Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (30 page)

Stone pointed to a photograph on the wall. “There,” he said, “is Bartholdi’s plan.”

“I see,” said Garczynski, “a kind of truss bridge shooting out at an angle from the iron columns within the figure. Is that the support?”

Stone nodded and laughed, and Drexel joined him. They told Garczynski that the statue was balanced on the wrong leg. If a person raised his right hand and held it to its highest extent, the weight would rest on the right, not the left as Bartholdi had it.

Garczynski asked: “Has [the statue] evoked any enthusiasm among artists?”

Both roared “No!”

That was all Garczynski needed to hear. “We have all the work and ten times the outlay, and the feeling that we have been imposed upon,” he wrote.

The next day, June 24, Stone denied in the
Commercial Advertiser
everything in this encounter. The
Telegram
responded by publishing an actual affidavit from its reporter and responded to Stone on the front page:

“The TELEGRAM . . . is not so foolish as to permit, if it possibly can prevent by timely interference, the commission of faults in the placing of the great statue on the great pedestal which shall imperil the former and make both America and France the laughing-stocks of the universe now and hereafter.”

Not only did Garczynski stand by his statements; he said: “I further affirm that during the past two years I have seen and conversed with General Charles P. Stone upon the subject of the Bartholdi Statue many times—in fact, nearly a hundred times—and not once did General Stone ever express the sentiments published under his signature in the
Commercial Advertiser
of Wednesday, June 24, 1883, with regard to Bartholdi; but, on the contrary, he invariably and at all times, to the best of my recollection, spoke slightingly of the work of Bartholdi and intimated that it would be necessary for him to correct it in many particulars.”

Stone would have to address the problem of the iron and copper mixing “by which the blundering of Bartholdi might be set right.” Garczynski went on to say that he knew Drexel and had talked to him multiple times over the past two years, and “during that time I never heard him utter one word in praise of Bartholdi.” He said he had also talked to all the members of the American Committee “and they all, with the solitary exception of Richard M. Butler, left upon my mind the impression that they considered Bartholdi inefficient.” He added that Stone’s denial of the conversation was “an action unworthy of a gallant man and an American.”

Garczynski’s article, however, did not spoil the mood at the farewell dinner at Delmonico’s to honor the French sailors of the
Isère
before the French frigate headed back to sea. One of the guests, Edmond Bruwaert, acting consul general of France at New York, described an ardor between France and America so pure of heart, it seemed that affection could never vanish. He spoke of the way Frenchmen and Americans knew everything of each other—their battles, their cities, their novelists. “But what we love better still is a nation which can choose great and honest citizens from perhaps small and obscure towns, and give to such the supreme power,” he said to rousing applause.

“What we love is to see these able and disinterested statesmen descend from this power with simplicity, and ceasing to be chiefs in a great nation, return tranquilly to their farms, their books or their offices. It is things such as these that the representatives of France may see in America. Liberty is indeed a good teacher.”

A few other speakers rose to the podium, including General Horace Porter, vice president of the Pullman railcar company and former personal secretary to President Grant. He spoke of the slow process of constructing Liberty’s base. “We long ago prepared the stones for that pedestal, and we first secured the services of the most useful, the most precious stone of all—the Pasha from Egypt,” he said.

The guests laughed at the pun, but Stone must have savored the moment. Tomorrow he’d be faced with some hard realities on Bedloe’s Island. There were only 70 feet of a 154-foot pedestal in place. The statue was in crates, unsheltered from summer heat and thunderstorms, with no money to erect it nor any plan for how to sufficiently anchor it or maintain it. Only $9,900 had been raised for putting the statue in place. One-fourth of all the funds raised had come from the pockets of the American Committee itself.

As for the French, Captain de Saune oversaw the unloading of the last part of the precious cargo onto Bedloe, and the
Isère
turned her prow toward home.

13
Pulitzer’s Army and Other Helpers

With so much money still needed, Pulitzer again went into action. He’d already done a tremendous amount of fundraising from individuals ignited by his editorials, articles, and cartoons in the
World
. That campaign appeared to be thriving. Behind the scenes, though, his rousing words were turning out to be insufficient to generate the required capital. The newspaper, one of the workers on the project noted, did “not know the word
fail,
” and in keeping with this attitude, Pulitzer decided to run the fundraising as a business.

This detail almost escaped detection, but a few reporters at the time noted the secret strategy: Pulitzer created the first professional fundraising corps in the United States, with the employees making a rather large percentage of what they collected.

The head of the operation was John Reavis, who had suggested the campaign and was charged with keeping “the matter constantly before the public.” He did much of his work from abroad. In the United States, a peripatetic agent named Philip Beers handled the national fundraising. As he traversed the country, Beers found that immigrants were most generous. “They seem more appreciative of liberty than do our native born.”

It was in New York that Pulitzer created his army of “drummers.” This fundraising team was divided into districts, with each district having a chief who reported to the general boss. Each fundraiser worked a particular district. The drummers were paid in direct proportion to what they raised—20 percent of all the money—and if they failed to hit their target amount, they were promptly fired. “These drummers have had, as you may observe, a perfect pudding and made a handsome stake!” wrote one reporter.

Each day, as morning broke in New York, these fast-talking charmers fanned out from the
World
offices into the stores, factories, and shops of the city. Some “Pulitzer Canvassers” might take the elevated train to “Germany,” on the East Side below Fourteenth Street. Others might interrupt the Chinese men on the Lower East Side. Others would visit “Africa” on Thompson Street just north of Canal, or Judaea, at the east end of Canal around Ludlow and East Broadway. Some would take the Sixth Avenue elevated line up to 155th Street and canvass the pleasant suburb of Harlem, or take a horse-drawn stagecoach through Fifth Avenue to petition the wealthy ladies. They might stop on the line of “the Slave Market,” the queue of actors near the Washington monument in Union Square who waited to be hired for work and who might spare a few coins for Liberty and to finally get their names in the paper. Once Pulitzer’s team was trained for this task, this group could be called upon—assembling its full corps within a month—for other fundraising or to rally voters. He had created the first professional corps of canvassers and fundraisers in America.

On August 11, 1885, Pulitzer announced: “ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS! TRIUMPHANT COMPLETION OF THE WORLD’S FUND FOR THE LIBERTY PEDESTAL.

“From every single condition in life—save only the very richest of the rich and their tainted fortunes—did contributions flow,” the
World
announced. “From the honorable rich as well as the poorest of the poor—from all parties, all sections, all ages, all sexes, all classes—from the cabinet member and the Union League member—from the poor news boys who sent their pennies, until the unprecedented number of 120,000 widely different contributors had joined in common spirit for a common cause.”

The $100,000 now could go directly to General Stone to ensure that the pedestal would be completed by the beginning of September as planned. Richard Butler had told a reporter in July that he asked Bartholdi and his crew of men to come at the end of September, or the first of October, in 1885. They would erect the statue and set the inaugural for July 4, 1886.

Butler had seen Bartholdi on his trip to France when Butler was helping to oversee the loading of Liberty on the
Isère
. The businessman, who had now become a rubber magnate, admitted he had worked tremendously hard on the cause, “but Mr. Bartholdi is my personal friend, and I wanted to see his work succeed,” Butler told the reporter. “He is a noble man, one of the grandest God ever created, and his whole heart and soul is in this work. He has given it fifteen of the best years of his life, and has sunk most of his private fortune in it. But his effort has been successful, and he is delighted.”

Butler went on to affirm that King was a wonderful choice to actually do the construction. Butler had just seen Pulitzer, who was jubilant. And the statue had been funded, as Butler had hoped, by the American people joining forces. “This statue has awakened a great esteem for America in the hearts of the Frenchmen, and it has been an excellent movement to strengthen the good will between the two nations.”

Butler reported that Richard Morris Hunt had arrived in Paris on a family trip and would meet with Bartholdi to go over the pedestal details.

All that was left to be done was to have Stone oversee the last of the masonry work. That, however, had stopped in late July because Stone’s steel girders were not yet completed. All the construction estimates were off, and Pulitzer’s fundraising would now not be enough. The girders and anchors would cost $14,000. Unloading the
Isère
had cost $4,350.

At some point, the committee would also need a shed to protect the crates. Amid the granite blocks, lumber, cement barrels, and hills of sand, crates holding Liberty’s unassembled pieces were lying out in the sun and rain. People had scratched their initials on the metal inside. The pedestal still stood at only 70 feet, with another 29 feet to go. A dozen or so men, many of whom had been involved in constructing the piers of the Brooklyn Bridge, puttered about with little to do.

In Paris, Bartholdi fumed that he had been long waiting for a meeting with Hunt to discuss the final details. Bartholdi also complained about a smaller project that he was eager to secure in America. A committee in Washington, D.C., had approached him to talk about a new statue of Lafayette for that city. Bartholdi believed this committee was asking him exclusively. The project offered $45,000, and $50,000 had already been set aside by Congress to make the work. The committee changed its strategy, though, organizing a competition and even inviting the French government to recommend an artist other than him. “It consequently loses its character of an act of consideration towards the author of the Statue of Liberty,” he wrote to Butler.

He now explained that he no longer planned to come to the United States in the autumn, because there was no real need of him. “Whenever it will be time to put up the statue, you will only need to send for the man who has been posted by me as to all the work, he will be able to supervise and to give information on everything.”

Bartholdi continued: “My first idea in going to the U.S. was on account of the Lafayette. . . . I intended on going in order to form a correct idea of the situation and pay a sort of duty call to the committee. . . . I first thought of being courteous in going to the U.S., now my trip would have all the appearance of an intrigue which is repugnant to me. . . . I will go and take a rest amongst the trees, I will think of you and it will do me more good than to go on a visit to the members of the committee at Washington.”

This declaration must have seemed extraordinary to Butler, who now was faced with all of the logistical issues of erecting Liberty, as well as the financial problems and the efforts to win government support.

Bartholdi offered kind words for Stone, perhaps unaware of the scuffle in the
Herald
and
Commercial Adviser
. “Pray thank General Stone for his note contained in your letter—I had written to him a few days previously. As soon as advisable I will write to him full details as to the mounting and about the party I will send him to oversee the work—whilst you are giving him my regards pray renew my thanks for all he has done for the reception of my ‘big daughter.’”

He also added that he had received no copy of the
World
since July 1. He had wanted to watch the march to the end of Pulitzer’s fundraising drive but someone had stopped his complimentary subscription. He hoped Butler would renew it.

He then offered Butler thanks, conveying his own hurt more than his appreciation. “I am grateful to you for all the charming and affectionate words you express for me; now that I have reached the terminus of my great enterprise and I feel the weariness resulting from the long effort I had to make, it is gratifying to hear of one’s being beloved. I am reaping as a reward many petty jealousies. . . . I shake your hands with all my heart.”

Some ten days later, he wrote at the end of a letter: “P.S. Hunt still has not shown up.”