The Woman Was Big. Colossal, They Called Her. Her Nose Was Four Feet Long. She Had Almost

Lady Liberty

The woman was big. Colossal, they called her. Her nose was four feet long. She had almost sunk on the voyage from Europe. Now she was in New York Harbor, with no place to go. Her home wasn’t ready. Some said it would never be ready. She was patient. She would wait.

It was June 1885, and workmen prepared to unload 214 wooden cases. They held the body of the handsome woman. She was a gift from the people of France to the people of America. Some Americans were prepared to turn their backs on the gift. A pedestal was needed to hold her, and that would cost money. So the wooden crates—36 of them just held nuts, bolts and rivets—were stacked on an island while Americans fussed and worried about who was to pay for the pedestal. She was, of course, Lady Liberty—the Statue of Liberty—and she was about to become a metaphor.

A metaphor is a symbol: something that represents something other than itself. Usually metaphors are words. But this metaphor was a copper-skinned giant of a lady. She soon came to represent two things—the spirit of freedom and America’s policy of welcome to people from around the world. That policy was called America’s “golden door.” The Statue of Liberty was a metaphor, but it was also a real figure. She was 151 feet from tip to toe, weighted 225 tons, had a waist 35 feet thick, and could hold 40 people in her head.

The statue was the idea of a Frenchman named Edouard Laboulaye. Laboulaye hosted a dinner party in 1865 where he and his guests talked about liberty and America. He had a passion for liberty, and, although he had never been to the United States, he was filled with the praise for the young nation. Laboulaye saw the recent Civil War, terrible as it had been, as a triumph for forces of liberty. That awful paradox—slavery in the land of the free—was no more. How could people in France join with Americans to celebrate their idea of freedom, liberty, and justice for all?

The people at the dinner table talked about the long friendship of America and France. When they were children they had heard their parents and grandparents talk of the time when Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson lived in France. Laboulaye was proud of the role France played in the America’s revolution. He was proud of the French hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette. Laboulaye and the others wanted to do something that would be a symbol of selflessness as well as of liberty. They decided to contribute much of their own money and time.

They would be doing it for France as well as for America. France had a freedom revolution, but that had gone awry. Now France had an emperor: Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who was the nephew of the first Napoleon. Laboulaye was a fierce republican. He didn’t want to have anything to do with monarchy. He wanted to create a symbol of liberty for the whole world to admire.

Among the guests at his dinner party was a young sculptor named Frederic Bartholdi. Bartholdi was swept away by the conversation. Laboulaye encouraged him to visit the United States. Bartholdi did. He went to Newport, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, San Francisco and Niagara Falls. “Everything is big here,” he wrote to Laboulaye, “even the green peas.”

When he sailed into New York, Bartholdi was struck by the beauty and openness of its harbor. He saw it as a symbol of the openness of America. In the harbor he found a small island—Bedloe’s Island—and he knew almost at once this was where he wanted his statue to stand. By now he had a great statue in his mind. On Bedloe’s Island he could view rivers, ocean and land—all at the same time. Bedloe’s Island belonged to the government, Bartholdi wrote to Laboulaye, “it is land common to all the states.”

Bartholdi decided he would build a statue bigger than the Colossus at Rhodes. That huge statue had been built to show Greece’s power. Bartholdi’s woman would be a symbol of liberty and welcome, not power. But those in France who believed in kings and military power certainly didn’t want to help build a statue of liberty. It was the liberty-loving French people, ordinary people giving small amounts of money, who built the statue. So many of them gave money that soon these small amounts added up to a great sum.

This was an expensive project. Consider the problem of building a huge statue that would stand unprotected in a harbor where it would be buffeted by winds, rain, snow, ice, lightning, perhaps even an earthquake. An engineering genius was needed.

France happened to have one. His name was Gustav Eiffel. (He would soon build a famous tower in Paris.) Eiffel designed a skeleton of iron bars. It was elastic enough to bend with the wind and strong enough to support the giant lady and the people who would climb up inside her body. The lady’s skin was to be made of delicate sheets of copper.

Bartholdi began work in his studio, but his great statue soon outgrew that home. Before long, Liberty’s head and arm could be seen towering over the rooftops of his Paris neighborhood. People were curious. Some 300,000 came to watch (and donate) as she was built. But when Liberty was built, she needed a place to stand. No pedestal had been built on Bedloe’s Island, and there was little money and little interest—or so it seemed—for the project in America.

What was needed was another kind of genius, a public relations genius—one who could tell the story of Lady Liberty and make people listen. America just happened to have that kind of genius. His name was Joseph Pulitzer. Pulitzer came to the United States from Hungary when he was 17. He fought in the Civil War and then settled in St. Louis. Pulitzer became a reporter for a newspaper. Eventually he bought the paper he had worked for. Then he bought another. Eventually he went to New York and purchased another newspaper called the New York World.

He turned the World into a reform-minded, crusading newspaper. He attacked the wealthy and powerful in his columns. Pulitzer soon took up the cause of the Statue of Liberty. He announced that anyone who donated money to construct the pedestal would have his or her name printed in the paper.

All across America people began to respond. School children donated nickels and pennies. Factory workers gave whatever they could afford. Some people gave things besides money. A group of writers—including Mark Twain—gave some of their work to be auctioned to raise money for the statue. Another writer, a poet named Emma Lazarus, also gave some of her writing to the cause.

Lazarus’ ancestors had come to America in the 17th century, fleeing religious oppression in Europe. This made Lazarus think about liberty and religious freedom. In America, oppressed people had always been welcome. Emma Lazarus wrote a poem about what the Statue of Liberty meant to her. What she didn’t know at the time, and never learned during her short life (she died at age 38), was that her words would give the statue a second meaning. It became not only a monument to celebrate liberty, but it also became a symbol of America’s policy of welcome. The last lines of Lazarus’ poem were engraved on the pedestal of the statue. Millions of immigrants sailing into New York harbor have been greeted by those words: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.