat in New York, or Buenos Aires, were often fleeing particular evils—persecution, squalor—that could be abated by a simple change of venue. But American liberty is more than an absence of evils. It is a system of principles and conduct that keeps evils at bay. Maintaining it requires the devotion of Americans, native-born and newcomers alike.
The Statue of Liberty is a challenge as well as a welcome. Come here, but be like us. I will show you the way.
Lazarus died in 1887 of lymphoma. She had arranged her works for posthumous publication, putting “The New Colossus” at the head of the collection; when it appeared, edited by her sisters, the sonnet had been bucked to here.13
It was retrieved from obscurity by a friend and fellow bluestocking, Georgina Schuyler. Schuyler is an old Dutch New York name, but she had an immigrant in her family tree: her great-grandfather, Alexander Hamilton. In 1903, twenty years after “The New Colossus” was written, she arranged to have a plaque commemorating it and Lazarus installed on Bedloe’s Island, in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.