Statue of Liberty

The statue stands on Liberty Island (formerly Bedloe’s Island) in New York Harbor, on a pedestal set within Fort Wood, an 11-point Army fort built in the early 1800s. Lady Liberty holds a torch in her right hand and, in her left, a tablet inscribed with the date of the Declaration of Independence. Her crown’s spikes evoke rays of light, and a broken shackle and chains — symbols of the end of slavery — lie at her feet, invisible from below. Her copper skin is only 3/32 of an inch thick.

In 1865 the French historian and abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye proposed a monumental gift from the people of France to the people of the United States — to mark the centennial of American independence and to celebrate the recent abolition of slavery. Sculptor Bartholdi took up the idea. France paid for the statue; Americans were to pay for the pedestal. The Franco-Prussian War delayed the work, and when the first engineer died in 1879, Gustave Eiffel designed the internal framework. To raise money, the torch-bearing arm was displayed in Philadelphia in 1876 and in New York’s Madison Square from 1877 to 1882.

France formally presented the statue on July 4, 1884. Fundraising for the pedestal lagged until Joseph Pulitzer used his newspaper, the New York World, to appeal to the public, promising to print every donor’s name; about 120,000 people gave more than $100,000. The statue crossed the Atlantic in 214 crates, arriving on June 17, 1885, and was dedicated on October 28, 1886. President Grover Cleveland promised, “We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home.”

Emma Lazarus had written “The New Colossus” in 1883 for a fundraising auction; in 1903 a plaque with the poem — “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — was placed in the pedestal. Because the statue stood next to the immigration station at Ellis Island, it became a symbol of welcome, and in 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a major immigration act at its base. It was restored for its 1986 centennial, when a replica of Bartholdi’s original torch replaced the much-altered original.