At ten o’clock, “handsome and erect” in his dress uniform, he entered 57th Street ready to lead the parade. Mysteries and suspicions followed him back to America and were surrounding him still that October morning. All along the parade route, recent immigrants were jostling to join the flag-waving procession. After his decommission Stone traveled to Africa where he served as chief of staff to the Khedive of Egypt and Sudan there his military career ended ingloriously, under the fire of British bombs. Accused (probably unjustly) of causing the defeat of Ball’s Bluff in 1861, he spent six months in solitary detention at Fort Lafayette in Brooklyn. Stone joined the Union Army and for his actions in D.C. On the eve of the Civil War, Stone was serving as Inspector General of the Washington Militia in charge of security for the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, he unraveled a conspiracy against the president-elect. ![]() He tried a banking career in San Francisco, and directed an ill-fated surveying expedition to Mexico. A graduate of West Point, he had served in the Mexican War. Stone had seen much in an extraordinarily adventurous life. No one could have deplored the lousy weather as much as the man in charge of the parade, General Charles Pomeroy Stone, who had for six years supervised construction of the statue and its pedestal on what was then called Bedloe’s Island. A rain-drenched celebration meant no fireworks and more police those who had rented balconies weeks in advance to watch the parade would be disappointed those who had taken off work would now have to stand, soaking, in the downpour. A bad start, commented the acerbic Times of London, and it was hard to disagree. Find more at Audm.įor almost a week foul weather had threatened, and on October 28, the day of the official dedication, New Yorkers awoke under a leaden sky. The massive statue, designed by the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, was a gift from France to the United States she was named Liberté éclairant le monde: Liberty Enlightening the World.Īudio Listen to an audio version of this article here. ![]() No wonder that Karl Rossmann, the unlucky hero of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, at first mistook the statue’s torch for a weapon: “The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven.” 3 The military fort on which she was sited and the surrounding cannons were menacing enough not to mention her skin, made from the kind of copper sheets also used to make bullets and guns. ![]() With a stern, almost severe face staring straight ahead, and her right arm outstretched to lift a burning torch, the figure of a robed woman rather recalled a Teutonic warrior raising his sword to the skies. 1 Compared to the new statue, which rose 305 feet high and weighed more than two hundred tons, the gigantic Bavaria- an imposing woman with an oak wreath in her raised left hand, erected in Munich in 1850 - now seemed “a shadow of herself.” 2 The New York statue had no trace of the aggressive femininity of the German Valkyries. It was the tallest in the world, taller than the column in the Place Vendôme, and more than twice as tall as the statue of San Carlo Borromeo in Arona, Italy (pedestals included). In late October 1886, a French delegation arrived in New York for the inauguration of a colossal monument. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, July 30, 1898 The experience of the old is not a motor: it is only a lamppost, warning against dangers the light that illuminates the long path ahead is you, the youth, who are holding its torch it is you who are to illuminate the future and its obscurities.
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