Excerpt: Lady with a Past
Byliner | October 2011
Submitted by Ian Stewart + FollowIn this excerpt from the Byliner Original "Lady with a Past," author Elizabeth Mitchell explains just how massive an undertaking the construction of the Statue of Liberty proved to be.
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Like all things grandiose, [Frederic Auguste] Bartholdi's statue would be hollow inside. The sculpture was monstrous, in every sense of the word. Art critics protested that no monumental statuary could be considered true art because it would never trigger the requisite firing of the sympathetic nerve. A colossus could only cause the jolt of fear, awe. It spoke to the human effort required to fashion it.
It predicted the earthquake that would fell it, pulverizing every house, tree, and human in its path. Bartholdi worked on art that was too big for him ever to see whole as he crafted it. That is, he built a woman in parts. He carved Liberty in miniature, then grew her to four feet, then to a woman just taller than himself. He magnified her a third time to thirty-seven feet in height. She went off to the courtyard of Monsieur Gayet-Gauthier's workshop, where she was enlarged again, then divided in four so that fifty artisans could work on her parts. They labored on her for ten years in that way. A colossus could only be conceptualized in fragments, just as a nation could only be understood by its laws, or by its states, or cities, or, better still, by the suffragette Bartholdi met on the Western train, or the Chinese immigrant, or the Negro waiter.
First the carpenters created an exact replica of the colossus using wood slats so closely joined that a leg or a hand looked like an enlargement of an etching, the stacked lines forming the mass. Workmen applied a plaster coating to the wooden form, then finished the surfaces. Next, carpenters joined bits of wood sheathing as closely as they could to the plaster's curves. With that wood form complete, the workers smashed the plaster, leaving the wooden shell. Copper sheeting was then applied with a hammer—forty thousand pounds in all. When each section was finished, the pieces were joined with tightly spaced rivets. The coppersmiths leapt back and forth in the tip of the statue's nose. A six-foot man standing at her lip could just reach her eyebrow.
The first engineer on the project, Viollet de Luc, died in 1879, and Bartholdi sought out the forty-seven-year-old Gustave Eiffel, then known for his bridges, as de Luc's replacement. The engineer needed to create a support system to balance the enormity of a statue that was designed to be off-balance (her left foot stepped forward a bit). He devised a sixty-thousand-pound iron pylon on which the statue would hang. Inside the pylon would be a 145-foot wooden staircase.
Liberty also presented possibilities of invigorating danger. For one, Eiffel was aware that saltwater spray could create such a strong electrical current when in contact with iron and copper that Liberty might become, as one engineering magazine put it, in Verne-like terms, a "gigantic battery of unknown potential."
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Story Update
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America’s greatest symbol of freedom, Lady Liberty, always showed a crass commercial side. The sculptor, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, planned to make his fortune on the giantess by charging American and French businesses copyright fees to use the Statue’s image in advertisements. Even a laxative company, Castoria, petitioned to be an early sponsor of the monument by contributing $25,000 in exchange for having the company’s name emblazoned below the colossus’s feet for a year. “Thus art and science, the symbol of liberty to man, and of health to his children, would more closely be enshrined in the hearts of our people,” the company’s representatives proposed. Bartholdi demurred from that request.
But in June 1887, a year after the Statue’s inauguration, commercialism cropped up in a weird new form in a New York Times article, “An Incident of Liberty: How M. Bartholdi Was Made Glad and His Statue Saved From Delay.” The reporter explained how the statue almost failed to be completed because the key artist, M. Lanier, whom Bartholdi had employed in France to oversee the work, fell ill in the spring and summer leading up to the statue’s shipment to America. “At first he felt a lack of interest in his work, then a tired sensation, then loss of appetite and sleeplessness,” the reporter said. “He struggled manfully, but was forced by the mysterious feelings within him to give up entirely. Then Liberty languished.”
Two eminent doctors were consulted, a cure prescribed, and within days, Lanier was up and clambering about the colossus, much to Bartholdi’s happiness. The miracle treatment? “QUINA LAROCHE is a marvelous combination of Peruvian Bark, Iron, Catalan Wine, and other valuable compounds,” the reporter noted. “It has taken the medical professions and scientists by storm wherever it is introduced. It received the French prize of 16,600 francs, and the gold medals at the Paris and Vienna Expositions…”
The reporter continued: “For all who are debilitated; for those who feel they are not well, but do not know the cause; for anyone who needs a gentle tonic or a stimulating restorative, QUINA-LAROCHE is a God-send. The Statue of Liberty indirectly felt its power, and the land of liberty is being helped by its use.”
The Times followed up two months later with an article, “The Source of Fashion: Why Things Are Popular – A Most Striking and Valuable Instance” leading with the sentence, “Merit is the source of fashion.” The reporter went on to describe why a “great part of the gay capital” of Paris imbibed the elixir and why Americans were giddily following suit. An advertising magazine noted that the American marketers of Quina Laroche found the greatest success when promoting their product in the religious press.
Alas, in 1906, Massachusetts denied America the curative that would make it younger, more vibrant, more filled with energy. It listed Quina LaRoche as one of the preparations unsalable under its new anti-cocaine law.
