to the national archives this afternoon and a special honor to welcome those of you joining us by youtube, and a very special welcome to our c-span viewers. today was supposed to have been a national day of celebration, in john adams' vision, it is. it was on this day in 1776 that the continental congress declared the united states a free nation, no longer part of the british empire. adams believed that the second day of july, 1776, will be the most memorable in the history of america. as it turned out, we now se celebrate the day the 4th of july that congress told the world of its brave action with the declaration of independence. this afternoon, elizabeth mitchell will tell us about another symbol of our independence, the statue of liberty. she stands as a beacon for those who come to our shores in search of the american dream. our guest will reveal how lady liberty herself came to our shores. before we get into this afternoon's program, i would like to tell you about 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 steps facing the mall. it will be a dramatic reading of the declaration of independence by re-enactors. then from 11:00 to 4:00, we'll have a program of family activities. come and join us for some living history and fun on the 4th of july. and it is the best place to watch the parade. next tuesday, july 8th, at noon here in this theater, we welcome alem rems who will discuss his book. the book recounts the many battles in the pacific that you probably haven't 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 sign-up sheets where you can receive it physically or virtually, and another way to get more involved in the national archives is to become a member of the foundation for the national archives. the foundation supports all of our education and outreach activities. and there are applications for membership in the lobby also. our guest this afternoon, elizabeth mitchell, is the author of two nonfiction brooks, three strides before the wire, the dark and beautiful world of horse racing, and w, the revenge ofdynasty. she also published novella length nonfiction about the first female detective in the united states. her freelance writing has appeared in the wall street journal, chicago tribune, gq, glamour, and the nation. she was also executive editor of george, and before that, feat e featurfeatur features editor at spin. she's the co-founder of read this, volunteering books to troops aprbroad, children in poverty, and those without reading. today, she's here to talk about her third book, liberty's torch, the great adventure to build the statue of liberty. please welcome elizabeth mitchell. hello. how are you? first of all, i would very much like to thank the national archives for having me here. when you're working on aback like this, you just can't bless the archivists enough because they are the ones who, you know, beyond any engine searches will find you materials that you would never find, and they keep them in such great condition, and i can't say enough about their work. i'm going to start the talk by just telling you how i came to this story because i think i started where probably most people started, which is with the idea in my head that the french government had given the statue of liberty to the american government. i feel that i grew up with that story. and you know, it was never refuted. i was at the new york public library archives and 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 america to pitch the statue of liberty. so i started looking at the diary, and it turns out he wasn't coming under government auspices. he was just this individual who had the idea to create a massive statue, and he came to america, you know, liking the idea of the american experiment, building a strong democracy, a constitutional government. but he wasn't exactly in love with america itself. and he certainly didn't know anyone here. he was working just off letters of introduction. so that really shocked me. and so it led me to wonder, who exactly was frederic auguste bartholdi? so it turns out he was at the time he was 36 years old, he was a middle-tier statue maker. he wasn't extremely famous. he the come from the town of clemar. this is actually a very recent photograph, but much of the town still looks like this. it's a story book looking town on the border between -- the border of france and germany. it's on the french side. it was a town that had some status because it was part of the -- it was one of the capitol of the region, but still it was fairly small, and he was able, though, to have very big dreams in this town. this was his house. his parents were pretty well connected. but when he was 2 years old, his father died, and his mother was left to raise just frederick auguste and her son charles. and she had great ambitions for him. she herself was educated. she very much was an admirer of the arts. so she wrote a letter to one of his uncles when frederic was a little boy and said i see in this boy, he's less than 3 years old, the signs of strong character and strong will. and it's going to be a challenge to shape that will without breaking it. but i see the seeds of a man of, you know, sort of great vision. so that was kind of remarkable because it held true through the rest of his life, and it was interesting that she saw it then, but she decided that the only way for him to really make his mark on the world and the same with his brother charles, was to move him to paris. now, paris at the time was often struck with turmoil. there were revolutions kind of rolling through all the time. but it was worth going because that's also where you had a big idea, it was going to have enough support. you could make the connections that might make it happen. now, 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 actually she got for him when he was still in his early 20s. here he's an older man, but this is the studio in which he worked. and so he was, from an early stage, a statue maker. he wasn't trying to be a sculptor, exactly. he wasn wanted to be ithe makerf statues. that required all sorts of 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, or he got accepted into the salon. the salon was the place where people showed their art and possibly tried to create a career. he had done a statue that was of a war hero. he got the commission at the very, you know, shockingly young age of 19, and in fact, pushed aside other more established artists to get that commission, and i think a lot of it had to do with his mother's campaigning, but because of that, he won a third place prize for that statue, he had made it one inch basically taller than the doorway of the exhibition hall so it had to be outside. because it was outside, it got the attention and also the envy of his peers. but so he must have learned at that point, the first benefit of being -- of doing a big thing. so from that, he gets basically rewarded with a trip to go to egypt. and he went with another artist who was more established, jerome, who is here, and they went off, kind of a lark. you know, an exotic place to go. it wasn't exactly dangerous. but it was unusual. and bartholdi decided to teach himself photography. photography waz very, very new. and but he learned the craft, and he decided to photograph all of the monuments he saw, the sphinxes and on, and also to photograph normal life there, and then he became completely enchanted in the country. here you see him, he's over there on that side, dressed in the native garb. there was a lot of that among this group. but 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 were, he felt they almost embodied eternity. to us, they might wear away somewhere down the line, but they would stand for all of these millennia, and he was something who i think had a real sense of the fleeting nature of life. lost his father when he was 2. he actually when he was born was not the first frederic auguste bartholdi in the family. there had been another son who had lived for a brief period of time and then died, and he had the same ganame. and then he had seen his country rocked by one turmoil after the other. seeing these things in egypt that could last 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, he would create a colossus that would stun the world. the other thing that was going on was the suez canal was being built. the boat he went on to get to egypt had the man who had decided who had wanted to create this thing, and 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 two and a half months. you wouldn't have the risk of being, you know, destroyed down here around the horn of africa. and so that was happening. and it was this age of magnificent creations, people trying to do things, great daring, and so bartholdi was very influenced by this, too. so he decided he wanted to create a colossus. this is an artist rendition of the colossus of rhodes. it was supposed to stand, according to, you know, histories of the time, or after, but around the time, that it was a monumental figure celebrating the god apollo and sort of thank you for the god's intervention in a particular battle, and it supposedly was in the harbor of rhodes and had this, you know, great statue, and it had been a wonder of the world. so bartholdi wanted to make that, but he wanted to make it for egypt, so this is actually bartholdi's design for the suez canal in egypt. and this was the original place that he wanted to put what, i mean, to me, that looks an awful lot like the statue of liberty. this is supposed to be a slave woman because the ruler at the time had officially abolished slavery. it was supposed to commemorate the fact he had done this. and you know, the headdress is a little lower, but it's still a same draped figure, still a torch. so bartholdi designs this. he goes back to egypt a few years later. he meets with the leader. he placed the model down in front of him. he takes a look at it and he seems very unimpressed. he said, well, you know, i would like the light to come out of her head as opposed to the torch. he said, yes, yes, it sound good. although in his let toor his mother, he said, it wouldn't be as good but i didn't want to argue the point. the ceti was not impressed. he was into modarouernty. you're in a place where the suez canal is being build, you're creating dredging machines that can move mountains and this man is coming with basically like an almost roman statue to put in the harbor, so he rejected this idea. now, bartholdi goes back to france, france is rocked by the franco prussian war. bartholdi served in the national guard. he also served as a decamp to gar abaldy who was the italian mercenary who stepped in to help the war, and he was a flamboyant kaerk character, and there's interesting things about their relationship and the back and forth they went through, half admiring the man, half thinking he was too old to fight the war, and when the war ended, the french were defeated,/zzxz4id had to give away territory. bartholdi had to make the decision, you stay and become a german citizen, or you have to leave. he decided to leave. he decided to go back to paris where he had his studio. when he gets to paris, his studio is riddled with bullets, all the windows have been blown out. and many of the buildings inn- paris were smoldering. it had been the week before what is called bloody week. in one week, 10,000 parisians were killed in the streets, and in fact, when he was there basically, people are still burying the bodies in the parks and under the paving stones. it was a fight between the left group in paris and then this government forces, and they had finally had this moment of reckoning that lasts this week. so bartholdi comes into the city, just gets what he needs, and then he gets on a boat and comes to america to pitch his idea, which i think shows kind of remarkable resilience and also it's almost odd. so he redesigns his statue so over there, we have the one for egypt, and here is his new rendition for america. but he came to america, and like i said, before he didn't know anyone really here, he had these letters of introduction. he arrived in new york. at that time, this is what new york looked like at fifth avenue and 28th street. this is a few years before he arrived, but it hadn't -- didn't change that much in the intervening years, six years. he originally thought, actually, the statue -- he had a few ideas. he did like the little island out in the harbor when he first came in, but he also thought it was possibly a good thing to put in central park or to put in prospect park. so he went to meet with the designers of those parks. and in his diaries, he refers to it being, you know, them seeming to be wary of him, and there's, you know, a weird -- they won't exactly talk to him about his project. and you have to wonder, was it because they didn't really want this massive statue in the middle of their park? because if you think about it, at the time, the biggest building that was still proposed and notdakota. and the dakota, the top of it would have just reached to liberty's big toe. there would be this thing hanging, you know, over new york. so anyhow, he realized, you know, that probably wasn't going to work. on the first trip, he actually did go out to the island, bedlow island, which is now called liberty island. he met with a general there and he talks about a very discouraging day there, but also you can imagine how a general would, you know, how yod wufeel about having this random french person come to his fort and start telling him how he's going to build this enormous woman. so anyhow, in his frustration, he's getting no traction really to speak of. he heads out west. and he was accompanied by his very faithful assistant. this man, simon marie, and it's sort of sad because we don't know very much about this man other than he seemed to be beloved by everyone he met. and he was truly dedicated to bartholdi, but there's not much we have accept things like this. this is their photograph together at niagara falls, and they go out all the way, you know, he keeps track of everything he sees. he meets with brigham young. at first, he loved him, he th k thinks he's a very noble man and amazingly bright. he think he's going to make a bust. by the end, brigham young said i'm a little busy, can you come back? he said, he can go to blazes and gives up entirely on him. he goes to san francisco, goes to the chinese quarter. he goes to see the redwoods of california. he sees politicians, the republicans and the democrats hammering it out and has interesting scenes of that. he is completelyswept away by the landscape of the west, the monumental, you know, the cliffs and you know, the chasms that the trains have to go over and just the ingenuity of making the train tracks. so something out there in america really made him a believer, let's say. so he comes back to the east coast, and he realizes he doesn't have much to go on. he doesn't have much support. but he's going to try his best to get this thing made. so he goes back to france. he has a few other projects he's working on, but he gets the services of iron works, and starts to have a strategy for how they're going to get this thing done. they have to fund raise in france because they have to get it started somewhere, so his idea is that he's going to have the french raise half the money and the u.s. raise the other half. and it will, you know, the french will probably all rally because it will be this great tribute to the relationship between france and america, but actually, the french, they have a great fund-raising dinner at the beginning and then it just goes away. he doesn't know really what he's going to do to raise money, so he has to come up with various schemes. he'll have operas, concerts and he's headed to the fact in 1876, there's going to be this 100th anniversary of the country, the u.s., and the world exposition was going to be held in philadelphia. he wants to build the hand with the torch and exhibit it there. now, this is a situation that was taken at one of the happier moments for the creation of this. one of the more unhappy moments is he's getting it ready. he needs it to go with him to philadelphia. he's leaving in may. it's got to be there for sure on july 4th. the philadelphians have already made a pedestal for it. he's just about to go and he hears that the plaster form they used to actually make the statue has toppled over as they're moving it and cracked. and they have to start the whole thing over again. so 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, but it's at the very end of the whole world expo. but luckily, the weather had gotten a little nicer. he was able to get people to come by and take a look at the torch. but he had thought this would make americans crazy with exc e exciteme excitement. instead, they were more suspicious. they said, first of all, the drawings we have seen have shown this big woman and there's three people standing at the base of it. is there no enthusiasm over in france for even 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? so he doesn't get the fund-raising that he's hoping for. he ships this up to new york to sit in madison square park, hoping that would make things happen for him. but what he realizes is when it's in madison square park, at first, people are interested because it's so big, but over time, they kind of lose interest. it just blends in with the scenery. the difference between when it was here and people were sort of lining up to see it and up in new york is that in new york, it wasn't open to visitors. and so bartholdi certainly understood people want a thrill. they want fun. they don't want to just look at something and admire it, so he decides he's got to use this as a way to raise money. in france, he goes to the greatest opera designer, theater designer in paris and says that he wants to make the harbor of new york in paris. so it's a diorama. they were the main entertainment for people before movies came around, and what you would do is you would walk into a room and suddenly, you would feel like you were dining with cleopatra or, you know, you had gone from summer to winter in a minute. and people thought they were just, you know, the most fantastic way to spend your evening. so he sets one up that looks like the new york harbor, and he really thrilled people. they felt like they walked in and they could feel the sea breezes and they say there's people talking yankee fashion near you. you feel like you're there. and so 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. and there again, this was one of those magical things that made people realize, you know, that he was doing something special. and at this point, a few visitors came to see it, including joseph pulitzer, who we'll get to later, but the key thing that he actually saw this head near the 1878 world expo. now, here's the question of who is the face of liberty? now, there's a story that goes around that it's the face of his mother, and in fact, some places say, you know, he said, yes, it is my mother. but when i look at the original text that is based on, it actually didn't happen quite that way. he didn't confirm it. what happened is a senator at a dinner said he had gone to see this head being made and then he went to the opera with bartholdi and saw the mother sitting in the audience and said to b bartholdi that's the face of liberty, and bartholdi squeezed his hand and that was it. when he tells it at dinner, bartholdi gets teared up, but he never actually said this is the face of my mother, and it is my belief he would have said so because he would know that's a very heartening thing that it was the mother. i think if you study the faces, here's the mother. now, look at her arched eye, and when she was younger, too, this is after liberty was built. her nose is extremely narrow and she has a very thin lip, but then that's the face, a real close-up of the face. here's his brother. now, i think if you baesh bartholdi was a person who actually studied faces. this is what he had to do as a living, make likenesses of people that were really accurate. if i could enlarge that, you would see that the brow is very, very similar. in fact, even the crease near the nose, his nose is the same basic width and the mouth has the fuller lip. now, his brother, i mentioned earlier, he's the older brother. when they were growing up, this brother showed greater artistic promise. he also was very smart and he studied for the law and he looked to have a promising law career. but he went mad, and there was this period of time where first bartholdi had a very sad job of taking his brother and sn institutionalizing him, but he would go to see his brother every week, sometimes multiple time as week and sit with him. sometimes his brother would be raging and sometimes he would be very quiet, but bartholdi would just stay no matter what he was doing. he always did put the faces of people he loved in his work. there's a church up in boston where he, the battle street church, and bartholdi did the freeze up there. it's supposed to be pictures of christian life. he has geribaldi marrying bartholdi's mother -- and ann lincoln in one of the images in one of the images. that was common for him, and i actually believe it is the face of the brother. so the funding, you know, started to come in in france. mainly because of these entertainments and also they ran a lottery and everybody just wanted to do the lottery and kind of get rich quick. and so they could start building. and i love this photo because here they are in the workshop, and you know, that shoulder just looming over there is so spooky but you know, it's such a beautiful photo. the actual construction technique was that they would take -- they would make lattices of everything, you know, and this was all from enlarging a model and breaking it into sections, and then they would cover it in plaster. there's the plaster on the sleeve that's already done, and then they would create boards that would stack together like a topographic map, and those would be the forms on which they would harmer the copper. it was an incredible process. and the copper is only the thickness of two pennies stacked together. they would use little hammers or do it, you know, by little levers that they had. and then when it actually was put in place in paris, they made the rivet holes for the whole thing, but just screwed it together every other rivet hole, but in new york, it's riveted an inch apart for every rivet, which is just incredible. and so yeah, they would eventually after they had hammered everything, they would break apart the mold at the knees. that's bartholdi there looking on at the work. so they made it in paris to sort of test the structure, and also just because bartholdi was a wise enough businessman to realize if he put it up, he could have people climb up to the top and they would -- he could actually earn money to build the statue, you know, in america as well. and make up for the fund s that had already been spent. here it is at the workshop in a neighborho neighborhood. so if you lived in the neighborhood, this is what you would see as you came out of your house. so over in america, you know, you think that this thing being made would make everybody in america decide, okay, now we're going to do our part to raise our money for the pedestal and to put it up. that in fact was an amount that was bigger than the amount to build the statue in france. the papers wouldn't do their part, announcing the fact that there was fund-raising for it, but nothing was catching on. to the point where joseph pulitzer takes a look at, you know, sees an article about this in one of the other papers and he goes and2óé2fjsn; makes it the american committee, how much have you raised? they had something like $1300 in the bank. he's outraged. they have charles stone, who is a former civil war hero who had been disgraced in the civil war, had spent time in lafayette prison as a traitor, even though there were no specific charges brought against him. he was a man when he was released with no explanation for why he was held in the first place, retreated to egypt for a while, advised the leader over there, and then came back to america. as soon as he came back, he got the job of doing the pedestal of the statue of liberty, and he was determined to clear his name, to become a hero again. so they had him on the case but still no money to actually build the thing. they had the workers. a lot of them were from the making of the brooklyn bridge, and they were basically in some points just on standby. and then they started to create the concrete structure for the pedestal, but sometimes they would just have to stop, and there was this one period of time where they had the structure of about this height, they had the statue over in paris, and everything stopped for about a year. there was no money to do it, and bartholdi was frantic, because not only was he frantic because he needed to get this thing done, but he also had to come up with a way to move it out of that workshop because he couldn't just leave it there forever. and so money was, you know, is costing money all the time, but it was not being built. this is when pulitzer steps in. so pulitzer kind of basically hated the rich people of america. but he loved the little man. and so he saw this as a fight of just terms, that if the millionaires would just give their money, the thing would be made, so he said, he wrote an editorial and he said, you know, let's just forget about them. they're too, you know, cheap to do this. we're going to do it. so i'm going to run the name of every person who gives a penny to the fund. and with that, people started giving money to the fund. a lot of them just wanted to see their names in the paper. when they put the name in the paper, the circulation started skyrocketing, and it had been a dead paper, but he built it largely on the back of this project. so he did raise enough money. liberty came over to america on the boat here. it almost crashed. there was a terrible storm when it was out at sea, but it finally made it to the u.s. late. there were many other struggles that happened when it first arrived, so there was a whole year where nothing was going on again, but in 1886, they started actually putting it up and putting on the copper cladding, and this is a lithograph made at the time, basically to give the true account of what was going on. and the other thing is that the americans worked without an exterior scaffolding when they put it up. even the french thought that was lunacy. you could die doing it. you could see these people hanging off of it to put on the rivets. so liberty was inaugurated in october 1886, and whereas there had been so little support before, between pulitzer's drumming up the excitement and the fact that there was a sudden day off given to everybody in new york, people showed up, and charles stone, the civil war hero who needed to be redeemed had made a parade to end all parades. it was 30,000 marchers. it had a naval parade. unfortunately, it was a very soggy, rainy day. if you were onshore, you actually couldn't even see liberty, but a million people turned out, and it was a huge celebration, and people were so excited about it that, you know, in the week to come, bartholdi when he went on a train to niagara falls, they would stop his train in the tracks to get a glimpse of him and write articles about how he was a very handsome man. he was the one to rip the flag off the liberty's face to unveil her to the world. and it was -- it's unclear exactly why, but the moment that he unveiled her, it was premature. he was supposed to wait until she was actually officially handed over to the president. instead, there was a speech being given. the person mentioned the name bartholdi. the crowd erupted in roars, and he yanked the thing off. the whistles went off. the cannons went off. no one could hear anything else. the ceremony really couldn't be finished, but it was bartholdi, probably, just saying if it had not been for me, this thing would not be there. so anyhow, one other interesting thing is that the scallffolding inside liberty was an engineering feat. bartholdi's first engineer was one of the best engineers in all of the world, basically. it was exciting he had him onboard. he was a man who was meticulous with all his details. he usually sketched even the last screw. but he never made sketches of what was going to happen with liberty. so they had just raised enough money in france to really build her. and the man drops dead of a brain aneurysm. so bartholdi was left in the situation of having this idea but no way to actually make the thing stand, so he went to the next best person he could think of, and it was the man who had made extraordinary bridges around the world, gustof eiffel. he said he would only do a quick thing, he wasn't going to get very invested in it. but later on, there's reference to the idea that he thought of it being just an ugly clad, liberty being an ugly cladding to his beautiful scaffold, so only a couple years later, he made the eiffel tower and made it just a bit taller than the statue of liberty, thus taking away its claim to tallest structure in the world. this is bartholdi. i love this picture because this is richard butler who everyone got annoyed at bartholdi at one point or another. he was a little bit of a peeves guy. he could be funny and emotional and charming, but he also was very demanding. and this man, for some reason, he was a rubber magnate, he never tired of the man. and i think this picture really shows the warmth of their friendship. so anyhow, bartholdi, you know, what became of him, you would think that the man who made the statue of liberty would live in fame and wealth. and he had tried actually to -- he copyrighted the image of liberty back in 1876, to -- said he could if anyone used the image on a postcard on in an advertisement or a painting what have you, he would get money from it, but it quickly spun out of control and he never got money out of it. he would beg to richard butler all the time, begging him, and he tried his best, but he never can can c could. bartholdi also felt sort of humiliated because he thought from this americans would be giving him commissions left and right. he thought it was being given to him, but then he found out they had invited a lot more artists to compete and given them longer time to put in their piece. this is when they already had bartholdi's piece in their model to judge, and he ultimately was rejected for that job, so he didn't get that kind of claim, but he had a very emotional attachment to the statue of liberty, and he had married a woman when he was in newport, rhode island, a french woman, and there's a lot of mystery around that, and that's in the book, but it appears he knew her in france. he had brought her over to america. mainly so he could marry her outside the prying eyes of his mother, who was so overwhelming -- overinterested in his personal life. so anyhow, at one point, he writes to the wife, obviously, she's brought up the issue, and he says, i'm paraphrasing, but childless, because she must have said, you know, it was sad that they had no children, and he said, but what of our daughter, liberty? and so that is not bartholdi, but that's just of the statute. but so, you know, there's a lot of -- there's a lot of irony and some, you know, myths that are busted by knowing the true story, but the thing is, it is quite amazing how it has functioned for us, just reminding us all the time of what we're supposed to be. and what would we be without it? we have a human face that greets people into the country, and also is used, you know, as our logo around the world. and it's kind of nice that, you know, more than the flag, we can say this is what we stand for. so it was worth it. and that's it, i guess. [ applause ] and i think we'll take questions now. and i guess it would be good if people could go to the microphones because it is c-span is kindly recording this. >> will you talk about emma lazarus's proitation? >> the emma lazarus poem which is famously, give me your tired, your poor, was written for a fund-raising effort for the bartholdi statue. it was done towards the tail end of the production of the statue. and this woman in new york was, had gathered the largest collection of artwork new york had ever seen. there was no metropolitan museum of art at the time, so this was quite an incredible thing. she also approached a whole bunch of writers and mark twain, for example, contributed to that bo booklet. she went to her friend, emma lazarus, who was a poet and had gained for fame for her poetry that was bringing to light the plight of refugees from the russian pilgrims, and she said, you know, would you write a poem? and emma lazarus thought this was just the kind of scheme of the ego. she didn't think much of it apparently. so she said no, and then the friend said, what if you think of those refugees? so she went away. she came back, and she gave that poem. and the poem was published the next day in the newspaper, and people really loved it, and then it just disappeared. there was no sign of it anywhere. emma lazarus died basically a year later, and then it was some years later when the friend decided to put it on a plaque at the statue of liberty and paid for that, even then, it wasn't really, no one paid attention to it. it wasn't until a journalist around 1950 saw it and wrote about it and it started to have more meaning to people. so it really is, you know, encompasses the way we think of the statue of liberty now, as people this greeting point for immigrants and it's a meaning that is much more elegant than even what bartholdi thought, actually, when the island was being considered as a processing station for immigration, he said that would be an abomination and despock ab despickable, but luckily, he didn't -- her poem kind of won out over his feelings about that. any other questions? sorry. >> i walked in, so feel free to skip this if you covered this, but i'm sort of curious about the genesis of this project, whether it was something that bedevilled you for a long time before you sat down to it or if it just happened and how it fits with your other current passions and obsessions. the big view of how this works for you. >> thank you. well, i originally -- it was probably around 2003 that i originally stumbled across the diary in the archives of the new york public library in the manuscript division. and i was definitely interested in it at that time. i sort of proposed, you know, to, you know, my agent. maybe i would be interested in doing this, following this story, but nothing really came of it at that point, and then i moved on to other things for a period of time, but i always was very interested in the story. and it was later on, i was talking to an editor, a friend, and i said i always wanted to do this. and he was an editor at by-liner. and he said, please do. and so i wrote it, and then grove noticed that, the publisher of this book, and said they wanted the bigger story. it's very exciting to me that people are interested in the story in the same way i am because i held on to it for a while, you know, there's a certain humanity to it that interests me a lot. >> where does r. bartholdi foundm fit into the saga? >> well, the fountain, actually, he created to bring to the 1878 world expo, 1876, sorry, in philadelphia. and he actually saw it as a fund-raising tool for his statue of liberty. he thought he would exhibit it and then some city or town would love it and want to buy it and take it up. but when the expo ended, nobody had shown any interest whatsoever. and he was actually devastated because not only did he not sell it to make the money, but he was going to have to figure out a way to ship it back, you know, to france. so it was a while before it actually got adopted down here, but also the other thing is that it was -- he used copper on that, and he had iron fittings on it. and that had an erosion problem for a while, and so later on, when liberty was having an erosion problem before it even was fully standing, they were saying, you know, he should have learned from his fountain that you can't combine those metals yeah, that was his process with that. >> i commend you on a fine presentation. >> thank you. >> i would like to know about the access to the torch. i understand when it was opened that people could go up into the torch. and you showed a slide of a person looking over the balcony of the torch. i'm curious as to why it's not any longer, you know, accessible, and what is the access even to the crown now? is it all stairs? >> yeah, it is. >> it was stairs? >> yeah, actually, there was a period of time even during bartholdi's time where he thought there would be an elevator going up, but it is stairs. and the torch has always been a little bit tricky. in paris, no one seems to have had any real problem with going up into the torch, but when it came to america, i found these funny accounts of the workmen who were putting it together, the ones on the american side, and they said, yeah, you know, we think that torch is going off in the first hurricane, and also, we ended up with this massive piece of copper and we have no idea where it goes. and so it's possible that it actually was part of where the arm was because the arm was put in about 18 inches off its alignment that it was supposed to have, so this was continuously unstable. and so there were only sort of fleeting times when it was open to the public, and now it's just too risky. although i have seen accounts that it was, i think maybe it's different now, since hurricane sandy, but there was one family who lived on liberty island as the caretakers of the statue and the land, and there were these accounts that the teenage boys used to be able to get up into it, you know, which would have been quite impressive, i think, to their friends. if you say we'll go up there and hang out. >> i believe that the torch was originally open to the public and then during -- before we got involved in world war i, there was a munitions explosion on the jersey side of the island and the torch has been -- which slightly damaged the torch, and it's been closed to the public ever since with no plans of reopening it. >> thank you. yeah. it was a fleeting moment. there were accounts at the time of people going up all the way. there was a woman, even, women weren't actually invited to the inaugur inaugural, other than bartholdi insisted that his wife go, and then fernand insisted his 13-year-old daughter also be allowed to attend, but no other women were allowed to go. on the day of the inaugural, one woman went to the island and climbed up to the torch. it was in the papers and everything about how she had done it, and then she was quickly hustled off the island. there was a brief period where they could do that. anything else? thank you. [ applause ] >> you're watching american history tv. 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span3. follow us on twitter @csp twitter @cspanhistory for information on our schedule, upcoming programs and to keep up on the latest history news. by this time in the war, a lot of soldier husband been away from their homes for about three to four years. and they were getting letters home saying the farm is falling to pieces. we have patrollers in the area that are taking supplies from us. when are you going to come home? there's a large problem with z dusertions at the time. it's not desertions from the standpoint of soldiers not wanting to go into battle. their heartstrings were being pulled by their families really needing them back home. what lee had imposed was a fairly strict set of orders that deserters would be sometimes shot and definitely the punishment -- there were several occurrences of this happening. in fact, the morale was so low, about this time, les miserables came out in book form. there were troops in a richmond shot, and they bought them on the shot, and he said, that's us, we miserables. >> the civil war with our series about the people and events that shaped the era. saturdays at 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. eastern here on american history tv on c-span3. tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv, we'll hear about president warren harding's long term love affair detailed in letters recently released by the library of congress. his nephew explains why his family insisted on keeping the letters sealed and how the family continues to deal with the fallout from the letters and the impact on harding's history. next on american history tv, a panel of vietnam veterans and scholars reflect on the events leading up to the vietnam war and whether it was a necessary conflict for america. the speakers also discuss what it was like being in the war, both from the american and vietnamese points of view. the group vietnam veterans for factual history organized this event. it's about two a a

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