Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (39 page)

Butler’s affection and admiration for Bartholdi would never fade. As the head of the American Hard Rubber Company, Butler accrued enough wealth to found his own town in New Jersey, and named a street in Bartholdi’s honor.

When Butler died in 1902, after a long struggle with tuberculosis, Bartholdi wrote to his friend’s widow: “I have been deeply moved by the sad loss of my dear friend Richard Butler, and I am happy that my souvenir cable reached him before the last moments. The whole past year I have been anxious to come over only to see his dear face, only my poor health prevented, and I felt deeply afflicted when I heard of his death.”

Bartholdi himself had begun to suffer from tuberculosis in 1901.

He went on: “All those fortunate enough to know [Butler] have lost a true and noble friend. I have sent you as a token of my love for him a bronze bust, life size, which I have made. He expresses the good and bright physiognomy which he kept during all his life, as shown in his late pictures.”

Then, in typically Bartholdi fashion of never missing an opportunity for career advancement: “I beg you to keep the bust for yourself, and later [give it] to the Museum of Art, as you will judge the best.” Being displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art was an honor that had so far eluded him.

In 1890, Joseph Pulitzer, who had labored so long on Liberty’s behalf, built his World
Building, just east of City Hall, next to the Brooklyn Bridge. It would be the tallest building on the planet at that time, trumping Liberty by four feet.

In his office on the second floor of the dome, high in the air, Pulitzer could peer down on City Hall, while also lording it over the other newspaper offices on Park Row. From his perch in this suite of offices with nineteen-foot ceilings, he took in a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the best angle on the Statue of Liberty. It was considered by many the grandest view in all of New York. Perhaps he might even have been able to see his yacht, the
Liberty,
in her dock.

Unfortunately Pulitzer could glimpse none of it. He had gone blind in 1889.

And what of Bartholdi himself? America’s ingratitude amazed the sculptor. He wrote to Pulitzer that, had it not been for the publisher, Bartholdi would have received no souvenir of his gift to America. Pulitzer had presented him with a large Tiffany silver globe, etched with thanks and an image of the statue.

Bartholdi noted a rumor that Congress would vote him a monetary award, but the gift had never materialized. Others suggested he would receive a monument commission, but nothing came of the talk.

“Everything is finished, the Americans have done nothing for me,” he wrote.

In 1888, the committee in Washington that had been formed to choose the Lafayette statue made its decision. Bartholdi had rambled to the press about his hopes that his piece would be placed not in a public park, where summer foliage would hide it, but on an open boulevard.

The committee, which Richard Hunt had served on, passed Bartholdi over.

In his atelier, Bartholdi busied himself on new projects. There was the “Monument des Sports” for the International Olympic Committee, “which should be one of the finest works of art that the world has seen.” He also designed a statue to the balloonists who had helped Gambetta and others escape during the Siege of Paris. He thought the balloon could be made of mica filled with electric lamps, and the glow could light up the Place Pigalle or the Square St.-Pierre.

Bartholdi also continued making oil paintings for friends, mainly as a way to relax after working with his chisel. “I frequently send canvases to the Salon,” he confessed to a reporter, “but they are always signed with a pseudonym; I wish to be known only as a sculptor.”

One of Bartholdi’s last acts was to become plaintiff in a groundbreaking copyright trial over the monumental fountain he had designed for Marseilles. It had been marked with a slab of stone etched with the name Esperandieu as the designer. Bartholdi insisted the city inscribe his own name there as well.

Despite the ire of Bartholdi’s mother at his choice of spouse, his simple wife brought him contentment until his last days. Those who met her described her as spirited and charming, and Bartholdi seemed to always want her near. She, along with his mother, was family enough for him.

The tuberculosis Bartholdi had contracted in 1901 began to weaken him and when he saw the end was near, he designed his own gravestone—a figure holding out a laurel wreath. He went to his sickbed the next day and never rose again. Did he mean for the laurel wreath to symbolize his own heroism or his fellow Masons’ search for the Word, or did it represent his gift of Liberty (
Libertas
being often depicted wearing a laurel crown)?

As Bartholdi lay in bed in a dire state, many former students, models, and sculptors called at his home. Bartholdi fell more deeply ill on Monday, October 3, but through the night, he held on, painfully gasping. Jeanne-Émilie never left his side. Three doctors tended to him. At his death, at eight in the morning on October 4, 1904, these were the people with him, including two of Jeanne-Émilie’s relatives. Bartholdi himself had no other family remaining.

They laid the insignia of the Legion of Honor on his body. Mourners, including many artists and models, came throughout the days. The ceremony at the funeral home on rue d’Assas was attended by hundreds of people, including representatives of the American embassy. Tony Robert-Fleury, president of the Society of French Artists, delivered the funeral oration.

When Bartholdi’s flower-covered hearse drove down by the Luxembourg Gardens toward the cemetery of Montparnasse, it was preceded by a delegation from Alsace, a military battalion, music, and mourners, including Gustave Eiffel. At the burial, many clusters of workers could be seen in the crowd, listening to the eight eulogies.

The figure with the laurel wreath did not end up on Bartholdi’s grave; instead his obelisk at Montparnasse shows a winged angel ascending to heaven, a copy of a grave design he had built for French soldiers killed at Schinznach. What happened to his laurel wreath gravestone design is a mystery.

Twelve years later, in 1916, Joseph Pulitzer’s son Ralph managed to raise enough money to build a generator that could permanently light Liberty at night, though she still wouldn’t serve as a functional lighthouse.

From his yacht, the
Mayflower,
President Woodrow Wilson hit a button at five minutes to six on December 5, and “the statue bloomed into vivid brightness. The torch, which had seemed dim as a glowworm in the harbor, now beamed with fifteen 500 candlepower electric lamps so it was the brightest thing on the horizon.

“Miss Ruth Law, the aviator who had recently set records crossing the country, zoomed into view, twisting and turning and darting, a brilliant light on the plane, like a shooting star. And then, of a sudden, the plane let forth a shower of golden sparks, sweeping fast toward Liberty.”

At the celebratory dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria that night, a gentle-looking old man climbed up to the podium. Whoever had witnessed that Liberty unveiling thirty years earlier might have recognized his voice when he began to speak.

“Of all the famous company who participated in the ceremonies thirty years ago, I am the sole survivor,” said Chauncey Depew. “Among the French were Count de Lesseps, then at the zenith of his fame as the builder of the Suez Canal, and the sculptor Bartholdi. They have joined the majority, and so have most of the statesmen, generals, admirals and men of letters who accompanied them. President Cleveland received the statue and was surrounded by Bayard, Secretary of State; Whitney, Secretary of the Navy; Lamont, Secretary of War; and Vilas, Postmaster General. All are gone. The chairman of the committee was William M. Evarts, and the opening prayer was made by the Rev. Dr. Richard M. Storrs, while the benediction was pronounced by Bishop Potter. They have left blessed memories.”

His melancholy list underscored the point of why a
statuaire
creates. Bartholdi had wished to touch and create an object almost eternal, which would bring back the heroic deeds and great ideas of dead men and women. He had wanted to mix with the sort of being that never could be imprisoned in such a eulogy as Depew delivered at the dinner, that would not fade from memory. His desire for immortality on earth might have been more than hubris and grandiosity. It might have been a desire to never be separated from the earthly ephemera that so enchanted him.

President Wilson then spoke: “There is a great responsibility in having adopted Liberty as our ideal, because we must illustrate it in what we do. I was struck by the closing phrase of Mr. [Ralph] Pulitzer’s admirable little speech,” he said. “He said that there would come a day when it was perceived that the Goddess of Liberty was also the Goddess of Peace, and throughout the last two years there has come more and more into my heart the conviction that peace is going to come to the world only with Liberty. . . .”

The guests applauded heartily, as the world had been engaged for two years in the bloodiest, most brutal war yet seen.

“And so sometimes when I see the Statue of Liberty and think of the thrill that must come into some hopeful heart as for the first time an immigrant sees that Statue and thinks that he knows what it means, I wonder if after he lands he finds the spirit of Liberty truly represented by us. I wonder if we are worthy of that symbol; I wonder if we are sufficiently stirred by the history of it, by the history of what it means; I wonder if we remember the sacrifices, the mutual concessions, the righteous yielding of selfish right that is signified by the word and the conception of Liberty.

“I wonder if we all wish to accord equal rights to all men, and so it is profitable that occasions like this should be frequently repeated and that we should remind ourselves of what sort of image we have promised to be; for the world is enlightened, my fellow citizens, by ideals, by ideas. The spirit of the world rises with the sacrifices of men, the spirit of the world rises as men forget to be selfish and unite to be great. . . .

“This, to repeat that beautiful phrase of Lincoln’s in his Gettysburg address, is not a time of self-adulation, but a time of rededication. Let us determine that the life that shines out of our lives upon the uplifted image of Liberty shall be a light pure and without reproach.”

Wilson was inspired that night. Indeed, political rhetoric—even political vision as elegant as Wilson’s—would often find safe harbor in Liberty. Commercial interests could rely on her as an easy shorthand for America to inspire the world’s consumers. She would attract millions of tourists to New York, making her, as it turned out, a worthy investment. She would also, from time to time, inspire the same sort of emotion and vision that led to her creation in the first place, the potent whimsy that made a young man from a picturesque village on the eastern edge of France dream that he, too, could achieve immortality.

At the foot of Bartholdi’s Liberty, less than two months after her inaugural, a man wearing an ordinary business suit sat on the edge of Bedloe’s Island, now Liberty Island, in the December cold, strapping on a pair of shoes. Alphonse King had made his footwear of hollow, airtight tin. The shoes were 32 inches long, 8 inches wide, and 9 inches deep. They were extremely heavy, 30 pounds apiece. At the bottom of each, a series of automatic paddles acted as fins.

Alphonse King had, like Bartholdi, been inspired by the idea of the majestic Niagara Falls and had tried a visit and a stunt there. Since hearing of Liberty’s inaugural, he was inspired to try another magnificent feat.

Just as the submarines at the 1867 Paris exposition spoke to Jules Verne or the colossi made Bartholdi feel eternity, King had heard Bartholdi’s clarion call to wonder. He stepped off the banks. It was a windy day that December and the waves ran rough. To anyone spotting King on the open water, he would have looked no different from any other man going off to business across the brine, soaked to his collar stays from the spray. He held no balancing pole, so his hands swung as freely as a pedestrian’s might. The tempestuous sea tried him, though, so his steps went slowly.

As he came around the Battery, headed toward that other wonder, the Brooklyn Bridge, his friends rowing next to him in the skiff worried that they, too, might be dumped over. One of them motioned for him to hurry but he could not hurry in that churning.

Behind him was the tallest statue in the world, ahead the longest suspension bridge. He would try all he could to battle the elements to get to his destination.

The ocean’s spray lashed his face, the bitter chill biting him to the bones. The waves rose up over the shoes. With his lapels plastered to his chest, his pants tight to his thighs with water, Alphonse King finally gave up and climbed on board the rowboat.

Headed toward safety and warmth, he drank a bit of brandy and saw the adventure entirely differently from how others might. He said it was the greatest water-walking ever accomplished on rough seas. He had learned, as Bartholdi had, that sometimes a person merely needed to grope toward the fantastic to reach his own version of immortality.

[Fluffer Nutter]

Acknowledgments

Kind people helped this book along. Starting at the beginning, I was lucky enough to be brought to Byliner by the great editor Will Blythe, who initially accepted my pitch for a long article about Bartholdi and the Statue of Liberty. That piece, “Lady with a Past: A Petulant French Sculptor, His Quest for Immortality, and the Real Story of the Statue of Liberty,” was edited by him, Laura Hohnhold, and Mark Bryant. Clare Hertel helped gain readers for the piece, and John Tayman, as always, offered his support.
Liberty’s Torch
contains revised pieces of that article.