It was on this day in 1886 that the Statue of Liberty was officially unveiled and
opened to the public. It was gift from France intended to celebrate the two
countries' shared love of freedom, shipped to the U.S. in pieces packed into
214 crates. Workers put it back together in New York. The day of the dedication
was cold and rainy, but huge crowds came out for the celebration anyway. The
statue was under veil, and the sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi was alone in
the statue's crown, waiting for the signal to drop the veil. A boy down below
was supposed to wave a white handkerchief at the end of the big speech. The boy
accidentally waved his handkerchief before the speech was over and Bartholdi
let the curtain drop, revealing the huge bronze lady, and gunshots rang out
from all the ships in the harbor. The speaker, who had been boring everybody,
just sat down.
That was interesting to me because I’ve written
before about the
Statue of Liberty, and written incorrectly. Where I got the nugget of knowledge
that the statue was dedicated on the 18th I will never know, and how
I ever remembered, three years later that there was something wrong with the
dates, I will also never know. At any rate, she stands majestically up there in
the harbor and I stand corrected down here.
I do wish I’d known before about the
unveiling and the boring speaker. The details of the 1886 ceremony, like the details
of the 1863 ceremony at Gettysburg, make it all a lot more interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment