Thomas Bailey Aldrich in Ellis Island Era Immigration
Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907) was a prominent 19th-century American writer. Aldrich's most popular work was The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), a quasi-biographical novel based on Aldrich's own rambunctious childhood in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Mark Twain, a friend and admirer of Aldrich, later said that the story's eponymous hero provided him with the inspiration for the character Tom Sawyer.
In 1895, Aldrich published "Unguarded Gates," a poem that might be read as a nativist riposte to Emma Lazarus' famous sonnet, "The New Colossus." Like Lazarus, Aldrich built his poem around the iconic image of the Statue of Liberty. Aldrich, however, invoked the statue to question immigration, not to celebrate it:
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates
And through them presses a wild motley throng
Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes
Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho
Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav
Flying the Old World's poverty and scorn
These bringing with them unknown gods and rites
Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws
In street and alley what strange tongues are loud
Accents of menace alien to our air
Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well
To leave the gates unguarded?