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hammered away at the necessity of taking power away from the “the idle, the vicious and the scheming politicians.” They dismissed as “preposterous” the idea that “a mere majority should direct how the public expenses, paid by the minority, should be regulated.” Democracy, acceptable for a small town, was lunacy in a large city like New York. Most towns, after all, had an “intelligent, orderly American population,” whereas Manhattan was filled with dependent proletarians and “desperadoes from all ends of the earth.” (Nor was it much better across the East River: the World believed that the “uncivilized classes in Brooklyn are quite as murderous as the savage in Montana.”)

Urged on by Governor Tilden, the state legislature passed the proposed amendment in the fall of 1877. Under existing rules, if it passed again the following year it would go into effect. In the fall of 1878, unfortunately, New York City voters gave Tammany Hall a controlling influence in the state legislature and the Common Council. Despite John Kelly’s heretofore extraordinary willingness to court businessmen’s approval, he recognized the Tilden Commission’s suffrage restriction plan for what it was—a device to dethrone politicians by disfranchising their electoral base—and when the proposed constitutional amendment came up for reconfirmation, it was scuttled. For the moment, neither the propertied nor the new-model politicians could rule without the other, and an uneasy power-sharing arrangement was cobbled together in which Kelly maintained control of the party, and the wealthy contented themselves with strategic positions in the government and on independent boards and commissions.

A MONUMENTAL ASIDE

During the period when the city’s political and economic elite were striving mightily to rein in democracy and the immigrant masses, New York City played host to an object that would become the quintessential emblem of them both. Auguste Bartholdi, one of the many Frenchmen who had arrived in New York in 1871, was not a Communard seeking refuge but a sculptor seeking a site. Bartholdi was the emissary of a group of activist French intellectuals, of moderate republican stamp, who were intent on erecting a monumental statue in the United States, dedicated to liberty, to commemorate the upcoming centennial of 1776. The leader of this group was Édouard-René Lefebvre de Laboulaye, a prolific writer who had produced a three-volume Histoire des États-Unis and a book, Paris in America, about a Parisian transported to Manhattan.

Laboulaye was fascinated with the United States because he saw it—especially after the northern victory—as the kind of ideal republic he wanted to establish in France. He had worked to liberalize Napoleon’s reign from within, and after the fall of the empire he became a republican member of the royalist-dominated National Assembly. To advance his cause he fastened on the idea of having a collaborative Franco-American group erect a statue in America, far enough away to avoid provoking a monarchist backlash, yet close enough to foster (by association) a republican image for France. Hence Bartholdi’s scouting mission. In addition to meeting with American notables, he inspected various locations and found his ideal spot on Bedloe’s Island, situated in what was now unquestionably the gateway to the United States, the harbor of New York City.

The project advanced slowly during the 1870s. In 1873, in a kind of test case, the French government commissioned Bartholdi to execute a larger-than-life bronze statue of Lafayette, to give to New York City for having sent aid to Paris after it had been besieged by the Germans in the winter of 1870-71. It would be delivered and erected in Union Square for the 1876 centennial of the American Revolution.

By 1875 Laboulaye and his colleagues had gained the ascendancy and established the Third Republic. Now a French-American Union was created (with Laboulaye heading the French side), and Bartholdi forged ahead with producing a prudent Statue of Liberty, one that embodied republican ideals but steered clear