In 1865, as the American Civil War ended, French historian Édouard de Laboulaye, president of the French Anti-Slavery Society, proposed at a dinner near Versailles that France and the United States build a monument to American independence and democracy. Under Napoleon III, praising American liberty was a way to criticize French rule without saying so. Sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi reworked a design he had pitched for the Suez Canal at Port Said, Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia, which Egypt’s ruler and Ferdinand de Lesseps rejected as too costly. To avoid revolutionary imagery, Bartholdi dropped the Roman liberty cap, which Jefferson Davis had once objected to on the Capitol’s Statue of Freedom, and gave her robes, a radiate crown, and a Roman legal tablet dated July 4, 1776.

A broken shackle and chain lie at her feet, hidden under her robes, after Bartholdi abandoned sketches of her holding them aloft. Gustave Eiffel designed a flexible iron skeleton for a copper skin only 3/32 of an inch thick. The French public crowdfunded the statue, but Americans were slow to fund the pedestal until Joseph Pulitzer shamed the wealthy in the New York World and printed the names of small donors. The statue was dedicated on October 28, 1886, prompting the first ticker tape parade.

• Her torch arm stood in Madison Square Park, where visitors paid to climb to the balcony to raise funds
• Emma Lazarus, who aided refugees fleeing pogroms, wrote The New Colossus, added on a plaque in 1903
• A 1916 stained glass torch leaked water into the arm and body for decades
• The 1984 to 1986 restoration found a misaligned arm, a head two feet off center, and asbestos insulation that had failed
• Workers froze paint with liquid nitrogen, blasted tar with baking soda, replaced the iron with stainless steel, and gilded a new torch in 24 karat gold