Notes on a Visit to the Statue of Liberty

My nephew just graduated high school, and for his present he wanted to see New York City. He lives in Nebraska, so this is no mean feat. Yesterday I had a blast taking him and his parents around the city to various sights in lower Manhattan, including the Statue of Liberty.

I went there on my first visit to Manhattan thirty years ago, and have taken friends and family and my own kids there a few times since. I was not prepared for my emotional reaction on this go around, however. As the ferry boat got closer to the statue, which is a truly awe inspiring object in its own right, I felt tears welling up in my eyes and started to shudder.

The passengers on the ferry were a diverse, polyglot group of families from different parts of the world, mostly in high spirits. On the way in I listened to the conversation in Italian of the family behind me, hearing a language that had rung out from countless people approaching the Statue back in the heyday of Ellis Island. Seeing the statue made me think of my own ancestors, speaking a foreign language and having this be their greeting to a new country, a new country that would the home of descendants like me that they would never meet or even be able to imagine.

Thinking about that in the context of the brutal attacks on immigrants shook me, but not as much as another thought. Because we associate the Statue with immigration, we think of her torch as welcoming people in. However, the statue is called “Liberty Enlightening the World,” and she is moving forward, stepping out to share her light. The idea for it came from a French abolitionist, and the Statue cannot and should not be separated from its historical context. The idea came in the wake of the Union victory in the Civil War, as well as France (in 1871) re-establishing itself as a democracy after the reign of Louis Napoleon. This was a gift from one republic to another at a time when democracy was much the exception.

Liberty walks forward because she is supposed to share the light of democracy with the world. The French planners of the Statue saw the United States as an exemplar to be imitated in its devotion to what Lincoln had called “a government for the people, by the people.” That idea had survived its biggest test on the battlefields of the Civil War. It had overcome twenty years of autocracy in France.

I started to cry because it hit me that my country may no longer represent that idea to the world. Our allies, who once too believed in this idea of America, are scrambling to realign themselves. A nation founded in universals has lowered itself into the gutter of blood and soil nationalism. America has never fully lived up to its promise, but getting rid of the pretense that it’s even trying to has been horrifying. I am writing this on a day when Donald Trump is literally sending in the Marines to an American city to squelch dissent against him and is having a massive military parade in his honor while two progressive state legislators in Minnesota were assassinated in their homes.

Despite the awful events of today, I feel more hopeful than I did yesterday on Liberty Island. The “No Kings” protests took place everywhere, even in supposedly deep-red areas. My social media feed is full “blue dot” friends part of big crowds in places like Georgia and Texas. It’s becoming clearer that the lower levels of resistance to Trump so far this time around have more to do with the oligarchs and their media arms bending the knee than it does with a change in mentality among regular people. Today’s protests show that a huge portion of our country still believes America ought to shine the light of liberty and democracy to the world. The idea that we were doing so in 1886 or even 1986 may have been arrogant, but I hope we stay on the path to a time when Americans can feel that way without any reservations. In the meantime, let’s try to live up to the belief that put the Statue of Liberty on its pedestal in the first place.