Statue of Liberty

• 1. Introduction

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  The Statue of Liberty stood finished on Bedloe's Island, and on the night of its dedication almost nothing happened when the torch was lit. The glow was so faint that it was barely visible from Manhattan. A New York newspaper, the World, said it looked "more like a glowworm than a beacon." That was a poor showing for a colossal copper woman named Liberty Enlightening the World. Yet this gift from the people of France, standing in New York Harbor, became an icon of freedom and of the United States itself.

  How did an after-dinner remark grow into a monument? Who paid for it, when many Americans did not want it? What hidden machinery lets a thin copper skin sway in harbor winds without cracking? And why did arriving travelers read a message into it that its sculptor never intended?

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• 2. A Dinner Conversation

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  In mid-1865, according to a long-told story, the abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye sat in his home near Versailles with the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. Laboulaye was an ardent supporter of the Union in the American Civil War. He supposedly mused that a monument to American independence should be "a common work of both our nations." The National Park Service has its doubts. A report from the year 2000 traced the tale to an 1885 fundraising pamphlet and judged that the statue was most likely conceived in 1870. Bartholdi himself later said the remark was never meant as a proposal. It inspired him anyway. Under the repressive regime of Napoleon III, he did nothing but talk it over with Laboulaye.

  Bartholdi had other colossal ideas to chase. He traveled to Egypt in 1856 to study ancient works. In the late 1860s he pitched Isma'il Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, on a lighthouse called Progress or Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia. It would take the form of a robed peasant woman holding a torch aloft at the northern entrance of the Suez Canal, in Port Said. The ancient Colossus of Rhodes offered a precedent. That bronze statue of the sun god Helios is believed to have stood over 100 feet high at a harbor entrance, carrying a light to guide ships. Both the khedive and the canal developer Ferdinand de Lesseps declined because of the cost. In 1869 a conventional lighthouse by François Coignet went up in its place.

  On his return from Egypt, Bartholdi visited the Sancarlone, a 76-foot statue of St Charles Borromeo at Lago Maggiore in Italy. It was made of repoussé copper over an iron armature. He also knew the Vercingétorix monument by Aimé Millet, built the same way. When that statue was restored a century later, the work would draw international attention to the poor state of Liberty herself. Bartholdi chose copper over bronze or stone because it was cheaper, lighter and easier to transport.

  War intervened. The Franco-Prussian War ended with Napoleon III captured and deposed. A more liberal republic was installed, and Bartholdi's home province of Alsace was lost to the Prussians. Bartholdi himself had served as a major of militia. In June 1871 he crossed the Atlantic carrying letters of introduction signed by Laboulaye. Entering New York Harbor, he was struck that every arriving vessel had to sail past Bedloe's Island. Better still, the island belonged to the federal government, having been ceded by the New York State Legislature in 1800 for harbor defense. He called it "land common to all the states." President Ulysses S. Grant assured him that obtaining the site would be easy. Bartholdi crossed the country twice by rail and still judged public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic too cool for a campaign.

  Back in France he kept busy with patriotic sculpture for a country humiliated by defeat. The Lion of Belfort, 73 feet long and carved in sandstone, honored a fortress that had resisted a Prussian siege for over three months. Its Romantic emotion was something he would carry into his next great figure.

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• 3. Faces and Symbols

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  A half-clothed woman leading an armed mob over fallen bodies is how Eugène Delacroix painted liberty in 1830. Bartholdi and Laboulaye wanted nothing to do with that. Laboulaye had no sympathy for revolution, so the figure would be fully robed. Bartholdi wanted a peaceful look and gave her a torch, which stood for progress.

  The ancestry of the figure was Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, widely worshipped by emancipated slaves. A Liberty figure already appeared on most American coins. Thomas Crawford's Statue of Freedom, dated 1863, topped the Capitol dome and has its own story. Crawford first planned to crown it with a pileus, the cap given to freed slaves in ancient Rome. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, a Southerner who later led the Confederacy, feared it would read as an abolitionist symbol and ordered a helmet instead. Bartholdi also thought about a pileus, but France's Marianne always wears one. He chose a radiate halo. Popular belief says the rays stand for the seven seas and seven continents, though research has not confirmed it.

  Many people say the face belongs to Augusta Charlotte Beysser Bartholdi, the sculptor's mother. Regis Huber, curator of the Bartholdi Museum, says there is no basis in fact for that or similar guesses. What the sculptor did write down was his method. "The surfaces should be broad and simple," he said, warning that too much detail would destroy the proportion of the work. So the face is austere and the silhouette strong, meant to change gradually for passengers sailing toward Manhattan.

  At her feet lies a broken chain and shackle. Bartholdi had considered putting a broken chain in her hand but decided that would be too divisive just after the Civil War. The version he built is half-hidden by her robes and hard to see from the ground. The historian Maria Cristina Garcia says that is "why Americans have forgotten this history." In her left hand is a tabula ansata, a tablet that evokes law. Though Bartholdi greatly admired the United States Constitution, he inscribed JULY IV MDCCLXXVI on it. That tied liberty to the date of the Declaration of Independence.

  Her pose is a classical contrapposto, with the right foot raised and set back. From the front she looks still; from the side she seems to move. Look down at her toes. The second toe on each foot is longer than the big toe, a trait called Morton's toe or "Greek foot," common in ancient Greek art.

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• 4. Copper and Iron

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  The first chief engineer was Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the architect who had been Bartholdi's friend and mentor. He proposed a brick pier filled with sand, rising to the hips. Iron bars like the veins of a leaf would anchor the skin. After consulting the metalwork foundry Gaget, Gauthier and Company, he settled on copper sheets. They would be shaped by repoussé, in which heated metal is struck with wooden hammers. The copper needed to be only 0.094 inches thick, so the whole figure stayed light for its volume. Bartholdi set the height at just over 151 feet. That was double the Sancarlone and the German statue of Arminius, both built the same way. Viollet-le-Duc also designed the pleats of the dress.

  Then Viollet-le-Duc fell ill in 1879 and soon died. He left no hint of how he meant to join the copper skin to his masonry pier. In 1880 Bartholdi won the services of Gustave Eiffel, who worked with his structural engineer, Maurice Koechlin. They scrapped the pier and built an iron truss tower instead. A fully rigid frame, Eiffel reasoned, would let stress build up in the skin until it cracked. So a secondary skeleton hung from the central pylon, letting the statue move slightly in the winds of New York Harbor. Flat iron bars, or springs, connected it loosely to the skin through metal straps called saddles. Every saddle had to be crafted individually. To stop the copper and iron from corroding each other, Eiffel insulated the skin with asbestos soaked in shellac.

  The result was one of the earliest examples of curtain wall construction, where an inner framework carries the weight and the outer surface does not. Visitors would climb two spiral staircases to the crown. The arm was too narrow for more than a single 40-foot ladder up to the torch. The Norwegian immigrant engineer Joachim Goschen Giæver later turned Eiffel's sketches into the computations and construction drawings for the frame.

  The pieces of the iron tower were built in Eiffel's factory at Levallois-Perret, a nearby suburb of Paris. Because the frame was now iron, Bartholdi chose to build the statue in France, take it apart and ship it. The first rivet, fixing a copper plate to the big toe, was driven by the United States ambassador to France, Levi P. Morton. Work moved on many segments at once, which often confused visitors. One finger was made to Bartholdi's specifications by a coppersmith in the southern French town of Montauban. By 1882 the statue was complete to the waist, and Bartholdi marked the moment by serving lunch to reporters on a platform inside it.

  The French copper industrialist Eugène Secrétan donated 128,000 pounds of copper. Some of the metal is said to have come from a mine in Visnes, Norway, but testing has not settled the matter. On the 4th of July 1884, the finished statue was presented to Ambassador Morton in Paris. Lesseps, who had succeeded the late Laboulaye as chairman of the French committee, announced that the French government would pay to ship it. By January 1885 the pedestal was far enough along, and the statue was taken apart and crated for the ocean.

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• 5. Paying the Bill

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  On the 25th of April 1876, the Paris Opera staged a special performance. It featured a new cantata by Charles Gounod, titled La Liberté éclairant le monde. Laboulaye had announced the project in September 1875, along with the Franco-American Union to raise money. The announcement also gave the statue its name. The French people would pay for the statue itself, not the French government, as many wrongly assume. Americans were expected to pay for the pedestal. Some French people resented the United States for not helping in the war with Prussia. Monarchists opposed the statue largely because the liberal Laboulaye, newly a senator for life, had proposed it.

  The Union aimed first at the wealthy, yet money came from across society. Schoolchildren and ordinary citizens gave, as did 181 French municipalities. So did descendants of the French contingent in the American Revolutionary War. Some donors, less idealistically, hoped for American support for France's Panama Canal. Models of the statue went on sale. Tickets were sold to watch work in the Gaget, Gauthier workshop. A government-authorized lottery offered silver plate and a terracotta model as prizes. By the end of 1879 about 250,000 francs had been raised.

  Meanwhile the finished arm and torch traveled. It reached the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia only in August 1876. Too late for the catalogue, it was called the "Colossal Arm" or "Bartholdi Electric Light" in some reports. It still drew crowds, and visitors climbed to the torch balcony to view the fairgrounds. From 1876 to 1882 it stood in Madison Square Park in Manhattan. Bartholdi toured the United States and urged the creation of American committees in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. The New York group, later called the "American Committee," took on most of the work. One member was 19-year-old Theodore Roosevelt. On his last full day in office, the 3rd of March 1877, President Grant signed a resolution authorizing the acceptance of the statue. The next day President Rutherford B. Hayes chose Bartholdi's Bedloe's Island site.

  American money was another matter. A depression that began with the Panic of 1873 lasted through much of the decade. Many Americans preferred realistic art honoring national heroes to allegory, and some felt Americans should design American monuments. Harper's Weekly wished that the French "had 'gone the whole figure'" and supplied statue and pedestal together. The New York Times wrote that "no true patriot can countenance any such expenditures for bronze females in the present state of our finances."

  At an art and manuscript auction for the cause, the poet Emma Lazarus was asked to donate a work. She first declined, saying she could not write a poem about a statue. But she was helping refugees from antisemitic pogroms in eastern Europe, who lived in conditions she had never known. That gave her a way in. Her sonnet "The New Colossus" set the frightening Colossus of Rhodes against an "American colossus" and a "beacon to the lost and hopeless." It includes the lines "Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

  Still the money lagged. In 1884 Grover Cleveland, then governor of New York, vetoed a $50,000 bill for the project. A request the next year for $100,000 from Congress failed. The New York committee had only $3,000 left and halted work on the pedestal. Boston and Philadelphia offered to pay the whole cost if the statue moved to them. Then publisher Joseph Pulitzer launched a drive in the New York World for $100,000, promising to print every donor's name. He published their notes. A young girl alone in the world gave "60 cents, the result of self denial." Children sent a dollar they had saved to go to the circus. A kindergarten class in Davenport, Iowa, mailed $1.35. Bars and saloons put out donation boxes. On the 11th of August 1885, the World announced $102,000 from 120,000 donors, with 80 percent of the total in sums under a dollar. The pedestal alone had needed up to $300,000.

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• 6. Rising in the Harbor

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  Richard Morris Hunt was hired in 1881 to design the pedestal, and he expected to finish it in about nine months. He proposed 114 feet in height. Money problems cut that to 89 feet. His truncated pyramid, 62 feet square at its base, mixes Doric portals with touches inspired by Aztec architecture. Bartholdi proposed placing the coats of arms of the states on ten disks above each door, but that was never done. The base was set inside Fort Wood, a disused army fort built between 1807 and 1811 in the shape of an eleven-point star. It was aligned to face southeast, toward ships arriving from the Atlantic.

  General Charles Pomeroy Stone oversaw construction. The foundation began in 1883 and the cornerstone was laid in 1884. Cost forced Hunt to abandon solid granite. The walls were poured concrete up to 20 feet thick, faced with Stony Creek granite from the Beattie Quarry in Branford, Connecticut. It was the largest concrete mass poured to that time.

  On the 17th of June 1885, the French steamer Isère reached New York carrying the crated statue. Two hundred thousand people lined the docks and hundreds of boats went to sea to greet it. The pedestal was not finished until April 1886. Eiffel's frame was bolted to steel I-beams in the concrete, and the skin sections went on. The base was too wide for scaffolding, so workers dangled from ropes. A week before the dedication, the Army Corps of Engineers vetoed floodlights on the torch balcony, fearing ships' pilots would be blinded. Bartholdi instead cut portholes in the gold-leaf-covered torch and put the lights inside. Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of Central Park, supervised a cleanup of the island. On dedication day Stone claimed nobody had died during construction. That was false. Francis Longo, a 39-year-old Italian laborer, was killed when an old wall fell on him.

  The dedication ceremony came on the afternoon of the 28th of October 1886, with President Cleveland presiding. That morning a parade, watched by anywhere from several hundred thousand to a million people, marched from Madison Square to the Battery. It took a small detour past the World building on Park Row. Traders at the New York Stock Exchange threw ticker tape from the windows, which began the tradition of the ticker-tape parade. Lesseps spoke first, then Senator William M. Evarts. A French flag over the statue's face was supposed to drop at the end of Evarts's speech. Bartholdi mistook a pause for the finish and let it fall, and the cheers ended the speech. Cleveland promised that the statue's "stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man's oppression until Liberty enlightens the world."

  Only dignitaries were allowed on the island. The sole women admitted were Bartholdi's wife and Lesseps's granddaughter, because officials feared women might be hurt in the crush. Suffragists chartered a boat and made speeches near the island praising Liberty as a woman and demanding the vote. Bad weather postponed the fireworks until the 1st of November. The Cleveland Gazette, an African American newspaper, was blunt. "This government is a howling farce," it wrote. It suggested the torch stay dark until the nation was free "in reality."

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• 7. Welcome and War

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  The United States Lighthouse Board took over the statue in 1887 and promised equipment to strengthen the torch. It never worked, and the statue stayed nearly invisible at night. Gilding the figure to reflect more light proved too expensive. Bartholdi came back in 1893 with more suggestions, all ineffective, though he did win better lighting inside the statue so visitors could admire Eiffel's design. In 1901 President Theodore Roosevelt transferred it to the War Department because it was useless as a lighthouse. Roosevelt had once sat on the New York committee. An Army Signal Corps unit stayed on the island until 1923.

  By then the statue meant something else. Wars and upheavals in Europe sent large numbers of emigrants to the United States, many through New York. They saw a sign of welcome rather than enlightenment, and the opening of an immigrant processing station on nearby Ellis Island strengthened the link. It matched Lazarus's vision, since she had called the statue "Mother of Exiles," but her sonnet had grown obscure. In 1903 it was engraved on a plaque fixed to the base. One Greek immigrant recalled saying to the statue, "Lady, you're such a beautiful!" and asking for a chance to prove himself.

  Another change came with color. When built, the statue was reddish-brown and shiny. As early as 1902 the press noticed green spreading over it, and by 1906 the verdigris covered it completely. Congress authorized $62,800 to repair the statue and to paint it inside and out, believing the green was corrosion. Public protest met the plan for exterior paint. The Army Corps of Engineers studied the patina. It protected the skin, they found, and had "softened the outlines of the Statue and made it beautiful." Only the interior was painted.

  On the 30th of July 1916, German saboteurs set off a huge explosion on the Black Tom peninsula in Jersey City, near the island. Carloads of dynamite and other explosives bound for Russia detonated. The statue suffered minor damage, mostly to the torch-bearing right arm, and closed for ten days. Repairs cost about $100,000. The narrow ascent to the torch was closed and has stayed closed ever since.

  That same year Ralph Pulitzer, who had succeeded his father Joseph as publisher of the World, raised money for exterior floodlights. He claimed over 80,000 contributors but fell short of the $30,000 goal. A wealthy donor quietly covered the gap, which was not revealed until 1936. Gutzon Borglum, who later sculpted Mount Rushmore, redesigned the torch with stained glass in place of much of the copper. On the 2nd of December 1916, President Woodrow Wilson pressed the telegraph key that lit the statue. The United States entered the war in 1917. Its image then filled recruitment posters and Liberty bond drives, reminding the public that embattled France had given the statue.

  In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge declared the statue a national monument. In 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt moved it to the National Park Service. The Works Progress Administration demolished most old buildings, replaced rusted stairs and supports, and built granite steps for a new entrance. During World War II the statue stayed open but was dark at night under wartime blackouts. It was lit briefly on the 31st of December 1943. On D-Day, the 6th of June 1944, its lights flashed "dot-dot-dot-dash," the Morse code for V, for victory.

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• 8. Keeping the Flame

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  In 1956 an Act of Congress renamed Bedloe's Island as Liberty Island, a change Bartholdi had advocated generations earlier. The island soon became a stage for protest. In 1970 Ivy Bottini led members of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women in hanging a huge banner. It read "WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE!" Beginning on the 26th of December 1971, fifteen anti-Vietnam War veterans occupied the statue and flew a US flag upside down from the crown. A federal court order sent them out on the 28th. Other groups briefly seized the statue for causes such as Puerto Rican independence. The Park Service permitted others, including a Gay Pride Parade rally.

  In 1982 engineers announced that the statue needed major restoration. Detailed drawings were missing, and the structure had changed greatly over prior decades. The right arm had been attached improperly and swayed more as winds grew, risking structural failure. The head sat 2 feet off center, and a ray was wearing a hole in the arm. The armature was badly corroded, and about two percent of the exterior plates needed replacing. President Ronald Reagan created a commission headed by Chrysler chair Lee Iacocca. Its foundation raised more than $350 million for the statue and Ellis Island. An American Express promotion in 1983 gave one cent per card purchase, producing $1.7 million.

  The statue closed in 1984 behind the world's largest free-standing scaffold. Liquid nitrogen stripped decades of interior paint, and baking soda blasting removed two layers of coal tar. Bartholdi's asbestos insulation had failed to prevent galvanic corrosion, and it forced workers into protective "Moon suits." Replacement copper came from a Bell Labs rooftop with a patina close to the statue's own. Eiffel's iron armature was replaced entirely with bars of Ferralium, a stainless alloy that flexes and springs back. The leaking 1916 torch gave way to a replica of Bartholdi's original, with a flame covered in 24-karat gold. On the 4th of July 1986, during Liberty Weekend, Reagan rededicated the statue. He said, "We are the keepers of the flame of liberty; we hold it high for the world to see."

  The decades since have brought repeated closures. After the September 11 attacks the island shut, and the pedestal reopened in August 2004 without access to the statue itself. On the 17th of May 2009, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar made an announcement. A limited number of people could climb to the crown from the 4th of July. Another closure for new elevators and staircases began on the 29th of October 2011. The statue reopened on the 28th of October 2012 and closed a day later ahead of Hurricane Sandy. Reopening followed on the 4th of July 2013. The COVID-19 pandemic closed it on the 16th of March 2020, and the crown did not reopen until October 2022.

  A $70 million museum opened on the 16th of May 2019. It lets every visitor see exhibits that only 20 percent had reached in the pedestal. In 1984 UNESCO named the statue a World Heritage Site, calling it a "masterpiece of the human spirit." Today about 425 people a day may buy tickets that include the climb to the crown.

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