Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (38 page)

The lighting of Liberty would continue to be a grave problem for the statue’s adoptive caretakers. The Lighthouse Board found that nine hundred dollars a month would be required and a squabble ensued over which entity ought to be held responsible—the board, the city, or the federal government. The call for donations failed. “Few are willing to subscribe, being utterly disgusted with the function of those chiefly connected with the pedestal,” wrote a reporter. “It is understood that M. Bartholdi is greatly incensed over the refusal of the light-house board to bear the expense.”

With that expense hanging over the project, after much cajoling the White House finally ordered the Lighthouse Board to pay for the statue’s lighting. The lights were turned on again on November 22 and were still insufficient. “It is said by some experts that a more powerful light cannot be used, as it would melt the hand and arm of the statue,” wrote a reporter. “We reckon it has seen its day as an attraction, although a boat leaves a slip near the south ferry every hour to convey visitors to Liberty Island at 25 cents the round trip.”

That month, workmen cut holes in the flame to put in windows. They added lamps, created a temporary generator on-site, and proposed building a bigger generator.

The American authorities continued to deferentially solicit Bartholdi’s ideas and critiques since it was he who had conceived this “lighthouse” in the first place. Bartholdi eventually replied by letter to the Lighthouse Board with a remarkable disavowal of his original scheme.

“I may tell you frankly what I almost feared to say when I was in New York,” he wrote. “The committee had entertained an idea which deeply honored me, namely, that of lighting the whole monument by means of electric projections. The idea was a grand one but hardly practicable, for at a very short distance the statue would disappear and the pedestal alone remain visible. The dark color of copper will not permit the bringing out of the statue by light; only a shining metal or gilding would have allowed the desired effect.”

“The only effective lighting is therefore to place a powerful light in the hand.”

He said he knew that would probably resemble any other light, and that the public wanted something more interesting, such as beams shooting through the diadem or a revolving light. “A further idea would be to represent in the diadem openings by means of the stained glass so well made in America the national stars of the United States.

“This addition to the lighting would likely give a very original and peculiar aspect to the statue light. That in the hand being very powerful, would be seen from afar; while the other in the head would be a decorative complement visible in the whole harbor.

“I send you hereby some little drawings showing that scheme.

“Such is the only suggestion I would allow myself to make, because the lighting of the statue by projection appears to me a useless expense, unless some one would afford the luxury of plating the statue with either gold or some shining metal.”

Bartholdi’s suggestion to gild Liberty was never taken seriously, but half a year after her inauguration, her luster had already faded. A reporter who journeyed out to Bedloe’s Island in the summer of 1887 found a lonely scene. “Few big undertakings are a whole year’s wonder, and it is only natural that the Statue of Liberty should be falling more and more into a conventional harbor landmark,” the reporter wrote. “Such, in fact, it is; and though the boats still run down from the Barge office daily with a fair sprinkling of sightseers, one can feel that Bartholdi’s work has lost its freshness for all but a few strangers and enthusiasts. The sail these hot days is a pleasant one, and the air at the island is cool and salty. That the statue is there is something, but not all that it used to be.”

General Charles Stone said on the day of the inauguration that his biggest achievement had been that no man had been killed or seriously injured in its construction. That wasn’t entirely true. Francis Longo, a thirty-nine-year-old Italian laborer, died when an old wall fell on him, and there had been some minor injuries along the way. Still, given the acrobatics involved in building the statue without scaffolding, and given that about twenty-seven people had died making the Brooklyn Bridge, one could say that a single death had been almost an achievement.

Even if Stone had been pummeled in the press as the statue took form, he had restored his good name with the magnificent New York parade he organized. With his eye firmly focused on a bright future, on January 13, 1887, only two and a half months after inaugurating the statue, Charles Stone packed his trunks for New Orleans. He figured his wife might want to visit her birthplace after such a long time in the North, and this southern city held the best hopes, he thought, for making good money quickly. It would be temperate and pleasant for the rest of that winter.

As he packed his bags in Flushing, Queens, he felt a slight cold coming on and thought he might lie down. He never rose again.

“The death of General Charles P. Stone in New York, on Monday, was a shock,” wrote one reporter. “It reveals what was little known before, or realized, how much of a vital force he put into the prolonged strain and frequent exposures required of him in the superintendence of the final arrangements for the unveiling of the statue of Liberty.”

Stone received a small military funeral. In February, his wife asked to be administered her husband’s personal estate. The amount came to no more than one hundred dollars. With that pittance in her pocket, she left the North to finally head back home.

Richard Morris Hunt, for his part, seemed to never get over his pique with Bartholdi. In May 1887, the French government sent him a blue Sèvres vase, the traditional gift to sovereigns. Bartholdi himself had picked out the item and included an inscription on paper thanking Hunt for his work, placing the note inside the vase.

Not long after he received the gift, Hunt’s wife, Catherine, found him scouring the vase with soap and water. When she asked him why, he said he “wanted to get rid of that dirty piece of paper.”

Only three months after Liberty came to stand in New York Harbor, construction began on Eiffel’s iron tower in Paris. “It is interesting to know that the feasibility of the Eiffel Tower was suggested to the engineer by the huge framework which he designed and erected for the construction of the huge, even if hideous, statue of Liberty,” the
Illustrated American
reported.

“My tower will be the tallest edifice ever erected by man,” Eiffel said.

That wasn’t the engineer’s only ambitious new project. Eiffel also joined with de Lesseps on the Panama Canal project, promising ten locks for that dig at a cost of $24 million. De Lesseps had already been six years into the canal’s creation when he came to the United States for Liberty’s inauguration. Just over two years later, in December 1888, his Panama Canal Company declared itself bankrupt. It turned out that the entire operation suffered from a lack of investment and from financial corruption. Rumors spread that reporters and politicians had taken bribes to cover up the disaster. French politicians even voted government funds when they knew the prospects were hopeless.

In January 1893, Ferdinand de Lesseps—the Grand Français—and his son Charles stood trial, along with Gustave Eiffel and other representatives of the Panama Canal Company. For the sentencing in the following month, the courtroom was “packed to suffocation,” although de Lesseps himself did not attend.

The judge found fault with the loans, including the use of false fronts. He also criticized the mendacity of the official bulletins, and the empty puffery put out to the press by the directors. The judge ruled that Eiffel had taken his twenty-four million and promised to finish the ten locks by 1890 but records showed he had not even purchased all the supplies. He had invested only $245,000.

Eiffel received a two-year sentence and was fined $4,000. De Lesseps, at age eighty-seven, received a sentence of five years in jail and a fine of $600. His wife said she would not tell him of the ruling unless it became absolutely necessary.

From that day forward, Eiffel resigned from construction. He declared he would instead devote himself to the study of aerodynamics and meteorology. De Lesseps died the year after the sentencing. Both sentences were eventually overturned on technicalities.

Although Charlotte Bartholdi’s frailty had almost kept Auguste Bartholdi from the unveiling, and had cut short his American stay that fall of 1886, she lived for another five years, until the age of ninety, and was sprightly until the very end.

She had been a dramatic mother for Charles and Auguste in their youth, but time had truly mellowed her. In her later years “one never saw a trace of self righteous harshness in the old lady,” a friend recalled. “She was very indulgent toward the erring; but that grace, she said, came with the wide experience of old age.” When in Paris, she would regularly drive to the Isle of Swans, in the Seine, to simply gaze upon the reduced version of the Statue of Liberty that had been erected there.

While she was living in Colmar, there came a time that the Prussian government took a tighter stance on allowing foreign visitors into the Alsace region. Bartholdi was prevented from going to see her. He fought over the forced separation, and eventually was able to be by her bedside, holding her in his arms when she died.

Richard Butler never stopped working for Bartholdi. He fought to get Bartholdi copyright money, though he ultimately failed. In 1890 Bartholdi told him that he had bigger plans for Bedloe’s Island. He wrote to Butler: “My idea has always been that it would be in the future a kind of Pantheon for the glories of American Independence. That you would build around the monument of Liberty the statues of your great men, and collect there all the noble memories.”

It was proposed that same year to make Bedloe’s Island the welcoming station for new immigrants. Bartholdi considered the concept a “desecration” and “monstrous.” Butler backed him up. “[Butler] is as full of sentiment on the subject as an egg is full of meat, and he lets no one talk about it without trying to impress his own views on his hearer,” wrote a reporter.

What Bartholdi and Butler and their backers argued was that the idea of Liberty was not necessarily tied to immigration, the very link that had made Emma Lazarus’s poem so powerful. Lazarus had died of Hodgkin’s disease the year after the unveiling. Even before her death, the “New Colossus” poem had been lost from memory. It would take her friend Georgina Schuyler to independently raise funds in 1903 to get the poem placed on a bronze tablet in the statue’s pedestal. No one even noticed that gesture until the fiftieth anniversary of the statue, when a Slovenian journalist brought it to public attention.

In the end, the government decided to rule out Bedloe for the immigration station because the North River ice made the island too hard to reach in the winter.

Bartholdi called for Butler’s assistance again in 1892 when he asked Butler to write a letter to the city government of Paris. Upon his return to Paris after the inaugural, Bartholdi found the city planned to build a road through his studio. One can imagine the distress of a fifty-eight-year-old man facing the prospect of losing his home and the studio where he had worked for almost forty years. Bartholdi had filed a lawsuit. Butler’s letter was to affirm that this lawsuit, which caused Bartholdi to remain in Paris at the moment when he most enjoyed American fame, was leading to missed work opportunities.

When Bartholdi returned to New York the following year, he had come with Jeanne-Émilie to try to address the statue’s lighting issues. He went to view his statue from different places in the city, including the top of the Mail & Express Building. In the afternoon he went with Butler to Bedloe and took in the statue from every angle. Bartholdi climbed to the head, too. The two friends posed for a photograph. Bartholdi was seated up on a cannon block, with Butler standing below, leaning into him.

Bartholdi declared himself pleased with what he saw but told a reporter he was sorry about the problems with the lighting. He would talk to the Lighthouse Board. A few weeks later, he promoted an old plan and included a new one. He wanted not only the pantheon of statues of great Americans that he championed to Butler and the gilding of the Liberty statue. He hoped for artistic walks and “beautiful bowers.” A casino would be excellent as well, with a restaurant and “a band playing national airs.”

“Although M. Bartholdi, who is the embodiment of modesty, did not say so, his own statue of Washington and Lafayette, with their hands clasped . . . would also grace such a pantheon as the great sculptor suggests,” wrote the reporter.

“M. Bartholdi suggests that the establishment of a modest museum of relics of the Revolution might be made,” which he considered excellent for the minds of children. Bartholdi became animated. “The whole work of the Statue of Liberty has been one of generosity and self-sacrifice,” Bartholdi told the reporter. “Every one who has ever had anything to do with it has given either time or work or money.” He said it had cost about $8,000 to gild the dome of Les Invalides in Paris and so he thought Liberty could be done for about $20,000. He sent the reporter to discuss the matter with Butler.

Butler had reached his limit. He firmly stated to the reporter that neither the gilding nor the pantheon could happen. The American Committee did not even have enough money to build a decent pier, or finish the entrances and walkways. Then—and this was typical of Butler’s unflagging affection for Bartholdi—he agreed that all of Bartholdi’s suggestions would be wonderful sometime in the future.