Statue of Liberty, the first hundred years

Christian Blanchet, Bertrand Dard

Distributed by Houghton Mifflin Company, hardcover, illustrated.


The first truly com­prehensive history of America's most compelling symbol, STATUE OF LIBERTY: THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS is the result of more than three years of exhaus­tive research.
The French authors, CHRIS­TIAN BLANCHET and BERTRAND DARD, searched out original sources, interviewed over one thousand people, and combed through over a hundred museums, collec­tions, and libraries to put together this definitive and magnificently illustrated centenary book. Here is the little-known story of the statue's origins and the people who brought it to completion - such people as Edouard de Laboulaye, an ardent French patriot and judicial theorist who wanted to give the United States a gift that would both commemorate a friendship and make a political statement, and - Auguste Bartholdi, the visionary sculptor who gave form to the idea with a colossal statue of a woman standing an unprece­dented 151 feet high. A consummate entrepreneur, politician, and fund raiser, Bartholdi almost single-handedly sold the idea of his statue to a skeptical and at times unfriendly American public.

Here, too, are such lesser-known figures as Colone! Charles P. Stone, who built the pedestal for Liberty in a harbor where he had formerly been imprisoned, and the members of the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty, whose largely un­heralded work raised the then enormous sum of $200,000 of the total $300,000 needed-the greatest fund-raising cam­paign of the nineteenth century.
The actual construction of the statue drew on the most modern developments of technology and industfy. Bartholdi re­cruited Gustave Eiffel, an engineer whose ingenious solutions to the problems posed by the scale of the project helped make his reputation as the most innovative and imaginative builder of the age.-
Nor does the story stop with the comple­tion and the inauguration of the statue on October 28, 1886. Improvements to the island, attempts to light the monument properly, and efforts to accommodate the increasing numbers of visitors mark the statue's gradual transformation from memorial to shrine.
The narrative ends with the exploration of the statue as symbol, how its vari­ous meanings - of liberty, of welcome for the oppressed, of America itself - have evolved and been incorporated in every­thing from heroic paintings to cartoons, souvenir ashtfays, and advertisements for champagne.

BERNARD WEISBERGER, who wrote the English narrative based on the French text, is a historian and the author of four­teen books, including the American Heritage History of the American People.