If the federal government has often neglected the Statue of Liberty, such was not true of the public at large, especially in the twentieth century. Tourism there didn’t begin to soar until after 1945, but even before Bartholdi erected his statue in New York Harbor, journalists, cartoonists, playwrights, photographers, painters, advertisers, and many others couldn’t get enough of it. Tens of thousands, as we’ve seen, flocked to the U.S. centennial celebration in Philadelphia to see Liberty’s arm and torch. They bought reams of sheet music with the monument on the cover; countless illustrated magazines and newspapers; and Liberty trinkets, postcards, and other souvenirs by the boatload. Later, nearly a dozen postage stamps would feature Lady Liberty, and she would become an irresistible prop or symbol for filmmakers great and obscure. Advertisers grabbed hold of the great green goddess from the beginning and never let go.
Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty coincided almost exactly with the advent of the advertising agent, the nineteenth-century predecessor of the “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue. These agents took advantage of the ubiquity of Liberty’s image, even before the statue itself went up. One obvious early use was to sell French products in the United States—champagne, for example, and other Parisian luxury goods as well. At first, advertisers took existing images of the statue and added a caption touting their product, as they did for “Astral Oil,” using the Root and Tinker print originally commissioned by the U.S. fund-raising committee. In other cases, advertisers altered a ready-made image to feature what they wanted to sell. Most often, they replaced Liberty’s torch with their product so the statue could appear to hold it aloft. Using an 1883 Currier and Ives lithograph, “Star Lamps” turned the torch into one of its lights. Some switches seemed less germane—as when Liberty held aloft St. Jacob’s Oil and Perry’s laundry soap. And in other cases, the entire statue morphed into the product in question, as in Dr. Hass Hog Remedy (1884), which transformed Liberty into a pig. Such near vulgarity moved Puck magazine to mock the situation by plastering ads over every inch of Liberty’s form.
“Elite ‘Sec’ Champagne Enlightening the World” (Judge, October 30, 1886).
Liberty as advertising billboard: “Let the advertising agents take charge of the Bartholdi business, and the money will be raised without delay” (Puck).
Unsurprisingly, the idea of liberty appears as a key theme in advertisements using Bartholdi’s sculpture. In 1883, Singer sewing machines put out a three-by-five-inch “trade card” showing the statue on one side and the following text on the other:
If the WOMEN of the world were to build a monument to commemorate that which had afforded them the greatest liberty, and given them the most time for enlightening their minds and those of their children, they would build one to the SEWING MACHINE, which has released the Mother of the Race from countless hours of weary drudgery, and has in the truest and best sense been quietly but steadily Enlightening the World.1
If Singer liberated women from drudgery, L & M cigarettes, according to a late-1950s ad, freed them from the ill effects of tar and from the aging process as well. The Statue of Liberty is “still young and beautiful at age 75,” just as you can be by smoking the cigarette that’s “light, mild . . . and kindest to your taste.”
It’s easy to smile at ads such as these, at Statues of Liberty slurping an ice cream cone instead of holding a torch, or at a barcode that takes Liberty’s form. Artists and cartoonists have long made a sport of satirizing the statue’s naked commercial use. Robert O. Blechman’s send-up of McDonald’s turns the statue’s crown into the company’s iconic golden arches, and he captions the cartoon, “Over 17 billion served.” This droll image pairs nicely with a real French advertisement for that country’s own fast-food chain “Quick.” The text beside Liberty’s face explains how Bartholdi’s sculpture “amazed” the Americans, just as the quality of Quick burgers must amaze us as well. Taking all this in, the French painter Jean Lagarrigue produced a particularly unsubtle commentary on the commercialization of the Statue of Liberty as symbol of a commercialistic United States. His Liberty reshapes itself into a Coke bottle holding a torch. The tablet has been erased, suggesting that July 4, 1776, has lost all meaning save for the freedom to buy and sell. Better perhaps than this brutal satire is an advertising image lacking in any (overt) satirical intent: an all-purpose inflatable Liberty that allows the icon to stand for any product or service an advertiser wants.
Robert O. Blechman, Over 17 Billion Served (1974). (Courtesy of the artist)
For all its commercial exploitation, Bartholdi’s sculpture has also been used to publicize more serious things, especially during times of war. The most famous such ads are for the Liberty Loans that helped finance the First World War. One asks potential contributors to “Remember Your First Thrill of American Liberty,” and another urges “that liberty shall not perish from the earth.” Later, America First-ers used Liberty’s image to disseminate their isolationist message, while in 1942 she encouraged young men to prepare for combat by joining the Boy Scouts. Two years later, she stood for the liberation of France.
Jean Lagarrigue, Miss Liberty/Coca Cola. (Courtesy of the artist)
The Statue of Liberty’s versatility, her status as a “hollow icon” open to almost any meaning, allowed her to stand just as easily for peace as for war, for the virtues of unrestricted immigration and the dangers of admitting huddled masses from abroad. Liberty bonds encouraged the war effort in 1917, but in the composer Kurt Weill’s hands two decades later, the statue bore witness to the evils of battle. Weill’s first U.S. musical, Johnny Johnson (1936, lyrics by Paul Green), portrays Liberty as the opposite of a warm, open-armed “Mother of Exiles.” She’s the stone-cold symbol of needless death, “a meaningless, insensate” form used to justify sending young men to war.
Liberty loan poster, 1917.
In the final scene of act I, Johnny finds himself en route to the trenches of France, thinking, among other things, about his fiancée, Minny Belle.2 As his ship begins its journey to the Old World in early 1918, it passes the Statue of Liberty. “The upper part of her figure,” reads the stage directions, appears “illuminated from a hidden light. . . . Tall and majestic she stands, immovable, and brooding over the scene like some fabled apocalyptic figure.”
R. Dumoulin, Liberation, 1944. (FR 1721 [OS], Poster collection, Hoover Institution Archives)
Dressed in an army uniform, Johnny, “his rumpled hair gently caressed by a little breeze . . . [stares] in dreamy and silent awe at the faraway STATUE.” After a moment, he begins to speak:
There you stand,
Like a picture in that history book I read.
Minny Belle said I’d see you so,
And now at last I have—
Your hand uplifted with a torch
Saying goodbye to us,
Good luck and bless you everyone.
(with hushed fervency)
And God bless you,
O Mother of Liberty—
That’s what you are,
A sort of mother to us all,
(saluting sharply)
And we your sons.
And here tonight as we set forth
To fight the German Lords.
His speech complete, Johnny stretches out among the other sleeping figures on the deck. The stage directions point to the illuminated statue, “alone in the depths of the night, lonely and aloof.” Suddenly she comes to life: “a shiver seems to run through her figure, and quietly she begins to turn as if following with her sightless, stony stare the progress of the boat that carries JOHNNY JOHNSON out to sea. And as if up from the caverns of her hollow breast, a vast and all-pervasive whispering sigh goes out over the scene.” Having heard Johnny’s lines, Liberty begins to sing, “her voice tinged with a queer, outlandish quality of sound through stone:”
He calls on me, poor wandering one,
A voice more piteous than the rest,
And knows not I’m a thing of stone
And have no heart within my breast.
A million years I dreamless lay
Insensate in the quiet earth,
Unformed and will-less till the day
Men rived me forth and gave me birth.
And set me up with queer intent
To swear their pride and folly by,
And I who never nothing meant
Am used to send men forth to die.
Clearly, the lyricist didn’t know much about the Statue of Liberty, thinking her made of stone, but for him, the stony earth symbolized the body-strewn trenches in which so many young lives had come to an end. The mediocre writing and sodden music makes it unsurprising that Weill’s first U.S. composition left little lasting impression here. But in the late 1930s it enjoyed a certain popularity, if not critical acclaim, logging sixty-six performances on Broadway and dozens more in Boston, Los Angeles, and elsewhere after it became part of the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project in 1937.
If the Weill/Green musical represented the Statue of Liberty’s Broadway debut, she earned a second starring role in 1949 amid the patriotic afterglow of the Second World War. The great songwriter Irving Berlin teamed up with the playwright Robert E. Sherwood, director Moss Hart, and choreographer Jerome Robbins to produce a showy musical titled Miss Liberty. The plot was banal—two newspapers competing to discover who had been Bartholdi’s model for Liberty’s face. But the play proved popular thanks in part to a grand finale in which the entire cast sang “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor” beneath a shimmering shadow of the goddess of New York.3
By 1949 the statue had been fully Americanized, its French origins largely forgotten on this side of the Atlantic. The “Liberty Loan” posters of World War I had begun the process of Americanization, as—somewhat ironically—had the end of mass immigration in 1924. By the 1940s, the children and grandchildren of the turn-of-the-century wave of newcomers had themselves been Americanized, and that helped the immigrants’ monumental symbol be Americanized as well. As for World War II, it cemented the identification of the Statue of Liberty with the United States. When Nazi Germany subdued most of Europe and threatened Great Britain, it seemed to many Americans that their country might soon become the world’s last bastion of liberty. Life expressed this view with a cover image of the Statue of Liberty photographed to show it looming over New York Harbor as a “fortress of freedom,” as the mighty guardian of a great continental power immune from Hitler’s designs. “It is fitting,” wrote Life’s editors, “that in these days when the light of freedom burns ever lower in Europe, Liberty stands out with new brightness against the American sky.”4
Cover of Life, June 5, 1939. (Herbert Gehr/Getty Images)
Two years into World War II, Life’s image of fortress Liberty jumped from its front cover to one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best war-time films, Saboteur (1942).5 The British-born director began work on the movie almost immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and he concluded it with a dramatic chase scene in—and on—the Statue of Liberty, used as a prop for making an uplifting political point. The plot revolves around a clean-cut American worker, Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), falsely accused of being a German agent and sabotaging an aircraft factory near Los Angeles. Kane thinks he knows who really committed the crime, and he escapes police custody to pursue the real German agent, a man named Fry (Norman Lloyd). During the chase, Kane meets a beautiful model, Pat Martin (Priscilla Lane), who alternately believes and disbelieves Kane’s story. Once in New York, Kane foils Fry’s attempt to blow up an American warship, and for inexplicable reasons the saboteur then boards a ferry for the Statue of Liberty. Martin follows him onto the boat. The camera shows us the monument looming in the water, but Fry turns his back to it. The German agent has no interest in what Liberty represents.
Martin tails Fry into the statue, and both climb to the top. The FBI has told her to stall him until the G-men can get there. Trying to make conversation, she tells him it’s the first time she’s been to the statue: “It means so much to us now.” The French gave it to us, she adds, “but just look at the French [now]; isn’t it sad?”—a reference to the German occupation of France and the collaborationist Vichy regime. She then recites the first stanza of Emma Lazarus’s poem. But Fry can only scoff: “Oh, little Miss Liberty carrying the torch.” Martin tries to charm him into remaining with her, but he finds out who she is and flees, first down the winding stairs and then up into the torch. Kane, now on the scene, follows him there, armed with a gun that Fry had dropped earlier. We see the two men on the narrow platform surrounding the flame. The German agent backs away from Kane and topples over the low railing. He manages to grab hold of Liberty’s arm, and Kane risks his life to save him. A wide camera shot shows the two men clinging tenuously to the arm; an overhead view reveals just how high up they are. Kane holds Fry by his sleeve, and a close-up shows the seam coming apart. Seconds later, the German agent plummets to his death, as if vanquished by the Statue of Liberty and all she represents.
Good-guy Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) hangs on to the torch with one hand as he attempts to rescue the villain (Norman Lloyd) with the other in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 thriller, Saboteur. (Everett Collection, Inc.)
Hitchcock’s political purposes are clear, and his use of the Statue of Liberty as the scene of danger and suspense foreshadows the appearance of another great American monument, Mount Rushmore, in the concluding sequences of North by Northwest (1959).6 Here, Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint flee two villains by descending precariously across Lincoln’s nose. Both villains plummet from the monument, while the heroes come through the ordeal, as in Saboteur, alive and in love. It’s notable that, in 1942, Hitchcock didn’t imagine that Liberty herself might be the target of a saboteur. In his day, terrorists attacked factories and soldiers and sometimes civilians, but not symbols. In our time, the Statue of Liberty’s thick blanket of security, far stricter than at airports, ballparks, and other vulnerable places, suggests that today’s terrorism has heavily symbolic designs, though it of course takes a terrible toll on human lives as well.
Hitchcock proved to be the first of many filmmakers to bring the image, idea, and symbolism of the Statue of Liberty into their work. After Saboteur, the most famous use of the statue is doubtless the shot that concludes Planet of the Apes (1968). Charlton Heston escapes from the Ape civilization and makes his way to a forbidden part of the planet. There he rides horseback along a sparkling water’s edge, accompanied by a mute, animal-brained human female—in this topsy-turvy world, the human-ape hierarchy has been reversed. Suddenly we see a twisted piece of metal from behind and then four dark spokes pointing toward the sky. The camera zooms in and frames Heston between the two middle spokes. “Oh my God,” he cries, “I’m back, I’m home. . . . You finally, really did it . . . you blew it up. . . . Goddamn you all to Hell!” The camera pans up and away from Heston, and we see the ruined upper half of the Statue of Liberty emerging from the sandy shore. Her broken image reveals to the hero that he’d been on Earth all along—a post-apocalyptic Earth, a wrecked human civilization, apparently destroyed in a holocaust exemplified by Liberty’s severed torso. The remains of Miss Liberty make a stark contrast with Heston’s mute, uncomprehending companion, for Liberty alone is full of human meaning. The silent statue, not the voiceless female, serves as exemplar of a great civilization that has destroyed itself.7
The final scene in Planet of the Apes (1968). (Everett Collection, Inc.)
Another mute, clueless woman appears before a looming Statue of Liberty in the movie Splash (1984). Daryl Hannah plays a mermaid who emerges from New York Harbor and slips onto Liberty Island, naked and suddenly transformed into completely human form. Naturally, the gorgeous unclad blonde diverts the tourists’ attention away from the monument and onto her. Is this an indication, this time playful, of the perils civilization faces? How can Lady Liberty, who represents austere ideals and solemn promises, compete with pure Eros, however innocent? In both Planet of the Apes and Splash, the real woman represents untamed, unintelligent nature—as women have often been made to do in Western culture—while the allegorical, lifeless statue stands in for human civilization.
The 2011 film The Adjustment Bureau reiterates such themes by having the hero, a charismatic young politician named David Norris (Matt Damon), lead an uncomprehending “natural” woman, Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), a sensuous dancer, onto Liberty Island. The Adjustment Bureau represents Fate, or God’s design, and fate has decreed that for Norris to win the presidency (which the Adjustment Bureau wants), David and Elise must be kept apart. Agents of the bureau are prepared to take extreme measures to confine David to his preordained path. But the couple falls deeply in love, and a rogue employee of the Adjustment Bureau helps David defy the Plan. That defiance takes place on Liberty Island, where David and Elise open a door into the Statue of Liberty. Once inside, the couple passes into a realm of forbidden free will where they must outwit men with supernatural powers bent on stopping them. Here, the statue represents the terrifying dangers—and ultimate rewards—of resisting authority, foiling fate, and freely choosing one’s own path in life. David was destined to be president, though only by sacrificing love. In good Hollywood style, he succeeds in achieving both.
While Splash and The Adjustment Bureau associate the Statue of Liberty with the perils of love, Planet of the Apes was the first of a series of films in which the Statue of Liberty would bear witness to apocalypse and the destruction of New York. A key example is John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), whose dystopian action is set in 1997 during the concluding phases of World War III. Much of the country has apparently been destroyed, and crime is so severe that authorities have turned a bombed-out Manhattan Island into a huge, walled-in prison camp. Carpenter was the first fiction filmmaker permitted to shoot on Liberty Island, which serves in the film as the remote command post for Manhattan’s security forces—no policeman dared to set foot in the city/prison itself. Here Carpenter reverses the Statue of Liberty’s dominant symbolism, turning her into the guard tower from which soldiers ensure that no one escapes from New York.
Although Carpenter’s film doesn’t depict the statue being destroyed, her severed head appeared on the studio’s publicity poster. That image apparently inspired J. J. Abrams’s film Cloverfield (2008), which makes New York the scene of an attack from outer space. An alien ship targets the Statue of Liberty, whose severed head explodes missilelike into the city, where it careens down the streets. Clover-field’s poster shows the statue from behind and shorn of her head. Here Liberty symbolizes the destruction of New York. It’s a potent, terrifying image, one that may have influenced New York and federal officials after 9/11. After all, enemies of the United States had, at one point, come close to knocking the Statue of Liberty off its pedestal. On July 30, 1916, with the German army stalemated in France, the Kaiser’s agents blew up a munitions dump in Jersey City in an effort to disrupt the supply of shells to Britain and France. The blast sent shock waves as far as Philadelphia and registered the equivalent of a 5.0 earthquake on the Richter scale. The Statue of Liberty was close enough to suffer $2 million in damage, including the weakening of the torch, already unstable from the flawed construction process. Officials made the torch off-limits to visitors, as it has remained ever since. (For that reason, Hitchcock’s villain, in real life, wouldn’t have been able to climb to the torch and then plunge to his death from there.)
Although the statue suffered indirect damage from the bombing of 1916, it might have been blown up altogether in 1964 when a small group of African American militants teamed up with Quebec separatists to plot the destruction of three icons of America: the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and the Washington Monument. The conspirators seemed most intent on blowing away the head and torch of what they termed the “damned old bitch” in New York Harbor. Fortunately, they were clumsy and allowed the group to be infiltrated by undercover agents, who foiled their plans. But their efforts, futile as they were, seemed to encourage others to use the Statue of Liberty for militant, if less-destructive, ends.
On the day after Christmas 1971, fifteen members of the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War hid inside the pedestal just before closing time. Once the tourists had gone, the veterans seized control of the monument and promised to remain there until President Nixon ended the war. After a lengthy standoff with the police, the protestors agreed to leave peacefully. “The reason we chose the Statue of Liberty,” declared the group’s final communiqué, “is that since we were children, the statue has been analogous in our minds with freedom and an America we love. Then we went to fight a war in the name of freedom. We saw that freedom is . . . allowed only to those who are white and maintain the status quo.”8 The Vietnam veterans staged their sit-in at the Statue of Liberty not because they found the monument hypocritical, as had the earlier group, but because it dramatized to them how much the country had fallen short of its ideals.
Three years after the Vietnam veterans’ occupation, another radical group, the Attica Brigade, locked itself inside the statue, calling for Nixon’s resignation. (He ultimately left office, of course, but not because of them.) In 1976, antiwar veterans took over the monument once again, and a few months later dissident Iranians seized the statue in protest of U.S. support for the shah. Law enforcement agents got both groups to leave peacefully, only to have a dozen Puerto Rican nationalists take their place. For the most part, the various groups of protestors used the statue to dramatize their respective causes; they did no damage to the monument itself. But bomb threats against the statue were common in the 1970s, and in June 1980 a band of Croatian terrorists succeeded in setting off an explosive device. They destroyed parts of Liberty’s base, but fortunately no one was inside. Only in the 1980s did the Park Service tighten security enough to prevent recurring occupations and attacks. Local and federal officials had come to understand that the Statue of Liberty represented a choice political target, but not until September 11, 2001, did they perceive that terrorists might want to destroy it altogether.
Immediately following Al Qaeda’s assault on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the National Park Service closed Liberty Island, fearing a potential attempt against the statue. The island remained off-limits for three months, and the statue itself was closed until August 2004. Visitors weren’t allowed to climb to Liberty’s crown until July 2009. By then the Park Service had introduced strict new security protocols that, among other things, restricted to about two hundred a day the number of people allowed to climb above the pedestal. September 11 may have awakened government officials to the mortal dangers facing the Statue of Liberty, but filmmakers had begun to create fantasy versions of such threats long before that fateful date.
Already in 1987, GI Joe: The Movie depicted the prospect of a terrorist attack on the goddess of the harbor. The evil Cobra organization plans to blow the statue up, and only at the last minute does the film’s hero manage to foil the plot. In another 1987 movie, Superman IV, the man of steel almost dies while protecting Lady Liberty from Nuclear Man’s wrath, and in Batman Forever (1995) villains crash a helicopter into her.
Although these dangers come from Earth, Liberty’s cinematic enemies have mostly hailed from other worlds. In Independence Day (1996), a gargantuan flying saucer vaporizes New York and knocks the Statue of Liberty on her side. Deep Impact (1998) shoots a comet into midtown Manhattan, its shock wave producing a tsunami that propels Liberty’s severed head (again) through the gutted city. Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence (2001) buries Bartholdi’s monument under water up to her torch. But that’s nothing compared to the indignities she suffers in Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004), a global warming film that makes Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth seem equivocal by comparison. Emmerich’s drama subjects New York to tidal waves and biblical floods before freezing it down to absolute zero. The Statue of Liberty turns into an ice sculpture, her green form now brilliantly white.
While the Statue of Liberty often comes to life in political cartoons, and talks and sings in O. Henry and Kurt Weill stories, she rarely moves about in film. The exception comes in Ghostbusters II (1989), when the heroes desperately battle an invasion of supernatural slime. As the ooze draws force, it roars up from the sewers and subway tunnels of New York, taking shape as a pair of monsters determined to destroy the city. Fortunately, the slime isn’t inherently bad; when infused with a positive charge, it can combat its dark, evil side. Knowing as much, poltergeist exterminator Bill Murray and company ascend to the Statue of Liberty’s crown and blast the monument with positive ooze. Immediately, we see Eiffel’s inner structure melt into motion, propelling the statue off its pedestal and across the harbor, the water up to her neck. She then trudges through the city streets, King Kong–like, in pursuit of the monsters, which she helps defeat. In the end, barbarism succumbs, as Liberty, having saved civilization, returns to her perch.9
If the statue has regularly faced destruction and dismemberment on film, in countless video games players get the chance to save her from such a fate. She’s threatened by German Zeppelins (“Turning Point: Fall of Liberty”), Soviet planes (“Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2,” “Freedom Fighters”), nuclear bombs (“Splinter Cell: Double Agent”), and Japanese terrorists (“Metal Gear Solid 2”). Still, Lady Liberty doesn’t necessarily come out unscathed. In “Twisted Metal 2: World Tour,” players shoot at the statue until her robes disappear, revealing a red bikini underneath. More gunfire makes her enormously fat while stretching her bikini to the breaking point. In the end, gamers can destroy her completely. Ditto in “Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3,” whose object is to demolish the Statue of Liberty and then to build a Lenin statue in her place.
On television, the Statue of Liberty has made a great many cameo appearances, as in CSI NY, when blood on her crown revealed that two National Park Service guards had been murdered inside. Viewers could also glimpse her on The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Seinfeld. Meanwhile, Miss Piggy, the prima donna star of The Muppet Show, regularly posed as Lady Liberty. But when a potential contestant on American Idol dressed up as the Statue of Liberty and began to sing “New York, New York,” show judge Simon Cowell shooed the young crooner offstage.
Video games and television have accustomed people to seeing the Statue of Liberty unclothed, but never as much as advertisements and political cartoons. Legions of commercial artists and cartoonists have transformed the unerotic Mother of the Harbor into an alluring, sexy babe. During the statue’s centennial celebration in 1986, an event widely criticized for its commercialization, the statue appeared as a curvaceous blonde wearing a mini-bra, G-string, and see-through hose. She had become, as the New Republic put it, “a high-priced corporate tart,” the victim, another commentator wrote, of “statuary rape.”10
Beyond the centennial, scantily clad Statues of Liberty have served almost every imaginable political and commercial purpose. To poke fun at Donald Trump, a cartoonist drew Lady Liberty as a buxom bimbo, the refurbished symbol of a New York City under the billionaire developer’s rule. Another artist pictured the statue in a bikini to represent the chilly winds of recession. And a cartoonist used a naked Liberty to criticize intrusive airport security scans, as did cover artists for the New Republic. Sometimes the statue’s nudity serves no overt purpose at all, except to give her a female sexuality. Examples include a cartoon in which Liberty sheds her copper skin to reveal a bikini, and Hudson Talbott’s Luncheon on the Grass, a clever send-up of Edouard Manet’s famous painting Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Talbott depicts a nude Liberty lounging in Central Park alongside the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, the remnants of their picnic littering the ground next to her torch.
Carlos Devizia, “Statue of Liberty as Stripper.” (Artizans Entertainment Inc.)
New Republic, December 30, 2010. (Copyright © Sean McCabe)
Having real women pose as the Statue of Liberty hasn’t been uncommon, although usually they’re fully clothed. But for the cover of V Magazine’s “New York issue” (fall 2010), Lady Gaga stripped down to her bra and panties to masquerade as Lady Liberty. The pop singer’s hair is teased into the seven spokes of Liberty’s crown, and the torch shaped into a burning V. “Just as the Statue of Liberty was France’s gift to America,” wrote V editor Stephen Gan, “Gaga is, to us, New York’s greatest gift to pop culture and fashion. [She] is also a beacon of the city’s creativity and hope . . . a bona fide genius and we can safely declare her our muse.” The Statue of Liberty has suffered a great many indignities, but the comparison to Lady Gaga has to be one of the worst.
Hudson Talbott, Luncheon on the Grass (1982). (Courtesy of the artist)
Even when feminized Statues of Liberty are covered up, female sexuality is often the point. When former New York governor Eliot Spitzer resigned over a prostitution scandal, a cartoon showed him propositioning the Statue of Liberty. An anti–George W. Bush cover of the Village Voice pictured the former president as a vampire biting poor Liberty’s neck. And an even uglier cartoon on the website Protein Wisdom shows a sobbing Liberty having been violated sexually by Barack Obama.11 The caption has the president promising to come back for more. This disturbing image represents the ultra-right-wing version of what has been a common cartoonist theme, the violation of liberty by malign political forces, sometimes on the right and sometimes on the left. These include, among many other targets, an intrusive FBI, the Patriot Act, the burka, the pope, and Obama’s health care law, the object of Protein Wisdom’s sexually charged disdain.
Mad magazine, June 1975, back cover. (From MAD Magazine No. 175 © E. C. Publications, Inc.)
Most such images don’t go as far. Mad magazine good-naturedly parodied the women’s lib movement by having the statue discard her bra, and in other cases, Lady Liberty has lent positive associations to women political figures such as Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin. Cartoonists commonly depict Liberty shedding a feminine tear, and they have shown her bottle-feeding crude oil to a baby Uncle Sam or as an overfed American needing to lose weight. It matters that the Statue of Liberty is a woman, and artists and editors never seem to tire of emphasizing, even exploiting, that fact. Through it all, Bartholdi’s monument manages to maintain its dignity, its ability to represent cherished values and ideals. If Lady Gaga can’t trivialize Lady Liberty, nothing can.
