Why “No Sum Too Small”?

The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886. This site was made for her 140th birthday, to tell the part of her story most people skip: she was nearly left without a place to stand, and ordinary people — most giving less than a dollar — paid for her pedestal.

The real story

The statue was the idea of French jurist Édouard de Laboulaye and sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. The French people paid for the statue itself through public subscriptions, schoolchildren’s donations, contributions from 181 municipalities and a lottery. Gustave Eiffel and Maurice Koechlin designed her iron skeleton after the original engineer, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, died in 1879.

The Americans were to supply the pedestal, designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Fundraising went badly. In 1884 Governor Grover Cleveland vetoed $50,000 from New York State; in 1885 an attempt to get $100,000 from Congress failed. The committee stopped work with about $3,000 in the bank, while Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Cleveland, Baltimore and Minneapolis offered to put the statue up themselves.

On March 16, 1885, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World relaunched its pedestal drive, aimed at ordinary readers rather than the rich, and promised to print the name of every donor. Gifts poured in, many with notes. On June 17 the French ship Isère arrived with the statue packed in crates. On August 11, 1885, The World announced it had raised about $102,000 from roughly 120,000 people, around 80 percent of it in sums under one dollar.

The pedestal was finished in April 1886, the statue was riveted together by workers hanging from ropes, and on October 28, 1886 she was dedicated, with the first ticker-tape parade, a premature unveiling, and suffragists protesting from a boat because women were barred from the ceremony.

What’s real and what’s invented in the game

• Real: the $100,000 goal, the March 16 start, Pulitzer’s promise to print every name, the refusals by Congress and the governor, the rival-city offers, the April 1885 Puck cartoon mocking the fund with advertising, work resuming on May 11 with 38 of 46 granite courses still to lay, the Isère’s arrival on June 17 to about 200,000 onlookers, and the August 11 finish. Cards and events marked Historical are based on these.
• Real, paraphrased: six donor letters marked “Real gift” describe donations reported at the time (60 cents from a girl alone in the world, five cents from an office boy, a dollar saved for the circus, a dollar from an aged woman, $15 from residents of a Brooklyn home for recovering drinkers, $1.35 from a Davenport, Iowa kindergarten). We paraphrase them rather than quote.
• Invented: every other letter, every name in the donor tickers and clippings, the exact weekly numbers, the heat wave, the millionaire’s cheque and the other non-historical events, and of course the alternate endings in which Boston or San Francisco gets the statue. The game’s maths is a toy model, not a reconstruction of the real weekly totals.
• Money today: conversions use Wikipedia’s figure that $100,000 in 1885 is roughly $3.58 million in 2025 dollars.

How to play well

• Match your headline and cartoon themes for a bonus, and feature a letter that fits your headline.
• Don’t print the same thing week after week — readers get tired of it.
• Watch the Rival pressure meter. Cards tagged Rival Cities and The Nation calm it down.
• Spirit (public enthusiasm) drives the small gifts that make up most of the fund.

Sources

• Statue of Liberty — Wikipedia (history, Pulitzer campaign, donations, dedication)
• Statue of Liberty Facts — National Park Service
• Statue Statistics — National Park Service (all dimensions used on the Up Close page)
• Joseph Pulitzer — National Park Service
• Statue of Liberty Historical Handbook (NPS) (May 11 restart, 38 of 46 courses, rival cities)
• How Joseph Pulitzer Saved the Statue of Liberty — Mental Floss
• Pulitzer’s Campaign — City Reliquary
• The Price of Liberty, 1885 — Forgotten Files (the Puck and Judge cartoons)
• Why did the Statue of Liberty change color? — History.com (patina timeline and minerals)
• 10 fun facts about the torch — Untapped New York (Black Tom, 1986 torch)

Credits

Concept, writing, code and the stylised statue artwork are original to this site. Fonts: Old Standard TT, UnifrakturMaguntia and Libre Franklin from Google Fonts. No trackers, no cookies; your scores, theme and clipping are saved only in your own browser’s local storage.

Not affiliated with the National Park Service, the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation, or the Pulitzer organisations.