The Woman with the Torch — Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty (1886)

An Idea from France

A dinner party near Versailles, France.

The legal scholar Édouard de Laboulaye spoke up. "America has ended slavery. We should send them something."

Sitting at the table was a 32-year-old sculptor — Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi.

He didn't forget those words. For 21 years.

21 Years of Construction

Construction began in France.

Bartholdi modeled the face on his mother. The pose with a raised torch. The seven rays on the crown — light to seven continents.

The internal skeleton was designed by Gustave Eiffel (yes, the Eiffel of the tower). A steel lattice supporting copper skin. A test run for the Eiffel Tower he would build four years later.

The money came from the French public. Schoolchildren sent coins. By 1884, the statue stood complete in Paris.

America Couldn't Build the Pedestal

The problem was on the American side.

America had agreed to fund the pedestal. The fundraising failed.

New York City: "We can't pay for it."
Congress: "That's for private enterprise."
Rockefeller, Carnegie, the wealthy: silent.

The statue was disassembled into 350 pieces and shipped to America. It arrived in June 1885. But there was nowhere to put it.

A Newspaper Publisher Saved It

Joseph Pulitzer. Hungarian-born immigrant. Publisher of the New York World.

He launched a campaign in his paper. "Send even one cent. We'll print every donor's name."

In five months, 120,000 people sent $101,000. Most gave less than a dollar. Immigrants, workers, children.

The Statue of Liberty was paid for by immigrants. The very people it would soon greet built it themselves.

October 28, 1886

It rained.

A million people gathered in New York Harbor. President Cleveland. The French delegation. Bartholdi himself.

As the veil dropped, suffragists protested. "Women cannot vote. What does a female statue of liberty mean?"

Not a single woman was invited to the speakers' platform. The statue was a woman.

The Poem on the Pedestal

In 1903, a bronze plaque was mounted inside the pedestal.

It carried a passage from Emma Lazarus, a Jewish-American poet, written in 1883 — The New Colossus.

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, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Lazarus died at 38, four years after writing the poem. She never knew her words would come to define the American soul.

What the Torch Meant

1886 was the height of the Gilded Age.

The Haymarket affair had happened in May the same year.
Six years before the Carnegie Steel massacre.
Six years before Ellis Island opened.

The Statue of Liberty symbolized the hope and the hypocrisy of the Gilded Age, at the same time.

A promise of liberty to the poorest people on earth. Built atop a system that exploited them.

The two still stand together today.