President Roosevelt rededicates Statue of Liberty, Oct. 28, 1936

On October 28, 1936, FDR rededicates the Statue of Liberty on its 50th anniversary. From the article:

"President Roosevelt rededicates Statue of Liberty, Oct. 28, 1936
Spectators on the Lower East Side in New York await a glimpse of President Franklin D. Roosevelt after Statue of Liberty observances, Oct. 28, 1936.

By ANDREW GLASS

10/28/2017 12:05 AM EDT

On this day in 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt — on his way to being easily reelected to the second of what would be a record-breaking four terms — rededicated the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor to mark the monument’s 50th anniversary. The statue, a gift to the people of the United States from the people of France, commemorates the Franco-American alliance during the American Revolution.

Roosevelt, a former Democratic governor of New York, noted in his 1,256-word address that President Grover Cleveland, who had also served as a Democratic governor of New York, accepted the gift on this day in 1886 “with the pledge that ‘we will not forget that liberty has here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected.’ During those 50 years,” the president added, “that covenant between ourselves and our most cherished convictions has not been broken.”

FDR also said: “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 fiber 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.

“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.”

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Finally, FDR asserted: “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.”