Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (28 page)

Bartholdi and Hugo moved around to the entrance at the foot. They passed the luminous Lavastre diorama set up to the side. New York Harbor spread out before the poet on this painted canvas. As they walked on, Bartholdi seemed to remember something.

May I,
he asked,
present my old collaborator, Simon?

Of course, Hugo said. The elderly Simon threaded his way from the back of the crowd and timidly stood before the legend. He was only ten years younger than Hugo so he knew every step of Hugo’s very public life.

Hugo extended his hand.

“Ah,” said Simon, “Mr. Victor Hugo, I haven’t seen you since the atelier of David!”

Hugo smiled, remembering the neoclassical artist who had rendered a famous bust of him back in his youth. “You were part of the atelier of David?” Hugo asked.

“Yes, monsieur, and I can still see you posing for your bust!”

Hugo seemed to give way to a short reverie. He had written poetry to the artistry of Pierre-Jean David d’Angers, so the man had been important to him.

Another guest piped up that he had not seen Victor Hugo since Chateaubriand’s funeral. Henri Cernuschi, the famous banker, economist, and art collector, held a hand toward the statue and said, “I see two giants gazing at each other.”

Bartholdi led Hugo toward Liberty’s foot. Hugo marveled at the gigantic interior. They ascended the stairs that had been constructed since Bartholdi’s luncheon in the statue’s knee two years before. Hugo nimbly climbed two floors. “I could easily climb ten,” he said laughing.

Before leaving, Hugo stood at Liberty’s base again, his hands in his pockets, silent. He thought for a while, then said, slowly, loudly, “The sea, that great restless being, observes the union of these two great lands at peace!” He tried a variation, as if for someone taking dictation: “Yes, this beautiful work tends to what I have always loved, called: peace. Between America and France—France, which is Europe—this guarantee of peace will remain permanent. It was good that it was done.”

Before he departed, he gave permission for the first remark to be inscribed at the base of the pedestal. No one ever placed the inscription there, probably an omission for the same reason that other elements were left out of the statue’s final realization—the sponsors simply ran out of money.

The day before the visit, Bartholdi asked his engravers to scratch the following words on a piece of the statue’s metal:

VICTOR HUGO

Workers of the Franco-American Union

Fragment of the colossal statue of Liberty

presented to the illustrious apostle

of Peace, Freedom, Progress

VICTOR HUGO

the day he honored with his visit

the work of the Franco-American Union.

November 29, 1884

Hugo took the fragment from Bartholdi when it was offered. Then bowing, saluting, leaning on the arm of his companion Madame Lockroy, he began to leave.

All the men took off their hats and shouted, “Vive Victor Hugo!”

An American hollered over the crowd, in French: “
Vive Victor Hugo!
The greatest poet of France!”

Bartholdi, overcome, added his own shout. “You could say the world!”

On the first of the year, 1885, the Gaget & Gauthier workers, led by Master Workman Bouquet, began taking apart the statue. Bartholdi’s project had been meant to vacate the premises in May 1883 and the workshop couldn’t wait any longer. Workmen methodically packed the pieces into large crates and numbered each item in chalk, indicating where each strap would go to bolster the copper shell. Liberty was ready for her voyage to America.

That same month, pedestal construction halted on Bedloe’s Island. There was no more money to continue.

12
Liberty Sets Sail

What could the Americans do to ease their financial distress? They could hope for federal help, but Washington politicians seemed to have little confidence in the project. As of January 10, 1885, Congress noted that the committee members still had not decided which kind of stone to use—granite, marble, or black compact limestone—for the pedestal. Nor had they worked out the details of the anchorage. They knew only that iron rods would pass from the figure to the pedestal’s base.

With only the eighty-foot stump and all but three thousand dollars of the fund spent, the committee members appealed to New Yorkers one last time on March 24, 1885. They had no other real hope. New York and its near vicinity had given 90 percent of the monies they had received.

“We can not believe [New Yorkers] will fail us in this our last appeal,” the committee stated. “If the money is not now forthcoming the statue must return to its donors, to the everlasting disgrace of the American people, or it must go to some other city, to the everlasting dishonor of New York.”

In a sign of the muted enthusiasm mustered, the millionaires of the Board of Trade of Paterson, New Jersey, heard that summons, debated the issue for long hours at a meeting, and chose to donate twenty dollars.

This lack of civic pride continued to enrage Joseph Pulitzer. In a few short years, he had fermented from an energetic and ferocious employer able to inspire ardent enthusiasm in his employees to a joyless overlord who provoked fear in those who worked with him. His natural tendency toward the morbid had been heightened by the death of his youngest daughter in the spring of 1884.

Pulitzer hadn’t lost his intelligence or his drive to right the wrongs of greed and class oppression, but he seemed beset, paranoid. He prowled his offices in a suit too big for him, his hair scraggly. He poked in desks and layout tables and advertising offices, looking for errors and for evidence of thievery or conspiracy. A chronic insomniac, he would explode in fits of rage over trifling matters. At home, he tortured his poor wife, Kate. His eyesight had weakened, damning him to have to hunch over every column inch, trying to focus and glimpse the lines of his own newspaper.

Theodore Dreiser visited the offices and saw the effect of his ill temper on the staff. “[The reporters] had a kind of nervous, resentful terror in their eyes as have animals when they are tortured. All were either scribbling busily or hurrying in or out.”

Still, the staff aimed to please Pulitzer as best they could and were on the lookout for potential items of interest to him. Over in France, Bartholdi had ordered his workmen to load the crates that contained the parts of Liberty, which ranged in weight from 150 pounds to four tons, onto a special seventy-car train and to ship them to the river port of Rouen. There, over the course of three weeks, the crates were lowered onto the French frigate
Isère
. She would set sail for New York the first week of May. America would be forced to receive the statue, ready or not.

Knowing Pulitzer’s affection for the Liberty project, the cartoonist Walt McDougall made a joke of Liberty’s homelessness by depicting her gloomily wandering in the mud of New York Harbor, her dress hoisted up around her knees, searching for a site. John R. Reavis, the
World
’s theater reviewer, noticed the image and liked it. He thought something more could be done to formalize Pulitzer’s support of Liberty. Perhaps the
World
could actually create a named campaign to raise the money through the people and make the project a media spectacle. He proposed the concept to Pulitzer.

Reavis was a man whom Pulitzer respected enough to steal from the oil beat at a Tulsa, Oklahoma, paper and turn him into his political correspondent. They’d gone together to the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1880. Reavis went on to cover theater for the paper and was on the brink of being sent to London as the
World
’s European representative, the most coveted staff position. Stylish and amusing, Reavis exuded enough charm to win over the famous actors of the day as friends. He would be the perfect hustler for the statue.

Pulitzer didn’t initially bite. He couldn’t afford to attach himself to a losing cause. His newspaper was climbing in circulation every month, boasting 150,000 readers. He liked to claim that the
World
had gotten Cleveland elected president, and the public had believed him. He couldn’t afford to tarnish that record by going public as an advocate of Liberty if there was a risk of failure. Yet he couldn’t completely dismiss Reavis’s idea, either. After several days, Pulitzer told Reavis he wanted him to head the fundraising drive.

Pulitzer first checked in with the American Committee and discovered that only a paltry $2,866 remained in its bank. He then wrote a front-page editorial on March 16, 1885, titled “What Shall Be Done with the Great Bartholdi Pedestal.” The article outlined the financial difficulties plaguing the American Committee. Then it declared, “
We must raise the money!
The
World
is the people’s paper. . . . Let us not wait for the millionaires to give this money. It is not the gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America, but a gift of the whole people of France to the whole people of America.”

Not only would the newspaper collect the funds, Pulitzer pledged, but the
World
would print the name of every donor in its pages, no matter how small the contribution. This was an extremely savvy plan; it would demonstrate an honest accounting of the donations, and—most important—give people a personal incentive to donate: public recognition.

Meanwhile, the newspaper kept up its pro-Liberty campaign of cartoons and editorials. McDougall sketched a cartoon of Vanderbilt, Field, and Gould, diamond links in their cuffs, passing a contribution box for the fund without dropping in a coin. The men couldn’t see the box because their hands were so full of moneybags, their eyes so blinded by the silver dollars lodged in their eye sockets.

The donations began flooding in from readers, along with heartfelt letters describing why the pennies had been offered. Along the way, savvy businessmen of New York realized even a small contribution bought cheaper advertising than one could acquire with a contract with the
World
’s advertising department. Many contributed daily simply to keep their names in the paper. Two months in, Pulitzer’s fund was at $37,249.13, but it still needed to raise an additional $70,000.

Back in Rouen, the statue was originally meant to set sail in late April. The
Isère
’s departure date was postponed to early May. For two more weeks, the ship waited in the river fully loaded. On the day the newspapers could report her definite departure, they also announced the devastating news that Victor Hugo had died.

Crowds swarmed the writer’s house in Paris, adding to the many who had been standing vigil during his last, long bout of illness. The sculptor Jules Dalou wended his way through the hordes to mold Hugo’s death mask. The great actress Sarah Bernhardt arrived dressed in white, bearing a large crown of white roses.

Hugo had refused the services of a priest in his last moments. His heaven and hell existed only on earth.

In his will, Hugo left it to the republic to decide the style and whereabouts of his burial.

The legislators chose the Panthéon and declared that, on that day of his interment, government offices, schools, and theaters should be closed. The coffin would lie in state under the Arc de Triomphe before burial.

The nation could speak of nothing else. Wrote one reporter: “The death of Hugo dwarfs every other subject, political or social.”

A week later, May 31, Bartholdi released to the public his account of how Liberty came to exist. The manuscript, submitted to newspapers and later published as a booklet, described how the idea was sparked at the dinner at Laboulaye’s home back in 1865, a story he had never previously mentioned. He also fought back against the “evilly disposed” people who were suggesting that his
Liberty Enlightening the World
had its origins in a design he did for Egypt. He claimed he had never executed anything for the khedive except a “little sketch” left in the khedive’s palace. Most important, from the point of view of building public support of his project, he included a note that Hugo had sent him upon receiving a copy of the manuscript from Bartholdi. The reply, written only ten days before the poet’s death, stated: “The form of statuary is everything, and it is nothing. It is nothing without the spirit. It is everything with the idea.”

Those words, it would be claimed, were the last written by the great poet.

Pulitzer was in Paris for Hugo’s funeral on June 1.
He saw the mourners forced to sleep in tents owing to the overcrowding of hotels. He saw the shrouded lamplights against the blossoming chestnut trees, the people packed in so tightly to watch the coffin’s procession to the Panthéon that some were almost crushed, yet would not break their reverent silence. “Liberty, equality, fraternity” had been Hugo’s quest, the eulogist proclaimed, and this funeral was his apotheosis. Pulitzer demanded a long front-page tribute written to the man. Always savvy about public sentiment, he realized that passion for the legend ran high and could be fanned still higher. The statue, blessed by the French secular saint, sailed toward New York.