November 20, 2025 • 27 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, long before the Statue of Liberty became a beacon for newcomers, it was simply a gift from France that struggled to find a purpose. To raise money for the statue's pedestal, Jewish American poet Emma Lazarus wrote a sonnet about the sculpture, never expecting it to be more than a throwaway donation. Years later, as anti-immigrant fervor spread through the country, her friend Georgina Schuyler returned to the poem and recognized the power in its plain plea for mercy.
Professor Elizabeth Stone shares the story of how Schuyler quietly worked to place The New Colossus inside the statue's pedestal and, in doing so, changed the meaning of the monument itself.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people,
and we love to hear your stories. Our listeners' stories
are adored here by our staff. We love to produce them,
put them up on air, send them to Ouramerican Stories
dot com. There's some of our favorites. Up next, a
(00:31):
story about the remarkable woman who gave Lady Liberty her identity.
Georgina Schuyler, doctor Elizabeth Stone, journalist and professor of literature
at Fordham University, is here to tell the story of
how the Statue of Liberty, a gift to America from
France designed by sculptor Frideric Bartoldi, came to be the
(00:51):
worldwide symbol of freedom and opportunity we know today through
a visionary woman named Georgina Schuyler recognized that a poem
written by her friend Emma Lazarus could change the definition
of the monument forever. Let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
It's a sonnet.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
It's called the New Colossus because there was an old colossus.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
This is the new Colossus. And it's a woman, not like.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
The brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride
from land to land. Here at our seawashed 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 worldwide. Welcome her mild eyes,
(01:48):
command the air, breach harbor that twin cities frame, keep
ancient lands, your storied pomp, cries she, with silent lips.
Give me your tired you're poor, your huddled masses yearning
to breathe, free, the wretched refuse of.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Your teeming shore.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Send these, the homeless tempest tossed to me.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
The statue begins really with a French historian named Edward Laboulay,
who was a strong abolitionist. He certainly believed in the
American constitution. America and France were very much on the
(02:45):
same or at least overlapping Enlightenment pages about freedom. The
French were pushing toward freedom, and this was a country
that was born with an idea of freedom. That was
the original idea for the Statue of Liberty.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
It was to.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Celebrate the end of slavery and Laboula was also a
friend of Bartoldi. But as time went on, eighteen seventies
turned into the eighteen eighties and it was clear that
the idea he had would be divisive in the post
Civil War United States, so.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
There was a sort of redirection.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
The statue celebrated freedom, but it also celebrated the French
American friendship and their joint idea of liberty enlightening the world.
It was a gift, and the only stipulation that the
French had was that the Americans had to pay for
(03:52):
the pedestal. But they didn't raise all the funds they
needed to, so there was a delay in building the
statue and then getting it here. And it was Joseph
Pulitzer who Nickel by nickel and dime by dime, raised
money from the readers of his newspaper.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
And the funds were finally in place by.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Eighteen eighty six. It was really the People's statue. It
was really the People's pedestal, and so the installation of
the statue took place in October of eighteen eighty six.
Cleveland was the president, and there were big parades and
(04:39):
lots of musicians and lots of boats and people watching,
and it was a It was a big celebration. However,
it didn't mean that everybody was equally enthused. And there
was a British journalist who said, yeah, the America Bikins
(05:00):
took it because it was offered, but they didn't really
want it. It was like they couldn't turn their back
on a gift. But it didn't detract tourists.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Initially it did, but it was a very.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Expensive proposition for New York because originally it was New
York that had to foot the bill, the electricity bill,
So New York was putting a huge electricity bill for
a statue that was a failed lighthouse, so that didn't
do much. Liberty enlightening the world was neo classical, but
(05:37):
it wasn't like the Lady Liberty we have today, who
almost seems like a person. By eighteen ninety, nobody really cared.
The statue was in incredible disrepair. The island was in disrepair.
When the statue started to turn green, nobody sort of
(05:58):
knew what to do about that. They they thought it
was almost like a skin disease, and.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Were they going to paint it? And what were they
going to do?
Speaker 3 (06:11):
It was the pandemic, and I was bored, and so
I started reading. I'd read them every day of the
New York Times I could get my hands on, and
I started reading the archives. And I was interested in
the Statue of Liberty. And I was certainly interested in
the early twentieth century because that coincided with my grandparents,
(06:31):
all four of my grandparents arrival in this country. And
I was also because I teach immigrant literature. I had
been and still am a huge fan of Hamilton the musical.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
So if you've seen Hamilton, the name Skyler leaps out
at you.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
And so I was reading about how the poem, the
Mma Lazarus poem got installed in the head is still
of the Statue of Liberty. And there was just one line,
and the line said through her friend Georgina Schuyler, and
I thought, I wonder if that's the same Skylar.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
And you're listening to doctor Elizabeth Stone tell the story
of the Statue of Liberty, and as you're about to
find out the woman who gave Lady Liberty her identity.
Here on our American stories, folks, if you love the
great American stories we tell and love America like we do,
we're asking you to become a part of the Our
(07:36):
American Stories family. If you agree that America is a
good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly
gift of seventeen dollars and seventy six cents is fast
becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to Ouramerican Stories
dot com now and go to the donate button and
help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our
American Stories dot Com. And we returned to our American
(08:11):
Stories in the story of Georgina Schuyler and their Statue
of Liberty. Telling the story is Fordham University professor Elizabeth Stone,
who wrote an article about Georgina Skyler for the Smithsonian
Magazine that you can read for yourself. It's entitled The
Woman who Saved the Statue of Liberty. When we left off,
the dots were starting to connect between Georgina Skyler and
(08:33):
the Statue of Liberty. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Georgina Schuyler lived a very, very invisible life. When she died,
she had a seventy two word obituary in the Times.
She died of heart disease on Christmas Day in nineteen
twenty three and lived with her sister at five seventy
Park Avenue, and was the descendant of both Eral schylar
(09:01):
of the Revolutionary War and Alexander Hamilton.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
And that was it. Seventy two words.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
As I looked and looked and looked, I found little
tidbits of this and that. She gave money to an
opera society that ran benefits for Italian immigrants. She gave
money to education for women. She gave money to Cooper Union,
(09:28):
which provided free tuition for years. So I got very,
very interested in her. She came from a family which
was very, very political, very grounded in activism. She was
herself a poet, an artist, a collaborator who shared the
political vision of her family.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
She was the baby of the family and.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Her sister would put most fortune five hundred CEOs to shame.
I mean, her sister, Louisa was remarkable. She worked with
Civil warvet, She was a philanthropist and worked with the blind,
the mentally ill.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
She was an organizer and she recognized.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
That you couldn't just if you were wealthy, You couldn't
just be Lady Bountiful anymore, and you had to really,
you had to really know what the social needs were,
and you had to organize wealth accordingly, and that is
what she did. The amazing part Georgina was sort of
(10:37):
like her work wife, is the only way I can
put it. She was the younger sister, She was Louisa's helper.
They were both single women. They lived together their whole lives.
But she didn't want to be in public. Really, what
she was was a composer, and she would compose music
(11:01):
to a company existing poetry or biblical passages. And I
don't think that's incidental because what she saw in Emma's poem,
she didn't put it to music. But she was the accompanyist.
She wasn't she wasn't the poet. She didn't want to
(11:23):
do anything outright and opened. What she did that is
so remarkable is she understood that a poem possibly could
change the definition of a monument, and that that change
in a monument could change history. The statue that Georgina
(11:47):
saw through the eyes of Lazarus's poem is not the
statue that was in the harbor and in front of
everybody's eyes. It was not the idea of the statue
that was in the harbor and in front of everybody's eyes.
So it was an imaginative act for something that was
(12:08):
really defunct. And that's where I found her correspondence with
Richard Watson Guilder the New York Public Library, which has
a statue of Liberty Archives. It was clear that they
were that Georgina and her sister and the Guilders, Helena
(12:33):
and Richard Guilder, they were all friends.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
But what I wondered.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
I began to wonder, and I thought, wait a second, Emma.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Dies in eighteen eighty seven.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
If Georgina wanted to memorialize her, why didn't she do it?
Then I knew that by the late eight teen hundreds
and the early nineteen hundreds, there was a huge ground
swell of nativism, and it was obvious to me that
(13:10):
given I couldn't prove it, but I saw how interested
Georgina was as a progressive. I knew that she contributed
financially to progressive causes, but that she never.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Went into the limelight herself.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
And what occurred to me was that the time had
really come for her to step forward as a retort
to the nativism of the day, and that.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Was how she decided to act.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
When she decided to act to get Emma's poem put
into the pedestal. She understood that monuments were permanent billboards
with Italian being denigrated as mafioso and blackhand, and really
(14:05):
anti Semitic posters depicting Jews. She understood that the Statue
of Liberty was going to be a big and permanent microphone,
and it was not a poem that anybody knew. Emma
Lazarus was a popular poet in her day. A lot
(14:27):
of her poetry was being a champion for the Jews
who were being hurt in the pigrums of Russia, and
she was really many many scholars say she's the first
Zionist in that she was very aware that Jews were
not welcome in the United States with open arms, and
(14:47):
so she began to think about a homeland for Jews, ways.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
That they could get out of Russia and be safe.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
So she and Georgina shared a passion for the arts
and a passion for the downtrodden, so that was the
link between them. Emma put her own sentiments into the
mouth of the mother of exiles, give me you're tired,
you're poor. I mean at the time that she wrote that,
(15:19):
in eighteen eighty three, there was nothing in New York Harbor.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
The statue hadn't even come It was.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Being put together by Bartoldi in France. But she went
to a fundraiser to raise money for the statue of
Liberty's Pedestal. And it was a gally. It was all
the glitterati. It was the Whitneys and the Astors and
(15:46):
the Vanderbilts.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
And she went in. She was asked to read her poem.
She went in knowing that all these wealthy people.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
Who had come to the National Academy of Design by
invitation only were much more interested in silks and oriental
rugs and sabers.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
They weren't really there to hear a poem about huddled masses.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
But she knew what she was doing with that poem,
and she, in fact did not I want to be
clear about this. She did not read the poem herself.
But she wrote the poem, and she understood the occasion
that she was writing it for, and she knew it
was not going to be well received because it didn't
(16:32):
go with the spirit of this.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
These people who wanted.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
To be philanthropic, wanted to give money for the pedestal,
wanted to support what was a neoclassical statue.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
About liberty and enlightening the world.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
But they weren't necessarily also gung ho on, rolling up
their shirt sleeves and working with the huddled masses who
were coming to New York.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
And you're listening to the story of Georgina Schuyler is
told by Fordham University Professor Elizabeth Stone. And this remarkable
connection between Skyler and Emma Lazarus, the author of the
poem so famously and eternally connected to the Statue of Liberty,
and the two of them shared an imagination and the
(17:21):
love of the arts and of poetry, and the ability
of both to change not just the world, but in
the end the meaning of this statue, and this statue
which was not even built yet when Emma Lazarus wrote
the poem. When we come back more of the story
of Georgina Schuyler, the Statue of Liberty, and in the end,
(17:43):
immigrants from everywhere who come to America for the very
liberty the French and American alliance was built upon. Our
American stories continues after these messages, and we returned to
(18:10):
our American stories and the story of Georgina Schuyler with
doctor Elizabeth Stone, we last heard the meaning behind Emma
Lazarus's poem The New Colossus as a call for sympathy
and support for those emigrating to America at the turn
of the century. Up next, how Georgina had a vision
for the Statue of Liberty through the lens of lazarus
(18:32):
poem and took decisive action to change the monument and
its meaning forever. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
And that brings us to nineteen oh two. I think
she was very good friends with the Guilders. Richard Watson Guilder.
He was the equivalent of the editor of The Atlantic
or the New Yorker. He was very political, and he
was Emma's publisher.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
He and Georgina.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
And Louisa and his wife. They were all progressives and
all interested in making this country open to everybody. The
first time Georgina stepped forward was in regard to the
(19:27):
Statue of Liberty. She had wanted to do this clearly
for a long time, but she couldn't do it as
long as it was under the aegis of a federal agency,
meaning the light Board, the Lighthouse Board.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
But she knew that that.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Was coming to an end. They'd wanted to get rid
of it. They said it was useless for six, seven,
eight nine years, but nothing happened. But in nineteen oh
one the Lighthouse Board got rid of the Statue of
Liberty and it was placed in the War Departy Department, which,
when you think about it, was a little bit ridiculous
since the Statue of Liberty's pedestal is on top of
(20:08):
a decommissioned fort that was built in eighteen oh seven
and that was used to store supplies during the Civil
War and occasionally to house a prisoner a Civil War prisoner.
But it's not clear what the War Department has ever
done with the Statue of Liberty.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
At any rate.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Once it was out of the hands and sort of
retired and became a monument, then Georgina was free to act,
and in nineteen oh one she did act. There was
a Statue of Liberty committee that was sort of in
(20:50):
charge of you can do this and you can't do this,
and so what she did was she got permission for
a bronze plaque. Then what happened was there were delays
and delays and delays due to bureaucracy. Then she went
to Europe with her sister and she then tried to
(21:15):
work from Afar to get the names of other people
on that plaque as well.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
She ran into trouble there because one of.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
The people she approached, he was a founder of the museum,
the Metropolitan Museum, and he said he could not sign
on to this plaque unless Huddled Masson's was left out
because it was far too Vulgari didn't want that phrase
in there, so Watson Gilder had to handle this, and
that caused a delay. The Lazarus family also did not
(21:50):
want anybody else somehow, They wanted to pay for it,
and they were told they could not pay for it
because it was going into a public mind.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
So there were a lot of.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
Delays on well were they going to remove their approval.
Georgina's brother had been involved in a privacy suit such
that she knew that it was legally risky to go
ahead with doing anything without the Lazarus family permission, and
(22:23):
so she had to work very carefully. She and Guilder
had to work very carefully to get the Lazarus family
to sign on, and eventually they did. Eventually, she came
back from being abroad and she had wanted there to
be a little sort of gathering in the statue's pedestal
(22:45):
to celebrate the hanging of the plaque that I think
did not happen. But there is a letter where she
says to Josephine Lazarus, this will be wonderful.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
This will I'm not quoting directly, but this.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
Will honor the country. It's good for the country, and
it's good to memorialize Emma. But the idea of putting
the poem into the pedestal was her idea, which she
did in collaboration with Guilder. It really was her show,
(23:20):
and she really was the impetus behind it. In eighteen ninety,
there weren't a lot of Russian Jews. In eighteen ninety,
there weren't a lot of Southern Italians.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
What I really admired Georgina.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
For is that she faced the same nativism, the same racism,
the same anti semitism in the country and she didn't
give up.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
She acted.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
It took a long time, and there were lots of
permissions to get and it was it was bureaucracy and
that caused the delay. But she was a visionary in
the same way. She wasn't Alexander Hamilton, but she a
visionary in the way that he was and that her
family was, which was always planning for a correction that
(24:10):
would take place in time. She wasn't just doing what
she was doing for the moment, and she wasn't just
doing it to memorialize Emma. She was doing it politically
for a future that she would not live to see.
She never got credit for what she tactfully created. I
(24:31):
think one of the reasons Georgina didn't get the attention
she deserved is because after I don't know.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Name your year, but anyone born by nineteen.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
Thirty five and that they are now in their eighties,
and nobody remembers the statue before she was Lady Liberty.
Nobody remembers the definition the rebranding, which is what I
think of it as rebranding of liberty, enlightening the world
to Lady Liberty, who defends huddled masses and the weary
(25:09):
and the poor and the tired.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
That was all because.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Georgina took Emma's forgotten poem and gave her an identity
by putting that poem in the pedestal, and once the
statue and the words were together, the redefinition of Liberty
into what she's now become and what people think she
(25:37):
always was.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
It began.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
A terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by
our own Maggie Wackenott. And a special thanks to doctor
Elizabeth Stone. She's a journalist and also a professor of
literature at Fordham University. My brother graduated from the School
of Law there. And what a story we learned about
the confluence of art and imagination. And Malazarus writes this poem,
(26:03):
but it is Georgina Schuyler's work that puts it on
the Statue of Liberty. By the way, if you visited,
and I have visited many times, my immigrant grandparents, the
Italian and Lebanese side, were sworn as citizens there at
Ellis Island, not far from that statue. And the Italian
side of my family not welcome necessarily. In the early
(26:26):
part of the twentieth century, Italians facing real, real racism
and discrimination. And this is a part of life everywhere, folks.
Not everybody is always welcome everywhere. America has that distinct
and unique feature of bringing people from everywhere to the
great shores of this country. And my goodness, the words,
well you heard them in the beginning, and there are
(26:46):
words that live forever. They define not just the statue
in the end, not just a gift from France, but
in the end define the nation itself and how the
world views us and how we view from the rest.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Of the world.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
The story of Georgina Schuyler, also the story of m
Lazarus in a way and their unique connection, and the
story of the Statue of Liberty and America. Here on
our American stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people,
and we love to hear your stories. Our listeners' stories
are adored here by our staff. We love to produce them,
put them up on air, send them to Ouramerican Stories
dot com. There's some of our favorites. Up next, a
(00:31):
story about the remarkable woman who gave Lady Liberty her identity.
Georgina Schuyler, doctor Elizabeth Stone, journalist and professor of literature
at Fordham University, is here to tell the story of
how the Statue of Liberty, a gift to America from
France designed by sculptor Frideric Bartoldi, came to be the
(00:51):
worldwide symbol of freedom and opportunity we know today through
a visionary woman named Georgina Schuyler recognized that a poem
written by her friend Emma Lazarus could change the definition
of the monument forever. Let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
It's a sonnet.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
It's called the New Colossus because there was an old colossus.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
This is the new Colossus. And it's a woman, not like.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
The brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride
from land to land. Here at our seawashed 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 worldwide. Welcome her mild eyes,
(01:48):
command the air, breach harbor that twin cities frame, keep
ancient lands, your storied pomp, cries she, with silent lips.
Give me your tired you're poor, your huddled masses yearning
to breathe, free, the wretched refuse of.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Your teeming shore.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Send these, the homeless tempest tossed to me.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
The statue begins really with a French historian named Edward Laboulay,
who was a strong abolitionist. He certainly believed in the
American constitution. America and France were very much on the
(02:45):
same or at least overlapping Enlightenment pages about freedom. The
French were pushing toward freedom, and this was a country
that was born with an idea of freedom. That was
the original idea for the Statue of Liberty.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
It was to.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Celebrate the end of slavery and Laboula was also a
friend of Bartoldi. But as time went on, eighteen seventies
turned into the eighteen eighties and it was clear that
the idea he had would be divisive in the post
Civil War United States, so.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
There was a sort of redirection.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
The statue celebrated freedom, but it also celebrated the French
American friendship and their joint idea of liberty enlightening the world.
It was a gift, and the only stipulation that the
French had was that the Americans had to pay for
(03:52):
the pedestal. But they didn't raise all the funds they
needed to, so there was a delay in building the
statue and then getting it here. And it was Joseph
Pulitzer who Nickel by nickel and dime by dime, raised
money from the readers of his newspaper.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
And the funds were finally in place by.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Eighteen eighty six. It was really the People's statue. It
was really the People's pedestal, and so the installation of
the statue took place in October of eighteen eighty six.
Cleveland was the president, and there were big parades and
(04:39):
lots of musicians and lots of boats and people watching,
and it was a It was a big celebration. However,
it didn't mean that everybody was equally enthused. And there
was a British journalist who said, yeah, the America Bikins
(05:00):
took it because it was offered, but they didn't really
want it. It was like they couldn't turn their back
on a gift. But it didn't detract tourists.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Initially it did, but it was a very.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
Expensive proposition for New York because originally it was New
York that had to foot the bill, the electricity bill,
So New York was putting a huge electricity bill for
a statue that was a failed lighthouse, so that didn't
do much. Liberty enlightening the world was neo classical, but
(05:37):
it wasn't like the Lady Liberty we have today, who
almost seems like a person. By eighteen ninety, nobody really cared.
The statue was in incredible disrepair. The island was in disrepair.
When the statue started to turn green, nobody sort of
(05:58):
knew what to do about that. They they thought it
was almost like a skin disease, and.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Were they going to paint it? And what were they
going to do?
Speaker 3 (06:11):
It was the pandemic, and I was bored, and so
I started reading. I'd read them every day of the
New York Times I could get my hands on, and
I started reading the archives. And I was interested in
the Statue of Liberty. And I was certainly interested in
the early twentieth century because that coincided with my grandparents,
(06:31):
all four of my grandparents arrival in this country. And
I was also because I teach immigrant literature. I had
been and still am a huge fan of Hamilton the musical.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
So if you've seen Hamilton, the name Skyler leaps out
at you.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
And so I was reading about how the poem, the
Mma Lazarus poem got installed in the head is still
of the Statue of Liberty. And there was just one line,
and the line said through her friend Georgina Schuyler, and
I thought, I wonder if that's the same Skylar.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
And you're listening to doctor Elizabeth Stone tell the story
of the Statue of Liberty, and as you're about to
find out the woman who gave Lady Liberty her identity.
Here on our American stories, folks, if you love the
great American stories we tell and love America like we do,
we're asking you to become a part of the Our
(07:36):
American Stories family. If you agree that America is a
good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly
gift of seventeen dollars and seventy six cents is fast
becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to Ouramerican Stories
dot com now and go to the donate button and
help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our
American Stories dot Com. And we returned to our American
(08:11):
Stories in the story of Georgina Schuyler and their Statue
of Liberty. Telling the story is Fordham University professor Elizabeth Stone,
who wrote an article about Georgina Skyler for the Smithsonian
Magazine that you can read for yourself. It's entitled The
Woman who Saved the Statue of Liberty. When we left off,
the dots were starting to connect between Georgina Skyler and
(08:33):
the Statue of Liberty. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Georgina Schuyler lived a very, very invisible life. When she died,
she had a seventy two word obituary in the Times.
She died of heart disease on Christmas Day in nineteen
twenty three and lived with her sister at five seventy
Park Avenue, and was the descendant of both Eral schylar
(09:01):
of the Revolutionary War and Alexander Hamilton.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
And that was it. Seventy two words.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
As I looked and looked and looked, I found little
tidbits of this and that. She gave money to an
opera society that ran benefits for Italian immigrants. She gave
money to education for women. She gave money to Cooper Union,
(09:28):
which provided free tuition for years. So I got very,
very interested in her. She came from a family which
was very, very political, very grounded in activism. She was
herself a poet, an artist, a collaborator who shared the
political vision of her family.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
She was the baby of the family and.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
Her sister would put most fortune five hundred CEOs to shame.
I mean, her sister, Louisa was remarkable. She worked with
Civil warvet, She was a philanthropist and worked with the blind,
the mentally ill.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
She was an organizer and she recognized.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
That you couldn't just if you were wealthy, You couldn't
just be Lady Bountiful anymore, and you had to really,
you had to really know what the social needs were,
and you had to organize wealth accordingly, and that is
what she did. The amazing part Georgina was sort of
(10:37):
like her work wife, is the only way I can
put it. She was the younger sister, She was Louisa's helper.
They were both single women. They lived together their whole lives.
But she didn't want to be in public. Really, what
she was was a composer, and she would compose music
(11:01):
to a company existing poetry or biblical passages. And I
don't think that's incidental because what she saw in Emma's poem,
she didn't put it to music. But she was the accompanyist.
She wasn't she wasn't the poet. She didn't want to
(11:23):
do anything outright and opened. What she did that is
so remarkable is she understood that a poem possibly could
change the definition of a monument, and that that change
in a monument could change history. The statue that Georgina
(11:47):
saw through the eyes of Lazarus's poem is not the
statue that was in the harbor and in front of
everybody's eyes. It was not the idea of the statue
that was in the harbor and in front of everybody's eyes.
So it was an imaginative act for something that was
(12:08):
really defunct. And that's where I found her correspondence with
Richard Watson Guilder the New York Public Library, which has
a statue of Liberty Archives. It was clear that they
were that Georgina and her sister and the Guilders, Helena
(12:33):
and Richard Guilder, they were all friends.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
But what I wondered.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
I began to wonder, and I thought, wait a second, Emma.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Dies in eighteen eighty seven.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
If Georgina wanted to memorialize her, why didn't she do it?
Then I knew that by the late eight teen hundreds
and the early nineteen hundreds, there was a huge ground
swell of nativism, and it was obvious to me that
(13:10):
given I couldn't prove it, but I saw how interested
Georgina was as a progressive. I knew that she contributed
financially to progressive causes, but that she never.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Went into the limelight herself.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
And what occurred to me was that the time had
really come for her to step forward as a retort
to the nativism of the day, and that.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Was how she decided to act.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
When she decided to act to get Emma's poem put
into the pedestal. She understood that monuments were permanent billboards
with Italian being denigrated as mafioso and blackhand, and really
(14:05):
anti Semitic posters depicting Jews. She understood that the Statue
of Liberty was going to be a big and permanent microphone,
and it was not a poem that anybody knew. Emma
Lazarus was a popular poet in her day. A lot
(14:27):
of her poetry was being a champion for the Jews
who were being hurt in the pigrums of Russia, and
she was really many many scholars say she's the first
Zionist in that she was very aware that Jews were
not welcome in the United States with open arms, and
(14:47):
so she began to think about a homeland for Jews, ways.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
That they could get out of Russia and be safe.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
So she and Georgina shared a passion for the arts
and a passion for the downtrodden, so that was the
link between them. Emma put her own sentiments into the
mouth of the mother of exiles, give me you're tired,
you're poor. I mean at the time that she wrote that,
(15:19):
in eighteen eighty three, there was nothing in New York Harbor.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
The statue hadn't even come It was.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Being put together by Bartoldi in France. But she went
to a fundraiser to raise money for the statue of
Liberty's Pedestal. And it was a gally. It was all
the glitterati. It was the Whitneys and the Astors and
(15:46):
the Vanderbilts.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
And she went in. She was asked to read her poem.
She went in knowing that all these wealthy people.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
Who had come to the National Academy of Design by
invitation only were much more interested in silks and oriental
rugs and sabers.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
They weren't really there to hear a poem about huddled masses.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
But she knew what she was doing with that poem,
and she, in fact did not I want to be
clear about this. She did not read the poem herself.
But she wrote the poem, and she understood the occasion
that she was writing it for, and she knew it
was not going to be well received because it didn't
(16:32):
go with the spirit of this.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
These people who wanted.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
To be philanthropic, wanted to give money for the pedestal,
wanted to support what was a neoclassical statue.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
About liberty and enlightening the world.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
But they weren't necessarily also gung ho on, rolling up
their shirt sleeves and working with the huddled masses who
were coming to New York.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
And you're listening to the story of Georgina Schuyler is
told by Fordham University Professor Elizabeth Stone. And this remarkable
connection between Skyler and Emma Lazarus, the author of the
poem so famously and eternally connected to the Statue of Liberty,
and the two of them shared an imagination and the
(17:21):
love of the arts and of poetry, and the ability
of both to change not just the world, but in
the end the meaning of this statue, and this statue
which was not even built yet when Emma Lazarus wrote
the poem. When we come back more of the story
of Georgina Schuyler, the Statue of Liberty, and in the end,
(17:43):
immigrants from everywhere who come to America for the very
liberty the French and American alliance was built upon. Our
American stories continues after these messages, and we returned to
(18:10):
our American stories and the story of Georgina Schuyler with
doctor Elizabeth Stone, we last heard the meaning behind Emma
Lazarus's poem The New Colossus as a call for sympathy
and support for those emigrating to America at the turn
of the century. Up next, how Georgina had a vision
for the Statue of Liberty through the lens of lazarus
(18:32):
poem and took decisive action to change the monument and
its meaning forever. Let's return to the story.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
And that brings us to nineteen oh two. I think
she was very good friends with the Guilders. Richard Watson Guilder.
He was the equivalent of the editor of The Atlantic
or the New Yorker. He was very political, and he
was Emma's publisher.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
He and Georgina.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
And Louisa and his wife. They were all progressives and
all interested in making this country open to everybody. The
first time Georgina stepped forward was in regard to the
(19:27):
Statue of Liberty. She had wanted to do this clearly
for a long time, but she couldn't do it as
long as it was under the aegis of a federal agency,
meaning the light Board, the Lighthouse Board.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
But she knew that that.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Was coming to an end. They'd wanted to get rid
of it. They said it was useless for six, seven,
eight nine years, but nothing happened. But in nineteen oh
one the Lighthouse Board got rid of the Statue of
Liberty and it was placed in the War Departy Department, which,
when you think about it, was a little bit ridiculous
since the Statue of Liberty's pedestal is on top of
(20:08):
a decommissioned fort that was built in eighteen oh seven
and that was used to store supplies during the Civil
War and occasionally to house a prisoner a Civil War prisoner.
But it's not clear what the War Department has ever
done with the Statue of Liberty.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
At any rate.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Once it was out of the hands and sort of
retired and became a monument, then Georgina was free to act,
and in nineteen oh one she did act. There was
a Statue of Liberty committee that was sort of in
(20:50):
charge of you can do this and you can't do this,
and so what she did was she got permission for
a bronze plaque. Then what happened was there were delays
and delays and delays due to bureaucracy. Then she went
to Europe with her sister and she then tried to
(21:15):
work from Afar to get the names of other people
on that plaque as well.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
She ran into trouble there because one of.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
The people she approached, he was a founder of the museum,
the Metropolitan Museum, and he said he could not sign
on to this plaque unless Huddled Masson's was left out
because it was far too Vulgari didn't want that phrase
in there, so Watson Gilder had to handle this, and
that caused a delay. The Lazarus family also did not
(21:50):
want anybody else somehow, They wanted to pay for it,
and they were told they could not pay for it
because it was going into a public mind.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
So there were a lot of.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
Delays on well were they going to remove their approval.
Georgina's brother had been involved in a privacy suit such
that she knew that it was legally risky to go
ahead with doing anything without the Lazarus family permission, and
(22:23):
so she had to work very carefully. She and Guilder
had to work very carefully to get the Lazarus family
to sign on, and eventually they did. Eventually, she came
back from being abroad and she had wanted there to
be a little sort of gathering in the statue's pedestal
(22:45):
to celebrate the hanging of the plaque that I think
did not happen. But there is a letter where she
says to Josephine Lazarus, this will be wonderful.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
This will I'm not quoting directly, but this.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
Will honor the country. It's good for the country, and
it's good to memorialize Emma. But the idea of putting
the poem into the pedestal was her idea, which she
did in collaboration with Guilder. It really was her show,
(23:20):
and she really was the impetus behind it. In eighteen ninety,
there weren't a lot of Russian Jews. In eighteen ninety,
there weren't a lot of Southern Italians.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
What I really admired Georgina.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
For is that she faced the same nativism, the same racism,
the same anti semitism in the country and she didn't
give up.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
She acted.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
It took a long time, and there were lots of
permissions to get and it was it was bureaucracy and
that caused the delay. But she was a visionary in
the same way. She wasn't Alexander Hamilton, but she a
visionary in the way that he was and that her
family was, which was always planning for a correction that
(24:10):
would take place in time. She wasn't just doing what
she was doing for the moment, and she wasn't just
doing it to memorialize Emma. She was doing it politically
for a future that she would not live to see.
She never got credit for what she tactfully created. I
(24:31):
think one of the reasons Georgina didn't get the attention
she deserved is because after I don't know.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Name your year, but anyone born by nineteen.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
Thirty five and that they are now in their eighties,
and nobody remembers the statue before she was Lady Liberty.
Nobody remembers the definition the rebranding, which is what I
think of it as rebranding of liberty, enlightening the world
to Lady Liberty, who defends huddled masses and the weary
(25:09):
and the poor and the tired.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
That was all because.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Georgina took Emma's forgotten poem and gave her an identity
by putting that poem in the pedestal, and once the
statue and the words were together, the redefinition of Liberty
into what she's now become and what people think she
(25:37):
always was.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
It began.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
A terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling by
our own Maggie Wackenott. And a special thanks to doctor
Elizabeth Stone. She's a journalist and also a professor of
literature at Fordham University. My brother graduated from the School
of Law there. And what a story we learned about
the confluence of art and imagination. And Malazarus writes this poem,
(26:03):
but it is Georgina Schuyler's work that puts it on
the Statue of Liberty. By the way, if you visited,
and I have visited many times, my immigrant grandparents, the
Italian and Lebanese side, were sworn as citizens there at
Ellis Island, not far from that statue. And the Italian
side of my family not welcome necessarily. In the early
(26:26):
part of the twentieth century, Italians facing real, real racism
and discrimination. And this is a part of life everywhere, folks.
Not everybody is always welcome everywhere. America has that distinct
and unique feature of bringing people from everywhere to the
great shores of this country. And my goodness, the words,
well you heard them in the beginning, and there are
(26:46):
words that live forever. They define not just the statue
in the end, not just a gift from France, but
in the end define the nation itself and how the
world views us and how we view from the rest.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Of the world.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
The story of Georgina Schuyler, also the story of m
Lazarus in a way and their unique connection, and the
story of the Statue of Liberty and America. Here on
our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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