If President Trump has nightmares, Emma Lazarus stars in them.
Back in 2003, I wrote about certain widely held norms of American patriotism. President George W. Bush’s new imperialist minions had attacked the patriotism of millions of citizens, myself included, who had criticized the Invasion of Iraq as an unjust war but that the President had publicly sworn was “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.”
I began this writing project by reflecting on the self-interrogating nature of American patriotism that Francis Scott Key had woven deeply into the first verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I then turned to Abraham Lincoln followed by Emma Lazarus. I’m still shocked that what I wrote 14 years ago about Emma’s contribution to normative patriotism remains ever-so pertinent today. I had titled the Lincoln section “Lincoln’s Memorial—Equality, Hope, Repentance” and Emma’s “Lazarus’s Pedestal—World-Widening Welcome. Here it is:
Twenty years after Lincoln remade America’s normative patriotism, a thirty-four-year-old, aristocratic Jewish-American woman picked up the Lincoln’s hope-filled “un-finished work” and poetically enlarged our patriotism’s normative capacity. Emma Lazarus, already a well-known poet by 1883, wrote her famous sonnet, The New Colossus, for an art auction to raise funds for the pedestal that now supports the Statue of Liberty.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.1
Another score of years would pass—actually, sixteen years after she died—before Emma’s sonnet, which had already captured the American patriotic imagination, was engraved on Liberty’s pedestal in 1903. Before Emma had died, James Russell Lowell had written her that “your sonnet gives its subject a raison d’etre.”
Indeed, by 1903 Emma had poetically moved American normative patriotism beyond the wide-spread nativist proclivity for a single hegemonic race, ethnicity, class, and gender. American nativism had begun already in the 1850s with campaigns to restrict immigration and naturalization. American nativist culture and politics had its roots going back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 18th-century politics of aristocratic republicanism. In the early years of the 20th century Theodore Roosevelt’s triumphalism again re-kindled American nativism and it continues to be a force up to the present.2
Already in the Civil War post-bellum era of the nineteenth century, nativism had threatened to subvert Lincoln’s re-making of normative patriotism around equality. American nativism has found a home not only in the South’s Jim Crow, and in the New Jim Crow, but in various expressions and to various degrees throughout American political culture. The notion of an American “melting pot,” of course, rhetorically participates in nativist proclivities.
Lazarus had learned the nativist sting in the anti-Semitism she experienced from her earliest years to her last. She also understood the breadth of nativism and the threat it posed to the whither of normative patriotism. No wonder she, an heir of Lincoln’s remade patriotism of equality, began her sonnet with a repentant refusal, a clarion “Not…”!
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
America’s fame is not to be that. With personal experience as pedagogue, Emma prophesized what she knew. Conquering had never been confined to military might alone. It happens economically; it happens culturally; and in these ways, it happens most craftily. Listen.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, . . .
She reserves her most poignant criticism for the cultural “pomp” that had formed the pedestal for the entire edifice of aristocratic economy and culture upon which American nativism, upon which Western civilization through the centuries, had regularly built. Empire and its colonial aspirations have, from of old, stood sturdily upon such pomp. So has the quest for American exceptionalism, for American “greatness.” Emma bids us turn repentantly away from this temptation.
From this “Mother of Exiles,” however, “from her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome.” Lazarus generates a pluralist hospitality of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses that takes its place within the normative constellation of American patriotism. At the dawn of the 20th century Emma dedicated normative patriotism, continually threatened by nativist proclivities, to that last “great task remaining before us,” as Lincoln had recorded it, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” This is the beacon path beyond so-called American “greatness” toward genuine American goodness.3
In the half century after Lazarus, American patriots would travel the world engaging justifiably in two world wars in order that such government, normed by worldwide welcome, would not perish from the earth. Nativism, nevertheless, would perdure, even flourish, here at home. It fell to another thirty-four-year-old American, this time to an African American pastor with a dream, to lead the unfinished work of hope against America’s persistent proclivity toward nativist patriotism.
- For the full text of the famous poem, for an excellent resource for Emma Lazarus’s life, and for a brief and competent critical analysis of her poetic contribution to American public life, see http://www.jwa.org/exhibits/lazarus/ (accessed May, 13, 2003).
- See Michael Walzer’s analysis of nativism and its different manifestations and of Rousseauian republicanism in “What Does It Mean to Be an ‘American’?” in The American Intellectual Tradition, ed. David Hollinger and Charles Capper, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 2:391-393. For a brief critical analysis of classic republicanism, see Gary M. Simpson, Critical Social Theory: Political Reason, Civil Society, and Christian Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002) 115-118.
- For the long debate between American goodness and greatness see Robert Bellah, et al., The Good Society (New York: Vintage, 1991).
aka SweetLips 