Transplanted People: 1880–1924

Abstract

Abstract The American poet Emma Lazarus was descended on her father’s side from Sephardim who could trace their ancestry back to Spain. Her mother’s family were German Jewish immigrants who had prospered in the United States. In 1883 Lazarus entered a poetry competition. The organizers of the competition planned to auction off the winning poem to raise money for something unusual, something monumental—the pedestal on which an enormous statue would stand. The statue was of a woman holding a torch, and it was to be placed on Bedloe’s Island at the tip of Manhattan in New York Harbor, the gateway to the United States. Emma Lazarus won the competition, but the story does not have a perfectly happy ending. Lazarus died at thirty-three, before the statue’s unveiling. The plaque bearing her poem was not fastened to the statue for another twenty years—and then it somehow got placed inside the pedestal where few could see it. It would be thirty more years before the plaque was moved to the outside of the Statue of Liberty.