America's Prophet Read online

  To my right, framed by the slate sky and a tangle of steel cranes, is the ultimate icon of industrial age America. The towering giant of copper and steel was conceived as a pagan symbol, meant to exude Old World muscle. But by the time the New World got through reinterpreting it, the 305-foot colossus had become the standard-bearer of America’s escape from tyranny, its commitment to freedom and law, and its role as the new Promised Land. Just when America’s connection to Moses was tarnished by its association with the losing side of the Civil War, along came the country’s most captivating symbol yet and a renewed link to its Mosaic past.

  Along came the Statue of Liberty.

  THE ROSEMARY MILLER, a small coast guard vessel, docks at the pier, and a half-dozen commuters walk up the short plank and gather in the open air at the stern. Many carry brown-bag lunches or crumpled plastic sacks. One wears a hard hat. Ignoring the wind, a few are trying to talk on cell phones or listen to iPods. These workers are taking the morning commute to Liberty Island, and as the boat pushes off from the shore, all of them are leaning against the rail or huddled in small groups, looking north. The statue is south. I had been invited by the monument’s chief historian to take the staff boat to the island, and my first impression is that if you are exposed to the statue often enough, even the country’s beacon of hope can become a mere backdrop. As the boat splashes into the harbor I risk exposing myself as a newbie when I defiantly look south.

  At the close of the Civil War, the country’s most profound shock may have been the damage to its self-image as a chosen people, selected by God to create a biblical kingdom on earth. Even more destabilizing, the closing decades of the nineteenth century brought a dizzying barrage of intellectual movements, economic transformation, and scholarly invention that collectively constituted the biggest threat to the Bible’s authority in its nearly two millennia of influence. Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, initiating a direct assault on the biblical idea that God created the world in six days. Also, literary critics exploded the traditional view of who wrote the Bible. Custom held that Moses wrote the books that bore his name; David wrote the psalms; and the prophets wrote their books. Scholars now argued that different authors composed the stories, often long after the events described. Educated people were forced to accept that the Bible may contain the word of God but also contains the work of scribes. Overnight, everything known about the Israelites was open to question. Did Moses really turn the Nile into blood? Did he really part the Red Sea? Did he even exist? And what about God?

  God’s New Israel particularly felt the impact of these changes. In less time than the Israelites are said to have spent in the desert, the United States went from a predominantly rural nation to a highly urban one, from a mostly agricultural economy to a heavily industrialized one, from a deeply religious society to a more secular one. The “age of belief” gave way to a “scientific revolution.” The grip of evangelicals gave way to wave after wave of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. By 1900 it became clear that if the nineteenth century had been America’s Protestant century, the twentieth century would be something else entirely. And that raised a question: If America’s focus on the Bible was diminishing, would its attachment to Moses lessen as well?

  ON A GRAY approach from Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty doesn’t quite stir the soul as the postcard images would suggest. Her mint color seems more chilly than star-spangled. She faces south, meaning that for much of the ride you’re viewing her from behind. The shadows in her folds look streaked in soot. From the rear, she appears to be sagging under the weight of her gown. Not until the boat passes under her feet does my heart skip a beat at her Olympian splendor: her firm grip on the tablet in her left arm, the seven bolts of light from her crown, and the erect majesty of her right arm, with the twenty-karat flame managing to brighten the gloom. The shock of gold in the otherwise dreary environs reminds me of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

  Barry Moreno was not what I had expected. On the phone, the chief historian of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island sounded like a pencil pusher who wore a green visor and toted a tuna fish sandwich to the island every day. I would have pegged him for balding and fifty. In person he looked like a backup singer for Madonna. He wore fashionably flared jeans, trendy shoes, and a yellow, polka-dotted dress shirt with unbuttoned French cuffs. The son of an Egyptian mother and a Cuban-Italian father, he also has long, lithe fingers that he bends back in the manner of a yoga instructor.

  “I first visited the statue in 1988 when I was hired as a temporary ranger after college,” Moreno explained. “I took a train from California. I had never been to New York, and I was stunned by the statue. She was so historic. Not quite as great as a monarch, but something close to the glory of a king.”

  He never left. A first-generation polyglot American and a sponge for languages, Moreno was a perfect Boswell for Liberty. He has since written one book and one encyclopedia on the subject in English and was cowriting another in German, and in order to examine all the immigrant documents that came into the library, he had managed to learn French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Afrikaans, Romanian, Portuguese, and Catalan. “They’re all related,” he said nonchalantly, as if the task was as simple as collecting his mail.

  Moreno led me up the broad sidewalk, through the tightest security I’d ever seen, and into a small museum at the base of the statue. A giant, life-sized mask of Liberty’s face peers out from the entrance, not as serene as the Mona Lisa, more sternly serious. Alongside it are some of the wooden molds used to hold the 200,000 pounds of molten copper, which were pounded into 310 sheets, each two pennies thick. Nearby is a model of the steel interior designed by Gustave Eiffel, which anticipated the Eiffel Tower that was built the following year. Liberty’s pageantry may be American, but her infrastructure is pure French.

  “When I was growing up, I knew the statue as a great symbol of the United States,” Moreno said. “But when I first came here, many aspects of her origin were simply fuzzed over. The Park Service didn’t want us to do our own research. It was not until I started doing my own digging that I really understood the story.”

  The birth of the Statue of Liberty grew out of the death of Abraham Lincoln. The news of Lincoln’s assassination arrived in France at a time when the country was rent by a generation-long struggle between republicanism and monarchism. In the spring of 1865, under the regressive regime of Emperor Napoléon III, French liberals were struggling to articulate a viable model for representative democracy, and they turned to the United States. The approaching centennial of the Declaration of Independence offered the ideal time to hail American liberty, remind the world of France’s role in bankrolling that freedom, and forever align the two countries. At a meeting outside of Versailles, Americaphile Édouard de Laboulaye, the author of a history of the United States and an avid abolitionist, conceived the idea of presenting a monument to the United States as a gift. At least one man in the group thought it was a good idea.

  Frédéric Bartholdi was not exactly an Americaphile. But the thirty-three-year-old sculptor was a classicist, a lover of Egypt, and likely a Mason, since he had put his face on a Masonic sculpture in Paris and sculpted Washington and Lafayette in a supposed Masonic handshake. He also loved grand gestures, all of which made him uniquely suited to tackle the complexities of raising money for a work modeled partly on the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the original Seven Wonders of the World. In back-to-back trips to Egypt and the United States, Bartholdi honed the idea of a tribute to liberty that would draw its size from pharaonic monuments of Rameses II and be placed in New York Harbor. It should be seen “from the shores of America to the coast of France,” Bartholdi said. To boost sagging fund-raising, Bartholdi sent a model of the torch to Philadelphia in 1876, then to New York. Joseph Pulitzer helped with the final push by appealing to readers of the World. On August 11, 1885, the World showed Uncle Sam bowing down to Lady Liberty on the occasion of topping one hundred thousand
dollars in donations. The torch was being passed to a new American symbol.

  But what did the statue, officially called Liberty Enlightening the World, represent?

  “To me, she’s a Roman, pagan goddess,” Moreno said. He had brought me to a spot deep in the pedestal where the original torch is displayed. “Nearly everything about the statue is Greek or Roman. She’s dressed in totally Roman garb. Her hairstyle is from that time. She strides forward in a neoclassical way.”

  “But France and America were largely Christian,” I said. “Were people offended?”

  “Bartholdi knew that no figure customarily represented the American people. On maps, female Indians had been used to symbolize the United States. But classical imagery had been popular in Europe for centuries, and even in America, our courthouses and post offices were built as Greek and Roman temples. Plus, she does have a lot of non-pagan influences.”

  “So let me ask you about a few of those,” I said. “Is it significant that Bartholdi was a Mason? He met with Masons when he came to New York. Masons raised a lot of the money, and Masons actually constructed the pedestal.”

  Liberty Enlightening the World, with ships and New York Harbor in the background. Lithograph published by Currier & Ives, c. 1886. (Courtesy of The Library of Congress)

  “Bartholdi believed that Masons had some secret to democracy,” Moreno said. “They were connected to the breakdown of the authoritarian models of government and hierarchical, ritualistic religions. Plus they supported new interpretations of the Bible and the idea that certain elite people share a secret message of freedom.”

  I ticked off a series of the statue’s prominent symbols and asked Moreno what they represented. A number seemed as if they were taken directly from the Bible. I started with the chains and shackle at Liberty’s feet.

  “Ostensibly they symbolize independence from England, but secretly they mean other kinds of servitude—slavery, tyranny, any kind of oppression in the world. That’s why immigrants and refugees legitimately saw the statue as a symbol of their freedom.”

  The crown. Roman depictions of Liberty often showed her with a soft red bonnet, called a Phrygian cap, given to Roman slaves when they were freed. The U.S. Capitol was designed with a Liberty on top wearing one of those bonnets, though the statue was renamed Freedom and the cap replaced with a helmet of an eagle’s head. Bartholdi scuttled the cap in favor of a nimbus, a gold circle of light in the shape of a crown with seven pointed sun rays, one for each continent, or ocean, or day of God’s creation. As Moreno noted, the Roman sun god Helios was also shown wearing a spiked crown, as were Roman emperors, even Constantine. The motif of a halo around the head of a significant person was commonly used in medieval and Renaissance art, especially for Jesus.

  But the notion that light should envelop the head of an exalted figure is introduced in the Hebrew Bible, predating all of these uses. In the first sentence of Genesis, God is associated with light as he utters the earliest words ever spoken: “Let there be light.” God later appears to Moses in an illuminated burning bush, and he appears to the Israelites encamped at Mount Sinai as “a consuming fire on the top of the mountain.” The first human to have his presence infused with God’s light is Moses. In Exodus 34, when Moses descends from forty days on Sinai carrying the “two tablets” of the covenant, he “was not aware that the skin of his face was radiant, since he had spoken with the Lord.” The Israelites shrink from Moses because his face is luminous and he veils himself to protect them. The story of the Exodus predates the Byzantine, Christian, and classical Greek and Roman eras, so Moses—not Helios, Nero, Jesus, or Constantine—introduces the nimbus into Western imagery. A misinterpretation of a Hebrew expression in this scene, karan orh pahnav, which can be read “ray of light” or “horn,” produced the idea that Moses had horns. Michelangelo memorialized the horns in his statue of Moses, and they are echoed in the spikes around the forehead of Bartholdi’s Liberty Enlightening the World.

  Was Bartholdi aware of this lineage? Did he purposefully connect Liberty’s nimbus to Moses?

  “I’m not sure where he came up with this idea,” Moreno said. “Was it the Hebrews, the Greeks? But it seems to me that he probably got it from Judeo-Christian sources, because the nimbus constantly resonated in European thought. Even if Bartholdi himself didn’t go to Rome to see Michelangelo’s Moses, his friends did. And they were sharing ideas.”

  The statue’s most unusual symbol may represent its most direct link to Exodus. Traditional depictions of Roman Libertas show her left arm down at her side, holding a broken jug, signifying the slaves’ release. Bartholdi’s earliest clay model includes a jug, which he later replaced with a broken chain. The final statue shows Liberty holding a singular rectangular tablet, inscribed with JULY IV MDCCLXXVI, or July 4, 1776. Tablets were not common in classical art and were introduced into European art in conjunction with one story, Moses carrying the Ten Commandments down Mount Sinai.

  In Exodus 24, God summons Moses up Mount Sinai and promises to give him “the stone tablets with the teachings and commandments which I have inscribed.” Exodus 32 says that the tablets were inscribed on both sides. The tablets are elsewhere referred to in the text as tablets of stone, testimony, or law, and are often translated as the tables of stone. But the Bible never describes their composition or shape. Traditional Judaism suggests they were made of blue sapphire as a reminder of God’s heavenly throne; others believe they were transparent. As for shape, some commentators have said they were sharp-edged cubes; others that they were separate pieces of oblong stone. Michelangelo’s Moses, for instance, sculpted in 1513, holds two stacked rectangular tablets. The familiar depiction of side-by-side, flat stone tablets with semicircular tops containing the first five commandments on one face and the second five on the other face is not found anywhere in the Bible. These round-top tablets seem to have entered Christian art in the Middle Ages to reflect the diptych, a popular form of writing tablet in which two waxed boards were joined together by a hinge.

  Regardless of their shape, Moses lugs the tablets down the mountain, but upon eyeing the Israelites frolicking with the golden calf, he “hurled the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain.” The move is shocking: Moses purposefully destroys the only physical manifestation of God’s commitment to protect his people. But he goes further. He burns the golden calf, grinds the charred remains into powder, sprinkles the ashes into water, and forces the Israelites to drink their infidelity. Suddenly the great liberator has become a fanatic. “Whoever is for the Lord, come here!” he announces. The Levites step forward, and Moses sends them on a purge. “Go back and forth throughout the camp, slay brother, neighbor, and kin.” Having completed his own God-like version of the tenth plague, Moses then returns to the mountain and asks God to forgive the remaining people. God adds his own unspecified plague but ultimately accepts Moses’ plea. The covenant between God and humans is restored. God asks Moses to carve two more tablets, and once more he inscribes them. This new set of tablets is stored in the wooden ark that Moses constructs; this ark is then installed in the temple that Solomon builds in Jerusalem; and this vault later becomes the “lost ark” that goes missing for more than two thousand years.

  The significance of the Statue of Liberty holding a tablet of law has not been lost on commentators over the years. French historian Pierre Provoyeur wrote that Bartholdi must have conceived the statue as a “second Moses.” “Liberty carried the Tables of the Law in her left arm, while her forehead shone with light like the prophet’s on Mount Sinai.” Marvin Trachtenberg, in his definitive account of the statue, writes: “Liberty’s tablet—particularly the way it is borne forward—is an unmistakable allusion not only to political events but to the great Mosaic tradition.” He adds, “Not only does she carry the tablet of the patriarch but her radiant crown also may allude to the ‘rays of light’ about his face after revelation.” The statue, he concludes, is “a seer and a prophetess.”

  I a
sked Barry Moreno if he agreed.

  “Even though the outer form of the statue is pagan,” he said, “she was devised in a Judeo-Christian society in which the traditions of the Jewish Bible are richly powerful. The tablet is suggestive of the twelve tablets of Roman law as well as the Code of Hammurabi, but in Western society, the great symbol of the law is Mosaic. So to me, the tablets symbolize constitutional law. The goddess of freedom promises to enlighten the world with freedom, but then she has this tablet of law, reminding us that there are strict precepts. There is no absolute freedom, but rather limitations.”

  “But doesn’t the tablet say 1776, not 1787?”

  “Yes, it clearly invokes the Declaration of Independence. But to me the statue has external symbols and internal symbols. There are the ostensible reasons, and there are the secret meanings the statue conveys. Freedom from England is one of the outward messages, but freedom from slavery, whether the Exodus or the Civil War, is one of the more subtle messages.”

  “The Moses story is about the tension between freedom and law,” I said, “between the exhilaration of the Exodus moment followed by the constriction of the Sinai moment. And it seems to me that you can see this tension in the Statue of Liberty, from the broken chain at her feet to the tablet in her arm to the light around her head. She perfectly embodies the American story—and the Mosaic story.”

  “Precisely,” Moreno said. “That’s what Laboulaye was trying to say, and he’s the real intellectual force behind the statue. His main goal was to increase freedom in France but not so much that it led to anarchism, violence, and coups d’etat. He looked to America and saw a totally open society, yet one that had prevented disorderly conduct. Even with the Civil War, Americans had somehow managed to preserve the Constitution without a revolution. It was a miracle.”