The trouble was, mainly, that everyone was getting extremely anxious to see the work completed, and to know exactly, once and for all, just how much the whole thing was going to cost.
As of the start of the new year, 1882, total expenditures on the bridge would come to $13,377,055.67. But as several editorial writers noted habitually, the original estimate had been for about half that, and although Henry Murphy said he thought another $600,000 should be enough to finish with, even he was unwilling to be held to that figure. The old memory of Tweed’s courthouse was returning to haunt honest men on the board, the cost of the bridge now being up to what had been spent on the courthouse.
In addition, only a small minority of the trustees understood very much about the engineering of the bridge, or its history, and fewer still had ever had any personal dealings with the Chief Engineer. In fact, more than half the men now charged with managing the great enterprise had never even seen Washington Roebling. And there was no way to communicate with him except in writing, which few wanted to do, which was a nuisance for those who did, and which occasionally led to misunderstandings.
Robert Roosevelt, the most outspoken of them, asserted foolishly at the trustees’ meeting of October 13 that the added weight of the extra steel would weaken the bridge. Exactly how much more weight could the cables carry, he demanded to know. He wanted Roebling to present a complete report promptly. His motion had carried and Roebling had done as directed, explaining in a letter dated January 9, 1882, why the added weight meant added stiffness in the deck and so even greater strength, not less. Roebling did not say who had directed him to revise his plans, he said only that it had become “incumbent” upon him to do so. He had been against the idea of conventional trains on the bridge, as they knew, but he had gone along with it. “When I consented to make this change,” he said, “it was not so much owing to personal solicitation as to the reflection ‘of what benefit had it been to erect this bridge at a vast expense unless we use it for every possible purpose to which the structure will lend itself.’” They were now to have a bridge so rigid that ordinary traffic would have no visible effect on it. And to settle the nerves of anyone concerned about the cables, he concluded by stating rather dramatically that the cables were strong enough to uproot the anchorages.
The original plan for a cable-drawn bridge train had not been abandoned. It was just that the bridge would now have enough added strength to accommodate the future, which, it was quite naturally presumed, would involve some sort of railroad. The presumption was mistaken; but for different reasons nobody could have guessed at then—the advent of the internal combustion engine and the automobile, mainly—the decision would turn out to be the right one. As a result, the bridge would remain in service for another fifty years before any major alterations in the superstructure became necessary.
It was an extremely important and fortunate decision, in other words, and from some things said later Stranahan appears to be the one who made it, with Kingsley, Murphy, and, ultimately, Roebling backing him up. Perhaps Stranahan had reached an “understanding” with old Commodore Vanderbilt, who was dead by this time, and the New York Central was still serious about the idea. Perhaps Stranahan and the others simply figured the decision was in the best long-range interest of Brooklyn, that a bridge could not be too strong after all, and rather than risk a noisy fight over the thing—a fight they might very well lose—they just went ahead and did it.
The decision was made in Brooklyn, that much is certain, and whatever the explanation, they were pressing their luck. Delivery of steel already on order was way behind schedule; any additional steel would mean further delays, as well as greater cost. So the immediate result of the announced change in plans was a clamor to find out who was mismanaging things in this the final stage of the work.
Ironically, the bridge was all but built. Certainly the difficult and demanding work was done with. It was largely a matter of finishing things up now—the final masonry on the approaches, the last of the trusswork, the plank flooring for the roadways and promenade, and a lot of painting. Already the men had begun taking down the footbridge.
For the first time since his father’s death in the summer of 1869, Roebling could relax a little. For the first time in thirteen years his services were no longer vital. For the first time he was not really needed any longer.
Like Roebling, those trustees who had been in on the work since the beginning were all thirteen years older. A few, like Henry Murphy, were showing their age. But now, with the completion of the work at last almost within reach, it was the newcomers on the board who were the most impatient and the most frustrated by delays. As before, Robert Roosevelt made the greatest noise, claiming with some justification that nobody ever gave him a straight answer to his questions. But he also had an important new ally, the very young new Republican mayor of Brooklyn, Seth Low.
Seth Low said hardly anything at the first trustees’ meeting he attended in January 1882. He simply sat and listened, an alert, serious expression on his boyish face. Only toward the end did he inquire of Henry Murphy when the bridge would be finished.
Murphy answered the question as directly as it had been asked. The bridge would be finished in the fall, he said, providing there were no further complications about money.
At age thirty-two, Seth Low was young enough to be Henry Murphy’s grandson, but still not quite so young as Murphy had been when he was elected mayor of Brooklyn. Low was the son of A. A. Low, the wealthy silk merchant, whose clipper ships had once lined the Brooklyn wharves, and he had grown up with “all the advantages,” in the Low mansion down the street from the Roebling house on Columbia Heights. Perhaps Henry Murphy saw something of himself in the young man. Without question he understood the background Low came from.
Like Murphy, Low had done extremely well at Columbia College. President Barnard had called him “the first scholar in college and the most manly young fellow we have had here in many a year.” Since then he had taken his place in the silk business, married the daughter of a United States Supreme Court Justice, and organized a Young Republican Club in Brooklyn to help elect Garfield and Arthur. As political clubs went, it was quite a departure, there being no smoking or billiard rooms, no bar, no social occasions, nothing but hard work.
When Seth Low ran for mayor it was as “the people’s candidate” and the overriding issue had been home rule for Brooklyn. His well-scrubbed, well-brushed good looks and “tender” age had been in his favor. Politicians did not much care for him, but the people responded in no uncertain terms. He roundly trounced Boss McLaughlin’s candidate, winning with a majority of four thousand votes, and without using his own money. Out-of-state papers were already calling him a figure of national importance and there was talk he would be governor before long.
But by spring the completion of the bridge looked no nearer, Murphy’s assurances were no longer good enough, and Low had joined forces with A. C. Barnes and the New York contingent—Mayor Grace, Roosevelt, and the Comptroller of New York, a man named Campbell—“to clean the stables,” as the papers put it. The young men were all in a very great hurry now and the papers and the public seemed very pleased with that.
Low made his first move on June 12. He asked that the Chief Engineer be required to submit a regular monthly report on the work accomplished and that he include an opinion on when the bridge would be completed. Then a motion was made that the Chief Engineer be requested to appear in person before the trustees at a special meeting two weeks hence, “to consult on matters appertaining to the bridge.”
But later that very day Robert Roosevelt had thrown up his hands and in a great pique announced his resignation. If his purpose, in part, was to draw attention to the mounting animosity within the board, he succeeded. The problem with the bridge was lack of leadership, Roosevelt declared in a long open letter to William Grace. A conscientious trustee could never get straight answers on anything. The management of the bridge, he said, was in the grip of a soli
d phalanx that “even death itself could not break in upon.” The delays in steel delivery were scandalous and left little doubt that things never would have come to such a pass had there been a full-time Chief Engineer on duty, not just to supervise the work but to meet with the trustees whenever they needed explicit information.
The papers made much of what Roosevelt had to say. Henry Murphy immediately called in the reporters to present the other side of the story. If Roosevelt felt in the dark on bridge matters, the elderly lawyer said, it might be because he had attended less than half the meetings there had been in the time since he became a trustee. Nor had he ever once taken his technical questions to the assistant engineers, who were always available for just that purpose. As for Roebling, his place could not be filled by any twenty engineers.
Another trustee who was with Murphy at the time, John T. Agnew, interrupted to make the point that Roebling’s mind was as clear as ever. From his window Roebling could see everything going on at the bridge, Agnew said. Why, with a glass he was even able to distinguish the faces of the different men at work. “His plans and diagrams are all about him, and nothing is done in the work until it has first been submitted to him. He cannot walk about the streets as you and I can, but he moves about his room, and on some days can go out. He has promised to be present at a future meeting of the Board.”
Roebling had made no such promise. It was true he had improved somewhat. His eyesight, in particular, was much improved. He could write again, in a dreadful, childish scrawl that was just barely legible, but he could do it. And by this time he had gone out of doors once or twice. But irrespective of its accuracy, Agnew’s statement put a very different light on things.
Seth Low had also by this time accepted the chairmanship of a committee to investigate the failure of the Edge Moor Iron Company to deliver according to contract. When the head of the company appeared before Low’s committee to explain himself, he said the fault lay not with his firm but with the Cambria Iron Company at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, suppliers of the steel blooms Edge Moor rolled into eyebars and other pieces for the bridge. To the delight of the newspaper editors the man’s name was Sellers, the same as the central character in Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age, which had become a hit play in New York. The editors had a fine time with this right away, sarcastically emphasizing that the Sellers in question was a Pennsylvania gentleman and not, of course, Twain’s archetype Southern promoter whose stock expression was “there’s millions in it.”
Sellers’ contract was the issue to be taken up in the presence of the Chief Engineer at the special meeting scheduled for June 26. But when the appointed hour arrived and everyone was gathered, the Chief Engineer did not appear. Not only that, as the reporters and most of the trustees suddenly learned for the first time, to their extreme surprise, the Chief Engineer was not even in Brooklyn any longer. He was in Newport, Rhode Island.
“Cannot meet the trustees today” was all Roebling said in the telegram that arrived that morning, which Henry Murphy read as soon as everyone was seated.
The meeting continued as planned, but not before a good deal had been said about Roebling’s lack of manners. Slocum remarked acidly that Roebling was an employee of the board, that he should therefore appear before it when so directed, and that he could have at least sent a letter of explanation. Mayor Low commented ominously how much better it would have been had Roebling simply attended.
More than a few people were exceedingly upset now.
“The curt indifference displayed in sending such a message is not excusable by reason of any illness,…” wrote the New York Sun. “It is natural to sympathize with a distinguished engineer who has sustained severe physical injuries while engaged upon a great public work; but he should not rely upon this kindly sentiment to excuse conduct on his part that is unbecoming and hardly civil.” The civic-minded Seth Low, too, was leaving no doubts as to his feelings on the subject. He criticized Roebling whenever he got the chance and called the bridge nothing more than the “unsubstantial fabric of a dream.”
All kinds of intriguing stories were going about. It was said Roebling had been shipped off to Newport against his will, that he himself had nothing to hide but that Stranahan, Murphy, and Kingsley dared not let him be questioned by the others. Roebling knew too much about the original contracts, it was said. He was the one man who could tell the story from beginning to end.
There was another rumor that he had become hopelessly paralyzed by this time and that the trustees certainly did not want this known. It was said that he lost all control over his mind, that he was raving mad, that he was “really as one dead,” that his wife, without anybody knowing it, had been deciding everything, directing the entire work for months. Soon most of the papers were saying as much.
Roebling was again requested to appear before the board. But again when the day came around, he failed to appear. However, this time he did send a letter of explanation. He was too ill to come he said. He could only talk for a few minutes at most and could not listen to conversation if it continued very long. He had gone to Newport on the advice of his doctors, who hoped, he said, that being out of doors some and away from the noise of the city might lessen “the irritation of the nerves of my face and head.” He was now able to be out of his room occasionally.
He had not explained his absence from the previous meeting because he had assumed everyone knew he was sick and he figured the trustees must be getting as tired as he was of seeing his health discussed in the papers.
Not a day went by that he did not do some work on the bridge. His assistants could refer to him for advice at any time. The work to be done that summer was “very plain routine.” If the contractor, Sellers, would supply the steel as fast as it was needed, the work would proceed with no delays whatever.
But then he wrote to Henry Murphy to say he was powerless to speed Sellers up. Making the various shapes required was a difficult job, Roebling stressed, but even more to the point, since Sellers was making no profit out of the contract, he was in no particular rush about it. If all the steel needed were at hand, the superstructure could go up in three months. As it was, there was no chance of the bridge being finished that year, as Murphy had been saying it would. A more realistic date would be late in 1883. For Murphy and those others on the board still loyal to the Chief Engineer, this was extremely discouraging news.
“Newport has never looked more attractive than it does at present,” reported the Brooklyn Eagle in early July. “A large number of summer residents have already arrived. The business people seem to be satisfied with the outlook, and the hotel proprietors anticipate a bigger season than they have had for years.” The National Lawn Tennis Association was to hold its tournament there by invitation of the governors of the Cassino, and the meets of the Queens County Hunt, yachting, shooting and horse races were also to be included in the program of outdoor sports.
Newport had its reputation, of course, and when it was reported that Colonel Washington A. Roebling had taken “the Meyer Cottage” for the summer, people quite naturally had a definite picture in mind of the life he was leading.
The picture was decidedly mistaken, however. The house Emily had rented was not the sort of “cottage” Newport was famous for. It was large and comfortable, but located in what was known as “the other Newport,” the older, less fashionable section of the old sea-port, out near the end of Washington Street, which runs parallel with the shore of the bay and which was described in the Newport Guide of the time as “shady, quiet, and a favorite resort of persons of literary character.” The house suited their needs perfectly. The air came right off the bay, there was little noise or distraction and a good deal of privacy. The broad front porch and the front bedrooms upstairs offered a spacious view of the water and the Newport Harbor Light. Most important, the house was an easy, level, ten-minute ride from the New York steamboat landing, so bringing him up from the boat had been about as uncomplicated and painless as possible.
The
yachting, tennis-playing, lawn-party side of Newport was not only out of sight several miles away, but was an entirely different and separate world from the one they experienced that summer, quite as distant in spirit as it had been when they were still in Brooklyn.
They had picked Newport because G. K. Warren was now stationed there. He had been put in charge of all Corps of Engineers activities in New England, the principal work at the moment being the construction of the breakwater at Block Island. Whether Emily was aware of how much her brother’s health had failed by this time is not clear, but more than likely that too was on her mind when she arranged for the house.
It was the first time she and her husband had been away from Brooklyn in five years. And it might have been a first real vacation since the trip to Europe in ‘67 had it not been for the clamor for him to return to face the trustees. As he saw it, there was little cause to have remained in Brooklyn. His instructions had all been prepared long since, the work was quite routine, as he said; there was really nothing more to be decided of any major consequence. Indeed it must have begun as about the most hopeful summer they had seen in a very long time. By now it was clear to both of them that he was going to pull through. The bridge was all but built, and except for an unfortunate falling out between Martin and Farrington, the work was going perfectly smoothly. (What the fight was about is not known. But Farrington was so angry he quit, much to Roebling’s regret, and there is no record of what became of him afterward.)
A sudden return to Brooklyn would have been a tremendous strain for Roebling, physically and emotionally, but he would have done so immediately, without reservation, had anything serious gone wrong at the bridge. But at this late date he did not propose “to dance attendance on the Trustees,” as he said in the private notes he dictated to his wife. “I never did it when I was well and I can only do my work by maintaining my independence.” If the trustees were angry and irritated with him, the feeling was mutual. He saw their request for him to appear before them as no more than a political ploy at his expense. Important elections were coming up in the fall and there were ambitious men of both parties on the board. The bridge might well decide who would be the next governor. How seriously Seth Low was taking the talk about his becoming governor was anyone’s guess. But there was no doubt at all about Slocum. He was a prime contender for the Democratic nomination. It was a long-awaited opportunity for Slocum, and for William Kingsley, his great benefactor, the time was ripe to become something more than the man to see in Kings County.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 130