The statue, a gift to America from the people of France, was unveiled in 1886 but it was not until 1903 that these words, written 20 years earlier by a then well-known New York poet, became part of the Statue of Liberty.

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.”

Lazarus was not a surprising choice to contribute to the auction; she was a frequent contributor to literary magazines, had published several books, and belonged to literary circles that included Ralph Waldo Emmerson. The daughter of sugar refiner Moses Lazarus, Emma was also a member of New York’s Jewish social elite. In fact, her family could trace its roots back to the first Jewish settlers in New York, a group of 23 Sephardic Jewish refugees who arrived in New York in 1654, after fleeing the Portuguese takeover of the Dutch colony in what is now Brazil.

Yet it was a more immediate Jewish refugee crisis that most likely inspired her to find a “Mother of Exiles” in what was supposed to be a “Statue of Liberty.” The Russian pogroms of the early 1880s and the flood of poor Russian Jewish immigrants and refugees arriving in New York inspired Lazarus to start working with the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, volunteering as an aide to newly arrived immigrants at Ward’s Island, and to help establish the Hebrew Technical Institute.

Yet that particular poem would remain quietly buried in the obscure exhibition catalog for the next several years. Although the World published the poem after the exhibition, the Times did not. No public mention was made of the poem at the statue’s dedication in 1886. In fact, Lazarus was in Europe when the statue was unveiled, and she died, likely from Hodgkin’s disease, shortly after her return in 1887. Her warm obituaries do not mention “The New Colossus” either

It was Lazarus’s friend, Georgina Schuyler, who reunited the words and the statue in 1903. In honor of her friend, she had a plaque inscribed with the poem installed inside the statue’s base. It was then that The New York Times published the poem for the first time, as did the New-York Daily Tribune.

Lazarus’s interpretation of the statue, a subtle shift from the meaning its creators gave it, has endured. Perhaps this is because she was not the only one to see it that way. In 1903, when the poem was installed, 600,000 immigrants came through Ellis Island (at its peak in 1907 one million people came through). Each of them had a chance to ponder the meaning of the oxidizing copper sculpture as their ships arrived in New York harbor. The newly arrived immigrant looking up at the Statue of Liberty is one of the lasting images of the era of Ellis Island immigration.