His design to fruition. Despite woes and hurdles, he would create what he would call a colossus that would stun the world. This event is from the National Archives. It is a little under one hour. Good afternoon. I am the archivist of the United States. It is a pleasure to welcome you to the theater at the National Archives this afternoon. A special welcome to those of you joining us by youtube and a very special welcome to our cspan viewers. Today was supposed to have been a national day of celebration in john adams vision, that is. It was on this day in 1776 the Continental Congress approved the resolution that declared the United States a free nation, no longer part of the british empire. Adams believed the second day of july, 1776, will be the most memorable in the history of america. As it turned out, we now celebrate the fourth of july with the declaration of independence. This afternoon, Elizabeth Mitchell will tell us about another symbol of our independence, the statue of liberty. Lady liberty stands in the new york harbor as a beacon for those who come to the shores of the search of the american dream. Our guest will tell us how lady liberty came to our shores. I would like to tell you about some exciting things coming up at the National Archives in the next few days. On friday, our annual independence Day Celebration will begin at 10 00 a. M. On the constitution avenue steps facing the mall. The highlight will be a dramatic reading of the declaration of independence by reenactors portraying thomas jefferson, john adams, benjamin franklin, and ned hector. From 11 00 until 4 00, we will have family activities. Join us for living history and fun on the fourth of july. It is the best place to watch the parade. Next tuesday, july 8 at noon in this theater, we welcome the author who will discuss his book on world war iis great forgotten battlegrounds. The book recounts the many battles in the pacific that you probably have not heard about. If you want to know more about these and all of our upcoming programs, there are copies of the monthly calendar in the lobby as well as signup sheets where you can receive it. Another way to get more involved in the National Archives is to become a member of the foundation that supports all of our educational and outreach activities. There are applications for membership in the lobby also. Our guest this afternoon, Elizabeth Mitchell, is the author of two nonfiction books luo three strides before the threethe books, strides before the wire, the ness of horseracing and the revenge of the bush dynasty. She also recently published nonfiction works about the first female detective in the United States. Her freelance writing has appeared in the wall street journal and the chicago tribune. She was also the executive editor of george and spin. She is the cofounder of read this, the group that delivers books to soldiers abroad and children. This summer, she is teaching writing in the Columbia University summer session and today is here to talk about her third book, libertys torch the great adventure to build the statue of liberty. Please welcome Elizabeth Mitchell. [applause] i would very much like to thank the National Archives for having me here. Working on a book like this, you cannot bless the archivist enough because they are the ones who beyond any engine searches will find you materials you would never find. They keep them in such great condition. I cannot say enough about their work. Im going to start by telling you how i came to this story. I think i started where most people start, which is with the idea that the french government had given the statue of liberty to the american government. I grew up with that story. It was never refuted. I was at the New York Public Library archives. In their manuscript division, i was researching something else, but i found they had the diary of Frederic Auguste bartholdi. It was from 1871 when he came to pitch the statue of liberty. It turns out he was not coming under government auspices. He was just this individual who had the idea to create a massive statue. He came to america liking the idea of the american experiment of building a strong democracy, a constitutional government, but he was not exactly in love with america itself. He certainly did not know anyone here. He was working off of letters of introduction. That shocked me. It led me to wonder who exactly was Frederic Auguste bartholdi. It turns out that at the time he was 36 years old, he was a middletier statue maker p. D. He was not extremely famous. He had come from a town where much of it still looks like this, a storybook town on the border of france and germany. It is on the french side. It was a town that had some status because it was one of the capitals of the region but still it was fairly small. He was able to have very big dreams in this town. This was his house. His parents were wellconnected. When he was two years old, his father died, and his mother was left to raise Frederic Auguste and her son charles. She had great ambitions for them. She was educated and an admirer of the arts. She wrote a letter to one of his uncles when frederic was a little boy and said, i see in this boy, who is less than three years old, the signs of strong character and will. It is going to be a challenge to shape that will without breaking it, but i see the seeds of a man of great vision. That was kind of remarkable because it held true through the rest of his life. It was interesting she saw it then. She decided the only way for him to make his mark on world, and the same for his brother charles, was to move him to paris. Paris at the time was often struck with turmoil. There were revolutions rolling through all the time. It was worth going because that was where, if you had a big idea, it was going to have enough support where if you make connections that might make it happen. Very early on, she started putting him up in art studios and arranging for art instructions from some of the great artists of the day. This she got for him when he was still in his early 20s. Here he is an older man, but this was the studio in which he worked. He was from the early stage a statue maker. He was not trying to be a sculptor. He wanted to be the maker of statues. That required business connections and trying to charm people into donating money to get these things made. When he was still a young man, he entered a piece into the salon of 1855. He got it accepted into the salon. The salon was the place where people showed their art and tried to create a career. He had done a statue of a war hero. He got a commission at the shockingly young age of 19 and in fact pushed aside more established artists to get that commission. I think a lot has to do with his mothers campaigning. He won a thirdplace prize for that statue. He had made it one inch taller than the doorway of the exhibition hall, so it had to be outside. Because it was outside, it got the attention and envy of his peers. He must have learned at that point the benefit of doing a big thing. From that, he gets rewarded with a trip to go to egypt. He went with another artist who was more established. They went off. It was kind of a lark. It was an exotic place to go. It was not exactly dangerous, but it was unusual. Bartholdi decided to teach himself photography. Photography was very new. He learned the craft. He decided to photograph all of the monuments he saw, the sphinxes, and also normal life. He became enchanted in the country. He is on that side dressed in the native garb. There was a lot of that among this group. While he was there, he became struck by a few things about egypt. First of all, the sphinxes and the pyramids. He was amazed by these because they almost seemed to embody eternity. To us they might wear away somewhere down the line, but they would stand for all these millennia. He was someone who i think had a sense of the fleeting nature of life. He lost his father when he was two. When he was born, he was not the first Frederic Auguste bartholdi in the family. There had been another son who lived for a brief time and died, and he had the same name. He had seen his country rocked by one turmoil after another. Seeing these things in egypt that could last for all this time was very impressive to him. He came away from that trip saying he wanted to create if he got an idea big enough a colossus that would stun the world. The other thing going on in egypt was the suez canal was being built. The boat he went on to get to egypt had ferdinand on the same boat, and ferdinand was the man who decided he wanted to create this thing. What an amazing creation this was. It was digging 100 miles through egyptian desert to connect these two seas so you could cut the trip from europe to india and asia down by 2. 5 months. You would not have the risk of being destroyed around the horn of africa. That was happening. It was this age of magnificent creations, people trying to do things of great daring, so bartholdi was very influenced by this. He wanted to create a colossus. This is an artist rendition of the colossus of rhodes. The colossus of rhodes was supposed to stand according to history it was a monumental figure celebrating the god apollo. A sort of thank you for the gods intervention in a particular battle. It was supposedly in the harbor of rhodes and had been a wonder of the world. Bartholdi wanted to make that, but he wanted to make that for egypt. This is bartholdis design for the suez canal in egypt. This was the original place he wanted to put it. To me, that looks a lot like the statue of liberty. [laughter] this is supposed to be a slave woman. The kedi, the ruler at the time, had officially abolished slavery, so it was supposed to commemorate the fact he had done this. The headdress is a little lower, but it is the same drapes and torch. E, still the bartholdi designs this. He goes back to egypt a few years later. He places the model of this in front of the leader. He takes a look at it and seems unimpressed. He says i would like the light to come out of her head as opposed to the torch. Bartholdi said yes, that sounds good. Although he said in a letter to his mother it would not be as good, but he did not want to argue the point. The kedi was not impressed. He was into modernity. This was not a modern design. The suez canal is being built. You are moving mountains and this man is coming with a roman statue to put in the harbor. He rejected this idea. Bartholdi goes back to france. It is rocked by the war. He serves in the national guard. He was influenced by garibaldi, who stepped in to try to help the friend. Garibaldi was a flamboyant character. There are interesting things about their relationship. It went through half admiring the man, half worrying about the man. He was too old to fight in the war. When the war ended, the french were defeated. They had to give away the territory in which komar is located. Bartholdi had to make the decision to stay and become a german citizen or leave. He decided to leave. He decided to go back to paris where he had his studio. When he gets back to paris, his studio is riddled with bullets. All the windows had been blown out. Many buildings in paris were smoldering. The week before, it was bloody week. In one week, 10,000 parisians were killed in the street. In fact, when he was there, people were still burying bodies in the parks and under the paving stones. It was a fight between the left group in paris and the government forces. They had finally had this moment of reckoning that lasted this week. Bartholdi comes into the city, just gets what he needs, and gets on a boat and comes to america to pitch his idea, which i think shows remarkable resilience. Also, it is almost odd. He redesigns his statue. Over there, we have the one for egypt. Here is his new rendition for america. He came to america. Like i said before, he did not know anyone here. He had letters of introduction. He arrived in new york. At the time, this is what new york looked like at 5th avenue. And 28th street. This was a few years before he arrived, but it did not change much during the intervening six years. He originally thought he had a few ideas about the statue. He liked the islands in the harbor when he first came in, but he also thought it was a good thing to put in central park or prospect park. He went to meet with the designers of those parks. In his diaries, he refers to them seeming to be wary of him. They wont exactly talk to him about his project. You have to wonder if it is because they did not want this massive statue in the middle of their park. If you think about it at the , time, the biggest building that was still proposed and not finished was the dakota. And the dakota the top would , have just reached to libertys big toe, so there would have been this thing hanging over new york. Anyhow he realized that was , probably not going to work. On the first trip, he did go out island to what is now , called Liberty Island. He met with the general and talks about a discouraging day. You can imagine how a general would feel about having this random french person come to his port and start telling him how he is going to build this enormous woman. In his frustration, he is getting no traction to speak of. He heads out west. He was accompanied by his faithful assistant, this man, simon marie. It is sad because we dont know very much about this man other than he seemed to be beloved by everyone he met, and he was truly dedicated to bartholdi. Theres not much we have except things like this. This is the photograph together at niagara falls. They go out all the way. He keeps track of everything he sees. He meets Brigham Young. At first, he loves Brigham Young and thinks he is a noble man and amazingly bright. That is what he thought he would be making a bust of Brigham Young. At the end of the visit, Brigham Young says i am busy and can you come back the next day. He says he can go to blazes and gives up on him entirely and is annoyed by him. He goes to san francisco. He goes to the chinese quarter. He goes to see the redwoods of california. He sees politicians hammering it out and has interesting scenes of that. He is swept away by the landscape of the west, the monumental cliffs and chasms the at the trains have to go over, just the ingenuity of making the se train tracks. Something out there in america made him a believer, lets say. He comes back to the east coast. He realizes he does not have much to go on. He does not have much support, but he is going to try his best to get this made. He goes back to france and has a few other projects that he is working on. He gets the services of the iron works. He starts to have a strategy of how they will get this done. They had to fund raise in france because they had to get it started somewhere. His idea is he will have the french raise half the money and the u. S. Raise the other half. The french will probably all rally because it will be this great tribute to the relationship between france and america. The french have a fundraising dinner at the beginning and it goes away. He does not know what he will do to raise money. He has to come up with various schemes. He will have operas, a concert. Theres going to be this 100 anniversary of the country and the world expedition was going to be held in philadelphia. It would be the first world expo in america. He wants to build the hand with the torch and exhibit it there. This picture was taken at one of the happier moments of the creation of this. One of the more unhappy moments is hes getting it ready and needs it to go with him to philadelphia. He is leaving in may. It has to be there for sure on july 4. The philadelphians have already made a pedestal for it. Hes about to go and hears the plaster form they used to make the statue has toppled over and cracked. They have to start the whole thing over again. He was in quite a sweat that he would have nothing to show, so he goes to philadelphia and waits for his hand. Eventually, the hand arrives. It is at the end of the world expo. Luckily, the weather had gotten nicer. He was able to get people to come by and take a look at the torch. He thought this would make americans crazy with excitement. Instead, they were more suspicious. They said the drawings we have seen show this big woman and there are three people standing at the base of this. Is there no enthusiasm in france for the concept . Second of all, if it took that much money and effort to make just that part, how much more would it take to make the entire woman . He does not get the fundraising he is hoping for. He ships this to new york to sit in Madison Square park hoping that will make things happen for him. He realizes at first people are interested because it is so big. Over time, they lose interest and it blends in with the scenery. The difference between when it was here and people were lining up to see it and new york was that in new york, it was not open to visitors. Bartholdi understood people want a thrill. They want to fun. They dont want to just look at something and admire it. He decides he has to use it as a way to raise money. In france, he goes to the greatest theater and opera designer in paris. He says he wants to make the harbor of new york and paris. So it is a diorama. Dioramas were the main entertainment for people before movies came around. You would walk into a room and suddenly feel like you were dining with cleopatra or had gone from summer to winter in a minute. People thought they were the most fantastic way to spend your evening. He sets one up that looks like the new york harbor. He really thrilled people. They felt they walked in and could feel the sea breezes. There are people talking yankee fashion near you. You feel you are there. They flocked to that. They paid the ticket price. A lot of money was raised through this particular endeavor. Then he went out and set up the head at the paris expo in 1878. This was one of those magical things that made people realize he was doing something special. At this point, a few visitors came to see it, including Joseph Pulitzer. It was a key thing he saw this head at the 1878 world expo. Here is the question of who is the face of liberty. The story goes around that it is the face of his mother. Some places say he said it w