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Sunday Pages: "La Liberté éclairant le monde"
A Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi
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Dear Reader,
Raphaël Glucksmann is the son of the philosopher André Glucksmann, the founder of France’s Place Publique party, and a member of the European Parliament. Last weekend, in response to the Trump/Musk government seizing the phone and denying entry to a French scientist for daring to write messages critical of King Donald the Snowflake, the 45 year old made international headlines for making a provocative—and obviously tongue-in-cheek—statement:
“To the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants,” he said, “who fired researchers for demanding scientific freedom….Give us back the Statue of Liberty. We gave it to you as a gift, but apparently you despise it. So it will be just fine here at home.”
MAGA—congenitally incapable of understanding nuance, irony, or satire—thought Glucksmann meant this literally. Enter Trump’s dimwitted press secretary, Karoline Leavitt—a living, breathing Dunning-Kruger Effect. She felt the need to embarrass herself, her employer, and the American people by 1) taking Glucksmann’s proposal at face value and 2) responding by (unknowingly?) quoting a line the ugly American Otto says in A Fish Called Wanda: “My advice to that unnamed low-level French politician would be to remind them that it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now,” the dumb-blonde-joke punchline said, “so they should be very grateful to our great country.”
Nota bene: Before Kevin Kline’s Otto says, to the stuffy British aristocratic lady who (accurately) calls him stupid, “If it weren’t for us, you’d all be speaking German,” he first remarks, “Oh, you English are so superior, aren’t you? Well, would you like to know what you’d be without us, the good ol’ U.S. of A., to protect you? I’ll tell you. The smallest fucking province in the Russian Empire, that’s what! So don’t call me stupid, lady. Just thank me.” Thus did Leavitt nail the arrogant tone, the unequivocal stupidity, the ugly Americanness, the lame insult about speaking German, and the laughable demand for unconditional gratitude. But she didn’t go Full Otto. KKKaroline can’t very well claim that France would have hypothetically been “the smallest fucking province in the Russian Empire,” you see, when her lord and master Donald Trump has, in actuality, made the United States its largest.
Always looking for something silly to get worked up over, the MAGA outrage machine kicked into overdrive. Fake accounts run by smart ex-Soviets and real accounts run by dumb Americans had a field day on X. Legitimate news outlets wasted time writing actual articles explaining how, no, France just can’t come and take back Lady Liberty from New York Harbor.
To his credit, Glucksmann, no doubt perplexed by the attention lavished on him by the hateful shrew in the Dracula-the-Musical-sized cross, did not back down. He issued a statement, patiently explaining to analphabetic MAGAs what he actually meant:
Dear Americans,
Since the White House press secretary is attacking me today, I wanted to tell you this:
Our two peoples are intimately linked by history, by the blood we shed, and by our shared passion for freedom—symbolized by the Statue of Liberty, which France gifted to honor your glorious Revolution. As the press secretary for this shameful administration said: without your nation, France would have “spoken German.” In my case, it goes further: I would simply not be here if Americans hadn’t landed on our beaches in Normandy. Our gratitude to these heroes and their sacrifices is eternal.
But the America of these heroes fought against tyrants; it did not flatter them. It was the enemy of fascism, not the friend of Putin. It helped the resistance, not attacked Zelensky. It celebrated science, not fired researchers for using banned words. It welcomed the persecuted, not targeted them. It was far—so far—from what your current president does, says, and embodies.
This America—faithful to the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty; your America—is worth so much more than betrayal. More than the abandonment of Ukraine and Europe. More than xenophobia and obscurantism.
We in Europe love this nation to which we owe so much. And we know it will rise again. You will rise again. We are counting on you. And that is why I said in a rally: if your government despises everything the Statue of Liberty symbolizes, we could symbolically reclaim it. It was a wake-up call.
No one, of course, will come and steal the Statue of Liberty. The statue is yours. But what it embodies belongs to all of us. And if your government no longer cares for the free world, we will take up the torch here in Europe.
Until we meet again in the fight for freedom and dignity, we will be the continuators of our shared history and the protectors of our greatest treasure: not copper and steel, but the freedom it represents.
Now there’s a guy who knows a little something about liberté, egalité, fraternité—and also, being French, about how to topple dictators, exile emperors, and behead kings.
When the idea of a “Statue of Liberty” was first conceived by the French legal scholar and staunch abolitionist Édouard-René Lefebvre de Laboulaye, right after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, France was ruled by the despotic Napoleon III. What was, on its face, an innocuous proposal for a gift to the United States on the occasion of its upcoming 1876 centennial was, simultaneously, a subversive Nique tes morts to the Second Empire. (Sartre could write a play about the son of a French philosopher trying and failing, for the rest of eternity, to explain this to an ill-tempered, bottle-blonde American pouffiasse.)
The Leavitt/Glucksmann brouhaha got me to thinking about the Statue of Liberty—as a work of art, as a part of our national identity, and as a symbol for diversity, inclusion, and equality. Given my background, my ignorance on the subject is remarkable. I grew up in northern New Jersey and lived in New York City for ten years, but I’ve never been to Liberty Island, never seen the Statue up close—frankly, never thought about it much at all. The Statue of Liberty was just a landmark that’s always been there, something for tourists and elementary school field trips, a place “real” New Yorkers know to avoid. If I thought about it at all, it was always as something cheesy: a hokey symbol of American patriotism used mostly by car dealerships and Republicans.
But when we read up on how it was constructed (so much copper! so many copper sheets!), when it was constructed (way back in the 1870s and 80s), when it was dedicated (in October of 1886, a few years before the construction of the Eiffel Tower), who paid for it (many thousands of small donors), and what it signifies (see Glucksmann, above), the Statue of Liberty was then, and remains now, a Wonder of the World—a “new colossus,” as the poet Emma Lazarus put it, alluding to the Colossus of Rhodes that was one of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. This miracle of metal, engineering, and art, this signifier of freedom and wisdom, has been right in my backyard this whole time!
In her excellent book Enlightening the World: The Creation of the Statue of Liberty, Yasmin Sabina Khan describes this colossal endeavor:
The Statue of Liberty was thus conceived, in the words of the sculptor, Auguste Bartholdi, “grand as the idea which it embodies.” In size and in composition, the statue’s grand design was perfectly suited to her island setting in New York Harbor and to her identification with the United States. As one of the statue’s supporters, a young Theodore Roosevelt, assured his listeners during a Fourth of July celebration the same year the statue was unveiled: “Like all Americans, I like big things: big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheatfields, railroads, and herds of cattle, too.” The statue’s symbols of liberty and independence seem to emerge spontaneously from the history of the nation’s birth. In her left arm she carries a tablet of the law marked with the date of the Declaration of Independence; in her right hand she raises a torch of enlightenment; and with her left foot she tramples a broken chain. The diverse yet complementary moods she conveys are also drawn from America’s history: triumph at having achieved independence from oppression, delight in liberty, eagerness to progress rather than remain fixed in time, un understanding of the struggles inherent in liberty, and the determination to maintain stability and uphold justice.
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s massive copper sculpture—at the time the tallest structure in the city—is officially called La Liberté éclairant le monde, or, in English, Liberty Enlightening the World. So it’s not just the Statue of Liberty; it’s the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World. This suggests that for us Americans, being free is not sufficient; we must also lead the way in bringing freedom, knowledge, and opportunity to the rest of the planet—which, notwithstanding dalliances with dictators in South America and the Middle East and a few ill-conceived wars, we’d been doing a pretty decent job of until, oh, two months ago.
The Statue’s design borrowed from antiquity—specifically, the Roman goddess Libertas—and also from Britannia, the embodiment of Britain, and Marianne, the personification of France. But Lady Liberty is not, to paraphrase Rose in Titanic, “drawn like those French girls.” Unlike the badass action-movie iteration in Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, the American Liberty is not bare-chested. The curves of her body are barely noticeable, chastely buried under layers of flowing, Roman-style robes; on her feet are the 19th century equivalent of Birkenstocks (but then, what else would she wear, Manolo Blahniks?); other than her Rolling Stones-logo lips, none of her other facial features are particularly feminine. Her radiate crown, of a type popular on the obverses of Roman coins during the third century Age of Chaos, has seven spiky protrusions. And while Britannia wields a trident, and Marianne a bayonet, Lady Liberty bears a torch.
Grover Cleveland remarked on this, at the unveiling of the statue on October 28, 1886: “We are not here today to bow before the representation of a fierce and warlike god, filled with wrath and vengeance,” the then-President said. “Instead of grasping in her hand thunderbolts of terror and of death, she holds aloft the light which illumines the way to man’s enfranchisement.”
Key word: man’s. To call attention to the hypocrisy of a nation celebrating liberty while denying it to half the population, the New York State Women’s Suffrage Association rented a barge on the day of the ceremony and went into the harbor to protest, as its resolution stated, “the cruelty of woman’s present position, since [the Statue of Liberty] is proposed to represent Freedom as a majestic female form in a State where not one woman is free.” It would be another 34 years before (some) women were given the vote.
Bedloe Island, the glorified rock in New York Harbor, was already the property of the federal government, so there was no issue in appropriating what would be re-named Liberty Island; as Khan explains in her book, the site was chosen because it belonged not to one state but the whole country. But, while Bartholdi’s creation was a gift from the citizens of France, the pedestal on which it stands had to be financed by the United States—kind of like when you win a new car on Oprah but have to pay the sales tax. Fundraising took longer than expected—so much so that for a few anxious months, it looked like Philadelphia might purloin the Statue. But Joseph Pulitzer would not allow this to happen. The publisher of the New York World, himself an immigrant from Austro-Hungary, made this his pet project. As Lucie Levine writes at 6sqft:
Raising funds for the Statue of Liberty appealed to him. He used his newspaper, The New York World, as a platform to solicit donations. Pulitzer announced from the World’s editorial pages that he would publish the name of any person who made a contribution to the Statue of Liberty, no matter how small the sum. He appealed “to the whole people of America,” to make a donation to the pedestal fund. He noted, in words that land hard today, Liberty “is not a gift from the Millionaires of France to the Millionaires of America,” but instead an international project of “the whole people.” The campaign was a major success. In a few months, Pulitzer raised $100,000 (nearly $2 million today) from donations of a dollar or less.
In 1908, Pulitzer commissioned a stained glass window of the Statue, which was installed at the now-defunct World Building. Today it can be seen in the World Room at the School of Journalism at Columbia University—the same Ivy League institution Donald Trump is hellbent on destroying.
Speaking of Trump and the war on education: Yasmin Sabina Khan, who wrote the book on the Statue’s history, is the daughter of the legendary structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan—hailed, without hyperbole, as “the Father of tubular skyscraper designs,” “the Einstein of structural engineering,” and “the Greatest Structural Engineer of the 20th Century.” Among many other buildings and architectural projects, Khan designed the Sears Tower in Chicago. But his overall influence is impossible to understate. Basically any building 40 stories of higher built since 1960 makes use of his “tube concept” of structural engineering.
No Fazlur Khan, no Trump Tower.
Khan was 1) a Muslim, 2) an immigrant from Bangladesh, and 3) the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship that financed his higher education in the U.S. In the Trump Redux, funds for the Fulbright Scholarships are frozen, Muslims are considered personae non grata, and immigrants are being rounded up and forcibly extradited to prisons in Cuba, Venezuela, and El Salvador. While I’m sure there are at least three or four actual members of that gang no one’s heard of among the terrified human beings on the “deportation” planes, what this really means is that Trump and his hateful, racist enablers are barring the next Fazlur Khan from entering, and bringing his or her unique talents to, the United States. Perhaps KKKaroline Leavitt can explain how that makes America great again?
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Statue’s unveiling, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a speech of rededication. Nineteen thirty-six was a bleak year. The country was mired in the Great Depression. Fascism was on the rise in Europe—and, in some quarters, in the United States itself. The promise of America didn’t seem quite so promising. And yet FDR put it all into the proper perspective:
Even in times as troubled and uncertain as these, I still hold to the faith that a better civilization than any we have known is in store for America—and by our example, perhaps, for the world. Here destiny seems to have taken a long look. Into this continental reservoir there has been poured untold and untapped wealth of human resources. Out of that reservoir, out of the melting pot, the rich promise which the New World held out to those who came to it from many lands is finding fulfillment.
The richness of the promise has not run out. If we keep the faith for our day as those who came before us kept the faith for theirs, then you and I can smile with confidence into the future.
It is fitting, therefore, that this should be a service of rededication to the liberty and the peace which this Statue symbolizes. Liberty and peace are living things. In each generation—if they are to be maintained— they must be guarded and vitalized anew.
We do only a small part of our duty to America when we glory in the great past. Patriotism that stops with that is a too-easy patriotism— a patriotism out of step with the patriots themselves. For each generation the more patriotic part is to carry forward American freedom and American peace by making them living facts in a living present.
To that we can, we do, rededicate ourselves.
When I read that speech on Friday, I wept. I couldn’t help myself. I cried so much that an oversized teardrop fell from my eye onto my pant leg, leaving a wet stain as wide around as a Roosevelt dime. Because I’m not as certain as FDR was that the richness of the promise has not run out. I can smile at the future, and will continue to do so, but no longer with the same degree of confidence. Liberty and peace are indeed living things; Trump, Musk, and the American Nazis are trying to strangle them to death; our current crop of politicians—especially the feckless Republicans in Congress—seem uninterested in guarding and vitalizing them anew.
Glucksmann was right. The value of the Statue lies not in its metal components—although one can imagine D.O.G.E. ordering Lady Liberty dismantled to sell off the copper—but in what it represents. What “Liberty Enlightening the World” really means is freedom from ignorance. And ignorance, thy name is Trump.
“We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected,” Grover Cleveland said at the 1886 unveiling. “Willing votaries will constantly keep alive its fires, and these shall gleam upon the shores of our sister republic in the East. Reflected thence and joined with answering rays, a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression, until Liberty enlightens the world.” In France, that “sister republic in the East,” thank goodness, the flame still burns bright, just as the first president to serve nonconsecutive terms foretold.
Twenty twenty-five has also been a bleak year, as 1936 was. But for all that’s happened these last few months, for all the evidence pointing to the decline and fall of the American experiment, I’m still with FDR: “Even in times as troubled and uncertain as these, I still hold to the faith that a better civilization than any we have known is in store for America—and by our example, perhaps, for the world.”
For Grover Cleveland and Franklin Roosevelt, for Auguste Bartholdi and Fazlur Khan, for Joseph Pulitzer and Emma Lazarus, for every suffragette protesting on the rented barge and every enslaved person emancipated by Lincoln and every immigrant in steerage beholding, for the first time, the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World—for our own children and grandchildren!—we cannot, and shall not, allow the avatars of ignorance to snuff out the torch. To that we can, we do, rededicate ourselves.
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ICYMI
Great show on Friday: Nina Burleigh joined us from an undisclosed location somewhere in the Caribbean, and we discussed Musk getting Chinese war plans, the government killing NOAA, fascism creep, and more.
Photo credit: Wally Gobetz (top) and Centennial Photographic Co., 1876 (the 2025 on the print is, remarkably, the number of the sequence, and not our current year).
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