Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (19 page)

In addition to these men, the American Committee included four hundred prominent citizens, among them a former New York governor, the poet and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant, and, eventually, Teddy Roosevelt. Despite being such an impressive collective, the group had at least one great difficulty: it was asking Americans to make preparations to host a statue that existed largely on paper.

In the first petition, signed by Evarts early in 1877, the group announced its intention to raise funds for the “reception, location, presentation and inauguration” of the statue. No mention was made of the most costly items, such as the supporting platform, the labor to hoist the work into place, or the maintenance of Liberty once she arrived.

In this first appeal, the notion of French amity was pushed into the background. The group explained that Liberty would be a functional monument to capitalism, “an impressive ornament to the entrance of the commercial Metropolis of the Union.” She would also serve as a “beacon or a signal station.” French-American friendship was listed third.

Perhaps the American Committee hoped that it could raise some public funds, while Congress would foot the rest of the bill for what the committee thought would total $125,000. The politicians in Washington, D.C., had just pledged $200,000 to finish the Washington Monument.

As for the private fundraising, Butler did not want millionaires to be the focus of the Liberty appeals. If the citizenry could make the work happen, he thought, they would be investing in their country, voting en masse for patriotism. Appealing to the masses meant that someone on the committee would have to appeal to the American heart, a skill none of the members quite possessed.

They did understand political power. In early 1877, they petitioned President Grant to ask Congress for either Governors Island or Bedloe’s Island to be the location of the statue. They also appealed for support for its inaugural celebration, and “for its maintenance as a lighthouse.” This request went rather smoothly. The language of the resolution made clear that the French were planning to send the statue and erect it “at their own cost” and that the pedestal would be paid for by private subscription. Congress passed the measure, and Grant signed the bill on his last full day in office, giving General William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the U.S. Army, the opportunity to choose which island.

The last clarification in that petition, the part about the lighthouse, was key to Liberty’s future. A work of art, particularly one that did not celebrate a dead president or general, would be an unlikely candidate for federal largesse. A lighthouse, on the other hand, aided commerce.

And then a strange thing happened in New York. Ismail Pasha, the same khedive who had rejected Bartholdi’s colossus, offered obelisks to America and England to cement the friendship between Egypt and the two countries. The khedive required only “between $75,000 and $160,000 to remove the needle” for America. Behind the scenes, he needed whatever capital he could find to help efforts to modernize his country.

New York’s committeemen immediately responded to the catnip of Cleopatra’s Needle. Evarts liked the idea of an obelisk for New York. The consul general opened negotiations. It was first thought money for extracting the artifact would be raised through subscription, but then William Vanderbilt stepped forward to pay the entire expense. The U.S. Navy bought a ship in Egypt expressly to move the piece.

In contrast, it had been six years since Bartholdi’s first trip to America and his American Committee had convened only once. Ismail Pasha’s obelisk arrived in Central Park three years after the idea first emerged, sped along by the government and financed by the simple donation of one patron. The dream was realized quickly, smoothly, and with good feeling. Why had Bartholdi’s project dragged along?

One advantage the obelisk had over Liberty was that the sculptor who made it was dead. Liberty, on the other hand, was so entwined with the statue maker’s own persona that it was usually referred to as “the Bartholdi Statue.” Bartholdi did not seem to consider what was required to convince Americans that his design was the perfect addition to the national landscape. In an almost comically bad piece of press relations, he submitted to the French government a condescending report on the American decorative arts at the Philadelphia exposition, which was then picked up by the American newspapers.

Bartholdi sniffed at America’s “loud” ornamentation, and said that its cabinetry relied too much on machined items endlessly repeated—best realized in the Pullman railroad car. “The parlor cars of the American railways are the highest expression of this peculiar American style.”

Back in Paris, Bartholdi fared better in wooing his own countrymen. Sometime during his stay in America, he came to understand that what people from any country yearned for in this age of P. T. Barnum was not a remembrance of past heroics. The Americans and French did not want to wallow in the memory of Lafayette nor even have their hearts stirred by grand ideals. Both America and France were battle-weary. Both countries suffered from economic depressions. What the people wanted was pleasure and awe.

In that regard, Bartholdi seemed to have made one mistake with his Madison Square Park installation of the torch: after first sparking curiosity because of its size, the torch soon began to blend into the background. Nannies would push their prams past; horse-drawn carriages would negotiate the cobblestone roundabout nearby without pausing. Bartholdi had provided no way for viewers to participate by going up into the torch. He probably couldn’t afford a caretaker to take the tickets and keep graffiti to a minimum.

That muted response must have greatly illuminated Bartholdi’s understanding of fundraising. Lofty ideals did not sell, but a massive banner lit up during the night of a parade on New York’s Fourth of July caused a sensation. People queued in Philadelphia to climb up in the torch, but passed it by in Madison Square Park. Bartholdi knew he needed to get people to interact with the statue in order to capture the public imagination.

The quickest way to thrill people was to trick their senses. Louis Daguerre, who invented the daguerreotype, had been the progenitor of dioramas. These were structures or rooms in which people could enter and be seduced into thinking they were walking through falling snow, or passing the hours between day and night in an instant. Daguerre studied with French opera scene painters and realized that by manipulating colored lights on fastidiously rendered canvases, he could simulate a different world.

Bartholdi paid a visit to Jean-Baptiste Lavastre, the first decorator of the Paris Opera. In a city known for its seductive and dreamlike scenic art, Lavastre reigned as chief magician. On vast canvases blanketing the floor or hung from the high ceilings in their warehouses, scene makers created cities, misty gardens, frothing oceans. The painters studied how pigments shifted under the glow of the theater’s gaslights—the yellows looked white, the greens brightened, the violets turned black.

Lavastre isolated what line or shade would be required to convince spectators in the center rows they were in the company of Cleopatra or Caesar. Lavastre built culs-de-sac, succulent gardens canopied by plane trees, stone staircases leading to moon-swept terraces. He could create a hazy mountain or blue waves rippling on a beach
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He worked in the opposite way from Bartholdi, measuring the grandeur of life and then shrinking it down.

Lavastre’s artistry was combined with Bartholdi’s imagination to bring the city of New York to Paris. Back in 1877, it took weeks to get to America, at risk of murderous seas or death by disease. At Paris’s Palais de l’Industrie, all summer, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., viewers could climb a sweeping balustrade to gaze over a balcony that seemed to transport them three thousand nautical miles in a second.

“By some incredible feat of trompe-l’oeil, you are all of a sudden looking out over the stern of an American steamboat on her way out of New York harbor,” a reporter breathlessly wrote. “Very near you, on the bridge, are life-sized people, dressed Yankee-fashion, smoking and talking; a little farther away more people are clustered together on the bridge, and farther off yet the pilot stands at the helm. Over his head floats the ensign with its silver stars.”

The reporter’s description greatly resembled Bartholdi’s written account of his arrival in New York for that first time. “But let us turn our eyes away from our ship to the spectacle which invites our attention,” the reporter continued. “All around us, on the choppy waters, sailboats and steamboats of all kinds are moving, fast or slow, in all directions. . . .

“The traffic is unbelievable . . . , and now, from her island, rises the gigantic Statue of Liberty, illuminating the world with the rays of her electric beacon. . . . All around is the beautiful harbor; beyond it, the huge city . . . with its endless streets and avenues, an ocean of houses as big as the Atlantic itself.”

In a two-month period, more than seven thousand people made the fantastical climb, paying one franc per person (fifty centimes on Sundays and holidays). Eventually Bartholdi and Lavastre moved their thirty-six-foot-long canvas and staircase to the Tuileries and continued the display for two more years, through 1879.

One could say that Bartholdi’s scheme worked. Not only did money accrue through the ticket sales, but the vision enticed the media and the geniuses of the era. Thomas Edison, who had just patented a remarkable invention called the phonograph, claimed to a reporter in April 1878 that he was creating a “monster disc” to play from within the statue. The sound would be treated with special air compressors so that the statue would be able to give speeches that could be broadcast out to the entire bay. The sound, the reporter noted, would be likely to reach the northern reaches of Manhattan as well.

Word soon spread that Bartholdi was planning a remarkable contribution to the upcoming Universal Exposition in Paris in 1878. He would unveil for the world Liberty’s head. Wrote one reporter enticed by that news: “Long before the head reached the Champ de Mars my curiosity as to this stupendous specimen of womanhood took me to the workshop in the Rue Chazelle, near the Parc Monceau, where it is being made.”

That particular Gaget & Gauthier studio had been constructed exclusively for crafting the statue. It bustled with the comings and goings of fifty workmen who pummeled, sanded, and blowtorched the earthbound statue parts. The reporter found the craftsmen “hammering for their lives on sheet copper to complete the toilet of her tresses for the show. . . . I mounted the scaffolding with them and stood on the level of her awful eye some thirty inches from corner to corner to be ingulfed in her gaze.”

Men who looked like Lilliputians ran up and down on ladders between the stages of scaffolding. A man level with the statue’s lips could reach to work only at her middle brow. A number of men crawled in a vast cauldron that looked like something from a sugar refinery but was really the crown of the statue’s head. A bowl large enough to dole out gruel to an army was the tip of her nose. “Her lips, from dimple to dimple, were as long as my walking-stick, and fifteen people, I was told, might sit around the flame of her torch.”

The reporter then went in search of Bartholdi himself at his studio. “Bartholdi is an Alsacian as well as a Frenchman, still young for an artist of his reputation—I should not give him a day more than forty, sincere and winningly bold in manner, of middle height, dark, large-featured, and with a very penetrating glance. He gives you the impression of a man of power, and his works confirm it. He loves to model on a colossal scale perhaps because this most readily conduces to the simplicity and massiveness of effect which he seeks in art.”

Bartholdi wouldn’t speak much about Liberty to the reporter, but with his characteristic peevishness, he did not hesitate to criticize his peers. “The Italians, for instance, as we see them in this exhibition,” Bartholdi said, referring to the Salon of 1878, which was being exhibited at the time, “are positively mean in their imitations of texture in marble work. The pattern of a lady’s fan, the lace in her dress, her slippers, and the embroidery of her cambric, are done to the life, and nothing else. All that is but so much taken away from the effect of the essential parts, the form and face. You can hardly conceive how much a figure may lose by such treatment until you see it in some striking example.

“There is one in New York, a monument in Madison Square, of a great man seated in his chair. The chair is so elaborately wrought that it takes all attention away from the great man. The upholstery is the first thing you look at and the last. Contrast that with another seated figure, the Voltaire of the Théâtre Français, in which I will defy you to ignore, for one moment, the head, the noblest part of the work, the cause and motive of all the rest. Of the statue of Liberty itself I can only say that I have modelled it on these principles, always bearing in mind the place it is to occupy, and consequently not breaking up the work into frivolous detail.” Bartholdi knew he was about to unveil a sensational work of art.

In France, the Universal Exposition of 1878 had gotten off to a slow start on the Champ de Mars. Attendance lagged in the exhibition halls, which were devised by Viollet-le-Duc, who still had not come through with the full plan for Liberty’s structural support. The immense aquariums disappointed with slimy floors and fake stalactites and stalagmites. The grottoes and pools were nearly empty. The profusion of fish from Oriental ponds, sparkling Swiss lakes, the Danube, and the Volga were dying from a mysterious chemical in the water’s mix.

On June 30, 1878, a few months after the beginning of the exposition, Bartholdi opened the doors of the Gaget studios to usher out a remarkable creation. In a wagon big enough, as one observer noted, to carry the Panthéon, Liberty’s head, from the tip of her rayed crown to the beginning of her broad shoulders, rested on a cushion of boughs.