Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (34 page)

Before he could be made fully aware of his mistake, on July 10 the Senate Committee on Appropriations gave its amendments, including $56,500 slipped into the sundry bill for Liberty. It would have pleased Bartholdi to learn the money was the exact allocation to fix the dilapidated Washington Monument he so hated, switched to Liberty instead. The funding was approved on August 3, speedily, so that Congress could adjourn, with the proviso that none of the sum be used for wines or liquors. The president signed the bill a day later.

The planning for Liberty’s inaugural could begin.

Book III

The Triumph

14
Liberty Unveiled

On Bedloe’s Island, workmen were painting the cannons and picking up cannonballs and other remaining detritus around the fort. October 28, 1886, would be Liberty’s official dedication date.

To be eligible for government support, the statue had to be transformed into a lighthouse, but the committee lacked money for machinery. Stone did not wait around for government approval or committee funds. He simply made a deal with an engineer to put the fixtures in place so Liberty could be lit the night of her inaugural and shine thereafter. As far as Stone was concerned, the government could approve his plan after the fact.

In addition to the eight lamps that Stone wanted positioned on the torch, the engineer would place four lamps of 6,000 candlepower each at the pedestal’s base, hidden behind the parapets. They would light up Liberty’s folds, making her visible “even on the darkest nights.” Or at least that was what was hoped.

All other signs pointed to a disastrous unveiling. Only a few weeks before Bartholdi’s planned departure, the American Committee realized that the U.S. government had failed to extend invitations to a French delegation. “The invitations are issued so late that those receiving them will be obliged to pack their gripsacks and run for the train to Havre on the instant or be left,” one reporter noted. Bartholdi himself wasn’t sure he would even be able to attend. Just before leaving France, he rushed to Colmar to visit with eighty-five-year-old Charlotte, who was unwell. He found her so frail that he decided not to leave her side. She insisted he go to America for the unveiling, and so, reluctantly, he walked down the narrow cobblestone streets, headed to the train back to Paris to pack.

Late though he was, Bartholdi would travel to America for the unveiling, and he would not be alone. The French delegation included celebrated military officers, government officials, an editor, a journalist, and the painter Émile Renouf.

A crowd sent them off from the St. Lazare depot on October 15. While this should have been Bartholdi’s moment to celebrate, the public enthusiasm mainly rose at the presence of Ferdinand de Lesseps, who was serving as the chairman of the Franco-American Union. At age eighty, de Lesseps had become a true celebrity in France. “Societies of every sort competed to have him as a member or as President,” wrote one reporter. “Hardly a project of any kind was considered practicable unless Ferdinand de Lesseps had at least cast his eye over it; or its sponsor had been received and encouraged by him. He was a kind of arbiter for all new schemes.” The average Frenchman would not have known that de Lesseps bore serious worry on his shoulders. Thirteen of the thirty engineers he had sent to work on the Panama Canal that month had died of yellow fever. Many millions of dollars had disappeared into “the ditch” and investors balked at throwing in more.

Bartholdi and the rest of the French delegation arrived at the port of Le Havre at dawn ready to sail to America with the other 583 passengers booked on the
Bretagne
. A violent storm was beating down on the town. Water stood waist-high in the streets of the St.-François Quarter. A hurricane was said to be coming in from America, and the port master reported that the barometer hadn’t been so low in a year.

In that gale, at half past six in the morning, the group made its way up the gangplank preparing to head out to a churning sea. De Lesseps clasped the hand of Tototte, his charming thirteen-year-old daughter, who would be his sole traveling companion. In his other hand, he held a small Arabian satchel, famously the only baggage he took with him on his round-the-world trips.

To the passengers’ relief, the port master considered it impossible for the steamer to leave the harbor. He let the storm lash them at anchor as they waited for calmer seas.

Despite the delay, the delegates carried on as if nothing were amiss. They spent the day settling in, then gathered in the electric-lit saloon for a “truly fairylike” dinner. At dessert, Bartholdi stood to read telegrams sent by the American Committee, along with invitations to dinners on the twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth, and twenty-ninth in New York. Those who had received an invitation from the president to visit the White House agreed they must go.

That evening the barometer showed a slight rise in air pressure, and the wind made a turn for the northwest. The order to sail came. “Despite the darkness—for it was night—and really frightful weather, several hundred persons had gathered at the end of the pier and there gave utterance to sympathetic shouts of ‘Hurrah!’ frequently repeated,” wrote the reporter. “The sight of the packet boat issuing majestically from the port, rocked by a tempestuous and agitated sea, bearing with it personages so important and distinguished as de Lesseps, the Jaurès and the Pélissiers, was in itself one calculated to move, and we ourselves felt its influence on hearing the shouts of the crowd. My own feelings were all the more touched by this unexpected nocturnal spectacle, because I caught sight of M. de Lesseps, who stood near me, giving his hand to his daughter Tototte at the same time shedding a few tears, which were furtively brushed away. It was assuredly to the ‘grand Français’ that those hurrahs were addressed, and, as may be seen, it was he, perhaps, who was most profoundly impressed by them.”

The first full day, Sunday, October 17, began with a violent hailstorm and a brawny north wind that sent the seas high. Toward six o’clock, the hail calmed and rain began to fall, but the sea continued to rise and break over the steamer’s prow. Poor Tototte fell to her bed seasick.

There would be many amusements on board the
Bretagne
. De Lesseps planned an address on Abyssinia, with a focus on the history of the world before the time of Solomon. Gilbert, who was known as the “young Naudad,” referring to a popular singer, and was the favorite of the Prince of Wales and grand dukes of Russia, would perform.

The delegation started a newspaper called
La Bretagne.
Among the elements in the paper was an extremely telling contribution by Bartholdi. All the members of the delegation listed a matter of extreme meaning to themselves, along with their signature:

C
HRISTIAN
D
OCTRINE
: L
OVE
O
NE
A
NOTHER

—F
ERDINAND
DE
L
ESSEPS

T
O
P
LACE
M
Y
N
AME
AT
THE
F
EET
OF
THE
G
REAT
M
EN
AND
AT
THE
S
ERVICE
OF
G
REAT
I
DEAS
—T
HAT
I
S
M
Y
A
MBITION
.

—F. A. B
ARTHOLDI

On October 25, the
Bretagne
finally arrived in the New York Harbor, but too late to let the passengers off. The steamer remained in quarantine that night, and Bartholdi and other passengers stayed awake late, pacing the deck, trying to glimpse New York in the glare of electric lights from the shore. No one from the American Committee came to greet them, which led to grumbling, but a Frenchman living in New York rowed out to deliver a bouquet of flowers to Jeanne-Émilie.

The next morning, at seven thirty, Louis de Bebian, the American manager of the French line, was fretting on the pier, trying to prepare for the arrival of not only the five hundred passengers from the
Bretagne
but the French delegation coming to America specifically for the Liberty unveiling. His face was marked with fatigue and anxiety as he answered question after question from the people waiting onshore for the deluge—“Where are you going to take them?” “What time will they be visible?”—and was given advice: “I wouldn’t go to the Hoffman; go to the Windsor.”

Key members of the American Committee, including Drexel, Butler, Pulitzer, King, and Hunt, all wearing tricolor badges, had gathered there. At eight thirty they set out from the Twenty-Third Street dock. The decorated steam yacht
Tillie
took them to pick up John Schofield, commanding general of the U.S. Army, from Governors Island, and escort Bartholdi and the delegation to shore.

The
Bretagne
slowed as it passed Bedloe’s Island and received a salute from the navy ships and whistled greetings from the ferryboats and other craft.

Then it crept closer to downtown and through the October fog, a sunburned Bartholdi could be seen pacing the deck in his checked cutaway suit and bearskin coat, a small, flattened derby on his head. Jeanne-Émilie stood at the rail in a peacock-blue dress and sealskin jacket, waving the flowers from the Frenchman. Tototte jokingly posed as the statue.

A little boy on the pier in Manhattan glimpsed the personages on deck and asked, “Is that Bartholdi?”

When someone confirmed it was indeed Bartholdi, he exclaimed: “Great Scott!” Bartholdi was now a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic.

The members of the American Committee who had trailed the
Bretagne
into port rushed on board to distribute flowers and greetings. Some members of the French delegation were whisked off at once to view the elevated train and the other wonders of New York. One delegate, General Pélissier, would later comment, “This is a very strange country. Two minutes after landing they take us for three hours’ gymnastic exercises up and down rough ladders, over and through stone walls and then for a trip up the river.”

The American Committee led Bartholdi and his crew directly to the
Tillie
. This too was a rather extraordinary choice. The committee was taking a group that had just spent two weeks sailing to America directly onto a boat and out to an island. Yet if Bartholdi were to discover a problem with the statue, everyone realized it would be better to know now than at the time of the unveiling, two days hence. A
New York Times
reporter covered the scene.

“They tell me,” Bartholdi said to Richard Morris Hunt as they motored out, “that my statue is spoiled, and that it has been rushed up regardless of any artistic sense, and that the torch is monstrous. Is it so? Can such a thing have been done?”

“Bosh!” Hunt said.

“
Qu’est ce que c’est que
bosh?” Bartholdi asked.

“I assure you that your statue is exactly as you planned it should be. People have been telling you a lot of silly stories, and that is all there is to it.”

Bartholdi and Hunt went below for breakfast. Meanwhile, Jeanne-Émilie lingered on deck with Richard Butler’s daughter, the wife of Georges Glaenzer, one of the committee members. As the statue came into view, Jeanne-Émilie pointed.
“Tiens!”
she said. “Look at that arm. Do look. I tell you there is something wrong there—a black lump that should never have been and that Monsieur Bartholdi never planned. Don’t you see it?”

Mrs. Glaenzer peered at the dark figure, then burst out laughing. “That lump is a man, and that man is at work. He is not a fixture.”

As the boat drew closer to Bedloe’s Island, Bartholdi emerged from below. He examined the statue both by bare eye and with field glasses, then he, de Lesseps, Tototte, Richard Butler, and other members of the delegation climbed into a rowboat and headed to shore.

The landing was not yet completely repaired, so the delegation had to climb a crude ladder of boards nailed to pilings to come ashore. The doughty de Lesseps, in his big overcoat and battered silk hat, could not make the climb and so was brought onto the sand.

Though the unveiling was only four days away, workmen were still clambering around the torch and hand to place the electrical wiring. They even clung to the rays of the diadem, mere specks against the copper. Scaffolding hung from Liberty’s face and a bit of rope dangled down.

“Souvenirs of the statue! The only authentic souvenirs!” a seller at the end of the pier yelled. “Picture on one side, words on the other!”