Statue Of Liberty In Emma Lazarus's Sonnet The New Colossus

Erected in October of 1886, the Statue of Liberty stylized after the Roman goddess Libertas, with torch held high above her head and broken chain beneath her feet, became a symbol of freedom to immigrants arriving to the United States from abroad. This is epitomized in Emma Lazarus’s sonnet The New Colossus which describes how the Statue of Liberty welcomes those oppressed and homeless with open arms. However, while the statue did instill hope in many weary travelers, the socio-economic conditions in the United States told otherwise for many racial groups.

The Statue of Liberty represented the core American ideology that was penned in the United States Constitution. Emma Lazarus uses the Statue to compare the Old World (Europe) and the New

World (the United States) by comparing the “new” colossus (the Statue of Liberty) to the “ancient” colossus (the Colossus of Rhodes). This was used a contrast between the outdated mentality of Europe versus the acceptance of the United States for all peoples regardless of race or religion. Under the statue’s gaze on Ellis Island, some twelve million immigrants passed through including Germans, Jews, Italians, and Irish whom were escaping poverty and religious persecution. However with the passing of the Immigration Act 1924, more commonly known as the Johnson-Reed Act or the National Origins Act, the “golden door” to the American dream served more as a pathway to deportation or detention.

Even for those who made it past increasingly strict immigration barriers, life in the United States was often not the one they had dreamt of.

The Statue of Liberty described by Lazarus as the “Mother of Exiles,” was a symbol of an escape from persecution and poverty from the abandoned and orphaned. What most immigrants faced however, was a grim reality of racial and economic tensions in the slums of New York. After the close of the Civil War, many flocked to the industrial powerhouse cities in the North. In the 1880s, many of the 5.2 million immigrants settled in New York and fought for jobs and housing with 3rd and 4th generation immigrants, who were mainly Western European and Protestant, sparking enormous racial tensions particularly towards the Irish and Italians who were among the largest groups immigrating to the United States en-masse. These new immigrants lived in squalor with multiple families crammed into one unit. This issue was brought to light when Jacob Riis, an immigrant from Denmark and photojournalist, published How the Other Half Lives which showcased the dark, squalid living conditions of the lower class immigrants. It also included photographs of the sweatshops these immigrants toiled in to make only a few cents a day, oftentimes in hazardous work environments. His piece started a new movement of “muckracking” journalism that attacked established institutions and the upper class and ultimately inspired many reforms to both the living and working

conditions of immigrants.

Some 2,500 miles away from the light of the Statue of Liberty’s torch, immigrants were arriving on America’s other coast.

These immigrants were just as scared and hopeful as the millions processed through Ellis Island but faced even greater persecution. Beginning in the 1850s, young Chinese men immigrated to California during the Gold Rush. Many supplied cheap labor to the Central Pacific Railroad Company. During the Railroad boom of 1865, Central Pacific had a hard time holding onto workers as railroad construction was physically demanding and dangerous leading to a high attrition rate among workers. Most of the early workers were Irish but later Chinese laborers began to fill the vacancies on the railroads. After the Central Pacific railroad connected with the Union Pacific Railroad in Utah, the now unemployed Chinese labor force returned to California where they began to compete with the Irish and other whites for low paying jobs. In 1887 during the Long Depression, tensions became so severe that a large mob of white men waged a two day pogrom against Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco. The result of this bout of ethnic violence lead to four deaths and $100,000 in property damages. Anti-Chinese sentiment quickly spread throughout the state and the rest of the country and ultimately resulted in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in

1882.

The Chinese Exclusion Act not only barred the entry of Chinese laborers to the United States, but also made life extremely difficult for those that had already found home in America. These men were barred from obtaining US Citizenship and made the permanent aliens. Most could no longer be reunited with their families or even visit them in China at the risk of being denied entry when they returned to the US. Chinese immigration went from highly regulated to restricted with the Immigration Act of 1917 or the Asiatic Barred Zone Act. Although an anathema to the ideals in the Constitution and the inscription of Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty, this Act among others that stemmed from the “Yellow Peril” phenomenon of the time almost completely halted Asian immigration. This Act was the final measure from the anxiety of Asians fracturing the American cultural identity which started with the Naturalization Act of 1870 that completely forbade the immigration of Chinese woman in the hopes of creating a bachelor population of Chinese men who would be transient and thus return to their homeland in time.

Some of what can be gleaned from the Chinese-American experience can be found in Mae Ngai’s The Lucky Ones which describes the successes and troubles of Joseph and Mary Tape who found themselves extraordinary circumstances hence the title “The Lucky Ones.” Their “stroke of good fortune was that they had found each other” and “neither had much contact with other Chinese (Ngai, p. 6).” With Joseph being moderately successful in business and Mary being rescued from prostitution by Protestants, both were more integrated into White society than their fellow countrymen. The Tapes are what Ngai calls an “interpreter class” or hybridized in between people, the first true Chinese-Americans. This status served them well and the Tapes eventually went on to pioneer change for the Chinese community. Their daughter, Mamie, became a plaintiff in a groundbreaking case civil rights case in 1885 for public schools in the Chinese community. Mamie’s brother was also the first Chinese to serve on a San Francisco jury. Despite their relative success. Chapter Six in Ngai’s book illustrates the disparity of the upper class to the Chinese immigrants in Berkley, California. Berkley is described as having “elegant homes” for the Whites which is a contrast to the Chinese who are referred to only as “local help.” While the Tapes were able to assimilate into White society with relative success and enjoy many of its privileges, the overall Chinese experience in the Gilded Age was one of legal and racial oppression.

“The New Colossus” conveyed the optimistic ideal of a new beginning and a refuge for the oppressed and homeless. The Statue of Liberty was a symbol of an elusive American dream where wishful immigrants would pass through only to be treated like refuse in the overcrowded slums of New York. Even for Asian immigrants who arrived in the West Coast without seeing the statue, it still reminds us of the hopes and dreams of the ambitious men, women, and children that would help shape the history of the United States of America.