Iconic America: The Statue of Liberty (WNET Media Group, PBS, aired July 11, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, July 11) I watched a couple of documentaries on PBS, an episode of a series called Iconic America: Our Symbols and Stories with David Rubenstein dealing with the Statue of Liberty. I wasn’t sure how much more there was to say about the Statue of Liberty after the early (1985) Ken Burns documentary which PBS also re-ran in 2020 to commemorate the July 4 holiday, a re-showing replete with ironies because not only are former U.S. Col. Alexander Vindman and his twin brother shown as boys with their father, a political refugee from Ukraine, but Mario Cuomo gave an interview in which he talked about how his parents had immigrated from Italy and he’d risen to become governor of New York. At the time of the 2020 rerun Cuomo’s son Andrew had become governor and he looked like a shoo-in for higher office someday – he got well-deserved praise for how he handled the COVID-19 pandemic – until he was driven out of office in disgrace for his abominable treatment of women in the #MeToo era. What I hadn’t realized before was that the Statue of Liberty was originally proposed by a French abolitionist named Édouard de Laboulaye in 1865 to commemorate the abolition of American slavery and the Union victory in the Civil War. Laboulaye was a huge admirer of President Lincoln and he saw the Statue as at least in part a giant memorial to the Great Emancipator. The original concept of the Statue was to show Lady Liberty holding a set of chains and symbolically breaking them to commemorate the freeing of America’s slaves.

But the sculptor Laboulaye actually hired, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, gradually shifted the emphasis and changed the design so the only remaining reference to chains would be at the bottom of the statue, under Lady Liberty’s feet. The Statue was commissioned at a fraught political moment not only in the U.S. but also in France, which in 1865 was an empire ruled by Louis Napoleon, the original Napoleon’s nephew who styled himself “Napoleon III.” (“Napoleon II” was Napoleon’s son, who died young and never actually ruled or commanded anybody, though Cyrano de Bergerac author Édmond Rostand wrote a play about him called L’Aiglon – “The Eagle” – which starred Sarah Bernhardt in drag.) It was not exactly a good time to ask the French government to pay for a statue as a gift to the United States to celebrate the unquenchable spirit for human liberty and freedom. By the time Napoleon III’s regime fell as a result of the ass-kicking France got from Prussia (modern-day Germany) in the 1870-1871 war and the subsequent emergence of the Third Republic (which itself collapsed in the face of a German invasion in 1940), Bartholdi’s project was in a state of limbo that wasn’t ended until 1875, when France made the U.S. a formal offer: they would build the statue in France and transport it in pieces to the U.S. if the U.S. would donate the site for it and erect a pedestal. Fundraising proved difficult, more so on the American end than the French: in 1885 New York World publisher Joseph Pulitzer used his paper to launch a major fundraising drive. Among the people who contributed were a young woman writer named Emma Lazarus, who wrote a poem called “The New Colossus.” It was not until 1903, 16 years after Lazarus’s death, that her poem was actually inscribed on a plaque mounted under the Statue of Liberty, and her sonnet –

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!"

– shifted the meaning of the Statue of Liberty from a celebration of abolition and the Civil War to a commemoration of American immigration and this country’s welcoming spirit. As some of the people David Rubenstein interviewed noted, this country has been considerably less welcoming than advertised; even before the Statue of Liberty was formally erected in 1886, the U.S. Congress had already started passing anti-immigration laws, notably the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, whose purpose was exactly what it said: to keep out all Chinese immigrants. Further restrictions on immigration, especially from Asia and southern Europe, followed until in 1924 Congress passed, and President Calvin Coolidge signed, the most draconian anti-immigrant law in U.S. history. It set up a system of numerical quotas and apportioned them to various countries – and, not surprisingly, the largest quotas went to Britain, Germany, France and the Scandinavian countries. One of the most dramatic contrasts in the show was between the relatively welcoming detention center at New York’s Ellis Island – where the rooms in which immigrants stayed let out into decks giving them opportunities to breathe fresh air, and the big rooms were equipped with pianos so people with musical talent could play for each other – and the cramped quarters in El Paso, Texas where immigrants from Mexico and the rest of Central and South America were kept in leaky shacks with no amenities. Not surprisingly, Rubenstein and his director, Michael Kirk, included footage of the modern-day family separations under former President Donald Trump as a legacy of previous generations of anti-immigrant exclusion. The show’s point was that the messages conveyed by monuments change over time, and the issues raised by the Statue of Liberty and by Emma Lazarus’s promise of welcome (and one key issue in Lazarus’s life was she was Jewish but didn’t think the leaders of the Jewish-American community were doing enough to persuade the American government to let in more Jewish refugees from the pogroms) have remained live-wire controversies in American political history to this day.