Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (37 page)

As the ceremony wound down, the first European immigrants arriving in the United States after Liberty had been unveiled came down the Narrows exhausted from their journey. They crowded the deck for their first glimpse of America. What they saw was what millions of immigrants after them would see—Liberty welcoming them to their new home. But on this day, they also witnessed the fantastic vision of boats and smoke and new neighbors celebrating this symbol of freedom.

The crowd’s exodus from Bedloe’s Island wasn’t smooth. The attendees rushed to the landing to get out of the rain and go home. The president and his cabinet officers were bumped and pushed. Tototte, crushed by the crowd, began to cry, and de Lesseps did all he could to keep her from being trampled underfoot. Bartholdi and Jeanne-Émilie had to elbow their way through the mob as no one recognized them.

Things were more civil at the celebratory party at Delmonico’s for 210 men (no women) that night. Frederic Coudert, the French-American lawyer, stood to make a toast. “The banquet at which we do honor today marks the end of a work crowned by unprecedented success,” he said. “Today the Statue of Liberty has become American before the Mayor, the President, the army, the navy, and the people. It therefore enjoys all the rights that a citizen—or rather, a female citizen—of the United States can enjoy. Owing to her sex, however, she can hardly vote without provoking criticism unworthy of her dignity. But this restriction is of no consequence, because as she was born in Alsace she has already voted for France at a critical moment of her destiny.”

At the dinner, Bartholdi recounted how he had suffered so many difficulties making his statue real, but that the events of “this great day” had settled that debt. The toast that night to Bartholdi read, “Jupiter one day had a severe headache; Vulcan opened his head with an axe; Minerva came forth fully armed.” Bartholdi apologized for his faulty English, then said, “I see in the title of this toast that Jupiter was fortunate enough to give birth to Minerva with a plain little headache. I am obliged to confess that my headache has been somewhat longer. I have now had that headache for about fifteen years; and if I had not received the most kindly and beneficent support I believe that no axe would have opened my head enough to bring out the Statue of Liberty. . . . There was a time when I met with difficulties.” He recounted how the statue almost went to Philadelphia. “I however was convinced that the best place for the statue would be in the harbor of New-York.”

He went on to boast: “Somebody called me once ‘the Columbus of Bedloe’s Island.’ They said nobody had known of Bedloe’s Island before I came here. I am obliged to confess that I did discover it. . . .”

Then he softened: “Gentlemen, if I had to pass through many trials during those years, as I told you, a single moment of this great day which has just passed has more than repaid me. I cannot tell you how much I feel moved by the sympathy which has been extended to me, by the ‘shake-hands’ I received from all the people I met on my trip. Indeed, I have been so deeply moved that I find it quite beyond my power to express to you the gratitude I feel. I accept them as meant not for me alone . . . but as your tribute to my country. . . . I have brought you a present from my country, from France—yes, from Alsace herself.”

The men cried out “Bartholdi!” amid cheers.

Epilogue

When Bartholdi traveled by train to Niagara after the unveiling, people along the tracks shouted his name. Admirers were arrested for halting the locomotive’s progress. A Salt Lake City paper deemed him “an exceedingly good looking man” on its front page. Newspapers across the country were filled with praise for the statue’s grandeur and for Bartholdi’s genius.

The statue had always been referred to as the “Bartholdi Statue” or the “Bartholdi pedestal” but, over time, the sculptor’s name would disappear from popular memory.

“In the crowd on ‘Bartholdi’s’ day, I heard one of two workmen ask the other, ‘Whose statue is this, anyhow?’” a reader of the
Engineering News
wrote to its editorial page a week or so after the unveiling. “I lost the answer, but the query was significant as suggestive of the animus which inspires many great works of these days; and recalling an idea which has found expression in many ways—and in your own columns—briefly expressed in the advice, ADVERTISE! ADVERTISE! I found, if not an answer to the above query of
who,
certainly a clear explanation of the
how
and
why.
”

He went on to demonstrate how each participant had been driven by this self-promotional impulse, beginning with Bartholdi realizing the possibilities of advertising himself to the old and new world by crafting the work. “The labors of the artist, as such, great as they were, were but as child’s play to the prolonged daily grind, continued through years, in order to obtain the means for his great undertaking. . . . Does any one suppose that the inspiration to this grew out of, or was sustained by any
sentiment,
such as this statue is supposed to embody? Not a bit of it! A business advertisement it was, pure and simple, from beginning to end . . . clearly beating the Yankees in their own field.”

The writer noted how the committee members promoted themselves as patriots by joining the cause, even inscribing their names on bronze at the base. Pulitzer had promoted his paper through his speechifying on behalf of Liberty; even the penny donors were advertising themselves in his pages. The politicians rose to the occasion, mainly because they wanted to “go down” in history. One newspaper, the writer noted, printed the names of a full fifteen thousand of the parade marchers, and that paper sold out even with its presses running at full capacity.

In the end, the writer noted, Liberty had been an act of selfish promotion from beginning to end. The culprits had just been lucky enough to get an astounding artwork out of it.

Of course, in typical American fashion, Liberty’s commercial opportunities quickly expanded after her unveiling. The symbol became a popular logo immediately. A laxative company, Castoria, petitioned to be an early sponsor of the monument by contributing twenty-five thousand dollars in exchange for having the company’s name emblazoned below Liberty’s feet for a year. “Thus art and science, the symbol of liberty to man, and of health to his children, would more closely be enshrined in the hearts of our people,” the company’s representatives proposed.

Bartholdi demurred, though he himself flirted with advertising schemes. In one ad, he commented that if he had been drinking Vin Mariana—a tonic whose ingredients included cocaine—when making the Statue of Liberty, it would have been three times taller. In praising the tonic, he would join the company of Ulysses S. Grant, Pope Leo XIII, and Thomas Edison.

The Bartholdi statue also appeared in what seemed to be product placements within newspaper articles. In June 1887, eight months after the statue’s inauguration, the
New York Times
ran an article headed “An Incident of Liberty: How M. Bartholdi Was Made Glad and His Statue Saved from Delay.” The reporter explained how the statue almost failed to be completed because the so-called key artist, M. Lanier, whom Bartholdi had employed in France to oversee the work, fell ill in the spring and summer leading up to the statue’s shipment to America. “At first he felt a lack of interest in his work, then a tired sensation, then loss of appetite and sleeplessness,” the reporter said. “He struggled manfully, but was forced by the mysterious feelings within him to give up entirely. Then Liberty languished.”

Two eminent doctors were consulted, a cure was prescribed, and within days, Lanier was up and about, much to Bartholdi’s delight. The miracle treatment? “QUINA LAROCHE is a marvelous combination of Peruvian Bark, Iron, Catalan Wine, and other valuable compounds,” the reporter noted. “It has taken the medical professions and scientists by storm wherever it is introduced. It received the French prize of 16,600 francs, and the gold medals at the Paris and Vienna Expositions. . . .”

The reporter continued: “QUINA-LAROCHE is a God-send. The Statue of Liberty indirectly felt its power, and the land of liberty is being helped by its use.” The tonic would later be blocked from import under an anti-cocaine law.

The idea that Liberty might have represented something less than Bartholdi’s selfless service to the principles of democracy and equality was echoed in the memoir of the notorious socialite Marguerite Steinheil. She spoke of Bartholdi’s character: “I often visited Bartholdi in his studio. The sculptor of the colossal statue of ‘Liberty illuminating the World,’ on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbour, was an old friend of my husband. He was a man of keen intellect and had much originality of thought, but his conceit was as colossal as his famous statue. Showing me once the small model of ‘Liberty,’ he said quietly: ‘The Americans believe that it is Liberty that illumines the world, but, in reality, it is my genius.’”

She went on to describe Bartholdi’s pride at having earned the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor soon after Liberty’s unveiling. “I never met a man quite as naturally and unconsciously conceited. . . . I remember meeting him once at the Institut. He wore the green uniform and the sword of a member of the Institut, and on his breast there shone a mass of orders. He pointed one out to me with his parchment-like forefinger, ‘You see this little thing here,’ he whispered. ‘There are but three Europeans who have the right to wear it—one emperor, one king and—myself. . . . I don’t attach the slightest importance to it.’ And, leaving me, he went off to tell exactly the same thing to all who stopped to listen to him.”

Bartholdi was not in New York City for the first lighting of the statue on Monday, November 1. Thousands of people came down to Battery Park to witness it. They climbed up to the rooftops of lower Manhattan to see, as Hewitt had promised, the statue “made so luminous that the entire harbor of New York, from the Narrows to the wharves, will be as if lighted by a great heavenly body introduced by the hand of man.”

The light went on at 7:35 p.m.

Across the harbor, far out over the waves, a spectator straining his or her eyes could just barely make out the dim outline of the statue. The torch remained invisible. Disappointment ran through the crowd.

The fireworks that followed, therefore, must have seemed almost hysterical in contrast. The sky filled with “mammoth spreaders,” asteroids, peacock plumes, and “a jeweled cloud studded with gems of every hue.” The air filled with the scent of sulfur, and the noise distracted the crowd momentarily from the feeble wick of the statue.

When the reviews came in the next day, the American Committee knew it had more work to do, lest it be cursed with a “work of art,” not a lighthouse. The committee members would have to earn the government’s financial support they desperately needed by crafting a penetrating, visible light that could actually guide ships. The dimness of the first light also caused problems for birds: the statue brought a quick death weekly to thousands of seabirds that collided with it and littered the base with their corpses.

Even maintaining the dim glow of the statue’s first electric setup would be too costly for the American Committee, however. The government had not agreed to pay for that first week of lighting. No one yet knew whose authority the statue fell under: the government, the U.S. Lighthouse Board, or the American Committee. With the money short to run the steam engines, each day that Liberty shone could be the last.

Bartholdi returned to New York just after the final day of the contracted lighting. The American Committee had pleaded with the engineers Hampson & Company to light Liberty one last time for the
statuaire.
Bartholdi had never seen his statue lit up. Hampson agreed to foot the sixty-dollar expense for that night.

At nine o’clock, Bartholdi headed out with Jeanne-Émilie, Butler, and others. They took the
Judd Field
from the barge office in a heavy rain. Most of them carried umbrellas and wore waterproof coats.

Out on Bedloe’s Island, the granite sparkled like a diamond in the wet. The copper surfaces caught the upward bloom of light. Bartholdi declared that the lighting had turned out perfectly as a stronger glow would hide the torch.

The little group climbed the iron staircase into the pedestal and surveyed the view of distant lights from the top. “The sculptor . . . said he could no longer realize the immensity of the Goddess as he could when he was working with it in Paris,” a reporter noted.

Bartholdi said the enigmatic words: “She is going away from me. She is going away from me.”

After Bartholdi had witnessed her aglow, the engineers snapped off the machines. With no money to keep her lit, Butler suggested a special subscription fund to pay the bill. It would not be the American Committee, however, that would run this fund. Butler could promise not one more penny in fundraising. He wrote: “The cost of lighting the torch, it may be added, is now about $60 a day. There is no well on Bedloe’s Island, and all the water used in making steam must be carried over from New York.” Salt water would have been damaging to the machinery.

An editorial in the
Cincinnati Gazette
about the electrical problems at Bedloe’s Island aimed to make a larger point about liberty itself: “It is proper that the torch of the Bartholdi statue should not be lighted until this country becomes a free one in reality. ‘Liberty enlightening the world,’ indeed! the expression makes us sick. This Government is a howling farce. It can not or rather does not protect its citizens within its own borders. Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man in the South to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged and his property destroyed.”