Liberty's Torch The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty

300 Pages·2014·4.17 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Mitchell

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LIBERTY’S
TORCH
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A E M
LSO BY LIZABETH ITCHELL
Three Strides Before the Wire: The Dark and
Beautiful World of Horse Racing
W: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty
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LIBERTY’S
TORCH
The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty
Elizabeth Mitchell
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
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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.
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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
www.groveatlantic.com
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To Lucy and Gigi
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Contents
Prologue
Book I The Idea
1 Our Hero Emerges from the Clay
2 Bartholdi Down the Black Nile
3 The Khedive Refuses
4 War and Garibaldi
5 Paris in Rubble
Book II The Gamble
6 America, the Bewildering
7 The Workshop of the Giant Hand
8 Making a Spectacle
9 Eiffel Props the Giantess
10 The Engineer and the Newspaperman
11 The Blessing
12 Liberty Sets Sail
13 Pulitzer’s Army and Other Helpers
Book III The Triumph
14 Liberty Unveiled
Epilogue
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Acknowledgments
Notes
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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
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