A Little Sister of Liberty

This copper Statue of Liberty standing about eight feet tall is one of the Little Sisters of Liberty, scattered across the country by the Boy Scouts of America. In nineteen fifty, the Scouts marked their fortieth anniversary with a campaign called Strengthen the Arm of Liberty. The idea came from a Kansas City scout leader named J.

P. Whitaker. Between nineteen forty-nine and nineteen fifty-two, scout troops bought roughly two hundred of these stamped copper replicas and donated them to communities in thirty-nine states and several territories, even as far as Guam.

Each one is a faithful miniature of the great statue in New York Harbor, raising her torch in a small Kansas town instead of over the sea. They were meant as reminders, during the early Cold War, of the liberty the Scouts pledged to defend.