America's Prophet

by Bruce Feiler

  “So even before Americans set about reinterpreting the statue, the French viewed the United States as a Promised Land.”

  “Yes, I think they felt Americans had achieved the promise.”

  THE PEDESTAL IS an engineering marvel nearly equal to that of the statue. Built over a massive, tapering block of concrete fifty-two feet tall and ninety-one feet square at the bottom, the six-story pedestal is probably strong enough to withstand nuclear attack. Its walls are eight to nineteen feet thick, made entirely of concrete, covered with Connecticut granite. It narrows to forty-three square feet under the statue’s feet. The pedestal’s labyrinthine interiors, a Rube Goldberg–like maze of black staircases, elevator shafts, and steel beams, remind me of underground bunkers from the Cold War. The base involved by far the largest use of concrete at the time—twenty-seven thousand tons—and is said to have marked a turning point in the revival of Roman-style concrete as a popular building material in the United States.

  Barry Moreno led me to a narrow staircase and we began climbing the 156 steps. Giant conical bolts and sixteen steel tie-rods fill the walls and open spaces, securing the 450,000-pound statue to the pedestal. Steel cables and a glass elevator shoot up through the middle. The effect is rather like rock climbing through a pocket watch. I felt a little light-headed from the sharp turns and elevation. Even more unsettling was that every gust of wind outside causes the tie-rods to reverberate like twangs on a mouth harp. The statue was generations ahead of its time with a tension-flex system that lets the body sway five inches and the arm up to eight. Liberty has withstood two category-three hurricanes, and Barry believes it could weather a category-five.

  As we climbed, we talked about how the statue had become a symbol of immigrant America. The reason for that belongs largely to a poem that linked the Statue of Liberty with the Mosaic tradition of her adopted homeland.

  Emma Lazarus, the poem’s author, was an unlikely champion of “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.” The daughter of one of the wealthiest Jews in New York City, the Portuguese sugar tycoon Moses Lazarus, the never-married Emma lived with her six siblings in elegant, Judaism-free splendor in New York society. Though she was raised to keep Mosaic law, she told Ralph Waldo Emerson’s daughter that her family “no longer keep the law, but Christian institutions don’t interest her either.” All that changed on July 29, 1881, when a steamer arrived in New York Harbor containing 250 Russian Jews fleeing pogroms triggered by the assassination of Czar Alexander II. Nearly 170 Jewish communities were attacked and 20,000 Jewish homes destroyed. The events spurred the largest mass migration of Jews since the Exodus. Between 1881 and 1914, 2 million eastern European Jews, most from Russia, Romania, and Austria-Hungary, arrived in the United States.

  By December 1881, Wards Island, a dilapidated asylum in the East River, had become the dumping ground for hundreds of these refugees. The following March, Emma Lazarus made her first visit there. Her impressions were recorded the following day in the New York Times. Never before were prayers of gratitude more genuine, wrote the reporter, believed to be Lazarus, “when after a new exodus, and a new persecution…, these stalwart young representatives of the oldest civilization in existence met to sing the songs of Zion in a strange land.” The visit sparked an emotional Jewish awakening in Emma. “The Jewish Question which I plunged into so recklessly & impulsively,” she wrote a friend, “has gradually absorbed more and more of my time & heart—It opens up such enormous vistas in the Past & Future and is so palpitatingly alive at the moment.” She began studying Hebrew; she joined delegations to the State Department on the Jewish question; she helped found the Jewish Technical Institute. And she composed a series of sixteen letters, published as “An Epistle to the Hebrews,” that called for two new exoduses—one to the Promised Land of old, in the Middle East; the other to the new Promised Land, in America.

  In two divided streams the exiles part—

  One rolling homeward to its ancient source,

  One rushing sunward, with fresh will, new heart.

  In late summer 1883, the thirty-four-year-old Emma returned from a trip to Europe and received an invitation to contribute a poem to a fund-raising exhibition for something called Liberty Enlightening the World. She gave her stock reply: She was “unable to write for order.” But a writer friend pressed her. “Think of that Goddess standing on her pedestal down yonder in the bay, and holding her torch out to those Russian refugees of yours you are so fond of visiting.” Emma lit. The result was “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!”

  Even before the statue was complete, Emma performed a deft turnabout of the tensions between the goddess’s pagan ancestry and the Hebraic iconography of her accoutrements. With her opening salvo, “Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,” Lazarus smashes the godless idol of the “old Colossus,” the Greek god Apollo who stood astride Rhodes. Then she rechristens—or, more accurately, re-Judaizes—the statue as “Mother of Exiles.” One of the Hebrew Bible’s consistent themes is that humans encounter God most intimately when they are in exile. Abraham forms his alliance with God when he leaves his native land and his father’s house to go forth to the land God promises him. Moses encounters God in the burning bush during his self-imposed exile, after he leaves his native land and his surrogate grandfather’s house and flees into the desert. The Israelites form their covenant with God during their forty years in exile, after departing their native land and their fathers’ homes and crossing into the wilderness. The pattern is later repeated in Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome.

  But exile is not just a physical state, the Bible suggests; it’s a moral one. At Mount Sinai, God specifically uses the Israelites’ exile in Egypt as a foundation of their identity and a core reason that they should be compassionate toward others. “You shall not oppress a stranger,” God says in Exodus 23, “for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” The idea that people who were once exiled have a moral imperative to care for future exiles is the primary lesson Emma Lazarus drew from the Israelites. Her genius was to fuse this biblical value with the story of America, then attribute both to the Statue of Liberty. As the great prophet of exiles, Moses becomes a bridge linking the Bible with Liberty, the mother of exiles. Emma Lazarus, a Sephardic aristocrat with little identification with the Jews, who returns from her own exile from her faith to become a passionate leader of her people, bears so many similarities with Moses that the connection becomes even more profound.

  Lazarus’s “Mother of Exiles” also channels Moses’ showdown with the pharaoh. Just as the exiled Israelite cries to the mighty superpower, “Let my people go,” so Liberty has a similar confrontation with entrenched status: “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp.” A society must gauge its worth not by power, the statue insists, but by how it treats its strangers. Rejecting the “conquering limbs” of the past, Liberty offers an outstretched arm. “From her beacon-hand / Glows world-wide welcome;…‘Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’” Like Moses, the Mother of Exiles becomes the reborn child of privilege leading her “wretched,” “homeless” “refuse” of a people out of bondage into freedom. Lazarus’s
poem is a masterful act of redefinition, rejecting the “brazen,” imprisoning godlessness of the past with the welcoming beacon of moral-centeredness in the future. A “mighty woman” heralds the dawn of God’s New Israel and lights its greatest “flame.”

  WE REACH THE top of the pedestal and light floods in from all sides. Above, a plate-glass window shows the molded interior of Liberty’s gown. Outside is a 360-degree walkway. The wind whistles against copper, creating a kind of sound cocoon. I mention 9/11, and Moreno explains how a colleague, seeing a plane flying abnormally close to the statue, hurried up the pedestal and took one of the photographs of United flight 175 crashing into the second tower. Since then, visitors are not allowed to enter the body of the statue. From the pedestal, the hole in Ground Zero is still visible, and the cavity in the skyline is its most notable feature. The nearest icon is the Brooklyn Bridge, which was under construction when Emma Lazarus wrote her poem, a detail she captured in her line “the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.”

  Liberty Enlightening the World was dedicated on a rainy October 28, 1886. Lazarus’s sonnet, which had earlier helped raise a paltry fifteen hundred dollars, was not read and not missed. Still, a number of speakers did draw connections between Liberty and the Exodus. Renowned orator Chauncey Depew, the day’s main speaker, said the statue was the “inspiration of God” who elevated “the conquered” to the “full measure” of freedom. Earlier he had said the statue “would for all time to come welcome the incoming stranger.” John Greenleaf Whittier’s official poem also likened Americans to enslaved Israelites whom Moses freed from the shadow of the Pyramids.

  Unlike the shapes on Egypt’s sands

  Uplifted by the toil-worn slave,

  On Freedom’s soil with freemen’s hands

  We rear the symbol free hands gave.

  José Martí, the Cuban patriot, described the statue on its opening day as advancing forward “as if to enter the Promised Land.”

  Lazarus died from cancer the following year, unlinked to Liberty. Not until 1903 did a wealthy friend place a plaque containing “The New Colossus” inside the pedestal. Still, it wasn’t until the late 1930s, with Hitler compelling Jews once more to flee Europe, that a Slovenian American immigrant named Louis Adamic began a one-man campaign to resuscitate the sonnet and renew Liberty’s role as a Mother of Exiles. This time it worked. New biographies called Lazarus the “Woman with a Torch” Alfred Hitchcock ended Saboteur (1942) in the statue’s crown with the heroine quoting the sonnet to an enemy agent; Irving Berlin used the poem’s final words in the lyrics of his Broadway musical Miss Liberty. By midcentury, Lazarus’s vision of the Statue of Liberty as a beacon of freedom to heal a broken world had become its dominant cry. Emma Lazarus gave a voice to the statue that could not speak.

  While we were standing outside the pedestal, I asked Barry Moreno why he thought Lazarus’s interpretation had become the prevailing one.

  “I think it has something to do with the biblical ties of the statue,” he said, “and how much that related to the American experience. And to the Jewish experience. Jews were attracted to the New World, yet many of them felt attached to the world they were leaving behind. They felt compelled to come here. I think America, and the Statue of Liberty, helped persuade them into accepting a new life.”

  “So the statue’s biblical iconography helped make them feel welcome?”

  “Even the tablet itself may have been strong enough to overcome doubt. They were looking to escape their awful past—the poverty, the shtetl. Then when they get to the golden land, they see the Statue of Liberty, and they have a sense that this place also views itself as having a special role and being home to a special people. That idea had been in America from the very beginning, of course, but it took a Jewish poet to reignite it.”

  As if to reinforce that image, Ronald Reagan came to the statue on its centennial in 1986 and made the connection explicit. Weaving Emma Lazarus and Abraham Lincoln together with the signers of the Declaration of Independence, he rooted the Mother of Exiles in the earliest Americans, the Puritans. “We sometimes forget that even those who came here first to settle the new land were also strangers,” Reagan said. “I’ve spoken before of the tiny Arbella, a ship at anchor just off the Massachusetts coast.” As the ship reached shore, Reagan continued, John Winthrop reminded his fellow Puritans that “they must keep faith with their God, that the eyes of all the world are upon them, and that they must not forsake the mission that God had sent them on.” Reagan failed to note that when Winthrop quoted these words he attributed them to their source, “that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel.” Moses. At the centennial of the Statue of Liberty, the union of state and symbol was complete. In the elegant, biblical phrasing of Ronald Reagan:

  I have always believed there was some divine providence that placed this great land here between the two great oceans, to be found by a special kind of people from every corner of the world, who had a special love for freedom and a special courage that enabled them to leave their own land, leave their friends and their countrymen, and come to this new and strange land to build a New World of peace and freedom and hope.

  BACK ON THE water heading home, I was struck by how much the statue’s story mirrored that of the Liberty Bell. An object made for one purpose was reimagined to signify another. In both cases, the power of the American story, with its grand themes of slavery and freedom, oppression and hope, had become so muscular that even objects with little transparent connection to Moses could be reforged in his image. The sacred story lines of America had long paralleled the central themes of the Exodus.

  Then, just as the Bible seemed to be peaking in influence, something unexpected happened. Until now, the idea of linking America with Moses had been done almost entirely by Protestants. As Peter Gomes pointed out to me back in Plymouth, Christians easily cast themselves as inheritors of the Jewish role as the chosen people when no real Jews were present. But suddenly at the turn of the twentieth century, millions of real Jews showed up in America, eager to claim their place as heirs to their own story. Efforts by Jews to interact with Christian America would become one of the dominant undercurrents of the coming century and one of the greatest reasons why Moses endured as a defining figure in the American identity.

  To help understand the role of Jews in creating modern America, I went to see Jonathan Sarna, the leading historian of American Jewry. Sarna’s father, Nahum, was a pioneer student of biblical archaeology, and I had carried his books with me when I retraced the Bible through the Middle East. Now I was doing the same with his son’s books. Jonathan Sarna is a compact man, with a tidy beard, spectacles, and a small kippah on his head. He holds himself very still when he talks. Like Barry Moreno, he seems perfectly cast for a man of precision, but his mind is grand and his writing brims with joy.

  I began by asking him to characterize the importance of Moses to Jews.

  “In traditional Judaism,” Professor Sarna said, “Moses is the central figure to whom God gives the Torah. The assumption was that all the law, written and oral, was handed down at Sinai to Moses. The rabbis call this halachah le’Moshe mi’Sinai, the ‘law that goes back to Sinai.’ Cantors say that certain ancient melodies go back to Sinai. Jewish brides and grooms get married in the name of Moses. Moses is the human who comes closest to God, so everything is mediated through him.”

  Given that importance, it’s not surprising that when Jews came to America they tried to link Moses with their adopted homeland. Their task was made easier because Moses was already here.

  Jews made spotty appearances in the New World among early settlers, and the first significant community was established in New Amsterdam in 1654. But as late as the Revolution, Jews were still a microscopic presence, totaling fewer than 2,000 people. One hundred Jews are known to have fought during the War of Independence. Still, the Constitution’s support of religious tolerance, and the elimination of state-sponsored churches, encouraged European J
ews to view the United States as offering greater opportunity. By the start of the Civil War, America’s Jewish population had reached 150,000.

  As early as the 1820s, Jewish leaders in Europe and the United States had begun referring to America as the new Promised Land, but the analogy was not always positive. Many Jews echoed Moses’ warning to the Israelites in Deuteronomy not to succumb to sinful temptations. As one teacher warned a couple leaving for Ohio in 1839, “You are traveling to a land of freedom…. Resist and withstand this tempting freedom and do not turn away from the religion of your fathers. Do not throw away your holy religion for quickly lost earthly pleasures.” Again the words echo Winthrop.

  Protestants were ambivalent about these Jewish immigrants. Anti-Semitism ticked up during these years, but Jews were mostly perceived as less threatening than Catholics, who had grown from 2 percent of the population in 1830 to 10 percent by 1860 to 16 percent by 1910. Americans’ love-hate attitude toward Jewish immigrants was on display in an extraordinary edition of the satiric magazine Puck in 1881. The issue contained a two-page color cartoon showing Uncle Sam in red-and-white trousers, a blue coat, and a red cape, standing on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic, wielding a wand labeled “Liberty.” In an image that looks both back to Daniel Boone and forward to Charlton Heston, Uncle Sam spreads his arm and splits the Atlantic, while a stream of Jewish immigrants, many with hooked noses and kinky hair, dressed in top hats and formal gowns, crosses on dry ground to America. The editorial compared Jewish and Catholic immigrants on the question of who fit better in the Protestant Promised Land. The writers urged hooligan Catholics to act more like the Jews but cautioned Jews not to believe they could have free rein in America. “Who is competent to decide the question?” the editors ultimately asked. “Uncle Sam, as the modern Moses, will decide it.”