In honor of the Fourth of July, we asked Elizabeth Mitchell, author of the new book Liberty’s Torch, an account of the Statue of Liberty’s bumpy history and the life of her creator, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, to reveal some little-known facts about America’s most famous monument.
Every year, New York hosts the largest July 4th fireworks display in the country. This year, the blasts will be going off from the Brooklyn Bridge and the waters around the Statue of Liberty as Lady Liberty gazes out in her usual imperturbable fashion.
We take this icon for granted—the perfect backdrop for celebrations of American patriotism. But few people know the fascinating story of how she came to be, and how one quirky visionary, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, battled naysayers, engineering impossibilities, and a raging storm during transport to put the Lady on her feet in New York harbor.
My new book, Liberty’s Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty, tells the improbable journey of the statue from one artist’s whimsical inspiration to the feverish labors of supporters from Gustave Eiffel to Mark Twain to the penny donors of old New York tenements.
Here are just 10 of the little-known facts about America’s colossus:
1. The Statue of Liberty was not a gift from France to America.
We have all heard the shorthand that implies that the statue was exchanged government to government. In fact, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a mid-career statue maker, decided to pitch a country he had never visited before on his vision to build a massive lighthouse in the shape of a woman. In his diaries and letters, he described his journey to all corners of America, from Niagara Falls to Washington, D.C., from Chicago to Los Angeles, to explore this exotic land and drum up support.
When no significant government funding emerged, he contrived every possible fundraising strategy himself. He put on spectacles of wonder in Paris, charged visitors admission to watch the statue’s construction in a dusty workshop, sold souvenirs, and petitioned the French government to let him run a national lottery.
In the end it was Joseph Pulitzer, the American newspaper magnate, who helped him finish the job by printing the names of every person who donated even a penny to the cause. This strategy rapidly boosted the circulation of Pulitzer’s newspaper when readers bought a copy simply to see their names in the paper—a brilliant marketing strategy.
2. The Statue was originally designed for the Suez Canal in Egypt.
Bartholdi did not craft the basic design of Liberty specifically for America. As a young man, he had visited Egypt and was enchanted by the project underway to dig a channel between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. At Paris world’s fair of 1867, he met with the Khedive, the leader of Egypt, and proposed creating a work as wondrous as the pyramids or sphinxes. He then designed a colossal woman holding up a lamp and wearing the loose fitting dress of a fellah, a slave, to stand as a lighthouse at the entrance of the Suez Canal. The Egypt deal fell through, so Bartholdi decided to adventure to America to pitch his colossus.
3. Americans were very slow to welcome Bartholdi’s statue.
So how excited were Americans about the possibility of giving a home to this new monument? Initial fundraising and support was extremely lackluster. It took about 15 years, with the statue completed and assembled in a neighborhood of Paris, before the American citizenry finally began to embrace it.
4. The statue’s torch was exhibited in Philadelphia—and she almost ended up there.
The torch was exhibited to great success at the 1876 world’s fair in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia; fairgoers paid admission to climb up into the torch and take in the view from the top. With the funds raised from that exhibit, Bartholdi finally had enough capital to build the statue’s head. He was so pleased with Philadelphia’s reception to the statue that for a time he considered giving it to them instead of New York.
5. The Statue of Liberty also nearly went to Boston.
In 1882, when the statue was well under construction in Paris, but fundraising efforts were stalling in New York, Boston made a play to get the statue. Proving that nothing motivates New Yorkers so well as rivalry, the New York Times retorted in an editorial:
“[Boston] proposes to take our neglected statue of Liberty and warm it over for her own use and glory. Boston has probably again overestimated her powers. This statue is dear to us, though we have never looked upon it, and no third rate town is going to step in and take it from us. Philadelphia tried to do that in 1876, and failed. Let Boston be warned . . . that she can’t have our Liberty … that great light-house statue will be smashed into … fragments before it shall be stuck up in Boston Harbor.”
6. New York City’s Central Park and Prospect Park were both considered as locations.
When Bartholdi first arrived in New York in 1871, he considered Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and the newly constructed Central Park as possible locations for the statue. Had he chosen to build the Statue of Liberty in Central Park, the famed Dakota apartment building would not even have reached to her big toe.
7. The statue was originally supposed to be a lighthouse.
When Ulysses Grant authorized the use of Bedloe Island (now Liberty Island) for the statue, he specified that the Statue of Liberty would be a lighthouse. That would give the Lady a purpose, and therefore, would merit government funding. However, the engineers were never able to successfully light it enough to serve that purpose—a cause of extreme frustration for Bartholdi. Over time, it would be clear that the site of Bedloe’s Island was too far inland for it to be a good position for a lighthouse, anyway.
8. Bartholdi planned for the statue to be covered in gold.
In order to make the statue visible after dark, Bartholdi proposed that Americans raise the money to gild her. However, given how daunting and arduous a task it had been to gather even enough money to place the statue in New York harbor, no one followed through on paying the enormous cost of covering the massive statue in gold.
9. Thomas Edison once had plans to make the statue talk.
When Edison introduced the phonograph to the public in 1878, he told the newspapers that he was designing a “monster disc” for the interior of the Statue of Liberty that would allow the statue to deliver speeches that could be heard up to the northern part of Manhattan and across the bay. Thankfully, no one pursued that strange promise, which would have led to the odd experience of walking in New York and suddenly hearing the Statue of Liberty “talking.”
10. Suffragettes protested the unveiling of the statue.
When it was unveiled in October 1886, women’s rights groups lamented that an enormous female figure would stand in New York harbor representing liberty, when most American women had no liberty to vote.
Only two women attended the actual unveiling on what is now known as Liberty Island: Bartholdi’s wife, and the 13-year-old daughter of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French engineer who had designed the Suez Canal. The wives of the American Committee members were forced to watch the proceedings from a navy vessel off the island. Suffragettes chartered a boat to circle the island during the unveiling. They blasted protest speeches, but those could not be heard over the din of steam whistles and cannon blasts in the harbor.