The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  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 lat
e 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.

  Roebling refused to be “dragged into the board and put on exhibition,” as he said, simply to serve the purposes of political ambition. He had had his fill of politicians. “I am not a politician and I have never tried to conceal the contempt I have always felt for men who devoted their lives to politics,” he wrote privately. At another point he said there was not a self-respecting engineer in the country who would have put up with what he had over the years. He was seething with indignation, and when the Sun editorial appeared, charging him with irresponsibility, his patience ran out. He drafted a long letter in response, a letter he never sent. The one copy is in pencil, in Emily Roebling’s handwriting, in one of her letter books, and it is the single piece of evidence that perhaps there was, after all, a grain of truth to the whispered story that he was staying away because he knew too much.

  Roebling said in the letter that over the years he had had to deal with “no less than one hundred and twenty politicians” on the board. But now he found it particularly infuriating that the “virtuous Slocum” had been among those demanding that he appear in person before the board and that the “virtuous Slocum” had been seconded by “the still more virtuous Kingsley.”

  “This is the same General Slocum,” he wrote, “who joined with the request that I absent myself from any meeting of the board because my presence may embarrass Mr. Kingsley’s proposed operations of putting a couple of millions in his pocket, millions which have not yet reached their destination.” His “patience at an end,” Roebling said flatly that General Superintendent William Kingsley had been paid $175,000 for work he had never done—for work that he, Roebling, had in fact done—and that it had been Henry Slocum who stood up in the conference room years back and exclaimed that no man could name a sum that would compensate so eminent a man as Mr. Kingsley for the services he had rendered.

  In another note he commented that Kingsley had also been in line to get a granite contract, but the fall of the Tweed Ring had put an end to that. Which of the granite quarries Kingsley had an interest in, the note does not say.

  So the Chief Engineer had been aware of what had been going on. Had he not been there, he seems to say in his notes for another letter, this one to Comptroller Campbell, things might have been worse. (“I have always had bitter enemies in the Board for no reason except that I was in the way of any schemes for robbery.”) But so far Roebling had held his tongue.

  Farther along in his notes for the Campbell letter, Roebling wrote, “I have over and over again been interviewed by trustees who when they found themselves face to face with me and found me a live man and not the driveling idiot they had expected, had very few questions to ask and scarcely anything to say about the bridge in any way.”

  Toward the end of July, Seth Low decided that if Roebling would not come to Brooklyn, then he, the mayor of Brooklyn, would go to Newport and see for himself. Low was one of those trustees who had never laid eyes on the fabled Chief Engineer.

  It is only from comments Low and Roebling made later that anything can be deduced about Low’s flying visit and the confrontation. The papers said merely that the mayor of Brooklyn would be out of town briefly.

  Low arrived by boat, took a carriage down Washington Street, and apparently was ushered directly into Roebling’s room. Few words were wasted. Low told Roebling that it was time for him to step aside, which would be a perfectly honorable move for him to make. History would still remember him as the builder of the bridge, Low said. He could remain on as a consulting engineer and his salary would stay the same. C. C. Martin would be made Chief Engineer.

  Roebling flatly refused to do any such thing. If Low and the others wanted him out, he said, they would have to fire him out right. He would not step aside of his own accord and his decision on that was final. Low answered that if Roebling insisted on being stubborn then fire him they would. Why, Roebling wanted to know. Low tried to explain, but according to Roebling’s notes on the interview, the young mayor’s reasons “were so weak and childish he finally abandoned all attempt at argument and said, ‘Mr. Roebling, I am going to remove you because it pleases me.’” Whereupon Low walked out of the house and was back in Brooklyn in less than twenty-four hours.

  A few days later Emily and Washington Roebling were struck still another crushing blow. On August 8, after a sudden, severe illness, G. K. Warren died at his Newport home at the age of fifty-two. The military court appointed to examine his ignominious relief at Five Forks had by this time reached its decision, not only exonerating Warren fully and applauding him, but casting serious doubts as to the manner in which he had been treated. But tragically, for him and his family, the findings of the court would not be published for another three months. He had not lived to see his name cleared.

  On the afternoon of August 17 Mayor Low sent each of the Brooklyn trustees a note saying there would be a meeting of the board on Tuesday the 22nd. “Please make it convenient to be present, as business of importance is to be considered,” the mayor wrote. Right away reporters at the Brooklyn City Hall wanted to know what this meant, but Low replied that there was nothing more to be said in advance. In another couple of days, however, before the meeting, it was reported on good authority that Low planned to move for the dismissal of the Chief Engineer.

  The trustees met as planned promptly at three in the afternoon. It was noted by one reporter that Henry Murphy “did not look nearly so eager to proceed as did the youthful, bright-faced Mayor Low of Brooklyn…Nor did the venerable member of the Board, Mr. James S. T. Stranahan…appear as thirsty for information as did the affable business-intending Mayor Grace of New York.”

  Low made a little speech. “I am convinced,” he said, “that at every possible point there is a weakness in the management of the Brooklyn Bridge. The engineering part of the structure—the most important—is in the hands of a sick man.” He went on to say what a serious handicap this was and told how he had gone to Newport to reason with Roebling but had failed. He had made an eminently fair proposition to Roebling “in order to facilitate the completion of the work,” but the man “would not accede.” Therefore action had to be taken. So Low said he had held a private conference on the issue with two other ex officio members of the board (the mayor and comptroller of New York) and they were “of the opinion that the change ought to be made, notwithstanding Mr. Roebling’s unwillingness.” He had, therefore, Low said, prepared certain resolutions, which he immediately presented:

  WHEREAS, The Chief Engineer of this Bridge, Mr. W. A. Roebling, has been for many years, and still is, an invalid; and,

  WHEREAS, In the judgment of this Board the absence of the Chief Engineer from the post of active supervision is necessarily, in many ways, a source of delay; therefore,

  Resolved, That this Board does hereby appoint Mr. Roebling Consulting Engineer, and Mr. C. C. Martin, the present First Assistant Engineer, to be the Chief Engineer of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge; and,

  Resolved, That in doing so, this Board desires to bear most cordial testimony to the services hitherto rendered by Mr. Roebling, and to express its regret at the necessity of making such a change at this time.

  Mayor William
Grace rose to his feet and said he “heartily seconded” the resolutions of Mayor Low. “It is our duty to set aside all other considerations in seeing that nothing shall interfere with the progress of this work.” The elected heads of the two cities building the bridge and paying for it had decided the time had come to dispense with Washington Roebling.

  But at that point the Comptroller of Brooklyn, Ludwig Semler, a new man on the board, asked for the floor. “I also think the work should be pushed,” he said, “but I do not think it would be using Mr. Roebling justly to oust him from his position now that he is about to reap the full benefit of his labors. If he had been in any way guilty of delaying the bridge, I should be in favor of retiring him, but there is not a shadow of a charge upon which to base such action. In fact, Mr. Roebling has done much toward pushing the bridge along. Let us not act summarily toward him after his thirteen years of service. If someone will tell me how an engineer is going to build a bridge without material I shall be pleased. Mr. Roebling did not have the material and so he is made a scapegoat for others’ sins.”

  Semler, who had had almost nothing to say at the few previous meetings he attended, spoke with great feeling and was strongly commended for it by Stranahan, who had gotten up from his customary seat on a sofa that stood against the wall and began addressing the group, as one man said later, “with the manner and voice of a speaker at a funeral.”

  “I cannot but remember at such time as this,” Stranahan said, “the eminent abilities of the elder and younger Roebling. When I think that that ability has given us the finest bridge in the world I cannot help but feel that there is something yet due to the Chief Engineer. True, his health is not as sound as we could wish, but it is as good as it has been for many years past—years wherein we could not dispense with his services because of the accurate knowledge of the enterprise which he alone possessed. The older trustees will comprehend the truth of what I say. If this matter is to be referred to another meeting I should be much obliged, so far as I am personally concerned, to have it come up at the next regular meeting. I have traveled one hundred and eighty miles to attend this one, and I must travel one hundred and eighty miles tomorrow to join my family.”