Rust: The Longest War

Rust 1

A HIGH-MAINTENANCE LADY

On Saturday, May 10, 1980, her caretaker slept in. David Moffitt awoke around eight o’clock and put on civilian clothes. He had a cup of coffee, then went out to the garden on the south side of his brick house, on Liberty Island, and started pulling weeds. A trained floriculturist who’d worked on Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification efforts in Washington, DC, he had a spectacular vegetable garden. As the superintendent of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, he also had a spectacular backyard. As usual for a day off, he planned to do a little bit of gardening before going to Manhattan with his wife and three kids, to go shopping in the city or bike riding in Central Park. It was a clear day, about 50 degrees, with a steady light wind out of the southwest. Moffitt was on his knees, pruning roses, a couple of hours later, when Mike Tennent, his chief ranger, ran up and told him that two guys were climbing the outside of the statue. That was a first. Moffitt looked up, focused his hazel eyes, and confirmed the claim. So much for his day off.

It was about 150 yards from Moffitt’s house to the statue, and on the walk there, he could hear visitors yelling from the base of the pedestal up at the climbers. “Assholes!” they yelled. “Faggots!” Their visits were being interrupted, and they objected, because they knew the situation was unlikely to end in their favor. Moffitt was already as mad as the visitors, but not for the same reason. He thought the climbers were desecrating the statue, and probably damaging it. Moffitt, who was forty-one, with thick dark brown hair and a Houston accent, had gotten the job—considered a hardship assignment on account of the isolation—because of his good track record with maintenance. The island, and the statue, had fallen into disrepair; the National Park Service recognized that its maintenance programs were wholly deficient. Moffitt was the first full-time caretaker in a dozen years.

Halfway to the statue, Moffitt stopped, and watched the climbers unfurl a banner. Liberty Was Framed, it said in bold red letters, above Free Geronimo Pratt. Until then, he’d figured the climbers were just pranksters. Now, though he didn’t know who Geronimo Pratt was, he knew the duo were protesters. And he knew how to resolve the situation. The NYPD had a team skilled at removing people from high places—he’d seen footage on TV—and he would call them. So he turned around, walked to his office, and ordered the island evacuated. Inside the statue, an announcement blared over its PA system requesting that visitors proceed to the dock area due to an operational problem. In his office, Moffitt then called the National Park Service Regional Director’s Office in Boston. He’d done this a few times before, and was destined to do it many more times again.

On his watch, Puerto Rican nationals had occupied the statue for most of a day, and a handful of Iranian students had chained themselves to the statue, protesting America’s treatment of the Shah. On his watch, he dealt with about ten bomb threats a year. Before his time, the statue had been the site for college kids protesting President Richard Nixon, veterans protesting Vietnam, the American Revolutionary Students Brigade protesting the Iranian government, and the mayor of New York protesting the treatment of Soviet Jews. As Moffitt well recognized, the statue was the ideal place to protest any perceived wrong. So Moffitt called the NYPD, rather than the US Park Police—and this decision had ramifications for the climbers, and more importantly, the statue.

When the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit arrived, its agents were cheered by the departing visitors. They quickly assessed the situation. A “removal,” they determined, would be too dangerous. They figured nets were needed. And helicopters. Given all of this, Moffitt figured that the situation might take a while to conclude and told his wife to go to Manhattan without him. Then he learned from the NYPD that Geronimo Pratt was a Black Panther convicted in the murder of a Santa Monica teacher, a crime for which he’d been imprisoned for a decade, and he remained angry. There was nothing admirable about desecrating the statue, no matter the cause. “I took the job of protecting this symbol of America very seriously,” Moffitt recalled.

Moffitt spent the day in his office, watching the climbers through a pair of government-issued binoculars. That afternoon, he took a call from a reporter at the New York Daily News. In the middle of the interview, he heard a banging sound coming from the statue. “God damn them!” someone below the statue yelled at the same time. “They’re busting my statue!” A ranger came in the office and said one of the climbers was driving pitons into the copper skin. Moffitt doesn’t recall how many bangs he heard, but he remembers being frantic. Now he was sure they were damaging his statue. He yelled at the reporter, then hung up.

Up on the statue, Ed Drummond, a thirty-four-year-old English poet from San Francisco with an arrest record for climbing buildings and hanging banners, was struggling. After traversing around the left foot, then up and left, the climbing became more difficult than he had expected, or had been prepared for. It had taken him two hours to get to the crook of Lady Liberty’s right knee, and now he was stuck on a small ledge, looking up at a short chimney in the folds of the robe on her back. The surface of the copper skin, in particular, was causing problems, rendering his two eight-inch suction cups useless. The skin was covered in millions of little bumps, almost like acne, the result of the French craftsmen who pounded the copper into shape a century before. Consequently, his suction cups stuck only for about ten seconds, even if he pushed with all of his might. “I realized that they were not going to work,” he recalled, describing the fatigue he began to feel in his arms. He slipped, slithered down a few feet, and barely caught himself with his other suction cup. He was aware of the consequences of falling. “You’d just go hurtling out into the air,” he recalled, “and end up two hundred feet down on the esplanade.” It was also almost certain that if that happened, he would pull his climbing partner, Stephen Rutherford—a thirty-one-year-old teacher-in-training from Berkeley, California—off too.

As he climbed, he could see that between the plates of copper there was often a small gap. The plates had begun to lift for some reason, though the edge formed was not big enough to use for climbing. He also noticed many little holes in the statue, which he had not seen from the ground. Rumor had it, among Statue of Liberty buffs, that they were bullet holes. As the climbing grew more desperate, with his back on one wall of the chimney and both of his feet on the other, he tried placing a tiny S-hook, which he’d bought last minute, in one of the holes, for support. Using a sling, he weighted it, and under less than his full weight, it bent alarmingly.

Drummond had planned to climb up the statue’s back, and onto her left shoulder, then stay in a little cave under the lock of hair over her left ear. Sheltered from wind and rain, anchored to that lock of hair, he planned to keep a weeklong vigil. (He brought a sleeping bag, and a supply of cheese, dates, apples, canned salmon, and water bottles.) He planned to drape his banner across the statue’s chest, like a bra. But he never made it past the chimney. Instead, he decided to spend the night on the ledge, and descend in the morning. He told as much to the NYPD, who relayed the information to Moffitt. That night, Moffitt didn’t get much sleep. From his bed, through his window, he watched Drummond and Rutherford. His children complained about all of the hubbub and helicopters flying around.

The next morning—Mother’s Day—Drummond and Rutherford surrendered, more or less twenty-four hours after they’d started. By the time they’d rappelled to the statue’s feet, the press had shown up on the mezzanine. A reporter yelled up, “Did you use any pitons?” Immediately, Drummond yelled down, “No, we haven’t damaged the statue!” Then, below the small overhang formed by the little toe of the statue’s left foot, he yelled, “This is how we climbed the statue!” and pressed one of the suction cups against the metal. He and Rutherford hung from it. As they descended into the scrum of police waiting with handcuffs, Drummond insisted, again, that he hadn’t damaged the statue. Moffitt, though, later told the Associated Press reporter that the climbers were “driving small spikes” into the statue. As he was talking to reporters, someone handed Moffitt a note from the US Attorney’s Office. It said, “Do not offer them amnesty.” Moffitt wasn’t about to. He was furious.

After a night in jail, Drummond and Rutherford were charged with criminal trespassing and damaging government property, to the tune of $80,000. By then, Moffitt had studied the statue through his binoculars, and discovered the same holes that Drummond had. He’d also sent one of his maintenance guys up the statue to inspect the damage from the inside. He discovered that the holes were everywhere, and weren’t the result of pounding pitons, or spikes of any kind, into the copper. They were places where the rivets, which held the statue’s copper skin to her iron frame, had popped out. The holes in the statue hadn’t been created by Drummond at all. They’d been created by corrosion.

So Ed Drummond was right. Liberty was framed, and her frame was rusting.



What had been interpreted as an act of vandalism turned out to be a much bigger headache for Moffitt. Sure, there was graffiti on the inside of the statue, but nobody had ever damaged the outside. At least Moffitt was pretty sure. Perplexed, he dug through a file cabinet, in search of reports on the statue’s condition. He found none. So he had a short section of scaffolding put up to inspect the damage on the statue. Scuff marks, and small spots where Drummond’s rope had worn away the green patina, were discovered. He also called the National Park Service’s design/construction firm in Denver, and asked their engineers to examine the statue and report on its condition. Two engineers came out a few weeks later, and investigated. They wrote a memo, and gave it to Moffitt. It concluded that the statue was basically sound, corrosion notwithstanding, and did not recommend any repairs. Moffitt was relieved they’d found no damage, but was disappointed that the inspection was solely visual. He was hoping for something more. He’d seen the damage himself, and he wanted answers. So on May 20 Moffitt had two of his staff ask the Winterthur Museum, which had examined the Liberty Bell, to determine the “causes of the severe corrosion and make suggestions to stabilize the system to avoid catastrophic destruction.” They sent two copper samples from Lady Liberty’s torch to the museum, and the museum put them in front of Norman Nielsen, a metallurgist at DuPont.

Nielsen’s report wasn’t much more illuminating than the one from Denver. “It was hoped,” he wrote, “that such a study would define the corrosion processes that appear to be causing the copper to deteriorate at an alarming rate and which might suggest measures that might be taken to stabilize the corrosion process.” Instead, his investigation, achieved via X-ray fluorescence, merely identified the chemical composition of the copper, its patina, and some of the impurities within, including antimony, lead, silver, zinc, and mercury.

Two days before Nielsen finished his report, Drummond’s case was heard. It was obvious, by then, that Drummond hadn’t put the holes in the statue, and the damage charges were dismissed. After all, Drummond had brought no pitons, and no hammer—as was recorded in the report of his arrest, during which his backpack was searched. The banging sound, it turned out, had come from a police officer rapping the butt of his gun on the inside of the statue. But Drummond was convicted of trespassing, a misdemeanor for which he was sentenced to six months of probation and twenty-four hours of community service.

A few months later, Moffitt received a phone call from a lawyer representing a couple of French engineers who’d just completed the restoration of a similar copper and iron statue, called Vercingetorix. They offered to do a more thorough investigation of the Statue of Liberty, which, after all, had been a gift from France. (It’s not surprising that France beat us to the punch; France’s history with metal structures is generations older than America’s.) Moffitt was all for it, as his questions remained unanswered, and he knew further inquiry would be limited by severely restricted NPS funds. The coincidence was serendipitous, to say the least, as Moffitt had twice suggested the formation of a commission to plan for the statue’s upcoming hundredth anniversary, but gotten nowhere, because of budget constraints under President Jimmy Carter. He knew the statue would need to be spiffed up, but nobody, it seemed, wanted to hear about it, much less pay for it. So Moffitt met the engineers at Liberty Island, and arranged for them to meet with the director of the Park Service. A year after Drummond’s ascent, they agreed to form a partnership to restore the Statue of Liberty. The years of “neglect and deterioration,” as the Park Service referred to the 1960s and 1970s at the statue, were about to end. Amazingly, what had begun as an obscure attention-getting stunt by two protesters ended with the most symbolic rust battle in this nation’s history.



The rusting statue—once the world’s tallest iron structure—was a mystery. As seven architects and engineers from France and America began to research her past, they pieced together details. What was clear was that she had been managed, or mismanaged, in a variety of ways, by a mess of agencies. She’d been built in 1886, on top of Fort Wood, on Bedloe’s Island, and after two weeks of orphanage, was initially overseen by the US Light-House Board, which was part of the Treasury Department. She spent fifteen years in that agency’s care, and then twenty-three years under the War Department, before she was declared a national monument. Nine years later she was transferred to the National Park Service. In other words, a half century transpired before anyone with a sense of preservation took over caring for her. One of the first things the NPS did, with the Works Progress Administration, in 1937, was replace parts of her corroded iron frame. Good preservationists, they replaced iron bars with similar iron bars. But, because all of the work was done from the inside of the statue, they used self-tapping screws, rather than rivets. You could say they botched the job. Since then, the statue hadn’t received much better care; the monument hadn’t had an official superintendent since August 1964. There’d been a management assistant, three assistant superintendents, one acting assistant superintendent, a unit manager (none for more than two and a half years), and finally Moffitt, in January 1977.

The American half of the team—Richard Hayden, Thierry Despont, and Edward Cohen—wanted more detail about the statue’s past, so they visited other statues built by the statue’s architect, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, and its engineer, Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel. They went to the Bartholdi museum, in Colmar, France, to see notes, papers, models, and a journal from 1885. They found no drawings, but found out that Bartholdi never intended visitors to see the inside of the statue, which complicated things, be...

“Jonathan Waldman’s first book, Rust, sounds like a building code violation. But don’t let that fool you. This look at corrosion—its causes, its consequences, and especially the people devoted to combating it—is wide-ranging and consistently engrossing. Mr. Waldman makes rust shine. . . . At one point, a canning executive hostile to Mr. Waldman’s questions tells him rust is ‘a silly subject to write about.’ It is a testament to Mr. Waldman’s skill and perseverance that this book proves that man so thoroughly wrong.” —Gregory Cowles, The New York Times

“Compelling . . . Mr. Waldman does a masterful job of interweaving elements of the science and technology.” —Henry Petroski, The Wall Street Journal

“Engrossing . . . Brilliant . . . Waldman’s gift for narrative nonfiction shines in every chapter. . . . Watching things rust: who would have thought it could be so exciting!” —Natural History

“It never sleeps, as Neil Young noted: Rust is too busy wrecking our world. The relentless, destructive process has downed planes, sunk ships, crashed cars, dissolved priceless artifacts, and committed countless other crimes of corrosion. Waldman uses our long war with the iron oxide . . . [to] offer fascinating insights into our endless battle with the dreaded four-letter word.” —Discover

“Lively . . . Don’t be put off by the subtitle, The Longest War. Waldman has embarked on the opposite of a slog.” —The Atlantic

“Fascinating . . . Waldman attends ‘Can School,’ interviews rust experts, and visits the Alaska pipeline, among other adventures, to illuminate the myriad attacks rust makes on our daily lives. In doing so, he adds luster to a substance considered synonymous with dullness.” —Scientific American

“Arresting . . . A book of nonstop eye-opening surprises . . . Brilliantly written and fascinating.” —Booklist

“A mix of reporting and history lesson that never gets boring . . . Impossible to put down.” —Men’s Journal

“The story of corrosion is in some ways the story of Western civilization—the outsized ambitions, the hubris and folly, the eccentric geniuses and dreamer geeks who changed the world. What a remarkable, fascinating book this is. The clarity and quiet wit of Waldman’s prose, his gift for narrative, his zeal for reporting and his eye for detail, these things and more put him in a class with John McPhee and Susan Orlean.” —Mary Roach, author of Stiff, Bonk, and Gulp

“In this remarkable book, Jonathan Waldman takes one of our planet’s oldest, most everyday—and most dangerously corrosive—chemical reactions and uses it as the starting point for a literary odyssey. Part adventure, part intellectual exploration, part pure fun, it will make you see both rust and life on earth in a new way.” —Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook