Enlightenment and Immigration

I've been fascinated by Lady Liberty since the day I first saw her from our apartment.  She's been out in the harbor 24/7, withstanding all the weather that races from the Delaware Water Gap in the west, and sneaks in on a northeaster wind from the Atlantic.  I wanted to wait to get up close to her until we had beautful warm weather but I almost missed my chance.  It turns out over 4.5 million people want to visit her each year and one has to get a ferry reservation to get out to Bedloe Island and the ferry was nearly booked for the rest of May.  Luckily I found one 9 a.m. slot for Tuesday and luckily the weather turned out to be sunny and cool.  I should also say that luckily I did not get a reservation to the crown, which I had wanted to ascend.  Turns out it is a 22 story hike and I don't think the view would have justified the damage to this old lady's knees.  I climbed to the crown when I was twelve and last visited the statue-I've got to stop thinking I'm still a teenager. I will, however, brag that I walked from our apartment to the ferry landing in Battery Park and had another wonderful excursion across the Brooklyn Bridge and through downtown Manhattan.

Obsessive that I am, I ate up all the facts about the design and construction of the Statue in 1886 in the renovated museum inside the pedestal.  The 350 pieces of copper plate had to be attached to an interior scaffolding that was designed by Eiffel, who modeled it on the structures that were being used for the new architecture of skyscrapers.  The beautiful flowing gown of Liberty was based on a Roman palla attached at the shoulder over a stola and would work out to be 4000 square yards were this really fabric.  I love the way Bertholdi was able to mold hard copper into a flowing gown and I took about 30 pictures from every angle in my obsessive need to capture this.

Bertholdi titled his statue "Liberty Enlightening the World" and he built it to highlight the United States' liberty in contrast to the dictatorships in Europe at that time.  It wasn't until the twentieth century that Emma Lazarus's ode to the "poor, huddled masses yearning to be free" was closely identified with the statue even though she won a competition with the poem when the statue was being built. Since this magnificent statue dominated New York Harbor she greeted the millions of immigrants, mainly from Europe, who gambled to come to the United States in search of political, religious and economic liberty and their passionate recollections of the statue's impact on them led to the Lazarus poem becoming re-connected with the monument.

Ellis Island was became the central immigration gateway to the United States from 1892 to 1924.  (It remained open from 1924 to 1954 but as a detention and deportation center only.)  New Yorkers such as my friend, Lynne Allen, will tell stories of going out to Ellis Island in the 1970's and seeing an eerie scene with abandoned trunks. empty hospital beds, and gigantic cobwebs.  It was as if the ghosts of all these striving newcomers were left behind while their new American bodies moved on to homes not only in New York, but onward to Detroit or Cincinnati, Nashville or Albany.  As a result, 1/3 of our current population, 100 million Americans, can trace their roots back to their one of their forebears' initial sojourn on the island, which typically only took 2-5 hours.   The current National Park Service museum, opened in 1990, has a fascinating exhibit, walking us all through the halls and explaining the steps that these 12 million immigrants faced.  I came away with a positive impression about the experieince and had many myths about mistreatment or harsh conditions corrected.  For example, no one had their name changed by the Immigration inspectors.  They didn't have the capacity to change a name and all the records were based on the ship's manifests which generally always had the correct name and spelling for the passenger.

So now for a wish that Lady Liberty's Enlightenment would extend to immigration policy in 2010.  If the "Americans" who are descended from Ellis Island as well other 19th century immigrants who entered through other ports (as the Alexander's and Kruggel's did) thought about the contributions these generations of migrants made to our country, perhaps we would be less hypocritical about the Mexicans, Columbians, Hondurans, Africans, who drive our cabs and pick our crops and deliver our carry-out food in hopes of also finding the American dream that our 19th century ancestors cashed in on.  I'll close with a quote from Ellis Island that Italian immigrants loved to say:

They say the streets are paved in gold in America

They aren't paved in gold

They aren't paved at all

We're expected to pave them.