Statue of Liberty
On July 4, 1884 France presented the United States with an incredible birthday gift: the Statue of Liberty! Without its pedestal it’s as tall as a 15-story building. She represents the United States. But the world-famous Statue of Liberty standing in New York Harbor was built in France. The statue was presented to the U.S., taken apart, shipped across the Atlantic Ocean in crates, and rebuilt in the U.S. It was France’s gift to the American people.
It all started at dinner one night near Paris in 1865. A group of Frenchmen were discussing their dictator-like emperor and the democratic government of the U.S. They decided to build a monument to American freedom—and perhaps even strengthen French demands for democracy in their own country. At that dinner was the sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi (bar-TOLE-dee). He imagined a statue of a woman holding a torch burning with the light of freedom.
Turning Bartholdi’s idea into reality took 21 years. French supporters raised money to build the statue, and Americans paid for the pedestal it would stand on. Finally, in 1886, the statue was dedicated.
• The statue sways 3 inches (7.62 centimeters) in the wind; the torch sways 5 inches (12.7 centimeters).
• Visitors climb 354 steps (22 stories) to look out from 25 windows in the crown.
• The statue—151 feet, 1 inch (46 meters, 2.5 centimeters) tall—was the tallest structure in the U.S. at that time.
• Engineer Gustave Eiffel, who would later design the Eiffel Tower in Paris, designed Liberty’s “spine.” Inside the statue four huge iron columns support a metal framework that holds the thin copper skin.
• Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi knew he wanted to build a giant copper goddess; he used his mother as the model.
• The statue is covered in 300 sheets of coin-thin copper. They were hammered into different shapes and riveted together.
• The arm with the torch measures 46 feet (14 meters); the finger, 8 feet (2.4 meters); the nose, nearly 5 feet (1.5 meters).
• Seven rays in the crown represent the Earth’s seven seas.
"The New Colossus", a poem written by Emma Lazarus in 1883, is on display on the Statue's pedestal.
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "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!"
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- Light of democracy, the Statue of Liberty
A gift from France welcomed generations of immigrants
- The idea for the Statue of Liberty originated with Édouard Laboulaye, a historian of American history and advocate for French democracy. Laboulaye conceived of a symbol that represented a nation that valued liberty and freedom, prompted by the abolition of slavery in the United States after the Civil War. The sculpture was commissioned in 1876, the centennial year of the United States.
- The statue, designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, was financed by the people of France and America, rather than by governments. Sections of the statue were exhibited at World’s Fairs to raise money. The French raised 400,000 francs for the sculpture, and the Americans needed to raise around 250,000 dollars for the pedestal.
- The final pedestal funds were raised in less than six months, mainly from donations of less than a dollar. The people who donated — many of them poor, many of them immigrants — showed their belief in American ideals and ideologies.
- The sculpture takes an abstract idea — liberty — and personifies it in the tradition of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. The seven spikes of her crown reference the seven seas and seven continents, symbolizing the idea of liberty spreading throughout the world. She holds a tablet that holds the date July 4, 1776 written in Roman numerals.
- Gustave Eiffel, the designer of the Eiffel Tower, engineered the interior structure of the statue so that it could survive the heavy winds it is subjected to. The thin copper sheets are supported inside by a system of four pylons that have a web of supports connected to them that independently stabilize each copper sheet.
Official website from the National Parks Service
Statue of Liberty: Topics in Chronicling America at the Library of Congress
Primary sources on historical immigration from the Library of Congress
Newspaper and periodical resources from the Library of Congress
Rediscovering An Ornate Cast Of Cast-Iron Buildings (New York Times)
Biography of Bartholdi from the National Gallery of Art
A “committee model” replica of the Statue of Liberty at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
More to think about
The design of the Statue of Liberty and its pedestal relies on references to ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian art. Do you think that the average person who contributed to Joseph Pulitzer’s fundraising campaign understood those artistic references? If not, why do you think they used those references anyway?
Smarthistory images for teaching and learning:
[flickr_tags user_id=”82032880@N00″ tags=”Bartholdi”]
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- Theme: America in the World
- Period: 1877–1898
- Topic: Immigration
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The statue of liberty: symbol for a nation.
The Statue of Liberty is one of our nation's most enduring symbols and is well represented in the collections with art, posters, stamps, memorabilia, and more. Take a closer look at our Statue of Liberty Hanukkah lamp and the Immokalee Statue of Liberty at our National Museum of American History. Find out if a Statue of Liberty is in your town. Visit the Many Voices, One Nation exhibition, which presents the five-hundred-year journey of how many distinct peoples and cultures met, mingled, and created the culture of the United States.
- The Statue of Liberty
- Liberty Across America
IvyPanda . (2022) 'Analysis of Statue Liberty History and Sense'. 22 February.
IvyPanda . 2022. "Analysis of Statue Liberty History and Sense." February 22, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/analysis-of-statue-liberty-history-and-sense/.
1. IvyPanda . "Analysis of Statue Liberty History and Sense." February 22, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/analysis-of-statue-liberty-history-and-sense/.
IvyPanda . "Analysis of Statue Liberty History and Sense." February 22, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/analysis-of-statue-liberty-history-and-sense/.
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Statue of Liberty: The Making of an Icon
By: Patrick J. Kiger
Updated: April 25, 2024 | Original: May 14, 2019
The Statue of Liberty , which towers 305 feet, six inches over New York Harbor, is one of the most instantly recognizable symbols of America. It has inspired countless souvenir replicas and been referenced in everything from posters for war bonds to the final scene of the 1968 movie “Planet of the Apes,” in which an astronaut who returns to Earth in the distant future discovers it partially buried in sand.
But the statue that’s known across the planet went through an odd, serendipitous journey to iconic status. It was conceived by a French sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who had never even been to the United States before arriving in 1871 in hopes of convincing Americans to support his dream of building a monumental statue.
His design for the Statue of Liberty borrowed from an earlier idea he’d had for a colossal woman bearing a lantern at the entrance of the Suez Canal . The proposed figure he called “Liberty Enlightening the World,” was a woman wearing a crown of rays and holding a torch aloft in one hand and a tablet in the other. He originally scouted Central Park as a possible location, before settling upon what was then Bedloe’s Island.
Bartholdi traveled across the United States from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles to promote his idea, but when he wasn’t able to secure government support, he went back to France and started working with his friend Edouard de Laboulaye , who for years had wanted to build a French-American monument.
“Laboulaye was a very great admirer of the United States,” American University historian Alan Kraut says in a podcast, “Raising the Torch,” created for the Statue of Liberty Museum. “He was particularly excited about the outcome of the America Civil War, the emancipation of 4 million slaves, and also the long relationship the United States had had with France.”
In 1875, Laboulaye formed the Franco-American Union to raise $250,000 to finance Bartholdi’s creation of the statue. The idea was that Americans, in turn, would raise money for the statue’s base.
But it wasn’t that easy to get people in the United States—particularly in New York City, where it was to be located—excited about putting up money for the project. In 1876, to drum up more enthusiasm, Bartholdi exhibited the statue’s hand and torch at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. When skeptics in New York questioned why he wasn’t showing more of the body, Bartholdi dropped hints that he might just put the finished statue in Philadelphia instead. New Yorkers, not wanting to be shown up, quickly agreed to exhibit the hand and torch in Madison Square to advertise the project and stimulate more contributions, according to the New York Public Library .
In the 1880s, the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty raised money for the construction of the statue’s pedestal by selling small souvenir models of the planned statue, which ranged from $1 for a six-inch replica to $5 for a foot-high version, which were marketed through a nationwide campaign. The effort led to the spread of miniature Statues of Liberty throughout the United States and the world and helped establish the statue in the public imagination as a symbol of America.
A variety of other fundraising efforts were staged, ranging from theatrical galas to prizefights, according to Christine Garnaut’s and Donald Langmead’s Encyclopedia of Architectural and Engineering Feats. Emma Lazarus wrote a poem, “The New Colossus,” which was read at a fundraising art exhibition in 1883. (Two decades later, it was inscribed on a bronze plaque on the inner wall of the pedestal.) Lazarus’ stirring plea to "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” helped to make the statue more than just a celebration of American democracy, by linking it with the waves of immigrants arriving in America in the late 1800s, and their aspirations for a better life.
“Laboulaye uses America as a symbol of good things. He sees Bartholdi as the tool by which he can achieve his aim of giving a gift,” Barry Moreno, historian and curator for the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, says in the “Raising the Torch” podcast.
When even those heroic fundraising efforts weren’t enough, Joseph Pulitzer , publisher of the tabloid New York World , came to the project’s rescue. Pulitzer ran a March 1885 article in his newspaper, which prodded readers into contributing more money for the base by pointing out that the statue itself had been paid for by “the masses of the French people—by the working men, the tradesmen, the shop girls, the artisans—by all, irrespective of class or condition.” Americans had to do their part as well, Pulitzer exhorted, and it worked. The newspaper was able to raise $100,000 to complete the project, most of it in donations of $1 or less.
But while the campaign to finish the pedestal—in some ways, an early version of today’s GoFundMe campaigns—required hustle, it ultimately helped Americans to feel a sense of ownership and connection to the statue, even though it had been created on the other side of the Atlantic.
As Magnuson-Cannady, supervising ranger for the National Park Service tells the “Raising the Torch” podcast, “The Statue of Liberty was really of the people in that the people of the United States and the people of France...not the super wealthy, not the super powerful—it was everyday folks contributing to the fundraising efforts and paying for the Statue of Liberty and the pedestal.”
In 1885, the statue arrived—in 350 pieces —in New York, where it took a year to be assembled because the pedestal hadn’t yet been completed. Finally, in October 1886, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated at a ceremony during which the crowd was interrupted by a full 15 minutes of applause before President Grover Cleveland could begin a brief speech in which he proclaimed that “she holds aloft the light which illumines the way to man’s enfranchisement.”
The massive statue’s magnificence instantly made it into a tourist magnet. As Barry Moreno explains in his 2017 pictorial history of the Statue of Liberty , Congress’s passage of the Private Card Mailing Act of 1898, which authorized private companies to produce postcards as long as they adhered to certain size and quality standards, also helped boost its profile, because people who visited bought inexpensive color postcards and sent them to friends and neighbors.
The market for Statue of Liberty postcards, in fact, became so lucrative that 11 years later, American printers convinced Congress to ban the importation of foreign-made postcards that depicted the statue and other quintessential “American scenes.”
The statue became an even more prominent American symbol during World War I , when it became one of the sights that U.S. soldiers gazed upon as they sailed off to fight in Europe, as well as one of the first things they glimpsed when they finally returned home.
The opening of a new $100 million museum on Liberty Island in 2019, paid for by private donations, further reinforces the Statue of Liberty as a monument cherished by people around the world. Timed to the May 2019 opening of the museum, the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation created an app featuring Apple’s augmented reality software, along with the “Raising the Torch” podcast to enhance the museum experience. Also featured in the new museum are a series of eight short films by HISTORY that outline fundraising and construction efforts behind the Statue of Liberty, how it became a symbol of home and democracy during wartime and its global significance as an icon representing equality and immigration.
“The statue is a kind of malleable or plastic figure,” Kraut says. “It can come to embody the kinds of definitions that one lends to the notion of freedom, itself.”
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Short Paragraph on The Statue of Liberty for Students
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Short Paragraph on The Statue of Liberty in 200 Words
The Statue of Liberty is a statue located on Liberty Islam, New York, USA. It was a gift from the people of France to the United State of America as a symbol of freedom and democracy. This statue was dedicated in 1886. It declared as a National Monument in 1924.
The entire monument’s height is 305 feet 1 inch or 93 meters. A french Sculptor named ‘Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’ was the Sculptor of this statue. The U.S. National Park Service is the governing body for this since 1933. According to the information it was a gift from the people of France.
At that time the French president was a huge supporter of the American Civil War. They wanted this land to be free and democratic. And this statue is also a symbol of freedom and democracy. The idea of the design has been chosen according to the origin story of America.
Bartholdi and Laboulaye did huge research before picking a final design. There is a torch in the hand of the lady, and it’s the sign of education or knowledge is power. It has been an amazing spot for tourists in New York City. Lots of people come here to spend time and watch the Statue of Liberty.
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The Statue Of Liberty And Immigrants
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