File:Statue of Liberty - breaking chains of slavery.jpg: Difference between revisions

Liberty: Breaking the Chains of Slavery

• https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/to-the-world-were-now-america-the-racist-and-pitiful

In France, the country that backed the American Revolution and later donated the Statue of Liberty, forty-six per cent of the people polled said that their opinion of the U.S. has “worsened a lot” (in the period of the administration of US President Donald Trump).

The proportion of respondents who still view America as a key ally is “vanishingly small” — as low as six per cent in Italy.

-- Robin Wright on US Independence Day

In The New Yorker / July 4th, 2020

How the world now sees America -- and how the Statue of Liberty was originally created to celebrate breaking chains of slavery. Robin's history shines a light... and a warning...

... the chain under Lady Liberty’s feet: she is stomping on it. “In the early sketches, she was also holding chains in her hand,” Edward Berenson, a professor of history at New York University, told me last week. The shackles were later replaced with a tablet noting the date of America’s independence. But the shattered chain under her feet remained.

The statue was the brainchild of Edouard de Laboulaye, a prominent French expert on the U.S. Constitution who also headed the French Anti-Slavery Society. After the Civil War, in 1865, he wanted to commemorate the end of slavery in the U.S., enshrined in the new Thirteenth Amendment, which, in theory, reaffirmed the ideals of freedom—this time for all people—first embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

The now famous line — “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” from a poem by Emma Lazarus — wasn’t added until 1903, Berenson noted.

The poem had been donated as part of a literary auction to raise funds for the statue’s pedestal. France donated the statue; the Americans had to raise the funds to pay for its pedestal. Long after Lazarus’s death, a friend lobbied to have the poem engraved on a plaque and added to the base...

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