How a person perceives technological failure is also deeply tied to that person’s level of trust in institutions like government. This is also why the Statue of Liberty lighting debacle is particularly fertile for metaphor: because it involved the technological failure of a deeply symbolic national icon—an icon which is managed by an agency that has itself become an emblem of the fight against the symbolic extinguishing of liberty's light.
Here’s how Emma Lazarus describes what that light represents in her 1883 poem, “The New Colossus,” which was engraved in bronze and affixed to the base of the statue in 1903:
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 mild 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, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
It wasn’t just Lazarus’s poem that made the statue an icon of immigration, it was the actual experience of the 12 million immigrants who entered the United States by way of Ellis Island, many of whom describe laying eyes on the statue as a defining moment in their lives. On the decks of boats entering New York Harbor, crowds of newcomers to the United States would dance and weep for joy. This happened even in terrible weather. Seymour Rexsite, who came to the United States from Poland when he was 8, described approaching Ellis Island in a miserable, driving rainstorm. “Everybody was on deck, no matter, they didn't mind the rain at all,” Rexsite told the Associated Press in 1986 at the time of the statue’s centennial. “Just to cheer that they came, they came to America.”
--Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic
