The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  Kingsley answered with a second letter, but briefly this time and not at all belligerently. He said the money had been spent on lumber, for office rent and office equipment, for the bridge tour to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Niagara Falls, for consultants’ fees, for printing documents. But he neither retracted the quarter of a million figure nor attempted to explain it. The issue was left hanging and the Committee of Fifty, which had never managed to deliver the sort of sensational scandal the public had grown accustomed to, gradually faded from the picture leaving a number of questions unanswered.

  The directors of the Bridge Company were not, however, about to let matters go at that. Nor was the public or the New York press. Irate letters to the editor demanded further investigation. Why, it was asked, had Roebling taken no stock? Why had so many of the prominent people listed as directors in the original charter withdrawn from the whole scheme, purchasing no stock? The World took to calling Kingsley a “cormorant,” said he was shrewder even than Tweed, and claimed to have solid proof that Kingsley had once received several hundred thousand dollars in kickbacks from a Brooklyn paving company. The Tribune, meanwhile, reported that there were at least eight different factories, stone quarries, and lumber mills furnishing materials for the bridge in which Kingsley had a direct interest.

  Something would have to be done, it was pretty generally agreed among the directors, and it was now that James Stranahan moved swiftly to restore public confidence.

  The directors met next on June 4, 1872. Murphy was again elected president (nothing derogatory had been said about him as yet) and Andrew Green, the Comptroller of New York, was named to the Finance Committee. Stranahan then had four other esteemed New Yorkers appointed directors, as replacements for the old Tammany quartet. The new men were William H. Vanderbilt, Lloyd Aspinwall, William H. Appleton, and most important, Abram S. Hewitt.

  Hewitt by this time had a great reputation as a reformer. He had been asked by William Havemeyer, soon to become mayor again, to become a director of the bridge, in order, as Hewitt explained it, “to investigate the expenditures, and to report as to the propriety of going on with the work.” Havemeyer, who had never much cared for the bridge, saw it as a perfect “illustration of the dishonesty which enters into public undertakings.” He thought a city government ought to be conducted with all the efficiency of a business, so he had sent an efficient, successful industrialist to clear things up in Brooklyn. Stranahan welcomed the idea, or so he said, and Hewitt was promptly named to fill Tweed’s vacancy on the Executive Committee. It was a little like putting the teacher’s pet in the seat long occupied by the class troublemaker, now expelled, as a way of restoring order in that corner of the classroom.

  Hewitt meant business it seemed. At his first Executive Committee meeting less than a week later, with Stranahan and Murphy present, he personally approved the payment of bills amounting to some $71,000. At a meeting a week later he moved that the Chief Engineer “be requested to examine and report, at the earliest possible date, whether the prices paid for stone, lumber and other materials, and for labor have been reasonable and just.” He also wanted Roebling to report whether the cost of the bridge thus far exceeded what his father had estimated, and if so why. His motions were immediately agreed to, as was a suggestion from Henry Murphy that for the next order of granite the Chief Engineer be directed to advertise for sealed bids.

  On July 1, the Board of Directors, which had met only nine times since the bridge began, convened once more to hear the special report of the Chief Engineer, which had been turned in on June 28, or just four days after it was requested. Murphy was out of town for some reason, so Abram Hewitt was called to the chair. To begin with, the records of the three Executive Committee meetings held in June—the three Hewitt had attended—were read before the board, something that had never been done before. That over and the real business about to start, Demas Barnes proposed another radical departure, that the reporters waiting downstairs be allowed to come up and sit in on the meeting. But Henry Slocum moved as a substitute that after adjournment all the papers be provided copies of the proceedings by the secretary, a full-bearded, pious-looking gentleman with the memorable name of Orestes Penthilus Quintard. Slocum’s motion carried. Then Roebling’s report was read.

  The opening statement probably left everyone breathing a little easier. Roebling began by saying that at the very start of the work he had been told explicitly by Henry Murphy that he was to have nothing whatever to do with making contracts or purchasing supplies. Still he was “personally cognizant,” Roebling said, of nearly every such transaction that had taken place. “I know that all contracts have been made in a judicious manner, and have resulted in the best interests of the Company. They have, in most instances, been given to the lowest bidder, and where they have been awarded to another bidder, it has been at a figure as low as the lowest bidder.”

  “It has been alleged,” he said, “that supplies have been furnished by members of the Company, at prices prejudicial to the interests of the Bridge. In all such cases I know that the supplies have been furnished after a reasonable competition, and at rates lower than those of any other bidder.

  “I can further say that every dollar’s worth purchased for the Bridge has been expended in a legitimate manner, and for the proper purpose for which it was designed, and nothing whatever has, to my knowledge, been diverted into any outside channel. I am in daily attendance at the Bridge, give it my whole time and constant superintendence, and am therefore in a position to give an honest judgment on this question.”

  Nobody, Roebling said, had been employed because of political influence. Wages were about what was customary. Wages might properly be higher considering the danger of the work. There was not a man on the job, he said, “who does not earn every cent he gets.” How much Kingsley was on the job, he did not say.

  Roebling did not deliver the report himself, he was not even present. The New York caisson had been sunk by this time and as was known by most of those in the room, the work had not gone at all well. The Chief Engineer was worn out and had worries enough of his own.

  Attached to this initial statement was a long accounting of expenses to date and a detailed explanation of why the bridge was costing more than had been anticipated—and could not therefore be completed for the sum John Roebling had set. The presentation was so very thorough, so concise and solid, that it was obvious that more than four days had gone into its preparation. Clearly Roebling had been ready in advance for just such an accounting. Quite likely he had even welcomed the opportunity.

  So far costs were running more than a million dollars above the original estimate. This, he explained, was due primarily to several large items that had not been taken into account by his father—the increased size and elevation of the bridge (the changes would cost about $113,000), the land that had to be purchased for the approaches (for which some $330,000 had already been spent), the troubles with the New York caisson (about $375,000, everything considered), and then a number of other expenditures that he lumped together, describing them as “outside of ordinary construction contingencies.” These included the following: $20,000 for a consulting engineer for two and a half years (Horatio Allen); $7,000 for the board of consulting engineers (the original seven); $8,000 for his father’s funeral expenses, travel, legal fees, donations, doctors, etc.; nearly $6,000 for taxes and interest; and lastly $125,000 for the General Superintendent. All told they came to $165,771.65. Such items could not have been anticipated, Roebling said, making it clear, in a respectful way, that neither he nor his father had been prepared for how much William Kingsley was to cost.

  The way things were going, Roebling concluded, the bridge would wind up costing $9.5 million, or nearly $3 million more than his father’s original figure.

  The “integrity and fidelity” of the Chief Engineer had never been questioned by any of the stockholders, as Hewitt would write later, and so the report was taken as a most encouraging document, as far as it w
ent. But in the opinion of several of the directors it did not go far enough. It was agreed, therefore, that a special Committee of Investigation be formed. Demas Barnes was the one who put forward the idea. When Hewitt asked him who would be acceptable to serve on such a committee, Barnes said he, Hewitt, would be, and F. A. Schroeder; “whereupon the Chair appointed as said committee Messrs. Barnes, Hewitt and Schroeder.” Barnes was to be the chairman.

  The Eagle angrily charged Barnes with concocting a political scheme, the purpose of which was to check Brooklyn’s growth and prosperity. The editorial read as though it had been written by none other than William Kingsley.

  In Congress three years before, Barnes had worked harder than anyone for the bridge. He had been among its most rhapsodic spokesmen and the one who called it a monument to progress. But Barnes had made trouble before. Ostensibly a Democrat, he had an unorthodox and aggravating habit of siding with the Republicans whenever he thought they were on the right side of an issue. He had never been one to “go along.” Now the Eagle was calling him a notorious demagogue, an ass, and a quack. Defeat the bridge, the paper warned ominously, and watch what happens to the value of Brooklyn property.

  Accusations of a bridge scandal were thus written off by Brooklyn’s most influential paper as purely politics, nothing more than the work of destructive little men of mean ambition. At the same time, by way of contrast Thomas Kinsella began giving more space to the bridge itself and to its Chief Engineer. Kinsella was a tough, expansive, and undisciplined man who had had his own personal experience with scandal. The father of ten children, he had been serving on the Brooklyn school board when it became public knowledge that he was having an affair with the wife of the superintendent of schools. Another man might have packed up and left Brooklyn under the circumstances, but Kinsella had stayed on, faced down his accusers, and despite the gossip maintained his grip on the Eagle. Kinsella was, of course, one of the earliest, most enthusiastic backers of the bridge. A number of New York editors considered him little better than a paid propagandist for the project, diligently serving the interests of the Kingsley-McLaughlin machine. But for all his obvious partisan feelings politically, Kinsella, as he would prove later, was no mere stooge, and beyond that, he had an unshakable belief in the great work itself and did not intend to see it destroyed by scandal any more than he had been.

  Moreover, it seems Kinsella had a very genuine, unbounded admiration for Washington Roebling, just as he had had for Roebling’s father. Another of Roebling’s reports on the progress of construction had been released earlier that same June of 1872 and Kinsella had published the entire thing, saying it set the kind of confident tone everyone ought to use when talking of the bridge. Most of the report concerned the sinking of the New York caisson. It told quite a different story from that of the Brooklyn caisson and it did not tell the whole story, as Kinsella was quite aware, but the spirit of its plain, confident language and the extraordinary achievements described were about as sharply contrasted with the other things being said about the bridge as could possibly be—as Kinsella fully appreciated. The strongest possible defense for the bridge, he had decided apparently, was just such a factual, unadorned accounting of what was being accomplished by brave men every day. And no more exemplary specimen of such men could be found than young Roebling. So while Demas Barnes was lumped with that “class of croakers that exist in every community,” the loyal readers of the Eagle were asked to consider “The Engineer”:

  …He is the thinker who acts. He contributes to his country’s sum of achievements as much as and less expensively than the soldier. His ends, in the elevation of the race and in increasing the aggregate of its capacity and performance, are kindred to the statesman’s. And if there be those who think that the work of the Engineer is only hard and material, that there is no charm of art in its processes, let them read the story of the building of the Bridge.

  The Bridge Company’s new Committee of Investigation would spend six months at its studies, submitting its conclusions more than a year after Kingsley had first come under fire.

  In the months following that July directors’ meeting, however, the heat was on as never before, with the New York papers making much of a bridge scandal. The bridge was entirely the doing of the Brooklyn Ring, it was charged, none of whom had paid a cent for their stock. The stock was merely a sham to hide “the too palpable intention of defrauding the corporations of New York and Brooklyn.” The superintendent of the work was himself “The Monarch of the Ring.” His duties appeared only to be selling material from his own mills to the Bridge Company at an enormous profit and then pocketing a percentage of the expenditures. If a superintendent was really necessary, then any one of the finest men in the business could be employed for no more than ten thousand dollars a year.

  Not even the word of the Chief Engineer was above suspicion. It was charged that he too might have his motives for concealing the truth and that he was, in any case, scarcely more than a hired hand who stood to lose his job if he said anything other than what he was supposed to say. “He is too good a son of his father not to wish to identify his own name and fame with the building of the structure his sire designed,” wrote the World; “and he could hardly be blamed for not quarreling with the powerful superintendent and Executive Committee of the company by which he was employed.”

  Scientific American commented that the bridge would end up costing forty million dollars unless something were done. A bridge over the river was a bad idea anyway, said the editors, who claimed they had been for a tunnel all along.

  Early in November, Abram Hewitt announced that “the agreement with Mr. Kingsley, General Superintendent, was at an end.” Kingsley still had his job, but his pay had been stopped.

  But by then, all of a sudden the ins and outs of bridge business, talk of kickbacks, investigations, and the rest, had become very bland fare in Brooklyn. For it was in early November that the Henry Ward Beecher scandal broke wide open. Victoria Woodhull, a notorious lady stockbroker and publisher, spiritualist, feminist, magnetic healer, free lover, and all-around adventuress, had branded Beecher an adulterer in the pages of her newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.* She had said as much about Beecher earlier that fall, speaking in a trance, as was her platform style, before a convention of spiritualists in Boston. But when no respectable paper had been willing to print the story, she had decided to publish it herself.

  The charge was not new. There had been whispered stories about Beecher for some little time in Brooklyn. Now, however, it was in print. It was said he had been carrying on an affair with one of his young parishioners, Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of Theodore Tilton, a prominent liberal editor and poet and a former protégé of Beecher’s on the Independent, a religious paper. Mrs. Woodhull said she thought Beecher perfectly within his rights to have done what she accused him of. Beecher’s “immense physical potency,” as she called it, was, in her view, “one of the grandest and noblest of the endowments of this great and representative man.” Beecher’s only sins, she held, were concealing his acts and not joining her to expound the glories of free love. Her fervent hope was that her article would “burst like a bombshell into the ranks of the moralistic social camp.” That it did.

  More than a hundred thousand copies of her paper were sold out immediately. Secondhand copies were soon selling for as much as forty dollars. The story was a sensation on both sides of the river, with people talking of little else.

  In no time Mrs. Woodhull and her sister were arrested on charges of sending obscene literature through the mails and were locked up in the Ludlow Street Jail, where they would be held for six months. The Sunday crowds at Plymouth Church grew steadily larger. Beecher, against the advice of family and friends, refused to say anything one way or the other on the subject. Mrs. Woodhull was known as a habitual liar, among other things. His best policy, he believed, was to hold his tongue and wait for the storm to pass. But it was not to be that way. And Brooklyn was never to be quite the sa
me again.

  The majority report of the Committee of Investigation was presented December 16. It ran to six printed pages and was signed by Hewitt and Schroeder. Its conclusions, in brief, were that everything was on the up-and-up inside the Bridge Company except for the expenditure of $125,000 for the superintendent’s services, which was politely termed a “misapplication of money.”

  After examining the purchases made under Kingsley’s supervision, and particularly those from his Saw Mill & Lumber Company, Hewitt and Schroeder concluded that though public competition was not in all cases required (“as is customary in enterprises where public moneys are disbursed”), the Bridge Company did not appear to have suffered any thereby. But they added:

  Your Committee believe, however, that this practice is objectionable, and that no purchase should ever be made, except upon public tender, with adequate notice, nor from parties who may be in any wise associated in the management of the work, unless such parties should be the lowest bidders upon fair and open competition, and under no conditions should contracts be given to parties identified in interest with the officers of the Company, who after first making or approving specifications are called upon to judge and certify as to compliance with such specifications in the execution of the contract.

  All of which was a long way of saying that Kingsley would have to mind his ways from here on out, but which also suggested, as doubtless several people immediately realized, that another major conflict of interest lay directly ahead, when the bridge would be further along. For it was common knowledge that the foremost manufacturer of steel wire was John A. Roebling’s Sons of Trenton.