Thread by @AmericanStudier

#OnThisDay 134 years ago, the Statue of Liberty was formally dedicated in New York Harbor. The moment reflects two frustrating layers to American mythmaking, but nonetheless still embodies some of the best of our ideals & community. A thread:

The 1st layer of frustrating mythmaking is the thoroughgoing erasure of the Statue’s original focus on slavery and abolition. Only the broken chains around Liberty’s feet (tellingly invisible to nearly all visitors to the island) reflect those origins.

By 1886 the US was fully in the throes of Lost Cause narratives of Civil War, race, & nation, & this erasure of Edouard Laboulaye’s original vision for the Statue reflects those broader collective elisions & myths.

americanstudier.blogspot.com/2019/04/april-…

So meanings of the Statue--& its full name, Liberty Enlightening the World—shifted, from a reflection of America’s own fraught, evolving, still contested histories of slavery & abolition to an image of the US as a foundational beacon of liberty & light to the world.

Moreover, that new meaning for the Statue represents a 2nd layer of frustrating national mythmaking. The Statue was dedicated just four years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1st national immigration law & one designed solely to discriminate & exclude.

I’ve argued elsewhere that the late 19C creation of such defining immigration laws & exclusions parallels & connects to the rise of a dominant, national Lost Cause narrative over the same decades.

& both those exclusionary narratives, the Lost Cause & immigration exclusions, were ironically but tellingly accompanied by increasingly celebratory, triumphalist visions of the US, as embodied by both the 1876 Centennial & 1893 Columbian Expositions.

So the Statue’s 1886 dedication & meanings have to be contextualized within that period, a moment of deepening exclusions of communities of color—from African Americans to Chinese immigrants (among others)—framed by mythologized national celebrations.

But as I argue in my book We the People, our foundational exclusionary histories have always been challenged by alternative, inclusive visions of the nation—& we often find those inclusive possibilities in precisely the same moments & stories.
rowman.com/ISBN/978153812…

For the Statue of Liberty, no voice better reflects such inclusive national narratives than Emma Lazarus, the Jewish American poet who traced her heritage to refugees who arrived in New Amsterdam a century before the American Revolution.

jewishvirtuallibrary.org/emma-lazarus

Lazarus’ poetry consistently linked her Jewish heritage, faith, & community to foundational American histories & identities, as illustrated by “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport” (1871):
poetryfoundation.org/poems/45637/in…

She also linked her poetry to aspirational, critical patriotic challenges of Gilded Age America’s failures & reforms, as in her poem “Progress & Poverty” (inspired by her friend Henry George’s book):
jwa.org/media/progress…

All of those contexts help us understand Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” written to raise money for the Statue’s pedestal & eventually inscribed on that stone, as the culmination of a radical, aspirational, inclusive American literary & cultural career.
nps.gov/stli/learn/his…

Commemorating the Statue of Liberty’s anniversary means engaging w/its multiple layers of celebratory & exclusionary mythmaking. But it also helps us remember those who have always challenged such exclusions & modeled an inclusive America, one that can genuinely inspire us today.