#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.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Ben Railton

Ben Railton Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @AmericanStudier

27 Oct
We’re a week out from not just #ElectionDay, but also the 100th anniversary of the Ocoee Massacre. & for this month’s @SatEvePost Considering History column, I delve into the foundational ties bt voter suppression & racial terrorism. #twitterstorians

saturdayeveningpost.com/2020/10/consid…
Even as we’ve started to better remember histories of white supremacist violence, from the Red Summer of 1919 and Tulsa to the lynching epidemic, I think we still too often see such horrors as spontaneous explosions of mob hate, reflective of deeper prejudices but impromptu.
But in truth, white supremacist violence in America has consistently been carefully planned & orchestrated, w/voter suppression as one of its chief goals. My column traces that legacy through New Orleans, the 1874 massacres, Wilmington, Ocoee, & the 1968 Mississippi murders.
Read 7 tweets
26 Oct
Determined not to let the limits & frustrations of hybrid/pandemic in-person classes keep me from sharing William Apess as fully as possible w/my Am Lit I students. He remains one of the 3-4 voices we all most need to listen to, & we're gonna hear & respond to him today!
That means "Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man," rivaled only by Douglass's "What to the Slave..." as a bracing, biting attack on white American hypocrisy & prejudice--& an act of hopeful resistance & challenge to move us toward a more perfect union.
english.hku.hk/staff/kjohnson…
& it means "Eulogy on King Philip," a critically patriotic speech as brave as Douglass' as it was delivered in Boston's Odeon Theater & made the case for the Wampanoag chief as a Revolutionary US ancestor at least as worthy of commemoration as Washington.
voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/apess-eulogy-s…
Read 4 tweets
18 Feb
On Toni Morrison’s bday, I’m thinking a lot about the end of her masterpiece Beloved in relationship to the @WoodsonCenter’s #1776woodson project (a direct response to the #1619Project). #twitterstorians
@WoodsonCenter Beloved’s short final chapter's through-line is a repeated phrase: “It was not a story to pass on” (shifted to “This is not a story to pass on” for its final repetition). The section's overtone is forgetting, suggesting the phrase's literal meaning (don’t pass this story on).
@WoodsonCenter That desire to forget—the character of Beloved, but also the histories of enslavement, slave trade, slavery's horrors, & esp what they demand of all those affected by them of which she’s a living reminder—is entirely understandable & to some degree even necessary for survival.
Read 13 tweets
18 Aug 19
Obviously some (well, a good bit) of the criticism of the #1619Project is white supremacist bigotry, full stop. But it seems to me another substantive factor is our collective reliance on celebratory, uncritical patriotism, & a related problem given a clear diagnosis in 1873:
In that year, the Harvard prof & reformer Charles Eliot Norton was on a steamship voyage from England to the US, & Ralph Waldo Emerson was on the same journey. They talked a lot, & Norton noted that even in old age, Emerson maintained his "inveterate & persistent optimism."
Norton acknowledged (this was in letters describing their convos) that such optimism was pleasant in an "such a character as Emerson's," but called it a "dangerous doctrine for a people," as it is "at the root of ... much of our unwillingness to accept hard truths."
Read 9 tweets
4 Aug 19
Let’s be clear: the exclusionary, white supremacist vision of the US has consistently produced some of our most horrific acts of violence & domestic terrorism. Native American massacres & genocides, as early as the Mystic Village massacre of 1636.
americanstudier.blogspot.com/2018/09/septem…
Lynching epidemics, targeting African Americans for more than a century but also targeting Chinese and Mexican Americans throughout the West and Southwest (among other communities).
saturdayeveningpost.com/2019/03/consid…
Massacres of entire American communities of color, from Wilmington, NC’s African American community in 1898…
wilmingtononfire.com
Read 15 tweets
30 May 19
Between @JohnCleese expressing his “culturalist, not racist” views of London and @DouthatNYT lamenting the loss of a “common-culture” America, kinder gentler #MAGA white supremacism is having a moment this morning. #twitterstorians
But here’s the thing: it’s not just that we can’t separate these laments for homogeneous cultural and national identities (English, American, wherever) from white supremacist racism and xenophobia (although we sure can’t and shouldn't).
It’s also and especially that, at least in America (and I’m willing to bet in England too, but UK #twitterstorians feel free to chime in!), that homogeneous cultural/national past is entirely mythic, invented, inaccurate to our history whenever/wherever you look.
Read 12 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!