â??Slowly the ship glides into the harbor,â? wrote one turn-of-the-century immigrant of arriving in New York, â??and when it passes under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, the silence is broken, and a thousand hands are outstretched in a greeting to this new divinity to whose keeping they now entrust themselves. â??Oh Papa,â?? cried one young girl, â??the goddess has waded into the water to meet us!â??â??â?
RONALD REAGAN CAMPAIGNS FOR PRESIDENT, 1980.
AP
This popular image of the Statue of Liberty as the â??Mother of Exilesâ? who (in the words of Emma Lazarus) beckons, Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, was not what the Frenchmen behind the project originally intended. In fact, the meaning of Lady Liberty has been remarkably flexible since she made her first appearance in the mid-1870s. The evolution of her significance is one of the many stories told here by Edward Berenson.
Berenson, who teaches French history at New York University, traces the development of Frédéric Auguste
Bartholdiâ??s universally recognized â??Liberty Enlightening the Worldâ? from the financing of the statue and her base to the ideals she has represented to her image in the popular mind.
The idea first emerged in 1865 at a gathering of French intellectuals mourning the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, whom they adored for his opposition to slavery. Napoleon III had aided the Confederacy during the war, however, and these Frenchmen wanted to give the reunited American states a symbolic gift to solidify their relationship and celebrate the common groundâ??a love of libertyâ??shared by the two countries.
They concluded that only a colossus would do to convey an idea as vast and important as liberty. To support the statue from the inside, they recruited Gustave Eiffel (later of Tower fame) to build a skeletonâ??a flexible, 132-ton tower on which Lady Libertyâ??s wafer-thin exterior hangs. The exterior itself, though only 3/32 of an inch thick, weighs 88 tons.
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