October 28, 2006
The Statue of Liberty Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:15 PM EST The Statue of Liberty celebrates her 120th birthday today. I still fondly remember the centennial in 1986, when I was a student at a public grade school in New Jersey. Back then our teachers considered it a point of pride to explain that Lady Liberty was actually situated on the New Jersey side of the invisible line that runs through the Hudson River. Whether this is actually true, I don’t know. A few years ago, in the course of preparing lectures for a class I taught on American immigration history, I came across an interesting claim. Several oral histories by immigrants who had arrived in the United States by way of Ellis Island, which operated as the primary point of entry between 1892 and 1954, claimed that they took little note of the Statue of Liberty upon their arrival in New York’s harbor. Even after 1900, when passage from Europe became quicker and more comfortable with the development of sturdier steamships, and with the introduction of relatively roomy third-class compartments, which replaced the dreaded, sublevel steerage rooms, families spent most of their last hour or two on the ship gathering their belongings, organizing their children, jockeying for a good place in the debarkation line, and reviewing their paperwork. They didn’t have a lot of time to reflect on the local scenery, and many wouldn’t have known to look for the statue in the first place. I suspect that for most people the Statue of Liberty became an important symbol of American pluralism after the fact. In 1936 President Franklin Roosevelt visited Liberty Island to commemorate the statue’s fiftieth anniversary. “I am proud—America is proud—of what they have given us,” he said of the several million immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. between the 1840s and 1820s. They “appreciate our free institutions and our free opportunity as well as those who have been here for many [more] generations . . . in some cases,” he continued, and added that “newer citizens have discharged their obligations to us better than we have discharged our obligations to them.” According to a recent issue of Time magazine, if we factor in illegal immigrants, whom many in Congress believe we should provide a road to permanent residency and citizenship for, today’s foreign-born population is as large a portion of the general population as it was in the peek years of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigration. They don’t come through Ellis Island anymore, but the Statue of Liberty may yet prove no less a symbol of their journey than it did for earlier migrants.
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