Happy Birthday, Lady Liberty!!!!!!

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

On Lady Liberty’s 135th birthday, honor the woman and poem that gave it its meaning

Many know Emma Lazarus’s transcendent sonnet, “The New Colossus,” especially the lines, “Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” Not many realize that the words weren’t part of the famous statue until more than 15 years after its 1886 dedication.

To appreciate how this came to be, we must know a bit about Lazarus. She was born in 1849, an age when women could not vote or own property or, in sum, control their own destinies. So how did she come to move millions who believed in the American mythology of immigration?

Lazarus was a serious woman reared by a wealthy and established Jewish family of Portuguese Sephardic descent and moved comfortably throughout New York’s high society. Her life in New York City afforded her the luxury of writing without the need to earn a paycheck.

So, by 1883, when notable American writers and poets solicited her to write a sonnet that would be auctioned off to help raise funds to pay for the Lady’s base and pedestal, she wrote the sonnet. Ironically, it did not successfully raise much money and was largely forgotten for decades. Indeed, she was not even invited to the dedication. She died in 1887 of lymphoma at the age of 38.

Now fast forward to 1901. Georgina Schuyler, a friend of Lazarus’s, was rummaging in a book shop when she discovered a volume containing the forgotten sonnet, “The New Colossus,” and decided to mount a civic campaign to revive the work. Schuyler was no ordinary citizen; she was a patron of the arts and a philanthropist who supported numerous social reforms and a direct descendant of Alexander Hamilton.

► Show Spoiler

So perhaps it is not surprising that on May 5, 1903, Schuyler succeeded in her efforts to have the sonnet’s gripping entreaty inscribed on a plaque and placed on the inner wall of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. No newspapers of the day reported on the plaque’s placement, and there was no immediate public response to the plaque. But over time the message of Lazarus’s sonnet penetrated and changed the trajectory of the Lady’s symbolism.

Author and editor David Lehman, in a 2004 Smithsonian Magazine essay, wrote: “It was not until the 1930s, when Europeans in droves began seeking asylum from Fascist persecution, that the poem was rediscovered, and with it the growing recognition that it expressed the statue’s true intention.”

[Luke]

Happy Birthday Lady Liberty! Although have we seen a birf certificate with footies?

You got me, TRL... first thought was, we're celebrating Orly Taitz' birfday? Cause of course, she's well known as Lady Liberty (see example below).

Lady Liberty.JPG (227.28 KiB) Viewed 785 times

https://pbenjay.blog/tag/birth-certificate/

taitz_tanic_e766a.jpg (384.07 KiB) Viewed 785 times

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

[Foggy]

Yeah, there are a lot of Americans who need to read that plaque.

That's America, not this anti-immigrant bullshit.

[realist]

Yeah, there are a lot of Americans who need to read that plaque.

That's America, not this anti-immigrant bullshit.

[AndyinPA]