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Hundreds of people worked to build the Statue of Liberty, which took 21 years to complete.
Here are some of the most important.
Charlotte Bartholdi ▶
Charlotte Bartholdi was the mother of the man who designed the statue. He wanted Liberty to be an older woman of great dignity, so he made the statue look like her.
◀ Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi
Bartholdi showed artistic talent from a young age. He studied architecture, drawing, and painting with the best teachers. So it was no surprise when he was asked to build a monument to celebrate American liberty. Bartholdi had created large sculptures before. One of them was of the Marquis de Lafayette, a wealthy Frenchman who fought on the side of the colonists during the American Revolution. It stands today in New York City. Bartholdi died of tuberculosis in 1904.
Alexandre Gustave Eiffel ▶
Eiffel didn’t think his work on the Statue of Liberty’s framework was anything special. Others thought it was a work of genius. Eiffel probably felt this way because—unlike the ironwork on his bridge designs—people who looked at the statue couldn’t see what he’d done. In 1885, he was asked to build what became his most famous work, the Eiffel Tower. It was the centerpiece for the Paris World’s Fair of 1889. It was also the world’s tallest building until 1931, when the Empire State Building was built.
Richard Morris Hunt ▶
Hunt was the first American to study architecture at the world-famous École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was known for building mansions for the rich and famous of New York. Hunt was paid $1,000 to design Liberty’s pedestal. He gave the money to the statue’s building fund.
◀ Édouard René Laboulaye
Laboulaye, who came up with the idea of giving the U.S. a gift on the 100th anniversary of its independence, was a historian, professor, and politician. He hired Bartholdi to design the statue and was president of the Franco-American Union. As a professor, he was the first ever to teach a course on the U.S. Constitution at a French college. Sadly, he died before the Statue of Liberty was unveiled.
◀ William Maxwell Evarts
Evarts was chairman of the American Committee of the Franco-American Union. It raised money for the pedestal. Evarts formally presented the Statue of Liberty to the American public at Bedloe’s Island on October 28, 1886.
Emma Lazarus ▶
Lazarus was a New Yorker of Portuguese-Jewish descent. She was an outspoken activist for the fair treatment of Jewish immigrants in the U.S. Four years after writing “The New Colossus” for the Pedestal Art Loan Exhibit, she died of cancer, in 1887. She was 38 years old. When the poem was written, it was not well known. But three years later, when other poems about Liberty were getting noticed, hers rose to the top. Still, it wasn’t until Lazarus’s friend Georgina Schuyler came across the poem that it was brought to the public’s attention. That led to it being placed inside the pedestal in 1903.
◀ Joseph Pulitzer
Pulitzer was an immigrant from Hungary. He fought for the Union army during the Civil War. In 1878, he bought two newspapers, the Saint Louis Post and the Dispatch. In 1883, he bought the New York World newspaper. Pulitzer hired Bartholdi to build a statue, Washington and Lafayette, which was Pulitzer’s gift to France—a thank you for the Statue of Liberty.
