See the discussion of Liberty Weekend in Berenson, The Statue of Liberty, chap. Think about it. The monument has been instrumental in underscoring the belief that liberty is the essence of America’s national life as well as its promise to all the peoples of the world. You should be receiving an order confirmation from Paypal shortly. But I was actually built in a place called Paris, France. Some 4 million Italians journeyed to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and between 1910 and 1920 alone, over 3.5 million people immigrated from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. America also faced a choice between more and less inclusive visions of the republic, radical versus conservative republicanism. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. As he wrote in 1862 at the height of the American Civil War, Frenchmen, who have not forgotten Lafayette nor the glorious memories we left behind us in the new world,—it is your cause which is trying in the United States … This cause has been defended by energetic men for a year with equal courage and ability; our duty is to range ourselves round them, and to hold aloft with a firm hand that old French banner, on which is inscribed, Liberty!19, The 1865 triumph of the North in the Civil War was followed five years later by the collapse of the Second Empire in France and the advent of the Third Republic. 19Edward Laboulaye, The United States and France (Boston, 1862), 13. The ideal of “the social republic,” a republicanism that emphasized social equality and justice, had to be suppressed, by force of arms if necessary.13 Not until the creation of the Third Republic in 1870 did French republicanism succeed in making this key ideological shift, and not until the republicans’ victory in the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the century did republicanism become the uncontested dominant political ideology and culture in France. “The stunning beauty and elegance of Lady Liberty” was unveiled in 2007 to mark the 159th anniversary of the 1848 Emancipation from slavery. (New York, 2009); Vincent J. Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (New York, 2010); Marianne Debouzy, ed., In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrants, Workers, and Citizens in the American Republic, 1880–1920 (Urbana, Ill., 1992). This statue is actually “Lady Liberty” at the Agrement roundabout, St. Martin which is probably the best-known public sculpture by Theodore Bonev in St. Martin. The plaque with the famous Emma Lazarus poem — “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — wasn’t added until 1903. One set is as bad as the other. Many argued that Liberty actually stood opposed to the immigrants, struggling to protect the integrity and purity of the American people. The Statue of Liberty was a reassuring sign that they had arrived in the land of their dreams. The Third Republic would go on to be the longest-lasting regime in modern French history.16, The idea of the Statue of Liberty took shape in this France wracked by empire, republicanism, and revolution. MARIGOT/GREAT BAY—The “Lady Liberty” statue at the Agrément roundabout is probably the best-known public sculpture by Theodore Bonev in St. Martin. 8Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994); David Wootton, ed., Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford, Calif., 1994). So how did the “white goddess” end up embracing immigrants from Europe in the twentieth century? 55Khan, Enlightening the World, 104–109. The America that welcomed the Statue of Liberty stood poised on the edge of global prominence, while at the same time the country was haunted by the shadows of the recent Civil War. America’s colonies were, like those of France, largely inhabited by non-whites and subject to authoritarian imperial rule.52 The Civil War and Reconstruction had brought the hope that republicanism in America could embrace all peoples, but by the dawn of the twentieth century, it was clear that America would remain a racialized white republic for the foreseeable future. Race and racism are not just central aspects of Western society; they have shaped and permeated the very idea of freedom as we understand it. At left is Lady Liberty of Freedom Point on the island of St. Martin, a public sculpture by Theodore Bonev that was installed in 2007. “The New Colossus” received little attention at the time, and played no role in the formal inauguration of the Statue of Liberty in 1886. 1Rebecca M. Joseph, “The Black Statue of Liberty Rumor: An Inquiry into the History and Meaning of Bartholdi’s Liberté éclairant le Monde,” National Park Service, 2000, https://www.nps.gov/stli/learn/historyculture/black-statue-of-liberty.htm; David Glassberg, “Rethinking the Statue of Liberty: Old Meanings, New Contexts,” National Park Service, 2003, https://archives.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/2450/678/RethinkingTheStatue-Glassberg.pdf; “Making the Case for the African-American Origins of the Statue of Liberty,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. All Rights Reserved. 84Rudolph J. Vecoli, “The Lady and the Huddled Masses: The Statue of Liberty as a Symbol of Immigration,” in Dillon and Kotler, The Statue of Liberty Revisited, 39–70, here 41. In addition, the point of the statue was not to honor immigrants but rather to commemorate the abolition of slavery in America, in particular the service of black Union soldiers in the Civil War. They threaten the guillotine in Paris. Human Statue of Liberty, 1918. Much as in the European colonies, white pioneer women in the American West were seen as crucial to transforming the region from a wilderness populated by savages into a settled and domesticated part of the United States. [The Radicals] would send halters to the leading men of the South. Their plight inspired in Lazarus a new attention to her own Jewish identity, as well as a determination to do what she could to aid her impoverished co-religionists in New York. For them, the French Civil War underscored the dangers of the revolutionary republic, which must be suppressed symbolically as well as in actual combat. (Waco, Tex., 1898), 1: 331. Swathed in a morning’s mist, the mesmerizing lady of the harbor appeared off to the left of their ships, hailing their entry to the new world. 48Carol A. Horton, Race and the Making of American Liberalism (Oxford, 2005). The Statue of Liberty embodies both racial difference and an unparalleled representation of human liberation. Lady Liberty tells her story! 7William R. Everdell, The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicanism (Chicago, 2000); John W. Maynor, Republicanism in the Modern World (Cambridge, 2003). She symbolized everything bad about republicanism, and the French troops that suppressed the Commune summarily executed women throughout the city suspected of being pétroleuses.30, The new Third Republic sought to craft a more peaceful, less revolutionary image of Marianne after 1870; like the Second Empire before it, it sought to ban the Phrygian cap as part of this symbol.31 More important for our purposes here, the turmoil of the 1870 Revolution and the Paris Commune reinforced Laboulaye’s and Bartholdi’s belief in moderate republicanism and the need to represent it in a monumental symbol. All rights reserved. Written by an unknown writer. Lazarus herself came from a well-established German Jewish family in New York, and by her early thirties she had carved out a substantial reputation as a poet. With the United States’ entry into the war, the idea of welcoming the tempest-tost huddled masses once again became important to American identity. The white woman on a pedestal epitomized patriarchal control over women in general: at best it was an idea of protection, certainly not freedom. 76On the history of European immigration to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, 2nd ed. Most important, they deployed federal troops throughout the former Confederacy to ensure the freedmen’s right to vote, so that during Reconstruction black legislators often controlled the state governments of the South. The concept of liberty has frequently been represented by personifications, often loosely shown as a female classical goddess. 62The classic image of the traveling European woman is that of Miss Sadie Thompson in W. Somerset Maugham’s short story “Rain.”. It represented the changing view of republicanism, and freedom in general, in France during the nineteenth century. He is currently working on a global history of the relationship between freedom and race, tentatively titled White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea (forthcoming from Princeton University Press). As the ultimate representation of the white woman on a pedestal, the Statue of Liberty could thus symbolize not just freedom but also racial conflict, the pure female needing protection from the black rapist and at the same time standing for retribution against black men in general. Freud’s Madonna-whore complex, a powerful representation of this ambivalence about women, thus found expression in the great statue dominating New York Harbor after 1886.61, As many feminist historians have noted, these new ideals of domesticity often intersected with and were mutually reinforced by the new racial hierarchies and racism. ‘Corona’ is not the holiday gift you want. It soon, however, also became linked to a defense of white womanhood against the threat of black rapists. (New York, 1998). In 1907 alone, almost 1.3 million came to the United States.75 Moreover, they came from different places. In addition, Lady Liberty can be seen year round at a variety of websites on the internet. Conceived by French scholar and activist Édouard de Laboulaye and wrought by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the Statue of Liberty not only represents the admiration of the people of France for America but equally illustrates the changing nature of liberty, including its racial dimensions, in French history. White Freedom and the Lady of Liberty. There was a sense that the very notion of freedom had been defiled. 20Édouard Laboulaye, Paris in America, trans. Moderate and conservative Republicans, like Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, wanted not only to reconcile with the defeated South but also to prevent social or political equality for African Americans. HOUSTON – Texans may soon start breathing some cautious sighs of relief as the first ... Christian Right Evangelicals and GOP Loyalists cannot be convinced against their wills, because you leave ... WALLER, Texas - Whitetail deer in the wild don’t migrate; they remain in an area about the size of seven square blocks all year. 82Thomas Bailey Aldrich, “Unguarded Gates,” Atlantic Monthly 70 (July 1892): 57. The Statue of Liberty in Black and White. Moreover, the symbolic role played by the monument in allowing European immigrants to the U.S. to claim white status underscores its racial character, as does its complicated but largely exclusionary or at best irrelevant relationship to African Americans and other peoples of color. The rise of white domesticity in the colonies often corresponded to an increased sense of racial barriers and discrimination; historians have long debated whether women themselves embraced colonial racial segregation or whether colonial society used their presence as an excuse to impose it. Political dynamics in both France and the United States thus served to distance the Statue of Liberty from republican egalitarianism, and in doing so gave it an important racial meaning. 66Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (2002; repr., Philadelphia, 2009); Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford, 2010). 10André Jardin and André-Jean Tudesq, Restoration and Reaction, 1815–1848, trans. The true original was modeled after a black woman and had African features. 80Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History (New York, 1916). Jacqueline Jones Royster (New York, 1996); Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, Mass., 2011). 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