Art: Liberty’s Jubilee

Cannon banged out a 21-gun salute, steamboat whistles mooed deeply. Over the narrow gullies of narrow Manhattan, office workers industriously emptied their trash baskets over the automobile of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From Paris, loudspeakers brought a few polished French platitudes from President Lebrun. President Roosevelt spoke in kind. The occasion last week was the 50th anniversary of the most famed piece of sculpture in the Western Hemisphere: Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s 152-ft. Statue of Liberty. The statue was decorated for its birthday with an enormous U. S. flag hanging from the upraised torch.

Handsome, silky-chinned Sculptor Bartholdi was an Alsatian who studied painting first, then turned to sculpture under the little-known French Artist Soitoux. The gigantic always fascinated him: his projects grew bigger and bigger, a habit which brought him into contact more with young engineers than young sculptors. Ferdinand (Suez Canal) de Lesseps was a friend of his; with Alexandre Gustave (Tower) Eiffel he was even more intimate.

In 1870 Sculptor Bartholdi suddenly chucked his art, served eight months in the Franco-Prussian War. Immediately after the armistice in 1871 he sailed for New York on the French steamship Pireire. At his first glimpse of New York harbor—so he always maintained—he immediately conceived the idea for a gigantic statue of “Liberty Enlightening the World,” picked Bedloe Island with its abandoned ramparts of Fort Wood as the ideal site. Ashore, he talked hard about his project to various rich citizens, went down to Long Branch, N. J. to see President Grant about it.

Sculptor Bartholdi quickly produced a number of sketches for his monument (now on exhibit among other Liberty documents at the Museum of the City of New York), but would have had little success with his project when he got back to France without the interest of Historian Edouard de Laboulaye, grandfather of the present French Ambassador to Washington. With the backing of Historian de Laboulaye and other prominent Frenchmen, francs were raised by popular subscription among French citizens to present the statue to the U. S. on its 100th Anniversary, the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876.

Technical difficulties were greater than mink-chinned Sculptor Bartholdi expected. By the time the Philadelphia Exposition opened all that was ready was Liberty’s torch, right hand and wrist, but that was imposing enough. An armature for a statue 152 ft. high was beyond the capabilities of Sculptor Bartholdi. He called in his friend Engineer Eiffel — already planning the tallest tower the world had ever seen — who solved the problem by designing a skeleton for Liberty in the form of a central steel mast round which are wrapped two spiral staircases, braced like a camera by a quadruped of four iron pylons. On this framework the whole weight of the statue hangs. Not bronze is Liberty’s skin but hand-hammered sheets of pure copper about the thickness of a silver dollar. Each sheet is anchored to an iron strap, tied with iron girders to the central skeleton (see cut). Even the nearby Black Tom explosion of 1916 did not shake it. In 50 years it has not sagged, cracked or corroded.

In 1884 the statue was completed, set up temporarily in Paris. France’s gift was the statue itself. The base, a mass of almost solid granite designed by famed Architect Richard Morris Hunt, was to be provided by the U. S. In the winter of 1884-85 the base was less than half built and funds were completely exhausted. To the rescue came exuberant Publisher Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World. With screaming editorials, cartoons, prize contests, fancy dress balls, all the impedimenta of modern publicity, Publisher Pulitzer had the $100,000 necessary to finish Liberty’s pedestal oversubscribed in less than six months.

Carefully taken apart, the Goddess of Liberty was packed in 214 enormous crates, consigned to the steam-and-sail gunboat Isère for shipment to the U. S. In charge of the shipment was a 19-year-old French lieutenant, Rodolphe Victor de Drambour. No hatches on the little ship were big enough for the enormous crates. He cut open the side of the ship, pushed the dissected goddess straight into the hold. Throughout a 72-hour storm with canvas cut to staysail & spanker, Lieutenant de Drambour stayed on the bridge of his ship, while the crates shifted wildly, threatened any instant to sink him. Two days after his 20th birthday he dropped anchor off Sandy Hook, welcomed by the New York World, the New York Yacht Club, the U. S. Fleet, and a spanking good dinner at the Hoffman House.

Last week newshawks found Rodolphe Victor de Drambour, 70, hale, hearty and long a U. S. citizen, comfortably seated in his apartment at No. 2482 Valentine Ave., The Bronx.