Welcome to the American Story.

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

The American Story Podcast is made possible through listener donations.

You can simply visit our website at the

American Story Podcast.org and click donate. That's the American Story Podcast.org.

Thanks to all of you in the land of the free who have given generously so that we can produce more stories and reach more listeners.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one Mother of Exiles.

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 tossed to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

These are among the most world famous lines of any work of American literature, and whoever hears

or reads them identifies them immediately with the most famous statue in America.

But that is usually where the familiarity ends.

Many serendipities would be needed before these lines would come not just to be identified with the statue,

but to be inseparable from it in the eyes of the world.

What Americans popularly call the Statue of Liberty, the French creator of the statue, had called Liberty enlightening the world. It was to be a monumental gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of America to commemorate

the Centennial of the Declaration of Independence and raised before the whole world

the universal cause of liberty that bound France and America together. The statue was

financed by the French people and the American people were to provide the

pedestal. This is where these famous lines come into the story.

...