America's Prophet by Bruce Feiler

Author:Bruce Feiler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

ON A GRAY approach from Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty doesn’t quite stir the soul as the postcard images would suggest. Her mint color seems more chilly than star-spangled. She faces south, meaning that for much of the ride you’re viewing her from behind. The shadows in her folds look streaked in soot. From the rear, she appears to be sagging under the weight of her gown. Not until the boat passes under her feet does my heart skip a beat at her Olympian splendor: her firm grip on the tablet in her left arm, the seven bolts of light from her crown, and the erect majesty of her right arm, with the twenty-karat flame managing to brighten the gloom. The shock of gold in the otherwise dreary environs reminds me of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

Barry Moreno was not what I had expected. On the phone, the chief historian of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island sounded like a pencil pusher who wore a green visor and toted a tuna fish sandwich to the island every day. I would have pegged him for balding and fifty. In person he looked like a backup singer for Madonna. He wore fashionably flared jeans, trendy shoes, and a yellow, polka-dotted dress shirt with unbuttoned French cuffs. The son of an Egyptian mother and a Cuban-Italian father, he also has long, lithe fingers that he bends back in the manner of a yoga instructor.

“I first visited the statue in 1988 when I was hired as a temporary ranger after college,” Moreno explained. “I took a train from California. I had never been to New York, and I was stunned by the statue. She was so historic. Not quite as great as a monarch, but something close to the glory of a king.”

He never left. A first-generation polyglot American and a sponge for languages, Moreno was a perfect Boswell for Liberty. He has since written one book and one encyclopedia on the subject in English and was cowriting another in German, and in order to examine all the immigrant documents that came into the library, he had managed to learn French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Afrikaans, Romanian, Portuguese, and Catalan. “They’re all related,” he said nonchalantly, as if the task was as simple as collecting his mail.

Moreno led me up the broad sidewalk, through the tightest security I’d ever seen, and into a small museum at the base of the statue. A giant, life-sized mask of Liberty’s face peers out from the entrance, not as serene as the Mona Lisa, more sternly serious. Alongside it are some of the wooden molds used to hold the 200,000 pounds of molten copper, which were pounded into 310 sheets, each two pennies thick. Nearby is a model of the steel interior designed by Gustave Eiffel, which anticipated the Eiffel Tower that was built the following year. Liberty’s pageantry may be American, but her infrastructure is pure French.

“When I was growing up, I knew the statue as a great symbol of the United States,” Moreno said.

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