The Statue of Liberty Revisited: Making a Universal Symbol

Most of the essays in this informative collection were presented by academics at a symposium on the 1986 centennial of the Statue of Liberty, and they remain worthy observations. Christian Blanchet suggests that the liberty conceived by the statue's late-19th-century French donors was one of fair legal process, not the earlier revolutionary French conception. Rudolph Vecoli examines the statue as an icon for immigrants and describes how it entered American popular culture, such as in political cartoons expressing pro- or anti-immigrant feelings. Barbara Babcock and John MacAloon take a skeptical view of manipulation of the statue's female identity by a male-dominated culture, asking ``why Liberty has been eroticized as both a goddess and a whore in Western culture.'' David Billington portrays the statue as part of the engineering wave that also brought the Brooklyn Bridge and the Eiffel Tower. Two unusual perspectives come from Tsao Hsingyan and Fang Lizhi, Chinese observers who comment on the inspiration from the statue for the ``Goddess of Democracy'' in Tiananmen Square. Dillon is senior scholar in residence at the Smithsonian; Kotler is a special assistant in the Smithsonian's Office of External Affairs. Photos not seen by PW. (Jan.)