But if in New York—even in New York—men of principle, men of integrity, education, and property, could rise up and triumph over a Tweed, then perhaps there was hope for the Republic. The idea was a tonic. Numerous other cities had their “mute, inglorious Tweeds,” as E. L. Godkin wrote in The Nation, and other cities would have their own spirited crusades for the restoration of political virtue. Reform groups became the fashion. Committees were formed. Silent indifference to political immorality was no longer acceptable in polite society and Brooklyn was no exception.
As might be expected the impact of things happening so close by in New York was especially pronounced in Brooklyn. The talk that October was nearly all politics. The editors of the Union, in their offices directly below the Bridge Company, wrote that Brooklyn could well use the services of New York’s Committee of Seventy and that there had been “fear and trembling” among certain Brooklyn officials ever since the assault on Tweed began.
That election frauds had made the Honorable Martin Kalbfleisch mayor of Brooklyn two years before was common knowledge. That there would be more of the same this time seemed inevitable. But even Kalbfleisch appeared to be caught up with reform spirit. He had denounced the Democrats and was running for re-election as an independent. So it was a three-way race. The Republicans had a candidate and Boss McLaughlin had put up a former mayor named Powell, a decent enough man, as were most McLaughlin mayors, with the notable exception of Kalbfleisch.
The Democrats appeared to be in trouble for the first time in years. The opposition was calling for the downfall of the Brooklyn Ring along with the Tweed Ring. Kalbfleisch would assuredly take away more Democratic votes than Republican. For McLaughlin, for Murphy, Kingsley, and Thomas Kinsella, these were exceedingly busy times, with much at stake, not the least of which was the total say on how the Bridge Company ought to be run. Nobody who understood the realities of Brooklyn politics seriously thought the Democrats might lose, but at the same time the Democrats were taking no chances.
Then on the 23rd of October there was a horrible accident at the bridge. Two men had been killed, both married men with families. A third was so dreadfully mangled that little hope was held out for him, and five others were badly injured. Until now the bridge had had a perfect safety record. In the two years since construction began there had not been a single serious accident, no injuries to speak of, no loss of life. This was extraordinary, in view of the known hazards, and it was generally taken as a sign of conscientious management.
The Brooklyn tower by then had reached a height of about seventy feet. The day of the accident an eight-ton block of granite was being hauled to the top of the tower by one of the three huge boom derricks mounted there, which were all held in position by wire rigging, like the masts of a ship. Suddenly a socket in one of the guy wires broke and two derricks fell from the tower.
One man, a rigger on the derricks, was struck by a great wooden boom that sheared off half his skull. He was thrown down on the top of the tower, stone dead. “If he had stood still he would not have been injured,” C. C. Martin said later; “but when he heard everything crackling and crashing, he lost his presence of mind and ran out where the derrick was coming down just in time to be struck.”
Another man had been standing on an elevated railroad track that ran along the side of the tower facing the river, about fifty feet above the dock where the stone scows tied up. His job was to shove a little flatcar under the stones as they were hoisted by an engine on the dock, then move them into position to be picked up by one of the derricks on the tower. When the derricks fell, the stone suspended from one of them crashed through the track about twenty feet from the spot where he was standing. It would have missed him, in other words. But seeing it coming, he had fled to the end of the track and leaped off. The fall broke both of his legs and no one knew how much else internally. He died later.
The other man killed instantly was also on top of the tower. He too saw the derricks falling and tried to get out of the way by jumping over a granite block sitting on the masonry. Just as he jumped, the mast of one derrick fell on him, crushing him, face downward, into a crevice in the masonry no more than eight inches deep.
Roebling, Paine, and Collingwood were over on the New York side at the time, but C. C. Martin, who was in his office in the yard below, heard the crash and rushed up the narrow flight of stairs built at one corner of the tower. Martin found several men trying frantically and futilely to move the fallen derrick. The man caught beneath was unconscious but still alive. Martin sent for jacks and levers and in another fifteen minutes had the derrick up and off. The man was pulled out from under; he breathed a few times, as though his awful agony had been eased, then died.
The man’s name was Daugherty and he had been working near Thomas Douglas, the stonemason, who was foreman on the tower. Douglas had started off running in the same direction as Daugherty, but instead of trying to jump the stone block in the way, he had crouched down beside it. As a result the stone saved him. But when Daugherty was struck, his knees came down on Douglas’ back, pinning Douglas so he could not move. In his agony Daugherty kicked Douglas in the kidneys so severely that Douglas would never recover. He lived on for nearly two years after that, working part of the time, but troubled terribly by the injury and gradually growing worse. The story goes that he wanted to live only long enough to know that the Brooklyn tower was finished. When he was told that it had been, he died almost immediately afterward. “He was a splendid man,” Martin told reporters.
But the accident also left a lot of people wondering how well things were being managed by the Bridge Company and at a time when what the Bridge Company needed most was public confidence. The guy wire on the derrick broke because of a defective weld in one socket, as would be learned. The accident had not been caused by mismanagement or the use of shoddy equipment, but a great many people did not know that, or believe it if they did.
An investigation was called for and was conducted by the coroner, with the result that the Bridge Company was entirely exonerated and credited publicly with using the best-quality material and taking every precaution to guard against accidents. “This has been the case from the first and will continue to be,” William Kingsley stated; “no labor or expense will be spared to insure the safety of the employees.” The day before elections the Executive Committee would grant to each of the families of the deceased payments of $250, or a little better than three months’s wages.
But a few days after the accident and two weeks before the elections several hundred reform-minded Brooklynites met inside the Brooklyn Skating Rink to organize their own Committee of Fifty, as they called it, or the Rink Committee, as it would become popularly known—“to investigate charges of fraud, extravagance, and corruption in several departments of the city government.” Also included for investigation was the New York Bridge Company.
As expected, the Democrats won in Brooklyn, but by only a slim margin. They were immediately charged with bringing hired goons over from New York, with buying votes, with using repeaters, fictitious names, all the customary devices. Most of the charges were probably true. That there was fraud at the polls there is no doubt whatever. Later examinations would show that a minimum of six thousand illegal votes were cast. But only five men would be convicted in subsequent trials, all of them quite unknown and unimportant, largely because the Democrats had in their possession some damaging information concerning the prosecuting district attorney.
Powell was mayor now. McLaughlin, Kingsley, and the rest were all still in power. But across the river the election had destroyed the Tweed Ring.
The reformers had gone to work in New York as never before, and they had worked together, Republicans and Democrats. It was their one best and last chance, they believed. Young Men’s Reform Associations were organized. Clergymen called upon their congregations to do their duty. Newspapers and picture magazines described it as probably the most important election ever. On Election Day A. T. Stewart closed h
is store so every clerk could vote. Four regiments of militia backed up the police to see that everything was conducted properly at the polls and for the most part it was. Among many older, wealthier citizens, however, it was thought that very little would come of all this.
The reform ticket won by an overwhelming majority. Only two Tammany aldermen managed to survive. Tilden was elected to the State Assembly. Of the five Senatorial districts in the city, candidates put up by the Committee of Seventy were victorious in all but one—Tweed’s. But Tweed’s majority was less than half what it had been two years earlier and it had cost quite a sum of cash distributed about the ward. A few days after the votes were counted it was announced that the annual Americus Club Ball would be postponed.
Almost immediately the New York World sent a reporter across the river to interview the man thought to be the brains of the Kings County machine, William C. Kingsley. The World had been notably patient with Tweed all these years and now seemed eager to demonstrate that New York had no franchise on corruption. Kingsley stated categorically that there was no such thing as a Brooklyn Ring. Hugh McLaughlin, he said, lived in the plainest fashion. Why McLaughlin did not even keep a horse, Kingsley said with emphasis, and was probably not worth $100,000. The contrast with Tweed went without saying.
Kingsley conceded that the Kings County Democrats had taken something of a beating at the polls largely because of Tweed’s troubles. “That great tidal wave of corruption in sweeping over the land has damaged us here to a certain extent,” he remarked. But just so nobody misjudged his own motives, he concluded the interview by saying that he would be richer by $250,000 had he never had anything to do with politics.
Sometime soon after that the Committee of Fifty began looking into the management of the Bridge Company. The committee had already searched first for foul play in the management of Prospect Park and failed to turn up much. One or two other investigations were proving equally inconsequential, and among Brooklyn Democrats, the very conscientious chairman of the committee, a man named Backhouse, became the butt of innumerable bad jokes. But with the bridge the investigators believed they were on to something, and chiefly as a result of their curiosity a number of matters that had only been talked about privately before got into print a good deal sooner than they would have otherwise.
Tweed’s prominent role in the business of the bridge, not to mention that of his three Tammany compatriots, Smith, Connolly, and Sweeny, was, of course, an obvious embarrassment to the Bridge Company at this particular time and many Brooklyn people thought that role and its origins needed explaining. But it was Kingsley’s rather ill-defined position in the management of bridge business and how precisely he was being rewarded for his “services” that now became subjects of the keenest interest.
Kingsley was a difficult man to figure. His name was a football in Brooklyn, as Beecher would say. On the one hand he was a force for progress, industrious, respected by the respectable (Murphy and Stranahan, most notably), a good citizen if ever there was one. His firm of Kingsley & Keeney was building the Brooklyn Theater, lately the most talked about new building in town. He was one of the commissioners for the new capitol in Albany. His personal success was obvious. He was a kind and devoted family man. He attended church regularly. He was generous with his money, openly compassionate in times of trouble. When news of the Chicago Fire reached Brooklyn that October, he had been among the very first to do something. Along with Kalbfleisch, Judge McCue, and Isaac Van Anden, he had donated $100,000 to aid the stricken city. This “princely contribution” was announced as only the prelude to Brooklyn’s bounty (which it was) and the Eagle, of which Kingsley was part owner, led the campaign to raise more funds.
Still, there was the political side of the man, as everyone knew, and it was never quite clear just where his business interests stopped and his political interests began. When the Rink Committee people started poking into the financial side of the bridge, it began to look as though his ability to work with machine politicians and to profit thereby was not necessarily limited to the Brooklyn side of the river.
As it happens neither Tweed nor any of the three other directors from New York had been seen in Brooklyn since Tweed’s “troubles” began in early summer. Only that June, Tweed and Hugh Smith had been appointed once more to the Executive Committee and nobody had raised any objections. But neither man, nor Connolly, nor Sweeny, had had a thing to do with the bridge, or a word to say about it, since then, a decision doubtless strongly encouraged in the offices of the Bridge Company.
But as the company’s records would show, Tweed had actually appeared at only a very few committee sessions even before his troubles. Of some fifty-eight committee meetings held between September of 1869, when Tweed came over for the opening session, and July of 1871, when the Times opened its attack on him, Tweed had bothered to show up for just six meetings, including the first one—so very few, as a matter of fact, that anyone examining the records afterward would naturally take a special interest in those he did attend. Tweed’s time was exceedingly valuable after all, as everyone could now appreciate, so whenever he did make the effort to come to Brooklyn he must have had some definite purpose in mind.
The records were only a “synopsis,” the business of each meeting being described in about the briefest, most general language possible, but even so, by looking at those meetings that Tweed attended a pattern emerges. Nearly always some particularly interesting motion was taken up, put forward, often as not, by Tweed himself and, as would be noted, these same motions almost always appeared to be directly beneficial to William Kingsley.
It was on a motion from Tweed, for example, at the Executive Committee meeting of October 27, 1869, when the bridge was just getting under way, that the members resolved to pay Kingsley & Keeney $46,915.56 for lumber. Kingsley would later explain that the lumber had been bought from a Georgia dealer at the request of John A. Roebling, before the bridge began, in order to take advantage of an especially good price. Since the Bridge Company had no money then, Kingsley said, he had made the purchase in advance. So the committee was merely paying back what he had coming to him. Be that as it may, the record showed that Tweed was the one who urged that Kingsley get his money, plus interest, and naturally that left some people wondering.
Much more important, however, was the motion passed at the meeting held on July 5, 1870, a meeting at which Tweed appeared after a notable absence of more than six months. This was the day the commission arrangement that Tweed would later divulge was made official policy by the Bridge Company. The resolution, as recorded then, reads as follows:
Resolved, That fifteen per centum on the amount of expenditure for the construction of the foundation of the towers of the-Bridge on both sides of the river, up to high-water mark, including payments for land, be paid to William C. Kingsley, the General Superintendent, for his services and advances on behalf of this Company, up to the completion of such foundations.
It was customary always to include in the record the name of the member who put forward a motion, but in this case that was not done. The arrangement was not announced in the papers, moreover, the business of the committee still being conducted in private. It had not been discussed at the annual Board of Directors’ meeting a few weeks before or even mentioned, nor would it be when the directors convened again.
Also, quite interestingly, Tweed was back again at the bridge offices in early September to move that “such amounts as due Wm. C. Kingsley up to the present time…be paid, and that hereafter the amounts, becoming due under said resolution be paid monthly.” By the end of the year, expenditures on the bridge totaled $1,179,-521.40. This meant that a 15 per cent payment to Kingsley came to roughly $175,000. A check for this amount was made out to Kingsley January 3, 1871. If Kingsley’s official connection with the bridge was to be dated from the time he was formally appointed General Superintendent in October 1869, slightly more than a year earlier, then his compensation to date worked out to be a very handsome
salary—about seven times that of the President of the United States, as would be noted in the papers.
Why Tweed took Kingsley’s interests so much to heart is not known for sure. Perhaps, as was speculated, the early “understanding” with the Ring people also included an agreement that Kingsley would turn over part of the 15 per cent in return for Tweed’s support in the Executive Committee or that Kingsley would merely apply part of the 15 per cent to what the four Tammany men owed him for the bridge stock he had handed over. That way nobody would suffer. Tweed, however, would testify that he himself had made no deals at all with Kingsley.
“Was he to divide the fifteen per cent with you?” Tweed would be asked.
“I had no understanding with him, sir,” Tweed answered, but then added, “I don’t know anything about the rest.” The rest meaning Smith, Sweeny, and Connolly. What they may have worked out with Kingsley on their own, Tweed could not say.
But since such arrangements had been shown to be the common practice of the Tweed Ring, a great many people, rightly or not, would conclude that that was just what Kingsley had agreed to. Moreover, it would also be pointed out that buying bridge stock by installments, 10 per cent at a time, which was all that was required and what Kingsley and most stockholders were doing, then drawing 15 per cent on several million dollars in expenditures, was a most attractive proposition from a business point of view.
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