America's Prophet (20 page)

Was Bartholdi aware of this lineage? Did he purposefully connect
Liberty
’s nimbus to Moses?

“I’m not sure where he came up with this idea,” Moreno said. “Was it the Hebrews, the Greeks? But it seems to me that he probably got it from Judeo-Christian sources, because the nimbus constantly resonated in European thought. Even if Bartholdi himself didn’t go to Rome to see Michelangelo’s
Moses,
his friends did. And they were sharing ideas.”

The statue’s most unusual symbol may represent its most direct link to Exodus. Traditional depictions of Roman Libertas show her left arm down at her side, holding a broken jug, signifying the slaves’ release. Bartholdi’s earliest clay model includes a jug, which he later replaced with a broken chain. The final statue shows Liberty holding a singular rectangular tablet, inscribed with
JULY IV MDCCLXXVI
, or
July 4, 1776. Tablets were not common in classical art and were introduced into European art in conjunction with one story, Moses carrying the Ten Commandments down Mount Sinai.

In Exodus 24, God summons Moses up Mount Sinai and promises to give him “the stone tablets with the teachings and commandments which I have inscribed.” Exodus 32 says that the tablets were inscribed on both sides. The tablets are elsewhere referred to in the text as tablets of stone, testimony, or law, and are often translated as the
tables
of stone. But the Bible never describes their composition or shape. Traditional Judaism suggests they were made of blue sapphire as a reminder of God’s heavenly throne; others believe they were transparent. As for shape, some commentators have said they were sharp-edged cubes; others that they were separate pieces of oblong stone. Michelangelo’s
Moses,
for instance, sculpted in 1513, holds two stacked rectangular tablets. The familiar depiction of side-by-side, flat stone tablets with semicircular tops containing the first five commandments on one face and the second five on the other face is not found anywhere in the Bible. These round-top tablets seem to have entered Christian art in the Middle Ages to reflect the diptych, a popular form of writing tablet in which two waxed boards were joined together by a hinge.

Regardless of their shape, Moses lugs the tablets down the mountain, but upon eyeing the Israelites frolicking with the golden calf, he “hurled the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain.” The move is shocking: Moses purposefully destroys the only physical manifestation of God’s commitment to protect his people. But he goes further. He burns the golden calf, grinds the charred remains into powder, sprinkles the ashes into water, and forces the Israelites to drink their infidelity. Suddenly the great liberator has become a fanatic. “Whoever is for the Lord, come here!” he announces. The Levites step forward, and Moses sends them on
a purge. “Go back and forth throughout the camp, slay brother, neighbor, and kin.” Having completed his own God-like version of the tenth plague, Moses then returns to the mountain and asks God to forgive the remaining people. God adds his own unspecified plague but ultimately accepts Moses’ plea. The covenant between God and humans is restored. God asks Moses to carve two more tablets, and once more he inscribes them. This new set of tablets is stored in the wooden ark that Moses constructs; this ark is then installed in the temple that Solomon builds in Jerusalem; and this vault later becomes the “lost ark” that goes missing for more than two thousand years.

The significance of the Statue of Liberty holding a tablet of law has not been lost on commentators over the years. French historian Pierre Provoyeur wrote that Bartholdi must have conceived the statue as a “second Moses.” “
Liberty
carried the Tables of the Law in her left arm, while her forehead shone with light like the prophet’s on Mount Sinai.” Marvin Trachtenberg, in his definitive account of the statue, writes: “
Liberty
’s tablet—particularly the way it is borne forward—is an unmistakable allusion not only to political events but to the great Mosaic tradition.” He adds, “Not only does she carry the tablet of the patriarch but her radiant crown also may allude to the ‘rays of light’ about his face after revelation.” The statue, he concludes, is “a seer and a prophetess.”

I asked Barry Moreno if he agreed.

“Even though the outer form of the statue is pagan,” he said, “she was devised in a Judeo-Christian society in which the traditions of the Jewish Bible are richly powerful. The tablet is suggestive of the twelve tablets of Roman law as well as the Code of Hammurabi, but in Western society, the great symbol of the law is Mosaic. So to me, the tablets symbolize constitutional law. The goddess of freedom promises to enlighten the world with freedom, but then she has this
tablet of law, reminding us that there are strict precepts. There is no absolute freedom, but rather limitations.”

“But doesn’t the tablet say 1776, not 1787?”

“Yes, it clearly invokes the Declaration of Independence. But to me the statue has external symbols and internal symbols. There are the ostensible reasons, and there are the secret meanings the statue conveys. Freedom from England is one of the outward messages, but freedom from slavery, whether the Exodus or the Civil War, is one of the more subtle messages.”

“The Moses story is about the tension between freedom and law,” I said, “between the exhilaration of the Exodus moment followed by the constriction of the Sinai moment. And it seems to me that you can see this tension in the Statue of Liberty, from the broken chain at her feet to the tablet in her arm to the light around her head. She perfectly embodies the American story—and the Mosaic story.”

“Precisely,” Moreno said. “That’s what Laboulaye was trying to say, and he’s the real intellectual force behind the statue. His main goal was to increase freedom in France but not so much that it led to anarchism, violence, and coups d’etat. He looked to America and saw a totally open society, yet one that had prevented disorderly conduct. Even with the Civil War, Americans had somehow managed to preserve the Constitution without a revolution. It was a miracle.”

“So even before Americans set about reinterpreting the statue, the French viewed the United States as a Promised Land.”

“Yes, I think they felt Americans had achieved the promise.”

THE PEDESTAL IS
an engineering marvel nearly equal to that of the statue. Built over a massive, tapering block of concrete fifty-two feet tall and ninety-one feet square at the bottom, the six-story ped
estal is probably strong enough to withstand nuclear attack. Its walls are eight to nineteen feet thick, made entirely of concrete, covered with Connecticut granite. It narrows to forty-three square feet under the statue’s feet. The pedestal’s labyrinthine interiors, a Rube Goldberg–like maze of black staircases, elevator shafts, and steel beams, remind me of underground bunkers from the Cold War. The base involved by far the largest use of concrete at the time—twenty-seven thousand tons—and is said to have marked a turning point in the revival of Roman-style concrete as a popular building material in the United States.

Barry Moreno led me to a narrow staircase and we began climbing the 156 steps. Giant conical bolts and sixteen steel tie-rods fill the walls and open spaces, securing the 450,000-pound statue to the pedestal. Steel cables and a glass elevator shoot up through the middle. The effect is rather like rock climbing through a pocket watch. I felt a little light-headed from the sharp turns and elevation. Even more unsettling was that every gust of wind outside causes the tie-rods to reverberate like twangs on a mouth harp. The statue was generations ahead of its time with a tension-flex system that lets the body sway five inches and the arm up to eight.
Liberty
has withstood two category-three hurricanes, and Barry believes it could weather a category-five.

As we climbed, we talked about how the statue had become a symbol of immigrant America. The reason for that belongs largely to a poem that linked the Statue of Liberty with the Mosaic tradition of her adopted homeland.

Emma Lazarus, the poem’s author, was an unlikely champion of “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.” The daughter of one of the wealthiest Jews in New York City, the Portuguese sugar tycoon Moses Lazarus, the never-married Emma lived with her six siblings
in elegant, Judaism-free splendor in New York society. Though she was raised to keep Mosaic law, she told Ralph Waldo Emerson’s daughter that her family “no longer keep the law, but Christian institutions don’t interest her either.” All that changed on July 29, 1881, when a steamer arrived in New York Harbor containing 250 Russian Jews fleeing pogroms triggered by the assassination of Czar Alexander II. Nearly 170 Jewish communities were attacked and 20,000 Jewish homes destroyed. The events spurred the largest mass migration of Jews since the Exodus. Between 1881 and 1914, 2 million eastern European Jews, most from Russia, Romania, and Austria-Hungary, arrived in the United States.

By December 1881, Wards Island, a dilapidated asylum in the East River, had become the dumping ground for hundreds of these refugees. The following March, Emma Lazarus made her first visit there. Her impressions were recorded the following day in the
New York Times
. Never before were prayers of gratitude more genuine, wrote the reporter, believed to be Lazarus, “when after a new exodus, and a new persecution…, these stalwart young representatives of the oldest civilization in existence met to sing the songs of Zion in a strange land.” The visit sparked an emotional Jewish awakening in Emma. “The Jewish Question which I plunged into so recklessly & impulsively,” she wrote a friend, “has gradually absorbed more and more of my time & heart—It opens up such enormous vistas in the Past & Future and is so palpitatingly alive at the moment.” She began studying Hebrew; she joined delegations to the State Department on the Jewish question; she helped found the Jewish Technical Institute. And she composed a series of sixteen letters, published as “An Epistle to the Hebrews,” that called for two new exoduses—one to the Promised Land of old, in the Middle East; the other to the new Promised Land, in America.

In late summer 1883, the thirty-four-year-old Emma returned from a trip to Europe and received an invitation to contribute a poem to a fund-raising exhibition for something called
Liberty Enlightening the World
. She gave her stock reply: She was “unable to write for order.” But a writer friend pressed her. “Think of that Goddess standing on her pedestal down yonder in the bay, and holding her torch out to those Russian refugees of yours you are so fond of visiting.” Emma lit. The result was “The New Colossus.”

Even before the statue was complete, Emma performed a deft turnabout of the tensions between the goddess’s pagan ancestry and
the Hebraic iconography of her accoutrements. With her opening salvo, “Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,” Lazarus smashes the godless idol of the “old Colossus,” the Greek god Apollo who stood astride Rhodes. Then she rechristens—or, more accurately, re-Judaizes—the statue as “Mother of Exiles.” One of the Hebrew Bible’s consistent themes is that humans encounter God most intimately when they are in exile. Abraham forms his alliance with God when he leaves his native land and his father’s house to go forth to the land God promises him. Moses encounters God in the burning bush during his self-imposed exile, after he leaves his native land and his surrogate grandfather’s house and flees into the desert. The Israelites form their covenant with God during their forty years in exile, after departing their native land and their fathers’ homes and crossing into the wilderness. The pattern is later repeated in Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome.

But exile is not just a physical state, the Bible suggests; it’s a moral one. At Mount Sinai, God specifically uses the Israelites’ exile in Egypt as a foundation of their identity and a core reason that they should be compassionate toward others. “You shall not oppress a stranger,” God says in Exodus 23, “for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” The idea that people who were once exiled have a moral imperative to care for future exiles is the primary lesson Emma Lazarus drew from the Israelites. Her genius was to fuse this biblical value with the story of America, then attribute both to the Statue of Liberty. As the great prophet of exiles, Moses becomes a bridge linking the Bible with
Liberty
, the mother of exiles. Emma Lazarus, a Sephardic aristocrat with little identification with the Jews, who returns from her own exile from her faith to become a passionate leader of her people, bears so many similarities with Moses that the connection becomes even more profound.

Lazarus’s “Mother of Exiles” also channels Moses’ showdown with the pharaoh. Just as the exiled Israelite cries to the mighty superpower, “Let my people go,” so
Liberty
has a similar confrontation with entrenched status: “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp.” A society must gauge its worth not by power, the statue insists, but by how it treats its strangers. Rejecting the “conquering limbs” of the past,
Liberty
offers an outstretched arm. “From her beacon-hand / Glows world-wide welcome;…‘Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’” Like Moses, the Mother of Exiles becomes the reborn child of privilege leading her “wretched,” “homeless” “refuse” of a people out of bondage into freedom. Lazarus’s poem is a masterful act of redefinition, rejecting the “brazen,” imprisoning godlessness of the past with the welcoming beacon of moral-centeredness in the future. A “mighty woman” heralds the dawn of God’s New Israel and lights its greatest “flame.”