Lady Liberty

Speaking of Wilhelm Steinitz’s 1886 victory over Johannes Zukertort, a Chess.com documentary makes a peculiar connection: “It was only fitting that an immigrant in the United States won the World Chess Championship in the same year the Statue of Liberty was dedicated.”

This is a peculiar connection because of one thing: when it was dedicated, the Statue of Liberty was not a symbol of immigration but rather a diplomatic gesture from France in celebrating the 1876 centennial of America’s Declaration of Independence.

Indeed, people today often erroneously associate the Statue of Liberty with immigration, but that association developed only decades later. Dedicated in 1886 as a monument to liberty, republican ideals, Franco-American friendship, and the successes of the American Revolution, the statue was not originally intended as a symbol of immigration. Above all, it was a symbol of America. To suggest any symbolic connection to immigration is not only historically inaccurate — when considering the actual dedication of the statue — but also doing an injustice to the generations of Americans who built and sacrificed for a country worth celebrating. Such a misplaced emphasis on outsiders undermines the sanctity of what it means to be an American, and it distracts from the great struggles and achievements of the generations of families who actually made America. In this sense, the Statue of Liberty stands not only to welcome visitors, merchants, and immigrants, but to declare the stake jealously defended by those who call America home. In this way, it serves also as a reminder that those who enter are expected to respect the American way and to, should they pursue citizenship, do as the Americans do. After all, the American way is precisely the reason that America became the champion of liberty and the most inviting and hospitable destination for immigrants the world over.

Ultimately, the Statue of Liberty became closely identified with immigration only after millions of immigrants crossed the Atlantic by steamship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and described the awe of sighting the statue as they entered New York Harbor. The later popularity of Emma Lazarus's poem The New Colossus — whose text was mounted on a bronze plaque inside the statue's pedestal in 1903, with its famous welcome to the world's "tired" and "poor" — further cemented that interpretation in the American imagination; an interpretation developed in the decades following the dedication of the Statue of Liberty and, as we have seen, one reimagining Lady Liberty as somebody she never was. Alas, a fate shared with so much of history — some people somewhere always reimagining it for their own ends.

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