JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1567

This image of the near-future Statue of Liberty (“Liberty Enlightening the World”) appeared in the German version of Puck magazine in 1888–since the statue was officially dedicated on 28 October 1886 it didn’t take the cartoonists and social satirists very long at all to get around to using Lady Liberty/Libertas as a backdrop for their message.   And the message here was the creeping advertising age, which was just the shroud of an advancing consumerist society, because there wouldn’t be that many ads if there wasn’t so much material fighting for so many consumers. Advertising was beginning to creeping in everywhere–and here the cartoonist foresaw a near-future in which the Statue of Liberty was a pure advertising vehicle, and as it turns out, most of the stuff advertised there was junk. 

Here’s another version in glorious black and white

Another intriguing image of the Statue of Liberty of the future appears below, and described in an earlier post on this blog, here.  Although not being used for advertising, she has become just another part of the landscape, swallowed up by the advancing transportation age. 

And although it looks as though Lady Liberty is being packed away as part of a mothball fleet of iconic Americana, this image shows her in France, being constructed (for deconstruction), in 1884.