Immigration Myths (contd.): The Statue of Immigration, or Liberty Inviting the World
By James Fulford
Everything
has its opposite and just as for the Battle
Hymn of the Republic there's The
Bonny Blue Flag, or for Lillibulero
there's The
Wearing of the Green, the sonnet on a small plaque
inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty (not, as
many think, emblazoned on the base) has an opposite,
too.
It's
called The
Unguarded Gates, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Of
course, it's possible that Aldrich wasn't even
intending to answer The
New Colossus, which wasn't really that popular at
the time, but simply expressing his concern about the
unrestricted immigration of the late nineteenth
century.
(This
is called blank verse. A worldwide shortage of rhyming
words hit the English language near the end of the
nineteenth century, and poetry hasn't been the same
since.)
UNGUARDED
GATES
Thomas
Bailey Aldrich
1895
…Wide
open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them presses a wild motley throng
Men
from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Featureless
figures of the Hoang-Ho,
Malayan,
Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav,
Flying
the Old World's poverty and scorn;
These
bringing with them unknown gods and rites,
Those,
tiger passions, here to stretch their claws.
In
street and alley what strange tongues are loud,
Accents
of menace alien to our air,
Voices
that once the Tower of Babel knew!
O
Liberty, white Goddess! is it well
To
leave the gates unguarded?…
(For
the entire poem, click here).
"Wait!"
I can hear you say. "I didn't learn that in
school. It was something about 'Mother of
Exiles'."
Well,
she wasn't planned as a Mother of Exiles, but as a
"light unto the nations."
"Liberty
Enlightening the World," the French called her,
not Liberty Inviting
the world. The French were expressing their thanks
that the good example of the American Revolution had
led to French Revolution.
The
Americans of the 1880's were acknowledging their debt
to Lafayette, de Grasse, and the French nation, which
had sent guns, and money to Washington's forces.
In
1865, during the reign of Napoleon III, when Édouard
Laboulaye was having dinner with Frederick Bartholdi,
he said to him: "Wouldn't it be wonderful if
people in France gave the United States a great
monument as a lasting memorial to independence and
thereby showed that the French government was also
dedicated to the idea of human liberty?"
Laboulaye
suggested this for his own anti-Imperial reasons. Napoleon
III was not "dedicated
to the idea of human liberty." He was dedicated
to Napoleon III.
By
the time the Union
France-Americaine got around to delivering the
statue, Napoleon III was gone. And again, the statue
served the purpose of French liberals, in emphasizing
that France was now "a Republic, not an
Empire"…as the saying goes.
Some
Americans sardonically wondered why France, which had
a shortage of Liberty, should be exporting it to the
U.S., which had plenty.
"I will try to glorify the Republic and
Liberty over there, in the hope that someday I will
find it again here."
-- Frederick Bartholdi to Édouard Laboulaye, 1871
The Statue of Liberty (and I yield to no one in my
devotion to Liberty itself, or in my admiration for
the actual Statue) was not a project of the American
government. It was a free-enterprise project, a gift
from the people of France (again not the government,
but private enthusiasts), to symbolize the
participation of France in the American War of
Independence, and the perpetual friendship of the two
nations.
France raised the money for, and constructed the
Statue itself, but the pedestal was to be built with
funds provided by the Americans.
Newspaper
magnate Joseph Pulitzer (b. Hungary, 1847), raised
most of the funds for the pedestal. He felt that New
York's millionaires should be coughing up more money
for the statue. They didn't have to, though. They had actual liberty; there were no income taxes to require tax-deductible
contributions.
Emma
Lazarus
was a fourth-generation American, a member of New
York's Sephardic Jewish community (described in
Stephen Birmingham's The
Grandees),
a philanthropist interested in aid to Russian
Jewish refugees persecuted by the Czar. (Russia was an
evil empire even while they still had Emperors.) She
supported the immigration of Russian Jews to America,
then as now, the least anti-Semitic country on Earth.
She wrote "The
New Colossus" for the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund
in 1883, before
the statue was erected (“Here at our sea-washed
sunset gates shall
stand, etc”), but it was not inscribed on a plaque
inside the statue's pedestal until 1903.
By who, you ask? The statue, not, as I've pointed
out a government project, had been administered by
first the Lighthouse Bureau, and then it was transferred to the War
Department. Could it be
the local authorities who asked the War
Department to put this plaque there? And do either the
War Department or the Lighthouse Bureau set
immigration policy?
This whole thing is very strange. Imagine a
hypothetical foreign country with immigration problems
explaining its policy this way: "We used to have
sensible immigration laws, but someone built this damn
statue." You'd think they were mad.
It turns out that the tablet was the gift of
Georgina Schuyler, a New York philanthropist who was a
friend of Emma Lazarus', but who didn't even know
about the sonnet until she found it in a bookshop
years after Emma Lazarus' death.
Georgina Schuyler was descended from the Dutch
founders of New York, and was a direct descendant of
Alexander Hamilton. She didn't consecrate this tablet
to the concept of unrestricted immigration but rather
"in loving memory of Emma Lazarus."
The
Statue of Liberty didn't become an official national
monument until 1924. Bedloe's Island (renamed
Liberty Island in 1956), is Federal territory,
"the former site of a quarantine station and
harbor fortifications."
(Immigration
skeptics note: Both quarantine stations and harbor
fortifications are designed to protect
America from the world, rather than promiscuously
admit it.)
Fans
of the United Nations will be delighted to learn that
the statue has been designated a World
Heritage Site. (Click here
for a list of the other US sites that a bunch of
interfering foreigners have presumed to designate as
part of the “patrimonio
mundial.”)
But
where did the sentimental poppycock tying the Statue
of Liberty with unrestricted immigration come from?
Young children who couldn't tell you what happened in
1776 or when the War of 1812 happened, hear The
New Colossus read so often in civics class that
there's some danger of them memorizing
it, in violation of every tenet of progressive
educational theory.
It
certainly never occurs to any of them to ask
themselves: "This is the statue of Liberty. Does
unrestricted immigration into a democratic country increase
human liberty, or does it decrease it? Suppose the new people don't like
liberty?"
This
connection was pushed by people like Louis
Adamic, an immigration enthusiast who flourished
in the Thirties and Forties.
Adamic,
who was born in Blato, Slovenia in 1899, passed
through Ellis Island in 1913. He was an itinerant
laborer for years, and his travels through America
gave him a mixed impression of his adopted country,
some good and some bad.
He
was an early multiculturalist. The Statue
of Liberty Encyclopedia says
He frequently expressed a hope that America would learn
to tolerate and even value the infinite variety of its
people. In 1934, he boldly launched a publicity
campaign to elevate the social position of immigrants
and ethnic minorities. Realizing that legitimizing
symbol might strengthen his cause, he enlisted the
potent imagery of the Statue of Liberty and inspiring
words of Emma Lazarus's eloquent sonnet, The
New Colossus. Throughout the 1930's and early
1940's Adamic and others recited it in radio
broadcasts, making its words known to millions of
listeners.
The
poem also appeared in World War II movies; Charles
Boyer recited it as a French refugee in Hold
Back the Dawn. (1941)
In
1954, Adamic was found dead of a gunshot wound to the
head; buildings on his property were on fire. Though
local police ruled his death a suicide, his wife
suspected murder by his political enemies:
"Tension in the Yugoslav immigrant exile
community was high due to powerful factions." (Titoist
versus Monarchist.)
That,
of course, was what Thomas Bailey Aldrich warned of in
The Unguarded Gates: "[T]iger passions, here to stretch their
claws."
If
he was shot
by a post-war Yugoslav immigrant, Adamic may have
suffered brief a change of heart on the immigration
question.
The
association of Lady Liberty with the ideal of
unrestricted immigration is thus fairly recent,
although most people don't know this.
In 1970, Thomas Szasz, criticizing attempts to examine the
mental hygiene of immigrants says "This, I should
like to remind the reader, was in 1912, when the
inscription on the statue of Liberty was not yet
rendered into a historical relic by the immigration
laws enacted after the First World War."
He
may be right about the mental hygiene movement (you
can’t really test people for sanity unless you speak
their language). But in 1912, the inscription had only
been there for nine years. The bronze on the plaque
was probably still shiny.
The
"ideal" of immigration doesn't, therefore,
go back to Plymouth Rock, or 1776.
Not
even 1886, when the statue was erected. You could ask
Frederick Bartholdi.
One
website
says "In 1870, with the beginning of the
Franco-Prussian War, Bartholdi temporarily changed
careers; he became a major in the French army and was
stationed in his home city of Colmar. When the Germans
annexed the entire Alsace region [including Colmar],
making its residents German citizens, the reality of
the word "liberty" took on a new, personal
meaning for Bartholdi."
And
so, I imagine, did the word "immigration."
May 23, 2001