In 1883, William Maxwell Evarts and author Constance Cary Harrison asked Lazarus to compose a sonnet for the "Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty" - an art and literary auction to raise funds for the Statue's pedestal run by the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty. In turn, Lazarus, inspired by her own Sephardic Jewish heritage, her experiences working with refugees on Ward's Island, and the plight of the immigrant, wrote "The New Colossus" on November 2, 1883. After the auction, the sonnet appeared in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World as well as The New York Times. She died in New York City on November 19, 1887, most likely from Hodgkin's lymphoma and was buried in New York City at Congregation Shearith Israel's Beth Olom Cemetery in Cypress Hills, Queens.Lazarus' famous sonnet depicts the Statue as the "Mother of Exiles:" a symbol of immigration and opportunity - symbols associated with the Statue of Liberty today. After its initial popularity however, the sonnet slowly faded from public memory. It was not until 1901, 17 years after Lazarus's death, that Georgina Schuyler, a friend of hers, found a book containing the sonnet in a bookshop and organized a civic effort to resurrect the lost work. Her efforts paid off and in 1903, words from the sonnet were inscribed on a plaque and placed on the inner wall of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Today, the plaque is on display inside the Statue's pedestal, and an exact replica of the plaque can be found inside the Statue of Liberty Museum.
America begins in New York:- Kenneth T. Jackson, the Columbia University historian, likes to say. New York's tolerance for or, at least, indifference to diversity spread west to the rest of the country. Embodied by the Statue of Liberty, that philosophy defined America to the rest of the world through accounts that immigrants sent home.In 1830, fewer than one in ten New Yorkers were foreign-born. Within two decades, nearly half were. Yet when the statue was dedicated in 1886 (six years before Ellis Island opened), the only immigrants mentioned were the "illustrious descendants of the French nobility" who had fought on behalf of the United States against Britain during the American Revolution.Her official name was Liberty Enlightening the World, and her donor's agenda was to burnish France's republican roots after the oppressive reign of Napoléon Ill and to foster stronger bonds with America. But it was the words of a fourth-generation American whose father was a wealthy sugar refiner and whose great-great-uncle welcomed George Washington to Newport, Rhode Island, that almost single-handedly-if belatedly- transformed the monumental statue in New York Harbor into a "Motherof Exiles" who beckoned generations of immigrants.Emma Lazarus's "New Colossus," with its memorable appeal to "give me your tired, your poor," was commissioned for a fund-raising campaign to pay for the statue's pedestal. Lazarus accepted the commission begrudgingly - few poets relish the idea of writing on deadline. But she was stirred by a wave of pogroms against Jews in Russia and by her regular visits to poor immigrants housed in temporary shelters on Wards Island. Lazarus wrote the sonnet in 1883, having seen only the torch when it was on display in Madison Square Park."It was a moment of moral and spiritual recovery, after her attempts to raise money to benefit the Russian-Jewish refugees of 1881-82 had largely fallen on deaf ears," said Esther Schor, her biographer and an English professor at Princeton University.The sonnet would survive periodic efforts to excise Lazarus's reference to "wretched refuse" and would become enshrined in the political lexicon in the 1930s as an anthem for Americans who, with war again threatening in Europe, lobbied to reverse immigration quotas imposed a decade earlier.Finally, in 1903, after relentless lobbying by Georgina Schuyler, a friend of Lazarus who was descended from Alexander Hamilton (himself an immigrant), it was affixed on a bronze tablet just inside the entrance to the pedestal. "An ex post facto inscription," as the art historian Marvin Trachtenberg wrote, that would elevate the values of immigration.TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS 101 OBJECTS
