Things Worth Remembering: Lady Liberty’s Open Arms It was a poet who transformed America’s favorite statue from a celebration of independence to a symbol of welcome.
Immigrants to the U.S. landing at Ellis Island, New York, circa 1900. (Universal History Archive via Getty Images)
Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Joe Nocera reflects on his Italian ancestors and the poem that lies on the pedestal of our Statue of Liberty. My grandfather, Lorenzo Nocera, immigrated to America in 1904 from a small town south of Naples, Italy. Like most European immigrants in the early part of the last century, he came through Ellis Island. He was 16 years old. Three years later, Carmela Tartaglia also arrived on a ship that docked at Ellis Island. Another 45 years later, she became my grandmother. What was Ellis Island like when my grandparents were herded through it? It consisted, writes Daniel Okrent in The Guarded Gate, his great book about immigration in the early twentieth century, of “27 acres of inspection centers, detention areas, and hospitals. Built to process 5,000 people a day, at times it had to handle twice that number. Many of them were exhausted and frightened, most of them impoverished.”
Ellis Island was a harsh entry to the U.S. But it’s also where the Statue of Liberty stood, which even then told these weary immigrants, with no idea what the future held, that America was a country that welcomed them with open arms. In 1903, the year before Lorenzo arrived, a plaque was attached to the statue’s pedestal on which a short, 14-line sonnet was inscribed. Its title is “The New Colossus,” and it imagines that the Statue of Liberty—“a mighty woman with a torch”—is speaking directly to the immigrants as they are processed at Ellis Island, all of them desperately praying for a better life than the one they had in the Old World. Listen to how it closes:
As the grandchild of Lorenzo and Carmela, I’ve thought about those lines often during the course of my life...
Become a paid subscriber Get access to our comments section, special columns like TGIF and Things Worth Remembering, tickets in advance to our live events, and more. UPGRADE TODAY |