26 May—The Hearst RepublicanAmerican’s opinion editor—or whoever is responsible for putting the ever-more-embarrassing editorial page together these days—evidently reckons that repetition is indeed the mother of learning and that not enough readers realize that “Climate change occurred well before the use of fossil fuels.” So he, she, it, or they today reran a letter to the editor with that title which had been published only a couple of days ago in the Sunday rag. Yes, it’s the very same letter, verbatim. And it’s absolutely true.

Another Hearst RepublicanAmerican editor (assuming there are other—or any—real editors at that rag) taught readers in today’s number in the “Today in history” column that “On this date [in] 1942 President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924, which barred immigration from Asia and restricted the total number of immigrants from other parts of the world to 165,000 annually.”

And that takes us to the topic of this disquisition, Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus.” (Not to be confused or conflated with Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.” Of course not.)

Emma Lazarus, who died at 38 in 1887, probably from Hodgkin’s lymphoma, wrote “The New Colossus” in 1883 to help raise funds for the construction of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty on what was then known as Bedloe’s Island, which arrived in 1885 in 50 pieces. [It’s still Bedloe’s Island rather than Liberty Island. Ed.] The poem wasn’t intended to be posted on a pedestal wall and in fact it was only in 1903 that it was bronzed, so to speak, and mounted in the pedestal.

This is it:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, 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 world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Getting past Emma’s rather self-consciously stilted verbiage, not uncommon for poetry in those days, let’s look at what she says, from “Glows world-wide welcome” to “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”

Put simply, Emma Lazarus didn’t know what she was rhapsodizing about. Because from the earliest days of the republic—the Naturalization Act of 1790 which restricted citizenship to “free white person[s]” of “good character”—through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (just the year before Emma’s paean to immigration) which banned all Chinese laborers—immigrants have been welcomed to our teeming shore only grudgingly. If at all.

Emma’s wretched refuse—largely Jews, Catholics, and Asians—had it especially tough until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (a.k.a. the Hart-Celler Act), signed into law by Lyndon Johnson, abolished quotas based on race and national origin.

Calvin Coolidge’s 1924 Immigration Act, then, was merely another instance of xenophobia. So Donald Trump’s abusive, inhumane immigration policies that do end-runs around Hart-Celler are nothing new. Just worse.

And the latest word from Mar-a-Lago is that Trump wants the National Park Service to remove the New Colossus plaque from the pedestal. But not because of the immigration allusions or the verbosity he can’t understand. Rather, he found an obvious mistake in it.

“The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame” obviously alludes to Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, Trump figures, so the plaque has no place in New York or New Jersey.

Funny that nobody else had noticed Emma’s error. Must be because she was actually alluding to Manhattan Island, regarded as New York City back then (and still, to many non-Manhattanites), and Brooklyn, which was a city unto itself until 1898, when it was consolidated into the City of New York as one of its five boroughs . . .