“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ”

They are the words inscribed on a plaque at the Statue of Liberty. For many, these words are proof that welcoming immigrants and refugees is as fundamental to what it means to be American as the idea of “liberty” itself

The statue’s original name, “Liberty Enlightening the World” gives us an idea of what the project’s French backer, political thinker Édouard René Lefèbvre de Laboulaye, and his sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, intended the sculpture to personify. Not just “liberty” itself, but also the idea that American “liberty” is a shining light guiding the whole world from the harbor of the young democracy’s largest city.

In 1875 Laboulaye formally announced the gift and set up an agreement in which the French people would contribute to the cost of construction of the sculpture, while the American people (rather than the government) would pay for the statue’s pedestal.

Fundraising for the pedestal was difficult. To build up excitement, parts of the statue appeared in various exhibitions and in public places. Committees were formed, meetings were held, and figurines of the statue were sold. It would take ten years and the intervention of publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who printed the name of every single contributor in his fledgling paper the World, no matter how small the donation, to raise the amount needed to realize a pedestal designed by Richard Morris Hunt. (Pulitzer, the true hero of the pedestal, raised $100,000 in donations ranging from 5c to $250 between March and August of 1885, in the process increasing his paper’s circulation, and adding an image of the statue to its masthead.)

In December of 1883, an Art Loan Exhibition was held at New York’s Academy of Design to help raise money for the pedestal. The exhibition and auction featured fine art, lace, stained glass, armor, and antique furniture, as well as literary manuscripts.

According to The New York Times nearly 1,500 people attended the formal opening. After a choir sang “Hymn to Liberty,” the exhibition’s director, Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, read a sonnet written for the exhibition catalog by a poet named Emma Lazarus called “The New Colossus.” Following her death, the now-famous poem would be inscribed on the statue's base in 1903.

The Statue was only unveiled in 1886 after many years of tireless fundraising.