THE STATUE OF LIBERTY was the brainchild of a Frenchman, named Edouard René de Laboulaye. He once wrote that “the folly of love and the madness of ambition are sometimes curable, but no one was ever cured of a mania for liberty.” A popular author, liberal politician, student of the American Constitution, and hero worshiper of George Washington, De Laboulaye rivaled the dead Lafayette in his extravagant admiration of everything American. He venerated the American Revolution more than the French Revolution because he was deeply religious and the revolution in his fatherland had taken on antireligious overtones.
A Parisian, he owned a country house in Glatigny, near Versailles, and in the summer of 1865 he invited a number of French intellectuals to visit him there. Among these writers, artists, and politicians was a thirty-one-year-old sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, busily working on a bust of his host. That pleasant afternoon the conversation turned to the subject of gratitude among men of different nations; whereupon someone recited the heroic deeds of Frenchmen in America during the American Revolution.
“There,” said De Laboulaye, “you have the basis of the American feeling for the French—an indestructible basis. The feeling honors the Americans as well as us, and if a monument should rise in the United States as a memorial to their independence, I should think it only natural if it were built by united effort—a common work of both our nations.” As chairman of the French Antislavery Society, he thought partly of American abolitionists, whom he admired. As a historian, he looked forward to 1876, when America would celebrate the hundredth anniversary of her independence.
The idea of a monument was novel, but nothing was done immediately to translate it into reality. Bartholdi never forgot it, though, and six years later he again visited De Laboulaye. They discussed the coming centennial of American independence. Bartholdi said, “I think it would be well to offer the Americans a statue—a statue of liberty.” He toyed with the thought of leaving for the United States to suggest the idea to Americans and to ask them to share the cost. De Laboulaye cried, “Go to America! Go see the country, and bring us back your impressions. If you find a happy idea—one that will rouse public enthusiasm—we may take up a subscription in France.”
In 1871 the French sculptor sailed for America. As his ship steamed into New York Harbor, he dashed off a watercolor of the statue he hoped to see erected at this gateway to the nation. Everything about New York looked so big that he decided only a big statue would do. Visiting Egypt as a youth of twenty, Bartholdi had been deeply impressed by the size of the Pyramids and the Sphinx. Now, as the Statue of Liberty took shape in his mind, he wrote: “The details of the lines ought not to arrest the eye. . . the surfaces should be broad and simple, defined by a bold and clear design, accentuated in the important places. . . it should have a summarized character, such as one would give to a rapid sketch.”
Armed with letters of introduction to influential Americans, Bartholdi spent nearly half a year traveling around the country. He received encouragement from notables like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. After the sculptor returned to France, his proposal was approved, and in 1875 the Franco-American Union was formed with Professor de Laboulaye, now a member of the Chamber of Deputies, as its head.
Since the statue was to be a gift to the American people from the French people—not from French officialdom—no funds were solicited from the French government. Over the next seven years money was raised by a variety of devices—lotteries, theatrical benefits, and the like. French composer Charles Gounod wrote a song for the campaign, and the composition was presented at a benefit performance in the Paris opera house. France was poor. Some Frenchmen could give no more than a sou—worth half a cent—but at last the equivalent of $250,000 was raised. This sum came from thousands of individuals, from 181 cities including Paris, and from 10 municipal chambers of commerce. Now that the French had done their part, to the Americans was left the task of underwriting the cost of the pedestal on which the statue would stand.
Bartholdi took no payment for his many years of work on the statue. The money collected in France was spent for materials and the wages of workmen helping the sculptor. Bartholdi did, however, obtain a patent on his figure; in 1876 he registered two small bronze models at the U.S. Patent Office. Besides the glory of the project, which obsessed him, he hoped to earn an income from the sale of souvenirs fashioned after the statue. In 1874 Bartholdi made his first design of Miss Liberty, using his handsome mother as a model.
Construction began in Paris in the foundry yard of Gaget, Gauthier & Cie., on high ground three-fifths of a mile to the northeast of the Arch of Triumph. Because a project of such magnitude demanded more than artistic genius, Bartholdi hired artisans, engineers, carpenters, plasterers, and contractors to help him. He also prevailed on Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, the famous French engineer who later built the Eiffel Tower, to design an iron framework for the statue.
In 1877 the growing figure was visited by former President Grant in the course of a trip around the world. Aging French novelist Victor Hugo tottered into the foundry yard to have a look. The statue’s thumbnail was a foot long, a child could stand up inside the thumb, and because bigness excites attention, more than 300,000 persons viewed the figure while it was under construction.
Bartholdi promoted it with all the skill of P. T. Barnum. In 1876 he shipped the torchbearing right arm to Philadelphia for display at that city’s Centennial Exposition. De Laboulaye’s hope of completing the memorial in time for the hundredth anniversary of American freedom could not be realized, but 9,000,000 visitors to Philadelphia saw part of it. In 1877 the right arm was sent from Philadelphia to New York, where it was exhibited in Madison Square Park. Here it remained until 1884, when it was returned to Paris to be fitted to the rest of the figure.
Bartholdi’s first sketch had shown the Statue of Liberty rising from Governors Island in the Upper Bay of New York, but he later decided that nearby Bedloe’s Island would display it to better advantage. On February 9, 1877, President Grant had urged Congress to accede to the wish of “many distinguished citizens of New York” by approving the use of Bedloe’s Island as a site for the monument Thirteen days later Congress granted this wish.
Americans now had to build and pay for the foundation and pedestal on which the statue would perch. At first an appeal for funds met with apathy and ridicule. The New York Times whimsically suggested that the statue be placed at the Battery to make it easier for people to scrawl their names on it. John D. G. Shea, who later became the first president of the Catholic Historical Society of the United States, wrote an article criticizing “Our Great Goddess and Her Coming Idol.”
America’s nine-year financial drive began in 1876, when the Union League Club appointed a fund-raising committee. This was two years after Bartholdi had begun working on the figure in Paris. Because money only dribbled in, on January 2, 1877, a group of civic leaders met in the Century Club and organized the American Committee of the Statue of Liberty. The original committee consisted of 114 members, but it was later enlarged to more than 400. They prevailed on President Grant to ask Congress to pass a joint resolution acknowledging the forthcoming gift from France and announcing that the pedestal would be built by private subscription. Although the Senate and House passed the resolution and although committee members now had this enormous prestige behind them, few contributions were made. Wealthy patrons of the arts were unsure about the artistic merit of the statue. Poor people felt that the rich could better afford to finance the pedestal than they could.
On May 25, 1883, Édouard René de Laboulaye died in Paris without knowing whether his brainchild actually would arise in the New World. Four days later on Bedloe’s Island a trumpetblast signaled the evacuation of the island’s marine hospital so that digging could begin. Charles Pomeroy Stone was chosen as engineer in charge of preparing the site. A Union general during the Civil War, he had later gone abroad and become commander in chief of the Egyptian army.
Meantime, plain-faced Emma Lazarus had become interested in the continuing appeals for funds. She was born in New York in 1849, was the daughter of wealthy parents of Portuguese-Jewish descent, and had her first book published when she was only eighteen. As her contribution to the Statue of Liberty, she wrote a sonnet that was read publicly for the first time on the evening of December 3, 1883. This was opening night of the Bartholdi Statue Pedestal Art Loan Exhibition, held in the National Academy of Design, and there author F. Hopkinson Smith recited the now-famous line: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . .”
On January 4, 1884, the pedestal stood fifteen feet high, about one-sixth its intended height of eighty-nine feet. There work stopped because the $125,000 raised by the committee was exhausted. A new American President, Chester A. Arthur, urged Congress to appropriate enough money to complete the pedestal, but a bill to this effect was killed in committee. The New York state legislature passed a measure giving New York City permission to contribute $50,000, but Governor Grover Cleveland vetoed it on “constitutional grounds.” Such was the state of affairs when Joseph Pulitzer entered the picture.
Of Magyar-Jewish ancestry, born in Hungary in 1847, and emigrating to America in 1864, Pulitzer became first the most famous reporter in St. Louis and then owner of the fabulously successful St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This failed to satisfy the tall and reedy journalist with the tangled black hair and reddish beard, who stared at the world with dimming brown eyes behind almond-shaped spectacles. He propelled himself into New York journalism on May 10, 1883, by purchasing the New York World from Jay Gould. On March 13, 1885, Pulitzer’s World declared, “Money must be raised to complete the pedestal for the Bartholdi statue. It would be an irrevocable disgrace to New York City and the American Republic to have France send us this splendid gift without our having provided even so much as a landing place for it.”
Bartholdi himself had not been idle. Whenever New Yorkers dragged their feet, the wily French sculptor pretended to offer his statue first to Philadelphia and then to Boston. When the word got around, bids for the statue came from other cities—Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Baltimore. Now Pulitzer goaded New Yorkers into taking positive action. To finish the concrete pedestal with its granite facing, $100,000 more was needed. The World started its patriotic drive by contributing $1,000 and offering to print the names of every donor regardless of the amount given.
Day after day, week after week, the World kept up a drumfire of publicity, printing front-page editorials and displaying a semipermanent cartoon of Uncle Sam standing hat in hand. It published this note: “I am a little girl nine years old and I will send you a pair of my pet game bantams if you will sell them and give the money to the Statue.” A man wrote: “Since leaving off smoking cigarettes I have gained twenty-five pounds, so I cheerfully inclose a penny for each pound.” A total of 121,000 Americans, most of them New Yorkers, sent money to the World; 80 percent of this was in sums of less than $1. By August 11, 1885, Pulitzer’s campaign had raised $101,091. A check for $100,000 was sent to the statue committee, while the balance was spent on a silver gift for Bartholdi.
In the Paris foundry yard the Goddess of Liberty was disassembled, and its hundreds of parts were packed into 220 crates. At Rouen they were loaded aboard the French ship Isère, which weathered a stormy ocean crossing and arrived off Sandy Hook on June 17, 1885. General Stone and New York aldermen boarded a tug to go down to meet the ship. After boarding her, they were ushered into the captain’s cabin, where General Stone was handed legal documents conveying the statue from France to the United States.
With completion of the pedestal, workmen began putting Miss Liberty together again. Some iron beams and copper plates were mislabeled. Time and again one or another section of the statue was hoisted into the air, only to be lowered when it could not be fitted into a particular niche. Although this was dangerous work, not a single laborer was injured or killed.
At last the 225-ton statue, an impressive 305 feet 1 inch from the base of its pedestal to the tip of its torch, rose to its full height and gazed seaward in warm welcome to the world. Will Durant, the historian, called it the most famous statue in the world.
The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on Thursday, October 28, 1886. To New York for the occasion came the great of America and a few leading Frenchmen. The sum of $9,000 was set aside to entertain the official French delegation, headed by Bartholdi and Count Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps. The eighty-year-old De Lesseps was a French engineer and diplomat representing the Franco-American Union. He had designed the Suez Canal, which had opened in 1869, and as recently as 1881 he had begun to dig the Panama Canal, which the French never completed.
For a week the weather had been vile, and on the day of dedication it failed to clear up. A Cuban correspondent for an Argentinian newspaper described it this way: “The day was bleak, the sky leaden, the ground muddy, the drizzle stubborn. But human joy has rarely been so bright.” President Grover Cleveland arrived from Washington and was received in the elegant town house at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street owned by his Secretary of the Navy, William C. Whitney. The thickset walrus-mustached President met handsome bearded Bartholdi and De Lesseps of the silver upturned mustache. Whitney beamed on this tableau through his pince-nez. Because a parade was scheduled to start from Madison Square at 11:30 A.M., the celebrities forsook lunch to emerge from the Whitney mansion and climb into waiting carriages.
By this time a river of humanity had poured across the Brooklyn Bridge and flowed in fleshy whorls and eddies in and about City Hall Park. Now and then the people glanced up at wet flags dangling limply from nearby buildings. Raindrops diamonded the hats of marching soldiers; water gurgled into the brass instruments of oompahing musicians; the cheeks of proudly strutting Negroes were silver-veined with unheeded trickles of water. The squash of shoes on pavements provided a counterpoint to the martial music as the parade slithered from Madison Square down to the Battery.
President Cleveland reviewed the marchers. Then, accompanied by members of his Cabinet, the governors of many states, French dignitaries, and other notables, he was driven to the Hudson River at West Thirty-third Street to board the U.S.S. Despatch. Full-rigged ships of the U.S. navy thundered a 21-gun salute to the President. Fog hugged the river’s surface and obscured the upper part of the statue. An armada of nearly 300 yachts, French warships, excursion steamers, and tugs groped their way toward Bedloe’s Island. Thousands of spectators at the Battery peered through the mist at the distant statue. An estimated 1,000,000 persons, ashore and afloat, took part in this gala event.
The 2,500 elite guests of the day disembarked on the island and took seats on a temporary platform at the base of the pedestal. Whenever they lifted their chins to look up, raindrops trickled down their throats. In the murky height above them a French flag, stained by the rain, clung to the contours of Miss Liberty’s face. The fifty-two-year-old Bartholdi and 3 helpers panted up the 167 steps from the ground to the top of the pedestal, walked inside the giantess, trudged the 168 steps from Miss Liberty’s feet to her head, and climbed the 54 rungs of a ladder leading into the torch.
Down on the soggy earth a teen-age boy quivered with excitement. As the son of the contractor who had built die pedestal, he had been granted the honor of signaling to Bartholdi when to unveil the face of the statue. Most eyes were on President Cleveland, whose huge fingers were locked across his great belly.
The ceremony began. The Reverend Dr. Richard S. Storrs of Brooklyn read the invocation, but boat whistles erased many of his words. Then Count De Lesseps, his majestic mustache defying the elements, read in French some prepared remarks from large loose sheets of paper, italicizing his meaning with quick Gallic gestures. His voice was inaudible to the waiting Bartholdi, high above his head.
William Maxwell Evarts stood up. Born in Boston, now United States Senator from New York and chairman of the Statue of Liberty committee, Evarts was an orator whose talent was better suited to an indoor hall than to a rain-swept island. When the Senator paused a moment to rest his voice, the contractor’s son thought that he had finished speaking. The boy waved his arm at Bartholdi. The sculptor and his helpers tugged at ropes, the French flag slithered off the face of Miss Liberty, and people and ships exploded in a bedlam of cheers and whistles. Evarts looked up in surprise. He gasped. He resumed speaking, but the pandemonium was so loud that he could not be heard. The tumult was augmented by a broadside fired from the flagship of the American naval squadron and a band’s brassy rendition of “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Evart’s lips still moved in pantomime. President Cleveland, courteous as ever, made a pretense of listening to him.
At last Evarts finished. The President got up and said a few words about accepting the statue from the French in behalf of the American people. He was followed by Chauncey M. Depew, another renowned orator. Depew had a hulking nose, thin lips, and long sideburns, and he wore a gates-ajar collar and lapelled waistcoat. His rhetorical flourishes wearied the audience, which had been sitting in the chill and rain since 3:15 P.M. Finally the benediction was pronounced by Henry C. Potter, bishop of the Protestant Episcopal diocese of New York, who removed his soaked mortarboard and let the raindrops fall on his eyelids.
It was done. The world’s best-known statue had been dedicated, and from this day forward it stood at New York’s doorway, a permanent reminder of an elusive ideal. Spiritually it belonged to all mankind—not just to New Yorkers, not just to Americans. It developed into a shrine, where all might worship. Perhaps an attendant said it best when he murmured, “Whoever visits the Statue of Liberty feels that he has come home.”