Welcome to the American Story.

Stories about all the things that make America the country we know and love.

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subscribers this is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute. I call this one, I kissed the ground.

A steamer was docking in New York Harbor. It was 1903.

An illiterate Italian peasant picked up his six-year-old son Francesco

from the black dark hole of a creaking ship crammed with wretched praying terrorized immigrants.

Carried him up steep iron stairs to the deck and shouted,

Chico, look at that.

The boy could only see the crowds of people on their knees on deck, crying and rejoicing.

But his father cried,

that's the greatest light since the star of Bethlehem.

And the boy looked up and saw what he later described as a statue of a great lady

taller than a church steeple, a lamp over the land we were about to enter.

They had just spent 13 miserable degrading days in steerage, crossing a stormy Atlantic Ocean after leaving their home in Sicily.

Now they were looking up at the Statue of Liberty.

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