How the Statue of Liberty Almost Got Shipped Back to France

Eighteen eighty-five. A warehouse in New York. Two hundred and fourteen wooden crates, and inside them, a woman in pieces. Her nose. Her torch arm. Three hundred sheets of beaten copper. And the committee that owns her is threatening to ship the whole thing back to France.

Back to... that's the Statue of Liberty? In boxes?

That's her. The gift nobody wanted to pay to stand up.

How do you mislay a hundred-and-fifty-foot statue?

You don't mislay it. You just can't afford the thing it stands on. The deal was split down the middle. France builds the statue, America builds the pedestal. France finished her in July eighteen eighty-four. America... didn't.

So the French brought the present and we forgot the table to put it on.

Congress couldn't agree on a spending package. That's Alan Kraut, history professor at American University, who chairs the history advisory committee for the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Foundation. So they improvised. Benefit theatre shows. Art exhibitions. Auctions. Prizefights.

Boxing matches. For the Statue of Liberty.

Boxing matches. And it still wasn't enough. But hold that warehouse in your head, because before I tell you who saved her, I have to tell you what she was originally holding in her left hand. It wasn't a tablet.

Go on.

June, eighteen sixty-five. Versailles. A French legal scholar named Édouard de Laboulaye has friends over for dinner. He's an expert on the American Constitution, and he's an anti-slavery activist, co-founder of the French Anti-Slavery Society. The American Civil War has just ended. Months earlier, slavery was abolished. The historian Edward Berenson told the Washington Post what came out of that table. They talked about, quote, creating some kind of commemorative gift that would recognize the importance of the liberation of the slaves.

Wait. So she starts life as an emancipation monument. Nothing to do with immigrants.

Nothing. Laboulaye brings in a sculptor, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. And in an early model, around eighteen seventy, she's holding broken shackles and chains. Left hand. Out in the open, at eye level. The whole point of her.

Which is not what's in her hand today.

No. The chains got moved down to her feet, under the hem of her robe, where you basically can't see them unless you're flying over the island. In the hand instead... a tablet. July fourth, seventeen seventy-six.

Okay, push back on me here. Is that proven, or is it one of those things the internet decided is true? Who actually ordered the chains moved?

Fair. The shackles at her feet are real, they're physically on the statue. The why is murkier. The account you'll hear is that early funders, especially the American ones, didn't want chains on the monument, and the French were leaning on American money. Rebecca Joseph, the researcher who fact-checked the myths for the Park Service, concluded the finished design carries Laboulaye's two-part idea of liberty... seventeen seventy-six, AND the end of slavery.

Two revolutions. One of them whispered.

One of them whispered. And then she sits in those crates while America shrugs.

So who blinks first?

March sixteenth, eighteen eighty-five. A newspaper publisher runs an appeal in his paper, the New York World. His name is Joseph Pulitzer, and he's an immigrant himself, from Hungary. His pitch is sharp. He goes after the millionaires for not giving... then asks ordinary readers to send whatever they've got.

Shaming the rich in print. Bold.

And here's the hook that makes it work. Every single donor gets their name printed in the paper. Not just names, either. He prints their stories. How they scraped it together. Why they gave.

That's a Kickstarter page. In eighteen eighty-five. With the backer rewards and everything.

Exactly that. And it detonates. By August, more than a hundred and twenty thousand people have given upward of a hundred thousand dollars. Most of it in tiny amounts. Schoolchildren. Office clerks. People who'd never set foot on that island.

A hundred and twenty thousand people. That's a whole city chipping in pennies.

And it's enough. Pedestal finished. Crates opened. October twenty-eighth, eighteen eighty-six, President Grover Cleveland dedicates her in New York Harbor.

So the richest country on earth couldn't fund her, and the poorest people in it did.

That's the part I keep turning over. She almost went home in a box. Instead she was bought in fractions by exactly the kind of people she'd later be famous for welcoming. The statue didn't hand them meaning. They handed it to HER.

And the chains just stay down there at her feet.

The chains stay at her feet. Everybody photographs the torch. Almost nobody photographs the hem of her robe... which is where the thing she was built to celebrate is lying, broken, under four tons of copper.

Next time I see her, I'm looking down.

Do. From a distance, a monument only tells you one story. Get close enough, and it'll tell you the one somebody tried to edit out.