Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (14 page)

The next year, Congress voted two hundred thousand dollars to finish the work but canceled that allocation when it learned about a dispute over one poetic aspect of the project. People around the country and abroad had been invited to donate stones that could be cemented into the monument’s walls. Allegedly a member of the Know-Nothing Party threw the rock submitted by the pope into the river. As punishment, Congress withheld further funding.

Over time, Bartholdi would come to feel an intense antipathy for this D.C. project, perhaps out of a sense of competitiveness. He disliked Washington too much at that moment, though, to aggressively propose his own project there. “Add to all this, dust, many negroes, bad pavements or none at all, plenty of sun and flies—and you have the city of Washington.”

He loved the picturesque voyage to Mount Vernon and was moved in the presence of the crypt that housed the remains of the man whom Lafayette had considered his most precious friend: “I believe that the same emotion filled the breasts of those who were with me. But this did not prevent their installing themselves with their provisions and eating their lunches in the presence of the great man.”

Arlington also stirred his soul. He surveyed the vast field of white tombstones. A guide described how the army was having a hard time providing sufficient white prosthetics for the Civil War soldiers because even the black soldiers were requesting the Caucasian appendages.

On July 4, Bartholdi dined with Senator Charles Sumner. To the public, Sumner was best remembered as having been caned by a congressional colleague into unconsciousness on the floor of the U.S. Senate in retaliation for a virulent speech against slavery. Bartholdi had never been, and would never be, as fearlessly vocal in his beliefs as Sumner, but he appreciated the man’s character.

“He is a most distinguished man,” Bartholdi wrote to his mother, “the greatest orator of the United States, and one of the most important political figures. He greatly loves the arts, knows all the literature, and showed great sympathy for France.”

Decades later, Bartholdi would recall this meeting and the many to follow: “I was in [Sumner’s] company often at Washington. I was filled with admiration of his intellectual power, of the fineness of his spirit, and his working faculties. I went to pass the evening at his house, interrupting him in his labors, and then with extraordinary animation he told me a hundred charming anecdotes, he questioned me about a thousand things in French politics or letters that he was far better acquainted with than I.”

A year after this visit, Bartholdi would write to the Massachusetts senator praising “his grand and noble country” and soliciting his support for the colossus. Yet in the moment, in 1871, Bartholdi did not seem so awed by the nation itself, exercising his artist’s sense of detail in his critique. He disliked the dirty Philadelphia train station, with a “gentleman paring his corns on a bench in full view of the public”; the locomotive’s whistle “as if it were blowing its nose—that is the way a locomotive whistles in this country.” The food was equally unpleasant: in Washington, D.C., “One eats all day—a great deal of green corn, with cabbage.” All in all, the American character was suspect: “It seems that honesty at the polls leaves something to be desired.”

Bartholdi’s excellent review of Sumner, though, suggests that the senator must have expressed support for Bartholdi’s vision. Bartholdi tended to disparage his critics and praise his enthusiasts. Sumner’s dear friend, the celebrated poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, also earned accolades. “He showed me the greatest cordiality and much enthusiasm for my project. He insisted on my staying to dinner; and afterwards we sat smoking cigars on the terrace and watching the sun set beyond the little islands in the sea.”

Bartholdi would later remember that Longfellow, whose face reminded him of Garibaldi’s, “received me as if he had always known me,” and “when I left him, pressed my hand as if he wished electrically to convey that pressure to his friends in France, charging me to express to them all his enthusiasm for their plans.”

Longfellow wrote more reservedly of the visit, saying that Bartholdi was a pleasant, lively, intelligent man. He “has a plan for creating a bronze colossus on Bedloe’s Island and in New York Harbor—a Statue of Liberty, to serve as a lighthouse. It is a grand plan; I hope it will strike the New Yorkers.”

Of all Bartholdi’s handful of enthusiasts, one supporter would be most important. On July 18, the Frenchman traveled out to Long Branch, New Jersey, to see Ulysses S. Grant, then in the first years of his presidential term. The travel itself was enchanting. Bartholdi loved the steamboat “with a hundred cages with canaries. In the middle, surrounded by glass, is the vessel’s engine, clean and shining like the inside of a watch.”

Bartholdi probably did not know that Grant had written to Bismarck after the Franco-Prussian War, congratulating him not only for his brilliant military strategy and for dethroning Napoléon III, but for winning two French provinces, one of them being Bartholdi’s beloved Alsace.

“I went to see President Grant, who received me very kindly,” Bartholdi wrote. “I found the sovereign of the United States installed in a most simple cottage. . . . The garden is the size of a man’s hand . . . few flowers and no trees whatever.”

Grant led him to the terrace and “listened with the greatest interest to the recital of my projects. He is a cold man, like most Americans. He has a very energetic physiognomy. He displays an affability that is reserved and simple, but at the same time genuine.

“There is no formality. . . . One is received as by the simplest bourgeois. I met his children, and his gouty father-in-law seated by a spittoon.”

Bartholdi then received his best scrap of American support. “I show him my project. He likes it very much, thinks that securing the site will not be a difficult problem, that the project will be submitted to Congress. He offers me a cigar.”

This would be more impressive as an endorsement of Bartholdi’s project if Grant hadn’t shown a tendency to high-handedly rubber-stamp dubious ventures. His administration would be riddled with charges of corruption and cronyism. Regardless for Bartholdi, who might have considered his statue all but anointed, Grant’s enthusiasm fired up his work ethic. On his return to New York he went out to Bedloe’s again. “Today, after having done some work on drawings for my projects, I went to the island which ought to be the site of the monument. It is admirably located for my purposes,” he wrote to his mother.

“Unfortunately, a fort is built upon it—so that there is a possible conflict with the Army. But I believe this difficulty will be resolved when a decision has been reached about the monument itself. That is the question. I believe this enterprise will take on very great proportions. If things turn out as I hope they will, this work of sculpture will become of very great moral importance.”

Through his time apart from his mother, Bartholdi worried a great deal about her. He wrote detailed descriptions of all he saw in this new world, but had received only one letter from her in return. He kept her old letter in his pocket “for the sake of the illusion it gives me,” the feeling that she had been in regular contact. It was a big sacrifice for him to be away from her for so long, he told her, but he hoped the trip would bolster his career and perhaps eventually provide money that could help pay off Charles’s debts, which had troubled her for so long.

His trip continued to Boston. He liked it no better than Washington, D.C., but seemed amused by its flamboyance: “Nowhere are there bigger hoopskirts and larger chignons than in the Puritan City.”

In Newport, Rhode Island, which roared with a cacophony of music from pianos, symphonies, and little parlor quartets, he met John La Farge, a painter and illustrator born to French parents. La Farge was a complicated man, so resistant to meeting new people that he felt physically ill when forced to shake hands, though he remained steadfastly loyal once a friendship had taken root.

One of La Farge’s students claimed that it was in La Farge’s studio that Bartholdi made a maquette of his Liberty statue (though a maquette would require a live model for Bartholdi in Newport, a fact that becomes interesting later in this history). La Farge offered Bartholdi not only his friendship, but two important contacts. Henry Hobson Richardson, the architect who was building Boston’s Brattle Street Church, ended up offering Bartholdi work creating carved stone reliefs on the church’s steeple. Bartholdi had not been the architect’s first choice. According to a student of La Farge, one of the country’s best-known sculptors had been asked to do the job, but had turned it down because “in his opinion it might level him to the position of a stone-cutter and for the public it would not look well.” Bartholdi was only too glad to have the work. In the relief he created in France to ship back to Boston, Bartholdi would later put the faces of prominent Bostonians and his own friends on the figures in “The Four Stages of Christian Life”: Longfellow gives Communion to Laboulaye’s family; Garibaldi, as a priest—ironic, given Garibaldi’s heated anticlerical views—performs a marriage between Abraham Lincoln and Bartholdi’s mother; and Sumner and Nathaniel Hawthorne also found themselves recorded for posterity in these Christian scenes.

Through La Farge, Bartholdi also met Richard Morris Hunt, a man who would become critical to Liberty’s becoming a reality. Hunt was born wealthy and remained so. He was the first American admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, founded the first American architectural school in 1855, and designed the first apartment building for Manhattan. He espoused a formal, elegant style and had been Olmsted’s frequent collaborator until the two fell out on whether or not Olmsted’s tangled Central Park should begin with an imposing gate.

Bartholdi detected Hunt’s prickly demeanor right away. The architect, he wrote, was “a little boastful, pleased with himself.” Unfortunately, for both of them, they would come to work together closely.

Bartholdi decided to set off by train to explore the rest of America, much as he had broken free in Egypt to journey to Yemen. The final piece of the transcontinental line had been laid only two years earlier, and for a man with adventure in his heart, the West was a thrilling prospect.

In mid-August, he and Simon arrived first at the grand Niagara Falls, which Bartholdi found “marvelous and startling.” He made his first painting in America there, and he and Simon posed for a photograph with the rush of water behind them. He also sent a cartoon to his mother showing a man and woman in oilskins warding off the Olympian tumble of water and mist. “Here is the gentlemen’s costume and the ladies’—they make a procession of yellow bears.”

From Niagara he went to Chicago, which overwhelmed him with its buzz of people and machines. Despite the bad architecture, he thought “Chicago is perhaps the most American of all the cities. . . . In 1804, five people lived here; today there are 299,000.

“In 1833 there were 28 voters; today you see telegraph wires like enormous spider-webs, 126 churches, a hundred newspapers—the whistle of locomotives and steamers make a continuous sound like that of an Eolian harp, smoke blackens the sky; a vast population rushes about, a prey to what might be called business colic. It is incomprehensible how all this could have come into existence in so short a time.”

He revealed his fascination with epic projects by marveling at the two tunnels under the river and lake bed bringing water to the people. “All those things are of the greatest interest from the viewpoint of activity, ingenuity, and courage,” he wrote. “What is lacking in the cities and in most of the men is charm and taste.”

Farther west, he was overwhelmed by landscapes. “At the beginning of the mountains there are scenes of the most extraordinary wildness—all that is lacking is the wild Indians. Red rocks extravagantly shapeless, scorched land, gray grass, rusty grass, red moss—no trees at all—dry river-beds—such is the aspect of the foothills of the Rockies.”

The train crossed near mountains eight thousand feet tall, and, as Bartholdi wrote, “in some places the scene is diabolical—something out of a fairy tale.” He watched roads plunge into deep valleys and gorges, and photographed trains that appeared like mere toys in scale, crossing delicate trestle bridges between prehistoric caverns. Another photograph shows men driving an enormous snowplow, dwarfed by its beak and the shovel pallet as tall as a hill.

One night he arrived in Reno. “We reached the passages of the high mountains of Nevada. By four o’clock, already up and dressed, I was gazing at the mountains and gorges and valleys through which we were passing. The wooden barriers, to keep the snow from drifting on the track, were more and more frequent. Mining settlements, devastated forests, the tortured earth torn up, a few scattered little houses of wood, water sluices for washing the gold, vast silhouettes of mountains, deep valleys, scrap iron and broken lumber—all this seems like a battle-field. Near the inhabited places, the landscape seems to have been hastily torn up and scattered by man in his furious search for gold.”

He stopped in Salt Lake City, Utah, on August 20 to pay a visit to its founder, Brigham Young, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The first night, he “strolled about a little too late to see anything.” He did record one poetic moment. “A man yells, ‘Fire!’ It appears he was dreaming.”

The day after he arrived, he noted that the “city still consists of wooden houses, with signs and posters everywhere as in all American towns; it is traversed by broad, macadamized avenues bordered with dusty grass. Along the streets are open shacks—as if at a fair—and a few houses.”