The Statue of Liberty

Few monuments are more immediately recognizable than the Statue of Liberty. Standing in New York Harbor, torch raised above the water, she has become so familiar that it is difficult to imagine her looking—or meaning—anything different.

But the Statue of Liberty Americans recognize today is not quite the statue that was unveiled in 1886.

Today, the monument is inseparable from immigration and the words of Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Yet those words were nowhere on the statue when it was dedicated. Lazarus had written The New Colossus three years earlier, in 1883, for an auction raising money to construct the statue’s pedestal. The poem attracted some attention and was published in newspapers, but then largely disappeared from public memory. It would not be placed inside the pedestal until 1903—seventeen years after the Statue of Liberty was dedicated.

Welcoming immigrants was also not the principal idea behind the monument itself.

Its official name was Liberty Enlightening the World, and its origins were rooted in nineteenth-century politics on both sides of the Atlantic. French legal scholar Édouard de Laboulaye, one of France’s leading authorities on the United States, was an abolitionist, a supporter of Abraham Lincoln and an advocate of republican government. Along with sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, he envisioned a monument celebrating political liberty and the ideals shared by France and the United States.

The end of the American Civil War was particularly important. Laboulaye saw the Union victory and the abolition of slavery as evidence that the principles proclaimed by the United States could survive an extraordinary national crisis. That connection remains physically embedded in the statue: at Liberty’s feet lies a broken shackle and chain, a detail easily missed from the ground but deliberately incorporated into the monument.

The message was directed toward France as much as toward America. Laboulaye hoped that celebrating republican government in the United States would strengthen the cause of democracy in his own country. Even the statue’s torch was part of that idea. Liberty was not charging into revolution; she was peacefully enlightening the world. In an era when the word “liberty” in France could invoke revolution and political violence, the distinction mattered.

At the 1886 dedication, President Grover Cleveland spoke about liberty, political freedom and the relationship between France and the United States. Immigration was not a central theme. Smithsonian historians note that Cleveland’s dedication address did not mention immigration at all. The now-familiar interpretation of the monument principally as a symbol of immigration was only rarely expressed during its earliest years and became dominant during the twentieth century.

Emma Lazarus helped begin that transformation before the statue had even been assembled.

Lazarus was not writing about immigration in the abstract. She had worked with Jewish refugees on Ward’s Island and encountered people fleeing persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe. When she was asked to contribute something to the pedestal fundraiser, she imagined Bartholdi’s enormous female figure in a way its creators had not: not simply as Liberty, but as the “Mother of Exiles,” standing at the entrance to America and welcoming people arriving from elsewhere.

It was a powerful reinterpretation, particularly because America’s actual immigration policies were considerably less welcoming than the poem suggested. The Chinese Exclusion Act had been enacted in 1882, the year before Lazarus wrote The New Colossus. Her vision of the statue therefore expressed an ideal that did not always correspond with the country’s policies.

That tension between ideal and reality became even more visible just a few years later.

Ellis Island opened as the country’s principal federal immigration station in 1892, only a short distance from the Statue of Liberty. During the decades that followed, millions of immigrants entering New York Harbor passed Liberty on their way toward the United States. But arrival did not guarantee admission. Immigrants were medically and legally inspected, and some were denied entry because of contagious disease, concerns that they might become a “public charge,” or other grounds established under federal immigration law. Even so, the overwhelming majority were admitted; only about 2 percent of those processed at Ellis Island were ultimately excluded.

The geography nevertheless proved powerful. Millions of newcomers literally saw the Statue of Liberty as they approached America, giving Lazarus’s interpretation a physical reality that the monument’s original creators had never intended. In 1903, her poem was placed inside the pedestal. During World War I, the federal government increasingly used the statue in appeals directed toward immigrants. By the middle of the twentieth century, Liberty as the welcoming “Mother of Exiles” had become so deeply embedded in American culture that it was increasingly remembered as the statue’s original purpose. The transformation from a monument to political liberty into a national symbol of immigration was complete.

That does not make the immigration symbolism false. Symbols can acquire meanings their creators never anticipated. Millions of immigrants really did sail past Liberty, and many understandably saw something deeply personal in the enormous figure standing above the harbor. Lazarus’s interpretation ultimately became part of the statue’s history rather than merely commentary about it.

But meaning was not the only thing about the statue that changed.

When the Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886, she was not green. Her exterior consisted of copper sheets, and the new statue had the reddish-brown appearance associated with fresh copper—a color much closer to a penny than the blue-green figure familiar today.

Exposure to air, moisture and the elements gradually caused the copper to oxidize. By about 1906, the statue had developed a conspicuous sea-green surface, and the transformation took roughly thirty years to become complete. The resulting layer, known as a patina, did more than change the statue’s appearance. It created a protective coating over the copper beneath it.

The Statue of Liberty therefore changed in two ways after she arrived in New York Harbor.

One transformation was physical. The reddish-brown copper gradually became green.

The other was symbolic. A monument conceived around republican liberty, abolition and Franco-American political ideals gradually became something more: a figure standing at America’s door, welcoming the people arriving beneath it.

Today, both transformations seem so natural that it is easy to assume they were there from the beginning.

They weren’t.