The Changing Face of the Statue of Liberty
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The Changing Face of the Statue of Liberty By John Bodnar, Laura Burt, Jennifer Stinson, and Barbara Truesdell Center for the Study of History and Memory Indiana University A Historical Resource Study for the National Park Service December 2005 Cover Illustration: [Last Stage of Mounting Copper to the Armature], Unidentified German newspaper, October 1886, in Pierre Provoyeur and June Hargrove, eds. Liberty: The French- American Statue in Art and History (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 195. Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter 1: Birth of Liberty in America…………………………………....11 Chapter 2: The French Connection………………………………………..31 Chapter 3: Americanizing Liberty: Celebrating the Statue………………..47 Chapter 4: The Immigrant’s Statue………………………………………..91 Chapter 5: African Americans and the Statue……………………………173 Chapter 6: War and Liberty: WWI to Iraq………………………………249 Chapter 7: The Statue of Liberty in Popular and Commercial Culture…..317 Conclusion: The Changing Face of the Statue of Liberty………………..377 List of Illustrations………………………………………………………..383 Introduction Just a few years after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City in 2001, architects and government officials announced their intention to rebuild at the site of the devastation. New York Governor George Pataki unveiled plans to erect the world’s tallest skyscraper to an expected height of 1,776 feet—a level intended to mark the year America declared its independence. The patriotic tone of this decision was reinforced by the young son of a police officer killed at the trade center who joined Pataki at the announcement and read the Declaration of Independence. The building’s architect, Daniel Libeskind, even called the new edifice the “Freedom Tower,” and explained that it was intended to “echo” the image of the Statue of Liberty which stood nearby, and commemorate the “strength and resilience of the human spirit.” Eventually the design for the new tower was modified for apparent safety and security reasons and came to resemble the Statue of Liberty a bit less, but the commemorative and aesthetic intent to reaffirm the central American political ideals of freedom and liberty and the hope to invoke the legacy of the popular statue in New York Harbor remained.1 It comes as no surprise to see Americans turning to the Statue of Liberty and the political dream it represents in a time of national crisis. The ideal of liberty helped to 1 drive the American Revolution in the first place and has been articulated continually by Americans ever since. Since its dedication in 1886, liberty’s central monument has captured the imagination of people in the United States and abroad, as well. The importance of the statue cannot be doubted; the many ways in which it has been used, interpreted, represented and described, however, is less clear. Centrality and prominence did not insure uniformity of thought and understanding. Essentially simple in design, the Statue of Liberty has been used and reused by political philosophers, government officials, business leaders, tourist promoters, activists, and just plain ordinary people in ways never envisioned by its original designers—who were French and not American. At its inception it was meant to stand for a universal political dream for all people and for the special friendship between France and the United States. Over time it became much more than that. Without a doubt it gradually became more patriotic than universal—an image tied to one nation more than all of humankind. The French connection tended to recede from view. Left to the resources of entrepreneurs it was sometimes celebrated as a symbol of American capitalist enterprise. In the hands of cynical cartoonists it might even be used to criticize the Untied States for not adhering to some of its ideals. The rhetoric surrounding the dedication of the Freedom Tower suggested a fighting spirit needed to defend one nation more than a declaration of the rights of all men and women. The ongoing project to give the Statue of Liberty meaning—the central focus of this study—captured the imagination of citizens from all sectors of American society and continues today. In this report, the ways that the statue served to organize thought about liberty is explored from various perspectives, including its place in civic ceremonies, its image in wartime, its close link to the story of American immigration, its relationship to 2 racial minorities, and even its reconfiguration in a culture filled with the constant circulation of artistic and commercial images. Even at its birth in the political ideology of the eighteenth century, liberty did not arrive in a neat and tidy package. Thomas Paine in his famous pamphlet of 1776, Common Sense, used the term liberty to advocate rejection of the power of the British monarch. Clearly many shared his understanding. But even in the age of Paine, as historians such as Michael Kammen have suggested, liberty held other implications. Some saw liberty as emancipation from any form of political or even religious authority. Liberty in this formulation was a natural right of all men who resented any restraint whatsoever on the exercise of their personal pursuits. In this sense liberty was part of the universal faith in human nature expressed by the Enlightenment to free the human mind from the constrictions and authorities of the past. Mainly, however, as Kammen suggests, during the era of the American Revolution liberty was linked to the concept of property or material possessions. Activists such as The Sons of Liberty actually took “Liberty and Property” to be their slogan. The idea was that all men—not just royals or nobles—were entitled to the unrestricted pursuit of property as a basis for establishing personal happiness. Free men would establish governments such as the United States not simply to overthrow a repressive king but to preserve the idea that they could be free to accumulate wealth and goods. These revolutionaries used the idea of freedom both to oppose unjust authority and celebrate the right to be acquisitive. Kammen wrote that liberty and property were highly “compatible” in the late eighteenth century.2 Over the next two centuries liberty came to be associated with other concepts as well, although its original meanings never went away. Kammen notes that in the 3 nineteenth century liberty was tied more to discussions of the social order. There was a growing fear that complete liberty—men competing against other men without some form of governing authority—would lead to social chaos or—to use a term of the time— “licentiousness.” In this era there was a realization that political stability was necessary for future economic growth but that it could be undermined by an excessive amount of inequality or unrestrained competitiveness for property at all costs. Abraham Lincoln said as much at Gettysburg when he proclaimed that the nation was originally conceived in “liberty” but that in order to honor all the men who died on this Pennsylvania battlefield citizens had to join the dream of liberty (and the end of slavery) to a determined effort to create a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The Civil War president called for a balance between personal liberty and the need for the government to serve everyone in an equitable manner. In the period after World War I—and especially during the 1930s—Kammen detected that liberty was invoked more and more with the idea of justice for all. The sense was evident that some degree of order had to temper the free pursuit of property, and calls were made for government intervention into social and economic life. Few called for an end to personal liberties and rights but prominent leaders did talk of the need to insure “equal justice.” There was a concern that democratic processes and institutions needed to be protected if personal liberty was ultimately to survive, a concern that was accentuated by the rise of totalitarian states in Germany and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. The simple defense of liberty without an equal commitment to institutions that insured fair treatment for all was deemed insufficient as a basis for the political community.3 4 The Changing Face of the Statue of Liberty recognizes the mutability of the meaning of liberty over the course of two centuries and seeks to relate public uses and interpretations of the Statue of Liberty to that unstable process. In this study the monument in New York Harbor becomes both a site for conducting civic discussions on the meaning of liberty and an image circulated through the culture of America and the world expressing all kinds of points of view. The story begins in the eighteenth century and the period of great revolutions in France and America. In fact, ongoing debates in France between liberals and royalists led to the conception of the statue in the first place. Chapter One will look at how liberty was already a multi-dimensional concept during the American Revolution that stood for both a conception of individual political rights and a new political order based on the authority of one’s human nature rather than on the authority of one’s rank. It is well known that slaves and others did not attain equal rights in the new American nation. Political rights were certainly granted to greater numbers, and doctrines were established that would help to improve the lot of others over time. Some, of course, used their newfound freedom to pursue happiness and goods in the marketplace. Yet, there were those who argued at the time that the pursuit of liberty carried a responsibility to support institutions such as political parties that would help spread the benefits of liberty to as many people as possible.