Raising Liberty
The Construction of the Statue of Liberty as Reconstruction Was Under Attack
By Lori Terrizzi
The construction of the Statue of Liberty served as a metaphor for the construction of Goaloop, which began as a series of questions following the financial crash of September, 2008. It is also being made into a movie.
September, 1873: Panic struck Wall Street.
“Like a cyclone, which came upon us without an hour’s warning.”
— Banker J. P. Morgan
Following a financial boom that was fueled by complex financial instruments, not fully understood, and overbuilding, the largest private bank in the country was brought down by the collapse of Northern Pacific Railroad.
The panic became a crisis. The President and the Secretary of Treasury rushed to Manhattan to spend the weekend of September 20th, 1873 in conference with leaders on Wall Street to try to avert a national disaster.
October 27, 1873:
“Faith in financial agencies gone. Factories and employers throughout the country are discharging hires, working half-time, or reducing wages.”
— George Templeton Strong
Hundreds of banks considered indestructible toppled. Credit stopped flowing. Businesses couldn’t secure loans, and folded or withered.
By 1876, unemployment had risen to 14%. Homelessness and hunger surpassed the ability of private and public services to meet demands.
It was called “the first truly international crisis,” devastating England and much of Europe.
As the Long Depression of the 19th century entered its fourth year, an enormous disembodied hand raising a torch appeared in midtown Manhattan. Horace Reid drove past it on his way through Manhattan to pick up supplies for the plantation he owned in Virginia. Born enslaved, Mr Reid had been the owner of the plantation for decades, long before the Civil War, and employed dozens of people. This surreal sight was the uppermost segment of a colossal statue the French planned to give to the American people. It was a gift to celebrate the triumph of liberty and unity following America’s Civil War, a beacon of hope for France, in the midst of its own turmoil, and for all who would see it, a symbol of democracy.
The idea for the gift did not emerge from the French government, it was the idea of a writer, law professor and abolitionist, Édouard René de Laboulaye, as recounted by the Statue of Liberty’s sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (North American Review, 1885). According to Bartholdi’s account, at a mansion near Versailles, he was one in a roomful of “men eminent in politics and letters,” discussing bonds between nations after dinner, when de Laboulaye mentioned, “if a monument were to be built in America as a memorial to their independence, I should think it very natural if it were built by united effort, if it were a common work of both nations.” France had helped to create the United States in 1776 through its alliance with the Thirteen Colonies to defeat Great Britain during the American Revolutionary War. It was now the Spring of 1865, months after the U.S. Congress had passed the Thirteenth Amendment in January, abolishing slavery, and weeks after the end of America’s Civil War in April. De Laboulaye would soon be elected President of the French Emancipation Committee, which aided formerly enslaved Americans and worked to advance emancipation globally.
In 1865, de Laboulaye’s own country was ruled by the Emperor Napoleon III. Over the prior 76 years, the French people had endured the French Revolution and founded its First Republic. Echoing the Declaration of Independence in the U.S., the First French Republic in 1789 ratified a Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen). But the Republic was lost under Napoleon’s First French Empire. France achieved its Second Republic in 1848, and lost it again to Napoleon III’s Second French Empire. The First Republic abolished slavery in 1794 but Napoleon reversed that decree in 1802. The Republic then abolished the slave trade in 1815 but it wasn’t implemented until 1826. De Laboulaye and his future wife took part in the Second Republic’s effort to re-abolish slavery in the remaining colonies in 1848, and then saw imperial aggression begin again, expanding into North Africa and Southeast Asia.
As de Laboulaye and his wife, Micheline, fought for universal freedom, his country was oppressing people home and abroad, while the U.S. Declaration of Independence was proving to be the declaration of a blueprint, one being built before the world’s eyes:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The truth in these words excited the same truth in individuals around the globe. A courageous new government had stated — proclaimed on parchment — what our spirits knew and needed. The words themselves spoke the truth, not their writers, whose original intent was limited to landowners. The world must bend to these words. But how?
The momentum toward liberty for all was growing. Reconstruction was well underway in the U.S.
De Laboulaye saw Frenchmen celebrate America’s Independence Day in 1865 in France, and knew Americans were building monuments to celebrate Lafayette and other Frenchmen in the U.S.
But knowledge of his own country’s failure to sustain a democracy meant the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln was no event, it was a fault line in the new country.
A monument to symbolize liberty for all would embolden the trajectory toward democracy. It would at once be a protest of the French government and support the ideals America was turning into reality. A monument would make the French people heard and seen to their American brothers and sisters through artistry and generosity. The people on both sides of the Atlantic could conspire in a modern statement of solidarity.
The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, meant African Americans won the right to vote, participated in politics, acquired land from their former ‘owners,’ sought their own jobs, received investment in local services, and military protection from the federal government.
“Black voting in the period after 1869 resulted in two Negro members of the U.S. Senate (Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, both from Mississippi), and twenty Congressmen, including eight from South Carolina, four from North Carolina, three from Alabama, and one each from the other former Confederate states.”
— A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, 2009.
“The Reconstruction Acts inaugurated the period of Radical Reconstruction, when a politically mobilized black community, with its white allies, brought the Republican Party to power throughout the South. For the first time, African-Americans voted in large numbers and held public office at every level of government. It was a remarkable, unprecedented effort to build an interracial democracy on the ashes of slavery.
Most offices remained in the hands of white Republicans. But the advent of African-Americans in positions of political power aroused bitter hostility from Reconstruction’s opponents.
[T]he new governments had a solid record of accomplishment. They established the South’s first state-funded public school systems, sought to strengthen the bargaining power of plantation laborers, made taxation more equitable and outlawed racial discrimination in transportation and public accommodations. They offered aid to railroads and other enterprises in the hope of creating a New South whose economic expansion would benefit black and white alike.
Reconstruction also made possible the consolidation of black families, so often divided by sale during slavery, and the establishment of the independent black church as the core institution of the emerging black community.”
— Why Reconstruction Matters by Eric Foner, March 28, 2015.
In July, 1870, the French Empire declared war on a coalition of German states. Bartholdi volunteered as a squadron leader in the National Guard. When the Germans captured Emperor Napoleon III, de Laboulaye took a lead role in writing the new constitution for the French Third Republic while Bartholdi continued to fight. Within less than a year, the war ended with nearly 140,000 French people dead or wounded, nearly 500,000 captured, and nearly 117,000 Germans dead or wounded. France was defeated, leading to the formation of the German Empire.
Bartholdi survived and served until the war ended in May, 1871. Depleted, he could not return home: his hometown of Alsace was conquered by Germany. He could not return to work in Paris, ravaged by its own civil war. He thought of his friend, de Laboulaye, and paid him a visit at his retreat near Versaille. They discussed the idea for a monument to celebrate the American Centennial of Independence, then five years away.
“Our first joint struggle for independence was not a simple service rendered to a friendly nation, but a fraternity of feelings, a community of efforts and of emotions; and when hearts have beaten together, something always remains among nations, as among individuals.”
— Édouard René de Laboulaye (North American Review, 1885)
With his artistic ambitions supported by his friend and mentor, shaped to realize de Laboulaye’s dream, Bartholdi left for America, eager to test the idea for their gift and excited to reignite his career on a massive scale.
“She will not resemble those bronze colossuses so venerated of which it is proudly declared that they have been cast from cannons, taken from the enemy. Our statue will be made of pure copper, and be the product of labor, and of peace.”
— Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (North American Review, 1885)
As Bartholdi entered New York Harbor, he spotted the ideal location for their peaceful giant, one of three tiny islands in the gateway to America. It was called Bedloe’s Island. Bartholdi’s design for the Statue was an evolution of another colossus that he had spent two years designing that did not come to fruition. It was to serve as a lighthouse for Egypt’s Suez Canal, and called, Egypt Carrying the Light into Asia.
The designs that Bartholdi created for his trip were entitled, “The Statue of Liberty Illuminating the World.”
As Bartholdi toured America, de Laboulaye was consumed by his work advancing emancipation with his wife, fighting for universal suffrage, including for women and children, and writing fairy tales. His tales include The Young Woman Who Was Wiser than the Emperor, and another where a young girl who has been hired as a tutor for a young prince “eventually succeeds in opening the prince’s eyes to his predicament and self-absorption, and spurring him to action.” “Whether princess or shepherdess, every woman in a household has brains enough for two,” de Laboulaye writes in Zerbino the Bumpkin.
Bartholdi began to call the Statue, “mon américain” (my American).
In November 1875, after generating enthusiasm for the gift in the U.S. and France, but not having garnered adequate financing, de Laboulaye and Bartholdi formed the Franco-American Union to fund it, announcing the French people would finance the Statue, and the American people would finance the pedestal. Their fundraising literature referred to the statue as a “Monument to Commemorate the Centennial Anniversary of the Independence of the United States.”
Bartholdi continued to work on segments of the Statue, not yet knowing how he would, structurally, piece them together to create the towering figure.
The Statue was not completed in time for the Centennial celebrations in America. Instead of delivering the whole Statue, they exhibited segments to raise funding and excitement for their work. At Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition, before it arrived in Madison Square, the raised torch was advertised as part of a “Colossal Statue of Lyberty.” It was exhibited outside, next to a pond. Unlike any other artwork, it was ‘interactive,’ allowing people to walk up a little stairway within its arm and around the flame. From the Statue’s earliest days, she was a welcoming figure.
Also debuting at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition was a bronze sculpture called L’abolizione della schiavitù (The Abolition of Slavery, a.k.a. The Freed Slave) by Italian artist Francesco Pezzicar, which stood inside in an art gallery in Memorial Hall:
Pezzicar’s Freed Slave bears compositional similarities to the final Statue of Liberty, not then fully formed, including holding a document that granted the figure his and her freedom, the broken chains and shackle, and a figure not merely in contrapposto, but taking a far more dynamic pose. The Abolition of Slavery attracted great interest from Centennial attendees, documented in Fernando Miranda’s illustration for Frank Leslie’s Historical Register of the Centennial Exposition. “Some were clearly disturbed by the powers of this sculpture; William Dean Howells revealed a disturbing racism in his sneering criticism of the sculptor and his work: “This is not his fault, perhaps, and I am not so sure after all that his Washington is as bad as the bronze statue of Emancipation (I suppose); a most offensively Frenchy negro, who has broken his chain, and spreading both his arms and legs abroad is rioting in a declamation of something (I should say) from Victor Hugo; one longs to clap him back into hopeless bondage.””
— William Dean Howells, The Atlantic Monthly 38 (July 1876), 93 (source).
Despite attracting popular interest and receiving the Gold Medal for his work from the Philadelphia Exposition, Pezzicar received no offers to buy The Freed Slave, and it was returned to Italy, where it remains on exhibit in Trieste.
In September that year, Bartholdi delivered a bronze statue of Lafayette to New York in appreciation for New York’s aid to Paris during the Franco-German War. It was funded by French residents in New York, and still stands in Union Square today. Lafayette takes a classical contrapposto pose, his legs situated in nearly the identical position as would be the Statue’s, but her pose would be more dynamic, as if walking off the pedestal.
As Bartholdi and de Laboulaye made progress building the Statue in France, Reconstruction in the U.S. was being dismantled, attacked, defunded, abandoned.
“Lincoln did not live to preside over Reconstruction. That task fell to his successor, Andrew Johnson. Once lionized as a heroic defender of the Constitution against Radical Republicans, Johnson today is viewed by historians as one of the worst presidents to occupy the White House. He was incorrigibly racist, unwilling to listen to criticism and unable to work with Congress. Johnson set up new Southern governments controlled by ex-Confederates. They quickly enacted the Black Codes, laws that severely limited the freed people’s rights and sought, through vagrancy regulations, to force them back to work on the plantations. But these measures aroused bitter protests among blacks, and convinced Northerners that the white South was trying to restore slavery in all but name.
[T]he failure to respond to the former slaves’ desire for land left most with no choice but to work for their former owners.
It was not economic dependency, however, but widespread violence, coupled with a Northern retreat from the ideal of equality, that doomed Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups began a campaign of murder, assault and arson that can only be described as homegrown American terrorism. Meanwhile, as the Northern Republican Party became more conservative, Reconstruction came to be seen as a misguided attempt to uplift the lower classes of society.
One by one, the Reconstruction governments fell. As a result of a bargain after the disputed presidential election of 1876, the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes assumed the Oval Office and disavowed further national efforts to enforce the rights of black citizens, while white Democrats controlled the South.
By the turn of the century, with the acquiescence of the Supreme Court, a comprehensive system of racial, political and economic inequality, summarized in the phrase Jim Crow, had come into being across the South. At the same time, the supposed horrors of Reconstruction were invoked as far away as South Africa and Australia to demonstrate the necessity of excluding nonwhite peoples from political rights. This is why W.E.B. Du Bois, in his great 1935 work “Black Reconstruction in America,” saw the end of Reconstruction as a tragedy for democracy, not just in the United States but around the globe.”
— Why Reconstruction Matters by Eric Foner, March 28, 2015.
The Statue of Liberty glares into the horizon as attendees at the Paris World’s Fair look up to her in 1878.
The Civil War created great wealth in New York City, while hundreds of thousands were suffering in tenements and dangerous conditions, children wasting away in windowless sweatshops without protections.
As the Gilded Age and Long Depression continued, 89 of the country’s 364 railroads, hundreds of banks, nearly 18,000 other businesses, and ten states went bankrupt, unemployment remaining high.
New Yorkers of means declined to fund the Statue’s pedestal. The New York Times stated, “No true patriot can support expenditures for a bronze female in the present state of our finances.”
As the Brooklyn Bridge was rising downtown, the raised torch stood still in Madison Square for five years. While the people of France financed the completion of the figure by 1880, its foundation was left unfunded by Americans in 1882. To finance the Statue, the French had rallied nearly 200 towns, thousands of French schoolchildren, and even the descendants of French officers who had fought in the American Revolution one hundred years before. Others contributed to the effort, including a metal company that donated copper for the Statue’s exterior.
On September 17, 1879, French architect, author, and art conservator Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who was designing the interior support for the Statue, suddenly died. Bartholdi turned to architect and structural engineer, Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel.
Envisioned to be the tallest statue in the world, the Statue employed new technological innovations, including its interior iron framework that allowed the thin copper exterior to move independently of it, and with the strong harbor winds, while enabling people to climb inside and up to the crown of windows, up further still to the torch, which was intended to serve as a permanent lighthouse.
It was a kinetic, flexible sculpture made with the most durable and inflexible of the world’s materials. It was a visionary fusion of art and architecture, a building with a human skin, a sculpture that served both a symbolic and functional purpose, and a gesture of friendship, unity and cooperation among the people of two nations.
The ambitious statue without a foundation appeared destined for permanent exile.
Then a Hungarian immigrant who had arrived in America penniless in 1864, with no knowledge of English, was inspired by the contributions made by the people of France, and he took up the challenge to fund the pedestal in 1885.
Having purchased The World, a New York daily newspaper circulated across the country, Joseph Pulitzer promised to print the name of any person who contributed to the effort, regardless of the amount. He considered media a public service, and used journalism as a means to reform corruption, often doing so by publishing publicly available information. He published, for example, the tax returns of St. Louis’s wealthiest people, which showed they claimed to have no money.
With the divide between rich and poor growing to historic levels, the families of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Astor and Armour carried down Fifth Avenue atop horse-drawn carriages, their names engraved into American society, Pulitzer’s campaign offered everyone, including the people who were invisible, the formerly enslaved, the immigrants who were working for ownership in a country that treated them as outsiders while they were fueling the engine of our industrial economy and therefore at the core of our economic identity, the chance for their names to be read in the most widely circulated and most influential paper in the country. And in doing so, they would help erect a pedestal that would hold the tallest statue in the world, the tallest structure in the metropolis. It would be a visible stake in their country on a monumental scale.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans funded the pedestal’s completion by sending in donations of less than one dollar, including schoolchildren who sent in pennies. For the art and literary auction in 1883, poet Emma Lazarus wrote The New Colossus:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “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!”
In 1884, Belva Ann Lockwood was running for President, the second woman to do so, while women were still not permitted to vote.
“The rain was pouring down in torrents” the day the pedestal’s cornerstone was to be laid, which kept away hundreds of people invited to witness and celebrate the milestone on Bedloe’s Island. “Yet 1500 water-logged people still jammed onto the small island to be part of the historic event.
The steamship Bay Ridge was festooned with French and American flags and chosen to shuttle across the harbor. Because of the driving rain “its capacity was not tested.” Once the ceremony began the David Island Government Band played “Marseillaise” and “Hail Columbia” respectively while men lowered the six ton granite stone” into place. (Source)
The same week the pedestal’s cornerstone was laid, Frederick Douglass was invited to speak in Battle Creek at the fifteenth anniversary of the Emancipation of the West Indies.
“The grand question is how [as when Fort Sumpter was first fired upon] shall the civilization of freedom be completely established in all the country.
They tell us that enough has already been done for the negro. He is allowed to vote, and that is enough. Well, the laws are right, but the fact is far otherwise. […] It is an insult that men should sit in congress and represent districts where the opinions of the majority are suppressed.”
— Frederick Douglass, Battle Creek, August 1, 1884.
The cornerstone finally laid, de Laboulaye imagined their giant would soon rise with her crown and torch raised so high, above the clouds, that she’d stand as a god to command and inspire peace and freedom for all. Imagination was his vocation. He had already written of an American dream in his novel, Paris in America. It was a fairy tale for adults and a popular success in France, published in the middle of America’s Civil War, in 1863. Micheline, his wife, was sewing clothing for freed slaves, resolutely making stitch after stitch after tiny stitch. How many stitches would be needed to right all wrongs in the new country, the world’s best hope to prove that freedom for all was the only way to create peaceful union. How many lifetimes would the vast new tapestry take to make? Only a god could put an end to the endless suffering. And they were building her. Their Statue was a formal fusion between the Greek God Helios and the Roman Goddess Libertas.
Helios is the personification and deification of the sun. Libertas is the personification and deification of liberty. Libertas had became a symbol for The People during the Roman Empire, emboldening the efforts of the Roman Republic in 509 BC/E, a symbol that became synonymous with the Junia family of plebeians who were instrumental in toppling the Roman Empire’s last king. The formal fusion of Helios and Libertas married the ancient understanding of good vs evil, the reality of light vs dark as the sun rose and set each day, in Helios, and the ideals of freedom and how they could be made a political reality for The People, in Libertas. Their Statue brought the power and wisdom of antiquity, the ideals and cautionary tales of the Roman Republic to inspire and protect the new nation at its portal.
De Laboulaye’s imagination, and his understanding of history, ignited Bartholdi’s artistic ambitions and his knowledge of art history. Bartholdi had studied art, architecture and painting, and then sculpture. Symbols and depictions of Helios and Libertas have been created by cultures around the world since thousands of years Before Christ/Common Era (BC/E).
At work on the Statue at the workshop in Paris, Bartholdi received word that de Laboulaye had died. It was May 25, 1883.
Looking at one of de Laboulaye’s novels on his desk, entitled, Liberty Enlightening the World, and then looking at the blueprint in front of him, he took a pen and crossed out the original name of their Statue, “The Statue of Liberty Illuminating the World,” and wrote in its place, “Liberty Enlightening the World.”
In Paris on July 4, 1884, Bartholdi and their extensive team presented their completed Statue to the U.S. Minister to France. They took “Liberty Enlightening the World” apart, dissembling her into 350 pieces, and carefully packed them into 214 crates, weighing a total of 225 tons.
The French Navy ship, Isère, departed for New York on May 21, 1885. Fierce storms formed over the Atlantic, the Isère nearly capsized along the way, the Statue’s heavy iron fragments in crates threatening to sink the ship with every thrust.
When the Isère arrived in New York Harbor on June 17, 1885, nearly 100 boats were waiting to greet her.
There was great fanfare, but the pedestal was not completed. The crates were unloaded on Bedloe’s island, the pieces lost without a foundation.
Determined to keep their promise, New Yorkers continued to fundraise and build, and by April 22, 1886, the pedestal was ready to hold “My American.”
The 214 crates were unpacked, the 350 pieces, carefully unwrapped.
Then the pedestal presented a new challenge: it was too narrow to use scaffolding to assemble the Statue, as they had done for years in Paris.
As if a scene from Gulliver’s Travels, the team devised a system of wire ropes and pulleys to assemble the giant, pulling her skyward, turning the construction workers into circus performers as they dangled from ropes at perilous heights.
Just a few years prior, 20 people had died building the Brooklyn Bridge.
Within four months, the Statue of Liberty rose above New York Harbor. Not one life lost.
The fractured symbol of freedom and democracy, conceived of by a writer more than twenty years before, and produced by an artist, artisans, architects and engineers, was unified and raised by a foundation funded by the people. It was a visionary achievement of the arts, technology and citizens of the world, as inspirational as aspirational.
Looking at the Statue from his home at the southern tip of Manhattan, Bartholdi’s triumph was dampened by the absence of his friend, de Laboulaye, whom he still mourned. Not able to sleep, he left his house in the middle of the night and walked to the edge of the Battery. It was pitch black except for the dim light emitting from the Statue’s torch, much dimmer than they planned it to be. At the dock, he looked up and down at the boats, large and small, some anchored in place, all fastened by rope. From inside his coat, he pulled a notebook and a pen, looking for a place to sit down and write. A boat was rocking back and forth, much more loudly than the others, as if calling Bartholdi. He walked to it, a mere rowboat between a yacht and a much bigger vessel. There was no one else in sight, the Hudson River a sheet of glass across the New York Harbor.
He unmoored the little boat, climbed aboard, and looking at “Liberty Enlightening the World,” began to row across the water, using her as the lighthouse he intended her to be, first in Egypt, and now a reality in America. Reaching Bedloe’s Island, he tied the rowboat to the dock, walked to their Statue and up her stairs in total darkness. He knew every millimeter of her, he had created her, but he owed this satisfaction to his friend. Reaching the gallery of windows above her forehead, he sat down and pulled out his notebook, the torch washing the page with light.
He began to write: “Dear Édouard, I hope you have forgiven my own fairy tale of how our Statue came to be. I was near total collapse when I came to see you after the war. You knew it. But you treated me as if with the dignity my mother required. I had started to carve the lion I hoped to find inside. It devoured me instead, unfinished, and I came to you. With the French army, and Garibaldi’s help, I could not protect my own home, who was I to think I could protect the Suez Canal with a large metal woman from afar? There was no recovering from that colossal, international humiliation when Egypt rejected my lighthouse and instead commissioned Coignet’s model— and it looks like they were right to do so because the lighthouse aspect of our Statue is the part that is faltering! I was ready to die in the war. You repurposed my statue in an instant, you redeemed my effort. I’ve no doubt of your commitment to abolition but know this idea came first from your empathy. Her generosity began with yours. I hope you approve how I made this point to the world. Mother would not bear the truth. You tired of ever teaching history and making none. Now you have.” In his fundraising literature, Bartholdi included a postscript to his account:
I have related these fragments of conversation [with de Laboulaye], in order that they may show how the idea had its birth and development; but I do it still more to answer those who, with an evil spirit of disparagement, have desired to diminish the value of the work by treating it as the personal fantasy of an artist. I may fairly claim a certain merit in the invention of the idea, in working it out and in carrying the undertaking to completion; but it has a value greater than that; it has roots deeper than an artist’s ambition.
October 28, 1886:
Declared a public holiday for the unveiling, a parade began down Fifth Avenue. It turned to stop at Madison Square, where the torch once stood, and proceeded downtown to acknowledge Pulitzer’s newspaper company, The World. The parade continued to the New York Stock Exchange, where traders, at work and watching the merriment pass by below, spontaneously threw ticker tape out hundreds of windows for the first time. The economy had begun to improve, but it proved only a brief respite.
Attendance for the Statue’s unveiling was not hampered by the weather. One million people participated in the festivities as it rained, but the weather clouded their view of their Statue from Manhattan. The people had funded the pedestal and made this triumphant day possible, but they were excluded from the ceremony on Bedloe’s island, where only dignitaries were allowed.
Symbolizing liberty, the Statue was the newest immigrant to arrive, the latest colonizer. Before the Dutch colonist Isaac Bedloe became the ‘owner’ of the island in 1667, the island had been home to the Algonquian and other Native American tribes for centuries. Looking on from Manhattan, the new outsiders were building new lives on the land ‘purchased’ by the Dutch West India Company from the Lenape Native Americans for 60 guilders, the sale ‘proven’ in the following document:
The Dutch West India Company was part of the Atlantic Slave Trade that enslaved, slaughtered and devastated 60 million lives. Life after life was stolen from Africa, bound to build the wealth of his and her captors. If they survived the Middle Passage, the purchase of their lives was ‘proven’ by documents. Their labor and horror created the wealth that led to the purchase of Bedloe’s Island. Their labor and horror was the foundation of the Statue’s pedestal. Their labor and horror created the parchment on which the Declaration of Independence was written and they were therefore as much its authors as those who signed it.
As the classical personification of freedom, a woman, was unveiled by men on Bedloe’s Island, women were excluded from the ceremony. The Statue is “a gigantic lie, a travesty, and a mockery,” said Matilda Joslyn Gage and other suffragists, who had rented a steamer to get as close to the giant as possible. If they were excluded from the ceremony, they would not be silenced. They hung banners to protest the event from the boat. “It is the greatest sarcasm of the nineteenth century to represent liberty as a woman, while not one single woman throughout the length and breadth of the Land is as yet in possession of political Liberty.” (New York Heritage Digital Collection)
President Grover Cleveland was to give a speech to dedicate the Statue. Just two years prior, when he was Governor of the State of New York, he had vetoed state funding for the Statue. His speech was interrupted as the crowd looked above him to the torch.
As if an elaborate wedding between nations, as President Cleveland looked up from the podium below, Bartholdi, perched in the torch above the clouds, pulled on a rope that lifted the veil, an enormous French flag, revealing the Statue of Liberty’s face.
She had reached America and was therefore now an American.
But the veil now gone, the Statue from France to America had little sign of either country. Greek and Roman from torch to toe, even the day and year of America’s Declaration of Independence is written in Roman numerals. The month of July above them conjures Julius Caesar’s empire. The torch, tablet and toga were elements familiar to American spectators. The long, pointy, prominent spikes around her head were not. Appearing as if a new crown for a new empire at one glance, an ancient crown from an ancient empire at another, the object without the warmth with which it was delivered was a hulking metal French flag planted on American soil. It stood so tall that its spikes became rays of the sun, turning her into mother earth, a female solar personification, even at sunset, when the window gallery in her crown shot rays of light into the night, as if good protecting evil at all hours.
The sun’s formal prominence cast a natural power over the Statue, now standing in a country cast by defying nature, carving up land, carving up people, passing laws that required everyone pay taxes but not that everyone eat. Her face framed by rays of the sun mirrored the image of Christ, and the people were finding a new deity in “My American.” Not a figment, not unreachable, not behind flames or fear, she was a physical spirit built to let you in, omnipresent above the skyline from every direction.
Across the misty river from Manhattan, the invisible people who had funded the Statue looked up to her. They were now visible through their creation. Her crown, her light, her laws, her freedom, her movement, was theirs. She was a deity for and by the people and the ideals she held began to live within the people of her new country.
Through rain, protests and dense fog, the people succeeded in celebrating their Statue of Liberty, lifting spirits around the world, and helping to lift the country itself out of the Long Depression and into the 20th century.
The Statue of Liberty began as a classical Helios and Libertas, and became the world’s modern Declaration of Freedom, stepping out of steel chains and broken shackles, armed with the truth, prominent in her left hand, her right arm raised high, holding a torch in defiance, enlightening the world, and welcoming everyone inside to reach it.
The classical meaning of the seven rays around her head took on additional meaning on Bedloe’s Island, their form echoing the star-shaped military fort at her base, built to protect the city in 1812. Mirroring the fort’s purpose, the rays become morning star weaponry, protecting the ideals of America within her mind.
The Statue’s classical forms and features, the Roman clothing, sandals, egg-and-dart and traditional motifs, surround something shockingly new: the expression on her face. Her brow is furrowed, concerned, she is in thought as she looks straight ahead. This is not the expression on the faces of women in most artwork by 1886, and beyond. The Statue of Liberty’s face, designed to be seen from below, evokes the expression on one of the most famous statues in the world, even then: Michelangelo Buonarroti’s David. Unlike the traditional renderings of David and Goliath that depicted David’s victory, Michelangelo brings David to life before his battle, contemplating his next action.
The Statue of Liberty is contemplating her next action. Standing at the gateway to the country of reinvention, she symbolizes freedom, equality, opportunity; ideals, innovation, diversity; enslavement, disappointment, thievery; striving, imperfect savior; enraging assassin, defender, sparking hope, pride, shame, passions, camaraderie.
She stands as a question. Who are we to be?
The Statue that is a giant in our national identity is now dwarfed by the skyscrapers around her. The iron framework within her led to steel innovations that soon sent buildings skyward.
The design of international influence, built with multiple agendas, personal and national, artistic and political, constructed in one country, deconstructed and shipped to another, nearly lost at sea, reconstructed by the people and claimed by the powerful, though as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa, has been adopted by the world as the singular symbol of America.
She is walking history.
We each are walking history.
By Lori Terrizzi © 2019
CEO/Founder + Site Architect of Goaloop — The Goal Market®
The construction of the Statue of Liberty served as a metaphor for the construction of Goaloop, which began as a series of questions following the financial crash of September, 2008.
While the Statue of Liberty was a symbol, Goaloop would be its evolution, a tool to help everyone actualize their dreams — as if “My American” stepped down from her pedestal and personally helped everyone navigate the complexities of modern life.
Goaloop is a reality (in beta) thanks to an extraordinary team. We are a client of the Yale Law School’s Entrepreneurship & Innovation Clinic.
Many on our team have connections to Columbia University:
Goaloop helps you reach your goals and connects the world through goals. Connecting everyone by the common denominator of our goals, across sectors, expands social circles and creates new opportunities for everyone. Goaloop’s technology has grown from the belief that by connecting goals, we can achieve — and become — anything together.
Please join us at Goaloop.com (in beta) or visit our climate goal at Goaloop.org:
Goals on Goaloop instantly become Govies (‘goal movies’), which will stream on Goaloop.tv:
One of the first goals set on Goaloop was to make a movie based on the story above, Raising Liberty. It was originally posted here in 2009. The story above is a work-in-progress, most of the characters are currently missing.
If you are interested in working with us, please contact us at:
goalooping [at] goaloop [dot] com
As we began to build Goaloop, in stealth, a monument to Frederick Douglass was unveiled, just blocks away:
For a glimpse of our company culture, please read the article by one of our youngest team members, Goaloop intern Julio Lopez:
https://medium.com/@jil54/goaloop-internship-top-3-reasons-to-intern-at-a-startup-252d8507499e
RAISING LIBERTY sources, in addition to those linked within the text above:
“New York: A Documentary Film,” Directed by Ric Burns, 1999.
Khan, Yasmin Sabina, Enlightening the World: The Creation of the Statue of Liberty, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010. ISBN 978–0–8014–4851–5.
Rezneck, Samuel, “Distress, Relief, and Discontent in the United States during the Depression of 1873–78,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 58, №6 (Dec., 1950), pp. 494–512 in JSTOR.
