In 1883, two years after Russian terrorists assassinated Czar Alexander II, compelling (in the scapegoating and pogrom aftermath) a mass migration of Russian and Polish Jews to the U.S. and England, Emma Lazarus composed “The New Colossus.” This sonnet, now inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty, contrasts old world and new, the “brazen” Apollo at the harbor at Rhodes and the statue called “Mother of Exiles” (1883).

Lazarus took hold of many pseudo-scientific descriptors of the immigrants of the late nineteenth century: Jews, Slavs, Italians, Irish, in such flash-point words as “teeming,” suggesting overwhelming fertility, and the enormous euphony of “wretched refuse,” connoting disease, filth, and garbage. The word “masses,” perhaps evoking the political radicalism that could plot and undermine, was neutralized by the vulnerability of “huddled.”