Statue of Liberty Dedicated
President Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to the United States
October 28, 1886
A Gift Across the Atlantic
The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886, on Bedloe's Island (now Liberty Island) in New York Harbor. It was a gift from France to the United States, conceived as a symbol of the shared democratic values of both nations and to celebrate the friendship forged during the American Revolution, when France was a crucial ally. French political thinker Édouard de Laboulaye proposed the idea in 1865. Sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi designed the statue, while Alexandre Gustave Eiffel — later famous for the Eiffel Tower — engineered its internal iron skeleton.
Building Lady Liberty
The statue was built in France and shipped to America in 350 individual pieces packed in 214 crates. Construction required an innovative engineering approach: Bartholdi designed a flexible copper skin mounted on Eiffel's iron framework, allowing the statue to expand and contract with temperature changes without cracking. The copper was just 2.4 millimeters thick. France paid for the statue itself; America was responsible for the pedestal. Fundraising for the pedestal was slow until newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer ran a fundraising campaign, eventually raising the needed funds from hundreds of thousands of small donations from ordinary Americans.
Symbol of Welcome and Freedom
The Statue of Liberty became the first sight that millions of immigrants saw when arriving in New York Harbor between the 1880s and 1950s, when Ellis Island processed over 12 million people seeking a new life in America. Emma Lazarus's poem "The New Colossus," mounted inside the pedestal, gave the statue its defining meaning: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." The statue has turned green over the decades as copper oxidized. It remains one of the most recognizable monuments in the world and the most powerful symbol of American identity as a nation of immigrants.