The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  His father’s plans still appeared to be the best possible solution, Roebling said; “and I am now making every arrangement to carry them out substantially as indicated.” This he knew was in direct opposition to what Stranahan and some of the others had been talking about in recent months, and what Kinsella had begun hinting at in the Eagle. The scheme was for regular passenger trains on the bridge, linking up with Vanderbilt’s New York Central—so it would be possible to go to sleep in Brooklyn and wake up in Buffalo, as they put it. That Henry Murphy’s Coney Island line might also benefit from such an arrangement had also become a topic of conversation among Brooklyn businessmen.

  Roebling explained that the grade of the bridge would be too great for any but heavy locomotives. The bridge had not been designed for such loads, he said. Possibly a narrow-gauge locomotive could be used, drawing a few light cars, but that would cut passenger loads to a sixth of what the cable system could handle. Moreover, according to his calculations, in a storm such as the one of January 31, narrow-gauge cars would blow right over. “Neither, must we overlook the effect of a puffing, snorting locomotive on horses already sufficiently startled by the novelty of a very elevated position,” wrote the engineer.

  Kinsella seemed to take all this very graciously. If they had reached the point where all there was to argue about was the size of the doors on the passenger cars, then they had come a long way indeed. That was not the issue, of course, and the issue was still very much alive behind the scenes; but for now an atmosphere of peace settled over the bridge offices and morale among the men actually building the bridge was very high.

  Early in March the full-rigged ship U.S.S. Minnesota, passing under the center of the bridge, clipped one of the cables with the tip of her topmast. The mast went down with a crash, taking flag and halyards along with it, but the bridge suffered no damage at all. Workmen on the footbridge cheered and waved their hats.

  Ever since he returned from Spain Tweed had been telling people he wanted to die. On the morning of April 12, 1878, his wish began to come true.

  A few weeks before, on his way from court back to the Ludlow Street Jail, he had caught a cold, which developed into pneumonia, complicated by heart disease. “They will be preaching sermons about me,” he had said. Gray, sunken-cheeked, actually gaunt now, he grew steadily weaker, virtually all alone. According to those few who were at his bedside, he died just as the Essex Market clock struck noon.

  There would be some dispute later over just what his last words were. A lawyer who was there claimed Tweed said faintly, “I hope Tilden and Fairchild are satisfied now.” (Charles Fairchild was then the Attorney General of New York.) Some of the newspapers said Tweed had died talking of angels. But a man named S. Foster Dewey, who was Tweed’s secretary and at his bedside, denied this vehemently. “He never thought of angels in his life.” Dewey asserted that Tweed’s final words were these: “I have tried to right some great wrongs. I have been forbearing with those who did not deserve it. I forgive all those who have ever done evil to me, and I want all those whom I have harmed to forgive me.”

  It was decided by the family that Tweed would be buried in Brooklyn, at Greenwood Cemetery. “If he had died in 1870,” said one old crony, “Broadway would have been festooned with black, and every military and civil organization in the City would have followed him to Greenwood.” As it was, the funeral was extremely modest indeed, attended by the family, a few friends, and maybe twenty politicians, among whom there was no one of consequence except “Honest John” Kelly. A procession of just eight carriages followed the hearse down Fifth Avenue and then Broadway, to the tip of Manhattan, where they took the Hamilton Avenue Ferry to Brooklyn.

  At Greenwood, Tweed was laid to rest by twenty Freemasons, as he had requested, and wearing a white apron of lambskin—“the emblem of innocence.”

  “Alas! Alas! young men,” cried the Reverend T. De Witt Talmage from his Brooklyn pulpit the following Sunday, “look at the contrast—in an elegant compartment of a Wagner palace car, surrounded by wine, cards and obsequious attendants, going to his Senatorial place at Albany; then look again at the plain box…behold the low-studded room, looking out upon a mean little dingy court where, a prisoner, exhausted, forsaken, miserable, betrayed, sick, William M. Tweed lies a-dying. From how high up to how low down! Never was such an illustration of the truth that dishonesty will not pay!”

  But Godkin in The Nation commented, “A villain of more brains would have had a modest dwelling and would have guzzled in secret.” And young Chris Magee, Republican Boss of Pittsburgh, made a special trip to New York to spend several months studying the reasons for Tweed’s downfall and returned home to tell his associates that a ring could be made as safe as a bank, and he would do just that.

  Asked by a New York reporter what he thought of Tweed and the part he had played launching Brooklyn’s bridge, the distinguished editor of the Eagle said, “Well, the Brooklyn people have no right to find fault with the Tammany Ring, so far as we are concerned…they favored the bridge project, and always acted fairly and liberally with us.”

  On June 14, at about five minutes past twelve noon, people in Tweed’s old neighborhood surrounding the New York anchorage were suddenly startled by what many thought to be the report of a cannon, followed by a loud scraping, hissing noise that sounded, one man said, more like a skyrocket taking off than anything else he had ever heard. A candy vendor on South Street was nearly struck by stones falling about him. A telegraph pole was snapped in two and a chimney was clipped off a nearby house as something went caroming overhead and crashed out of sight over near the bridge tower. People rushed into the streets, including, it was noted in one account, “several harlots” from the Water Street dance halls who supposedly got down on their knees and commenced praying. A bridge cable had snapped, it was said, something had happened to the tower, the whole bridge was coming down, nobody knew what to believe.

  Below the north side of the anchorage lay the body of a man, his chest torn open, his back, arms, and legs broken. He was unconscious but still alive. On top of the anchorage a dead man lay sprawled on the stone and two others were lying nearby, groaning pitifully. The only man on the anchorage who had not been hurt, except for a small scratch on one hand, was Master Mechanic E. F. Farrington.

  Farrington had been supervising the “easing off” of the sixtieth strand, which had been finished a day or two before. Some thirty men had been working on the anchorage during the morning, but when the noon break came, he had kept only a few of them on to help lower the strand into position. Thomas Blake had been standing where the strand tied onto the shoe, near the pulleys, so he could see that everything went right at that end. Harry Supple and Farrington had been about four paces forward, on either side of the front ends of the anchor bars, at the point where the finished strands for the upstream cable were attached and where the new strand was to take its place. Two other men named McGrath and Arberg were just opposite Blake.

  When everything was ready Farrington told Blake to remove the fastenings and the order was passed back to the hoisting engine to begin lowering away. The steel “fall rope” that held the strand began moving through the pulleys and the strand started forward. It had moved about four feet when one of the men cried out that a segment of the fall rope had parted. But the words were no sooner out of his mouth when the whole thing let go. The fall rope had snapped with a deafening report.

  It was all over in an instant. Farrington, who had been knocked down by something, but not hurt, looked about to find that only the jagged ends of the fall rope remained. Blake was dead. McGrath and Arberg were bleeding badly and clearly in terrible pain. The remainder of the rope, the pulleys, and the strand had disappeared. And so had Harry Supple.

  Blake, it seems, had been killed instantly, struck by the flying shoe more than likely. Supple had been hit by the rope and knocked off the anchorage, falling eighty feet into the yard. The rope had knocked Arberg down and it had caught McGrath by the feet
, ripping open the soles of both his shoes, and throwing him as it had Supple, but in the other direction, twenty feet across the top of the stonework.

  The strand, and everything it was dragging behind it, had shot away into the air. With one enormous leap it had landed in the bridge yard behind the tower, a good five hundred feet away. Except for the coping on one house, the telephone pole, and the chimney, it had struck nothing in its violent flight and harmed no one. At the bridge yard it had come down on top of a stone pile, shattering some rowboats lying there and barely missing a group of men who were sitting out in the sunshine enjoying their noontime meal. Instantly the great weight of the strand midstream had sent the free end shooting up over the top of the tower. And when the whole strand had gone plummeting into the river, the splash had shot fifty feet in the air and stretched from shore to shore, like a wall suddenly raised up. Passengers on the Fulton Ferry had been drenched, the strand had hit so close by, but nobody was hurt and no boats had been hit.

  By the time all the excitement cooled off and it was clear what had happened, everyone realized what a miraculously close call it had been.

  Harry Supple, the one who had performed such heroic high-wire feats two summers before, never regained consciousness and died in less than twenty-four hours. Several papers immediately charged that the rope that failed was made of Bessemer steel and that it had been manufactured by the Roeblings. Both claims were true.

  There was no explaining what happened, Martin and Paine told reporters as they walked about the anchorage yard where Supple fell. Henry Murphy had rushed over from Brooklyn at first word of the accident and told the reporters they could go up on top of the anchorage to look about for themselves if they wished. The Bridge Company had nothing to conceal. But he refused to offer any possible explanations. The rope had been used maybe fifteen times before this for the exact same purpose and had been tested for a strength six times the load it had been carrying.

  In another couple of days the engineers had completed their investigation and solved the mystery, to their satisfaction at least. The rope, they said, had somehow slipped out of place as it was running through one of the pulleys and the sharp edge of the pulley had cut into it, damaging it badly enough to cause the break. Blake, the dead man, should have seen this, but obviously he had not. The steel rope was not to blame, perhaps even Blake was not wholly to blame. The consensus was that it was one of those chance things that happen.

  Still the episode had put a scare into people that they would not soon forget and made a number of those who had some say in bridge matters even more skeptical than they had been before. The work went right on. Farrington was back seeing to other things that same afternoon. But the critics would grow increasingly louder now, and more numerous, and Roebling’s burden of worry, which was supposed to be lessening as the final phases of the work grew nearer, became greater than ever.

  Only a week or so before, the New York World had questioned in big headlines whether the bridge was a failure. For some nine millions of dollars, the paper claimed, the people of New York and Brooklyn had acquired nothing but a lot of disgusting scandal and two stone towers with a few wires dangling between. The Times had joined in saying that for all the money poured into the bridge, the ferries could have been offered free to the people for a lifetime.

  But of far greater seriousness was the hostility growing in that old seedbed of bridge enthusiasm, Tammany Hall. Anxious to disown any previous connection with Tweed, Connolly, and Sweeny, and reportedly exercised over how much the bridge was costing, the new boss of the Tammany, “Honest John” Kelly, was letting it be known that the city of New York just might refuse to spend anymore money on the bridge. The move was seen by many as nothing more than a political maneuver to replace some of the bridge trustees with Tammany men and to subjugate Boss McLaughlin. No one had taken Kelly very seriously at first. But an installment from New York of half a million dollars was already three months overdue. (Brooklyn had met its obligation of one million dollars right on schedule.) Kelly, regarded as “a warm advocate” of the bridge only a few years before, was now making public remarks about withholding New York’s payment until he was sure the bridge was being managed competently, and sensational accidents killing innocent laborers only aggravated his “grave concern.”

  Kingsley, Stranahan, and Henry Murphy claimed no knowledge of Kelly’s motives, nor did they care even to speculate on the subject. But if he persisted, Henry Murphy said, they would take him to court, since the law required that New York meet its financial obligations. Part of the problem, Murphy said, was that too many people still failed to comprehend the sort of bridge this was going to be and were listening to a lot of baseless nonsense from second-rate engineers whose only motivation was publicity. “It will not sway from side to side nor rock up and down,” he said. It was to be “a great street,” he said, solid and stationary. Kelly claimed to have heard from reliable sources that another immense pier would soon be needed to prop up the center span of the bridge. Besides, Kelly said, he was listening with increased interest to the arguments of Abraham Miller and others who were predicting that the bridge would destroy commerce on the East River.

  Perhaps in his quiet room overlooking the river, Washington Roebling recalled something his father had written when the same issue was raised at Cincinnati. “I have no fears of those who honestly believe the bridge to be injurious to the navigation,” John Roebling had said, “the opposition of cavilers I most dread.”

  By the end of June, New York had still not met its payment. July came and went and still there was no money from New York. By the first week in August, when the trustees convened for their monthly meeting, it was obvious that something would have to be done soon. There was virtually no cash on hand.

  At the close of the workday, Saturday, August 10, Murphy took what he viewed as his only course of action. He shut the work down except for the strand making. Approximately a hundred men were kept on. Some six hundred were laid off.

  Times were still hard, jobs scarce, and the idea of six hundred men suddenly idle and a great and costly public work standing unfinished was not going to be very well received by the public, as Murphy fully appreciated. The decision, he said, was entirely his own. He did not want to bankrupt the Bridge Company by carrying on, and he did not wish to see Brooklyn spend any more of its money until this trouble with New York was straightened out once and for all.

  Kelly said he was now convinced the bridge would do New York little good anyway and that it had been a great mistake for the city to get so financially involved in the first place. And since the costs were running ahead of what had been projected in the original agreements, then New York was no longer legally bound to its side of the bargain. As far as he was concerned, he would be very happy to settle the issue in court. So he held out, as tempers in Brooklyn kept mounting.

  With another accident to explain away and “Honest John” Kelly testing his newly gained power, Henry Murphy appeared to be coping with about all the trouble one man could handle during that summer of 1878. And yet this was but part of the story. For on July 22 he had been presented, privately, with what must have appeared to be the most devastating piece of news in all his nine years of administering the business affairs of the bridge.

  He was informed by the Chief Engineer that J. Lloyd Haigh, contractor for the cable wire, had been perpetrating a colossal fraud.

  The deception had been suspected by the engineers as early as mid-June, but they had had no real proof until July 5. Four days later, when the whole pattern was clear, Roebling had written a long letter to Murphy disclosing what had been going on, but then put off sending it for two weeks, to be absolutely certain his case was solid. So the letter Murphy received on the 22nd was dated July 9 and it told the following story.

  “From the known reputation of this man [Haigh], I deemed it necessary from the first to test every ring of wire made by him…” (instead of every tenth ring or so, as had been planned). Roeb
ling had also warned Paine and the others that Haigh would probably try to bribe the inspectors, which was exactly what Haigh had done, without success.

  But as Roebling expected he might, Haigh then tried another maneuver. Inspection of the wire was carried on by Paine and his assistants at Haigh’s big brick mill at Red Hook, near the Atlantic Docks. Once the wire was passed, it was loaded onto wagons and hauled up to the bridge. But in June it was found that rejected wire was also getting to the bridge. Wire that had been accepted, but held in the mill overnight, would be replaced before morning by rejected wire, which then went off to the bridge. The trick was discovered by secretly marking the good wire. Haigh was informed of the discovery and given a strong warning. Paine was assured there would be no more of that, but he remained suspicious. The rule from then on was that no more wire was to be inspected than could be delivered on that same day.

  But a little later it was noticed that the great pile of rejected wire, instead of increasing as it should have, with rings failing to pass inspection every day, was growing steadily smaller. The bad wire was going somewhere obviously and the assumption was that it was going to the bridge. But how, since all departing wagonloads were being carefully watched to see that they carried good wire only? The solution, the engineers decided, had to be that wagonloads were being switched on route, somewhere between Red Hook and the bridge.

  “A watch was therefore set on the morning of the 5th of July,” Roebling wrote, “and the trick discovered. The wagonload of wire as it left the inspector’s room, with his certificate, in place of being driven off to the bridge, was driven to another building, where it was rapidly unloaded and replaced with a load of rejected wire, which then went to the bridge with the same certificate of inspection.”

  When these rings reached the bridge—eighty in all—they were immediately tested. Only five out of the total were up to standard.