One hundred thirty-one years ago today, on October 28, 1886, The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World was dedicated. It was a gift from France, in recognition of our being a land of liberty .
In the intervening years, some of my ancestors, as well as my wife’s grandmothers and parents, entered the United States through Ellis Island, and were inspired by the sight of Lady Liberty as they sought new opportunities in the new world.
In commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the dedication of this statue, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed a gathering. I include his address in its entirety . I have italicized certain parts that deserve our attention today.
“Fifty years ago our old neighbor and friend from across the sea gave us this monument to stand at the principal eastern gateway to the New World. Grover Cleveland, President of the United States, accepted this gift with the pledge that ‘We will not forget that liberty has here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected.’ During those fifty years that covenant between ourselves and our most cherished convictions has not been broken.
“Four hundred years ago, in Europe as well as in Asia, there was little hope of liberty for the average men of courage and goodwill. The ambitions of a ruling class and the times alike conspired against liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of the person, liberty of economic opportunity. Wars, dynastic and religious, had exhausted both the substance and the tolerance of the Old World. There was neither economic nor political liberty—nor any hope for either.
“Then came one of the great ironies of history. Rulers needed to find gold to pay their armies and increase their power over the common men. The seamen they sent to find that gold found instead the way of escape for the common man from those rulers. What they found over the Western horizon was not the silk and jewels of Cathay but mankind’s second chance—a chance to create a new world after he had almost spoiled an old one.
“And the Almighty seems purposefully to have withheld that second chance until the time when men would most need and appreciate liberty, the time when men would be enlightened enough to establish it on foundations sound enough to maintain it.
“For over three centuries a steady stream of men, women and children followed the beacon of liberty which this light symbolizes. They brought to us strength and moral fibre developed in a civilization centuries old but fired anew by the dream of a better life in America. They brought to one new country the cultures of a hundred old ones.
“It has not been sufficiently emphasized in the teaching of our history that the overwhelming majority of those who came from the Nations of the Old World to our American shores were not the laggards, not the timorous, not the failures. They were men and women who had the supreme courage to strike out for themselves, to abandon language and relatives, to start at the bottom without influence, without money and without knowledge of life in a very young civilization. We can say for all America what the Californians say of the Forty-Niners: “The cowards never started and the weak died by the way.”
“Perhaps Providence did prepare this American continent to be a place of the second chance. Certainly, millions of men and women have made it that. They adopted this homeland because in this land they found a home in which the things they most desired could be theirs—freedom of opportunity, freedom of thought, freedom to worship God. Here they found life because here there was freedom to live.
“It is the memory of all these eager seeking millions that makes this one of America’s places of great romance. Looking down this great harbor I like to think of the countless numbers of inbound vessels that have made this port. I like to think of the men and women who, with the break of dawn off Sandy Hook, have strained their eyes to the west for a first glimpse of the New World.
“They came to us—most of them—in steerage. But they, in their humble quarters, saw things in these strange horizons which were denied to the eyes of those few who traveled in greater luxury.
“They came to us speaking many tongues—but a single language, the universal language of human aspiration.
“How well their hopes were justified is proved by the record of what they achieved. They not only found freedom in the New World, but by their effort and devotion they made the New World’s freedom safer, richer, more far-reaching, more capable of growth.
“Within this present generation, that stream from abroad has largely stopped. We have within our shores today the materials out of which we shall continue to build an even better home for liberty.
“We take satisfaction in the thought that those who have left their native land to join us may still retain here their affection for some things left behind—old customs, old language, old friends. Looking to the future, they wisely choose that their children shall live in the new language and in the new customs of this new people. And those children more and more realize their common destiny in America. That is true whether their forebears came past this place eight generations ago or only one.
“The realization that we are all bound together by hope of a common future rather than by reverence for a common past has helped us to build upon this continent a unity unapproached in any similar area or population in the whole world. For all our millions of square miles, for all our millions of people, there ‘is a unity in language and speech, in law and in economics, in education and in general purpose, which nowhere finds its match.
“It was the hope of those who gave us this Statue and the hope of the American people in receiving it that the Goddess of Liberty and the Goddess of Peace were the same.
“The grandfather of my old friend the French Ambassador, and those who helped him make this gift possible, were citizens of a great sister Republic established on the principle of the democratic form of government. Citizens of all democracies unite in their desire for peace. Grover Cleveland recognized that unity of purpose on this spot fifty years ago.
“He suggested that liberty enlightening the world would extend her rays from these shores to every other Nation.
“Today that symbolism should be broadened. To the message of liberty which America sends to all the world must be added her message of peace.
“Even in times as troubled and uncertain as these, I still hold to the faith that a better civilization than any we have known is in store for America and by our example, perhaps, for the world. Here destiny seems to have taken a long look. Into this continental reservoir there has been poured untold and untapped wealth of human resources. Out of that reservoir, out of the melting pot, the rich promise which the New World held out to those who came to it from many lands is finding fulfillment.
“The richness of the promise has not run out. If we keep the faith for our day as those who came before us kept the faith for theirs, then you and I can smile with confidence into the future.
“It is fitting, therefore, that this should be a service of rededication to the liberty and the peace which this Statue symbolizes. Liberty and peace are living things. In each generation—if they are to be maintained— they must be guarded and vitalized anew.
“We do only a small part of our duty to America when we glory in the great past. Patriotism that stops with that is a too-easy patriotism— a patriotism out of step with the patriots themselves. For each generation the more patriotic part is to carry forward American freedom and American peace by making them living facts in a living present.
“To that we can, we do, rededicate ourselves.”
Relighting the Statue of Liberty, July 3, 1986, Ronald Reagan said:
“I’ve always thought that a Providential Hand had something to do with the founding of this country, that God had His reasons for placing this land here between two great oceans to be found by a certain kind of people.”
John Adams wrote in his notes on A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765:
“I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:
“America is another name for opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of Divine Providence in behalf of the human race.”
A common theme in The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Christ, is that America is a choice land.
The prophet known as “the Brother of Jared,” writing some 2200 years before Christ, recorded: “Behold, this is a choice land, and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall be free from bondage, and from captivity, and from all other nations under heaven, if they will but serve the God of the land, who is Jesus Christ, who hath been manifested by the things which we have written”(Ether 2:12). He also referred to the Americas as a choice land “which the Lord God had preserved for a righteous people” (Ether 2:7).
Later in the Jaredite civilization, a reminder was given for our benefit as well as for those in those times: “And thus the Lord did pour out his blessings upon this land, which was choice above all other lands; and he commanded that whoso should possess the land should possess it unto the Lord, or they should be destroyed when they were ripened in iniquity; for upon such, saith the Lord: I will pour out the fulness of my wrath” (Ether 9:20).
In the sixth century before Christ, another civilization was led to the Americas from Jerusalem, with the promise: “thou beholdest that the Gentiles [the Europeans] who have gone forth out of captivity, and have been lifted up by the power of God above all other nations, upon the face of the land which is choice above all other lands, which is the land that the Lord God hath covenanted with thy father that his seed should have for the land of their inheritance; wherefore, thou seest that the Lord God will not suffer that the Gentiles will utterly destroy … thy seed [Native Americans]” (1 Nephi 13:30; comments in brackets are mine).
As we commemorate the anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, may we remember the promise of America, as we have been reminded, both by great Americans and by Book of Mormon prophets who saw the destiny of America.
References:
Adams J, A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law, 1765. http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/a-dissertation-on-the-canon-and-feudal-law/
Emerson RW, American Civilization, http://www.bartleby.com/90/1113.html.
Federer WJ, American Minute, October 28, 2017. http://web-extract.constantcontact.com/v1/social_annotation?permalink_uri=2gQ1zmJ&image_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmlsvc01-prod.s3.amazonaws.com%2F766c6672201%2F069ec989-88bd-4c0d-89fa-6dfa629a5f84.jpg%3Fver%3D1446431291000. Thanks to Bill for bringing this anniversary to our attention.
Reagan RW, Remarks on Relighting the Torch of the Statue of Liberty, 1986 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=37550.
Roosevelt FD, Address on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, 1936 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15210. All italics are mine.
The Book of Mormon, Another Testament of Christ.
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