Ellis Island remains associated in the American imagination with the gates to the Promised Land. This association was celebrated in a score of novels and autobiographies written by immigrants, and is indelibly inscribed in the memories of millions of American families. That association was powerfully reinforced by the location, on nearby Bedloe’s Island, of what has claim to be the most famous statue in history - the Statue of Liberty. This colossal monument, the gift of the French people on the one hundredth anniversary of American independence, was the work of the illustrious French sculptor Frederic Bartholdi and the American architect Richard Morris Hunt. The competition for the inscription was, appropriately enough, won by an American-born girl of Russian-Jewish parents, Emma Lazarus:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her wild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp,” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”