Sitting there on the traveler, a good 185 feet over the river, he cut his chair clear from the shackle and tied the chair ropes to the proper wire. It took him about fifteen minutes to make the switch, “the hearts of many spectators beating fast and hard on witnessing his cool daring.”
O’Neil had moved on again eventually and reached the middle of the river, where Arnold, meantime, had been sitting waiting patiently. Then, after dangling out there for a time, the two of them were towed back to the New York tower.
But the greatest excitement of the day had occurred a little earlier over on the Brooklyn side, where the descent from tower to anchorage was made by none other than E. F. Farrington, who apparently wanted to make up for Kohrner’s poor showing on Saturday and to demonstrate to his men (and just possibly to the Brooklyn spectators as well) how the job ought to be handled.
On the Brooklyn side, also, quite a number of people had been admitted within the enclosure surrounding the tower yard and among them were several seemingly fearless young women who wanted the best view possible of the high-wire performers, and of the fatherly Farrington in particular. One pretty brunette in a pink summer dress, a girl of about eighteen, led the way. Followed by the others, she had climbed to the top of the tower and there, with a pair of opera glasses, waiting for the master mechanic to make his appearance, she was seen to study the vast panorama spread out below.
Farrington, it was understood, would commence his descent at two o’clock and at two o’clock he appeared, dressed like a doctor this time, in suit and tie and a white linen duster and carrying a large knife.
He took his seat, stepped off, and was on his way with no to-do. And he was making swift progress, with all the dispatch of a surgeon, when quite by accident he dropped his knife. It fell some two hundred feet, harming nobody, but it also left Farrington in a rather impossible predicament, or so it would seem from the ground. Farrington, however, proceeded right along as though nothing had happened. When he reached the next lashing, he simply went at it with his hands and to the delight of everyone had it untied in a matter of seconds. Though it took him quite a little while to get down, the crowd stayed with him the whole time and he still managed to do the job faster than had poor Kohrner.
And then the circus acts were over. Both travelers were in position, ready for business, mounted in such a way that the space between the sides of each enormous loop was about twenty-seven feet, or so wide apart that when they were seen from the waterfront or from out on the river, it looked as though four separate ropes had been strung over the towers, placed about where the four great cables were to hang.
“I have carried out your instructions to the letter,” Farrington wrote to Roebling, “…and from my perfect familiarity with your plans, and my own experience, I shall expect the cables of this bridge to equal, if they do not excel, the best that ever were made.”
18
Number 8,
Birmingham Gauge
Sealed proposals will be received by the Trustees of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, up to the 1st day of December, 1876, for the manufacture and delivery in Brooklyn, N.Y., of 3,400 net tons or 6,800,000 lbs. of Steel Cable Wire…
—From specifications issued over the signature of W. A. Roebling, Chief Engineer
EVEN among his political opponents Abram Hewitt was considered an honorable man. There was nothing very engaging about him. A nervous, brusque little person with an authoritative manner, he was anything but the ingratiating good fellow. But he was hard-working, not a politician by trade, and reputedly both intelligent and honest, all qualities that counted high with the electorate in the year 1876.
Hewitt had come quite a way since the late Mayor Havemeyer had asked him to take a look into the bridge management. He was a Congressman now, and more. His friend Tilden, who had become governor of New York chiefly because of his reputation as a standard bearer against Tweed, was the Democratic candidate for President. Hewitt was his campaign manager, and with the depression still gripping the nation, the Republicans divided, and ever more scandal in Washington, it looked as if Tilden might be in the White House come spring. Tilden’s opponent was the mild, modest, and largely unknown Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio, who had been picked that June at a convention in Cincinnati, where the Roebling bridge had been a way for delegates “to take some air” as the balloting dragged on, and where the nominee himself had begun his law career about the time that bridge was being started.
Tilden, however, was not much as a candidate. Cold and secretive by nature, not in the least eloquent, he was also in poor health and rather reluctant to spend any of his sizable personal fortune on behalf of his own cause. As a result Hewitt had become more than just his manager. He was the driving force of the Tilden campaign and, with his brother-in-law, Edward Cooper, the biggest financial contributor. Hewitt also happened to be running for Congress again, but his reputation was so high and his Republican opponent so weak that his election seemed certain, despite the little time he could give to it.
“Hewitt was as true a patriot, as pure a man, as ever lived, in my opinion,” wrote one admiring young campaign worker. Henry Adams, historian and man of letters, whose vision of his times would count so with future historians, wrote that Hewitt was among that New York school of politicians “who played the game for ambition or amusement, and played it, as a rule, much better than the professionals, but whose aims were considerably larger than those of the usual player, and who felt no great love for the cheap drudgery of the work.” Everything considered, Adams judged Hewitt “the best-equipped, the most active-minded, the most industrious…the most useful public man in Washington.”
Hewitt was known for his liberalism and sense of responsibility. He was the wealthy ironmonger who believed in labor unions. He was the Congressman who had the intelligence to appreciate scientific research, ardently supporting the geologic surveys in the West, for example. He was not simply a reform Democrat, he was what all respectable people longed for: a decisive gentleman in public life.
So it is not surprising that when Hewitt introduced a resolution at a meeting of the bridge trustees the first week in September, it was considered an exemplary piece of foresight and was adopted immediately and unanimously.
The principal piece of business to be attended to next was the awarding of the wire contract. It was plain a lot would be riding on the decision. Estimates were that the order for wire would come to somewhere near a million dollars.
Hewitt had arrived at the meeting a little late, just as the president of the board, Henry Murphy, was recounting the progress made since the previous meeting in July and predicting no more problems henceforth. The contractors for the stone had all been paid and the Chief Engineer’s specifications for cabled wire had been approved by the Executive Committee. There was no reason, Murphy said, why the bridge could not be completed in a short time.
But then Hewitt, who was vice-president of the board, said that while he had read the wire specifications and found them to be “eminently wise,” he had not found any provisions concerning those who should be allowed to bid for the contract. Hewitt expressed some surprise about this.
The Chief Engineer was also a manufacturer of cable wire, Hewitt reminded Murphy and the others. He himself was a wire dealer, but he did not consider it just that he should become a bidder, and would not, therefore. Bids from any firm, company, or individual interested in the bridge in any way should not be accepted, he said. The Chief Engineer especially should not be allowed to become a bidder. Hewitt said further that if Colonel Roebling was permitted to compete for the contract, he, Hewitt, would resign from the board and have nothing more to do with the bridge. It was quite a little speech. It made an issue of something that had never been considered an issue in all the years since John A. Roebling was first asked to build the bridge and apparently it made a great impression, for when Hewitt offered the following resolution, it was adopted without any further discussion:
Resolved,
That bids from any firm or company in which any officer or engineer of the Bridge has an interest will not be received or considered; nor will the successful bidder be allowed to sublet any part of the contract to any such person or company.
There was no specific mention of Roebling or the Roebling company, but just so nobody mistook his intentions, Hewitt later repeated what he had said for the benefit of the press. “I am very strongly opposed to the Roeblings having anything to do with the filling of contracts for the bridge,” he was quoted as saying.
But before the meeting adjourned another man present stood up and asked to be heard. His name was John Riley and he too wanted to say something concerning the Chief Engineer. He said he had understood that Roebling was very ill and unable to attend to his duties, but now he had heard that Roebling’s wife was doing his work for him. Clearly the time had come to give somebody else the job, Riley said. If there were mistakes in the construction of the bridge, the trustees would become liable, and he for one did not intend to be responsible for any such mistakes.
Murphy immediately answered that in the event of Roebling’s death, Martin, Collingwood, or McNulty could take charge of the work (nobody had said anything about Roebling dying) and Kinsella commented that there were no more efficient engineers. That seemed to satisfy Riley and everyone else and the meeting broke up.
That was on September 7, the day after William Tweed, who had disappeared from his house on Madison Avenue nine months before, stepped off a ship at Vigo, Spain, and was immediately arrested. After hiding out in a farmhouse in New Jersey for three months, Tweed had moved to Staten Island and from there went by schooner to Florida, where he lived in the Everglades until he was able to sail for Cuba. In Havana he had booked passage for Spain on a bark called Carmen. On the trip across he had been so seasick that he arrived in Spain weighing a scant 160 pounds. Still, incredibly, the Spanish authorities, with only a Nast caricature to go by, had recognized him. The news of his arrest caused a sensation in New York, about the time Hewitt, the man who had taken Tweed’s place in the running of the Bridge Company, was making news with his latest service in behalf of the great public work. His resolution was widely praised. And even though it was an intensely political season, and the pronouncements of candidates were pretty generally viewed with that in mind, Hewitt was taken at his word. Whether he or any of the other trustees anticipated the reaction in Trenton is impossible to say.
The New York and Brooklyn papers carried Hewitt’s resolution and his remarks about the Roeblings on the morning of September 8. In Trenton, later that same day, Washington Roebling dictated a letter of resignation.
His health, he wrote to Henry Murphy, was such that he could no longer continue as Chief Engineer. His doctors had been urging him to give up for the past two years, but he had not, he said, because his personal direction seemed to be absolutely necessary to the success of the bridge. Now things were different. “All plans down to the smallest detail have been prepared by me for several years to come,” he said; so the work would not suffer any if he were no longer in charge. He had been neglecting his private business. (“I have not been inside our mill for four years,” he added, but then thought better of that and had Emily cross it out.) “My health has been undermined by my faithful attention to these duties [as Chief Engineer] and the extra expenses I have been subjected to during these years have far exceeded the recompense I have received and I therefore feel I have earned a rest.”
Then he got to the heart of the matter. He had taken the full burden of responsibility for the engineering of the bridge, he had given the work his every energy, he had made financial sacrifices, he had endured years of physical suffering, but now his own honesty and integrity, and that of his family, had been questioned publicly and this he would not endure, and particularly at the hands of Abram Hewitt. For Roebling, as he would make abundantly clear in time, in his private correspondence, did not share the conventional view of Abram Hewitt.
Although devotion to the success of the work has been my ambition throughout, it is only by strict adherence to this principle that I have been able to steer clear of the entanglement connected with the general management of the work and maintain the impartial position on which alone an engineer should stand. It is therefore with regret at the close of our pleasant relations I am obliged to resent the gratuitous insult offered to me by the Vice-President of the Board of Trustees…a man whose designs upon the cable wire and ironwork of the superstructure are only too transparent and whose nominal connection with the Board of Management has had from the first no object but his own personal advantage.
According to Emily Roebling’s letter book the letter ended there. But a day or so later, still in a rage, Roebling wrote to the Brooklyn Eagle, explaining a little further what he meant by Hewitt’s “nominal connection.” Hewitt, Roebling charged, could resign his place as trustee anytime so as to evade his own resolution. The bridge itself meant nothing to Hewitt. But the letter never appeared in the Eagle. Either Roebling decided not to send it or Thomas Kinsella decided not to publish it.
Murphy did not keep Roebling waiting long for an answer. He said he could not accept Roebling’s resignation, only the trustees could do that at their next meeting. In the meantime, he urged Roebling to reconsider, assuring him that his services were vital, and that Hewitt was motivated by only the noblest intentions. Roebling was anything but pacified by this. Still hurt and angry, he was even more outspoken in his reply.
I was publicly and specifically singled out by name by Mr. Hewitt, as if I had spent my whole life in concocting a specification which I alone could fill or as if I were a thief trying to rob the bridge in some underhanded manner and against whom every precaution should be taken. Coming from such a source this is an insult I cannot overlook and I am compelled to resent it by declining to remain in a position where I am at any moment liable to a repetition of such acts on his part.
In light of later events, however, the most interesting part of the letter, none of which was ever made public, was this single sentence:
As you seem to be deeply impressed with Mr. Hewitt’s action in declining to become a competitor for this wire, I desire to say that his magnanimity is all a show, as the firm of Cooper and Hewitt have no facilities whatever for making the steel wire, and if you receive a bid from a Mr. Haigh of South Brooklyn, it will be well for you to investigate a little.
What Henry Murphy thought of this is not known and there is nothing in the record to indicate that he followed up Roebling’s suggestion. So presumably Murphy either knew more than he was ever willing to admit or he figured Roebling’s accusations to be those of a man under a great deal of strain. Roebling and Hewitt had long been rivals in business after all and the Roebling brothers were all known to be staunch partisan Republicans just like their father.
How much Murphy knew about Haigh’s business reputation one can only guess. It is possible that he and the other trustees had no suspicions about the man, but it is not very likely, for J. Lloyd Haigh had certainly not gone unnoticed during his time in Brooklyn.
Haigh had arrived in town some twenty years before. He took up residence on Columbia Heights, joined Plymouth Church, and commenced his social life as “a single gentleman.” He was quite suave and handsome apparently, a fine vocalist and considered “a great catch.” At Plymouth Church he “not only became an enthusiastic attendant, but was noted for his intense admiration for the pretty girls of the Bible class. His captivating manners and his personal attractions made him a welcome guest in many households, and his triumphs in winning hearts soon assured as great a success in that direction as his subsequent career in his business operations.” In a short time he was courting the daughter of a prominent Willow Street family. An engagement was announced and the fashionable part of Brooklyn was “agog with the gossip of the approaching nuptials,” until the father of the bride-to-be did a little checking into Haigh and found the man already had a wife and two children living “in rural re
tirement.” The wife was brought to Brooklyn to confront Haigh and the whole affair was hushed up as quickly as possible by the Willow Street family.
Haigh, however, waited only long enough for the rumors to die down before setting off on another round of courtship, devoting his attentions this time to a young lady who lived only a few blocks from Willow Street, and again presenting himself as a bachelor. Again he was found out and again he became a suitor, on Henry Street this time, only now he was saying he had obtained a divorce. There was a wedding shortly, with Haigh’s first wife again in Brooklyn claiming he was still her husband. Eventually there was a third wife and some question whether there had ever been a second divorce.
That there was a single Brooklyn man on the Board of Trustees who had not heard something of all this seems very doubtful. It is also doubtful that none of them knew, as Roebling did, that in the wire business Haigh was considered little better than a crook.
When the trustees met a month later, there was no talk of Roebling resigning. No business at all was taken up since the turnout was not enough for a quorum. The crisis had passed apparently, the rift had been patched up some way or other. Perhaps Roebling’s assistants persuaded him to change his mind, or his brothers did, or Emily, or all of them together. Or perhaps he himself, with time to think things over, decided he had come too far, sacrificed too much, to quit over injured pride, that there was another honorable alternative, and that in truth the bridge really could not be built without him. Perhaps he was just incapable of giving up.
The Great Bridge Page 42