The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

by David McCullough

  Had he decided early that night to flood the caisson, in spite of the boulders beneath the water shaft, then things might have gone differently. But if he ever speculated about that, it was only in private.

  The last repairs were completed on March 6, 1871. Five days later the air chamber was completely filled with concrete. During the final few weeks of sinking the caisson, several fresh-water springs had been encountered, and now, much to everyone’s astonishment, the water came right up through six feet of concrete in such quantity that it filled the water shafts clear to the top. The water was perfectly fresh, without a trace of salt, so it was all coming from directly beneath the caisson. The shafts were drained, therefore, and they too were filled with concrete. The air locks were removed and these empty spaces were also filled with concrete.

  So by mid-March the Brooklyn caisson was permanently in place. The hardest, most treacherous and uncertain part of the work, the sinking of the caissons, was half done. No lives had been lost, no one had been seriously injured. Every man on the engineering staff had proved himself worthy of the faith Roebling had in him, and none had quit.

  Work on the Brooklyn side from here on would be of the sort everyone had been anticipating. There would be something actually to see now, to watch grow and change from one day to another. The Brooklyn tower, it was commonly said, would be the greatest structure in the world except for the Pyramids. “America has seen nothing like it,” Thomas Kinsella wrote on the editorial page of the Eagle. “Even Europe has no structure of such magnitude as this will be. The most famous cathedrals and castles of the historic Old World are but pygmies by the side of this great Brooklyn tower. And it is our own city which is to be forever famous for possessing this greatest architectural and engineering work of the continent, and of the age.”

  Such grandeur was still several years off, everyone knew, but it was not so very difficult to picture. “Think of Trinity Church as big at the top of the steeple as at the ground,” said Kinsella, “and one solid mass all the way up, and we get some idea of what this great Brooklyn tower is to be…the fame of the Roeblings and the boast of Brooklyn forever will be that, where Nature gave no facilities for a suspension bridge, and seemed indeed to place a veto upon the idea in these low and shelving shores, the genius of the father designed, and the consummate inherited and acquired ability of the son executed, in spite of all obstacles, this most novel and unparalleled masterpiece….”

  But not until June 5, when the Eagle published Washington Roebling’s annual report to the directors of the Bridge Company, did the people of Brooklyn and New York get a fair idea of what exactly had been accomplished to make the tower possible. Except for the flurry of excitement when the fire was discovered, almost nothing about the details of the work or the setbacks experienced inside the caisson had appeared in the newspapers. Roebling’s report filled seven and a half columns. It was straightforward, unadorned, and it was read with enormous interest. People were utterly astonished to learn all that had taken place beneath their very noses. “We are not partial to long official reports,” the Eagle said by way of introduction, “but this one is exceptional in the thrilling interest of the story.” Roebling was praised for his modesty by the editors and lauded for his own personal heroism in such a way that it seemed they too were realizing for the very first time the extent of what had happened down at the end of Fulton Street. In 1870, when the caisson was making its slow, tedious descent, the English translation of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea had appeared in America, with its adventures of the strange genius Captain Nemo. Now the Eagle wrote: “The adventures of Colonel Roebling and his twenty-five hundred men under the bed of the East River are as readable, as he tells them, as any story of romance which has issued from the imagination of the novelist.”

  What Colonel Roebling and his men might run up against on their next descent was now, naturally, a matter of much popular interest. On one side of the river a tower of imperishable granite would be rising straight into the sunlight, while on the other side, mortal men would be descending beneath the tides and into the earth. It was quite a picture to keep in mind for anyone crossing the river to clerk in a countinghouse or sit the long day at a sewing machine.

  11

  The Past Catches Up

  The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout.

  —WALT WHITMAN,

  Democratic Vistas

  WHEN the New York caisson hit the water it made such a wave that several tugs standing close by were tossed about in a “very sportive manner” and two men in a rowboat, who had come in close for a better view, were immediately swamped and had to be rescued. Because of the comparatively shallow water in front of the Sixth Street launchways, the caisson had been built with a temporary floor, which was the reason for the wave. Otherwise the launching had gone off perfectly, as expected. Indeed, the engineers had been so confident of success that Emily Roebling and Mrs. William Kingsley had gone along with their husbands and several others on top of the caisson as it was sent hurtling down the ways.

  At a large luncheon served in the Webb & Bell offices afterward everybody had been in high spirits. “We are now on foreign soil!” proclaimed John W. Hunter of Brooklyn, one of the stockholders. Everyone cheered. Then Henry Slocum got up and said he and Kinsella had agreed that Kinsella would do the speaking, while he did the thinking. But Kinsella interrupted immediately. Slocum was to do the drinking not the thinking, the editor said, and the laughter was very great according to later accounts.

  After that Kinsella reminisced about the days when the bridge was no more than “the shadow in the brain of one man,” as he put it. “When William C. Kingsley [loud applause] was the founder, he put up more of fortune and reputation than any man I ever knew to do in an enterprise at the time so shadowy.” Then Slocum was on his feet again to propose a toast to Kingsley “as the man to whom we are more indebted than to all others.” There was a standing ovation for Kingsley, who said only that he had never made a speech in his life and asked instead that everyone drink to the health of Colonel Roebling. According to one version of the scene, Roebling was “subsequently introduced and loudly cheered, but not threats nor blandishments could coerce a speech out of him.”

  The launching of the caisson and the celebrative luncheon afterward took place on May 8, 1871. There was still a great deal to be done, however, before the caisson would be ready for use. By the time it was completely fitted out, towed to position, and sufficiently loaded down so that the men could begin work inside, seven more months would have passed, the year would be nearly over, and by then if anyone were to use the word “shadowy” to describe the early business of building the bridge, it would be for quite different reasons. For by the time the New York caisson would start its descent, the Tweed Ring would have collapsed, something no one would have believed possible in May of 1871.

  The year had begun splendidly for Tweed. On New Year’s Day Oakey Hall was again sworn in as mayor of New York and John T. Hoffman as governor. If everything went according to Tweed’s plan, 1872 would see Hoffman elected President of the United States, Hall governor, and Tweed a United States Senator, or at least so it seemed to a number of political observers.

  The annual Americus Club Ball in early January had been a triumph. The club stood on a cliff overlooking Long Island Sound, at Greenwich, Connecticut, not far from Tweed’s own summer place. It was as sumptuous as any club in the country and the pinnacle of Tammany social life. On the night of the ball the great halls of the clubhouse were described as “a labyrinth of festoons, flowers, fountains, flags, and fir trees.” To the obvious delight of the club president, Tweed, a thousand canaries chirped in gilded cages hung everywhere about the hall, while on the stage before the dance floor there blazed an immense gaslight rendition of the Tammany banner, the familiar snarling tiger’s head of Tweed’s old Americus Six fire company. Vases of cut flowers lined the walls, and fronting the main entrance was a
life-sized photograph of the great man himself, hand-colored with crayons. Some six thousand people were there, the papers said, making it “a gala pageant such as is rarely witnessed anywhere in the world.”

  But later in the month, on the night of the 24th, a sleighing accident had occurred north of Central Park, in which a man named James Watson had been badly injured. Twenty years before, Watson had been behind bars in the Ludlow Street Jail when the warden put him in charge of the prison records because of his exquisite penmanship. But Watson had advanced rapidly in the time since and was now County Auditor and trusted bookkeeper for the Tweed Ring. A week after the accident Watson was dead and so began the fall of the house of Tweed.

  The newspapers made little of Watson’s demise and no one thought much more about it. Such momentous events were taking place elsewhere in the world that public interest in the Ring and its doings had greatly subsided. The Franco-Prussian War, which had begun the summer before in Europe, was coming to a thunderous conclusion. On January 18, in a solemn ceremony at Versailles, the German Empire had been born. Incredibly, France was about to be overthrown. Popular support for the Germans was enormous in the United States and in New York especially. King William I of Germany was described by the papers as an affable, courteous old gentleman and a special favorite of children. Heroic Prussian infantry charged across the illustrated pages of Harper’s Weekly. On January 27, newsboys in the streets were hollering the surrender of Paris. But the bloodshed had continued for months afterward, as civil war broke out within the city, and the New York papers were filled with grisly accounts of hostages murdered by the Communards.

  Not until the last of May was Tweed back in the news to any great degree and even then the occasion was a happy one, the publicity just what Tweed wanted. One of Tweed’s daughters, Miss Mary Amelia Tweed, was being married to Mr. Arthur Ambrose Maginnis of New Orleans and the father of the bride and his friends put on quite a show.

  The wedding took place at seven o’clock on the evening of May 31, 1871, in Trinity Chapel, where, at the appointed hour, “a richly attired audience” watched Tweed, daughter on arm, come slowly, grandly down the aisle to the tune of Mendelssohn’s march. The bride wore white corded silk, “décolleté, with demi-sleeves, and immense court train.” There were orange blossoms in her hair and she carried a huge white bridal bouquet. But the diamonds were what everyone talked about later. “On the bride’s bosom flashed a brooch of immense diamonds,” said the Sun, “and long pendants, set with large solitaire diamonds, sparkled in her ears.” On the white satin shoes she wore there glittered tiny diamond buttons.

  The mother of the bride, attired in salmon-colored silk, also wore “splendid diamonds,” and it was noted that “Mr. Tweed himself wore black evening dress, and a magnificent diamond flashed on his bosom.”

  After the service Tweed put on a reception at his Fifth Avenue mansion, where a blue silk awning and a Brussels carpet had been run out to the curbstone and a huge crowd had gathered in the street. The house was ablaze with lights. A fountain played at one corner. Inside, the rooms were a mass of flowers. “Imagine all this,” one dazzled reporter wrote, “lighted up with the utmost brilliancy, and hundreds of ladies and gentlemen in all the gorgeousness of full dress and flashing with diamonds, listen to the delicious strains of the band and inhale in spirit the sweet perfume which filled the atmosphere, and some inadequate notion can be formed of the magnificence of the scene.”

  The dinner was catered by Delmonico’s, but the main attraction was a display of wedding presents in a big room upstairs. The gifts lined all four walls and were said to surpass anything seen since the marriage of the daughter of the Khedive of Egypt two years before. There were forty sets of sterling silver. One piece of jewelry alone was known to have cost $45,000. Peter “Brains” Sweeny gave diamond bracelets “of fabulous magnificence,” and Tweed’s two other fellow stockholders in the Bridge Company, Smith and Connolly, proved equally generous. The Herald came up with an estimated cash value of everything on display: “Seven hundred thousand dollars!”

  The wedding was the high-water mark of the Ring’s opulence and for Tweed it was a great blunder. The public, dazzled and delighted at first, began to ask questions afterward. How could a man who had spent his whole life working in moderately paid positions with the city live in such style? Where did the likes of Police Superintendent Kelso get money enough to buy a wedding gift that, as the papers reported, was the “exact duplicate” of the one presented by Jim Fisk? People said the wedding was proof positive of the corruption the Times had been making such a commotion over and papers other than the Times took up the cry.

  “What a testimony of the loyalty, the royalty, and the abounding East Indian resources of Tammany Hall,” wrote the Herald with bitter sarcasm two days after the wedding. “Was there any Democracy to compare with thy Democracy, in glory, power, and equal rights, under the sun? Never! And it is just the beginning of the good time coming. Don’t talk of Jeff Davis and his absurd Democracy; don’t mention the Democracy of the Paris Commune, as representing true Democratic principles; but come to the fountainhead of Democracy, the old Wigwam, and you will get it there—if you get within the lucky circle of the ‘magic’ Ring.”

  So with summer coming on, the public was ripe for disclosures and as chance would have it things had been happening inside the “lucky circle” that would reveal for the first time and in plain figures examples of such outrageous plunder that Tweed’s wedding expenditures would look rather modest by contrast. The pattern of events was like something from one of the popular melodramas of the time, for it was on the very day of the wedding that a man named Matthew J. O’Rourke quit his job as County Bookkeeper, taking with him a package of documents he had been quietly assembling.

  O’Rourke was a newspaperman who had been hired two months earlier when the County Bookkeeper of longstanding was moved into the late James Watson’s place as County Auditor. For some strange reason Tweed’s people had not bothered to take O’Rourke into their confidence. Moreover, O’Rourke had long had a claim against the city which the Ring had ignored. So he had very carefully copied down a number of choice samples from the ill-fated Watson’s old account books and these he delivered to the offices of The New York Times.

  Watson had been at the nerve center of the Ring. Indeed, if there was “magic” to the Ring, Watson was the unseen assistant who made it work, and as with most grand deceptions the secret was extremely simple.

  Watson merely required everyone who received a contract from the city to increase his bills before submitting them by 50 to 65 per cent. Watson paid the face amount of the bill, then the contractor returned the overcharge in cash, and Watson, like a dutiful paymaster, handed it out within the Ring. Among New York contractors it was commonly said, “You must do just as Jimmy tells you, and you will get your money.”

  Anyone who knew a little bookkeeping could look at Watson’s voucher records and see what was going on. O’Rourke, for example, judged from what he saw that the Ring had made off with $75 million since 1869.

  Watson had worked directly for Comptroller Connolly. Why Connolly had been so careless about whom he let see Watson’s books is hard to fathom. But the books were left so unguarded that the Times soon received a second bundle of figures from a man named William Copeland, who had copied down still further revelations. *

  Tweed found out that the Times had the material before any of it appeared in print and he reacted predictably. Figuring that George Jones, publisher of the Times, had his price, like any man, Tweed told Connolly to go see him. Connolly offered Jones five million dollars to kill the story. Jones declined, reportedly saying to Connolly, “I don’t think the devil will ever make a higher bid for me than that.” Connolly persisted. “Why with that sum you could go to Europe and live like a prince,” he said. “Yes,” answered Jones, “but I should know that I was a rascal.”

  To Tweed the time seemed also right for silencing Thomas Nast. A well-known banker
was selected to call on Nast. The banker told Nast that his artistic talents were much admired by certain gentlemen, that these same gentlemen thought so highly of Nast that they would be willing to put up $100,000 to help him further develop his genius in Europe. Nast asked if he might get $500,000 to make the trip. “You can,” the banker is supposed to have answered most enthusiastically. “Well, I don’t think I’ll do it,” Nast said. “I made up my mind not long ago to put some of those fellows behind bars, and I am going to put them there.” Whereupon Nast was told to be careful lest he put himself in a coffin first. (Later, after the Times opened fire on him, Tweed said that were he a younger man he would have gone and killed Jones personally.)

  The Times began running transcripts from Watson’s account books in early July, starting with some armory frauds O’Rourke had copied down. (Ten old stables rented by the Ring for practically nothing had been sublet to the county as armories for $85,000 a year; the buildings had not been used at all, still the county had paid out nearly half a million dollars just for repairs on them.) Later in the month a special supplement was gotten out by the Times documenting the outlandish courthouse swindles, among other things. Two hundred thousand copies were sold out at once. Horace Greeley wrote in the Tribune that if the Times had its facts straight, then Mayor Oakey Hall and Connolly ought to be breaking rocks in a state prison. In the meantime, however, on July 12, the Ring had been dealt still another blow and, quite unintentionally, by some of its most ardent supporters.

  July 12 was the day for the annual Orangemen’s Parade, in honor of the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. The event had caused a serious riot the year before, in Elm Park. Some two thousand Protestant Irish Orangemen gathered for a picnic had been set upon by about three times as many Irish Catholics armed with clubs and pistols. The police had arrived eventually, but not before several people had been killed on both sides and scores severely wounded. This year, fearing the same would happen again, Mayor Hall had forbidden the Orangemen to hold their parade. (Though himself a Protestant and of English ancestry, the Elegant Oakey was accustomed to reviewing St. Patrick’s Day parades dressed in a green cassimere suit with shamrock buttons, a bright-green cravat, and green kid gloves.) Hall’s decision provoked a storm of protest. The Ring was pandering to the Catholic rabble it was said. New York had come to a terrible pass if decent people were no longer able to parade peaceably without fear of mob violence.