statue fred reason bartholdi. his first vision was to build the statue at the southern end of the sues canal and it would commemorate the opening of asia on to europe, the bringing of enlightenment to asia, that was his idea, and partly he had this idea because he, like many educated americans, and emma lazarus was one of them, studied the ancient world and -- and bartholdi had actualitily taken a trip up the nile and had seen the ancient collase of thebbes build 3,000 years ago, and he was impressed by those, and he wanted to build a classal stat you've his own, and he thought he should do what the ancients did. he should build it in egypt, hand that was his first idea, and it was only because the egyptian government ended up being bankrupt. they were in hawk to the british

and the french and the british were actually able to use their position of being creditors to buy up the suez canal. that's the reason that they took control of it, and the egyptian ruler, a man named ismael, just didn't have the money to finance the statue of liberty. this was in the late 1860s now. and bartholdi went back to france, disappointed that he wasn't going to be able to build his statue in the land of the great ancient colossal statues, and a whole variety of circumstances intervened. one was the franco-prussian war which kicked bartholdi out of his home. he was from the province of alcace which was occupied from the germans and bartholdi's home city was komar and his own home was occupied by german soldiers. he was a great french patriot and refused to go there as long

as the germans were occupying it, so he went back to paris only to have the paris commune break out. the pairs commune was a revolution in which the working people of the city basically seized control of the government and wanted to institute a very radical form of politics. bartholdi was again a liberal in the 19th century sense which would have made him a centrist, slightly left of center. a moderate guy. he believed in liberty and republicanism, and he thought the past went way too far. he was a guy who was an exile in his own country. he couldn't live in his own city because it was occupied by the german enemy, and he couldn't find his way to -- to return to paris which was in the hands of political radicals whom he hated. so his idea was to actually go

himself in person to the land of liberty which for him was the united states. he had never been there before. he didn't speak a word of english. he didn't know anybody, and in the fall, september of 1871, he wrote a letter to his friend, laboullet the specialist of american politics and history, bartholdi said i'm leaving france and i hope to find in america the liberty thatty with do not have here in our owner country and some day i hope we will. that's how he get to the united states and it's only when he got here, that he came up to the idea, you know that statue that i was going to build in egypt? it really needs to be in new york haaror. >> i love hearing about his journey across america also and the way it had even more richness to it than toqueville's journey and the way in which he went from east to west and then a different journey back, that

he was really seeing america as something much different and more progressive than what france had to offer at the time, that he came to see this as only possible true home of the statue. i love his account and that even the rocky mountains were terrifying to him because he had never seen anything like that before. >> yeah, yeah. there's a group of people there, aamerican foot in the united states and the only thing they knew about the united states was what they read in books and some newspapers so when bartholdi came here for the first time in 1871 he figured out immediately that the statue was going to go up in new york harbor. he found the island where he was going to put it, but he didn't have any takers, nobody was intereste interested: here was a guy who

no one knew, didn't speak english and he wanted to put up a statue in the harbor and he wanted the americans to pay for the pedestal that it would stand on and people thought he was nuts. to his great credit he said i need to find out who the americans are and what america really is as a country and so he got on a train and eventually other motors of conveyance and he crossed the country all the way to san francisco, and he took a northern route on the way out, and then he took a more southerly route on the way back. he spent six months traveling from the east coast and west back again. compared to toqueville's trip. toqueville's trip was a couple months long. he didn't get further west than ohio, and he only spoke to a handful of people, and, of course, everybody knows about toqueville's trip from democracy in america which is the book that resulted from it.

bartholdi's trip makes toqueville's look utterly superficial by comparison. toqueville spoke to a handful of elite types in the cities he visited and generalized brilliantly from that, but bartholdi talked to a wide range of people and explored the countryside and he wanted to understand what makes americans tick. and he was surprised by a lot of things that he saw, you know. he had read that americans were individualistic, and he actually saw us as much more collectivist. it seems kind of hard for us to have imagined that, but he saw the united states as a group of people who liked to form associations, who wanted to always be with other people who weren't -- he saw the french, after he went to the united states, he saw the french as the individualists and the americans as the more social people. and from that he concluded that

the -- if he was going to put up his colossal statue it was going to have to say something to people who understood themselves as a big group, as a society, as a kind of collective entity, and that's what made him realize that the statue of liberty really needed to say something to all americans, so he came up with the idea that finally worked is that what it would do is commemorate the 100th anniversary of the declaration of independence. and this idea worked, that he would build the statue. it would go up in 1876, and it would stand for 100 years of american liberty, the longest period of liberty that had ever -- that the world had ever seen really. and when he then presented the statue in those terms, that it's going to be the commemoration of

the centennial of american liberty, then -- then it took hold. >> and it's also so interesting that he looks back 100 years in order to find that moment that will sing to americans, because americans are also coming out of the civil war. >> mm-hmm. >> and the feelings of the north and the south per slavery and abolitionist ideals and the position of the french, that the french had supported the south, that all of this is creating great anxieties and that the statue is going to help heal those american anxieties and also heal the relationship again between america and france. so he picks a very strategic moment because it's not contemporary. it's looking backyards. >> yeah. what was really important for bar toldy and his friends was in a sense to gloss over the civil war. >> um-hum >> the civil war really didn't jive with their understanding of what america was. america was a land of liberty. it was the land of what -- what

toqueville called orderly liberty. he could be free because we had ourselves under control, and what french people liked toqueville and bartholdi, what they feared about the french was that they didn't have enough control themself to live in a free society, and they wanted to figure out how the americans could do it, but in order to figure that out, they couldn't look too closely at really recent american history. as you just said, melissa, because recent american history, of course, was pretty terrible with the fratricidal conflict of the civil war and the terrible disruptiveness and deaths, to say nothing of the way slavery contradicted the very ideals of american liberty. and so he wanted to take the long view, and in the long view the civil war receded in importance, especially vis-a-vis the american revolution and especially because the north won. slavery was abolished and so the

story, which had a bumpy patch, had a happy ending. >> yeah, yeah. let's talk for a moment, too, about how the form of the statue took shape because we talked about the suez canal, but i think it's so fascinating that around the same time he's going to do a journey to america the statue's shape is starting to take new form from an egyptian form to the one we now know as liberty, and that crystallizes for him very clearly in the plaster models that we know he worked with. >> yeah. so bartholdi goes to egypt, and the first sketches look like an arab peasant woman, and that made sense for egypt, but he also had a lot of other images in his head, and one of them is the colossus of roads. this is the -- the ancient statue that was build on the island of roads in the third

century bc to commemorate a great victory, and this was a male statue that presided over the island and the city and it commemorated a great victory. we talk about emma lazarus, we can get back to that, so he's got these different competing images in his head, so he's created this arab peasant woman on a pedestal. he's got the colossus of roads, but he's also got the goddess of liberty. these were greek and roman goddesses that surfaced during the french revolution, that come from ancient greece and rome and that in ancient times represented the freedom of slaves, and those images of the goddess of liberty re-emerged during the french revolution to symbolize the liberty that the french revolution was supposed to bring. and so all during the 19th century in france, you had different versions of a goddess,

a female image of liberty, and you -- you see them in -- in little sculptures, and you see them in paintings. there's a whole series of paintings that clearly influenced bartholdi. one of them is liberty guiding the people which is a -- a goddess of liberty from the revolution of 1830 in france, and she's holding a -- a light above her head, and she's leading people towards freedom. and you have one after the other in the politics of france of images of a female goddess of liberty that represent the freedom that the french are looking for and never able really to find, you know. they have a series of revolutions, and then counterrevolutions, and they end up with these authoritarian governments after having revolutions. and so the image of the goddess of liberty is there to keep --

for french people who want to have a more orderly form of liberty, for them to keep in mind what an ideal of liberty might be. so all these ideas are jostling around in his head, and when bartholdi gets to the united states, he decides that his liberty needs to be a classic ancient greek or roman goddess of liberty, and it has to be -- it has to be western because it's going to be in this western power of the united states, and it's going to represent the ideal of liberty that was percolating in france but never realized in the 19th century. >> so how did things get set in motion between bartholdi investigate idea, selecting the site, starting to talk to americans? how did this monumental work of art, engineering, fund-raising get moving? >> yeah. so the first to say is that it's -- the statue of liberty was not a gift from france to

the united states. neither government had anything to do with it. neither government raised a single penny toward the statue of liberty. there was a bill in the legislature to put up the pedestal. the bill in new york state was vetoed by governor grover cleveland and then the congress voted down the appropriation of $100,000 to pay for the statue, so all the money had to be raised by private sources so bartholdi gets here, doesn't speak english. he knows nobody. the first person he goes to is the editor of a french newspaper that's published in new york. so he speaks to this french person. she says, well, you know, it's not going to do you any good to speak to me. you've got to talk to americans, and so he has a letter of introduction to sumner, the great abolitionist because bartholdi is an abolitionist. he goes to washington and meets sumner.

he has this idea about the statue of liberty and people in washington say why are you talking to us about the statue you want to build in new york? you talk to people in new york. the united states was still much, much more a set of separate entities, separate states in the middle of the 19th century, and so he just didn't get -- he didn't get any play until the centennial, until 1876. and there in philadelphia the celebration in fairmount park of the 100th anniversary of the declaration of independence, and for that bartholdi sent over the arm and the torch of the statue of liberty which he managed to cobble together some money in france, after his trip in 1871. he goes back to france and he starts to -- he comes up with his definitived mo el. starts to raise money. not easy to do and finally gets enough money to build the arm

and the torch, and it goes up during the centennial celebration in philadelphia, and zillions of people go to see it. it's the most popular attraction and the most photographed, and then bartholdi gets an idea. he says i can make some money by selling souvenirs, and so all of the kitch that we see if we go out to the stat you've liberty and go into the gift shop, bartholdi, the sculpture, even before he built the thing, he was already figuring out how to make money from souvenirs, and -- and that's actually how this fund-raising got off the ground in this country, and once philadelphia displayed the arm and torch successfully, then new york, they decided okay, we can't let this second-rate two-bit town beat us on this, and so then the torch and the arm went up in madison square here in 1877, and then a year later there was a world's fair

in paris for which bartholdi built the head of the statue of liberty, and he was a very, very shrewd promoter, and so all while he was building the statue, he had the process photographed which he could then show to journalists who got interested because this was the beginning of the era of the illustrated newspaper. and all of a sudden you could do a lithograph. the technology wasn't there to publish photographs yet, but you could do a lithograph, and you could publish it, and you could present this image that was under construction. people in france were fascinated by this, and it helped the fund-raising effort. and bartholdi said i've got the arm and the torch and now i've got the head. he let people go inside the head, climb to the top and look out the window. it's a great thing.

rud-yard kipling in his memoirs said, i was at the world's face in 1878 as a boy, and i climbed up to the top of the head of the statue of liberty. i looked out the windows and a french guy to me said you, you young english guy, you've now looked at the world through the eyes of liberty herself, and so it was things like that that -- that made the statue of liberty seem real even before it existed and allowed bartholdi to raise the money. i don't know. you should tell me if you know, this but i didn't know this before i started working on this book, but the statue of liberty was built entirely from head to toe in paris. stood in paris for two years before it was dismantled and put in 212 crates and shipped over to the united states. just one more thing to mention along those lines. when the torch and the arm got displayed in mardsion square, the "new york times" ran this really snarky editorial in which it said, well, you know, maybe

he's going to build the rest of the statue of liberty, but if he wanted to convince us that he was going to build us the statue of liberty, shouldn't he have started with the foot and a leg and a knee and build it up from the bottom, then we might be convinced? and the "new york times," i have a bunch of quotations from different "new york times" editorials because they were sort of warm and cold. they got warm mainly after it looked like philadelphia or boston might want the salttatue new york didn't end up getting it. >> right. i'm going to take a moment to go back in my own memory to what emma lazarus is doing at this point because perhaps her only encounter with the statue of liberty would have been that arm and torch in madison square park. she lived not that far away. she was a very cultured young woman, and for those who don't know much about emma lazarus, i think a lot of people probably assume that she was an immigrant

herself. that she must have lived on the lower east side and had a hard life and come over on the ship but that actually was not the case. by the time she is born in 1849, she's a fourth-generation jewish-american, so to think about that, that today even people i know a lot of my friends aren't fourth-generation americans. >> right. >> and to be born 1849 before the civil war, that she's firmly seated at the american table, but she always knows what it means to be an insider and an outsider at the same time. >> right. >> that she has wide access to social circles, intellectual circles, artistic circles, literary circles, but at the same time her jewishness is frequently commented upon. she certainly knows the trials and tribulations of jews in exile. she's a very avid student of history, of anti-semitism, of literary works such as daniel

doranda, and this has a very profound impact on her as a young women and as a writer, and by the time that statue is going up, that arm and that torch in madison square park, she's not yet positioned to be the spokesperson we would know her to be with the new colossus, but her mind is hard at work to kind of break down society and recast it in her own poetic terms, and i find that even in her very early development as a teenager, studying with the transdent lifts in emerson, she's constantly looking at these events whether it's the civil war. she might have seen the funerary casket of abraham lincoln go by her window so just as bartholdi in his imagination is thinking about the same forces that will create a new virgs of liberty and a new american model, she's hard at work in the new york scene thinking about the plight of immigrants and refugees which will crystallize in sharp relief

in the 1880s just a few years later and that she undoubtedly saw that arm and torch in madison square park and would have known these lithographs and these images of liberty, and it didn't yet mean that much to her. it wasn't until 1838 that it known comes into a moment where all of these things come together. but how are other americans and people such as mark twain per seeping the statue that had yet to be realized? what was some of the other buzz on the american scene? >> yeah. there was a fair amount of skepticism about the statue. i said the editorial in the "new york times," and there were certain religious figures who thought that the statue of liberty was a pagan image and so they -- they worried about that, and -- and there were a lot of others who just didn't understand why you would build a

classical greek goddess in new york harbor. americans in the 19th century didn't do that sort of thing. they didn't build big monuments. this was a country whose economy was just beginning to develop in the second half of the 19th century was exploding. but this was a practical place where people were incredibly hard at work building an economy from scratch, and they weren't stopping to commemorate things, and when they -- when they did, it took a long time, and it was a hard process. it took something like 40 years to build the washington monument, and this was to the greatest hero in american history, the founding father, and -- and it was clear what the washington monument was about. it was about george washington. it wasn't at all clear to americans what the statue of liberty was about, and so this is where emma came in in a way. emma really in some ways, more

than bartholdi himself, defined what the stat you've liberty would mean. bartholdi didn't have any idea, didn't occur to him that the statue of liberty would represent an open door to immigration. for him the statue of liberty represented the abolition of slavery. that's why there are chains under the foot of the statue of liberty. it represented 100 years of american order of liberty, and it represented the friendship that he hoped to see between france and the united states. immigration didn't cross his mind. >> right. >> and i think there's a great transition from her name that she was known and publicized by the french as liberty enlightening the world and this idea of the old world will shed light on to the new world and that emma changes that identity forever. we don't know the statue of liberty as much with the title of her poem "the new colossus"

but it makes great sense in the way that she reframes the statue and its meaning to be a symbol of immigration. she's one of the first people who really sets that in motion as early as 1883, and this is kind of a storm that makes great sense for her in her professi professional, emotional heritage development, that she is through seeing the -- the effects of anti-semitism, the russian programmes, the great waves of immigrants coming in 1882 and '83 who aren't finding jobs or homes in america or in new york. she goes and volunteers for the hebrew immigrant aid society. she go and this is the direct experience that we can attribute her writing "the new includesus" to, because by the time americans need to fund-raise for the pedestal, she's really positioned to be the number one

spokesperson, so tell us a little bit how that happened. >> so the americans' role is to finance the building of the pedestal. we're in the early 1880s. the statue of liberty is up in paris. it's fully paid for, and now it's our turn. we've got to come up with the money, and the money is not coming in. the fund-raising committee is not doing very well, and so one of the ideas that the fund-raising committee has is to get a bunch of prominent american artists to contribute to work, auction off that work and to use the proceeds to pay for the pedestal, and this is the origins of emma lazarus' poem. she was asked to make a contribution, and her first impulse was to say i don't do stuff like that. you know, i'm a poet. i have to wait for a muse. i can't write -- i'm not a writer for hire or even a good cause like this. i write a poem because it comes

from -- from within, and then one of her friends and esther shore quotes this in her wonderful biography of emma lazarus. one of her friends says you've been going out. emma, you've been going out to ward's island. you've been working with jewish immigrants who are suffering, who have fled a place where they have been persecuted. you're working with these people. you've come to know them. you've come to feel for them, and -- and you should then write a poem that represents their plight, and emma then understood that she could connect the plight of the jewish refugees that she had been working with to the statue of liberty, and she did that as some of the top scholars of emma lazarus, people like max kavitch. emma lazarus did this by giving the statue of liberty a voice. she makes the statue of liberty

speak. give me -- you're tired, you're poor. give me, the statue of liberty is talking. emma lazarus breathed life into this inert statue something, again, that wouldn't occur to a sculpture because that's not what sculptures do. so in that sense emma lazarus is extraordinarily important. you could argue that she's more important to our understanding of the statue of liberty than the guy who built it. >> right, and some critics such as james russell lowe even said you gave it a reason dettori and perhaps your work was more important than the sculptures, and at the same time it did forever change the message. i think through getting to know emma lazarus with our exhibition here at the museum, that it's only by knowing her evolution as an american and as a jewish-american who came to understand the plight, not only of jewish refugees but for all those in exile that there wouldn't be an easy answer for

everyone, especially in the urban centers, that she starts to really reframe the message. let's take a look. i think most people who know her poem only know those few lines, give me your tired, your poor and i learned it as a school kid singing the irving berlin song for "miss liberty" years later. as i've come to know emma i've come to know the poem a whole new way and come to the front end which sets up the second half that we know and then i'm going to ask you help us unpack this a little bit, so, of course, it's called "the new colossus." not like the brazen giant of greek fames with conquering films astride from land to land, hear at our sea wash sunset gates shall stand, a mighty woman with a torch whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name mother of exile. from her beacon hand glows