The Statue of Liberty, and a Moment in History

There are few symbols of the US as well-known as the Statue of Liberty. The enormous neoclassical sculpture, 46 meters tall and clad in copper, may be the single most recognizable emblem of the United States worldwide.

The statue itself is filled with meaningful touches. Her foot stands on a broken shackle, which remembers the US’s historic abolition of slavery after the American Civil War. Her left hand holds a tablet inscribed with the date of the US Declaration of Independence, July 4th 1776, in Roman numerals, while her right holds aloft a great torch, shining a beacon to guide people to the Land of the Free (and making her essentially an extremely glamorous lighthouse).

Standing on her own island just off the southern tip of New York City’s Manhattan Island, she has become entwined with the history of that great city, welcoming her waves of immigrants through the 19th century to the New World and a new life. She is, by any standards, a masterpiece.

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She is also, perhaps surprisingly for those who are so used to seeing her depiction everywhere, an extremely unusual statue. It is hard to conceive in today’s divisive US political and social climate of such a project being completed. Such an attempt would probably fail at the design stage.

But of course the Statue of Liberty is not an entirely American project, and she did not start her life in New York. The Statue famously had its origins in France, and it was a rare confluence of events and circumstances which led to the project ever getting off the ground at all.

How did Lady Liberty come to be?

A Monument to Freedom

The project’s inception can be traced to an after dinner conversation between two men and a private home near Paris. One was Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the celebrated French sculptor. The other was Édouard René de Laboulaye, the prominent commentator on French politics and head of the French Anti-Slavery Society. And they were talking about the upcoming centenary of US independence and democracy.

Laboulaye had been closely following the American Civil War and had throughout been a staunch supporter of the Union movement. Having witnessed the victory of the Union over the secessionist (and slavery-supporting) Confederacy, and the resulting abolition of slavery in the US, he felt that this was a moment in time that required commemorating.

Laboulaye was keen on such a memorial coming from the combined work of both the French and the Americans, and that it should be the labor of the two countries who raised this monument to history. It was a beautiful notion and a perfect moment of peace and co-operative spirit, and it almost certainly didn’t happen.

It is much more likely that the idea for the Statue came about five years later, with the story of the after-dinner conversation being retroactively inserted to add a little poetry to the  conception of the Statue. Nor was it likely that, at first, Laboulaye actually intended his idea to take flight; he may just as likely have been commenting on the repressive French government of Napoleon III and comparing it to the freedoms enjoyed over the Atlantic.

Bartholdi certainly did nothing with the plan: he was already very busy with other projects. His next grand plan was to build a giant lighthouse, perhaps in the form of a woman, overlooking the Suez Canal, inspired by the ancient Colossus of Rhodes and Egypt’s ancient monuments lining the Nile.

Bartholdi would never get to build his lighthouse, the contract for its design going to a rival architectural designer. However the idea stuck, and after visiting monumental copper statues on both Italy and France he found himself crossing the Atlantic in 1871 with letters of introduction from Laboulaye to see if the Americans would be into that sort of thing.

Bartholdi already had a design in mind for the Statue, based on the Roman goddess Libertas, a popular representation of democratic republican idealism. The Statue was to appear serene, and by holding the torch aloft she was to stand for progress and a bright future. Her location, on an island which every ship which visited New York City had to pass, was no coincidence either.

It would take a monumental effort from both the United States and France to turn this idealized vision into a reality. Bartholdi would cross the US twice in drumming up support for the idea, and it would be a further six years before even the head was complete, ready to be presented at the Paris World’s Fair the following summer in 1879.

By now Napoleon III had been deposed and the new French regime was supportive of the endeavor, organizing a lottery to raise funding. A combination of this and additional state and private funding on both sides of the Atlantic, along with the essential help of one Gustave Eiffel who designed the internal framework, meant the Statue was largely complete by the early months of 1884.

Laboulaye himself had sadly died in 1883, having only seen the Statue’s head and completion to the waist. His successor presented the statue formally to the American ambassador on July4 th 1884, and promised to pay for shipping to Liberty Island once the Americans had sufficient prepared the plinth.

This was achieved less than a year later, the Americans facing much more severe challenges to fundraising than the freshly republican French. With Congress refusing to fund the statue and President Grover Cleveland also vetoing funding, it took a grassroots funding drive from New York World publisher Joseph Pulitzer to secure the money.

In April 1886 the pedestal was finally complete, and work began on reassembling the Statue. And on October 28th, 1886, presided over by President Cleveland and watched by as many as one million people, the Statue of Liberty was unveiled.

In the end, this was a bit of a mess. The French flag draped over the Statue’s face was dropped too early, and the suffragettes threatened to overrun the affair as only two women were allowed on the island for the ceremony, including Bartholdi’s wife.

But she was there, finally complete after a mammoth effort on both sides of the Atlantic. The Americans in their need to raise funds had even commissioned the poet Emma Lazarus to compose a sonnet in her honor. And it was a good thing she did, for a line from the resultant poem has become closely bound to the Statue and all she stands for ever since:

“Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Top Image: The Statue of Liberty in 2000. Source: Jakub Hałun / CC BY 4.0.