On August 5, 1884, the cornerstone of the Statue of Liberty was laid.
The formal masonic ceremony on Bedloe’s Island took place in the middle of a pouring rainstorm, serving as a hard-fought milestone for a monument that was nearly doomed by financial ruin. While the people of France had completely financed the construction of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s massive copper statue, the American public was entirely responsible for building the massive granite pedestal it would stand on. The American fundraising campaign had completely stalled out, leaving the pedestal half-finished until newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer utilized his paper, The World, to launch a brilliant crowdfunding campaign, successfully securing small penny donations from thousands of ordinary citizens to permanently anchor the international symbol of freedom in the mud of New York Harbor.
