look closer

Bartholdi was inside the torch waiting for a signal. A boy misread it, the flag came off the face early, and the speech was lost in the noise.

It rained on 28 October 1886, and the harbor was full of fog and gun smoke, so most of the estimated million people who turned out for the unveiling of Liberty Enlightening the World never actually saw it happen. The statue was a French gift 21 years in the making: Bartholdi's copper skin hung on an iron frame engineered by Gustave Eiffel, paid for by French public subscription, shipped in 350 pieces in 214 crates, and stalled for years on the American side because nobody would fund the pedestal until Joseph Pulitzer ran a newspaper campaign that raised the money from 120,000 small donors, most giving under a dollar. The ceremony went wrong in the way ceremonies do. Bartholdi was up in the torch waiting for a signal to drop the French tricolor covering the face; a boy misread the cue, the flag came down early, and the guns and whistles and the crowd erupted straight through Senator Evarts' speech, which nobody heard the end of. President Cleveland accepted the statue and promised the light would never fail. It failed regularly; as a lighthouse the torch was useless and the Lighthouse Board gave it up within 16 years. The sharpest thing said that day was said from the water. No women were permitted on the island for the ceremony except Bartholdi's wife and the granddaughter of Ferdinand de Lesseps, so the New York State Woman Suffrage Association chartered a boat, pushed as close to the island as the police would allow, and shouted their protest through the salutes: that a 150-foot woman was being erected as Liberty in a republic where no woman could vote. The newspapers reported it as a curiosity. Emma Lazarus had written her sonnet three years earlier to raise pedestal money, and it was not read at the unveiling; the lines about huddled masses were cast in bronze and fixed inside the pedestal in 1903, 16 years after she died, and only then did the statue slowly become an immigration symbol rather than a monument to a republican alliance. 12 million people came through Ellis Island past her. Edward Moran painted the day itself while the smoke was still in the air: the torch arm up in the weather, the boats packed and dressed, and the face barely visible in the fog.