Donald Trump’s revealing query this week, wondering why America welcomes immigrants from what he calls ‘shithole countries,’ got me to thinking about Emma Lazarus. Ms. Lazarus was the prodigiously brilliant author of The New Colossus, the poem memorialized on our Statue of Liberty. Both the statue and the poem were meant to give expression to an ideal of America that generation upon generation of Americans has striven to realize – that of a republican people who once knew bondage and now strive to afford all of their number, in more or less equal measure, the full material prerequisites to a productive and political liberty worthy of the name. Those prerequisites have always included, not only suffrage and representative government, but also affordable land, capital, and education.
The original republican ideal as just articulated, by the time that Ms. Lazarus first penned her poem, had birthed the ‘free soil’ Republican Party of Senator Abraham Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution passed during the post- Civil War era of Reconstruction, the mid- and post- Civil War era Homestead Acts that conveyed land free of charge to all who were willing to make it productive, and the mid- and post- Civil War era Land Grant Acts that endowed tuition-free institutions of higher learning – universities – in literally every state of our Union. This is what republicanism meant and what Republican statespersons stood for, and in this sense Ms. Lazarus was both as republican and Republican as she was brilliant and accomplished.
It is striking, in this light, that Ms. Lazarus also was a follower of Henry George's, a family relation of Benjamin Cardozo‘s, and a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson's. Mr. George was the last globally celebrated American economist who was fully as devoted to equal material, not just formal opportunity as he was to scientific rigor. Mr. Cardozo was the last globally celebrated American jurist who was fully as devoted to a body of law that grew in tandem with a developing democratic polity actuated by high ideals as he was to legal tradition. And Mr. Emerson, of course, was the most world renowned of American public philosophers, as joyfully welcoming of what our great growing polyglot culture was becoming as he was loving of all of the best of the pasts that fed into it.
Ms. Lazarus was as remarkable in her realms as these, her relations and friends were in theirs. Descended from Ashkenazi and Sephardic forebears who had immigrated to America from then-’shithole’ Germany and Portugal before there was any idea of a United States, she was writing lyric poetry by age 11 and publishing, by age 18, work she had written from ages 14 through 17. She also was fluent in multiple languages, and published English translations of much of the now-classic poetry of Europe along with her own work. One hardly could imagine a more fitting bard to speak for America to the world via ‘Lady Liberty’ in New York Harbor.
But look now how the mighty have fallen. Those who now call themselves ‘Republicans’ do all in their power to deprive the citizenry not only of remuneratively productive opportunity, basic education and minimal standards of health, but also of voting and representation rights themselves. Their favored economists bring inequality, plutocracy, and financial calamity; their preferred jurists are bloggers not lawyers; and their favored ‘philosophers,’ such as they are, are bizarre cult-leaders preaching ‘the virtue of selfishness.’ These aren’t authentic republicans or even Americans; they’re hostile Klingons.
Or, perhaps better put, they are ‘assholes,’ in the technical sense of that term elaborated by my friend Aaron James: people who ‘[allow themselves] to enjoy special advantages in social relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes [them] against the complaints of other people.’ When you read that phrase, do you think of the President whose family came here from once-’shithole’ Ireland, who wrote A Nation of Immigrants, or of the ‘President’ whose family came here from once-’shithole’ Scotland and Germany, who published the self-promoting, ghostwritten Art of the Deal? Do you think of Henry George, who taught that rents should accrue to us all, or of the slumlord’s son in our White House who claims all for himself. I think of the latter – the 20th century New Yorker who shrivels in moral and intellectual comparison to the 19th century New Yorker who penned The New Colossus. I think, in other words, of him I shall henceforth call ‘President Shithole.’
I would rather we all think of someone, and something, more truly American than our now cretinous joke of a ‘President’ and ‘Republican’-led Congress. As our economy falls ever further from Henry Georgian fairness; as our legal and political cultures fall ever further from Benjamin Cardozan justice; and as our shared moral and intellectual life falls ever further from one of joyful loving wonder à la Emerson to one of small-minded, hard-hearted fear and suspicion à la Bull Connor, it would be lovely if we all might remember and yes, resurrect, Emma Lazarus and the statue that calls her words out to a still-broken world:
The New Colossus
By Emma Lazarus
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!’