Origin , sun god of the late
Roman Empire. Sol Invictus, along with
Libertas the Roman goddess and
personification of Liberty, influenced the design of
Liberty Enlightening the World. According to the
National Park Service, the idea of a monument presented by the French people to the United States was first proposed by
Édouard René de Laboulaye, president of the French Anti-Slavery Society and a prominent and important political thinker of his time. The project is traced to a mid-1865 conversation between Laboulaye, a staunch
abolitionist, and
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a sculptor. In after-dinner conversation at his home near
Versailles, Laboulaye, an ardent supporter of the
Union in the
American Civil War, is supposed to have said: "If a monument should rise in the United States, as a memorial to their independence, I should think it only natural if it were built by united effort—a common work of both our nations." The National Park Service, in a 2000 report, however, deemed this a legend traced to an 1885 fundraising pamphlet, and that the statue was most likely conceived in 1870. According to sculptor Bartholdi, who later recounted the story, Laboulaye's alleged comment was not intended as a proposal, but it inspired Bartholdi. Given the repressive nature of the regime of
Napoleon III, Bartholdi took no immediate action on the idea except to discuss it with Laboulaye. Bartholdi was in any event busy with other possible projects. In 1856, he traveled to Egypt to study ancient works. In the late 1860s, he approached
Isma'il Pasha,
Khedive of
Egypt, with a plan to build
Progress or
Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia, a huge
lighthouse in the form of an ancient Egyptian female
fellah or peasant, robed and holding a torch aloft, at the northern entrance to the
Suez Canal in
Port Said. Sketches and models were made of the proposed work, though it was never erected. There was a classical precedent for the Suez proposal, the
Colossus of Rhodes: an ancient
bronze statue of the Greek god of the sun,
Helios. This statue is believed to have been over high, and it similarly stood at a harbor entrance and carried a light to guide ships. Both the khedive and
Ferdinand de Lesseps, developer of the Suez Canal, declined the proposed statue from Bartholdi, citing the high cost. The
Port Said Lighthouse was built instead, by François Coignet in 1869. Upon his return from Egypt, Bartholdi visited
Giovanni Battista Crespi's sculpture
Sancarlone, a 76-foot statue of
St Charles Borromeo in
repoussé copper covering an iron armature at
Lago Maggiore in Italy. He was also familiar with the similar construction of the
Vercingétorix monument by
Aimé Millet; the restoration of Millet's statue a century later would call international attention to the Statue of Liberty's own poor state of preservation. Bartholdi chose copper over bronze or stone due to its lower cost, weight, and ease of transportation. Any large project was further delayed by the
Franco-Prussian War, in which Bartholdi served as a major of militia. In the war, Napoleon III was captured and deposed. Bartholdi's home province of
Alsace was
lost to the
Prussians, and a
more liberal republic was installed in France. As Bartholdi had been planning a trip to the United States, he and Laboulaye decided the time was right to discuss the idea with influential Americans. In June 1871, Bartholdi crossed the Atlantic, with
letters of introduction signed by Laboulaye. Arriving at
New York Harbor, Bartholdi focused on Bedloe's Island (now named
Liberty Island) as a site for the statue, struck by the fact that vessels arriving in New York had to sail past it. He was delighted to learn that the island was owned by the United States government—it had been ceded by the
New York State Legislature in 1800 for harbor defense. It was thus, as he put it in a letter to Laboulaye: "land common to all the states." As well as meeting many influential New Yorkers, Bartholdi visited President
Ulysses S. Grant, who assured him that it would not be difficult to obtain the site for the statue. Bartholdi crossed the United States twice by rail, and met many Americans whom he thought would be sympathetic to the project. But he remained concerned that popular opinion on both sides of the Atlantic was insufficiently supportive of the proposal, and he and Laboulaye decided to wait before mounting a public campaign. '' Bartholdi had made a first model of his concept in 1870. The son of a friend of Bartholdi's, artist
John LaFarge, later maintained that Bartholdi made the first sketches for the statue during his visit to La Farge's
Rhode Island studio. Bartholdi continued to develop the concept following his return to France. He also worked on a number of sculptures designed to bolster French patriotism after the defeat by the Prussians. One of these was the
Lion of Belfort, a
monumental sculpture carved in sandstone below the fortress of
Belfort, which during the war had resisted a
Prussian siege for over three months. The defiant lion, long and half that in height, displays an emotional quality characteristic of
Romanticism, which Bartholdi would later bring to the Statue of Liberty.
Design, style, and symbolism by
Constantino Brumidi in the
Capitol in Washington, D.C., showing two early symbols of America:
Columbia (left) and the Indian princess Bartholdi and Laboulaye considered how best to express the idea of American liberty. In early American history, two female figures were frequently used as cultural symbols of the nation. 's
Statue of Freedom (1854–1857) tops the
dome of the
Capitol building in Washington. Artists of the 18th and 19th centuries striving to evoke
republican ideals commonly used representations of Libertas as an allegorical symbol. A figure of Liberty was also depicted on the
Great Seal of France. However, Bartholdi and Laboulaye avoided an image of revolutionary liberty such as that depicted in
Eugène Delacroix's famed
Liberty Leading the People (1830). In this painting, which commemorates France's
July Revolution, a half-clothed Liberty leads an armed mob over the bodies of the fallen. Crawford's statue was designed in the early 1850s. It was originally to be crowned with a
pileus or "
liberty cap", the cap given to emancipated slaves in ancient Rome.
Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, a Southerner who would later serve as President of the
Confederate States of America, was concerned that the
pileus would be taken as an
abolitionist symbol. He ordered that it be changed to a helmet. Delacroix's figure wears a
pileus, He designed the figure with austere face and a strong, uncomplicated silhouette, which would be set off well by its dramatic harbor placement and allow passengers on vessels entering
New York Bay to experience a changing perspective on the statue as they proceeded toward Manhattan. He gave it bold classical contours and applied simplified modeling, reflecting the huge scale of the project and its solemn purpose. Her right foot is raised and set back, in a classical
contrapposto pose that looks stationary when viewed from the front, but dynamic when viewed from the side, signifying a solid footing and a posture more relaxed than that of two feet set side by side, and introducing a sense of tension between standing and moving forward, both physically and mentally. The upright form and outstretched leg may have also helped to stabilize the statue. Bartholdi was initially uncertain of what to place in Liberty's left hand; he settled on a
tabula ansata, used to evoke the concept of law.
Announcement and early work By 1875, France was enjoying improved political stability and a recovering postwar economy. Growing interest in the upcoming
Centennial Exposition to be held in
Philadelphia led Laboulaye to decide it was time to seek public support. In September 1875, he announced the project and the formation of the Franco-American Union as its fundraising arm. With the announcement, the statue was given a name,
Liberty Enlightening the World. The French people were to finance the statue (contrary to the common misconception of it being funded by the French national government); and Americans would be expected to pay for the pedestal. The announcement provoked a generally favorable reaction in France, though many Frenchmen resented the United States for not coming to their aid during
the war with Prussia.
French monarchists opposed the statue, if for no other reason than it was proposed by the liberal Laboulaye, who had recently been elected a
senator for life. Laboulaye arranged events designed to appeal to the rich and powerful, including a special performance at the
Paris Opera on April 25, 1876, that featured a new
cantata by the composer
Charles Gounod. The piece was titled
La Liberté éclairant le monde, the French version of the statue's announced name. of right arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty,
1876 Centennial Exposition Initially focused on the elites, the Union was successful in raising funds from across French society. Schoolchildren and ordinary citizens gave, as did 181 French municipalities. Laboulaye's political allies supported the call, as did descendants of the
French contingent in the
American Revolutionary War. Less idealistically, contributions came from those who hoped for American support in the French attempt to build the
Panama Canal. The copper may have come from multiple sources and some of it is said to have come from a mine in
Visnes, Norway, The change in structural material from masonry to iron allowed Bartholdi to change his plans for the statue's assembly. He had originally expected to assemble the skin on-site as the masonry pier was built; instead, he decided to build the statue in France and have it disassembled and transported to the United States for reassembly in place on Bedloe's Island. In a symbolic act, the first rivet placed into the skin, fixing a copper plate onto the statue's big toe, was driven by
United States Ambassador to France Levi P. Morton. The concrete mass was the largest poured to that time.
Norwegian immigrant
civil engineer Joachim Goschen Giæver designed the structural framework for the Statue of Liberty. His work involved design computations, detailed fabrication and construction drawings, and oversight of construction. In completing his engineering for the statue's frame, Giæver worked from drawings and sketches produced by Gustave Eiffel.
Fundraising Fundraising in the U.S. for the pedestal had begun in 1882. The committee organized a large number of money-raising events. As part of one such effort, an auction of art and manuscripts, poet
Emma Lazarus was asked to donate an original work. She initially declined, stating she could not write a poem about a statue. At the time, she was also involved in aiding refugees to New York who had fled
antisemitic pogroms in eastern Europe. These refugees were forced to live in conditions that the wealthy Lazarus had never experienced. She saw a way to express her empathy for these refugees in terms of the statue. The resulting
sonnet, "
The New Colossus", including the lines "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free", is uniquely identified with the Statue of Liberty in American culture and is inscribed on a plaque in its museum. Lazarus's poem contrasted the classical Colossus of Rhodes as a frightening symbol, with the new "American colossus" as a "beacon to the lost and hopeless". to commemorate fundraising for the pedestal. Originally installed in the
New York World Building, it is currently located in Pulitzer Hall at
Columbia University. Even with these efforts, fundraising lagged.
Grover Cleveland, the
governor of New York, vetoed a bill to provide $50,000 for the statue project in 1884. An attempt the next year to have Congress provide $100,000, sufficient to complete the project, also failed. The New York committee, with only $3,000 in the bank, suspended work on the pedestal. With the project in jeopardy, groups from other American cities, including Boston and Philadelphia, offered to pay the full cost of erecting the statue in return for relocating it. while the United States had to raise up to $300,000 to build the pedestal.
Construction On June 17, 1885, the French steamer
Isère arrived in New York with the crates holding the disassembled statue on board. New Yorkers displayed their newfound enthusiasm for the statue. Two hundred thousand people lined the docks and hundreds of boats put to sea to welcome the ship. After five months' daily calls to donate to the statue fund, on August 11, 1885, the
World announced that $102,000 had been raised from 120,000 donors, and that 80 percent of the total had been received in sums of less than one dollar (). Even with the success of the fund drive, the pedestal was not completed until April 1886. Immediately thereafter, reassembly of the statue began. Eiffel's iron framework was anchored to steel
I-beams within the concrete pedestal and assembled. Once this was done, the sections of skin were carefully attached. Due to the width of the pedestal, it was not possible to erect
scaffolding, and workers dangled from ropes while installing the skin sections. Bartholdi had planned to put floodlights on the torch's balcony to illuminate it; a week before the dedication, the
Army Corps of Engineers vetoed the proposal, fearing that ships' pilots passing the statue would be blinded. Instead, Bartholdi cut portholes in the torch—which was covered with
gold leaf—and placed the lights inside them. A power plant was installed on the island to light the torch and for other electrical needs. After the skin was completed, landscape architect
Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of Manhattan's
Central Park and Brooklyn's
Prospect Park, supervised a cleanup of Bedloe's Island in anticipation of the dedication. General Charles Stone claimed on the day of dedication that no man had died during the construction of the statue; this was not true, as Francis Longo, a thirty-nine-year-old Italian laborer, had been killed when an old wall fell on him. When built, the statue was reddish-brown and shiny, but within twenty years it had oxidized to its current green color through reactions with air, water and acidic pollution, forming a layer of
verdigris which protects the copper from further corrosion.
Dedication . Oil on canvas. The J. Clarence Davies Collection,
Museum of the City of New York. A ceremony of dedication was held on the afternoon of October 28, 1886. President Grover Cleveland, the former New York governor, presided over the event. On the morning of the dedication, a parade was held in New York City; estimates of the number of people who watched it ranged from several hundred thousand to a million. President Cleveland headed the procession, then stood in the reviewing stand to see bands and marchers from across America. General Stone was the grand marshal of the parade. The route began at
Madison Square, once the venue for the arm, and proceeded to
the Battery at the southern tip of
Manhattan by way of
Fifth Avenue and
Broadway, with a slight detour so the parade could pass in front of the
World building on
Park Row. As the parade passed the New York Stock Exchange, traders threw
ticker tape from the windows, beginning the New York tradition of the
ticker-tape parade. A nautical parade began at 12:45 p.m., and President Cleveland embarked on a yacht that took him across the harbor to Bedloe's Island for the dedication. Lesseps made the first speech, on behalf of the French committee, followed by the chairman of the New York committee, Senator
William M. Evarts. A
French flag draped across the statue's face was to be lowered to unveil the statue at the close of Evarts's speech, but Bartholdi mistook a pause as the conclusion and let the flag fall prematurely. The ensuing cheers put an end to Evarts's address. President Cleveland spoke next, stating that the statue's "stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man's oppression until Liberty enlightens the world". Bartholdi, observed near the dais, was called upon to speak, but he declined. Orator
Chauncey M. Depew concluded the speechmaking with a lengthy address. No members of the general public were permitted on the island during the ceremonies, which were reserved entirely for dignitaries. The only women granted access were Bartholdi's wife and Lesseps's granddaughter; officials stated that they feared women might be injured in the crush of people. The restriction offended area
suffragists, who chartered a boat and got as close as they could to the island. The group's leaders made speeches applauding the embodiment of Liberty as a woman and advocating women's right to vote. A scheduled fireworks display was postponed until November 1 because of poor weather. Shortly after the dedication,
The Cleveland Gazette, an African American newspaper, suggested that the statue's torch not be lit until the United States became a free nation "in reality": ==After dedication==