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This item about the origins of the Statue of Liberty is difficult to explicate because it makes so many (sometimes conflicting) claims, so we'll distill its essence to four primary claims and discuss those: Of these claims, the first three are demonstrably untrue; the final one may have some small element of truth to it. We'll begin by examining some of the specific pieces of evidence offered in the piece quoted above: The statue wasn't meant as a tribute to black Civil War soldiers, nor were the women who modeled for it black. Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, then a young French artist, was commissioned in 1865 by Edouard de Laboulaye and a group of influential French citizens to work on a monument to liberty, intended as a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States of America. Most sources agree that Bartholdi used his mistress (later his wife) and mother as Lady Liberty's models, with his mother serving as the inspiration for the face and his wife for the torso. Neither of these women was black. As for the purpose of the statue, an 1879 design patent granted to Bartholdi contained his description of the work as a commemorative monument of the independence of the United States. There was no mention of black soldiers or the Civil War. Rather, the description specified the independence of the United States, an event which predated the Civil War — and the abolition of slavery — by a few generations. Dr. Haskins holds that the impetus behind the Statue's creation was the abolition of slavery in America. Possibly France did not feel America deserved a monument dedicated to freedom as long as a significant portion of its population was enslaved. That is not to say the Statue was dedicated to the abolition of slavery (else Liberty's tablet would surely have been emblazoned with the date of emancipation, not the date of its formal break from Britain), but that this happy change of affairs inspired some of those behind the gift to support the project. One of the Documents of Proof listed in the article, the magazine section of The New York Times from 18 May 1986, states: If the statue had been intended as a tribute to prowess of black soldiers, the choice of a female form was a rather curious one. All the combatants in the Civil War (and every other war of the era) were male, and women were not exactly the gender associated with the values of freedom and liberty in either the United States or France at that time. As Marina Warner notes in her book Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form: In fact, the only thing said about the model on which the statue was based in The New York Times that day comes up in an excerpt from Warner's book: Another excerpt from Warner indicates that the whole the model for the Statue of Liberty was a black woman may stem from its being confused with an earlier, abandoned project Bartholdi adapted to his new assignment: Whatever the color of the person who served as the model for the Statue of Liberty may have been, the statue itself is colorless. It does not represent a particular color of person any more than the Michelin Tire Man does, and the idea it symbolizes applies to people of all colors, whether or not its creators intended it that way. Just as the attitudes of people who lived hundreds of years ago cannot require us look upon others as inferiors today, neither can they magically elevate the status of those who may still be the objects of discrimination. That is a task for those of us who live here and now.
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