Grover Cleveland spent two years as governor of New York vetoing money for a French statue's unbuilt pedestal, arguing the state had no business paying for a national gift; then, as president, he was the one who stood beneath it on the day it was dedicated.

As governor of New York, Grover Cleveland vetoed a $50,000 appropriation meant to help pay for a French statue's unbuilt pedestal. Two years later, as president, he had no veto left to use.

A gift with no place to stand

The idea started in 1865, at a dinner table outside Paris, where the French political writer Édouard de Laboulaye suggested that France give the United States a monument marking a century of American independence and the friendship between the two republics. The sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi took up the commission a decade later: a robed woman lifting a torch, her face reportedly modeled in part on Bartholdi's own mother.

Bartholdi could sculpt copper skin. He could not, on his own, hold a hundred and fifty-one feet of it upright in a harbor wind. That problem belonged first to the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who died in 1879 before finishing a design for the statue's internal skeleton. The job passed to Gustave Eiffel, eight years before his more famous Paris tower, who built a central iron pylon with a secondary web of iron bars reaching out toward the copper shell. He never let the two metals touch directly (copper and iron corrode each other on contact); instead, he hung the skin from the frame on flexible iron saddles, padded with asbestos-soaked cloth, so the whole figure could flex slightly rather than crack in a gale.

France paid for the statue itself through public subscription: lotteries, entertainment, and a fee on the entry tickets to see Bartholdi's completed head at the 1878 Paris World's Fair, altogether around $250,000. The United States was supposed to cover the pedestal. It did not, for years.

How do you pay for a hundred and fifty-one feet of copper?

New York's own legislature approved $50,000 toward the pedestal, but Cleveland, as governor, vetoed it, arguing that New York's taxpayers should not have to cover a monument meant as a gift to the whole country. A companion bill for $100,000 in Congress also died, and New York City was barred from putting its own money toward the project either.

Meanwhile the statue itself was finished. Bartholdi's workshop disassembled it into 350 separate pieces, crated into 214 wooden boxes, and loaded them onto the French naval transport Isère, which sailed from Rouen on May 21, 1885, and reached New York on June 17. The crates sat on Bedloe's Island for months. The pedestal underneath them, designed by the architect Richard Morris Hunt, was still an unfinished stone stump.

What finally closed the gap was a newspaper. Joseph Pulitzer ran a six-month fundraising drive in his New York World, promising to print the name of every single donor regardless of the amount. It worked: about 120,000 people gave roughly $102,000, and by Pulitzer's own count, four out of five gifts came in under a dollar, mostly nickels and dimes from schoolchildren. The pedestal's capstone went in that April, and ironworkers finished bolting the statue onto it less than a week before the dedication.

What actually happened at the dedication?

Grover Cleveland, elected president in the meantime, led a morning parade down Fifth Avenue and Broadway to the Battery. Office workers along the route improvised a new kind of celebration, throwing spools of stock-ticker tape out of the windows as the procession passed the Stock Exchange; newspapers later credited it as the first ticker-tape parade in the city's history.

The harbor did not cooperate. A dense fog sat over the water through the morning, hiding the statue from most of the hundreds of thousands of spectators lining the shore. A naval review of warships and hundreds of smaller vessels escorted Cleveland's yacht out to Bedloe's Island anyway, fog or no fog. Only invited dignitaries were allowed onto the island itself; contemporary accounts note that the only two women present at the ceremony were Bartholdi's wife and the granddaughter of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, who chaired the French dedication committee and spoke first.

Then came the moment the whole day is remembered for going slightly wrong. A French tricolor had been draped over the statue's face, meant to fall away on cue once the ceremony's second speaker, Senator William M. Evarts, finished his remarks. Bartholdi, watching from a platform near the statue's crown, mistook an early pause in Evarts's speech (the crowd had started cheering) for the signal, and released the flag before Evarts had actually stopped talking. The face was revealed several minutes ahead of schedule, mid-sentence, to gunfire from the harbor's warships and a noise contemporaries described as the loudest New York had ever produced: horns, bells, and by some counts five hundred cannon rounds. Cleveland spoke last, accepting the statue on behalf of the country, closing with the line that outlasted the day itself: "we will not forget that liberty has here made her home," he said, "nor shall her chosen altar be neglected."

What the record doesn't settle

Exactly how many boats took part in the harbor procession is not something anyone agreed on even at the time; period accounts range from roughly 137 steamers in the formal naval line to several hundred once every tug and pleasure craft is counted. Crowd estimates for the day range just as widely, from several hundred thousand to a million, because nobody was selling tickets or counting heads.

One popular association gets the timeline wrong entirely. Emma Lazarus's sonnet "The New Colossus," the poem that gave the statue its lines about tired, poor, huddled masses, was not read at the dedication and was barely mentioned that day. Lazarus wrote it in 1883 for a fundraising auction of art and manuscripts, and it went largely forgotten until 1903, sixteen years after her death, when a friend had it cast onto a bronze plaque and mounted inside the pedestal's base.

Ninety years and one bombing later

The statue's torch has not been open to visitors since July 1916, when saboteurs blew up a munitions depot at Black Tom, in New Jersey, close enough that shrapnel tore through the raised arm and rattled the crown. No one was ever charged criminally; a postwar mixed claims commission later held Germany financially responsible and named the intelligence operative Kurt Jahnke among those who carried it out, though historians still argue over exactly how. Engineers judged the internal ladder too damaged to trust with tourist traffic, and it has stayed closed for more than a century since, through a full 1980s restoration that replaced the torch's flame with new copper sheathed in gold leaf.

Cleveland's veto, in hindsight, changed almost nothing about how the statue eventually got built; the money arrived anyway, one nickel at a time, from people his own budget math never accounted for. What his signature on that veto captures, better than the ceremony that followed it, is how close the most recognizable monument in the country came to standing on nothing at all.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Statue of Liberty National Monument" park history materials
• National Archives, Pieces of History blog, "Body of Iron, Soul of Fire: The Statue of Liberty" (2024)
• Wikipedia, "Statue of Liberty"
• Wikipedia, "Black Tom explosion"
• Doughboy Foundation, "Black Tom explosion on July 30, 1916 made Lady Liberty's torch off-limits after WWI"
• The Daily Wire, "Read It: Grover Cleveland's Speech The Day Lady Liberty Was Inaugurated"