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The Unlikely Origins of the Statue of Liberty

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I was persuaded to read this by a good review in the WSJ back in November. Somewhat surprisingly, the University Near Here actually bought a copy—no Interlibrary Loan required!

Unfortunately, it was both longer and less interesting than I thought it would be. I crawled through it, painfully, at about 20 pages/day, just sneaking it into my 2018 reading. The author, Francesca Lidia Viano, is from Italy, a young academic now working at Institute for New Economic Thinking.

The book explores the "origin story" of Lady Liberty; its opening metaphor invokes an extremely unexpected parallel: the Trojan Horse. No, the statue didn't make its appearance on Bedloe's Island with a covert cargo of French troops inside. Other than the statue being hollow, the physical metaphor doesn't apply. But Viano argues that the statue's ideological DNA contains a lot of unexpected strands. These are illuminated by the (extremely) detailed biography of the artist, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, and his associates. He was French, in the 19th century, a time of a lot of philosophical/artistic/political/international craziness. The folks who bankrolled much of the statue seemed to have messages to send: against British imperialism, for French colonialism, for free trade, against slavery, a healthy component of Saint-Simonism, Freemasonry, … (Ironically, today the main symbolism, thanks to that Emma Lazarus poem, seems to be immigration. That was a late addition.)

I could put up with a lot of that, but 500 pages? Eek!

I would have liked a little more detail on the statue's engineering. In fact, the description of the statue's construction and assembly is crowded into the book's final pages.


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:52 AM EDT