The 5 statues
Credits
On Liberty Island, on the way to the front of the statue, visitors come across a row of 5 statues representing key figures in the monument's history. These include Edouard René de Laboulaye, a French historian specializing in the United States. He was also a jurist. It was he who initiated the idea of building the monument. The second statue also features a Frenchman, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor and friend of Laboulaye. His ambition was to create a gigantic work of art, capable of rivaling the wonders of Egypt. His project for a colossal statue at the entrance to the Suez Canal was diverted to create the Statue of Liberty. The third figure is the designer of the statue's internal structure, Gustave Eiffel. He would later become famous for his ability to build a wrought-iron tower over 300m high in the heart of Paris, for the World's Fair. These three figures were complementary, as one was an intellectual, the other an artist and the third an engineer. Between them, they had the skills to transform a vague idea of an offering to a friendly country, coupled with a more general notion of Liberty, into a real work of art. This trio was completed by two other figures, both American. The first is Joseph Pulitzer, a famous journalist of his time. He deserved his statue because he used his newspaper, the New York World, to secure American funding for the plinth, thus saving the project. The last statue is Emma Lazarus, who wrote a poem - repeated at the feet of the statue - that magnifies the colossus. The poem served to popularize the statue project and helped finance it.
Joseph Pulitzer
Biography
Joseph Pulitzer, born József Politzer on April 10, 1847 in Makó, Hungary, and died on October 29, 1911 in Charleston, South Carolina, was an American journalist of Hungarian origin. In 1904, he created the Pulitzer Prize, a highly prestigious literary prize awarded annually since 1917 for works in various fields, including journalism and literature, and among uniquely American personalities.
His father, Fülöp Pulitzer, was a powerful Hungarian-Jewish seed merchant; his mother was a Roman Catholic of German origin. After Fülöp's death, the family became impoverished and Joseph emigrated to the United States in 1864. He arrived in Boston at the age of 17, his passage paid for by Massachusetts military recruiters looking for Civil War recruits. He joined the 1st New York Cavalry Regiment of Volunteers (en), known as Lincoln's Cavalry, Company L, in which he served for 8 months.
After the war, he settled penniless in St. Louis. He took a series of odd jobs, but never kept them, until one day he fell victim to a group scam by someone promising jobs on a plantation. His account of his misadventure is published in the local newspaper, the Westliche Post, where his writing skills get him noticed and win him the support of two neighboring lawyers. They helped Joseph find a job with the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, enabling the young immigrant to study law at the end of the day and join their firm in 1868, before he was offered a position as a journalist with the Westliche Post.
In the meantime, Joseph became a naturalized American citizen on March 6, 1867.
At the Westliche Post, Joseph worked hard and made a name for himself, as well as in the political sphere: he joined the Republican party, with dazzling success, which enabled him to join the Missouri state legislature at the beginning of 1870, even though at under 23 he was not yet of the legal age required for the position (25).
In 1879, Joseph Pulitzer became a shareholder in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the result of the merger of two of the city's daily newspapers, after acquiring shares in another paper in 1872 and selling them in 1873. He became a direct competitor of Edward Willis Scripps (1854 - 1926) when the latter launched the St. Louis Chronicle in St. Louis in 1880. He then founded the Pulitzer Publishing Association, with which he joined the Associated Press in 1893, and managed to keep Scripps' newspaper out of the Associated Press by enlisting the help of his allies in the Pulitzer Publishing Association. In 1897, the Associated Press succeeded in liquidating the United Press (association), forcing Edward Willis Scripps (1854 - 1926) to set up his own telegraph agency, albeit on the Pacific coast.
The exclusion of the St. Louis Chronicle played a key role in the history of the Associated Press, launching a series of court cases that culminated in the Illinois Supreme Court's Inter Ocean Publishing v. Associated Press decision, a precedent prohibiting a news agency from sorting through its members.
In the meantime, he bought the heavily loss-making New York World from multimillionaire Jay Gould in 1883, making him a direct competitor of William Randolph Hearst. When Hearst bought the rival New York Journal from his brother Albert Pulitzer in 1895, a commercial war broke out between them. Thanks to their consummate art of scandal, the two men developed yellow journalism, a kind of sensationalist press with flashy advertising. Pulitzer used this newspaper to raise funds throughout the United States to build the base of the Statue of Liberty.
In 1904, he created the Pulitzer Prize, a highly prestigious literary prize awarded annually since 1917 (for works in the fields of journalism, literature and classical music, among uniquely American personalities).
Joseph Pulitzer died on Sunday, October 29, 1911, at the age of 64, in Charleston (USA, South Carolina). His eldest son Ralph Pulitzer took over management of his press empire after his death.