Esther Schor talking:
I was appalled to hear what the senior adviser to President Trump, Stephen Miller, said about this poem, but not surprised. You know, I follow Emma Lazarus’s poetry and its use in the public sphere quite closely, and I get Google alerts every time “huddled masses” is mentioned in the press. So, I know that what Miller was doing was taking a page from the alt-right playbook, where this poem is dismissed, it’s been called graffiti, and it’s been said that the poem is simply a distraction, that’s not what the statue ever meant. And it goes—it degenerates from there, this rhetoric. Emma Lazarus has been called the Jewess who’s trying to destroy the U.S., etc. So, you know, it wasn’t shocking to me.
I think what happened was—you hear Miller’s, you know, his tone becoming more shrill. When he dismissed the poem, the press room suddenly was full of people with rolling eyes and shaking heads, and it really, I think, put Miller off his game. You could see that he intuited that the nation watching this briefing would be doing much the same thing, as I was.
– Emma Lazarus, the poet who wrote this, has long been a target of white nationalists. Trump supporter and former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, writes about Emma Lazarus in his 2003 book Jewish Supremacism. In a chapter titled “The Jewish Led Alien Invasion,” David Duke quotes lines from Lazarus’s “New Colossus” and writes, quote, “As I looked into the American fight over immigration laws during the last 100 years, the driving force behind opening America’s borders became evident: It was organized Jewry, personified by the poet Emma Lazarus whose lines I quoted to begin the chapter,” unquote. Well, in January, white nationalist Richard Spencer tweeted, “It’s offensive that such a beautiful, inspiring statue was ever associated with ugliness, weakness, and deformity.”
So, on one point, Miller was factually correct: The poem was not part of the original design or installation or dedication of the statue. But, in fact, the poem predates the advent of the statue on America’s shores. Emma Lazarus wrote it in 1883 to raise money for the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty.
Now, just to back up a bit, the statue was the brainchild of a liberal French statesman, historian, named Édouard de Laboulaye. And Laboulaye, his idea was to celebrate the return of France to Enlightenment values with the fall of the Second Empire and the rise of the Third Republic in 1870. So, he had the idea of, to commission the statue, it would be dedicated to Franco-American friendship, but it would really be designed to place the American emancipation of slaves in the context of the French Enlightenment and to do some good PR for the French people.
The Americans saw the statute as a very French thing. I mean, they were not at all identified with it. They didn’t reach into their pockets and give to the pedestal fund. Hence, an auction was set up, to auction artworks and documents written for this occasion, for this purpose.
Now, Lazarus had been very active on behalf of Jewish refugees from Russia, who were fleeing persecution, fleeing to pogroms and coming to the United States in great numbers, in 1881, ’82. And so she was known for her work with the immigrants. She herself was not an immigrant. She was a fourth- or fifth-generation American, the daughter of a Sephardic Jewish family, a very wealthy family in New York. She had no need to roll up her sleeves and work for these immigrants, but that is exactly what she did. She advocated for them in the press. She taught them English. She tried to get them jobs and job training. And she was, in general, one of their fiercest advocates. Most of her advocacy was to the Jewish community at that point. And I have to say that her efforts were met with some disappointment. But it was very typical of Lazarus not to back up, but to forge ahead.
And what she did, in writing this sonnet, was to take her plea for the support of immigrants to the nation. And what she did in the sonnet is quite astonishing. I mean, she completely recast the meaning of the statue, which, by the way, she never saw, she hadn’t seen at this time—it was lying in a warehouse in Paris. So it was really a kind of prophetic intuition, a prophetic envisioning, of this statue as America’s announcement to the world that it was renouncing imperialism, that it was renouncing tyranny and that it was going to accept those who had been cast out, who had been “refused.” That’s the word, “refuse,” really, is from the French refusé, people who had been refused by their own native shores. So that’s the genesis of the poem.
And it was taken notice of at the time, briefly, when there was a reception for the sculptor Bartholdi in New York. There was a long speech, of course, about Franco-American friendship, but the speech began by saying, “Here is a statue that will welcome the stranger to these shores.” However, Lazarus became ill. The poem was published to a very small reading audience in Art Amateur magazine. And the poem faded from sight, such that when the statue was dedicated by Grover Cleveland in 1886, it was not recited, it was not printed in the press. And when Lazarus died a year later, tragically, at the age of 38, only one of her eulogists even mentioned the poem at that time.
So, it wasn’t until 1903—and this is what Miller was referring to. You know, obviously, he’s gone to Wikipedia and read the National Park Service website. You know, he’s up on his information here. But in 1903, a private donation was made by a friend of Lazarus as a tribute to her 15 years after her death. And the poem still didn’t catch on until the 1930s, when it was embraced by pro-immigrationists, a man named Louis Adamic, Slovenian immigrant. And he saw in this poem a most eloquent statement for his cause. And he quoted it. His co-workers quoted it. They introduced it in schools. Children began to memorize it. It was set to music, etc. And since the 1930s, the poem and the statue have really been inextricably linked—through many vicissitudes and many debates about immigration reform, I might add, which has certainly not been static since the 1930s.
when Miller says, “Because the poem wasn’t planted on the statue when it was dedicated, it has nothing to do with the statue,” I think, is just a very blinkered and false statement. it’s now been on the Statue of Liberty, at the base, for over 114 years.
And people, you know, aging immigrants, when they’ve written their memoirs, have reported that they sailed past it and read the words of the sonnet emblazoned on the outside of the statue. It was never on the outside of the statue. So, this is a memory that comes from this deep sense that the American public has that this sonnet is linked to the statue.
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Esther Schor
professor of English and acting chair of the Humanities Council at Princeton University.
— source democracynow.org 2017-08-05