Statue of Liberty Congress officially renamed Bedloe's Island as Liberty Island, a change advocated by Bartholdi generations earlier. The act also mentioned the efforts to found an American Museum of Immigration on the island, which backers took as federal approval of the project, though the government was slow to grant funds for it. Nearby Ellis Island was made part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument by proclamation of President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. In 1972, the immigration museum, in the statue's base, was finally opened in a ceremony led by President Richard Nixon. The museum's backers never provided it with an endowment
Conservation-restoration of the Statue of Liberty the statue had also been misaligned. The cause(s) of the misalignments are undetermined, but a few hypotheses have been suggested. The first hypothesis proposed was that Viollet le Duc—the engineer who initially worked on the project with Bartholdi and who designed the structural reinforcement of the arm and the head (displayed in 1876 at the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia) had died after having completed those two sections—and had employed engineering methods that differed significantly from those of the better-known bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel, who had finished the remainder of the work on the statue, and who is generally credited for