Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (13 page)

Simon is known to have worked for one other artist, David d’Angers, a famous classical sculptor of medallions and busts, and one can presume an adventurous streak in the man because, in his late fifties, he was willing to travel more than three thousand miles with a relatively unknown artist who fantasized about crafting a colossus.

Bartholdi planned to check into the La Farge hotel, which a French-American on board claimed he owned. Bartholdi had asked for his mail to be sent almost across the street to Mr. Henri Maillard, no. 619 Broadway, New York, a chocolatier, who had arrived from France years before and had stunned New York with his meringues, charlottes russes, jellies, and ice creams.

Other than this connection, and letters of introduction from Laboulaye and others in France, Bartholdi was on his own. As he wrote on the day they had sailed out from Le Havre, “We watch the land disappear!!”

“Do not isolate yourself too much,” Bartholdi cautioned his mother at the close of his letter. “I see you clearly and I am with you in spite of the numerous longitudes that separate us. From my longitude, I embrace you most tenderly. Your loving son, A. Bartholdi.”

On board, Bartholdi would later claim he read and reread Victor Hugo’s
Châtiments
(
Chastisements
), a volume of poetry that the literary god had written in 1853, criticizing the rule of Napoléon III. The book had grown extraordinarily popular during the war, with a printing of five thousand copies selling out in two days in October 1870. In Paris, public readings of the poems had been held to raise money to buy cannons.

Bartholdi was one of the many people swept up in the passion of Hugo’s verse, and he probably knew that he could capitalize on Hugo’s immense popularity by later citing this as an inspiration for his Liberty. He cited specifically the poem “Stella,” which identifies the one human value capable of saving society from greedy and malicious governments:

I fell asleep one night near the shore.

A cool wind woke me, I left my dream

I opened my eyes, I saw the morning star. . . .

The poem spoke of an ideal that could move whole populations to joy, a star that could be used for navigation to peace.

An ineffable love filled the space. . . .

And then came the words that would mean so much to Bartholdi:

Arise, you who sleep!—For he who follows me,

who sends me forward first,

This is the angel Liberty, this is the giant light!

Bartholdi underscored the last two lines in his book.

The beloved Victor Hugo, he could claim, had inspired his lighthouse in the form of Liberty.

The weather favored the
Pereire
as the vessel slowly sailed toward America. In jubilation, Bartholdi recorded his first impressions. “The daylight had become strong enough for one to see grass and fields of grain—which are indeed pleasant to contemplate, even if one is not a ruminant, after a long sojourn in the world of fish.” They came closer and he sketched a map to help his mother understand the environs of New York, including Westchester, Flushing, and Jersey City.

“At the head of the bay is New York, between Brooklyn and Jersey City,” he wrote. “They seem and in fact are one broad city, although each is a municipality in itself. This may serve as an example to explain the mystery of the Trinity.”

Bartholdi was on a mission to drum up work, in particular someone to fund his colossus, and in his usual exuberant way he seemed unwilling to let any concern about recent events in France set him off track. He planned to begin by amassing information that would help get the project built. “[I]t was necessary at the outset to Americanize myself a little, to become acquainted with the country, the persons and the things, to become familiar with all the difficulties in order to hit upon the means of triumphant success,” he would later recall.

He probably wished to be like the baron’s son in the first of Laboulaye’s fairy stories: “It is time for me to go to seek my fortune. I wish to go to distant countries to try my strength and make myself a name.”

Bartholdi realized that his understanding of America was not broad or deep, but he was by no means in love with the American spirit. This relative indifference contradicts the picture he would later paint of himself as on a single-minded mission to give a unique and grand work to America to express French friendship. The statue would be, for Bartholdi, not a gift to a land he adored, but a work that found a ready location in a country that, like him, dreamed big.

His first goal was to spend time “studying the American mind. . . . I think I see pretty clearly that this is the most profitable thing for my development of my career and the production of my sculptures.” He thought it useful to make himself known; Americans might visit his studio on trips to Europe.

He could tell early on that the American mind concerned itself primarily with money. An editorial in the
New York Times
the month he arrived spoke of new fears emerging with the dawn of the Gilded Age. Though robber barons and industrialists such as Vanderbilt and Astor contributed to the productivity of the country, their reach caused concern. “The large capitalists are too powerful. They control legislation, tyrannize over the public, and help to corrupt the general conscience,” wrote the
Times
.

Even if Bartholdi disliked this obsession with the financial, that did not preclude the possibility of his having an adventure. “In spite of the dominating thought of money, there is a great deal here to see and to learn.”

The familiar story of Bartholdi’s inspiration for the location of his colossus says it struck him the moment he arrived in New York Harbor. He would perpetuate the legend that Bedloe’s Island was immediately his choice. From his journal, we know that at first he had in fact not settled on a location. “I hurry out to get a first glimpse of the city and to study sites for my project—the Battery, Central Park, the islands in the harbor. Then a bath and a rest.”

The Battery at the time encompassed twelve acres of park. Near a flagpole in the center of the walkways and flower beds, the city staged summer band concerts. The view from the harbor wall created by F. Hopkinson Smith encompassed Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Jersey City. It was one of the most beautiful views in all Manhattan, bathed by sea breezes and relatively untouched by the rattle of downtown that lay so close. No one arriving by ship in Manhattan would fail to notice Bartholdi’s Liberty if he were able to acquire this prominent southern point.

Of course, if Bartholdi’s Liberty had been erected in the Battery the effect would have been odd. Liberty, on her pedestal, would stand more than twenty feet taller than the spire on Trinity Church downtown, the highest landmark then.

Bartholdi scouted Central Park, too, but began to show a preference for Bedloe’s Island, even when inspecting it from afar. “Went to Staten Island by ferry-boat to study the open harbor. The little island seems to me the best site.” He traveled to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park to check its potential as well.

He needed supporters but was finding few enthusiasts for his proposal in Manhattan or Brooklyn. On July 25, Bartholdi made a visit that would prove crucially important to his career. He traveled with Vincenzo Botta, the Italian professor who had been trying to set up introductions for Bartholdi, to the beautiful estate of Richard Butler, a forty-year-old Ohio native. Butler was an adopted orphan who had arrived in New York at age fourteen looking for work. He found a job at A. W. Spies & Company, an importing house, and within five years, at the age of nineteen, had been made a partner in the firm of William H. Cary & Company, seller of fancy goods.

Only four months before Bartholdi met Butler, the
New York Times
had announced his name among the members of the committee seeking to establish a Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Butler had donated five hundred dollars to the subscription drive for the purchase of art, not a fortune compared with the subscription of the top donor, who gave ten thousand dollars, but he was clearly a man who was forward-thinking and knew other powerful men.

Butler was witty and knowledgeable, a “worthy man,” Bartholdi thought, albeit “a bit Quaker.” Bartholdi related to his mother how on his first visit he had arrived without eating breakfast and found the family eager to discuss such heady topics as religion and the great principles. He joked that they must require empty stomachs to get in the right frame of mind, but he, on the contrary, needed food. By his joking account, he received nothing to eat except for a tablespoon of soup until ten o’clock in the evening.

The lofty concept of Bartholdi’s Liberty must have appealed directly to Butler’s philosophical side. He agreed to be part of the scheme. “[Mr. Butler] is very much taken with my monument project, which I showed him tonight,” Bartholdi wrote triumphantly.

In a bit of a comic coincidence, Bartholdi ran into the famous landscape architects Olmsted and Vaux at his hotel while visiting Butler. In New York, they had been conducting a wary dance—meeting with him at their offices and taking him out to Prospect Park—but according to his account, his presence “worried” them. “I have simply aroused their jealousy. The waters are getting a little troubled,” he wrote.

What caused their jealousy is hard to tell. They served with Butler on the committee for the planned Metropolitan Museum. Butler had been named head of the committee on art acquisition for the Metropolitan, so perhaps they feared Bartholdi would gobble up the nascent museum’s funds with his mediocre statues.

A few days later someone counseled Bartholdi to make one last attempt to establish warm relations with the park designers. Bartholdi went to them with a fountain proposal for one of their projects, probably Central Park. “They are rather delighted with the combination I have worked out for the monument at the entrance of the park,” he said. “They seem to incline toward me with a little more confidence. They will unite my combination and their projects, and perhaps we shall then, in the future, be able to get somewhere.”

Perhaps they were merely pleased to direct him toward a less intrusive project, but a Bartholdi fountain for Central Park was never built.

With New York canvassed, Bartholdi extended his research on America. In his diary and letters, he revealed himself to be more an artist scouting the challenges and tastes of a potential client than a man enchanted by the nation and anxious to honor it. Bartholdi wrote to Laboulaye, expressing enthusiasm for the nation’s organization: “I greatly admire the institutions of the country, the patriotism, the sense of civic duty, the objectivity of the government.” He went on to imply that, ironically, in this democracy, the sense of true liberty might be lacking. “The lone individual can’t escape. He has to live in this ‘collectivity.’ There are probably elements of great power in this nation, but the individual . . . lives like a drop in a rainstorm, unable to break away by clinging to a blade of grass.”

Most of his observations to his mother or his diary entries never rose to this level of philosophical insight. Rather, they record aesthetic observations. The East Coast of America did not greatly impress him. Americans “whistle through their noses” when they speak. Their company was often charmless. “I passed the evening less pleasantly—with a group of American business men. They always greet you cordially, but they are no more entertaining on that account.”

He hated nearly everything of what he termed the typical American hotel: “There are drawbacks; your shoes are not shined; there are no bells; and the gentlemen’s water-closets are in the village, 300 metres away from the hotel. The room is supplied with gas, but the fixture is placed so that after dark it is impossible to read or write.”

For someone who claimed to be inspired by slavery’s end, on his travels he demonstrated a consistently disdainful attitude toward black Americans. “The dining-room is an immense hall full of negroes,” continued Bartholdi to his mother. “All the waiters are black, which contrasts with the whiteness of the blond guests and of their toilettes. You are taken over by a waiter who brings you an enormous amount of badly cooked food in separate little dishes. Everything is big in these hotels, even the petits pois. Each guest has his monkey who stands behind his chair. The only way to get rid of him is to send him to the kitchen for something.”

Washington, D.C., where he made “silly calls,” reminded him of Versailles. Otherwise, he disapproved. The place, to his mind, was nothing more than a great wasteland interspersed by buildings. “I am stopping at Arlington House, near the White House, the President’s palace. As for monuments to see, there is nothing except the Treasury,” which he liked; the patent office; and the Capitol building, which was “well-located,” “imposing,” and “beautiful from a distance,” but it had “crazy statuary” and the “central part leaves something to be desired, likewise the interior.”

He examined the “bizarre” Smithsonian, the public statues he deemed “pretty bad, generally,” and the Washington Monument, which was then a mere stump at seven stories. “It will not be beautiful, but the intention is poetic,” he wrote in a letter to his mother. “So far it has risen only seventy feet from the ground; and work on it stopped fifteen years ago.”

That stunted obelisk might have given Bartholdi pause. Begun in 1848, the monument had suffered many setbacks. The design had called for a pillar surrounded by a colonnade that would house statues of Revolutionary War heroes. Given the high price tag of $1 million for the proposed project, the committee decided to build the obelisk first and hope to inspire further funding. Work stopped in 1854, actually when the monument was at a height of more than 150 feet, but still just one-third of the projected height.