The Statue That Defines America
The Statue of Liberty has long been an icon of freedom and of the United States. Nowadays, the highest point that the public can access is its crown, but that’s not how it always was. For the first few decades after it was erected, visitors could go up the statue’s upraised arm, until they reached its torch. That ended in 1916, because of the first foreign terror attack on American soil. The torch has been inaccessible to the public ever since. For that, we have Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany to blame.
It happened on Black Tom Island, an artificial landfill in New York’s Harbor, just off the New Jersey shore and next to Liberty Island, home of the famous statue. In the early twentieth century, Black Tom housed one of the East Coast’s biggest munitions depots. When World War I started, its warehouses could barely keep up with the combatant’s orders for munitions. One combatant who did not like that was Imperial Germany, who as seen below, decided to do something about it.
