Library of Congress

On Oct. 28, 1886, President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France, in New York Harbor. In that day’s edition, The New York Times described the building excitement for the ceremony: “All day yesterday people came to the city in droves to participate in to-day’s celebration. Extra heavily loaded trains, much behind schedule time, were the rule on every railroad entering the city. Every hotel was crowded to its utmost capacity last night, and there was hardly one of the better known hotels which did not have to turn away hundreds of would be guests.”



The ceremony included speeches by the president and famed French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, among others, as well as music and gun salvo. The finale? The statue’s designer, Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, who was perched in the statue’s torch, pulled a rope removing a large French flag from the front of the statue, revealing Lady Liberty’s face to the crowd.

The statue was the brainchild of the French historian Edouard de Laboulaye, who proposed it in 1865. Bartholdi designed the statue and got help with its construction from Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, architect of the Eiffel Tower. Shipped to New York in pieces, the statue had to be reconstructed on nearby Bedloe’s Island (now Liberty Island) in New York Harbor.

The statue stands 151 feet high (on top of a 154-foot-high pedestal) and depicts Lady Liberty raising a torch in her right hand and holding in her left hand a tablet inscribed with the date of the publication of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.

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At the entrance of the pedestal there is a plaque bearing a sonnet by Emma Lazarus, who wrote it as part of fundraising efforts for the statue. Titled “The New Colossus,” it includes the famous lines:

“‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she

With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Though today, the Lazarus poem, especially its lines about the “huddled masses yearning to be free,” is often thought of as part and parcel of the Statue of Liberty, a City Room blog post explains that this wasn’t always so. Sam Roberts writes, “The only immigrants mentioned at the dedication in 1886 were the “illustrious descendants of the French nobility” who fought on behalf of the United States against Britain during the American Revolution.” Instead, the ceremony focused on the shared commitment to the idea of liberty by the United States and France.

The poem wasn’t even mentioned at the dedication ceremony and its lines were added to the pedestal years later — in 1903.

According to the statue historian Barry Moreno, it “was never built for immigrants.”

“It was,” he recalled, “built to pay tribute to the United States of America, the Declaration of Independence, American democracy, and democracy throughout the world. It honored the end of slavery, honored the end of all sorts of tyranny and also friendship between France and America.”

Only later, he added, “letters were written home, word of mouth, taught people that you would see this wonderful goddess in New York Harbor when you arrived in America to welcome you.”

“And she became really famous among immigrants,” he recalled. “And it was really immigrants that lifted her up to a sort of a glory that was probably before America really fully embraced her.”

Does the evolution of the meaning people have bestowed upon the Statue of Liberty reflect what you have learned about United States history around the turn of the 20th century? How about more recently? Do you think the words of “The New Colossus” hold the same meaning today as when they were inscribed? Why or why not?

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