The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough
“But the real question is not that which concerns the engineer as much as it does the trustees and the people. By our action today we say: ‘We have nine months before us. We have charge of the expenditure of a million and a quarter of dollars and an interest and expense account of about three thousand dollars a day. The question is, shall we have a sick man or a live man—a man who is responsible and with whom we can come into contact day after day?’ I say this without any reference to what has been done in the past—which has no further claim to my attention than that of historical interest.”
Here, according to one of the reporters present, Mayor Grace broke into a broad grin, as if Low had just said something extremely funny.
“I have only to say,” Low continued, “that if the majority will take the responsibility of leaving things as they are it will give me the greatest pleasure to work with them in justifying their judgment and in bringing about the result we all want—the finishing of the bridge.”
With that Seth Low sat down and Henry Murphy handed Roebling’s letter to the secretary, Otto Witte, who read it aloud.
The letter was brief and said pretty much what was already known—that he would not accept a position as consulting engineer, that his absence from active supervision had in no way hindered progress on the bridge, and that it was his personal wish that the vote be taken simply as to whether or not he was to remain in command.
Mayor Grace was immediately on his feet. “At the last meeting I seconded the resolution offered by Mayor Low, and I have since found no reason to change my mind and I again second it now.”
Then William Marshall spoke. He had never had a great deal to say at board meetings before, the way most of the others had, and he was not known as a speaker. So it is doubtful anyone in the room was quite prepared for the speech he gave.
“Mr. President,” he began, “I am sorry this resolution has been introduced here. I see no reason why Mr. Roebling should be removed. I know that this bridge has been kept back time and time again by many, but I never knew that Mr. Roebling had kept it back one day or one hour. The very gentleman that you propose to put in his place is honorable and honest enough to say he doesn’t believe the bridge has been kept back by the engineer who is his chief. Furthermore, he says that to his knowledge the engineer and his assistants have not made a mistake upon the bridge.”
Then turning to Seth Low, he said, “You want to remove him; to drive him out. For what? Why? As a bridgebuilder he has not had his equal on the face of the earth. I defy contradiction!
“There are two bridges across Niagara. He built the largest of them and it stands there today—a perfect success. When I say ‘he’ I mean his father and himself—the father who sacrificed on this bridge. There are two bridges across the Ohio, one built by Mr. Roebling and one by a man who is ashamed of his name. The one at Wheeling fell into the river; the other, at Cincinnati, is an honor to the man who built it. I never heard he made a mistake and kept the bridge back, and he must be sacrificed. For one I would take the arm off my shoulder before I would permit myself to vote against a man standing here without a blemish upon his character or ability. If you search back to the time of the sinking of the caisson to the present moment you will find that he has not kept the bridge back a moment.”
Again he turned to the Mayor of Brooklyn and this time angrily. “But our friend Mr. Low goes down to Newport and demands his resignation! By what authority?” There was absolute silence in the room. “Have you any law for it? If you have I should like to see it. I should like to know by what parliamentary usages three or four trustees, meeting in the Comptroller’s office in New York, claim to represent the wishes of this board?” The two mayors and Comptroller Campbell kept looking right at Marshall, smiling all the while.
“I consider you are bringing an innocent man and holding him responsible for the delay and losses we have gone through here. I know this board, I know there is too much honor on this floor to enable you to remove the Chief Engineer. If there is any fault to be found we should begin where the fault belongs. If there has been any fault in the board for the last ten years, for one I am willing to assume the responsibility for it, but I don’t want to sneak out and place it on the shoulders of the Chief Engineer. It would be mean and contemptible for me to do that, and I don’t propose to do it.”
There was a long silence when he sat down again. Then Secretary Witte read a short prepared statement supporting the Chief Engineer and J. Adriance Bush said he also would vote to keep Roebling. Martin was not the only member of the engineering staff to speak up in Roebling’s defense, Bush said, they all had. The core of the issue was the change in the plans and that had not been Roebling’s doing and they all knew it. “I think,” he said, “the question is one that we ought to approach…with just the same solemnity as we would approach the trial of a man accused of high crimes and misdemeanors. We ought to look at it in the same light that you and I would regard the impeachment of a judge or anyone in authority. We ought to look at it free from public clamor on the one hand and free from any personal feeling on the other.”
A. C. Barnes said he had a very sincere admiration for Colonel Roebling, but that he did not think Roebling ought to feel wounded if he were to be retired with every honor and his present pay. “Why, sir, if Mr. Roebling were a regular Army officer he would have been retired long ago, with half pay and nothing to do, and nothing would be thought of it.” Barnes said he was simply unable to understand why Roebling did not accept Mayor Low’s resolutions “in the same kindly and considerate spirit which I am sure animates every one of us who would vote for it.”
Ludwig Semler, who apparently had decided that the meeting was running against Roebling, moved the vote be postponed and the whole issue referred to special committee. But William Kingsley, who like Murphy, Stranahan, and Slocum had said nothing thus far, had done some figuring it seems and decided that this was exactly the time to vote.
“I feel the same way,” Mayor Low said instantly.
A few others asked to be heard and were, briefly, including Stranahan, who said simply and rather weakly that Roebling was needed still. Then a voice vote was taken on the Low resolutions, with the following result:
Yeas—Mayors Grace and Low, Comptroller Campbell, and Messrs. Van Schaick, Clarke, McDonald, and Barnes.
Nays—Comptroller Semler and Messrs. Murphy, Bush, Witte, Marshall, Stranahan, Agnew, Swan, Kingsley, and Slocum.
The count was 10 to 7. The resolutions had lost; Roebling had won by a majority of three, including William Kingsley and Henry Slocum. But had the two of them, or any other two, voted differently, Roebling would have been out.
“ENGINEER ROEBLING RETAINED,” “A MAJORITY FOR ROEBLING,” “ROEBLING NOT TO RETIRE,” were some of the headlines the following day.
Mayor Low told reporters that he was quite content with the decision of the board and he told several others on the board who had backed Roebling that he had secretly been hoping Roebling would win all along. He would rather see the bridge finished under Roebling, Seth Low told Ludwig Semler, than any other engineer. Semler repeated this in an interview, thinking apparently that it would put the mayor in a more flattering light, and he offered his own personal diagnosis of Roebling’s mysterious malady, something he had not done before the voting began. “I actually believe that all that ails him is a nervous affection which prevents him from mingling with numbers of people.”
23
And Yet the Bridge Is Beautiful
And yet the bridge is beautiful in itself.
—Scientific American
IN THE early spring of 1883, about the time the weather had turned warm enough for the Chief Engineer to spend some time outdoors in the garden, the bridge was finished. There was no one moment, no particular day, when he could have said as much, nor would there be. Bridges did not end that way. There was always something more to finish up, some last detail to attend to. The final touches at Cincinnati, for example, had dragged on
It had taken fourteen years. In another few weeks he would be forty-six years old. He had spent nearly a third of his life on this one bridge, nearly as much time as his father had given to all his major bridges combined.
His health was much improved. The nearer the end came the better he felt. He could get about the house much more easily than before or go out into the garden. His eyesight had returned. It was a little as though he himself had returned from a long absence. He could read the papers again, for one thing—about General George Crook chasing Apaches across the border into Mexico that spring or about the housewarming party given by Mrs. William Vanderbilt at her limestone palace on Fifth Avenue, the most lavish and costly fancy-dress ball ever put on in the United States (an estimated $250,000) and reputedly the greatest social event of the age. According to the Times the costume problem alone “disturbed the sleep and occupied the waking hours of social butterflies, both male and female, for over six weeks.” Abram Hewitt came as King Lear, “while yet in his right mind,” the paper noted, a remark that doubtless cheered Washington Roebling.
In the time he had spent on the bridge, the telephone and the electric light had been introduced. (What a difference they would have made during the work inside the caissons.) Now at night he could see hundreds of electric lights burning over in New York, directly across the river, in the blocks Edison had first lit the summer before, when Roebling was at Newport.
Instead of one transcontinental railroad, there were now four and a fifth was under construction. There were ten million more people in the country than there had been in 1869. (Brooklyn had grown by 180,000; New York by more than 200,000.) The buffalo had been all but exterminated on the Great Plains and Chester A. Arthur had installed modern plumbing in the White House. Robert E. Lee was dead. Horace Greeley, Jesse James, Brigham Young, Emerson, Crazy Horse, Peter Cooper, they were all dead now. A whole era had passed. His own son would be entering RPI in the fall.
The bridge had taken nearly three times as long as his father had said it would and it had cost $15 million, which was more than twice what his father had estimated. It had taken the lives of twenty men, not including his own father. * The price he himself had paid was long since past reckoning.
Henry Slocum had failed to become governor, because of the bridge mainly. Now Henry Murphy, too, was under the ground at Greenwood.
Would they all have gone ahead with it anyway back in 1869 had they known what was involved? It was a question neither Washington Roebling nor anyone else would ever be able to answer.
When the Democratic state convention opened in Syracuse late the previous September, it had been obvious that the nomination for governor was going to be worth a very great deal. A few days before, in Saratoga, the Republicans had picked a lackluster candidate named Charles Folger, who was generally taken to be what he was—a stooge for President Arthur and the infamous Jay Gould. Not even the Republican faithful had been able to get very enthusiastic about Folger. So in Syracuse, as the Democrats gathered inside the Grand Opera House, spirits were running high and especially among the Kings County delegation, for it had looked even to impartial observers as though General Henry Slocum would be the party’s choice. But instead the convention had picked an unknown upstate lawyer, the reform mayor of Buffalo, Grover Cleveland, who had been considered strictly a local candidate before the balloting began.
Slocum’s only serious rival had been Roswell P. Flower, a debonair Congressman from Watertown who had made a fortune on Wall Street and who, like Folger, was handicapped by his friendship with Jay Gould, as well as by a bad lisp that was sometimes linked unkindly with his name. But just as the convention was about to open, the World, then owned by Gould, began a series of sensational articles on the “Bridge Frauds.” The Tweed disclosures were published in full still one more time, as though they were all new history. Every prior example of corruption within the Bridge Company, documented or alleged, was assembled into a massive attack on the Brooklyn men who had been behind the project. It was charged that three million dollars had been stolen outright during the early years of the work, that Kingsley and Stranahan were little better than common crooks, but, unlike Tweed, so skillful at covering their tracks that proof of their guilt would be next to impossible to come by. Once again Henry Murphy was asked for a statement and once again he denied the charges, as did Stranahan. Kingsley refused to see reporters. Only Thomas Kinsella was willing to talk and he said the fanfare was nothing more than politics.
“I consider it a very bold movement on the part of Jay Gould to get control of the Democratic party, just as he has already got control of the Republican party,” Kinsella said. “In my opinion it is all politics and very bad politics, too. It is as transparent as glass, and anybody can easily see through it. Kingsley, one of the men attacked, is quite likely to appear as a delegate to the Syracuse convention, while General Slocum, one of the trustees, is the man who will undoubtedly be placed in antagonism with Congressman Flower for the nomination for governor. The object, it appears to me, is to cast odium on these men, and break them down in advance of the convention.” Kingsley was not only a delegate, he led the Kings County delegation, solidly committed to Slocum, and Kinsella would be the one to deliver the speech putting Slocum’s name before the convention.
The great issue at first had been the seating of the Tammany delegates, supposedly representing 45,000 voters and headed by that old enemy of the bridge, “Honest John” Kelly. Until late the night before the balloting was to begin, it had looked as though the Tammany delegates would not be let in. But then some of Kelly’s people came calling on the Kings County Democrats to beg for their support. The meeting lasted far into the night, when Kingsley at last agreed to go to work for Kelly. As a result the Tammany delegates were seated and Slocum’s backers went into the convention confident Slocum would get the nomination on the second ballot.
But a man named Ira Shafer, a Flower supporter, gave a speech referring at some length to Slocum’s connection with the bridge and its “gross frauds,” and this, on top of the World “disclosures,” was, as the Times reported, “the means of frightening many of the country delegates who were friendly to General Slocum, but feared the effect his association with the original promoters of the bridge enterprise might have…”
Slocum was also strongly opposed by an influential reform faction from New York City known as the County Democracy, the head of which was none other than Abram S. Hewitt.
As a result Slocum and Flower were deadlocked on the first ballot. Kelly had not delivered for Slocum, but split his votes, biding his time. The Brooklyn men felt they had been double-crossed. There was a fierce scramble to pick up votes but on the second ballot Slocum and Flower were deadlocked again. But this time Hewitt and Kelly had both gone for Cleveland and that decided it. The Flower delegates immediately abandoned their man and Cleveland won on the third ballot. As a consolation prize, Slocum was later nominated for Congressman-at-Large.
William Kingsley and his delegation returned to Brooklyn bitterly disappointed and talking freely with reporters of their disgust with Kelly, who, as they said, would never have been seated in the first place had it not been for their help. Kelly answered later that he himself had never said a word about supporting Slocum, which was quite true.
In November Cleveland defeated the Republican Folger by the largest majority ever given a candidate for governor. Slocum was elected to Congress, but among Brooklyn Democrats there were wistful reflections on what might have been. In an inverse way the bridge had made the Buffalo man governor.
Once the elections were over, the papers had little more to say about bridge frauds. The clamor over corruption ceased instantly. But on November 20, determined to
As it happened, and as no one realized at the time, November 20 was also Henry Murphy’s last day at the Bridge Company. That night he came down with a bad cold. On Friday, December 1, 1882, he was dead.
As the papers reported, Murphy, at age seventy-two, had been in good health up until the night he took sick. As regular as clockwork he had left his house each morning at nine and walked to his law offices on Court Street, where he and his two old partners, Lott and Vanderbilt, both dead now, had long been such fixtures. Later in the morning he would go over to Montague Street to the Coney Island Railroad offices, stay perhaps an hour, then walk down to the Bridge Company, where he generally spent the remainder of the day. On the 20th he had gone home about five.
His cold had turned to pneumonia a day or so later, but it was his heart that killed him, according to the papers, and from what his son said in an interview, it seems he died in terrible agony. The time of death was six in the morning.
“At the clubs and other places where men gathered, the deceased was the general topic of conversation,” wrote the Eagle, the paper he had founded. The feeling was that the day marked the end of an era. Murphy had been a historic figure, everyone felt. He was the closest thing to a Founding Father Brooklyn ever had, both in his personal grace and in the things he had accomplished. To many he had seemed a last holdover from a vanished golden age. His passing was like the tolling of a bell, as almost everyone who wrote about it tried to express in one way or other.