After New York’s exuberant celebration of its new Statue of Liberty in 1886, interest in the monument remained strong as long as immigration evoked controversy. When the controversy died down in the early 1900s, attention to the statue waned as well. Tourists did not yet frequent Bedloe’s Island in large numbers, and New Yorkers tended to look inward and away from the waterways that surrounded them.
Between Liberty’s dedication in 1886 and its torch-to-toe restoration of the 1980s, Washington largely ignored the monument, whose inner structure and copper skin inevitably deteriorated for want of regular maintenance. The notable exceptions were the Progressive and New Deal eras, when the two Roosevelt administrations agreed to devote some public funds to the statue’s upkeep. Even the massive restoration project completed in time for the centennial celebration of 1986 had no government support; the funding came entirely from private sources. If the Statue of Liberty has become one of the greatest symbols of the United States, it is because American people have made it so.
After accepting the Statue of Liberty and inaugurating the monument in 1886, the U.S. government didn’t exactly know what to do with it. One of its functions was to serve as a lighthouse, and as such, officials assigned it to the national Light-House Board. But the United States Army also exercised jurisdiction over the monument, because it controlled the little-used military installation, Fort Hood, whose buildings still occupied Bedloe’s Island. And finally, the American Committee, the private organization that had lobbied for the statue and raised funds for the pedestal, operated the ferryboats that shuttled between Manhattan and the statue. Each of these entities thought the others should take responsibility for the statue’s maintenance, which meant, of course, that none of them did. The result was a chaotic site unaccommodating to visitors and a decaying monument. “Inside and out,” wrote the commandant of Fort Hood, “the Statue of Liberty . . . is a distinct disgrace to our country.”1 Echoing the military man, Pulitzer’s World declared, “The National Government has been shamefully indifferent to the great monument of liberty from the first.” Pulitzer had editorialized against locating the immigration reception center on Bedloe’s Island—he wanted to keep Liberty and its surroundings “pure”—and now his paper pressured the government to make the site “a pleasure ground for the people.”
Despite the editor’s pleas, Washington remained supremely indifferent to the statue’s fate. In 1890, the Senate rejected a bill to make Bedloe’s Island a public park, fearing the “dangerous precedent” of dispensing federal money for the benefit of a single city. After the turn of the century, the statue’s situation improved marginally as Progressive-era presidents advocated a more activist government. Warning that the Statue of Liberty would collapse without needed repairs, the Theodore Roosevelt administration got Congress to appropriate a modest sum ($62,800) for the statue’s maintenance. Its interior received a new coat of paint, the pedestal a new granite facing, the island itself a new wharf. There was even enough money to install an elevator to the top of the pedestal.
But the government lacked the resources to fulfill its main objective: the effort to give the statue a powerful source of light. Liberty would spend her first thirty years of life as a beacon largely devoid of illumination, a lighthouse too dim to guide any ships. Once again, the World stepped in. In 1915 the paper gave the U.S. War Department a plan to brighten the torch and install floodlights around the statue’s base. The newspaper promised to raise $30,000 in donations if the government would agree to match that amount. Congress accepted the arrangement, and the newspaper proved true to its word. In December 1916 President Woodrow Wilson flipped a switch to dramatic effect: suddenly the statue glowed in a warm golden light.
Now New Yorkers could see the Statue of Liberty at night. Such new visibility doubtless helped Liberty become a protected national monument according to the terms of the 1906 Antiquities Act, a status that President Calvin Coolidge confirmed in 1924. But the Progressive era had passed, and Coolidge didn’t bestow any new funding on a structure once again needing repair. The perpetual spray of salt water, along with the heat of summer, the chill of winter, and the strong harbor winds, inevitably took their toll. And not only on the statue itself. By the late 1920s half of the floodlight projectors no longer worked properly, and many had become unmoored and risked being blown out to sea.
A small emergency appropriation of 1931 enabled the War Department to fix the lighting system, replace the creaking elevator, and strengthen the upraised arm. But most of the necessary maintenance remained deferred. Only with the advent of the New Deal and its unprecedented levels of peacetime government spending did the Statue of Liberty gain its first substantial federal appropriation. FDR’s administration made a genuine effort to turn the statue into a landmark hospitable to visitors and a monument of truly national proportions. This government attention to the Statue of Liberty, with its attendant funding for badly needed improvements and repairs, coincided with Lady Liberty’s new status as a widely admired symbol of immigration. With massive immigration now relegated to the past, the statue lost its controversial character and could now embody a nation no longer sharply divided between putatively dangerous and alien newcomers on the one hand and “real Americans” on the other. This emerging consensus around the statue as symbol of the nation helped make it politically possible to devote substantial New Deal resources to its maintenance and eventually its beautification.
The first step was the expansion in 1934 of the National Park Service (NPS), now part of the Department of the Interior, to include historic buildings and monuments. This development ended the old tripartite administration of the Statue of Liberty and its pedestal, but it still left the rest of Bedloe’s Island under the jurisdiction of the army, which presided over a dilapidated military installation there. Nowadays, Liberty Island, as the old Bedloe’s is called, sparkles with green landscaped lawns that gently slope downward from the statue’s base to the broad walkway that surrounds it. Liberty has nothing underfoot. Back in the 1930s she stood amid an unsightly cluster of nearly three dozen warehouses, barracks, administrative and utility buildings, and miscellaneous sheds. Passengers disembarking from the Manhattan ferry immediately were confronted by a smelly “comfort station” and a rusting metallic hotdog stand. No wonder only a small number of tourists visited the island.2
The NPS wanted to give the Statue of Liberty the dignified surroundings she deserved, but first it had to wrest Bedloe’s Island from the army. The process took until the fall of 1937, when Roosevelt proclaimed the entire island part of the Statue of Liberty national monument. Meanwhile, the NPS devised an ambitious plan to remove all structures save for the statue itself, shore up the island with a new seawall and landfill, build a new dock, add walkways around the monument, and finally repair or replace badly rusted parts of Liberty’s skeleton. The Park Service didn’t possess the $1.5 million needed to do this work, so it relied on New Deal institutions designed to alleviate unemployment and bolster the economy by dispatching people to public works projects. Between 1937 and 1941, the Public Works Administration (PWA) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) sent hundreds of laborers to Bedloe’s Island to fulfill the NPS’s plans. They removed Liberty’s rays one by one to clean out the rusted innards that threatened to collapse them into the sea; began work on the corroded, unsafe cast-iron stairway to the top of the pedestal; replaced the dangerous steps that led up to the statue’s base; sealed Liberty’s footings with a copper apron designed to keep seawater and rainwater out; remodeled the administration building; and built a visitors’ center.
Work proceeded relatively quickly until December 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. For the next four years, the federal government focused its energies and resources on the war, leaving most repair, conservation, and beautification projects, including the Statue of Liberty, unfinished. But the war abroad, and soon the war effort at home, promoted the statue to the symbolic center of the United States. Throughout the 1930s the U.S. government, pressured by public opinion and its own officials’ hostility to foreigners, had been extremely reluctant to admit menaced Jews and other refugees. But by 1940 the war in Europe and the widespread oppression and suffering of people subjected to German occupation had changed American attitudes. Citizens now showed more willingness to welcome foreigners (although very few could find ways to escape Europe), and editorialists nationwide expressed sympathy for the Europeans’ plight as well as pride in their country as a refuge for those who hoped to elude Hitler’s net. As for the recent immigrants themselves, even those who had suffered from prejudice and discrimination in the United States now felt a renewed gratitude toward their adopted country.
These developments added all the more to the Statue of Liberty’s luster as symbol not only of American welcome and openness but of an essential American identity itself. Visits to the statue jumped 42 percent between the last year of peace and the first of the war, and Bedloe’s Island set an all-time record for a single twenty-four-hour period, with 9,211 visits on Labor Day 1940. The overall numbers rose still higher in 1941, making the Statue of Liberty, as the New York Times put it, “our No. 1 Symbol.”3
The statue’s prestige spilled over into the postwar years, when annual visits hit five hundred thousand and continued to climb. Liberty tourism would breach the one million mark in 1964.4 It stands at three to four million annually today. The huge number of visitors called attention to the unfinished state of Bedloe’s Island and to the ailing statue itself. In 1946, Pulitzer’s successor paper, the World-Telegram, excoriated the NPS for “the unkempt condition of this revered monument,” for a neglect that “borders on a national disgrace.”5 Exaggerated as they were, these angry words moved Congress to appropriate enough to finish the projects begun before the war. The NPS demolished all remaining extraneous buildings, dredged a channel for larger ferryboats, and landscaped the island. Although workmen addressed some of the statue’s structural problems, the postwar appropriation, relatively healthy as it was, could provide only temporary solutions. The reality was that Eiffel’s original iron skeleton, innovative for its time, didn’t meet mid-twentieth-century standards. It had rusted badly and would need to be replaced. That enormous, complex project would have to await a centennial celebration still more than thirty years away.
In the meantime, Liberty’s popularity—and the reverence surrounding it—continued to grow. By the mid-1950s, the Statue of Liberty began to figure prominently on U.S. postage stamps. And the country’s history of immigration now basked in a glow of nostalgia made possible by what seemed the definitive end of the influx from abroad. Since 1924, Ellis Island had received only a trickle of newcomers; it closed altogether in 1954. With immigration now apparently relegated to the past, Americans could celebrate it symbolically by making the Statue of Liberty into the icon of America. But for many commentators, such a symbolic commemoration didn’t do justice to what now seemed fundamental to the American identity itself. We needed to reexperience our immigrant heritage, and to do that, a number of influential people now argued, only a museum of American immigration would do. Where to put that museum seemed obvious: it would go inside the Statue of Liberty. Putting it there would strengthen the monument’s symbolic tie to immigration all the more, while adding the concrete connections to the immigrant experience that genuine historical artifacts were said to supply. As representatives of the NPS wrote at the time, “The foot of our great symbol of the American ideal was the most appropriate place for presenting the fruits of that ideal.”6
To build the museum, in 1954 a group of blue-ribbon New Yorkers created the National Committee for the American Museum of Immigration (AMI). Its first presidents were the industrialist Pierre S. Du Pont III and Major General Ulysses S. Grant III, grandson of the president whom Bartholdi had met on his maiden voyage to the United States. Two years later, Congress endorsed the proposed immigration museum and voted to rename the dot of land that anchors Bartholdi’s monument Liberty Island. A joint House-Senate resolution proclaimed: “The Statue of Liberty is to the world the symbol of the dreams and aspirations which have drawn so many millions of immigrants to America.”7
These noble words, like the sentiments expressed when an earlier Congress first accepted Bartholdi’s gift, came without any significant funding attached. As the pedestal committee had done three-quarters of a century earlier, the AMI resolved to raise funds for the museum project privately. Prominent journalists supported the idea, and the famed television host Edward R. Murrow devoted a show to the project. But the fund-raising effort went nowhere: in more than a decade it netted less than $.5 million. The National Park Service ultimately contributed some money but devoted it mainly to enlarging the pedestal’s foundation and improving access to the statue for the growing number of visitors. The NPS also created a small exhibition space and eventually coaxed a series of federal appropriations totaling $5 million, enough to build a modest museum.8
For once with the Statue of Liberty, the main problem didn’t revolve around funding. Instead, the American Museum of Immigration became ensnared in ideology, in the dramatic changes in the public discourse surrounding immigration that surfaced in the 1960s. In the mid-1950s, when elite New Yorkers first conceived the museum, most journalists and historians understood immigration to the United States as having created a “melting pot,” a mixture of different peoples who melded together to form a unified American identity. As the AMI’s Historians Committee and NPS directors put it in 1954, the museum should focus on “Americanization,” on the “flowing together of the various races, creeds and cultures into one main stream.”9 Such, at least, was how most prominent commentators of the 1950s described immigration’s results. In practice, Americans commonly divided themselves according to their country of origin and often avoided, or discriminated against, those deemed to have come from inferior places. Thus, Americans of Irish background often felt ill-treated by people originally from England. Germans not infrequently looked down on Poles; Jews found themselves excluded from top universities and country clubs (while German Jews looked down on their eastern European coreligionists); and African Americans faced harsh Jim Crow laws in the South and racism in the North and West.
Despite such divisions, in the Cold War atmosphere of the mid-1950s the historian chosen to prepare the AMI’s prospectus, Thomas M. Pitkin, envisaged a museum designed to build national unity in the face of military and ideological threats from abroad. “In a time of conflicting ideologies,” Pitkin wrote, “when the competition for the loyalties of groups and individuals is keen,” the AMI would emphasize the immigrants’ contributions to a “common national life.” By immigrants, Pitkin mostly meant those who had come from Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He implicitly excluded from the story he planned to tell the millions of involuntary immigrants from Africa, the Chinese and Japanese who had mostly settled on the West Coast, and the growing number of Puerto Ricans and other Spanish-speakers who had begun to flow into the United States. Throughout most of its history, the U.S. census didn’t even count the number of foreign-born people whose native language was Spanish. When it began to do so consistently in 1970, Spanish-speakers had already reached 19 percent of the 9.6 million foreign-born individuals residing in this country.10 The proportion of Spanish-speakers would hit almost 40 percent in 1990.
But in 1958, when Pitkin and other museum planners first presented what we would now call their “Eurocentric” conception of the exhibits, most commentators accepted their premises at face value. A half-dozen years later, such an approach already seemed hopelessly out of date. The civil rights movement had focused attention on Americans of African origin and made it impossible to sustain the triumphalist narrative of immigrant assimilation and success that underlay the story Pitkin intended to tell. The new assertiveness and cultural pride of black Americans encouraged members of other minority groups to delve into their own ethnic histories, detail the hardships and discrimination their forebears had faced, and celebrate their distinctiveness rather than what they shared with other citizens of the United States.
These developments both sparked and expressed a democratization of American universities, which had begun to admit students from the lower reaches of the middle class. Many of the new students belonged to ethnic minorities, some of whom began to explore their cultural roots. Those who became historians commonly turned to a “new social history” attuned to race and ethnicity (and eventually to women and gender).11 This “history from the bottom up” rejected the metaphor of America as a melting pot. Immigration now seemed rather to have produced what the historian Robert Ernst called a “salad bowl,” a mixture of distinctive ingredients tossed together without losing the colors, qualities, textures, shapes, and sizes that made them unique.12 In this view, immigration had not produced a harmonious blend of different peoples, but a mosaic of cultural diversity and ethnic pluralism.
The AMI planners, having conceived their museum just before these developments erupted onto the American scene, remained wedded to their original ideas. They remained so partly for bureaucratic reasons—once enmeshed in the NPS machinery, museum organizers found it difficult to change gears—and partly for ideological ones. The museum planners inhabited a mental universe influenced neither by academic history nor by the representatives of newly mobilized ethnic groups. When museum officials finally tried to take the new claims into account, their efforts proved clumsy at best. An initial AMI exhibit of 1965 referred to black Americans as involuntary immigrants and pictured them as abject beings crammed beneath the deck of a miserable slave ship. This portrait evoked an angry response from New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who denounced the exhibit as an “insult . . . to America’s 20,000,000 Negroes.” It portrayed blacks only as brutalized and oppressed, ignoring the “fantastic cultural contributions of Negroes in this country.”13
These remarks foreshadowed a great many more to come. In 1967 Eugene Kusielewicz, vice president of the Kosciuszko Foundation, complained bitterly that “a visitor would leave the proposed museum with the impression that the two largest immigrant groups [Poles and Italians] virtually do not exist.” Italian American notables leveled similar charges and echoed Powell in protesting the banal, stereotyped imagery of their ethnic group. Congressman Frank Annunzio charged that when AMI planners didn’t ignore Italians altogether, they pictured them only as fisherman and vineyard workers “enjoying an Italian dinner.” Annunzio wanted the AMI to delete “the entire text about spaghetti, eggplant, peppers, Chianti, pizza, etc.”14
Meanwhile, Jewish leaders protested the exclusive reliance on religious artifacts in the proposed exhibit, while others objected to the near-neglect of Mexican, French Canadian, and Asian immigrants. Another criticism came from historians and journalists who represented the new social history. Rudolph J. Vecoli, who directed the new Center for Immigration Studies at the University of Minnesota, denounced “the Museum’s emphasis on the elite, [on] the few who won fame and fortune.” He wanted the exhibit to pay attention to the “millions of ordinary people” who had made immigration to the United States a “folk movement of unprecedented dimensions.”15
When NPS curator David Wallace lamely responded in mid-1971 that it was too late to refocus the exhibit, Vecoli mobilized the leaders of Polish, Italian, Jewish, and other organizations to help him create “a nationwide campaign against the Museum concept.” The campaign never materialized, but Vecoli convened a group of distinguished historians and representatives of the various ethnic groups, who prepared a highly critical evaluation of the AMI’s plans. NPS leaders responded with a few, mostly cosmetic changes but remained yoked to a set of premises about U.S. immigration now almost twenty years out of date.
If the new AMI disappointed a great many scholars, President Richard Nixon seemed more than pleased. He decided to speak at the museum’s dedication on September 26, 1972, seeking, as the New York Daily News put it, “the ethnic vote which usually goes to the Democrats” in the upcoming presidential election. The president’s advisers turned the dedication into an “ethnic festival” complete with young girls dressed in the “traditional” costumes of Italy, Germany, Poland, and Ukraine. Press reaction to the dedication and to the museum itself was predictably mixed. New York editorialists generally liked it, but the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, among other papers, found it wanting. “What was the big rush to open this travesty?” asked the Bulletin’s reporter, Rose De Wolf. “The overall impression you get there is that there are two ways to prove yourself as an American—one is to become rich and famous and the other—not as good—is to die in a war. Women and children, needless to say, are rarely in view. Poor Miss Liberty. What a dirty trick to hide this under her skirt.”16
Tourists’ views seemed mixed as well. Less than half of those who visited the statue bothered to enter the museum, and those who did spent an average of just 17.9 minutes there. To see everything would have taken 60 to 90 minutes.17 Still, an informal survey indicated than many liked what they saw and showed particular interest in the exhibits devoted to their own ethnic groups. Although permanently strapped for funds, the AMI curators made some effort to represent ordinary people and not just elites by collecting and displaying amateur photographs and films, and especially by recording the oral histories of more than 150 people who had entered the United States through Ellis Island.
If the American Museum of Immigration proved only a modest success, it helped set the stage for a vastly more important—and successful—project: the restoration of the main immigration reception center on Ellis Island and creation of a magnificent museum there, a project that took almost three decades to complete.18 Had the federal government’s original intentions been fulfilled, it would never have been done at all. After the Immigration and Naturalization Service closed Ellis Island in November 1954, the government decided to sell the island to the highest bidder. The General Services Administration (GSA) advertised the property in the Wall Street Journal, calling it “one of the most famous landmarks in the world.” Its potential uses? “Oil storage depot, import and export processing, warehousing, manufacturing”—twenty-seven acres of land, thirty-five buildings, and even the ferryboat “Ellis Island” formed part of the deal. The GSA advertised the sale widely, so widely that it evoked a storm of protest. “To millions and millions of Americans,” wrote one angry former immigrant, “Ellis Island was the 19th and 20th century counterpart of Plymouth Rock. . . . To see it sold for commercial purposes will be to see it lose its identity and its historic memory.” Politicians quickly weighed in, among them the New York congressman T. James Tumulty, who said, “If you can auction off Ellis Island, perhaps you will be auctioning off the Statue of Liberty next.”19
President Dwight Eisenhower quickly suspended the sale, a move that seemed to please almost everyone except those promoting the American Museum of Immigration. “It is inconceivable,” declared AMI co-chairs David McDonald and Du Pont, that Ellis Island “should be considered as appropriate for a national tribute to immigration.” This statement sounds bizarre today, but in the mid-1950s Ellis Island, which had housed illegal immigrants awaiting deportation before World War II and foreigners deemed subversive afterward, appeared to the AMI promoters a “depository of bad memories.”20 Du Pont and his colleagues also feared that a restoration of the old immigration center would compete with their plans to establish a museum on Liberty Island. But with the AMI progressing slowly, Du Pont’s views convinced neither Congress nor the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In 1965 Johnson announced that Ellis Island would become part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument and that Jobs Corps workers would be dispatched to Ellis to help fix it up.
But government funds quickly dried up in the face of mounting expenditures on the war in Vietnam, and it would take tens of millions of dollars in private contributions for Ellis Island to become the impressive museum of immigration we know today. The highly successful Ellis Island restoration lies beyond the scope of this book, but it is important to note that the museum there presents an ideal complement to the Statue of Liberty, which has transferred much of its immigration symbolism to the island next door. One result is that the statue can now stand apart from our renewed controversies over immigration and represent the more abstract ideals Bartholdi originally had in mind.