Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (31 page)

In mid-August, American newspapers erupted with a new controversy about General Stone. The
Evening Post
ran a front-page article based on an interview with an unidentified informant indicting Stone for incompetence and overspending. The informant campaigned for a new engineer to erect the statue.

Stone had overstaffed. He had puttered at work through the winters simply to justify paying expensive salaries, including his own. “Think of employing nine men to inspect work done in an excavation less than 100 feet square!” wrote the unnamed accuser. “The contractor told me at one time that his workmen had not room enough to do their work in, there were so many inspectors in the way!” The source went on to say that Stone had retained his own useless draftsman when Hunt’s office had rendered the plans. He had kept a ferryboat at ten dollars a day, even through the winter, for his use alone.

In the same article, Stone promised a full accounting to the committee. In a brief defense, he stated that owing to unforeseen delays, he had been forced to pay a team of competent men for no work, simply because he could not release so many talented laborers back into the pool and start assembling a crew again. To another newspaper, he dismissed the charges as “vapid nonsense.” The
World
backed him up, saying that only Stone and one inspector had received salaries.

Stone’s and the
World
’s retorts were not quite true. Alexander McGaw, with whom F. Hopkinson Smith had teamed to build the foundation, had supplied a list of the project’s workers and their salaries. The list of more than thirty-five employees had included three other engineers besides Stone, along with seven inspectors and more assistants.

A few weeks later, on September 3, Stone took a tougher stance in the
Evening Post
. He lashed out at Smith, thereby naming the previously unnamed source. He assumed that this man, with whom he had battled on the parapet of the Bedloe fort, had been the one to rake his reputation through the muck. He accused him of trickery in his contracts, including subcontracting out his work.

In a letter to the editor of the
Evening Post
the next day, Smith retorted that “the eminent Engineer-in-Chief has so far lost his temper as to descend to personalities, and to what lawyers call ‘abusing the witnesses on the other side.’”

Smith, like Garczynski, attested that Stone had pretended to be a stranger, in this case to the details of his business arrangement, when he had in fact had multiple meetings with him and the alleged “subcontractors.” The money he had raised at the art exhibition had all been frittered away on salaries for Stone and his staff of inspectors during a six-month period when basically nothing had been done on the pedestal.

Smith claimed that Stone was incompetent. He didn’t even know how to instruct workers on mixing concrete and the American Committee had been forced to tell contractors to ignore the misinformation. Smith accused Stone of having wasted $48,227.65 on the pedestal, and in addition to all the other elevated costs, Stone had blown through $26,259 on office rent, furniture, printing, and ceremonies and sundries.

The pedestal’s total cost was $307,359. Wrote Smith: “The public must understand that this pedestal is the simplest form of construction. There exists to-day hundreds of such piers, infinitely more difficult to construct, carrying heavy bridges, whose foundations are laid in rapid currents, and whose construction is presided over by one competent engineer and one assistant. This work is built on land, within reach of a dock, is of ordinary Ashlar masonry, resting on a concrete base.”

All it needed, Smith said, was a thoroughly considered plan, an architect, a reliable contractor, a competent engineer to see that the contractor did the work, and a treasurer.

If Stone had hoped to publicly dismiss Smith as a disgruntled employee, General G. A. Gilmore of the Engineering Corps of the Regular Army then chimed in. In a new article, he attested that Stone had squandered at least one dollar per cubic yard on the project.

On October 20, an article appearing in the
World
distanced the American Committee from Stone, even as it offered praise for his capability. Stone would not be needed after January 1, the article said. The pedestal should be completed by December 1. After that, the erection of the statue would be under the direction of a French engineer and the U.S. government would have charge of Bedloe’s Island.

Stone would be required to surrender his rooms in the Bryant Building as of January 1. Butler would from then on use his Hard Rubber Company office at 33 Mercer Street for American Committee meetings.

Bartholdi would be arriving in early November to give the last directions on erecting the statue and it would be up by July 4, 1886.

That meant that Stone, as of January 1, would be a man cast once more from public favor. He would miss the glory of seeing the statue through to the end.

Stone had one last trick. The
World
reported a few days later that he would now
volunteer
his services and see the statue through its erection.

On November 5, 1885, the
Transcript
published a tart letter to the editor, savaging Stone yet again. The writer referred to an article from the
New York Daily Star
of October 8, saying that in the journey from France, the braces of the face of the statue had become badly rusted and eaten by the “action of the bilge water.” It said that Stone had ordered the iron braces polished on the inner side and painted, then coated with shellac, then asbestos, then another layer of shellac, creating “a perfect non-conductor of electricity.”

The writer went on to doubt the bilgewater story. “I have two good reasons for my incredulity,” the writer stated. “One is that it was not bilge water that destroyed the iron braces of the bronze fountain made by Bartholdi and exhibited at Philadelphia in Fairmount Park in 1876. It was the galvanic action.

“My second reason is that General Stone has shown himself such a Turk in his suppression of agreeable falsehoods, that any statement made by him must be sifted. He is altogether too Oriental to be believed upon his bare word.”

The writer remarked how strange it was that no one had mentioned this problem of the face’s rusting upon the statue’s arrival. Instead, everyone had talked of how perfectly all the parts had weathered the journey. The writer noted how Stone had left the crates exposed over the summer. “I firmly believe that the damage was done on Bedloe’s Island, after the crates were landed, and that General Stone’s statement is an hypothesis of his own to hide the fact of his ignorance and carelessness.

“The unequal expansion and contraction of the braces and the copper scales will inevitably rub off all the baby devices of Stone Pacha. He might just as well mutter verses of his Koran over the statue as an enchantment.”

The letter was signed, “Edward Rudolf Garczynski, No. 42 Hudson St., Hoboken, N.J.”

Given all this trouble, Butler must have insisted Bartholdi come to America whether or not it made him look desperate with regard to the Lafayette commission. Bartholdi and Jeanne-Émilie arrived on November 4, aboard the
Amérique,
after a stormy voyage.

In his baggage, Bartholdi had brought with him two four-foot models of his proposed Lafayette statue. He would escort them to the War Department in Washington, D.C., to be examined by the committee.

Only the pedestals differed in the two models. In one, Lafayette stood on a plain pedestal; the other had an ornate pedestal with reliefs of Lafayette’s great battles, and an eagle at each corner holding a globe in its talons and the words “To our French allies.” Otherwise, Bartholdi had depicted the same uniformed Lafayette, gazing heavenward, holding his hat in one hand and the French and American flags in the other.

Bartholdi must have felt almost embarrassed to be carting along these maquettes as if he were a novice. Two other French artists who had been asked to compete for the commission had refused to submit models on the grounds that they were too established to receive anything but direct orders. But Bartholdi needed the work.

New York had changed greatly in the ten years since Bartholdi’s last visit. Back in 1871, uptown had been vacant lots and empty streets. Now mansions lined the bustling roads. The new Brooklyn Bridge stunned him with its size and engineering genius. He was surprised by the elegant, comfortable elevated railroads, ugly from the street and hellacious for neighbors, but a marvelous way of getting around the city.

President Grant had died four months before. Bartholdi went to Grant’s temporary vault at Riverside Park and enjoyed the beauty of the surroundings.

He visited Bedloe’s Island. November could be a bleak month in New York. Bartholdi found that Stone had built past the twenty-ninth layer of stone on the pedestal, but there were still almost sixteen layers to go just to cover the concrete base. The pedestal stood 123 feet high. Rubble, boards, piled granite, and mud littered the island. The steel fastenings still hadn’t been forged.

Bartholdi claimed to the papers that he approved of Stone’s work, but in actuality he was disappointed. He had expected the pedestal to be complete and had imagined the statue would be erected in the spring. With winter coming, Stone was rushing to finish the concrete work before the frost. He wouldn’t be able to start the statue for many months. Now Bartholdi realized the unveiling date would have to be put off until the following September, to coincide with the anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles, rather than Independence Day as planned.

In his melancholy, Bartholdi took refuge in braggadocio. A reporter asked him the purpose of his visit: “There were a great many difficulties about the mounting of the statue, and after considerable correspondence I and the committee deemed it best for me to come over and explain my ideas to Gen. Stone. You see it is a sort of puzzle to which alone I hold the key.”

The reporter asked if he approved of the pedestal’s position. “As to that my friend Simonnet has written that I was the Christopher Columbus of Bedloe’s Island. I selected it. The island was the inspiration of the statue.”

He headed down to Washington with his maquettes, to try to help his case on the Lafayette bid by making social calls. Jeanne stayed behind in New York. That arrangement made Bartholdi uncomfortable. Even in New York, he had disliked it when she, as a woman, had been left out of one dinner or another that he needed to attend.

In Washington, Bartholdi found Congress in recess and only the secretary of war in his office. He called at the White House, but arrived a few minutes late. Apparently, the president did not consider Bartholdi important enough to extend his public reception hour by a few minutes, because Bartholdi lamented he had just missed shaking hands with Cleveland.

Bartholdi considered Washington much improved since 1876, in particular with regard to its paving. He visited the Corcoran Gallery. “America is slowly developing a taste for the fine arts, although she has still much to learn in this direction, “ he told a reporter. The Corcoran Gallery gave him “new hope” and he “saw the art future of America in somewhat brighter colors.”

He retained his negative assessment of the Washington Monument, but this time—perhaps smarting with bitterness that this work had been granted funds for its completion while his statue had not—he criticized it more harshly. “The Washington monument does not add to the beauty of the capital,” he said of the obelisk that had been finished the year before. “It was an eyesore to me all the time I was there. In former times the imposing Capitol used to impress the traveler as he approached the city. But now you see at a distance this tall, ugly shaft, and everything else sinks into insignificance. It kills the city. Imagine such a monument set up in Paris. Why it would utterly destroy all the harmony of our beautiful French capital. Well, it has the same effect in Washington. Yes, it kills the city.”

Back in New York, the American Committee gave a dinner for Bartholdi at the Lotus Club, the literary fraternity on Irving Place. Bartholdi got up and spoke of the difficulties his project had faced and his hope for ongoing friendship between France and America. Then Butler rose. “I had the honor of calling one afternoon in June upon M. Laboulaye, accompanied by my friend [Bartholdi]. In the course of the conversation,” Butler remembered, “[Laboulaye] said that M. Bartholdi was the heart, the head and the fire that impelled them all in their good work. Without him the fire would have gone out long ago. To him alone can we attribute the success of the Statue of Liberty.”

The men applauded heartily.

“I had such strong faith in the final success to be attained by placing the statue on its feet on Bedloe’s Island—the spot that was made for it. It has been kept for that purpose from remote time to the present.”

Laughter interrupted him.

“That is as true as that we stand here,” he continued in his earnest way. “It was made for the purpose. Get upon the pedestal, look out on the Narrows, and you will think so, too. It is going to be the great welcome of all the ships that come into this port. It will be the object that will gladden more hearts from other lands than you can imagine.”

At his departure a week later, Bartholdi spoke on themes he had considered all the way back in 1856 about monumental sculpture. Now he contemplated his own Liberty, not the sphinxes. “I have put many years of my life into that work,” he said, “but I am sure that I will gain thereby the reward that all true artists seek—the kindly remembrance of posterity.”