Chapter 6
In the beginning, the Statue of Liberty was as Muslim as Mecca. Based on a proposed lighthouse in the form of a female holding a raised torch that would stand at the mouth of the Suez Canal, the sculpture with nicknames ranging from Green Goddess to Mother of Exiles took a meandering path, through several world expos, to its ultimate destination in New York Harbor.
Enraptured by the idea of creating a modern sculpture on the scale of the ancient Sphinx and the pyramids that would guard the entrance of the soon-to-open 120-mile-long Suez Canal in Egypt, Auguste Bartholdi promoted his titanic vision to Ismail the Magnificent, the Khedive, or viceroy of Egypt, under Turkish rule.
The Khedive, whom Bartholdi had met at the Exposition Universelle of Paris in 1867 (where a working model of the canal was displayed), encouraged the sculptor, prompting him to spend two years grinding out sketches and models. When he was ready, Bartholdi presented the Khedive with a small prototype of his vision: Called Egypt (or Progress) Brings Light to Asia, it took the form of an Egyptian female slave grasping a torch high above her head. It would stand 86.5 feet tall and be positioned on a forty-six-foot-high pedestal. It would surpass the ancient Colossus of Rhodes in mere measurement and perhaps even real-world impact, serving as an electrified lighthouse. But the Khedive, as bored with the presentation as a blind man watching a silent movie, eventually passed on the project. Bartholdi was left a man without a country for his statue.
After the Egyptian project collapsed, Bartholdi connected with Edouard de Laboulaye, a public intellectual, leading expert on the U.S. Constitution, and popular explainer of America to France, much as the dapper Alistair Cooke was a century later to England. In 1865, Laboulaye had suggested a monument honoring the recent Union victory in the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment which had abolished slavery. Now, in Bartholdi, he saw an artist who could deliver a monument befitting a country of vast geography and immense accomplishment. And it would take a nation passionate about large-scale projects, such as the Brooklyn Bridge that had begun construction in 1869, to welcome a sculpture that would be as tall as three blue whales are long.
In September 1875, Laboulaye announced the project, giving the repurposed statue a new name, Liberty Enlightening the World. To pay for Liberty’s construction, he also announced the establishment of the Franco-American Union. The people of France themselves would fund the statue through the organization, while the American public would pay for the pedestal. It would turn out to be a proto-Kickstarter, one of the first forays into crowdfunding.
Financing a 225-ton colossus with a size 879 shoe and a 35-foot waistline in the United States proved to be almost as arduous as building it. Raising cash through contests and exhibitions, Bartholdi displayed the torch at Philadelphia’s Centennial International Exhibition in 1876, earning money there partly through a souvenir-filled kiosk. For 50 cents, attendees could ascend a ladder to the balcony encircling the torch and survey the fairgrounds from this lofty aerie.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Similarly, at Paris’s Exposition Universelle of 1878, Bartholdi placed the head of Liberty in the gardens of the Champ-de-Mars. Visitors to the fair paid an admission fee to climb inside the statue’s head and gaze out the windows in the crown at the green space named for the god of war, and the site of all five world’s fairs held in the City of Light.
It was not enough. With Bartholdi still short of the $400,000 needed, the French-American Union held a lottery offering prizes donated by Parisian merchants. The lottery helped, but not quite enough. Finally, Bartholdi began selling miniature versions of the statue, with the purchaser’s name engraved on them, sufficiently filling the coffers.
In May 1885, as the statue was about to be shipped from France, the U.S. group responsible for fund-raising, the American Committee of the Statue of Liberty, remained $100,000 shy of the $250,000 needed to pay off the statue’s granite plinth. After New York Governor Grover Cleveland refused to release money to pay for it in 1884, Baltimore, Boston, San Francisco, and Philadelphia stepped up and offered to pay for the platform—as long as Liberty was willing to find a new home in their respective cities.
Finally, the resolution came from a pioneer of mass media. A public-minded newspaper magnate from another era, Joseph Pulitzer wielded the power of the pen in his own publication, the New York World, to rally support. “The World is the people’s paper,” he wrote, “and it now appeals to the people to come forward and raise this money.” He asked only that those contributors “Give something, however little,” promising to publish every donor’s name in the paper. Pulitzer seeded the campaign with $1,000 of his own money, and in the span of just five months, the World raised $101,091—enough to complete the pedestal. With an assist from two world’s fairs, and showmanship from Bartholdi, Laboulaye, and Pulitzer worthy of Lady Gaga, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886, a “Mother of Exiles” inviting the wretched of the Earth to find solace in her new home.