The
original torch and flame, and a full-scale face model, are displayed in
the new Statue of Liberty Museum in New York. (Richard Drew/AP)
John Malveaux of
writes:
Statue of Liberty
The
new Statue of Liberty Museum in New York Harbor boasts a number of
treasures: the original torch, which was replaced in the 1980s; an
unoxidized (read: not green) copper replica of Lady Liberty’s face; and
recordings of immigrants describing the sight of the 305-foot monument.
It
also revives an aspect of the statue’s long-forgotten history: Lady
Liberty was originally designed to celebrate the end of slavery, not the
arrival of immigrants. Ellis Island, the inspection station through
which millions of immigrants passed, didn’t open until six years after
the statue was unveiled in 1886. The plaque with the famous Emma Lazarus
poem — “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to
breathe free” — wasn’t added until 1903.
“One of
the first meanings [of the statue] had to do with abolition, but it’s a
meaning that didn’t stick,” Edward Berenson, a history professor at New
York University and author of the book “The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story,” said in an interview with The Washington Post.
The monument, which draws 4.5 million visitors a
year, was first imagined by a man named Édouard de Laboulaye. In France,
he was an expert on the U.S. Constitution and, at the close of the
American Civil War, the president of a committee that raised and
disbursed funds to newly freed slaves, according to Yasmin Sabina Khan,
author of the book “Enlightening the World: The Creation of the Statue of Liberty.”
Laboulaye
loved America — often giving speeches described by a New York Times
correspondent in 1867 as “feasts of liberty which move the souls of men
to their deepest depths” — and he loved it even more when slavery was
abolished.
In June 1865, Laboulaye organized a meeting of French abolitionists at his summer home in Versailles, Berenson said.
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