Lady Liberty Is Dedicated

Two Kinds of Liberty

It starts in France, in 1865. The American Civil War has just ended. The Union has won, and slavery has been abolished.

A French scholar named Édouard de Laboulaye admired the United States, and he was a passionate opponent of slavery. So he proposed that France give America a monument to liberty, to mark the coming hundredth anniversary of American independence.

But Laboulaye had a second reason. France was ruled by an emperor. Laboulaye and his friends wanted their own country to become a free republic. Honoring American liberty was a way of making a point about French liberty.

One of the people who heard him talk about it was a young sculptor named Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. Bartholdi loved big ideas and big statues. He took this one and ran with it.

In 1871, he sailed to America to scout a spot. As his ship came into New York Harbor, he picked out a small island called Bedloe's Island. He saw it as the gateway to America. Every ship coming into New York would pass right by her.

As a sailor, I can tell you a harbor entrance is where everybody topside is paying attention. Bartholdi picked the one spot nobody could miss.

He called her Liberty Enlightening the World. And every detail meant something. In her left hand, a tablet with the date of the Declaration of Independence in Roman numerals. July fourth, seventeen seventy-six. At her feet, mostly hidden from anyone standing on the ground, a broken shackle and chains. The National Park Service ties them to the end of slavery, the cause Laboulaye cared about so much. Her right foot is raised, as if she's stepping forward.

So who was going to pay for all that?

Copper Skin, Iron Bones

The plan was a partnership. France would pay for the statue. America would pay for the pedestal she'd stand on. Remember that deal.

France got to work. A fundraising group formed in 1875, and construction began in 1876. That year, the right arm holding the torch was finished first and shipped to Philadelphia for the great Centennial Exposition. Visitors could pay to climb up into the torch.

Her skin was thin copper sheets, less than an eighth of an inch thick, hammered by hand over wooden forms.

But something had to hold her up. The first plan came from a famous French architect, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. He died in 1879. So the project turned to an engineer named Gustave Eiffel. Yes, that Eiffel. Years before his tower in Paris, he designed her skeleton. A tall iron tower runs up through the middle, with a framework of iron bars reaching out to the copper.

And here's the clever part. The skin isn't welded to the frame. It hangs on it, so it can flex in the wind and expand and contract with the heat and cold. Any sailor knows that lesson. Anything that lives out on the water has to give a little, or it breaks.

By 1884, the whole statue stood finished in Paris, towering over the rooftops.

Then the French took her apart.

Nowhere to Stand

Three hundred fifty pieces went into two hundred fourteen specially built crates. In May 1885, the French navy ship Isère left the port of Rouen with her on board. On June 17th, 1885, the Isère arrived in New York Harbor to a big welcome.

But the crates went into storage. Because America hadn't kept its half of the deal.

The pedestal was designed by the American architect Richard Morris Hunt. Workers had started the foundation inside the walls of an old army fort on the island. But the American fundraising had gone badly. Wealthy New Yorkers weren't giving much. Other cities sniped that New York should pay for its own statue.

Even the governor of New York had vetoed a bill that would have put fifty thousand dollars of public money toward the pedestal. His name was Grover Cleveland. Hold on to that name.

In 1884, the money ran out and the work stopped. There was even talk that another city might get the statue instead.

The rich had said no. The government had said no. She was in America, and she still had no place to stand. That left everybody else.

A Penny and a Name

Enter a newspaper publisher named Joseph Pulitzer. He was an immigrant himself, born in Hungary, and he'd served in the Union Army during the Civil War. By the 1880s, he owned a New York paper called the World.

Pulitzer used his front page to shame the rich for sitting on their wallets, and to call on ordinary Americans instead. He called the statue "a gift of the whole people of France to the whole people of America." And he made that promise. Send in any amount at all, and the World would print your name.

It worked. Letters poured in. Schoolchildren sent pennies. Working people sent dimes and quarters.

By August 1885, the campaign had reached its goal. More than one hundred twenty thousand people gave. Most of them gave less than a dollar. Together, they raised more than one hundred thousand dollars. Pulitzer sold a lot of newspapers along the way, no question. But the pedestal got built.

One more thing came out of the fundraising, and almost nobody noticed. Back in 1883, a young New York poet named Emma Lazarus had written a sonnet to help raise money for the pedestal. It was auctioned off at an art exhibition. Then it was mostly forgotten.

Hang on to that poem. It isn't finished with her.

Fog Over the Harbor

The pedestal was finished in 1886. Workers put the statue back together on top of it, piece by piece, riveting the copper skin onto Eiffel's iron frame.

On Thursday, October 28th, 1886, she was ready.

It was a gray, wet day, with fog and drizzle over the harbor. That didn't stop New York. The National Park Service estimates about a million people turned out. A big parade wound through Manhattan. As it passed the offices of Wall Street, workers threw the paper tape from their stock tickers out the windows. It's often remembered as New York's first ticker-tape parade.

Out in the harbor, the water was jammed with boats.

And the man who came to accept the statue on behalf of the American people was the President of the United States, Grover Cleveland. The same man who, as governor, had vetoed public money for her pedestal.

High above all of them, inside her copper head, one more man was waiting for his cue.

The Cue

It was Bartholdi. Fifteen years after he picked out that island from the deck of a ship, the sculptor was up inside his own statue, ready to pull away the French flag that covered her face.

Down below, Senator William Evarts was giving a speech.

The way the day's accounts tell it, Evarts paused. And Bartholdi took that pause for his cue.

Down came the flag.

The crowd cheered. The boats let loose with their whistles. And the senator never got to finish.

Twenty-one years after a French scholar first floated the idea, Liberty finally showed her face to New York. Pennies, dimes and quarters had given her a place to stand.

And the man accepting her for the American people was the governor who had once vetoed public money for that pedestal. Grover Cleveland made her a promise. "We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected."

Not everyone was cheering. The guest list was almost entirely men. A group of women who were fighting for the right to vote chartered their own boat and sailed out near the island in protest. Their point was simple. Liberty was a woman, and women didn't have the vote.

Emma Lazarus died in 1887, a year after the dedication. In 1901, her friend Georgina Schuyler came across the forgotten sonnet in a little book. In 1903, a bronze plaque with the poem went up inside the pedestal.

It's called The New Colossus. Lazarus gave the statue a new name, the Mother of Exiles. And she gave her a voice. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

Starting in 1892, more than twelve million immigrants passed through Ellis Island, just across the water. For many of them, the first thing they saw of America was that torch.

Generations of soldiers and sailors coming home through New York Harbor have seen her waiting for them. As a Navy veteran, I can tell you a symbol like that reminds you what all the hard work is for.

The crates are long gone. Out where the Isère brought her in, a copper woman stands on a pedestal of pocket change, her torch held up over the water.

Tomorrow: a seventy-seven-year-old man straps into a rocket, and everyone wants to know why. The Daily Muster is supported by Parcaut Supply Co. Subscribe, and it'll be there in the morning. Muster's done. Fair winds. I'm Ed Parcaut, and I'll see you tomorrow.