![]() The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. Glows world-wide welcome her mild eyes command Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand With conquering limbs astride from land to land Historic American Engineering Record, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, HAER NY,31-NEYO,89–295. ![]() Jet Lowe, View west of Statue of Liberty, 2009. Instead of “Liberty Enlightening the World,” Lazarus called the statue “Mother of Exiles.” The beacon Liberty raised did not simply illuminate the virtues of free government for the edification of the non-free world it guided the downtrodden toward shelter: But Lazarus’ poem also shifted Laboulaye and Bartholdi’s thematic emphasis. The new statue, Lazarus wrote, would displace the ancient emblem of conquest with an emblem of welcome. The poem’s title alluded to the long-since vanished Colossus of Rhodes, a representation of the Sun-god Helios erected in 280 BC, whose reputed height Bartholdi had matched in his design. The Poet Who Reframed the Statue’s Meaning Her poem “The New Colossus” was read at the opening of the fund-raising exhibit and published to acclaim in the New York World and New York Times. One of many efforts in New York City, the 1883 “Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty” elicited a contribution from Emma Lazarus. It took creative effort in both countries to raise the money for the project. ![]() His friend, French sculptor Fr édéric-Auguste Bartholdi, had drawn designs for a colossal statue of a robed woman bearing a torch, to be called “Liberty Enlightening the World.” The French people, he hoped, would donate the money for the statue and the American people would finance the building of a pedestal for it. In September 1875 he announced the formation of the Franco-American Union as a fundraising platform for it. Ten years later, after Louis Napoléon had fallen from power during the Franco-Prussian War, Laboulaye was able to initiate a project. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division,LC-USZ62-20113. Raising the FundsĪlbert Fernique, Workmen constructing the Statue of Liberty in Bartholdi’s Parisian warehouse workshop, ca. By 1865, however, Louis Napoléon had permitted a return of a parliamentary system, allowing Laboulaye to push his idea. can long endure.” Laboulaye saw the statue as a joint project of France and the United States, one that would rebuke the authoritarian impulses of Louis Napoleon, who had staged a coup d’état in 1851, reinstated the empire, and imposed on France a new constitution granting himself almost dictatorial powers. Before a worldwide audience, the war had tested whether a nation “conceived in liberty, and founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. ![]() Laboulaye, a leading expert on the American Constitution and an abolitionist, understood the war as Lincoln did. The gift would commemorate the success of American democracy. The Original Idea for the Statueįrench historian Eduoard de Laboulaye, observing the close of the American Civil War, proposed that the French make a gift of a monumental sculpture to the United States. Yet a few other Americans-notably, the poet Emma Lazarus-saw the statue as conveying an additional message. President Cleveland’s remarks were in keeping with the original idea for the statue. Reflected thence, and joined with answering rays, a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression, until liberty enlightens the world. Willing votaries will constantly keep alive its fires, and these shall gleam upon the shores of our sister republic. We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home nor shall her chosen altar be neglected. When the Statue of Liberty was officially dedicated on October 28, 1886, President Grover Cleveland made a short speech thanking the French for their gift.
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