Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (36 page)

Bartholdi appeared to be near tears. Cleveland, who often seemed grumpy even when shooting or fishing, didn’t shake his stony expression through the whole two-hour pageant. To every commanding officer marching past, or a dipping of the flags, he dutifully raised his hat, exposing his large bald spot, the sum of enthusiasm he expressed.

Secretary of State Bayard took photographs. De Lesseps, just in front of Bartholdi at the back, pulled his brim low over his brow and turned up his collar against the cold.

Throughout the parade, Bartholdi, at the back of the stand, chatted amiably with everyone around him, admiring the highlights as they were pointed out to him. Observers thought he looked “more genial and less strenuous” in the face than his photographs and pictures had shown. He took his hat on and off in the rain to salute passing troops.

Whenever a band stopped playing, the bells of Trinity Church could be heard tolling the American national anthem or the Marseillaise. At the top of the reviewing stand, one of Stone’s signal officers waved and twirled his flag to a signaler on the top of a nearby ten-story building, a strange and distracting display for the onlookers.

Down in the lower reaches of Manhattan, a spectacle was unfolding, created by the Wall Street employees who unlike most of the other city workers hadn’t been given the day off. These traders peered from their windows at the marchers peeling off from the official line on Broadway. They could see the flower girls from the Fire Department sashaying away, or the old Civil War veterans, or the college boys hooting and hollering. One Wall Street trader threw a roll of white ticker tape from a window. Soon the air was filled with strips unfurling from every window. They rained down on the electric wire and on the heads of the marchers and the snouts of the horses, and draped in the hair of the girls. Even the older Wall Street workers were pushing the younger ones away from the windows to hurl the tape. That made the Liberty pageant the city’s first ticker-tape parade.

General Washington’s carriage pulled up by the reviewing stand, as it had at almost every parade since the death of Washington’s old black mare. The red-shirted firemen followed, hauling an antique machine. The crowd roared its approval. Ladies waved their handkerchiefs. The firefighters yelled back. Harry Howard, the idol of the Veteran Volunteer Firemen, inspired the greatest screams. He was dressed in a dove-colored uniform and carried his gold-plated speaking trumpet in one arm. He limped along, beaming and bowing, and raised his fire hat to the president.

As the firefighters passed, a fire gong sounded. A policeman dashed along the line, waving his arms to clear the track. Suddenly a modern engine, pulled by large gray horses, nudged the old veterans to the sides. It almost seemed like a demonstration, so odd was the timing, but it was a real call to flames. The retired firemen seemed anxious to join the rush but the president was watching them and they were committed to march. The fire, just a block above the reviewing stand, was soon extinguished.

Toward the end of the parade, three little American girls dressed as
vivandier
s
,
the women who traditionally served wine canteens to French troops, stepped out of the marching formation to present trinkets to the dignitaries. They handed Cleveland a basket of flowers and passed along a small gold-fringed, silk American flag to Bartholdi.

The last marchers passed and General Schofield leaned over to Stone. “This is the best parade I have ever seen in New York.”

The president appeared to gruffly agree.

Dignitaries and reporters then headed into the gloom on board various ships for the unveiling itself. No one could see Liberty from shore. Only the outline of Governors Island could be glimpsed.

Liberty revealed herself as they motored closer. “Soon, out of the mist, there loomed high in the air a great, somber, shadowy form, which grew vaguely distinct as the boat approached, and soon the well-known figure of the torch-bearing goddess stood revealed in hazy outlines,” wrote one reporter.

“What appeared to be a wide white splash swept down her face, concealing her features. It was the white centre stripe in the French tricolor with which the face was veiled, the drenched dun atmosphere rendering the red and the blue indistinguishable from the bronze which they covered. Great trailing scarfs of mist dangled from the uplifted torch and wrapped themselves around it and over the goddess’s mighty shoulders at times until they were all but invisible.”

By two o’clock, two hundred steamer sailboats cruised near the island, some so packed with people that they listed from side to side. Walt McDougall at one point had to dive into the cold to rescue a “strange fat woman” who had flopped overboard. Rather than receive the thanks he thought he so rightly deserved, he was threatened the next day by her husband, suspicious that they were lovers.

The naval parade boats came down the Narrows in a long line leading the president toward the island. The captains had been told not only to use their usual piloting whistles, but to set off five short blasts to indicate when they had stopped. Ten short blasts with an interval between the fifth and sixth would indicate the boat had anchored. So in addition to all the other ecstatic blasts and belches of steam whistles through the harbor were mixed these wild signals, making a tangled web of sound.

Over the next hour, the select 2,500 guests began arriving on the island and following the wood walkway to the camp chairs set up in front of the speakers’ stand. The back seats filled first, the French arriving last for the front row. Pat Gilmore’s band played the Marseillaise, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and other patriotic tunes. Gilmore was famous for having written “Johnny Comes Marching Home” and saved marching bands from extinction after their military use expired.

The last dignitaries took their places. Bartholdi, looking swarthy and earnest, arrived arm in arm with the white-haired de Lesseps. Bartholdi brought Jeanne-Émilie with him. She was one of only twelve women who had been invited to the ceremony and only one other besides her was present, that being Tototte. The wives of the American Committee had been told to watch the proceedings from Admiral Stephen Luce’s ship, the
Tennessee,
anchored off Bedloe’s Island. When the New York Women’s Suffrage Association had protested the bitter irony of celebrating the idol of a female Liberty while women enjoyed no voting rights, they had been disparaged. They chartered their own boat to get as close to the proceedings as possible.

Only during the preamble could women even land on the island. Before the parade began that day, twenty-seven-year old Mrs. Clarence Cary, previously known as Elizabeth Muller Potter, climbed to the outside of the Statue of Liberty’s torch—the first woman to undertake the feat. When she came back to earth, she received hearty congratulations all around, but was told she promptly had to leave.

At 2:55, Cleveland was rowed ashore. The guns fired their salute. He climbed the platform stairs, and policemen quickly blocked the steps from any other arrivals. He rose from the fog, hatless, smiling and bowing his thick frame. The din of steam whistles, horns, and gun blasts grew louder.

The president took his seat, with Bartholdi on his right and Count de Lesseps on his left. The portly Schofield waved his hat frantically to try to quiet the din. From the battlements, soldiers signaled and waved back, but no one seemed to know what all the signaling meant, nor did anyone stop whistling or blasting.

Schofield had no choice but to begin.

Dr. Storrs will open the exercises with prayer,
he shouted over the furor.

Reverend Richard Storrs rose and walked to the podium. He could not be heard. He waited.

Fifteen minutes of mayhem passed without a dip in the volume. There was nothing for him to do but start the prayers.

As he began, one steam tug sent out two short blasts and one long blow to imitate a rooster crowing. It was so perfect that everyone laughed, and other whistles took the cue until the sea was transformed into a barnyard gone wild.

When Storrs finished, it was de Lesseps’s turn. He strode to the podium and boomed out: “Steam, which has done so much good in the world, is just now doing us a good deal of injury.”

Amazingly, people could hear him. “He waited for nothing, for nobody,” recalled one reporter. “He silenced the guns and the deadly whistles.”

“In speaking to you of the sympathy of France,” de Lesseps said, “I know that I express the thoughts of all my countrymen. Not a single painful or bad memory between the two countries! Only one rivalry—that of progress. . . . I feel as though I were in my family when I am among you.”

In his closing remarks, he tried to brush aside the trouble brewing with his Panama Canal: “Soon, gentlemen,” he said, “we will find ourselves assembled again to celebrate another peaceful conquest. Adieu until we meet again at Panama, . . . the peaceful and fertile alliance of the Franco-Latin and the Anglo-Saxon races.”

As he finished, people in the audience began yelling out for Bartholdi. Bartholdi came to the edge of the stage and waved his hat to the crowd.

“Speech! Speech!” many in the crowd yelled.

General Schofield abruptly stepped in. “Mr. Bartholdi has nothing to say; so there’s no use talking about it!” he yelled out. According to the program sold that day, Bartholdi was supposed to speak after President Cleveland.

Senator Evarts took the podium. Bartholdi, Glaenzer, Butler, and King entered the statue and began climbing up, as had been planned in advance. King went off in his separate direction at the podium’s roof, charged with an important task. He was to make sure that all the guns would be fired at once when the flag dropped from Liberty’s face. To do this, he would wave a red flag five minutes before that historic moment would occur. Lieutenant Harvey C. Carbaugh of the U.S. Fifth Artillery would then signal with a series of army flags to the batteries and fleets. The commanders would see the signals and ready their men to sound the salvo from five hundred guns, the largest salute ever in America. This would mark the moment when the statue was formally handed over by Evarts to the president of the United States.

King had another job, too. A wire ran from the stage, through a hole in the canopy, up to the platform’s roof where he stood. The wire then followed through the statue’s hollow center to the head. When Evarts’s speech ended, King would receive the signal that the deed had been completed. He would send the signal up the line to Bartholdi, and Bartholdi would rip the veil from his statue’s face.

Up in the crown, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was having a rather surreal experience. He now stood in a colossal metal head that had sprung from his own imagination. From the highest point in New York City, Bartholdi could hear the muffled boom of the cannons and the shrieking whistles out in the bay. Gazing out through the crown’s slats at the sea, Bartholdi could mainly see only fog. Every now and then, the gloom might lift for a moment on a vast expanse of ships but then it would descend again. With his wife down below, Bartholdi experienced the pinnacle of his artistic success alone. His mother was ailing in a bed in Colmar. His brother Charles had died in the spring of 1885 after a series of convulsive attacks.

Evarts was still talking. When he said the name “Bartholdi,” a cheer shot through the crowd. High up in the slits of the crown, Bartholdi may have thought he saw—or felt—the signal. The moment he had been waiting for his whole lifetime finally had come. He yanked the cord. The veil dropped.

Alas, it was premature.

“Hail, Liberty!” someone in the crowd shouted.

People sprang to their feet, turning their eyes toward Liberty. A flag waved on the
Tennessee
. Flame shot from the sides of the warship until its whole hull disappeared in a vast cloud of powder and smoke.

The gunpowder hung over the bay’s surface in the heavy air, shrouding the island entirely. People two hundred yards from the pedestal could not see the statue. Their ears rang with the salvos blasted from every direction, cannons thundering, a roar of applause, brass bands, and steam whistles. Across the nation every U.S. military outpost sounded a salute so that every citizen might know that the statue to Liberty had officially been born.

High up in the crown, Bartholdi, overwhelmed, fell into the arms of Butler and kissed him, sobbing.

Down below, Evarts stared dumbly at the crowd. He still hadn’t finished his speech. He waited long moments for the clamor to subside but it was too late. The crowd would not be silent now that it had seen its statue.

“[Senator Evarts] smiled pleasantly at General Stone; then he braced himself against a post and looked fierce. . . . About that time the band played ‘America, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,’ and Senator Evarts strove to look patriotic. Gilmore followed with the ‘Marseillaise’ hymn, and Senator Evarts puckered his lips as if to sing the air. He could not hear any instrument beyond the bass drum, but he was no worse off than anybody else.”

People began to mill about, when somebody noticed that Evarts was still talking. He had turned his back to the audience and spoke directly to the president. He managed to formally hand the statue over, but it was a moment shared by him and the president alone.

After President Cleveland’s speech, which was “cheered to the echo when he ceased,” Depew delivered an oration on Lafayette. When he was done, all present sang “Old Hundred,” based on the hundredth psalm.