Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty is a personification of liberty in the form of a woman who holds a torch in her raised right hand and clutches a tablet in her left. Its formal name is Liberty Enlightening the World. It stands on Liberty Island in Upper New York Bay, off the coast of New York City, and measures 305 feet 1 inch (92.99 m) from the ground to the tip of the torch.

The proposal for the monument that became the Statue of Liberty was made in 1865 by the French historian Édouard de Laboulaye, who believed whole-heartedly in the common law of free peoples, an ideal in which every person was born with an inalienable, sacred right to freedom, and who spent much of his political career pushing for the return of democracy to France. The inspiration for the statue emerged at the end of the American Civil War, when Laboulaye proposed a monument to represent America's commitment to freedom and democracy. Laboulaye wanted to change the French government to a democratic government, but he did not want to do it through violence, and after an 1871 uprising by members of the working and middle classes in Paris against the government was brutally crushed, he was criticized by colleagues for supporting the governmental repression of the uprising. The Franco-Prussian War delayed the project for a number of years, but by 1875 Bartholdi started work on the statue's design while Laboulaye worked on fundraising, and after a national fundraising effort France had raised enough money for work to begin. The Franco-American Union was formed in France to oversee fundraising for the statue, and between 1875 and 1880 the French committee raised about 400,000 francs.

The statue was sculpted between 1875 and 1884 under the direction of the French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, who began drafting designs in 1870. The legend that the statue was conceived at an 1865 dinner party at the home of Edouard de Laboulaye is traceable to a single source, an 1885 fund-raising pamphlet written by the statue's sculptor, Auguste Bartholdi, after the death of Laboulaye. The statue's design almost certainly evolved from an earlier concept Bartholdi proposed for a colossal monument in Egypt, for which the artist used his drawings of Egyptian women as models, and his preliminary design is consistent with contemporary depictions of Liberty. The Statue of Liberty would never have been conceived or built if its principal French and American advocates had not been active abolitionists who understood slavery as the cause of the Civil War and its end as the realization of the promise of liberty for all, but the statue was not intended entirely as a monument to the end of slavery. References to the Civil War and abolition of slavery occur repeatedly from the statue's first introduction to the United States in 1871 through the dedication celebrations in 1886 and beyond.

The copper skin of the Statue of Liberty was shaped by the repoussé technique developed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, and the statue's copper weighs 176,000 pounds (about 80,000 kg). The sheeting itself is 3/32 of an inch thick, the thickness of two pennies placed together, and the finished figure can sway up to 3 inches while the torch sways up to 6 inches. Bartholdi oversaw the construction at the warehouse of Gaget, Gauthier & Co. in Paris, where the colossus was assembled and then taken apart to prepare for shipment to America. The French architect Viollet-le-Duc had been hired to design the framework, but after his death on September 17 in 1879 the French civil engineer Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was brought on to complete it.

For its trans-Atlantic voyage aboard the frigate Isère, the statue was reduced to 350 individual pieces and packed in 214 crates. The first piece to be reconstructed on Bedloe's Island was Eiffel's iron framework, and the remaining elements followed without scaffolding, hoisted by steam-driven cranes and derricks. The statue's highly potent symbolic elements include the United States Declaration of Independence, which she holds in her left hand, as well as the broken shackles from which she steps. The tablet she carries is inscribed JULY IV MDCCLXXVI (July 4, 1776).

Its design carries a classical face and drapery that suggest a Roman Goddess of Liberty, and the broken shackles and chains at the feet, hidden from view below, symbolize freedom newly achieved ^{7Liberty Island Chronology · U.S. National Park Service, Statue of Liberty National Monument ↗}. By 1906 the copper surface had developed its sea-green patina through natural oxidation ^{4Liberty Island Cultural Landscape · U.S. National Park Service ↗}.

On October 28, New York City held the first ticker-tape parade in honour of the dedication of the statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, an event attended by over one million people. A water parade of approximately 300 vessels passed in front of the statue even though visibility was less than a quarter of a mile due to fog and rain.

Double spiral cast-iron stairs were added to the interior of the statue in 1888. Control passed from the Lighthouse Board to the War Department in 1901. While under the control of the United States Army in the 1920s, the Statue of Liberty was in need of repair, and one of the workers assigned to the project, the craftsman Kenneth Lynch, was asked to repair damage caused by the Black Tom explosion created by German saboteurs during World War I.

Emma Lazarus wrote The New Colossus in 1883 as part of the fundraising effort for the pedestal, donating the poem to an auction held to raise funds for its construction. Its words include the appeal "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free". The poem was later cast onto a bronze plaque and mounted inside the pedestal's lower level. When money for the pedestal ran out in 1884, Joseph Pulitzer raised the rest of the funds.

Between 1886 and 1924 almost 14 million immigrants entered the United States through New York, and to these anxious newcomers the statue's uplifted torch did not suggest enlightenment as her creators intended but rather welcome. Liberty thus emerged as the Mother of Exiles, a symbol of hope to generations of immigrants. The opening of the immigrant processing station at Ellis Island in 1892, in the shadow of the statue, facilitated an immigrant association, as did the later popularity of Lazarus's poem.

On October 15 in 1924 a Presidential Proclamation declared Fort Wood and the Statue of Liberty within it a National Monument, with the monument's boundary set at the outer edge of Fort Wood. Care and administration of the monument passed to the National Park Service in 1933. Military use of Bedloe's Island ended in 1937, when the Department of War turned the island over to the National Park Service.

A museum dedicated to the history of immigration to the United States was built inside the pedestal, opening in 1972 as the American Museum of Immigration and closing in 1991 after the opening of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum. The monument's museum collection holds approximately 390,000 artifacts and over 1 million archival records. Among the significant items are 1886 models of the Statue of Liberty sold to raise funds for the statue's construction, letters exchanged between Auguste Bartholdi and Joseph Pulitzer, immigration documents such as inspection cards, passports and steamship tickets, and personal items families brought with them through Ellis Island.

In May of 1982 President Ronald Reagan appointed Lee Iacocca to head a private sector effort to restore the Statue of Liberty, and fundraising began for the $86 million restoration under a public-private partnership between the National Park Service and the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. In the same year the Centennial Commission was formed to perform restoration work as well as renovations and repairs. At the start of the statue's restoration in 1984 the United Nations designated the Statue of Liberty as a World Heritage Site, an inscription resting on criteria (i) and (vi), with the property covering 5.95 hectares and carrying dossier number 307. The newly restored statue opened to the public on July 5 in 1986 during Liberty Weekend, the July 3-6 celebration of her centennial, with President Ronald Reagan presiding over the rededication.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11 in 2001, Liberty Island closed for 100 days, and the Statue of Liberty itself was not reopened to visitor access until August 2004. The statue's crown was again reopened to the public in July 2009. Liberty Island draws more than four million visitors annually, making it one of the most iconic historic sites in the United States.

• 1876
  Torch arm completed and exhibited
  French artisans and craftsmen began constructing the statue in France under Bartholdi's direction; the arm holding the torch was completed that year and shown at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. ^{12Creating the Statue of Liberty 1865-1886 · U.S. National Park Service, Statue of Liberty National Monument ↗}
• 1878
  Head and shoulders completed
  The head and shoulders were completed for the Paris Universal Exposition. ^{12Creating the Statue of Liberty 1865-1886 · U.S. National Park Service, Statue of Liberty National Monument ↗}
• 1881–1884
  Assembly in Paris
  The entire statue was assembled in Paris while construction on the pedestal began in the United States. ^{12Creating the Statue of Liberty 1865-1886 · U.S. National Park Service, Statue of Liberty National Monument ↗}