Emma Lazarus was a fourth-generation New York Jew. At 17, she published her first book of poems, a volume admired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who entertained and flirted with her in Concord. She was a friend of Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Henry James. She was also a feminist, activist, and secular Zionist before such terms existed—she shaped social programs to assist refugees from Russia after the pogroms of the 1880s, traveled abroad to raise funds for a Jewish homeland years before the first Zionist council, and refused to mask her religion or sex while crafting a decidedly modern persona as an outsider and public intellectual. As CNN reports, she “originally wrote the sonnet, entitled “The New Colossus,” to raise funds for the [Statue of Liberty’s] pedestal in 1883. The sculpture itself, which sits in the New York Harbor and was visible on the path to the immigration checkpoint at Ellis Island, was a gift from France to the US. It was not until 1903 that Lazarus’s words were inscribed on a bronze plaque and attached to the inner wall of the Statue of Liberty, 17 years after its original unveiling in 1886.”
Lazarus died at 38 in 1887, and never saw the plaque or knew how deeply her poem would resonate. Would she be outraged, bemused, or proud to see her “Colossus” the center of controversy in 2017? I don’t think she’d be surprised by official attempts to rewrite history, or by hatred towards immigrants. She was aware of how her own class of long-settled Sephardic and German Jews despised Eastern European hordes from the shtetls, the “wretched refuse” of “teeming shores.”
Everyone is familiar with the last five lines of the sonnet’s sestet. Here’s the poem in its entirety:
THE NEW COLOSSUS
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“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!”
Instead of a warrior, a “mighty woman” keeps the “imprisoned lightning” of her power in check. Delete “brazen giant;” insert “mother”. Lazarus wants to rewrite the “storied pomp” of “ancient lands” and their princely heroes with modern tales of the exhausted poor. She was a modernist in her aesthetics as well as her politics.