The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  In 1898 with a population of nearly a million people and still the third-largest city in the United States, Brooklyn had relinquished its independence to become a borough of New York. By 1930 Brooklyn’s population was greater than that of Manhattan. Old Brooklyn families had become an infinitesimal minority, the Heights a tiny picturesque but inconsequential segment of a Brooklyn that spread over eighty-nine square miles, or four times the area of Manhattan. Even the name Brooklyn became synonymous with things never heard of before the turn of the century—the Dodgers, Murder Incorporated—and the butt of innumerable jokes. One favorite vaudeville remark about the bridge went, “All that trouble, just to get to Brooklyn.”

  In 1931 the George Washington Bridge was completed over the Hudson with a span more than twice that of the Brooklyn Bridge and six years later the Golden Gate Bridge, larger and still more awesome, was built at the opposite end of the continent. By contrast to such gleaming creations, the Brooklyn Bridge seemed an antique and there was even talk of tearing it down.

  In 1944 the elevated trains stopped running over the bridge and the old iron terminal buildings were dismantled. A team of engineers began a painstaking examination of the entire structure to see what ought to be done about it. When they had concluded their studies two years later, it was announced that all the bridge needed was a new coat of paint.

  Washington Roebling did not live to see the bridge eclipsed by the George Washington or Golden Gate Bridges, both of which were built with Roebling wire, but he came very close to it. Ironically—incredibly—the crippled, tormented legendary Chief Engineer lived on until 1926. He outlasted them all—Hewitt and Seth Low, each of whom became mayor of New York; Stranahan, who lived to be ninety and to see a statue of himself put up in Prospect Park; Kingsley, who died only a few years after the bridge was built, of a nervous stomach at age fifty-two; Eads, who died in 1887, while trying to enlist support for a fantastic ship railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; Slocum, whose name would be remembered for one of the worst disasters in American history, the burning, in 1904, of the General Slocum, a New York excursion steamer; and every one of the assistant engineers, each of whom, except for Martin, went his own separate way professionally once the bridge was finished.

  On the night Seth Low was defeated for re-election as mayor of New York, Roebling came up from Trenton to watch the returns in front of the Herald building and was very pleased by the results. But all he ever said for attribution concerning the old management of the bridge was that so far as he knew no money had ever been stolen—a decidedly different conclusion, of course, from what he said in his private notes years before. His exact statement, written at age seventy-eight, in a letter to an old friend then compiling a Trenton history, was this: “So far as I know not a dollar was stolen politically or otherwise. There was no thievery—no political robbery or peculation. In spite of the assertions of all the newspapers to the contrary. It is the unscrupulous press that makes most of the trouble.”

  He seems to have kept in touch with his former assistants over the years. McNulty named a son after him and Hildenbrand did a good deal of engineering work for John A. Roebling’s Sons. Hildenbrand, in fact, had quite a life after he left Brooklyn. He built the Pikes Peak Railway in Colorado, directed the complete renovation of the Ohio River bridge at Cincinnati, and built a suspension bridge of his own, of about the same span as the Ohio River bridge, at Mapimi, Mexico. Not long after Hildenbrand died, in 1908, Roebling wrote, “Soon I will be the last leaf on the tree.”

  For four years after the completion of the bridge, he and Emily lived in Troy, in order to be near their son, who was then at Rensselaer. Roebling spent his time quietly. Often the old pains and cramps returned with a vengeance and he felt himself a “used-up man.” Still the sustained separation from both the bridge and the wire business seemed to be what was needed. His health improved gradually but steadily.

  In the spring of 1888, when his son was graduated, the three of them moved back to Trenton. John went to work at the mill and was married the following year. In the meantime, plans were drawn up, to Emily’s specifications, for a “commodious mansion in the Tudor style,” which Roebling had built for her on West State Street, on grounds sloping down to the Delaware River. The house took several years to finish. It was a great baronial affair of huge gables and towering brick chimneys, and on the street side there was a big stained-glass rendition of the Brooklyn Bridge, complete with clouds sailing by and ships passing below. At night, all lit up, this window was considered one of Trenton’s “sights” and for years people went out of their way to see it.

  They moved in in 1892. She bought the most expensive carriages and the finest horses, which she insisted always on driving herself, her coachman seated behind her. For a number of years she seems to have had quite a good time. She entertained often and beautifully to judge by some old clippings from the Trenton society columns. She became active in women’s clubs. She studied law at New York University and received her degree. She worked on a book about Cold Spring. * She went to Europe twice. The first time they went together, but the second time, in 1896, she went without him and to Russia as well, where she was one of the few Americans present at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas and the Empress Alexandra. A formal photograph of Emily Roebling in the dress she wore to the coronation shows an erect, confident-looking woman in her early fifties, a little stout but rather regal herself in silvery white satin.

  From Roebling’s correspondence during these years, one gets a picture of him living in semiseclusion, privately very proud of her accomplishments, absorbed in all manner of interests—his mineral collection, his greenhouse, bird-watching, astronomy, the paleontological history of New Jersey. He also wrote a two-hundred-page biography of his father, which he misplaced and which was never found, most unfortunately. His one recreation was riding the trolleys, which he seems to have enjoyed enormously, riding out into the nearby countryside to look for wild flowers. And these he could identify and refer to by their Latin names as readily as a trained botanist.

  When he felt well enough, he traveled with her—to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, to Martha’s Vineyard, which he liked, to Nantucket, which he did not, and to New York, where they went out on the bridge together unnoticed.

  He read Schiller and Goethe, Carlyle’s six-volume Frederick the Great, which he had read before as a young man, and Tolstoy, his favorite. He followed the stock market and made a very great deal of money at it.

  He also kept an attentive eye on the wire business, in which he was again a major stockholder, but drew no salary. He liked to take his lunch at the office, which was the old family home long since so built over and swallowed up by the mills that it was barely identifiable. He was always available for his opinion and his opinion carried some weight apparently. Once when his brothers were all for selling out to U. S. Steel, he said no and that was that. But his relations with his brothers were always strained. Ferdinand was so bothered by the grand new house when it was first finished that he refused to enter it. For two years Ferdinand and he did not speak.

  His one male confidant was his son, but communication with him had to be carried on by mail. John had lasted only a short time in the wire business. It is impossible to tell just what went wrong. The official explanation was that John had retired because of his health. But it was commonly said in Trenton that family affections and loyalties (if there were any) stopped at the door of the Roebling works. If a young man did not measure up inside, or if there were personality conflicts, then he departed rapidly, even if his name was Roebling.

  Years before, Edmund Roebling, youngest of old John’s sons, had been unable to get along with Ferdinand and was “kicked out,” according to Washington Roebling. “He was now adrift with too much money, became a globe-trotter, and was somewhat dissipated.” Edmund never returned to Trenton, never married, lived on in seclusion on the Upper West Side of New York.

  Emily’s health began to fail abou
t the time the new century began. It would be said later that the strain of her experiences in Brooklyn was the principal cause. Her eyes gave her trouble at first and she took to wearing dark glasses. In the fall of 1902 Roebling went into Roosevelt Hospital in New York for some intestinal surgery and in early December, in Trenton, while he was still recuperating, she had a collapse of some sort. The doctors said she had stomach ulcers and were not encouraging. He kept going back and forth to Trenton from the hospital, a torturous trip for him, to be with her for a day or two at a time.

  An additional night nurse was hired in early February. He was home to stay by then and joked with her about renaming the house Roebling Hospital. Though pitifully weak, she refused to give up and announced she would go to the mineral baths at Sharon Springs, New York. But she never did. She died of cancer of the stomach on February 28, 1903, and was buried at Cold Spring. He was too weak to make the trip.

  In the file of Roebling’s letters kept by his son there is an envelope marked “Undated notes, clippings, etc, found among W.A.R.’s papers after his death.” Among the items in the envelope is a much-worn paper on which Roebling had copied in pencil an epitaph Mark Twain inscribed on the grave of his daughter:

  Warm Summer Sun shine kindly here

  Warm Summer Wind blow softly here

  Green Sod above, lie light, lie light

  Good night, Dear heart, good night, good night.

  For five years after Emily’s death he lived alone with the house and servants. The wire business in this time became the biggest in the world. The demand seemed unending—for telegraph wire, baling wire, electrical wire, for wire cloth, for bridge cable wire, for the construction of the Panama Canal, for wire rope for cable roads, coal mines, ships, oil rigs, logging machinery, tramways, elevators. The Otis Elevator Company was buying nearly all its cable from the Roeblings. The sons of John A. Roebling had become millionaires many times over. Washington Roebling’s own estate would be approximately $29 million.

  On fall afternoons in 1904, in Kinkora, New Jersey, a tiny village on the Delaware ten miles below Trenton, he watched the building of a new mill complex and an entire town of brick houses and broad streets that was to become known eventually as Roebling. His brothers had announced that the town was being built only out of “plain business necessity” and that there was to be nothing utopian about it. But to the surprise of very few, it turned out to be one of the best-planned industrial towns ever built in America, a model in every respect, as company towns went. In the view of many old admirers of the family, it was a fitting extension of ideas that had spurred John Roebling on at Saxonburg so many years before.

  The memory of his father remained a looming presence for Roebling. Confusion over which one of them had built the Brooklyn Bridge became increasingly common as the years passed and for him a sore subject. Time was cheating him out of everything, he lamented, even his identity. When the family decided to erect a larger-than-life-size statue of the old man and the sculptor said the few photographs on hand were not suitable, Roebling agreed to pose. He sat several times, his head turned as though studying some distant horizon, a sheaf of plans on one knee. When the finished bronze was unveiled with much to-do in Trenton’s Cadwalader Park in 1908, a great many people came up to tell him how much it looked like him.

  To the surprise of almost everyone, he married again, that same year. She was a widow of about his own son’s age, Mrs. Cornelia Witsell Farrow of Charleston, South Carolina. How they happened to meet, when, or how long he had been contemplating marriage are all unclear. “…these relationships are those of the heart, not governed by reason or judgment,” he had written to John. “A second marriage late in life cannot be judged by the standard of the first because its motives are usually quite different.” John and the rest of the family heartily approved of the decision once he announced it, and of Mrs. Farrow, who, it was said, helped him “take a less gloomy view of things.” The Colonel even “became at times almost jovial.”

  He who had weathered everything just lived on interminably, forever “bearing up,” people said. His teeth were pulled, one by one, and in his letters to John he complained repeatedly of physical torment and in particular of excruciating pains in his jaw. He was seized with a terror of contracting tetanus and dying like his father. “And yet people say how well you look,” he wrote, “I feel like killing them.”

  In April 1912 his nephew and namesake, Washington A. Roebling, III, Charles Roebling’s son, went down on the Titanic and the family was news again. An editor of the New York Times wrote to ask if he would be good enough to explain, for the historical record, the part his mother had played in helping John A. Roebling build the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling wrote back, explaining patiently that he was the one who had built the bridge, not his father, and that it was Emily, not his mother, who had been associated “for fourteen long years with the various phases of the work.”

  When the income tax came along in 1913, it was as though the country was coming apart at the seams. “It means 100,000 spies to snoop into everybody’s business and affairs.” When war broke out in Europe he shuddered at the fate of mankind. “It has come to this pass, that for an extra German to live, he must kill somebody else to make room for him. We can all play at that game. It means perpetual universal war.”

  And still he carried on, writing long, affectionate letters to John, taking solitary walks down West State Street. “War in the kitchen as usual,” he reported to John in August of 1916. “The cook touched the laundress’s smoothing iron. War to the Knife, peace impossible—damages 5 strands of hair, 4 aprons torn, 2 scratches. Starvation threatens!” Somebody was watering his whiskey.

  His “oddities” became a favorite topic of conversation in Trenton. When he and Cornelia dined out at the homes of friends or one of his brothers, he would frequently proceed, without a word of explanation, to make himself comfortable on the nearest sofa and go fast asleep. He hated gloves and refused to wear them even in the coldest weather. He disliked automobiles intensely and refused ever to ride in one. Jigsaw puzzles became his “narcotic,” but never satisfied with those to be found in stores, which he considered much too easy, he had his specially made, from large photographs or reproductions of paintings, each puzzle with a thousand to three thousand pieces.

  He wrote his correspondence on anything at hand—a scrap of cheap note paper, the back of an old invitation, some stray bit of Emily’s stationery found in a bottom drawer. His handwriting, again as perfect as copperplate, was so small that most of his aged friends were unable to read it without a magnifying glass.

  When out on his walks he was known to step into a gateway or to appear suddenly fascinated by the contents of a store window if he thought he could avoid a conversation. The standard explanation locally was that the Roeblings were all a little odd that way, but the fact was that talking was often physically painful for him. Strangers were constantly stopping him on the street. Often a mother or father with a small boy in tow would ask if the boy might shake his hand and years later these same boys would remember him as “a nice, courteous old gentleman.” Among beggars and other Trenton people interested in charity he was known as a soft touch.

  There seems to have never been a day of his life in all the years following the bridge when he did not know some kind of physical discomfort or outright pain. Privately, like old men everywhere, he was preoccupied with his health, as well as material possessions he no longer had any use for.

  Nature remained his solace. He had planted a grove of Siberian crab apples behind the house. “Four have agreed to bloom one year,” he wrote, “and four the next year. How good they are.” He had also acquired a new companion, a rather disreputable-looking Airedale, a stray he named “Billy Sunday.” It became a common thing to see them come down the long drive as he set off on a walk, a small, fragile old gentleman in pinstripes and boater, advancing slowly, stiffly, the dog trailing at his heels. Or they would stand together in front of his tall iron gate
waiting for the trolley. There was no regular stop there but the trolley stopped just the same and dog and master would climb aboard, everybody inside watching. As was widely known, Billy Sunday was the one dog in Trenton with a special pass to ride free on the trolleys. Once Roebling was seated, Billy would slip between his legs and curl up under the seat.

  Ferdinand Roebling died in 1917 and Charles the year after. Karl G. Roebling, Ferdinand’s oldest son, was named head of John A. Roebling’s Sons. But three years later Karl dropped dead on a golf course. Within days it was decided that there was only one person left who could possibly take charge of the vast industrial empire.

  The New York and Brooklyn papers made much of the announcement. “A little old soldier of eighty-four, Col. Washington A. Roebling, the man who built Brooklyn Bridge and the son of the man who planned it, is fighting today his last fight,” wrote the New York World, “is fighting to get his work done in spite of all his enemies—illness, debility, pain, loneliness, bereavement, the terrible depression of the man who has outlived his generation.”

  Roebling ran the company for the next five years and the business prospered exceedingly. “I claim a small part of this as the result of my management,” he confided to his son. Others credited him with more than a small part.

  He got up each morning at about seven thirty, had his breakfast, then, like the men in the mill, took the trolley to work, accompanied by his dog. His day was the full eight hours, the same as everyone. He had no secretary, preferring to handle his correspondence himself, which he wrote always in longhand. He was all but blind in one eye, almost totally deaf, and weighed perhaps 120 pounds. He looked so frail, so very old, like Lee in his final photographs, with the same snow-white beard and sunken eyes, that people wondered how in the world he could possibly manage, knowing, as most everybody did, what he had been through in his life. But the extraordinary thing is he did not simply manage. He was highly innovative, forceful, and seemed to know absolutely all there was to know about every facet of the business. He decided to change all the mills over to electric power, instead of steam, a momentous and costly move. An entirely new department for the electrolytic galvanizing of wire was set up under his direction and the contract for the cables of the Bear Mountain Bridge, over the Hudson River—among other bridges—was taken and completed during the time he was in charge.