The Statue of Liberty Is Dedicated

On October 28, 1886, President Grover Cleveland stood on Bedloe's Island and formally accepted the Statue of Liberty on behalf of the United States, the finished copper colossus that sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi had built in France and shipped across the Atlantic in more than 200 crates. The pedestal underneath her almost didn't get built at all until newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer used his paper, the New York World, to collect the last $100,000 in small donations from ordinary readers. Fog and rain moved in over the harbor that day, bad enough that the planned fireworks got pushed back to November 1, but a parade still drew crowds estimated as high as a million people down Fifth Avenue and Broadway to the Battery. As the marchers passed the New York Stock Exchange, office clerks leaned out the windows and threw spools of ticker tape into the street below, and nobody planned it. Out on the island itself, security was so tight that only two women were allowed anywhere near the ceremony, Bartholdi's wife and the granddaughter of French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps.