Liberty's Torch Quotes

“From his yacht, the Mayflower, President Woodrow Wilson hit a button at five minutes to six on December 5, and “the statue bloomed into vivid brightness. The torch, which had seemed dim as a glowworm in the harbor, now beamed with fifteen 500 candlepower electric lamps so it was the brightest thing on the horizon.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“In 1890, Joseph Pulitzer, who had labored so long on Liberty’s behalf, built his World Building, just east of City Hall, next to the Brooklyn Bridge. It would be the tallest building on the planet at that time, trumping Liberty by four feet.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“The last marchers passed and General Schofield leaned over to Stone. “This is the best parade I have ever seen in New York.” The president appeared to gruffly agree.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“The form of statuary is everything, and it is nothing. It is nothing without the spirit. It is everything with the idea.” Those words, it would be claimed, were the last written by the great poet.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“It is not the gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America, but a gift of the whole people of France to the whole people of America.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“Nothing motivated New Yorkers so well as rivalry. The New York Times retorted the next day in an editorial: “[Boston] proposes to take our neglected statue of Liberty and warm it over for her own use and glory. Boston has probably again overestimated her powers. This statue is dear to us, though we have never looked upon it, and no third rate town is going to step in and take it from us. Philadelphia tried to do that in 1876, and failed. Let Boston be warned .”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“Before the lunch ended, one of the organizers promised a reporter that, in 1883, when the full construction was complete, the group would be invited for lunch in the statue’s head. They were assured they would have a staircase to aid their ascent and a telescope to survey the countryside beyond Paris from that fourteenth floor.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“In all of his agonizing visits to Vanves, Auguste Bartholdi would have spent a great deal of time staring at Charles. Across from him, hour after hour, Auguste Bartholdi had nothing to do but observe the face of the once-gifted brother he had loved.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“Perhaps Jeanne-Émilie served as the model for the body, but someone equally significant would have served for the face. He tended to use people important to him”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“But Bartholdi never once confirmed that the face of Liberty was indeed that of his mother. When one takes a closer look, Liberty’s face does not resemble his mother at all. His”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“but then William Vanderbilt stepped forward to pay the entire expense. The U.S. Navy bought a ship in Egypt expressly to move the piece.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“Congress passed the measure, and Grant signed the bill on his last full day in office, giving General William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the U.S. Army, the opportunity to choose which island.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“In this first appeal, the notion of French amity was pushed into the background. The group explained that Liberty would be a functional monument to capitalism, “an impressive ornament to the entrance of the commercial Metropolis of the Union.” She would also serve as a “beacon or a signal station.” French-American friendship was listed third.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“Almost all of the newspapers printed Laboulaye’s request for what he called “The Monument to Independence” (The”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“Not only would the statue be a tribute to French-American friendship; it was “intended to do honor to the glorious memory of our fathers.” Laboulaye promised: “At night, a luminous aureola, projected from the head, will radiate on the far flowing waves of the Ocean.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“took fresh eyes to view the fourteen-acre Bedloe’s Island as promising for anything but oysters. Isaac Bedlow, a Dutchman, had acquired the island in 1667. It changed hands again before being bought for government use as a pesthouse and quarantine station in 1750. In 1814, federal authorities built the star-shaped Fort Wood there, housing three hundred men and seventy guns. For many years, it was the site of all federal executions. The last one had taken place on July 13, 1860, when an infamous pirate, Albert Hicks, was hanged for murdering a captain and two boys on an oyster sloop. Boats crammed against the shore to get a glimpse. Anyone older than twenty in New York would have associated the island with such gory events.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“Twelve years later, in 1916, Joseph Pulitzer’s son Ralph managed to raise enough money to build a generator that could permanently light Liberty at night, though she still wouldn’t serve as a functional lighthouse.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“What Bartholdi and Butler and their backers argued was that the idea of Liberty was not necessarily tied to immigration, the very link that had made Emma Lazarus’s poem so powerful. Lazarus had died of Hodgkin’s disease the year after the unveiling. Even before her death, the “New Colossus” poem had been lost from memory. It would take her friend Georgina Schuyler to independently raise funds in 1903 to get the poem placed on a bronze tablet in the statue’s pedestal. No one even noticed that gesture until the fiftieth anniversary of the statue, when a Slovenian journalist brought it to public attention.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“In 1890 Bartholdi told him that he had bigger plans for Bedloe’s Island. He wrote to Butler: “My idea has always been that it would be in the future a kind of Pantheon for the glories of American Independence.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“By two o’clock, two hundred steamer sailboats cruised near the island, some so packed with people that they listed from side to side.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“Even the older Wall Street workers were pushing the younger ones away from the windows to hurl the tape. That made the Liberty pageant the city’s first ticker-tape parade.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“VICTOR HUGO Workers of the Franco-American Union Fragment of the colossal statue of Liberty presented to the illustrious apostle of Peace, Freedom, Progress VICTOR HUGO the day he honored with his visit the work of the Franco-American Union. November 29, 1884”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“Inside the box, the committee had placed copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, a list of the Grand Lodge of Masons of the State, the daily New York papers, General Washington’s farewell address, nineteen bronze medals representing the presidents succeeding Washington, proofs of the United States coins of 1881, and a medal commemorating the Egyptian obelisk’s placement in Central Park.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“Bartholdi estimated that about three hundred thousand people visited the Gaget studio while the statue was being worked on, or later, as Liberty waited for America to receive her. Bartholdi kept her standing whole in the courtyard, her bright orangey copper turning a slightly darker brownish red with the weather. He used the income from the ticket purchases to finance the statue’s completion. Liberty was now ready for her passage to America.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“With the arm moving slightly in the breeze, you would walk through the doorway into the clear air and see all of Paris below.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“You entered the statue through the back foot, which was tilted up in the act of stepping forward. A temporary wooden staircase would carry you up to her chest, where you then either climbed to the head, or made an intrepid journey up the high staircase branching into the arm and the torch’s balcony.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“There was only one problem. In the course of the Bartholdis’ stay, La Farge discovered that Bartholdi and this wife were not in fact married. Jeanne-Émilie had been a model, it seemed, and Bartholdi feared his mother would not consent to the marriage had he told her he wanted to wed such a woman.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty

“America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.”
― Elizabeth Mitchell, Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build The Statue of Liberty