September, 1873: Panic struck Wall Street.

"Like a cyclone, which came upon us without an hour's warning."

-- Banker J. P. Morgan

The largest private bank in the country had been brought down by the collapse of Northern Pacific Railroad following a financial boom that was fueled by complex financial instruments, not fully understood, and overbuilding.

The panic became a crisis. The President and the Secretary of Treasury rushed to Manhattan to spend the weekend of September 20th, 1873 in conference with leaders on Wall Street to try to avert a national disaster.

October 27, 1873:

"Faith in financial agencies gone. Factories and employers throughout the

country are discharging hires, working half-time, or reducing wages."

-- George Templeton Strong

Hundreds of banks considered indestructible toppled. Credit stopped flowing. Businesses couldn’t secure loans, and folded or withered.

By 1876, unemployment had risen to 14%. Homelessness and hunger surpassed the ability of private and public services to meet demands.

As the “great depression” of the 19th century entered its fourth year, an enormous disembodied hand raising a torch appeared in midtown Manhattan. This surreal sight was the uppermost segment of a colossal statue the French planned to give to the American people, if they would fund its pedestal. It was a gift to celebrate the triumph of liberty and unity following the American Civil War, a beacon of hope for France, in the midst of its own turmoil, and for all who would see it, a symbol of democracy.

New Yorkers of means declined to fund the statue’s pedestal. The New York Times stated, "No true patriot can support expenditures for a bronze female in the present state of our finances." As the Brooklyn Bridge was rising downtown, the raised torch stood still on Madison Square for five years. While the people of France financed the completion of the figure by 1880, its foundation was left unfunded by Americans in 1882. To finance the statue, the French had rallied nearly 200 towns, thousands of French schoolchildren, and even the descendants of French officers who had fought in the American Revolution one hundred years before. Others contributed to the effort, including a metal company that donated copper for the statue’s exterior.

Envisioned to be the tallest statue in the world, it employed new technological innovations, including an interior steel frame that allowed the thin copper exterior to move independently of it, and with the strong harbor winds, while enabling people to climb inside and up to the crown and torch. It was a kinetic, flexible sculpture made with the most durable and inflexible of the world's materials. It was a visionary fusion of art and architecture, a building with a human skin, a sculpture that served both a symbolic and functional purpose, and a gesture of friendship, unity and cooperation among nations. The ambitious statue without a foundation, however, appeared destined for permanent exile.

Then a Hungarian immigrant who had arrived in America penniless in 1864, and with no knowledge of English, took up the challenge to fund the pedestal. Having purchased The New York World, a daily newspaper circulated across the country, Joseph Pulitzer promised to print the name of any person who contributed to the effort, regardless of the amount. He considered media a public service, and used journalism as a means to reform corruption, often doing so simply by publishing publicly available information. He published, for example, the tax returns of St. Louis’s wealthiest people, which showed they claimed to have no money.

With the divide between rich and poor growing to historic levels, with the families of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Astor and Armour carried down 5th Avenue atop horse-drawn carriages, their names engraved into American society, Pulitzer’s campaign offered everyone, including the people who were invisible, the immigrants who were working for ownership in a country that treated them as outsiders while they were fueling the engine of our industrial economy and therefore at the core of our economic identity, the chance for their names to be read in the most widely circulated and most influential paper in the country. And in the meanwhile, they would help erect a pedestal that would hold the tallest statue in the world, the tallest structure in the metropolis; it would be a visible stake in their country on a monumental scale.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans funded the pedestal’s completion by sending in donations of less than one dollar, including schoolchildren who sent in pennies. The pedestal was completed in 1885. The following year, the statue arrived in 214 crates and in 350 pieces from France.

The fractured symbol of freedom and democracy, conceived of by a writer more than twenty years before, and produced by an artist, artisans, architects and engineers, was unified and raised by a foundation funded by the people. It was a visionary achievement of the arts, technology and citizens of the world, as inspirational as aspirational.

October 28, 1886:

Declared a public holiday for the unveiling, a parade began at Madison Square, where the torch once stood, and proceeded down to the New York Stock Exchange, where traders, at work and watching the merriment pass by below, spontaneously threw ticker tape out hundreds of windows for the first time. "In a moment the air was white with curling streamers," The New York Times reported.

By lifting the statue, called La Liberté éclairant le monde by its sculptor, Frédéric Bartholdi, the people helped lift the spirit of an entire country, while they helped lift the country itself out of the long depression and into the 20th century.

© 2009 Lori Terrizzi

