dongreen76 wrote:
What` was I incorrect about.The statue `WAS`given to the U.S. merely as a gesture of diplomatic good will by France.I never said it was constituional law that the Constitution / country was in wantin for people to come over here for need of more citizens.The gesture by France wasn't done by France in order or to facilitate or be congruent to the United States movement in order to grow it self.The statue was not created specifically with the U.S. in mind.What it does is only speaks to spirit, it is only reflective of the personna of the country at the time. It was evolving,there is nothing technical and legal about it.
I really don't know what "YOU PEOPLE"are talking , except that it is very quintessential of you.
What` was I incorrect about.The statue `WAS`given ... (
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You stated "The inscription on it was already on it when it was graciously excepted (accepted??) by the United States." I simply pointed out that the poem was not mounted onto the statue until 1903. You also said, "How could it be referring to people coming from Europe, when France, the owner of it- is in Europe." Fundamentally, this is true. However, Lady Liberty was not built on the policy or expectation of immigration, it was Liberty being spread throughout the world. Depending on the writer, the design of the Statute was a tribute to the end of slavery while most point to the American Revolutionary War. Edouard de Laboulaye, French abolitionist and president of the French Anti-Slavery Society, some say is the undisputed "Father of the Statue of Liberty" and based on his belief that the new nation pointed the way to condemn the institution of slavery. After the United States' Civil War, Laboulaye conceived the idea of a gift to the United States to memorialize President Abraham Lincoln and celebrate the end of slavery. He enlisted sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who took an unused design he had created for a lighthouse near the Suez Canal and turned it into a monument for America. However, officially the French government put the emphasis on the Revolutionary War. Whatever the reason, in the 20 years it took between the conception and the statue's dedication in 1886, the statue grew to take on the centennial symbolism and broader meanings as it evolved. Today we are divided into two camps, Liberals strongly believe it is a welcome mat for the world to send their unwanted, needy illiterate, or diseased refuge, "the huddled masses." While others see it as a beacon of Liberty as interpreted by nations in their quest for freedom from oppression.
Make no mistake, Emma Lazarus' poem was about immigration. However, the poem was not penned for the Statute, but rather as an item to be auctioned to raise money for the base of the Statute.
Her inspired words were a product of her passion for refugee work as a Zionist. Her other poetry includes, In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport with the mournful stanza:
"What prayers were in this temple offered up,
Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,
By these lone exiles of a thousand years,
From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!"
You also write "The inscription on it was not changed when given to the United States because it was revelant to our circumstances at the time; in that era we were a young evolving country and could probably use more patrons/citizens ." Fact is, there was no "inscription" on the statue when it arrived. As for the "revelent" circumstances of the time....many politicians were adamantly against the immigration of poor and any "diseased" individual was to be denied entry into the USA. Indeed, 1903 introduced the first real laws, Anarchist Exclusion Act, that codified previous immigration law, and added four inadmissible classes: anarchists, people with epilepsy, beggars, and importers of prostitutes.