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1. Symbol as Rhetoric
Auguste Bartholdi's ageless Statue of Liberty stands in the New York City Harbor as it has since 1884, more than a hundred years now. Like other works of art, it continues to function aesthetically and extra-aestheticallyas a sign to different social groups, in various times and places. But change usually takes longer than the four short decades required for this monument's semiotic value to reverse itself. Before France could place the statue on its pedestal as a gesture of friendship, poet Emma Lazarus had already discursively recarved it in her sonnet, "The New Colossus", written to be auctioned off along with manuscripts by Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Bret Harte. Heirs of the recently deceased Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and William Cullen Bryant also donated several selections to raise money for the Bartholdi Statue Pedestal Campaign (Harris 1985: 81).
At the time,Lazarus was developing a fresh perspective on her religion and her country. Although descended from one of the first Jewish families to emigrate from Europe, she had just begun to identify with Judaism. Previously isolated from society by her wealthy father, she had recently visited Ward's Island, where the sight of immigrants fleeing the violence of Russian pogroms had awakened within her a need to offer them security and hope (Vogel 1980: 20). But this sanctuary disappeared when America's restrictive immigration policies supported, and perhaps compelled, Nazi Germany's "Final Solution". While Americar rhetorically fashioned itself a nation of immigrants in order to facilitate assimilation to its largely white, male, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant standards, the country's restrictionist policies literally fueled Hitler's ovens. By the time the Nazis linked anti-Semitism to technology, American politicians,well supported by their pro-isolation constituents, had turned away from Lazarus' co-religionists. The Statue of Liberty, with eyes no longer mild but copper-cold, was impervious to the tragedy it could have prevented. With the passage of the immigration quota laws of 1921 and 1924 and the National Origins Act of 1929, the Statue of Liberty resumed its position as the representation of an idea, a Platonic ideality, far removed from earthly concerns. During the Holocaust Lazarus' Mother of Exiles (re)turned to stone.
This reversal is not surprising, since she was conceived by French liberal Edouard-René Lefebvrede Laboulaye as just such a...