Nothing symbolizes the United States of America more than the Statue of Liberty. “The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World” was a gift of friendship from the people of France to the United States, and it is widely recognized as a universal symbol of freedom and democracy.
Frenchman Edouard de Laboulaye was an abolitionist and supporter of President Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. In 1865, he proposed creating a grand monument for the United States. The recent Union victory in the Civil War, which reaffirmed the United States' ideals of freedom and democracy, served as a platform for Laboulaye to argue that honoring the United States would strengthen the cause for democracy in France.
The statue itself was designed and fabricated by French sculptor Auguste Bartholdi. Bartholdi made a number of trips to the US to stir up support and to locate a site for the monument. The moment he first entered New York harbor, he spotted the location where he knew the statue must stand – on Bedloe's Island (known today as Liberty Island). New York was the gateway to America, and it was on Bedloe's Island that Bartholdi envisioned the statue standing atop the star-shaped Fort Wood.
Construction of the statue and its pedestal was a joint French-American effort. President Ulysses S. Grant was instrumental in getting a bill through Congress which authorized the acceptance of the statue. Publisher Joseph Pulitzer sponsored a fund drive to support construction of the statue’s pedestal. It was in support of Pulitzer’s fund drive that Emma Lazarus composed her famous sonnet “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!”
Upon its completion in France, the statue was shipped to New York and erected atop the pedestal. On October 28, 1886, the statue was formally dedicated in a spectacular ceremony headed by President Grover Cleveland, whose remarks echoed the words of Lazarus’ sonnet:
We are not here today to bow before the representation of a fierce warlike god, filled with wrath and vengeance, but we joyously contemplate instead our own deity keeping watch and ward before the open gates of America and greater than all that have been celebrated in ancient song. Instead of grasping in her hand thunderbolts of terror and of death, she holds aloft the light which illumines the way to man's enfranchisement. We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home, nor shall her chosen altar be neglected. Willing votaries will constantly keep alive its fires and these shall gleam upon the shores of our sister Republic thence, and joined with answering rays a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man's oppression, until Liberty enlightens the world.
Our Statue of Liberty symbolizes not just liberty, but also America’s gospel of peace and worldwide welcome. To the millions of people whom she greeted upon their arrival in America and to the billions who admire her from afar, she is truly the Goddess of Liberty.
From Chapter 11 of No More Patriots
Copyright © 2015 by Howard T. Uhal
All Rights Reserved
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