Origins
The idea was born at a dinner party near Versailles in 1865. French jurist and abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye proposed that France give the United States a monument to celebrate the centennial of American independence and the recent abolition of slavery after the Civil War. He saw it as a tribute to the friendship between the two republics and a beacon for liberty everywhere.
Sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi took up the commission. After visiting New York Harbor in 1871, he chose Bedloe's Island (renamed Liberty Island in 1956) as the site, struck by how every ship arriving in America would have to pass it.
The financing was unusual: France would pay for the statue, the United States would pay for the pedestal. Both halves struggled to raise money. Joseph Pulitzer's New York World finally rallied 120,000 small donors in 1885, most giving less than a dollar, to finish the pedestal.
Construction
Bartholdi sculpted the figure, but the engineering problem of holding 31 tons of copper skin upright in harbor winds went to Gustave Eiffel, four years before he built his tower. Eiffel designed a wrought-iron pylon and a flexible secondary skeleton so the statue could sway and the copper could expand and contract with the seasons without tearing.
The skin itself is only 2.4 mm thick, about the thickness of two pennies. It was shaped using repoussé, hammered by hand over wooden forms in a Paris workshop. The completed statue was assembled in Paris in 1884, then disassembled into 350 pieces, packed into 214 crates, and shipped across the Atlantic aboard the French frigate Isere.
On October 28, 1886, President Grover Cleveland dedicated the statue before a crowd of around a million people. Ticker tape was thrown from Wall Street windows for the first time that day.
Symbolism
“Give me your tired, your poor,
— Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, 1883
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Lazarus wrote the sonnet to help raise funds for the pedestal. It was engraved on a bronze plaque and mounted inside the pedestal in 1903, twenty years later, and it is what cemented the statue's identity as a welcomer of immigrants. That meaning was not part of the original French gift; it was given to her by the Americans who arrived past her.