Statue of Liberty

 FACT OF THE DAY:     
The Statue of Liberty was made possible largely by private funding through public campaigns. In 1885, newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer ran an ad in his own newspaper, The New York World to raise the remaining 100,000 dollars needed to complete the pedestal. Provided by The City Reliquary

I remember my brother and I during winter in deep winter snow going door to door to raise money for some refurbishment in Glenwood Springs, where my family lived for a few months.  I'm told our names are on a plaque there.  I had thought the statue was a gift of the French, so I assume this is just the pedestal (the statement could be clearer).


Yes — your understanding is right, and the “Fact of the Day” is phrased in a way that can easily give the wrong impression.
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The Statue of Liberty itself was a gift from France. The French raised the money for the statue and its construction, while the Americans were expected to provide the pedestal and prepare the site.

The problem was that the American fundraising effort for the pedestal was badly stalled. The statue arrived in New York in 1885 in crates, while the unfinished pedestal sat there waiting for money. Joseph Pulitzer then used The New York World to make a very effective public appeal. Rather than asking wealthy donors for large sums, he solicited small contributions from ordinary people and published the names and amounts of many contributors. More than 120,000 people eventually contributed, and roughly $100,000 was raised.

So the fact is substantively correct, but “the remaining $100,000 needed to complete the pedestal” would be much clearer as:

    The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, but Americans had to raise the money for its pedestal. In 1885, newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer launched a campaign in The New York World that raised about $100,000 from ordinary Americans to finish the pedestal.

And your Glenwood Springs memory is rather charmingly parallel to this. You and your brother trudging through deep winter snow, going door to door asking people for small contributions, and then discovering years later that your names are actually on a plaque — that's exactly the sort of little piece of civic history that makes these fundraising campaigns more interesting than the usual story of a rich benefactor writing a check.

There is also a nice historical point here: the Statue of Liberty is a monument to two different kinds of public generosity. France supplied the statue through a largely private fundraising effort of its own; America supplied the pedestal through a mass popular subscription. Neither government simply paid for the whole thing.
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