Read Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty Online
Authors: Elizabeth Mitchell
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Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty
LIBERTY’S
TORCH
A
LSO BY
E
LIZABETH
M
ITCHELL
Three Strides Before the Wire: The Dark and
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LIBERTY’S
TORCH
The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty
Elizabeth Mitchell
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Mitchell
Jacket design by Christopher Moisan
Jacket photographs: front © The Granger Collection, NYC.
All rights reserved. Back © Musée Bartholdi, Colmer, reprod. C. Kempf
Portions of this work previously appeared in the Byliner digital single
Lady with a Past: A Petulant French Sculptor, His Quest for Immortality, and the Real Story of the Statue of Liberty.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or
[email protected]
.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-8021-2257-5
eISBN 978-0-8021-9255-4
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
To Lucy and Gigi
Contents
Book I
The Idea
1 Our Hero Emerges from the Clay
2 Bartholdi Down the Black Nile
Book II
The Gamble
7 The Workshop of the Giant Hand
10 The Engineer and the Newspaperman
13 Pulitzer’s Army and Other Helpers
Book III
The Triumph
Prologue
At three in the morning on Wednesday, June 21, 1871, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi made his way up to the deck of the
Pereire,
hoping to catch his first glimpse of America. The weather had favored the sculptor’s voyage from France, and this night proved no exception. A gentle mist covered the ocean as he tried in vain to spot the beam of a lighthouse glowing from the new world.
After eleven days at sea, Bartholdi had grown weary of what he called in a letter to his mother his “long sojourn in the world of fish.” The
Pereire
had been eerily empty, with only forty passengers on a ship meant to carry three hundred. He passed his days playing chess and watching the heaving log that measured the ship’s speed. “I practice my English on several Americans who are on board. I learn phrases and walk the deck alone mumbling them, as a parish priest recites his breviary.”
These onboard incantations were meant to prepare Bartholdi for the greatest challenge of his career. The thirty-six-year-old artist intended to convince a nation he had never visited before to build a colossus. This was his singular vision, conceived in his own imagination, and designed by his own hand. The largest statue ever built.
The sky turned pink, the
Pereire
cut farther west through the waves, and before long Bartholdi and his fellow passengers caught the first sight of land and a vast harbor. He described the moment in his letter: “A multitude of little sails seemed to skim the water, our fellow travelers pointed out a cloud of smoke at the farther end of a bay—and it was New York!”
New York was not merely Bartholdi’s destination; it was his escape. Paris was smoldering. The army had just seized control of the government buildings from the leftist revolutionaries, the Communards. Parisians were upending the streets’ flagstones, digging into the walkways of the manicured parks to bury an estimated ten thousand corpses from a terrifying rampage dubbed the “Bloody Week.” A month before that, Bartholdi had left his birthplace in the northeast of France, which had just been turned over to the Prussians after an ill-fated war. He was now officially an exile.
Even in his despair, Bartholdi had been scheming to create an immortal work. His design resuscitated the centerpiece of a deal he almost struck with Egypt three years earlier. He had pitched to Egypt’s ruler the idea of a colossal statue of a woman, holding up a lantern, to stand in the harbor of the new Suez Canal. The khedive, Ismail Pasha, had turned him down. Bartholdi had been bitterly disappointed but now he intended to build essentially the same figure on America’s shores.
He was not particularly hopeful of success. “Each site presents some difficulty,” he wrote to his mother. “But the greatest difficulty, I believe, will be the American character which is hardly open to things of the imagination. . . . I believe that the realization of my project will be a matter of luck. I do not intend to attach myself to the project absolutely if its realization is too difficult.”
In his belongings Bartholdi carried letters of introduction from prominent intellectuals he socialized with back home. Those letters would earn him entrée into the salons, parlors, and offices of powerful people in New York; Washington, D.C.; and other cities. After seventeen years as a professional artist, he knew how to woo such individuals. He cut an appealing figure—of moderate height but strong build with intense brown eyes, a Frenchman with the dark coloring of his Italian ancestry. He could be cantankerous but that pique was confined mostly to the page—in his letters to his mother, to whom he was deeply attached; and occasionally in his small leather diaries, which he wrote in a tiny script, using an attached pencil with an ivory head.
The
Pereire
entered the Narrows and Bartholdi sketched a map of the landforms. He noted the flat shorelines, with only the hills of Staten Island and Long Island to offer variation. Ferryboats two stories tall steamed by, emitting “deep-toned blasts . . . like huge flies. Elegant sailboats glide along the surface of the water like marquises dressed in garments with long trains.” He also described the “little steamboats, no bigger than one’s hand—busy, meddling, inquisitive.”
His boat landed at Pier 52, just below West Fourteenth Street. “The city has a strange appearance,” he wrote to his mother. “You find yourself forthwith in the midst of a confusion of railroad baggage cars, omnibuses, heavily laden drays, delicate vehicles with wheels like circular spider-webs, the sound of hurrying crowds, neglected cobbled streets, the pavement scarred with railroad tracks, roadways out of repair, telegraph poles on each side of the street, lampposts that are not uniform, signs, wires, halyards of flags hanging down sidewalks encumbered with merchandise, buildings of varying size as in a suburb.”
The main avenues he found elegant, cutting north through the tight settlements of lower Manhattan. Broadway “extends about eight kilometers in the inhabited part of the city; after that it continues into the country among scattered dwellings.”
Coming from Paris, a city recently renovated and beautified by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Bartholdi found New York’s chaos shocking. The city had not been planned but rather was cobbled together, with eight-story buildings next to shacks, and trees pushing their roots into the cellars. “All of this in a style that is hard to describe—Anglo-Marseillais-Gothico-Dorico-Badensis.”
He then added pointedly: “I shall come back to this in discussing the American character in general.”
Bartholdi hastened in his very first days to pitch groups about his proposal, emphasizing the idea that the French and Americans would embark on his colossus project in unison. Those proposals went so badly that six days after his arrival, he reassessed them: “Decidedly, I am going to change my tactics.”
Among the people Bartholdi had been urged to visit was Vincenzo Botta, an Italian-born language and philosophy professor at New York University. Botta, a large, jovial man, whose eyes beamed behind spectacles, often hosted salons of literary and artistic types. His wife, the poetess Anna Charlotte Lynch, had raised money for Parisian women and children during the Prussian occupation. They invited Bartholdi to their home to try to woo supporters.
“I spoke of my project from a new point of view,” Bartholdi wrote of this evening at Botta’s home. “The French here want to offer a commemorative monument for 1876. We need a site (and if possible, the pedestal). The idea takes hold! Went to the Club—saw Mr. Blunt—said the same thing to him—it appears a better way. Remains to be seen how I shall come out.”
This new approach, suggesting that the French were committed to building the statue, dramatically underplayed the scope of America’s future responsibility and oversold France’s knowledge of the project. Bartholdi expected the Americans to ante up half the cost of creating the colossus. Only a handful of men in France were even aware of Bartholdi’s statue and no one had begun fundraising.
The idea that only a site was necessary to receive this magnificent gift wouldn’t seem that difficult a proposition in a country as vast as America. A simple pedestal would not be hard to fashion. Yet even with this modest request for help, Bartholdi found little eagerness. The next night with Botta left him despondent. “They gave me some letters and some advice!! All this is vague and cold, and I am frankly pained at not having found someone who will join me. After all, the project deserves it.”
The following month, another host requested that Bartholdi show his project photographs and explain his vision. “The audience looks at them with glacial interest,” he wrote later. “I pack up and leave as quickly as possible.”
Despite having no supporters or funds, Bartholdi toured possible locations for the statue. On the Friday after his arrival, he traveled to Central Park. Its construction was still in progress but the park remained open to visitors. Landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux had won a design competition in 1858 to transform what one guidebook described as a “bleak, dreary, and sickly” stretch of land into the city’s pride, with gardens and drives, lakes and waterfalls, fountains and magical re-creations of Alpine landscapes.
Visitors thronged to the new public land. The number of people who entered the park the year before Bartholdi arrived exceeded New York’s total population so significantly it suggested that every single resident—tycoon or washerwoman—had visited at least nine times per year.
Bartholdi immediately understood the park to be part of a development scheme. “It is situated at the extreme north of the city. Its name, however, proves that the Americans anticipate its being surrounded, soon, by the city.” He made a “detailed visit” and dined at the park’s restaurant. He liked the park’s general appearance, although not the statuary, which he thought mediocre. Of course, if Bartholdi’s Liberty had been erected in Central Park, the effect would have been surreal. Liberty, on her pedestal, would have cast long shadows over the esplanades. The soon-to-be-built Dakota, which was to be the highest apartment building in the city, would not even reach her big toe.