In the autumn of 1883, a young New York poet was asked to write a few lines for a charity auction. She said no at first. The sonnet she finally wrote turned a monument to liberty into a promise of welcome.
A poem for a pedestal
The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, but the pedestal it would stand on still had to be paid for in America. To help raise the money, organisers in New York staged the Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund, an exhibition and auction of donated art and writing. The fundraiser William Maxwell Evarts and the writer Constance Cary Harrison asked Emma Lazarus to contribute a poem.
Lazarus refused at first. Harrison persuaded her, and on 2 November 1883 Lazarus completed a fourteen-line sonnet she called "The New Colossus." It was printed in the exhibition's catalogue and later appeared in newspapers including Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and The New York Times.
The poem opened by contrasting the statue with the bronze giant of ancient Greek fame, a figure of conquest, and imagined instead a woman holding a torch at the harbour's gate. Lazarus gave her a new name: "Mother of Exiles." Where the official title spoke of Liberty Enlightening the World, the poem made her a figure who looks outward to the world's tired and poor and calls them in.
A poet who knew the exiles
Emma Lazarus was born in New York City on 22 July 1849, the fourth of seven children in a prosperous Jewish family whose roots in the city went back to the first Portuguese Jews to arrive in New Amsterdam. She was a serious and admired poet from her teens. Her 1871 collection, Admetus and Other Poems, was dedicated to her friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose ideas shaped her thinking for years.
Her life changed after 1881, when pogroms in the Russian Empire drove many Jewish families to seek refuge in America. Lazarus did not watch from a distance. On Ward's Island in New York Harbor she helped Jewish immigrants who had been detained by officials at Castle Garden, the city's immigration station, and she was deeply moved by the Russian Jewish families she met there.
She did more than write about them. She volunteered at the employment bureau of the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, helped to establish the Hebrew Technical Institute to give young immigrants vocational training, and in 1883 founded the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews. Her book Songs of a Semite, published in 1882, is often described as the first volume of Jewish American poetry. When she sat down to write about the statue, she was writing about people she had met.
Forgotten, then found
The sonnet had admirers from the start. The poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell wrote to Lazarus from London in December 1883 to say that he liked her poem better than the statue itself, and that it gave the statue a reason for being that it had lacked, just as it lacked a pedestal.
Yet when the statue was finally dedicated on 28 October 1886, the poem played no part in the ceremony. About a year later, on 19 November 1887, Lazarus died in New York at the age of 38, most likely of Hodgkin's lymphoma. For more than a decade, "The New Colossus" slipped from public memory.
It was a friend who brought it back. Around 1901, Georgina Schuyler came across a book containing the sonnet and began a civic campaign to honour Lazarus and her words. In 1903 the campaign succeeded: a bronze plaque bearing the poem was placed on an inner wall of the statue's pedestal, the very structure the poem had been written to help build.
“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”Emma Lazarus, poet, "The New Colossus", 1883
The words that greeted millions
The timing mattered. The plaque went up in the busiest years of American immigration. Between 1892 and 1924, Ellis Island, a short distance across the harbour, was the country's largest and most active immigration station, and over its working life more than 12 million immigrants were processed there. For the families who sailed past the statue, Lazarus's lines came to express what the sight of the torch meant to them.
Over the twentieth century, the poem and the statue became inseparable. The National Park Service, which cares for the monument, notes that the poem's picture of the statue as a symbol of welcome and opportunity is now the way most people understand it. The original plaque is still displayed inside the pedestal, and an exact replica stands in the Statue of Liberty Museum on Liberty Island. Lazarus's handwritten manuscript is kept by the American Jewish Historical Society.
The poem has inspired acts of care as well as reflection. Lazarus's friend Rose Hawthorne Lathrop was moved by it and went on to found the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, a religious community of women devoted to caring for others.
A welcome that keeps being renewed
Emma Lazarus lived only 38 years and never saw her words in bronze. She wrote the sonnet in a single act of generosity, for a fundraiser, at a time when she was spending her days with refugees who had arrived with almost nothing. Her poem took a monument built to celebrate an idea and gave it a heart that people could recognise.
More than 140 years after she wrote it, her sonnet still hangs where her friend Georgina Schuyler fought to put it, inside the pedestal it helped to pay for. Visitors from around the world can still stop and read it there. Each new generation that reads it meets the same image she offered in 1883: a lamp lifted beside an open door, and the hope that it will stay lit.
People in this story
Sources & further reading
- Emma Lazarus, National Park Service, Statue of Liberty National Monument
- The New Colossus, National Park Service, Statue of Liberty National Monument
- History and Culture, National Park Service, Ellis Island
- Mark Twain and Emma Lazarus: two visions of the Statue of Liberty, Library of America
- The New Colossus, Wikipedia
- Emma Lazarus, Wikipedia
Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
Tikkun olam in action. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.
