EMMA LAZARUS -- GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR. . .
NEW YORK — 1886 — On a breezy October day, a small crowd stood on an island in New York harbor, gawking at France’s gift to America. Towering above them was the torch, the crown, the robed woman in bronze not yet gone green. But in dedicating “Liberty Lighting the World,” men in top hats spoke more of France than of freedom.
Speaking to the crowd, President Grover Cleveland exalted the “chosen altar” keeping liberty’s light ”upon the shores of our sister republic in the east. “ No one mentioned immigrants. None spoke of “huddled masses.”
Months later, when Emma Lazarus succumbed to Hodgkin’s lymphoma, obituaries hailed her as “an American poet of uncommon talent.” But they said nothing of one poem in particular. Lazarus’ books were soon shelved. Buried in them were some lines about some statue. You know them. They are now American scripture.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “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-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
For most of her short life, Emma Lazarus thought little about immigrants. Her family had been in America since before the Revolution. As Sephardic Jews, they had struggled to fit into Manhattan society. Lazarus’ early poems spoke of love, nature, the “noble souls of half a million” fallen in the Civil War.
Lazarus’ path as a poet was as rocky as most. Emerson hailed her first collection but soon soured on her work. She wrote a play, a novel, and translated poems from French and German. She lived alone in Manhattan, reading, writing, living for language. Then in 1881, she began hearing stories, shocking stories.
Russian pogroms were tearing through Jewish shtetls. Women and children were “slaughtered like sheep.” Families fled. Thousands poured into New York’s Lower East Side. Lazarus began teaching them, helping them cope with this new ghetto, the most crowded place on earth.
Lazarus had heard of the statue being built in Paris. She did not think much about it until asked to write a poem to raise funds for its pedestal. She hesitated. She did not write poetry “on order.” But think, she was told. “Think of that goddess standing on her pedestal. . . holding her torch out to those Russian refugees.” A few months later, “The New Colossus” was read at a fund-raiser.
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 with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. . .
After funds were raised and the statue dedicated, Lazarus’ poem was forgotten. Then in 1902, one of Lazarus’ friends campaigned to have “The New Colossus” placed on a bronze plaque, inside the statue. And there it stayed while 20 million immigrants streamed past the torch, waving, saluting, but stirring resentment. When Congress, in 1924, closed “the golden door,” Emma Lazarus’ poem was barely a footnote in American life.
Fast forward to the Depression. As the Statue of Liberty approached its 50th birthday, the New York Times wrote, “If she had a tongue what she could tell.” In response, a letter to editor quoted Lazarus. A few years later, Slovenian immigrant Louis Adamic began to champion her work. And during World War II, the statue found her voice.
A 1942 Alfred Hitchcock movie ended with a dramatic chase to the statue’s crown. A woman, standing in the crown, quotes Emma Lazarus. Then at the end of the war, “The New Colossus” was posted outside the statue. In the 1949 musical, “Miss Liberty,” Russian immigrant Irving Berlin set “The New Colossus” to music.
Today, Lazarus’ words are quoted, Tweeted, parodied. In 2019, when a federal immigration official rewrote them to include only “the poor who can stand on their own two feet. . .” historians pounced. The debate rages on. But the words remain, outside the statue, stamped in bronze. Give me your tired, your poor. . .
“The irony,” said Lazarus’ biographer Esther Schor, “is that the statue goes on speaking, even when the tide turns against immigration — even against immigrants themselves, as they adjust to their American lives. You can’t think of the statue without hearing the words Emma Lazarus gave her.”
