After Stephen Miller's debate with CNN's Jim Acosta, media hacks are rushing out paeans to Emma Lazarus' poem, The New Colossus. It's the poem famously written on the Statue.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
A few problems.
1. The Dems and the left just made Linda Sarsour, an Islamist bigot and terrorist supporter, into their role model. Sarsour has declared that there's no room for Zionists in the movement. Emma Lazarus was a passionate and enthusiastic Zionist.
The Dems can have Linda Sarsour and her enthusiasm for Saudi Arabia's Sharia law and hatred for Jews. Or they can have Emma Lazarus and "your huddled masses yearning to breathe free". But not both.
2. Emma Lazarus never saw the Statue of Liberty. She died four years after writing the poem at the age of 38.
She wasn't writing the definition of what the Statue of Liberty represented. She was asked by a literary friend to write a poem for a benefit auction for the Statue of Liberty's pedestal. It was included with the works of other benefit writers like Mark Twain.
Initially she refused to do it. Then was talked into it. The auction failed.
We know the New Colossus mainly because it proved popular for attaching a political agenda to the Statue of Liberty. The actual physical attachment of the poem to the Statue of Liberty came much later. Lazarus had done a favor for a friend by contributing a poem to an auction. It wasn't the grand statement that it was eventually transformed into.
This didn't have much to do with Emma Lazarus. The poetess died before her time. Her sister did everything possible to destroy her legacy. The only poem of hers that people tend to know today is the New Colossus because it was passed around and then picked up and used to promote a particular agenda. It's a very dramatic poem, but far from her best work.
The poem is resonant, but it's not the words of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Nor was it meant to be.
It was written by a young woman as a favor to a friend for a statue she never saw. The prominence of the poem came after her death.
And Emma Lazarus would have fit very badly into today's anti-Semitic Democrat Party.