In 1865, Édouard de Laboulaye, a French abolitionist, proposed the statue’s construction to commemorate the end of slavery in the U.S. But France’s gift did not include a pedestal. To finance one, an art auction, which included Ms. Lazarus’s poem, was held in New York in 1883.

Image The Statue of Liberty in 1886. In 1903, the words of Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” were affixed to the pedestal. Credit... H. O'Neill

The statue was erected in 1886 without the poem, or its later association as the “Mother of Exiles.” Ms. Lazarus died a year later. In 1903, after a friend’s lobbying, Ms. Lazarus’s words were affixed to the pedestal. A reporter quoted some of them last week: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

When the sonnet was added, the poet James Russell Lowell said it gave the statue “a raison d’être which it wanted before quite as much as it wants a pedestal.”

Esther Schor, a biographer of Ms. Lazarus, put it this way: “Her poem was a prophecy. It isn’t legislation. But it is an ideal.”

Evan Gershkovich contributed reporting.

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