Miss Liberty

Miss Liberty is a 1949 Broadway musical with a book by Robert E. Sherwood and music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. It is based on the sculpting of the Statue of Liberty in 1886. The score includes the song "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor", a musical setting of Emma Lazarus's sonnet "The New Colossus" (1883), which was placed at the base of the monument in 1903.

Plot

In 1885, New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett assigns novice reporter Horace Miller to find the woman who served as Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi's model for the Statue of Liberty. In the artist's Paris studio, Miller sees a photograph of Monique DuPont and mistakenly believes she was the one. Bennett arranges for her and her grandmother to accompany Horace back to New York City, where she becomes a media darling. When rival publisher Joseph Pulitzer discovers it was Bartholdi's mother who actually posed for him, he exposes Monique as a fraud in his New York World. She faces deportation until a sympathetic Pulitzer comes to her rescue, paving the way for her to plan a future with Horace, who jilts his American girlfriend Maisie Doll in favor of the French beauty.