The Statue of Liberty Was Built on a Pedestal Paid for by Small Donors

Let me tell you about the most generous gift in the history of international relations, and the part of it nobody mentions on the postcards. France gave us a gigantic copper lady, a masterpiece of sculpture and engineering, a monument to liberty, and then, in effect, said: "Lovely. Now where are you going to put her?" The answer was that she had to stand on something, the something cost a fortune, and the richest country in the world spent the better part of a decade failing to come up with the money.

That failure is the best part of the story. When the wealthy and the legislators and the committees all ran out of enthusiasm, ordinary Americans reached into their pockets with their nickels and dimes, and they finished the job. The Statue of Liberty is not just a French gift. It is an American barn-raising with a very tall barn.

A gift with a bill attached

The idea started in France, and the usual telling credits a French legal thinker and admirer of the American republic named Edouard de Laboulaye, who around the time of the Civil War's end thought a monument to American liberty would honour the friendship between the two countries and remind his own countrymen what free government looked like. The sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi took up the design. The agreement, as it settled, split the labour: the French would pay for the statue and assemble it, and the Americans would provide the site and the pedestal.

That division seemed reasonable. It was also a trap, because pedestals are boring. Nobody writes a sonnet about a foundation. A statue is romantic and a base is plumbing, and plumbing is hard to fundraise for.

Bartholdi was a determined promoter, and he understood that people give to things they can see. So he built the statue in pieces and showed off the pieces. The right arm and torch were shipped to America for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, where visitors could climb up to the balcony around the flame. Afterwards the arm was displayed in Madison Square Park in New York for several years. Imagine a giant copper forearm holding a torch, standing in a park, as a fundraising brochure. It was a remarkable piece of marketing, and it worked about as well as such things usually do, which is to say, not quite enough.

Meanwhile the structure inside the statue was being designed by the French engineer Gustave Eiffel, the man whose own tower would go up a few years later. Eiffel built an iron pylon with a flexible skeleton that held the copper skin so that the statue could stand in New York Harbor wind without tearing itself apart. Here is a detail that deserves a little applause. The skin of the statue is thin copper, thinner than you would believe, and the frame is what lets it live in a storm. That is a decent description of a constitutional republic too. The skin is thin and the structure beneath it does the work.

The money problem

Congress accepted the gift and in 1877 approved Bedloe's Island, now called Liberty Island, as the site. The architect Richard Morris Hunt designed a granite pedestal. And then the money stalled.

The pedestal committee, chaired by the lawyer and senator William Evarts, tried everything a committee tries. They held auctions and exhibitions, and they put on performances. They asked the state of New York for money, and Governor Grover Cleveland vetoed a $50,000 bill in 1884. They asked Congress, and Congress did not appropriate the sum. A modern reader will find this wearily familiar. The federal government cheerfully accepted ownership of the statue and politely declined to pay for the base.

The cornerstone was laid in 1884, but construction slowed as the funds dried up. The statue itself, meanwhile, was sitting in crates. It arrived in New York harbor in June 1885 aboard the French naval vessel Isère, in 214 crates, and the pieces sat in storage. A gift that cannot be unwrapped is a poor sort of gift. There was a real risk that France's masterpiece would spend years in boxes on an island, because the richest country on the planet could not get itself organised to build a platform.

The newspaper that shamed the country into giving

Enter Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the New York World. Pulitzer was an immigrant from Hungary, and he was a showman who knew exactly how to move a crowd. In 1885 he turned his paper into a fundraising machine. His appeal was simple and shrewd: the World would print the name of every donor, no matter how small the gift. A man who gave a penny would get his name in the paper alongside a man who gave a hundred dollars. The paper also needled the rich for sitting on their wallets, which made for good copy, and the poor for their generosity, which made for better.

It worked. The campaign gathered more than 120,000 donors, and the great majority of the gifts were small, often less than a dollar. By August 1885 the World announced that the full amount needed for the pedestal had been raised, about a hundred thousand dollars. Children sent coins. Clerks and workers sent what they could spare. A pedestal for the symbol of liberty was paid for by the people who would most need liberty.

I would like you to notice what this proves, because it is a pattern that shows up whenever Americans really care about something. Not a program, not an appropriation, not a federal grant. A free press, a good cause and a hundred thousand people who decided to chip in. The cost was met by voluntary association, the habit that Alexis de Tocqueville saw in Americans fifty years earlier and called the country's special skill. When Washington did not deliver, the people did. It is almost enough to make you suspect that the people were not the problem.

And since we are being fair, let us be fair to the press, which is not a thing the commentariat can always manage. Pulitzer's campaign was a splendid piece of civic journalism. A newspaper saw a national embarrassment, turned it into a public campaign and solved it. If more of the press did that, instead of spending its energy deciding which news not to print, nobody would be writing columns about the state of the news business.

The dedication, October 28, 1886

The pedestal was finished in April 1886, the statue was assembled on top of it over the summer, and the dedication came on October 28, 1886. President Grover Cleveland presided. A parade marched through New York, and ships crowded the harbor. The statue itself had been covered with a French flag, which Bartholdi let fall during a pause in the speeches.

Here is a detail I enjoy. The immigrants who passed under the statue for the next several decades did not yet have a place called Ellis Island to arrive at, because that station opened in 1892. You can read about what happened there in Ellis Island Asked Twelve Million Newcomers to Become Americans and They Did. The statue was there first. For a generation of newcomers, the first thing they saw of America, before the Registry Room and before the ferry and before the chalk marks, was a lady with a torch.

For its first years the statue was also, practically speaking, a lighthouse. It came under the Lighthouse Board, and its torch was meant to show a light to ships. The Board ran it until 1901, when it passed to the War Department. I mention it because it reminds us that the people of 1886 were practical about their monuments. They wanted to use them. A statue that could also guide a ship was a statue that earned its keep.

What the statue originally meant

Now for the argument, which I will give you in numbered form because I promised the numbers.

One: the statue was about liberty, and specifically liberty under law. The figure is a woman in classical dress, an echo of the Roman goddess Libertas. In her left hand she holds a tablet inscribed with the date of the Declaration of Independence, JULY IV MDCCLXXVI. She is not holding a welcome mat. She is holding the founding document's birthday. That tells you the monument was first of all about the American idea of ordered liberty: a government of laws resting on the claim that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights.

Two: the statue stands on broken chains. At her feet lie a broken shackle and chain, partly hidden by the folds of her robe. The statue was conceived in the years after the Civil War, and its early supporters were admirers of the abolition of slavery and of the republic that had survived the conflict. In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery. The statue's creators saw the American story as one of liberty winning against bondage, and they chose to put the evidence under her feet. If you want the Civil War context, What Caused the Civil War, Who Won It and Why, Answered From the Record gives it.

Three: the immigrant meaning came later, and it came from a poem. The idea that the statue greets immigrants is true now, and it is something the American people added, which is exactly why it is so moving. It was not in the French design. It came from a sonnet.

Emma Lazarus and the plaque

Emma Lazarus was a New York poet, and in 1883 she wrote "The New Colossus" for an art and literary auction held to raise money for the pedestal. Her sonnet contrasted the new statue with the ancient bronze giant of Greek fame, the conquering colossus with its limbs astride the sea. Her statue was different:

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

The poem was a fundraising item, and then it was forgotten. It was brought back into public notice some years after her death, and in 1903 it was cast on a bronze plaque and mounted inside the base of the pedestal. So the famous words were not on the statue at the dedication, and they were not part of the sculptor's plan. They were added by Americans seventeen years later, because Americans looked at a statue standing at the entrance to their harbor, and at the people sailing in under it, and decided that the poem said what the monument meant.

That is how national symbols grow. They do not arrive finished. A people lives under them and reads its own experience into them, until the reading becomes the meaning. Lazarus's poem, written to raise money for a base, became part of the structure the base held up.

The rebuttal: is the lady a welcome sign or a warning?

Here is a fair statement of the other side. If the statue's message is "Give me your tired, your poor," then it is an open invitation, and anyone who wants rules at the border has misread the monument. And the opposite misreading is out there too: some conservatives answer that the poem is only a poem, that it was not part of the original design, and so it should be set aside. Both of those are wrong, and I would say so in three steps.

First, to the person who says the poem is a blank cheque: a poem is not a statute. The words on the plaque are an expression of a generous national spirit, and a generous spirit still needs a lawful door. The country that put that plaque up in 1903 also had a federal inspection station a short ferry ride away asking each newcomer a list of questions, with a doctor, an interpreter and a rule against admitting people likely to become public charges. The same Americans who admired the poem ran the screen. They saw no contradiction, because there is none. The lamp stands beside a golden door, and a door is a thing with a frame and a latch.

Second, to the person who says the poem should be set aside because it was added later: the later addition is exactly what makes it American. Nobody ordered it. The people took it up. A tradition that Americans chose, seventeen years after the unveiling, is as much theirs as anything on the pedestal. You do not need to defend a rule against a poem. You can love the poem and still believe in the rule, which is, again, what the people who put up the plaque did.

Third, the real point of the poem is not that every person on earth has a claim on admission. It is that America is a country that does not shut its door on the hopeful. The path from the one idea to the other runs through the question of who crosses the line and how. And the evidence of the next century says that the country that held the lamp also built the school and wrote the oath that took a stranger and made him a citizen.

What it asks of us

I want to end the argument with the people who built the pedestal. A hundred and twenty thousand small donors did not wait for a government programme. They did not wait for someone else to do it. They saw a thing worth doing, and they gave a quarter or a dollar so that a lady in copper could stand up in the harbor. It was a gesture of civic faith: that liberty is worth paying for, and that it is not something to be left entirely to officials.

That faith is what the statue asks of us. It was not enough for a French admirer to dream it, or for an artist to carve it. It needed Americans to build the ground under it. And that is a fair description of liberty itself, which is a gift of the Founders and the Creator that must be held up, generation by generation, by people willing to build the base. For a few ideas on how to honour that in your own town, How to Mark America's 250th Birthday in Your Own Town and With Your Own Family has a list, and America at 250 and What the Centennial and the Bicentennial Can Teach Us gives the larger history of America's anniversaries. For the mother of all patriotic songs, Irving Berlin Came Through Ellis Island and Wrote God Bless America is the companion piece.

The case in brief

1. The statue was a French gift, but the pedestal was an American job, and when state, Congress and the wealthy all failed to fund it, a newspaper campaign in 1885 raised it from more than 120,000 mostly small donors.
2. The dedication on October 28, 1886 completed a monument whose original meaning was liberty under law, shown by the tablet dated July 4, 1776 and the broken chains at her feet.
3. The welcome to immigrants came later, from Emma Lazarus's 1883 sonnet, which was placed on a plaque in 1903 because Americans chose to read it into the monument.
4. The poem expresses a generous spirit; it does not abolish the door, and the generation that put up the plaque ran an inspection line a short ferry ride away.
5. The lesson of the pedestal is voluntary civic action: when the institutions stall, free people can still build.

What you can do: give a small gift to a local historic site, veterans' memorial or flag-raising fund this year, and bring a child to see where the money went.