The Hidden Stories of the Statue of Liberty
She Began As A Joint Tribute to the American Revolution and the Emancipation of America’s Slaves, and Transformed Into A Universal Symbol of Hope
I had finally reached my destination. I gazed out over the southern tip of Manhattan into the city harbor’s choppy waters. Before me at a distance stood a figure which appeared to rise out of the waves.
It was monumental, majestic, and mesmerizing. In another kind of light — or cast in the evening’s shadows or winter’s mist — it might appear as kind of a mirage, a mysterious form beckoning all who looked in its direction to come closer.
No figure looked quite like it.
It stood 300 feet tall from base to crown. It weighed 225 tons. Its namesake was the Roman goddess Libertas, meaning liberty in Latin. Slaves in ancient Rome prayed to Libertas for freedom. Enemies of Caesar prayed to Libertas to keep the flame of democracy alive.
The statue rising out of the water conveyed a similar message as its ancient namesake: to safeguard those mechanisms that ensure democracy thrives, and to vigilantly protect those truths we hold to be self-evident. With her determined gaze and brightly lit torch held above her head, she had weathered countless storms of political corruption and cynicism. Clad in layers of iron, copper, and steel, her physical form seemed immutable, repelling an average of 600 lightning strikes every year.
She incarnated a spirit as old as humankind and as new as the young nation of the United States in the decades just before and after the dawn of the twentieth century.
As a child I had been in awe of the Statue of Liberty, originally called “Liberty Enlightening The World.” As an adult I still was, decades later.
This afternoon I had come to New York City’s harbor to hop on one of the ferries to the Statue and Ellis Island, the immigration portal where twelve million immigrants in the six decades between the 1890s and the 1950s came to become American citizens. But I’d been delayed in the city’s grinding gridlock. Every passing minute in the honking city streets seemed to conspire against my plans. I arrived late. The ferry ticket window was closed.
I had missed the last boat.
I watched the day’s last ferry teasingly glide through the purling waters as the sun’s rays bounced like lasers off its sides. It had debarked minutes before. Its decks were packed with people on a mission to meet the beckoning figure. The churning boat soon took the form of a silhouette against the harbor’s skyline as it steered two miles southwest to two of the world’s most iconic historic landmarks.
I shook my head. I had missed my chance to meet the beckoning figure myself. I’d missed my chance to step inside the massive bronze-covered colossus and temporarily disappear from the outside world — a disappearing act on an epic scale that any child would be rapturous to behold. I’d missed out on climbing up the 354-step 20-story wrapping staircase to reach Lady Liberty’s crowned head. I would not look out over the Hudson River at one of the world’s largest natural harbors and there imagine the millions of people arriving here, touched for a moment by the presence of this colossus as their boats moved towards the city’s dock.
But I had time now to reflect on the story of the Statue in a way I hadn’t before.
All these years I had thought the Statue’s story began with the vast waves of immigrants who came by boat at the turn of the 20th century. They had said farewell to families and to the Old World. They had left behind potato famines, anti-Semitic pogroms, shortages of land, shortages of jobs, crop failures, displacements, and discrimination. Their sea journeys were nightmarish. Many died before reaching shore. More than 70 percent of these immigrants came through the harbor of New York. Ellis Island opened up to receive them in 1892. The Statue, dedicated in 1886, was here when they came, and became the preeminent symbol of their transition to a new life.
But I was surprised to discover that the Statue had an earlier story as well.
It began after America’s Civil War had ended, when two Frenchmen began meeting near Paris to celebrate America’s reunification after its grueling war and the emancipation of its 4 million slaves. The two men wanted to strengthen the bonds between America and France. This seemed the right occasion.
Just 90 years before, France had helped America win its independence. With the end of the Civil War, America had freed its slaves and come closer to realizing the promise of its republican ideals. Meanwhile in France, its republic had been overthrown. An emperor reigned again. The two Frenchmen who met outside Paris thought a gesture towards America might inspire their compatriots to fight to restore their own republic again.
One of the two men was a jurist named Édouard René de Laboulaye, an influential political thinker who was considered France’s leading authority on America. The other was a sculptor named Frédéric Bartholdi, who had become obsessed with the gigantic sculptures of ancient Greece and the Middle East, and had traveled to Egypt and Yemen to see them. He wanted to create his own.
Both jurist and sculptor were also abolitionists interested in ending slavery worldwide. Laboulaye was president of France’s Anti-Slavery Society. France had abolished slavery in its colonies in 1794, only to restore it in 1804. It was permanently abolished in 1848, and its abolitionists then took up the cause to abolish it everywhere.
When the two men met, Laboulaye discussed creating a gift to honor America’s revolutionary past, the freeing of its slaves, and its promising future. Both men were admirers of the values their two countries shared for republican government and citizenship for all. Both thought America’s emancipation of its enslaved people fulfilled the revolutionary principle that gave rise to America’s Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal. In the years ahead they would come to lead a movement to build a colossal monument at the entryway to New York City as a gift from France and a tribute to America.
But it would take years of struggle to make it happen.
This was a story I had never heard of.
When the professor and sculptor met again in the 1870s, they began working out the details of their project. Gustave Eiffel, the French engineer famous for the Eiffel Tower, joined the team to mastermind how it would be built.
Money was needed. Laboulaye was stalled trying to win support for his idea in France. Funding fell short.
Meanwhile Bartholdi traveled to Egypt, where he tried to convince its viceroy in 1869 to allow him to build a female colossus for the historic opening of the Suez Canal. Egypt’s canal would join East to West. Egypt would be the fulcrum. Bartholdi thought it deserved an appropriate messenger, and drafted a female figure to be that messenger. Bartholdi called her “Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia.” His plan was declined.
Bartholdi then sailed to America in 1871. He was now ready to promote the Statue of Liberty he had spent time designing. Americans agreed to build her base on an island in New York’s harbor.
As the memory of the Civil War faded in the 1870s, and the government focused on unifying North and South, the memory of the Statue of Liberty as an Emancipation monument for America’s freed slaves faded as well. Everywhere plans were underway in 1876 to celebrate America’s centennial year of the signing of Declaration of Independence. The Statue of Liberty would now become the preeminent symbol of America’s decision to defy British rule.
But the statue remained unfinished. Lobbying for funds continued. In a fundraising event in 1883, the American Jewish poet Emma Lazarus penned her famous poem for an auction. She named the Statue of Liberty the “Mother of Exiles” and lyrically wrote about her beckoning the world’s tired and huddled masses. For Lazarus personally, these masses included Jews from Europe who had been persecuted in their home countries and fled here.
Finally in 1885, the Statue arrived from France. She was nearly lost at sea. Her crown had seven points, symbolizing the extent of her reach to seven continents and seven seas. Broken chains lay at her feet, reflecting freedom from the ties of tyranny.
She was set in New York Harbor in 1886, and dedicated that year. Suffragists made a timely and noisy appearance in the waters around the statue with their megaphone, protesting the fact that women were banned from the dedication, and calling for the rights of women to vote — yet another story revealing how adaptable Lady Liberty could be in taking on new symbolic meaning.
Immigrants now steadily arrived in the city and across the country, and Lady Liberty began her meteoric rise to become a universal symbol of representative government and freedom around the world. Twenty years later in 1903, Lazarus’ poem was finally engraved at the bottom of the Statue, as more millions passed under her penetrating gaze.
In the decades ahead, the Statue of Liberty gained new meaning as diverse groups each claimed her as their own. Often their stories of struggle and triumph obscured those before them.
By the mid-twentieth century, the Statue had grown into a symbol of American opposition to old world empires and modern fascism and communism. Decades later she would appear as the “Goddess of Liberty” in China’s capital city of Beijing, where protesters built a plaster cast version of her before she was bulldozed by tanks. Still later, she became a unifying figure for New Yorkers after the World Trade Center attack in September 2001.
The Statue of Liberty is no longer America’s alone. Nations around the world have appropriated her symbolic currency for themselves. Many have recreated models of her in their own public spaces.
From my harborside perch I watched as the packed ferry grew smaller and then almost out of sight. The crowd on its deck now faced the beckoning figure rising from the water. I checked my watch. I was thinking about the highway ramp I needed to get on to continue my journey. I’d missed the boat this afternoon — literally and figuratively.
Would I ever have a chance to be here again?
Oddly, it was precisely at this moment that it didn’t seem to matter. I had come this far. I had come to the water’s edge. Strangely, while feeling sorry for myself, I had the first inkling of how I might feel as someone leaving her homeland having missed the boat intended to carry her away. I also found myself in the inner world of those people who had arrived here earlier in chains, whose descendants, once emancipated, also deserved to make good on her promises and protection.
Yes, I had missed the boat. It was time to shed my tourist veneer.
I had come this far. I had seen Lady Liberty from a distance, her torch in hand, lighting the way for others, keeping the flame of liberty alive. I would always connect my image of her here with the message she conveyed across the water — to safeguard those mechanisms that ensure democracy thrives, and to vigilantly protect those truths we hold to be self-evident, whatever the odds stacked against them.