Bunny had his own story about the bridge. A few years back, a German journalist had come to town to write an article on Mohawk ironworkers. He asked Bunny to take him to the bridge. They walked out, as Bunny was now doing, to where the top chord curved sharply up from the track bed. When they got to the chord, the German started to climb it, as so many boys had done over the years. He apparently felt a need to experience the Mohawk gestalt. He was almost near the top when he suddenly froze. He could not go up, he could not come down. He was locked in a full-blown attack of acrophobia. Bunny spoke to him quietly for a while, then climbed behind him and walked him down, step by step. The German promised to send the article when it was done, but Bunny never heard from him after that.
Looking down now beyond the wooden ties, Bunny could see one of the endless barges pushing down the Seaway toward Quebec. He could see the river, too, of course—the river in which so many Indians had drowned and died, the river of wealth and grief. Still wearing flip-flops, Bunny walked over to the edge of the ties and leaped up onto a box girder running along the edge of the bridge. He stood there for a few moments, looking across the river toward Lachine and down toward Montreal. Then he stepped down onto the track bed and strolled back to land. It was time to go home and get ready for the week ahead.
MEMORY
A few days later, a retired ironworker named Alec McComber sat in the air-conditioned bar of Kahnawake’s Knights of Columbus Hall, sipping Bud Light from a bottle. The bar was nearly empty, just Alec and few younger men who had some time to kill on a Tuesday. Bunny and the other ironworkers were gone, off to New York and elsewhere, and the reservation was quiet. Outside, in the heat of the late afternoon, kids were doing bike tricks on the melting parking lot. Alec’s dog, an old black mongrel named Jimbo, snoozed in the shade of a pickup truck.
Alec McComber was 84 years old, which made him one of the oldest ex-ironworkers alive in Kahnawake. Neither the work nor the itinerant lifestyle—the heavy drinking, the fatty diet, the all-night travel—were conducive to longevity, but he had managed to defeat the risk factors. He appeared fit and in robust health.
Alec believed he might be related to Bunny, and to Kenneth McComber, the boy who’d recently died, but he wasn’t sure precisely how. Like Diabos and Beauvais and Kirbys and Skyes and Horns and Snows and Deers, McCombers were plentiful at Kahnawake and hard to sort. A great many of these McCombers were, like Alec, ironworkers.
Alec had been in the trade for 50 years. Thirty-four of those years he was a foreman, mainly for Bethlehem Steel. He’d worked all over America, Alaska to Florida to New York. He’d had a reputation as a hard-driving, demanding pusher. He was known by his men as “One-More-Piece Alec,” because there was always time to set one more piece before quitting. It was difficult to see the hard boss now beneath the bleary green eyes and the sweet, nearly toothless smile, but some of the old authority was still there. When Alec spoke about the old days, the younger men at the bar listened attentively, occasionally helping him out with a detail or two.
Not that Alec needed much help. His memory was uncannily sharp. He recalled the gauge of chokers and the precise weight of girders he’d handled half a century ago. He remembered how toggle bents were used to hold up the cantilevered arms of the Rainbow Bridge over Niagara Falls while it was under construction in 1940, and he remembered the weight of the heaviest sections of steel on that bridge (75 tons) and the size of the gap between the two arms of the cantilever when they were complete (18 inches). He remembered details of tricking up columns for the Chase Manhattan Building in New York (54 tons each, using a 75-ton derrick supported by one-and-a-half-inch guy wires). He remembered the name of the boat that ferried him and three other men from Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Port Au Basque, Newfoundland, on their way to Gander to help build an airplane hangar for the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940 (the SS Caribou), and he remembered the name of the policeman they met in St. John’s after riding a narrow-gauge train 600 miles across Newfoundland—and overshooting their stop by a couple hundred miles (Sergeant Mahoney).
“This was wartime, understand? So he looks at us Indians and he wants to know who the hell are we. Well, we explained the situation, and he made a call to Montreal and got it all straightened out. ‘You boys, you’re all right,’ he said. ‘Sleep here overnight. And in the morning, get back on the train. You only passed your job about two hundred miles back.’”
Alec cackled merrily at the 60-year-old memory, and the young men in the Knights of Columbus bar smiled. One of the men asked Alec if it was true his father worked on the Quebec Bridge in 1907. “Yes, he did. He didn’t like the way things were going so he walked off right before it went down.” And what was his name? “Dominic,” said Alec. “Dominic McComber.”
Dominic McComber: The young lacrosse player who got into a fight with his boss and quit the job three and a half hours before the collapse.
Alec took a last sip of beer and stood. It was time to go home. He waved farewell to the others and shuffled slowly to the door, his legs bowed and stiff. Outside in the heat, his dog rose, panting with joy, and Alec leaned over and patted him on the head. Then he straddled an old black three-speed bike that had been leaning against the side of the building and pedaled off, slowly but steadily, as Jimbo trotted along beside him. Fifty years on steel had ruined Alec’s legs, but his ironworker’s balance remained intact.
The following afternoon, Alec sat at the table in the dining room of his rambling white house, paging through an old book of photographs. He’d golfed that morning, and his face, already deeply tanned, was flushed by a fresh dose of sun. The windows of the house were open. The white lace curtains billowed in a strong breeze and wind chimes jangled on the porch. Alec’s wife, an ironworker’s daughter he’d met in Brooklyn 67 years earlier, was in Montreal at a baseball game with the grandkids. Alec had brought the book out to show to a guest.
“This,” said Alec. “This is it.”
The book lay on the table, along with several other books and folders containing yellowed newspaper clippings. Bound in worn red cloth, it had been bequeathed to Alec by his father years ago. It was a record of the construction of the Quebec Bridge—not the first Quebec Bridge, but the second Quebec Bridge, begun in 1914 to replace Theodore Cooper’s fallen 1907 structure. Dominic McComber had returned to the site to work on the second bridge, which must have been disconcerting given how close he came to death on the first. More disconcerting, the second bridge fell, too, in September of 1916, and Dominic nearly lost his life all over again. This time, the collapse occurred as the ironworkers were raising a 640-foot-long center span that was to stretch between the two cantilevers. Thousands of spectators had turned out to witness the event and crowded the cliffs on both sides of the river. A steel casting that held the span on the south side suddenly ruptured. The span plunged into the river, another 5,000 tons of steel lost, another 13 bridgemen dead. The span was quickly re-fabricated and the luckless bridge was finally completed a year later, September 20, 1917, when Alec was three months old.
Closing the book, Alec turned to the small stack of photographs and clippings. The guest asked Alec if he’d ever gotten hurt on a job. He shook his head. “I was always pretty lucky.” Did he know many men who had gotten killed? Alec shook his head again. “Naw. Not too many.”
A few minutes later, he studied a photograph of three men posing on a bridge in New Haven. One of them was Alec, still a young man in his 20s. Another had been Alec’s best man at his wedding. The third had been an usher. Alec’s guest asked where these men were now.
“This fellow,” said Alec, pointing at the best man, “died on the bridge a few months later.” The other man died a few years after that, on a bridge in Passaic, New Jersey.
“A minute ago you said you didn’t know many men who died.”
“Well, that, yeah,” said Alec. “I just happened to remember.”
A drop of liquid appeared in the corner of his eye. Maybe it was grief or maybe just the natu
ral wateriness of an old man’s eyes. He flipped through the old photographs. For a moment, he was quiet. Then he came to a photograph of the Chase Manhattan Building under construction in 1960. He lifted the photograph and studied it, and his eyes sparkled. “That job was sixty-four floors,” he said. “The turnbuckles on the derrick could hold fifty ton. Oh, that was some job.”
SEVEN
Cowboys of the Skies
Rough pioneers are these men of the steel, pushing each year their frontier line up toward the clouds. Wanderers, living for their jobs alone. Reckless, generous, cool-headed, brave, shaken only by that grim power of Fate, living their lives fast and free—the cowboys of the skies.
—ERNEST POOLE, 1908
High steel ironworkers lived and died on an operatic scale in the first few decades of the twentieth century. They were dashing and tragic figures who walked on air like supermen and dropped from the sky like stricken birds. They were daring and restless and possibly insane. And they were also—this fact was becoming ever more inescapable—extremely violent. By the end of the first decade of the century, the ironworkers and their small union of several thousand would be the most infamous labor organization in the country and villains in one of the most gripping dramas of the time. Poor Sam Parks. The war with capital he craved he finally got, only he wasn’t around to enjoy it.
The months immediately following Parks’ death marked a moment of relative peace in relations between New York ironworkers and their employers. This ended abruptly in the fall of 1905, when the International Association of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers declared a nationwide strike on American Bridge to punish the company for using non-union subcontractors. However justified the strike may have been, it was a rash and potentially suicidal gesture by a union that seemed to specialize in such gestures. American Bridge was the largest steel fabricator in the country, owned by U.S. Steel, the largest corporation in the world. The ironworkers were a small inchoate union with exactly $1,013.64 in their coffers.
To complicate matters, local New York ironworkers voted to expand the strike to most of the large steel erectors in the city, demanding a wage increase from $4.50 per day to $5. Most of the erectors refused the increase outright, though several, including George A. Fuller Company, did negotiate a deal to hire union men at $4.80 a day. Fuller had recently contracted to build the Plaza Hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street. To complete the job on schedule, the company decided it had no choice but to go ahead with union men.
Fuller’s willingness to deal with the ironworkers soon backfired. The trouble began in the spring of 1906, after the company hired a non-unionized subcontractor to do some of the ornamental (non-structural) ironwork at the Plaza. The affronted union bridgemen, strategically positioned a few stories above the non-union men, contrived to drive them off the job by “accidentally” dropping tools and hot rivets onto them. This went on for a few days before Fuller thought to put a stop to it. The company hired three armed watchmen to patrol the derrick floor and keep an eye on the 30 bridgemen. These measures only provoked the structural men further. “Beat it!” an ironworker told one of the watchmen. “If you know your business you’ll skidoo.” The watchman, armed with a revolver, stood his ground.
On the afternoon of July 11, just after lunch, the ironworkers made good on their threat. “Events showed that the whole attack had been outlined to a nicety,” reported the Times, “and the dispatch with which the job was executed demonstrated that each man knew just where he was expected to be when the signal should be given.” First, the ironworkers cut off escape routes. Then they pounced, 10 ironworkers per watchman, beating them mercilessly with wrenches and mauls. One gang dropped watchman Michael Butler through the middle of the building from the eighth floor to the fifth. Another gang dragged watchman John Cullen to the eastern edge of the building overlooking Grand Army Plaza. “Four men had him in hand and were swinging his body to and fro and about to toss it into space to drop to the asphalt pavement in the Plaza below,” reported the Times. Realizing that a body flying off the side of a building in the middle of the afternoon might draw unwanted attention, they instead left Cullen in a lump on the derrick floor, along with the bloodied body of the third watchman, William O’Toole, and returned to work as if nothing had happened. Cullen and O’Toole were severely injured. Michael Butler was dead.
The “Midair Murder,” as the outraged press dubbed it, provided more evidence of what most steel companies, if not most New Yorkers, already believed by the summer of 1906: that unionized ironworkers were vicious and irredeemable thugs; and that the only sensible way to deal with such a union was to join arms and destroy it. This is precisely what the National Erectors’ Association proposed to do.
The National Erectors’ Association (NEA) was a coalition of steel fabricators and erectors that had formed in the spring of 1903, amidst the turmoil of the Sam Parks reign. American Bridge Company was by far the largest participant in the NEA and, in many ways, its guiding light, representing the interests not only of itself but also of its corporate parent, U.S. Steel. Other members included such formidable entities as McClintic-Marshall, Post & McCord, and Phoenix Bridge Company. The NEA first convened as a loose and ineffectual assemblage of competing firms, but by 1906 it had coalesced into a strong body joined in a common cause. This cause was articulated in the deceptively mild language of the NEA’s constitution: “The object of this Association shall be the institution and maintenance of the open shop principle in the employment of labor in the erection of steel and iron bridges and buildings and other structural steel and iron work.”
Theoretically, an “open shop” industry was one in which any man was entitled to work, whether he belonged to a union or not. More to the point, open-shop employers were entitled to hire whomever they pleased. Open shops did not explicitly prohibit union employees, but they disarmed the union of the only real weapon it had, the threat of a strike. Open-shop employers tended, in any case, to be not merely non-union but aggressively anti-union. They discouraged unionism by firing pro-labor agitators or signing men under “yellow dog” non-union contracts. U.S. Steel, mother company of both American Bridge and Illinois Steel (another NEA member), had maintained a strict open-shop policy since the Homestead strike of 1892.
The NEA claimed the open-shop system to be more “moral,” more patriotic, than closed shop, because it gave workers the freedom to work where they pleased. But Luke Grant, who later studied the conflict between ironworkers and the NEA on behalf of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, thought this righteous-sounding argument amounted to nothing more than “meaningless twaddle.” The true reason employers favored the open shop was that non-union labor was cheaper than union labor. “No matter how many high-sounding phrases may be used in discussing the subject,” wrote Grant, “in the last analysis it is a common, ordinary question of dollars and cents.”
The “twaddle” not only obscured the real cause of the conflict, it also obscured its intensity. This was a fight to the death. The members of the NEA had only two options, declared William Post of Post & McCord: “breaking the union or breaking themselves.” The NEA instantly became, as one labor historian put it, “one of the most determined and brutal open-shop employers’ organizations in the United States.”
The NEA’s efforts to break the ironworkers union were well planned and highly effective. By the start of 1907, only half of the union men in New York were employed. Nationally, nearly all of the American Bridge jobs were completed on schedule with non-union labor. The ironworkers were “demoralized,” bragged Walter Drew, commissioner of the NEA. His claim seemed to be confirmed in an emotional debate on the floor of the 1908 ironworkers’ convention. “We have come to the conclusion that this is not a winning fight,” announced a delegate from Brooklyn, while another asked, “How can you expect to beat the Steel Trust?” The bridgemen had fought valiantly, the New York delegates argued, but the time had come to either throw in the towel or up the ante. Given it
s history of rashness, perhaps it’s no surprise which course the union chose.
DYNAMITE
In June of 1907, a Detroit ironworker named Ortie McManigal was approached by the business agent of his local union, Harry Hockin. McManigal, a short, florid-faced man of 34, had recently arrived in Detroit to help construct the new Ford Motor building. As a younger man, he’d labored in stone quarries in his native Ohio, where he’d learned a good deal about the use of dynamite. Somehow, the business agent had gotten hold of this fact.
“I am told you know how to handle dynamite,” said Hockin. “I want you to use the dynamite which I am going to procure as I direct you to use it.” According to a confessional account McManigal was to publish several years later, Hockin then ordered McManigal to blow up several non-union jobs in the Detroit area. “I’m going to show these fellows just what a union is,” declared Hockin.
McManigal later claimed that he felt like “a cornered rat.” He wanted nothing to do with Hockin’s scheme, he insisted, but the business agent warned him that he would be blacklisted by the union if he refused. “I could only see my wife and children hungry,” wrote McManigal, “and myself tramping about the country vainly hunting for work, or, finding it, holding it only for a day or so, to be kicked out as a denigrated thug with the instincts of a tiger.” He agreed, instead, to go dynamiting. The pangs this inflicted on his conscience were somewhat assuaged by the $200 he would be paid per assignment, almost 10 times what he could make in a full week as an ironworker.
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