What exactly his duties were, how much of his time he was giving to the bridge and how much to his other business and political interests, were never explained.
Why he had agreed to the ceiling of $125,000 and had returned the $50,000 when he did was explained, however. He had agreed “on the condition that he should be relieved of a certain portion of the stock of the company he was carrying, which we agreed to do in our individual capacities, with the assistance of two other members of the Board, at our request, by purchasing from him and paying him for $130,000 of the stock at its par value, taking the consequences of our act upon ourselves.”
In other words, by returning $50,000, Kingsley got back $130,-000 that he was in the hole for. So, in actual fact, instead of returning $50,000, he was really having $80,000 returned to him, and if that plus $125,000 he had been paid for his services did not add up to the $250,000 he claimed to have spent—but was never able to itemize to anyone’s satisfaction—it was a tidy sum nonetheless.
As for the purchases made from his Saw Mill & Lumber Company, the defense was that since the Bridge Company got everything at a good price, then no damage had been done. That the Saw Mill & Lumber Company and Kingsley may also have benefited by the business was apparently not considered a pertinent issue.
The Executive Committee was able to report, however, that the money paid to Mr. Ammerman, treasurer of the Saw Mill & Lumber Company, should not be viewed as payments to that firm. Mr. Ammerman, it was explained patiently, had been paid some $84,000 not as a representative of the Saw Mill & Lumber Company, but as the representative of mill owners in Georgia (the same Georgia firm perhaps from which Kingsley had bought the $46,-000 worth of lumber back in 1869).
But the real issue, in the view of the Executive Committee (then composed of Murphy, Slocum, Stranahan, and Husted), was not Kingsley’s innocence, but whether or not the Bridge Company had been run according to the accepted practices and ethical standards of a private corporation, and in their unanimous opinion it most certainly had. The purchasing of materials, for example, was, they said, conducted as it would be by the officials of a railroad company or a private citizen building a house; such people, it was reasoned, ask bids for the work from whichever builders and dealers they choose, whichever “they think best for their interest, without deeming it necessary or advisable to make public advertisement of them.”
“This Company was chartered as a private company,” they reminded everyone, “and although the cities of New York and Brooklyn subscribed to its capital stock, that fact did not change its character. There were scores of railroad corporations in this State to whose stock towns and cities have subscribed under authority of law, and which retain their private character. We refer to this fact merely for the purpose of showing how natural, right and proper in itself it was for the Executive Committee, in the absence of all legal provisions to the contrary, to exercise their discretion in this respect in the same manner as other private corporations.”
So for all the talk of the bridge as a noble public work, the men who had the power saw it as a business proposition.
This particular document was signed on the last day of December 1872. On January 11, 1873, the Board of Directors convened. A committee of five was named to consider how the charter ought to be amended. The five were Hewitt and Schroeder, William Marshall, Judge McCue, and James Stranahan. Murphy, the man who wrote the original document, was not chosen to participate, nor was Demas Barnes, its severest, most conscientious critic.
Then it was resolved by the board that the Executive Committee be directed to appoint “Mr. Wm. C. Kingsley…General Superintendent at a salary of $10,000.” This was done by the Executive Committee later the same day on a motion by Hewitt, which included the provision that Kingsley’s pay be effective as of the previous July 12, when his “former appointment” had terminated with the completion of the tower foundations up to high-water mark. The motion was carried. The management would remain precisely the same as it had been all along.
Kingsley, who was present for this little ceremony, accepted his “new” appointment gratefully, then remarked that his physician had advised “some recreation from his labors was absolutely necessary” and with that in view he was forced to ask for a six-week leave of absence. This request was granted unanimously.
Hewitt had been convinced somehow. He was the key man now, clearly enough, the one known voice of reform on the Executive Committee, the one new face, the one and only representative for the city of New York. And apparently his own examination of the Bridge Company, plus explanations offered by the others on the Executive Committee—not just in their formal rebuttal to Barnes, but in personal conversation—had been enough to satisfy Hewitt that there need be no shake-up in the over-all method of operation or in the principal members of the cast.
Hewitt still wanted the charter changed, but he was in no hurry about it and he had concluded that for the time being there was no reason why things could not continue as before. So as far as the bridge management was concerned the crisis had passed, the case was closed. Nothing was ever said to that effect, but that was the situation. No one on the Executive Committee would oppose changing the charter, then or later, but there would be no great rush to see it done either.
For anyone else who had troubled to follow the situation as it had evolved over the past year and a half, and who had been able to keep it all straight, things did not seem all that tidy, however. Quite a little had been left unsaid, several very important questions had been left unanswered.
Kingsley had still not explained how he spent a quarter of a million dollars prior to the start of construction. (Barnes had been able to justify slightly over $59,000, but that included the early lumber purchase of $46,000, for which Kingsley & Keeney had already been reimbursed. The Executive Committee in its answer to Barnes had not bothered with an estimate of Kingsley’s early expenses or even a suggestion of what they might have involved. Kingsley was simply credited with putting up a large sum of money “at risk,” for which he rightfully deserved to make a profit.)
Nobody said why Kingsley’s agreement had been changed so suddenly after the Tweed Ring’s defeat at the polls or why an erasure had been made in the records instead of simply amending the agreement in the usual fashion.
Kingsley’s duties were still unexplained. In all that had been said in the man’s defense or to justify the peculiar privileges he enjoyed, no one had bothered to mention what his responsibilities were or how much of his time he was expected, or requested, to devote to them. His presence was vital according to the members of the Executive Committee, but just why that was so none of them ever said. Moreover, it seemed curious that whenever the management of the Bridge Company wished to present an authoritative, reliable opinion on the status of the work, Kingsley was never quoted—it was always Roebling. The bridge was always progressing under Roebling’s direction, never under Kingsley’s, according to Bridge Company pronouncements. Unfortunately Roebling himself had not been very clear about what Kingsley contributed to the job; in the two annual reports he had prepared thus far, Roebling cited various members of his staff by name, going out of his way to credit them for this accomplishment or that, which, as he said, often involved “a certain amount of risk to life and health.” But Kingsley he mentioned only in passing—as having made some contracts.
If Kingsley had spent $100,000, $200,000, $250,000, whatever, before the bridge began, then where did he spend it? In Washington? Albany? Or if he had spent no such sums, but more like the sixty thousand that seemed a reasonable figure for the sort of initial expenses such a work customarily entailed, then why was he entitled to such a disproportionately high compensation for his services?
How much had his Saw Mill & Lumber Company profited from the bridge business he had arranged for it? In how many other firms doing business with the bridge did he have an interest? How much of the stock owned by the members of the Executive Committee had he made it possible for them to
own? Why had he been so very eager for this bridge in the first place and how many other bargains had been agreed to privately with politicians and contractors? These were the obvious questions and there were still no answers for them. Nor would there ever be from those in a position to know.
Hewitt would staunchly contend that nothing improper had occurred. The others would simply not say anything more, except to deny the charges that came along. How much Roebling knew of what went on behind the closed doors of the Bridge Company was very hard to surmise. But the impression was that anything undeniably dishonest could have been kept from him and would not have been an especially difficult thing to do. Roebling was not a stockholder and so was not eligible to attend directors’ meetings or meetings of the all-powerful Executive Committee, except when specifically invited. And the record revealed that he had been invited very seldom and only when engineering matters were to be discussed.
Why he owned no stock was never explained. It had been his father’s practice to invest in the bridges he built, whenever possible. And surely if Kingsley and the other Brooklyn people were as anxious for private capital as it appeared they were in the earlier days, then the wealthy John Roebling should have been a prime prospect. But the elder Roebling had not invested in the bridge, nor would his son.
Perhaps Kingsley and the others discouraged John Roebling from coming in with them, preferring to keep the imperious old man and his unbendable integrity at a safe distance. More likely, both Roeblings, knowing something of the other stockholders, and suspecting more, decided they wanted nothing to do with that side of the bridge. The answer will never be known.
Washington Roebling was a very sick man by the time the reports from the Committee of Investigation were issued. One day he would say something of what he knew about the alleged bridge scandals, but that would be many years later.
For the moment, even to those willing to give Kingsley the benefit of the doubt, it seemed obvious that if he had not gotten rich on the bridge, he certainly had been nicely set up to do so. Furthermore, he had managed it all in such a way that it had cost him virtually nothing. Neither he nor any of the others had lost a cent for their efforts.
Indeed, it seemed terribly naïve, quite unrealistic really, considering Kingsley’s basic nature and the ground rules of the political and business circles he customarily operated within, to conclude anything other than this: Kingsley had passed out money liberally in New York, perhaps in Washington, but most certainly in Albany. In Washington there had been comparatively little resistance and Demas Barnes, never a friend of the Brooklyn Ring, was probably not a likely candidate for bribery in any event, nor a safe confederate in any such dealings. But in Albany, support could be extremely dear, as everyone who read a newspaper knew perfectly well by this time, and especially for a charter that was virtually a license to steal, if anyone wanted to view it that way. It was even suggested by one New York paper that if Henry Murphy was the man doing all the work in Albany, writing the legislation, “lobbying” with Tweed, and so forth, then just maybe Henry Murphy had exacted his own large fee for services rendered, and that that had accounted for a substantial part of the money Kingsley “invested” earlier on. If this were so, then perhaps some of the “facts and figures” put forth by Kingsley beside Murphy’s fireplace that fateful winter night in 1866 were not quite what Alexander McCue implied in his account of the scene.
Kingsley had indeed purchased most of the stock and he had obviously handed it out where it would do the most good. He had every expectation of profiting from contracts with the Bridge Company, as the directors made no effort to deny, and it seemed pretty plain that he figured to recover what he had spent for political favors and for stock by the 15 per cent arrangement and quite possibly make a lot more on top of that. Had things continued as they were prior to the fall of 1871, there would have been no sudden unexplained changes in the 15 per cent arrangement and the bridge could have made him a very rich man. But the unexpected had happened. The Tweed Ring had crumbled like papier-mâché. Bargains with Tweed were no longer acceptable. Politically active building contractors were subjects of automatic suspicion. The whole bridge project was suddenly very suspect. Kingsley, just as suddenly, not to mention the whole Brooklyn Ring, was extremely vulnerable. His arrangement with the Bridge Company would not look good at all if it were to come to public attention. The management of bridge business might be put into other hands. The arrangement had to be changed, which it was, most hurriedly and clumsily.
So the rug had been pulled out from under him before he had a chance to do much. But as a result no one was able to pin anything on him either. And besides, since the bridge was being built by a private company, there was, as no one could dispute, little he or any major stockholder could not do, perfectly legally.
The importance of all this was not, however, the degree of Kingsley’s greed or guilt. What mattered in the long run was that largely by a quirk of fate—Tweed’s fall—the greatest municipal work of the age, the most inspired structure Americans had yet attempted, had been rescued from certain disgrace, and probable disaster, at the hands of the Tweed and Tammany rings. Moreover, the movement to make the bridge truly a public enterprise can be dated from this point. Two more years would go by before the old 1867 charter would be changed in Albany, but even so, the days when the Bridge Company could do entirely as it pleased were all over. No more could the Executive Committee and William Kingsley disregard public opinion or conduct their affairs with total immunity and no higher ethical standards to go by than those of a railroad.
At the same time, those people who were actually building the bridge now had to face up to the idea that the work was no longer viewed as an altogether noble and heroic endeavor. Too many seeds of doubt had been sown and the fact that Tweed was out or that a man like Hewitt was in and testifying to the conduct of bridge business certainly did not put an end to the rumors. Papers such as the World remained openly hostile to the bridge and by no means satisfied that its management was henceforth above suspicion.
One paper would list it as one of the “seven fraudulent wonders of the New World,” along with Tweed’s courthouse and the Northern Pacific Railroad. The bridge had been a subject of controversy since the beginning, of course, but always on technical grounds—i.e., was the engineering sound, would the finished structure stand or fall? Now there were other reasons to be skeptical and the bridge, as a result, became a subject of special fascination to a wholly different variety of skeptic, of whom there were a very large number.
The same rich opportunities for dishonesty were still there, it was agreed, the same people had the power, and the void created by Tweed’s departure could well provide lesser scoundrels that much more room to maneuver in. A cloud of suspicion remained about the whole endeavor, in short, and come what may the bridge itself would be viewed by many as the very thing John Roebling had feared it might become when he contemplated its social and political setting ten years earlier: a grand and conspicuous aggravation to the general state of venality on both sides of the river. Despite anything said to the contrary, a good part of the public would remain convinced that every day the work continued some crooked somebody behind the scenes was getting rich on it.
13
The Mysterious Disorder
Knowing from the reports of other similar works that compressed air was liable to affect some men unfavorably, every known precaution was taken to guard against this danger.
—WILLIAM C. KINGSLEY
BY THE FIRST of June, 1872, when the Chief Engineer and the General Superintendent issued their annual reports, the Brooklyn tower stood one hundred feet above the East River at high tide, while on the opposite shore the lower edge of the New York caisson rested seventy-eight feet six inches below the same tidal mark. The General Superintendent in his report stated that 14,500 cubic yards of masonry had been laid on the Brooklyn tower in the year past and 13,075 cubic yards on the New York tower. The Chief Engineer, however, wrote
as follows:
To such of the general public as might imagine that no work had been done on the New York tower, because they see no evidence of it above water, I should simply remark that the amount of the masonry and concrete laid on that foundation during the past winter, under water, is equal in quantity to the entire masonry of the Brooklyn tower visible today above the water line.
It was an impressive way to picture what had been accomplished, if not quite accurate, according to Kingsley’s figures. To be informed that something of comparable magnitude to the Brooklyn tower had been built unseen below the river was for most people to have all the abstract explanations of counteracting pressures and penciled diagrams of timber caissons replaced in an instant with a single vivid image that anyone could appreciate.
The massive, freestanding masonry tower rising at the edge of Brooklyn was still the only part of the bridge conspicuously on display. Through the whole of that spring, as charges of fraud and jobbery filled the papers and Brooklyn gossiped of bridge scandals, work on the tower had proceeded exactly according to schedule and the immense granite shaft was looked upon popularly as an irrefutable affirmation of all that had been promised and anticipated over the past several years. One look at something like this was enough to restore a person’s faith in what man could do and to make crooked bookkeeping and the like seem both terribly petty and no more than a temporary nuisance.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 108