12
Although the bridge from every element of its use and from the source of its finances, is considered a public enterprise, yet it is entirely a private corporation in which the public has no voice…
—DEMAS BARNES
THE SENSATIONAL Stokes trial dragged on for months in early 1872, keeping the excesses of Fisk’s (and Tweed’s) unsavory world very much in the public mind at the time when the Rink Committee began presenting its findings. Predictably, Tweed’s former association with the bridge was made much of. But Kingsley’s “compensation,” the possible reasons for it, and his relationship to the Saw Mill & Lumber Company were the heart of the committee’s case.
The Eagle immediately jumped to the defense of the Bridge Company. “It is true that Tweed, Connolly, and Sweeny are among the subscribers to this stock…but what corporation would have refused the cooperation of these men one year ago?” Kingsley was the man who got the bridge going, assumed the responsibility, and so “would have been justified in asking for any contracts the Bridge Company had to give, on the condition that he would do as well by the Company as any other contractor.” Furthermore, if the people of Brooklyn were not able to trust the likes of Murphy, Stranahan, Demas Barnes, or Henry Slocum to see that an enterprise was run legitimately, then whom were they to trust?
Kingsley himself replied right after that, by letter to the Eagle and the Union, rather than through an interview, since, he said, he wanted his answer worded properly.
The letter, however, was an angry tirade and raised new doubts about the man. The Bridge Company was composed of Brooklyn’s first citizens, all men to be trusted, he said, echoing the Eagle’s theme and citing the same names over again. To suggest that the company was being mismanaged, to malign the reputation of anyone connected with the bridge, was to be against the bridge, and to be against the bridge was to be against Brooklyn and against progress. The Committee of Fifty was made up of “vagabonds and scoundrels,” plus “a parcel of old fogies, who have accumulated wealth, though by their connection with the old farm titles of Brooklyn…and who have been made rich by the very progress they have persistently resisted.” These were the people, he said, who had been against the water works, the park, “every railroad track.” The landed gentry were out to block the people’s bridge was the theme.
As for his dealings with Tweed, Kingsley answered with a question of his own, again sounding quite a lot like Thomas Kinsella or whoever wrote the Eagle editorial, except that Kingsley was perfectly frank about how far back that relationship actually dated. “Will any man whose memory goes back five years dare hazard his veracity by saying that the Company were unwise at that time in soliciting the co-operation of Tweed, Sweeny, and Connolly…?” Besides, Kingsley said that in his dealings with Tweed and the other Tammany people, he had found “their characters were then at least infinitely better” than those of the men on the Committee of Fifty.
Then he said something he regretted later. He said he had paid for everything in getting the bridge under way and was “out of pocket more than a quarter of a million before a blow was struck.” (It was the same figure, interestingly, he had said he would be richer by had he avoided politics.) And as a kind of blanket justification for all those things he had done that seemed even the slightest bit suspect, he said, “I wanted to build the bridge.”
“Every man must have somewhere an objective in life with which a greater [good] than money allies him,” he said. “My objective is to build the bridge.”
The committee quickly responded with its own letter to the Eagle, saying it was ridiculous to tell the public to relax and be confident just because men of money and position were in charge. The committee also wanted to know, if the Bridge Company was employing a Chief Engineer, not to mention a consulting engineer and four assistant engineers, why William Kingsley’s services were so all-important and what exactly was he doing? In addition, the committee was now most interested to know how Kingsley had managed to spend a quarter of a million dollars. This new figure of Kingsley’s was exactly twice as much as anyone had ever implied he had spent. Moreover, the committee had been led to understand, by officials at the bridge offices, that the $125,000 Kingsley received from the company was mainly to cover those earlier expenses, all of which could be itemized supposedly. If that was so, then for what purposes had the rest of the money been used? And did not the people of Brooklyn deserve an honest accounting of such transactions? Perhaps he had been extremely liberal in Albany to get the sort of legislation that would allow private stockholders such free rein with the people’s money?
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 went. 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 same 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.
The two investigators said they did not know “how far in reality Mr. Kingsley was interested in any stock besides that which appears in his name,” but their impression was pretty far. This, they agreed, was not as it should be and they said that “a mere partnership between the public and private individuals who have the expenditure of the money is not sufficient to protect the public interests.” So they concluded with two specific proposals.
First, that Alexander McCue, as counsel for the Bridge Company, draw up for approval by the Board of Directors an amendment to the original charter authorizing the cities of Brooklyn and New York a vote on their stock. The cities would also decide on the choice of directors, “taking care, so far as may be practicable, that the private stockholders are represented in the Board in proportion to the stock held by them.” In short, the two cities would henceforth control the bridge and the power enjoyed by the private stockholders—as granted by Murphy’s charter—would no longer be absolute.
The second proposal was to continue to employ a General Superintendent (no name specified), but at an annual salary not to exceed that paid the Chief Engineer, which by this time had been raised from eight to ten thousand dollars.
Demas Barnes, however, insisted on submitting his views separately. The criticism in the majority report he found too mild and generalized; the recommendations made fell far short of the mark, he said. So as a minority of one Chairman Barnes presented his own report, which was twice the length of the other one and infuriated nearly everybody who had had anything to do with the business management of the bridge. It was a remarkable document.
Barnes’s basic contention was that since the bridge was being built with public money, its managers ought to be accountable to the public, which they were not. He said that the original charter provided the people of Brooklyn and New York with no adequate protection against fraud; that the business side of the bridge had been carried on in much too much secrecy; and that certain members of the company were benefiting personally more than was proper. He reported that the Finance Committee kept no records, that there was no record of a minority motion ever voiced at a meeting of the Executive Committee, or of any substantive debate on any question. He noted that Kingsley, the largest stockholder, was not a director or on any of the committees, so he could not be held responsible for anything decided on by the board or by the committees. And yet: “While no restriction appears limiting his discretion, there is no act or recommendation of his which has not the unqualified approval of the Committee.” No part of the material purchased thus far had been advertised for. There was no indication of who opened bids, if indeed any of them had ever been submitted sealed.
Kingsley’s arrangement for a percentage of expenditures Barnes found to be the most reprehensible irregularity and he was puzzled why the various alterations in the agreement made the previous November had been done without any explanation. And it was Barnes who totaled up all the money paid out to Kingsley’s Saw Mill & Lumber Company or to its treasurer, A. Ammerman.
Barnes also reported that checks seemed to be handled in a rather peculiar fashion. When most organizations deposited checks in the bank, he said, it was customary to record the name of the drawer on the check in the margin of the checkbook. But, he went on, “The following credits are given for money received April 12th, 1870: Five parties, $23,000. The amount did not reach the bank until June 3rd, and only one check was deposited instead of five. The name of the drawer of the check deposited has been erased and the word ‘check’ inserted. The same circumstances (erasures, etc.) occur several times.” The procedure struck Barnes as most mysterious.
But this and one or two other things in his report struck some of the other directors as nit-picking, and for all the rather fishy-looking inconsistencies in the record books, Barnes had in fact found precious little proof of foul play except, again, for Kingsley’s $125,000.
Still the report wound up as a rigorous indictment of the private corporation as a means of building such an important public work and a strong endorsement for an immediate change in that policy:
The Company is under no financial restriction, and is accountable to no authority. It may do its business in private; its members may furnish any part of the supplies; it may pay such prices for the supplies, labor, superintendence, etc., as it chooses. The company violated no law in agreeing to pay fifteen percent on its total disbursements…Neither would it have done so had it paid fifty per cent or one hundred per cent. There are men in this city who will pay for all the private stock, and give one million dollars for the privilege of completing the Bridge under the existing charter.
Kingsley, he said, might even be commended for taking only what he did, considering the opportunities available. The miracle was, in Barnes’s view, that more money had not been stolen. He left little doubt that he thought Kingsley was profiting handsomely, but he had no solid facts and figures and so never condemned the man outright. All Barnes could conclude in print was that Kingsley was doing no more, in fact a good deal less, than the law permitted him or any other big stockholder to do. The man was not crooked, or at least Barnes could not prove him so, but the law was and something could be done about that.
Unlike Hewitt and Schroeder, Barnes was not willing to leave any changes in the charter to the Board of Directors. He wanted such changes agreed to and approved by an impartial conference of responsible citizens, none of whom had had any previous connection with the bridge.
He also wanted further investigations conducted and he made no mention of keeping Kingsley on. “The people need the Bridge,” he concluded; “make them realize that when they have expended ten or fifteen million dollars on a bridge [he was not ready to accept Roebling’s latest figure apparently] that they will have ten or fifteen million dollars’ worth of bridge, and they will be ready to furnish the money.”
In the months to come, Barnes would argue for a long list of commendable amendments to the charter. He wanted all meetings of the board open to the public, all supplies in amounts over a thousand dollars advertised for, all bids to be opened by the secretary of the company and in the presence of the board. He wanted the records of all committees open for inspection by any director at all times.
When the Executive Committee filed its report, in answer to the Committee of Investigation, its defense would be that the stockholders were doing only what was within their rights. Barnes would be chastised for quoting from the records only those references that supported his own arguments and for filling his report with “disingenuous insinuations against the Executive Committee.” The arrangement with Kingsley was defended on the grounds that it covered only the building of the foundations, that such work was highly precarious, and as a man to take charge of such an unprecedented effort Kingsley had been the ideal choice. That Kingsley expected to make money out of the arrangement was not denied. “It is, no doubt, true that Mr. Kingsley, in connecting himself with this great work, looked to some pecuniary advantage. It is hardly to be supposed that anyone would spend so much time and labor and incur such pecuniary liability as he had done without some expectation of remuneration.” The Executive Committee claimed Kingsley’s 15 per cent was no more than the federal government allowed contractors furnishing stone for the new Post Office in New York. (The situation was not quite the same clearly, but that was overlooked.) And finally, argued the committee, if Kingsley had not put up the money he did, when he did, the bridge would not have been built, and nobody could say the job had not been handled superbly in all the time he had had anything to do with it.
What exactly his duties were, how much of his time he was giving to the bridge and how much to his other business and political interests, were never explained.
Why he had agreed to the ceiling of $125,000 and had returned the $50,000 when he did was explained, however. He had agreed “on the condition that he should be relieved of a certain portion of the stock of the company he was carrying, which we agreed to do in our individual capacities, with the assistance of two other members of the Board, at our request, by purchasing from him and paying him for $130,000 of the stock at its par value, taking the consequences of our act upon ourselves.”
In other words, by returning $50,000, Kingsley got back $130,-000 that he was in the hole for. So, in actual fact, instead of returning $50,000, he was really having $80,000 returned to him, and if that plus $125,000 he had been paid for his services did not add up to the $250,000 he claimed to have spent—but was never able to itemize to anyone’s satisfaction—it was a tidy sum nonetheless.
As for the purchases made from his Saw Mill & Lumber Company, the defense was that since the Bridge Company got everything at a good price, then no damage had been done. That the Saw Mill & Lumber Company and Kingsley may also have benefited by the business was apparently not considered a pertinent issue.
The Executive Committee was able to report, however, that the money paid to Mr. Ammerman, treasurer of the Saw Mill & Lumber Company, should not be viewed as payments to that firm. Mr. Ammerman, it was explained patiently, had been paid some $84,000 not as a representative of the Saw Mill & Lumber Company, but as the representative of mill owners in Georgia (the same Georgia firm perhaps from which Kingsley had bought the $46,-000 worth of lumber back in 1869).
But the real issue, in the view of the Executive Committee (then composed of Murphy, Slocum, Stranahan, and Husted), was not Kingsley’s innocence, but whether or not the Bridge Company had been run according to the accepted practices and ethical standards of a private corporation, and in their unanimous opinion it most certainly had. The purchasing of materials, for example, was, they said, conducted as it would be by the officials of a railroad company or a private citizen building a house; such people, it was reasoned, ask bids for the work from whichever builders and dealers they choose, whichever “they think best for their interest, without deeming it necessary or advisable to make public advertisement of them.”
“This Company was chartered as a private company,” they reminded everyone, “and although the cities of New York and Brooklyn subscribed to its capital stock, that fact did not change its character. There were scores of railroad corporations in this State to whose stock towns and cities have subscribed under authority of law, and which retain their private character. We refer to this fact merely for the purpose of showing how natural, right and proper in itself it was for the Executive Committee, in the absence of all legal provisions to the contrary, to exercise their discretion in this respect in the same manner as other private corporations.”
So for all the talk of the bridge as a noble public work, the men who had the power saw it as a business proposition.
This particular document was signed on the last day of December 1872. On January 11, 1873, the Board of Directors convened. A committee of five was named to consider how the charter ought to be amended. The five were Hewitt and Schroeder, William Marshall, Judge McCue, and James Stranahan. Murphy, the man who wrote the original document, was not chosen to participate, nor was Demas Barnes, its severest, most conscientious critic.
Then it was resolved by the board that the Executive Committee be directed to appoint “Mr. Wm. C. Kingsley…General Superintendent at a salary of $10,000.” This was done by the Executive Committee later the same day on a motion by Hewitt, which included the provision that Kingsley’s pay be effective as of the previous July 12, when his “former appointment” had terminated with the completion of the tower foundations up to high-water mark. The motion was carried. The management would remain precisely the same as it had been all along.
Kingsley, who was present for this little ceremony, accepted his “new” appointment gratefully, then remarked that his physician had advised “some recreation from his labors was absolutely necessary” and with that in view he was forced to ask for a six-week leave of absence. This request was granted unanimously.
Hewitt had been convinced somehow. He was the key man now, clearly enough, the one known voice of reform on the Executive Committee, the one new face, the one and only representative for the city of New York. And apparently his own examination of the Bridge Company, plus explanations offered by the others on the Executive Committee—not just in their formal rebuttal to Barnes, but in personal conversation—had been enough to satisfy Hewitt that there need be no shake-up in the over-all method of operation or in the principal members of the cast.
Hewitt still wanted the charter changed, but he was in no hurry about it and he had concluded that for the time being there was no reason why things could not continue as before. So as far as the bridge management was concerned the crisis had passed, the case was closed. Nothing was ever said to that effect, but that was the situation. No one on the Executive Committee would oppose changing the charter, then or later, but there would be no great rush to see it done either.
For anyone else who had troubled to follow the situation as it had evolved over the past year and a half, and who had been able to keep it all straight, things did not seem all that tidy, however. Quite a little had been left unsaid, several very important questions had been left unanswered.
Kingsley had still not explained how he spent a quarter of a million dollars prior to the start of construction. (Barnes had been able to justify slightly over $59,000, but that included the early lumber purchase of $46,000, for which Kingsley & Keeney had already been reimbursed. The Executive Committee in its answer to Barnes had not bothered with an estimate of Kingsley’s early expenses or even a suggestion of what they might have involved. Kingsley was simply credited with putting up a large sum of money “at risk,” for which he rightfully deserved to make a profit.)
Nobody said why Kingsley’s agreement had been changed so suddenly after the Tweed Ring’s defeat at the polls or why an erasure had been made in the records instead of simply amending the agreement in the usual fashion.
Kingsley’s duties were still unexplained. In all that had been said in the man’s defense or to justify the peculiar privileges he enjoyed, no one had bothered to mention what his responsibilities were or how much of his time he was expected, or requested, to devote to them. His presence was vital according to the members of the Executive Committee, but just why that was so none of them ever said. Moreover, it seemed curious that whenever the management of the Bridge Company wished to present an authoritative, reliable opinion on the status of the work, Kingsley was never quoted—it was always Roebling. The bridge was always progressing under Roebling’s direction, never under Kingsley’s, according to Bridge Company pronouncements. Unfortunately Roebling himself had not been very clear about what Kingsley contributed to the job; in the two annual reports he had prepared thus far, Roebling cited various members of his staff by name, going out of his way to credit them for this accomplishment or that, which, as he said, often involved “a certain amount of risk to life and health.” But Kingsley he mentioned only in passing—as having made some contracts.
If Kingsley had spent $100,000, $200,000, $250,000, whatever, before the bridge began, then where did he spend it? In Washington? Albany? Or if he had spent no such sums, but more like the sixty thousand that seemed a reasonable figure for the sort of initial expenses such a work customarily entailed, then why was he entitled to such a disproportionately high compensation for his services?
How much had his Saw Mill & Lumber Company profited from the bridge business he had arranged for it? In how many other firms doing business with the bridge did he have an interest? How much of the stock owned by the members of the Executive Committee had he made it possible for them to own? Why had he been so very eager for this bridge in the first place and how many other bargains had been agreed to privately with politicians and contractors? These were the obvious questions and there were still no answers for them. Nor would there ever be from those in a position to know.
Hewitt would staunchly contend that nothing improper had occurred. The others would simply not say anything more, except to deny the charges that came along. How much Roebling knew of what went on behind the closed doors of the Bridge Company was very hard to surmise. But the impression was that anything undeniably dishonest could have been kept from him and would not have been an especially difficult thing to do. Roebling was not a stockholder and so was not eligible to attend directors’ meetings or meetings of the all-powerful Executive Committee, except when specifically invited. And the record revealed that he had been invited very seldom and only when engineering matters were to be discussed.
Why he owned no stock was never explained. It had been his father’s practice to invest in the bridges he built, whenever possible. And surely if Kingsley and the other Brooklyn people were as anxious for private capital as it appeared they were in the earlier days, then the wealthy John Roebling should have been a prime prospect. But the elder Roebling had not invested in the bridge, nor would his son.
Perhaps Kingsley and the others discouraged John Roebling from coming in with them, preferring to keep the imperious old man and his unbendable integrity at a safe distance. More likely, both Roeblings, knowing something of the other stockholders, and suspecting more, decided they wanted nothing to do with that side of the bridge. The answer will never be known.
Washington Roebling was a very sick man by the time the reports from the Committee of Investigation were issued. One day he would say something of what he knew about the alleged bridge scandals, but that would be many years later.
For the moment, even to those willing to give Kingsley the benefit of the doubt, it seemed obvious that if he had not gotten rich on the bridge, he certainly had been nicely set up to do so. Furthermore, he had managed it all in such a way that it had cost him virtually nothing. Neither he nor any of the others had lost a cent for their efforts.
Indeed, it seemed terribly naïve, quite unrealistic really, considering Kingsley’s basic nature and the ground rules of the political and business circles he customarily operated within, to conclude anything other than this: Kingsley had passed out money liberally in New York, perhaps in Washington, but most certainly in Albany. In Washington there had been comparatively little resistance and Demas Barnes, never a friend of the Brooklyn Ring, was probably not a likely candidate for bribery in any event, nor a safe confederate in any such dealings. But in Albany, support could be extremely dear, as everyone who read a newspaper knew perfectly well by this time, and especially for a charter that was virtually a license to steal, if anyone wanted to view it that way. It was even suggested by one New York paper that if Henry Murphy was the man doing all the work in Albany, writing the legislation, “lobbying” with Tweed, and so forth, then just maybe Henry Murphy had exacted his own large fee for services rendered, and that that had accounted for a substantial part of the money Kingsley “invested” earlier on. If this were so, then perhaps some of the “facts and figures” put forth by Kingsley beside Murphy’s fireplace that fateful winter night in 1866 were not quite what Alexander McCue implied in his account of the scene.
Kingsley had indeed purchased most of the stock and he had obviously handed it out where it would do the most good. He had every expectation of profiting from contracts with the Bridge Company, as the directors made no effort to deny, and it seemed pretty plain that he figured to recover what he had spent for political favors and for stock by the 15 per cent arrangement and quite possibly make a lot more on top of that. Had things continued as they were prior to the fall of 1871, there would have been no sudden unexplained changes in the 15 per cent arrangement and the bridge could have made him a very rich man. But the unexpected had happened. The Tweed Ring had crumbled like papier-mâché. Bargains with Tweed were no longer acceptable. Politically active building contractors were subjects of automatic suspicion. The whole bridge project was suddenly very suspect. Kingsley, just as suddenly, not to mention the whole Brooklyn Ring, was extremely vulnerable. His arrangement with the Bridge Company would not look good at all if it were to come to public attention. The management of bridge business might be put into other hands. The arrangement had to be changed, which it was, most hurriedly and clumsily.
So the rug had been pulled out from under him before he had a chance to do much. But as a result no one was able to pin anything on him either. And besides, since the bridge was being built by a private company, there was, as no one could dispute, little he or any major stockholder could not do, perfectly legally.
The importance of all this was not, however, the degree of Kingsley’s greed or guilt. What mattered in the long run was that largely by a quirk of fate—Tweed’s fall—the greatest municipal work of the age, the most inspired structure Americans had yet attempted, had been rescued from certain disgrace, and probable disaster, at the hands of the Tweed and Tammany rings. Moreover, the movement to make the bridge truly a public enterprise can be dated from this point. Two more years would go by before the old 1867 charter would be changed in Albany, but even so, the days when the Bridge Company could do entirely as it pleased were all over. No more could the Executive Committee and William Kingsley disregard public opinion or conduct their affairs with total immunity and no higher ethical standards to go by than those of a railroad.
At the same time, those people who were actually building the bridge now had to face up to the idea that the work was no longer viewed as an altogether noble and heroic endeavor. Too many seeds of doubt had been sown and the fact that Tweed was out or that a man like Hewitt was in and testifying to the conduct of bridge business certainly did not put an end to the rumors. Papers such as the World remained openly hostile to the bridge and by no means satisfied that its management was henceforth above suspicion.
One paper would list it as one of the “seven fraudulent wonders of the New World,” along with Tweed’s courthouse and the Northern Pacific Railroad. The bridge had been a subject of controversy since the beginning, of course, but always on technical grounds—i.e., was the engineering sound, would the finished structure stand or fall? Now there were other reasons to be skeptical and the bridge, as a result, became a subject of special fascination to a wholly different variety of skeptic, of whom there were a very large number.
The same rich opportunities for dishonesty were still there, it was agreed, the same people had the power, and the void created by Tweed’s departure could well provide lesser scoundrels that much more room to maneuver in. A cloud of suspicion remained about the whole endeavor, in short, and come what may the bridge itself would be viewed by many as the very thing John Roebling had feared it might become when he contemplated its social and political setting ten years earlier: a grand and conspicuous aggravation to the general state of venality on both sides of the river. Despite anything said to the contrary, a good part of the public would remain convinced that every day the work continued some crooked somebody behind the scenes was getting rich on it.