Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (25 page)

Stone had picked up fluent French in Paris when he had traveled earlier through Europe. With that asset, he quickly became invaluable to the khedive. Stone learned Arabic as well, and the khedive appointed him chief of staff.

It was Stone whom the khedive asked to oversee the exploration of the Nile and the deserts to the Sudan. Stone also warned the khedive of the treachery of Arabi Pacha, the minister of war. When General Sherman made his world tour and stopped in Egypt, he conversed with Stone, with whom he had studied at West Point, and found him deeply enmeshed in the Egyptian court. Charles P. Stone was now called Ferik Pasha, the highest rank a man lacking princely blood could achieve in Egypt.

“The chief-of-staff was very suave—he was not only a most accomplished man in his profession, but he was a born manipulator of men,” wrote one man who had worked with Stone in Egypt (and liked him). “[The other Americans] formed a cabal against him, but he handled the whole crowd as though they were so many naughty children; and before he got through with them they were tame enough to eat of his hand and beg for his influence when they wanted any favors from the Khedive.”

In 1879, the khedive had run up so much debt he was forced from the throne. In the aftermath, as various parties vied for command over Egypt, the British and French became worried about their Suez Canal investment. They invaded and took control. Stone ultimately left the country amid intrigue and scandal, ending up on the shore of Bedloe’s Island in 1883.

Like Bartholdi, Stone was driven by ambition. Where Bartholdi could be grandiose, Stone leaned toward the melodramatic. Both were passionate and more than competent, but Stone possessed qualities Bartholdi needed. With his military precision he made up for Bartholdi’s occasional lack of diligence on details. Stone saw Liberty as a chance to redeem himself and wouldn’t let the project become a morass.

That spring of 1883, Stone went out to survey Bedloe’s Island. The place was windswept, buffeted by briny gusts. He walked through the fort entrance and scanned the old parade ground, the vaults, and the cisterns. For previous projects, Stone had crafted ammunition bunkers and had worked on mines and canals, but the depth of his true engineering experience or education was never entirely clear. The difficulties involved in placing Liberty in America were issues that could have undoubtedly challenged the engineering genius Eiffel himself.

Why, one might wonder, could Eiffel not devise a pedestal solution? It seemed Eiffel kept to the rigid stipulations about economy he had made when originally signing on to the project. “[Eiffel] mentions [the Statue of Liberty] mainly so as to ensure that it is not attributed entirely to Bartholdi, but he kept no account or memento of it,” wrote Eiffel’s biographer Henri Loyrette.

Stone knew that, according to Eiffel’s plan, the two central elements—Bartholdi’s shell and Eiffel’s pylon—would be joined by iron bracing. How could the statue be attached to the earth? It would need a massive foundation.

The four thousand square feet of surface area on the statue would confront gales packing 7,000 foot-pounds of force, based on Stone’s estimations. At the bottom of the foundation, the pressure from the figure’s weight would be about five tons to the square foot. Using those numbers, Stone estimated the statue would require a block of concrete that was 40 feet to a side. In short order, he escalated his calculation to 64 feet, then to 90 feet, the largest block of cement yet poured.

To secure the scaffold to the cement, Stone envisaged four iron bars that would connect to squares on Eiffel’s pylon in two sets—29 feet above the base level and then 55 feet higher.

Stone estimated the cost of excavating and pouring the concrete to be $55,000, approximately $13 million in modern labor costs—not including the materials. He told the committee that his team’s preliminary digs had uncovered a suitable bed of gravel and boulders.

D. H. King Jr., the thirty-three-year-old builder of the Vanderbilt mansion, the Hamilton Club in Brooklyn, and, more recently, the Equitable Life Assurance Building (at seven stories the tallest building in the world that wasn’t a church), offered to donate his services free as long as the cost of the masonry—$152,000—was covered. Taking on Liberty would give King a reputation for civic charity.

Stone chose F. Hopkinson Smith, a novelist, a watercolorist, and the man who had engineered the harbor wall around Battery Park, to do the concrete foundation and stone pedestal work.

He shipped a crew to the island and began excavating on May 11, 1883. Fairly soon, however, the shovels turned up sand. The men had to delve to 15.8 feet before they hit solid ground. The workmen also began to dismantle the fort’s innards—the cisterns, brick storerooms, and ammunition vaults. They needed to break through thick bunkers designed to withstand bombardments simply to begin building.

Stone was now employing a workforce of one hundred men. He erected a trestle of heavy timber to ferry the twenty thousand barrels of cement and wood for the forms to the site. Stone also had the fort walls to contend with. Bartholdi had decided that his design could work within them, but they still presented an obstacle to construction.

Stone decided to vault the building materials over them. At the dockside, he built steam elevators. The materials on the boat would be dumped by tube into a railroad car on the ground. That car would load into the elevator, then be raised six hundred feet, and roll down a track into the pit.

For the cement, Stone had ordered a trestle of 550 feet built on the other side of the island. It extended out on pilings to where the water measured six feet deep. That would allow a boat to unload cargo directly onto the trestle. For mixing the concrete, a steam pump sucked salt water through a tube and delivered it up over the parapet and into the pit.

It was a complicated task, but compared with the challenges presented by the neighboring Brooklyn Bridge, these obstacles were minor. The costs, however, were not. The price for excavating and the first cement work soared to $85,000, approximately $20 million in current labor costs. The committee had only $100,000 on hand.

The very week that the first shovel plunged into the sand at Bedloe, Joseph Pulitzer stood outside the entrance of robber baron Jay Gould’s office a block below Trinity Church on Broadway. He was peering through his thick-lensed pince-nez at the address, contemplating his future. This was a very strange moment for Pulitzer, who had made a name for himself in the Midwest by challenging corporate greed and corruption. He needed to stride into that building and convince Gould, the richest man in America, to sell him his newspaper business at a reduced price.

This was an extremely challenging task, not just because Gould could outwit the best brains in industry, but also because Pulitzer loathed the man he sought to woo. He had been quite public about those feelings, writing in his newspaper, the
St. Louis Post Dispatch,
that Gould was “one of the most sinister figures that ever flitted bat-like across the vision of the American people.”

Pulitzer did not stand alone in that negative assessment of Gould. The
New York Herald
had deemed Gould “the skunk of Wall Street.” Gould had become, even by his own assessment, the most hated man in America through his stranglehold on American railroads and his attempt to corner the U.S. gold market. Gould, however, possessed something that Pulitzer desperately desired.

The
New York World
was one of the worst rags in America, its subscription base a feeble nineteen thousand readers. Back in 1864, before Gould owned the newspaper, the paper had disgraced itself by publishing a letter from President Lincoln calling for a day of fasting and prayer and announcing plans to summon four hundred thousand men for draft or enlistment in the Union army. This letter turned out to be a forgery.

Outraged at the falsehood, Lincoln arrested and imprisoned the newspaper’s editor, Manton Marble, a Democrat; sent military guards to occupy the offices; and suspended the newspaper’s publication for two days.

The ensuing twenty years were not much more glorious for the
World
. “It is almost impossible now to make clear the bitter disfavor and fervid scorn in which the
World
of Jay Gould . . . was held by persons of refinement and Republican principles in 1884,” wrote Walt McDougall, one of the
World
’s most famous cartoonists. “Its copperhead convictions and sentiments, its Tammany Hall sympathies, its stockjobbing and its coarse vulgar methods had long since reduced it to the condition of a pariah, a slinking mangy outcast prowling in the garbage of the gutters.”

Pulitzer probably did not much care what the
World
was
at that moment
.
He had a vision for its future. He wanted to enter the New York newspaper market and the
World
had an established name, printing presses, and a distribution network.

Pulitzer had a great deal of experience transforming desperate circumstances into winning ones. He had traveled in steerage to New York as a seventeen-year-old Hungarian immigrant. With no English and little money, he worked at whatever jobs he could find and slept on park benches. He fought in the Civil War under Sherman and almost set off whaling with two companions but changed his mind at the last minute (his two would-be companions were never heard from again).

At the age of twenty-one he found work at a small German paper in St. Louis called the
Westliche Post
. A colleague described him as “the most inquisitive and annoying cub in the business.” That tenaciousness won him promotions. Pretty soon he became the
Post
’s city editor, then the manager; eventually he acquired an interest in the paper. He sold the interest, went to Europe on his honeymoon, and came back to buy a few St. Louis papers and consolidated them as the
Post-Dispatch
.

Now Pulitzer yearned to work in a bigger market. He also probably yearned to defeat his brother Arthur, a coarser man who owned the
Morning Journal,
a shabby New York paper with a strongly working-class readership. To get his paper up and running, Pulitzer started staffing the
World
by stealing employees from his brother’s masthead.

At the meeting on Broadway that May of 1883, Gould told Pulitzer he wanted $500,000 for the
World
. Pulitzer ultimately negotiated him down to $346,000, to be paid in several installments. Gould asked only that his son be allowed to keep a small block of stock. Pulitzer agreed but said Gould could never publicly claim to hold a financial interest in the paper. Pulitzer needed full freedom to attack America’s millionaires.

Gould soon had little doubt that Pulitzer was making that threat seriously. His first hire was John Cockerill, editor at the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. Less than a year earlier, Cockerill had shot and killed Alonzo Slayback, Jay Gould’s St. Louis lawyer, when Slayback burst into Cockerill’s office armed, complaining about a negative article.

Cockerill claimed self-defense and was not indicted but the incident did have repercussions. The questionable nature of the skirmish had sent subscriptions and revenues plummeting. Pulitzer could stand a dead body, but falling newspaper circulation was another matter. He needed to get Cockerill out of St. Louis.

May 10, 1883, found Pulitzer and Cockerill at the
World
’s rat-infested, fire-damaged offices on Park Row, the downtown block where more than a dozen other newspapers, including the
New York Herald,
the
Sun,
the
New York Times
(slowly building circulation), and the
Morning Journal,
his brother’s paper, conducted their business. The location provided easy access to breaking news. Across the street was City Hall. The police headquarters and the Tombs, otherwise known as the city jail, were an easy walk.

From the first early morning when Pulitzer bounded up the stairs to the offices of the
World,
he demonstrated that he would not merely be a figurehead of the newspaper, but a hands-on operator in all departments. On that first day, Pulitzer cut the “New York” that preceded “World” from the masthead. Pulitzer’s publication would not be a parochial newssheet but a soapbox of global importance. In his first editorial, he wrote: “There is room in this great and growing city for a journal that is not only cheap but bright, not only bright but large, not only large but truly Democratic—dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of purse-potentates—devoted more to the news of the New than the Old World—that will expose all fraud and sham, fight all public evils and abuses—that will serve and battle for the people with earnest sincerity.”

Pulitzer truly believed in advocating for the underdog. He also understood business, particularly building circulation. He was well aware that underdogs outnumbered top dogs, and that if he were to choose sides, becoming the mouthpiece for underdogs would be not only virtuous, but profitable.

In those early days at the paper, Pulitzer was well loved, able to rouse his employees to “fiery ardent energy” with a quick speech or comment. He “was very approachable, and even companionable, when not irritated by fear of disaster or the increase of expense,” remembered McDougall. “He lacked a sense of humor, except of a banal variety and public criticism made him frantic.”