Statue of Liberty

This guide to the Statue of Liberty in New York traces how the poem now tied to the monument almost never existed. In 1883, fundraisers asked Emma Lazarus, a poet who spent her days helping Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, to donate a poem for the pedestal fund, and she refused. You'll hear how a fellow writer, Constance Cary Harrison, persuaded her to change her mind, and what happened to the sonnet after it was read at a fundraising auction. It follows Lazarus's own story past the statue's 1886 dedication, in which her poem played no part at all.