Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (23 page)

The American Committee proposed to take the campaign national by petitioning each state and setting up fundraising committees in all major cities. The members suspected the hinterlands would balk at giving New York a gift, but they would try. Or at least they said they would try. In actuality they adjourned the meeting, and did not follow through.

Meanwhile, Bartholdi continued to exploit the greatest fundraising tool he had. He’d already charged people to see pieces of Liberty in Philadelphia and at the Paris exposition. Now he’d open his workshop where the statue was being built to public viewing. In this way he turned all the curiosity seekers into subscribers by making them buy a ticket to view the statue in progress in the high-ceilinged warehouse of Gaget & Gauthier.

The glass of the skylight and the vast windows that filled half of the high wall allowed daylight to illuminate the carcasses of the sculpture. In one section a man might be using a blowtorch on a finger larger than himself. In another a worker would be hammering away at a copper sheet bigger than a wagon bed. The coppersmiths would jump across the tip of the statue’s nose. A half dozen joiners might be fitting pieces of wood onto a section, so the plaster below could be destroyed and the metal laid over. A six-foot man might be standing at the statue’s lip, pressing the lead form for smoothing her eyebrow.

The workers screwed the joints together, skipping every few rivet holes. On Bedloe’s Island, the parts would be secured just under an inch apart along every seam. Those rivets would be loose enough to allow the statue to slide a bit to accommodate the vast changes in New York’s temperature. The workers would rivet the metal like a good tailor creating a seam, from the inside so that the bolts would not show. The work, one reporter noted, would cost more than a million francs.

In the center of the courtyard, outside the actual workshop, the men began erecting the immense skeleton of iron and steel that Eiffel had devised. What he had invented was a kind of tower, a pylon, with a single branch at the top that would support the upraised arm and torch. On Bedloe’s Island, that iron pylon would be riveted in four places to the foundation. The exterior copper skin would bear no weight, but would be attached to the frame like a flag to a flagpole. From a structural point of view, the statue’s shape would be superfluous. Eiffel’s creation would bear all the weight itself.

To deal with the threat of the galvanic charge, Eiffel and Bartholdi had planned to place little pieces of copper covered by small rags between each two joints and rivets, a solution that had been used on the bellies of ships.

By the end of August 1882, Eiffel’s iron framework had been cloaked with copper up to the knee. To celebrate, Bartholdi invited twenty-four visitors to the atelier—about sixteen journalists from influential French newspapers and magazines, including his Alsacian friend, the exuberant and biting writer Edmond About; the art critic Philippe Burty from
La République Française;
and Henri Escoffier, a columnist for the
Petit Journal,
which was said to be devoured by half the reading population of France. He also included his loyal assistant Marie Simon; the copper supervisor, Bargeret; the scaffold maker Baron; as well as Eiffel and other key employees engaged on the project from Gaget & Gauthier.

Bartholdi ushered his guests from the workshop into the shadow cast by the copper slices joined together four stories tall. The black metalwork of Eiffel’s scaffold climbed farther up. The cavern walls sloped and bowed with the curves of the copper drapery. The empty rivet holes let in pinpricks of light.

Ladders ran to the first floor from the ground, and Bartholdi and his crew indicated the way, as if it were normal to send two dozen eminent men in dark suits up a statue for a midday climb.

The men began making the ascent. At the first floor they came to another ladder, leading to the second floor, and so on, until a little below the knee, around the fourth floor, they arrived at a clearing, like a warehouse floor, with a table set there for twenty-five. A signal was given and, through a system of pulleys, plates of food began to rise, hoisted by makeshift dumbwaiters. Lunch for twenty-five began to rise up from four floors below.

As the men dined, Bartholdi stood to address them about his Liberty. “Her presence above the port of New York, will not allow Americans to forget that they have never had a friend more faithful and devoted than France,” he declared. “As each year misery grows in these widely separated lands, thousands of unfortunates want to both seek relief from their suffering and spread seeds of hatred against us, it is without doubt useful that there is something to recall that, a century ago, other men came to America, to take their part, not in its wealth, but in its dangers, to lend their strength to the oppressed and to help them conquer on the battlefields, this liberty which perhaps might have escaped them.” The men applauded heartily.

One journalist who attended wrote later that Parisians had been gossiping that Bartholdi was just building this statue to satisfy his ego. The reporter, prefiguring how Bartholdi’s Liberty creation myth would be developed, now sensed a deeper principle at work. “We have been glad to hear him explain the concept that gave birth to his giant statue, which more than one time we have heard accused of having the unique desire of astonishing the world.”

Adrien Hébrard, director of the daily
Le Temps,
then rose to toast the creators, citing the numerous difficulties they had been forced to surmount to build the statue.

Before the lunch ended, one of the organizers promised a reporter that, in 1883, when the full construction was complete, the group would be invited for lunch in the statue’s head. They were assured they would have a staircase to aid their ascent and a telescope to survey the countryside beyond Paris from that fourteenth floor. And sometime, either then or in New York, electric light would emanate from the crown.

The gulf of enthusiasm for the statue between the French and the Americans became even more apparent after that luncheon. “It was rumored to-day that the Bartholdi statue of ‘Liberty,’ which has been intended for Bedloe’s Island, has been virtually offered to Boston,” a U.S reporter wrote just over a month later, without even lamenting the loss.

According to the news item, the French committee had tired of waiting for New Yorkers to ready their pedestal. When John C. Paige of the Beacon Society in Boston, an organization formed in 1881 to better that city, visited Paris, he received a passionate welcome from the French committee. The committee members urged him to find a little island in Boston Harbor for the piece, and he agreed to petition his group about the matter.

Richard Butler, secretary of the American Committee, upon learning about this from an
Evening Post
reporter, said that “in view of the facts no New Yorker will have the slightest right to complain if the statue goes to Boston.” He recounted the promise of the first days of the American Committee and how, for ten months now, “absolutely nothing has been done.” There had been no meetings or fundraising of any kind. He had been embarrassed not to be able to reply to any of the letters from Paris because there was no news to report other than squabbling.

Nothing motivated New Yorkers so well as rivalry. The
New York Times
retorted the next day in an editorial: “[Boston] proposes to take our neglected statue of Liberty and warm it over for her own use and glory. Boston has probably again overestimated her powers. This statue is dear to us, though we have never looked upon it, and no third rate town is going to step in and take it from us. Philadelphia tried to do that in 1876, and failed. Let Boston be warned . . . that she can’t have our Liberty . . . that great light-house statue will be smashed into . . . fragments before it shall be stuck up in Boston Harbor. If we are to lose the statue it shall go to some worthier and more modest place—Painted Post, for instance, or Glover, Vt.”

Bartholdi wrote to the American Committee at the end of that month that the French committee disliked the sarcastic tone of the newspaper articles emanating from New York. The French committee would send a letter to the newspapers in a month and Bartholdi considered this a warning to Butler and the American Committee that they should be ready to reply publicly. “In short, we consider it high time for the U.S. to act,” wrote Bartholdi. “The committee here is about to make applications to the government for the official transportation of the statue but as you well understand we must be first assured of the feelings of the Americans on the subject.”

A fundraising concert was held at the Academy of Music in New York at the end of November but by January 1, 1883, only $70,000 of the total $250,000 estimated to be required for the pedestal and erecting the statue had been gathered.

In June, a Salt Lake City newspaper reported that a recent meeting of Liberty’s American Committee could not even achieve a quorum, and so “the engineer had to read his report to a corporal guard of three or four committeemen and reporters.”

Late that summer, Bartholdi wrote to Georges A. Glaenzer, a Frenchman on the American Committee, and offered a way for the committee to
pretend
it was raising money. “If agreeable I will transfer
temporarily
to the New York Committee all Royalties I am entitled to from my copyright which they might collect by authorizing the reproduction of the statue,” he said.

Once the American Committee met its financial goal, the rights would revert to Bartholdi. He authorized the American Committee to make any licensing deals it chose, but he would retain the right to sell the ten-inch terra-cotta models signed by him. “I have some little hope that there may be a demand for the same which may help to make up for the large sacrifices that, as you personally so well know, I have had to make.”

Starting that fall, the American Committee dutifully convened at 171 Broadway every morning to try to devise ways of gathering the money, but the four hundred men who had begun the project back in 1877 had been whittled to a committee of three.

In 1884, one could walk down rue de Vigny toward boulevard de Courcelles and hear hammers ringing in the street. In Parc Monceau, children chased pigeons beside the flower beds. Only a few blocks away a gargantuan copper figure towered over the six-story houses, looking as if she might step out to stomp the flowers, flatten the pigeons, and loft the children to her shoulders. Liberty could now fully stand on her own.

If it was between noon and five Monday through Thursday, you could pay for a ticket to see her. If you were a subscriber, or a student of the École des Beaux-Arts, you could visit free on Thursdays and Sundays.

You entered the statue through the back foot, which was tilted up in the act of stepping forward. A temporary wooden staircase would carry you up to her chest, where you then either climbed to the head, or made an intrepid journey up the high staircase branching into the arm and the torch’s balcony.

With the arm moving slightly in the breeze, you would walk through the doorway into the clear air and see all of Paris below. Its roofs appeared “as if they had been mown like grass with the scythe, and rising out of them, sharp and clear, the Panthéon, the Invalides, St. Clothilde, St. Sulpice, Notre Dame, L’Etoile and the Trocadero towers; then still further beyond, to bound the view, blue sky and the light cirrus clouds that in the distance seem to be distinctly lower than the spectator’s standpoint.”

This was the highest anyone had ever stood in Paris, save in the basket of a balloon.

If a visitor tired of touring the statue, he or she might simply gaze upon the other people who had flocked there, a motley crew, including the workmen in caps and blouses, art students, and politicians. Every now and again, a Frenchman would find himself moved to speechify about America. In some cases, Americans overhearing the oratory might be glad that their country did not exist as described. “But the impressionable hearers drink in the praises of the ideal republic with eagerness,” wrote a reporter, “and reward the speaker with cries of ‘
Vive la Liberté!’ ‘Vive la Republique Américaine!’
”

On your descent, you could buy a souvenir—a fragment of metal, or an engraving (of nearly any size or quality) depicting the statue.

People went in droves to visit, particularly on Sunday, which a reporter pointed out “is the Parisian holiday for all sorts of diversions from sightseeing to a revolution.” Bartholdi estimated that about three hundred thousand people visited the Gaget studio while the statue was being worked on, or later, as Liberty waited for America to receive her. Bartholdi kept her standing whole in the courtyard, her bright orangey copper turning a slightly darker brownish red with the weather. He used the income from the ticket purchases to finance the statue’s completion. Liberty was now ready for her passage to America.

10
The Engineer and the Newspaperman

It is difficult to imagine how Americans must have felt upon receiving word that a metal woman fifteen stories tall intended to immigrate to the United States in the very near future. What could they do with her?

In the United States, the construction work for the pedestal would have to begin. The American Committee needed a key figure to oversee the labor of getting Liberty safely into place on Bedloe’s Island. This person would solve every engineering problem, hire every laborer, and serve as Bartholdi’s doppelgänger on American shores. The man recommended for this position by former president Grant and General Sherman and other powerful U.S. figures was General Charles P. Stone. While others might help raise money or sketch designs for Liberty’s pedestal, Stone would control the ultimate outcome. He would oversee construction of Liberty’s base at a salary of five hundred dollars a month. He began his work for the American Committee as engineer in chief on April 3, 1883.