At a soirée 140 years ago in New York City’s Academy of Design, 1,500 people kicked off a fundraising exhibition to finance a pedestal for the aborning Statue of Liberty.
According to the New York Times, “Most of the gentlemen wore evening dress, and many of the ladies were arrayed in elegant costumes.”
During opening amenities on Nov. 2, 1883, exhibition director F. Hopkinson Smith ascended a platform and read a donated poem.
Smith recited: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
The lines had been written for the occasion by Emma Lazarus. Born to a wealthy Jewish family, she was immersed in working with Jewish immigrants and deeply sensitive to people who longed for opportunity in America.
Her poem, which Lazarus entitled “The New Colossus,” faded from public view for years afterward, until it was re-discovered and inscribed inside the pedestal in 1903.
Few of us can say we’d be here without the courage and hope of “huddled masses” who pulled up stakes and set off for a distant land with little or nothing.
With the approaching anniversary of the Lazarus poem – and much about immigration unresolved today – one wonders what our forebears were thinking as they set off into the unknown, as did my Ukrainian grandmother Becky, at age 15, in 1906.
Too bad she didn’t have a guidebook to provide helpful advice.
Actually, one existed: the “Handbook for Immigrants to the United States,” compiled in 1871 by the American Social Science Association, a group dedicated to bettering human lives.
The booklet dispensed practical advice to be followed even from the start of one’s emigration, noting that “Steam ships are far preferable to sailing vessels for the voyage.”
With no double entendre likely intended, the booklet advised, “The choice of acquaintances among the passengers should be very cautious, especially on the part of women. Discretion as to intercourse with others is of hourly importance during a voyage.”
Once in port here, the booklet warned, the immigrant might fall prey to swindlers of every stripe, and so “must be on his guard at every turn.”
As for who should come here, the advice was blunt: “Persons unwilling to work, or accustomed to live by their wits alone, are not wanted in the United States… Persons accustomed to earning a living by manual labor run the least risk in emigration. A pair of stout arms, if united with habits of sobriety and economy, are sure to give the emigrant a good start in the states.”
Back then, what kind of Americans would the migrant have found here? “They are a good natured people, and treat one another, and the stranger, likewise, kindly. Fairness and honesty prevail among them.”
We can only hope this assessment still holds as we discuss how to treat those seeking entry to our land.
Migrants spark furious debate today, but the old handbook cut to the heart of the matter, noting of would-be arrivals:
“The land of their adoption is large enough to hold them, active enough to employ them, and generous enough, one may trust, to care for them.
“To those, especially who have suffered in their native country, to those who seek a more liberal government, or a freer people than their own, the United States are what our fathers hoped they might be, – what our great leader, Washington, thought they would be, – a kind of asylum for mankind.”
As we confront issues involving the “huddled masses” of today, what a decent thought to bear in mind.
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net), a frequent contributor, is a retired Providence Journal editor and columnist.