22
The best way to secure rapid and effective work is to get a new Chief Engineer.
—New York Star
NOBODY would say who made the decision and that greatly aggravated the gentlemen from New York, and the mayor in particular. There was no possible way, they said, by which their city could benefit from Pullman cars and freight trains crossing the bridge and they wanted to know by whose authority the engineer’s plans had been suddenly and secretly changed to accommodate such traffic. But none of the other trustees would give a direct answer. There was mounting tension in the board room, whereupon James Stranahan, addressing himself to William R. Grace, said, “There has been authority for everything that has been done…No personal considerations and no personal feelings have entered into the matter in any way, and I say distinctly there has been nothing done on which a charge can be made that it was invested with secrecy or in any way outside the legitimate duty of the members of the board.”
Stranahan, obviously angry, was resorting to a defense he seldom used. His customary method was to assume his opponent was perhaps half right, well intentioned beyond question, but still, on the whole, altogether mistaken in the premises from which he started. He was always willing to rely upon “the more mature judgment” of his opponent, and to give him opportunity for maturing his judgment, he was generally willing to accept a delay. But there was no easy way to delay the direct question and so the usually amiable Stranahan, who reminded people of an English statesman and who was looking more dignified than ever now that he was in his seventies, had been filled with great righteous indignation, basing his case, as it were, on the excellence of his personal character and past services.
The tactic worked. Mayor Grace said he meant no harm and asked no further questions. Stranahan said there was really no reason for the gentlemen from New York to be apprehensive. He told them how ten years earlier he had talked with Cornelius Vanderbilt about linking up with the New York Central and how Colonel Roebling had met with Vanderbilt’s engineer to figure a way to handle the problem. It was thought that a sunken line could be run from Grand Central Depot south to the bridge, then the trains could be raised by hydraulic lifts to cross over the bridge. After all, Stranahan asked, was it so unnatural for Brooklyn to want a depot of her own? Consider what is happening all around, he said. “Already there are three trunk lines to the West terminating in Jersey, and more lines will be completed in twelve months. In New York the only trunk line going west is the New York Central. New Jersey sends Annex boats for passengers, and floats carry the freight past your shores, and of what benefit is that to you gentlemen of New York? Sooner or later, gentlemen, you will consider this matter, and when that time comes I trust you will see that we have not labored in vain, either for our own benefit or that of the City of New York.”
And then it had been remembered that Mrs. Roebling was up on the Brooklyn tower by this time, waiting to make the walk over the bridge, and the meeting had adjourned, the question still hanging.
As things turned out, there never would be an official answer. Those responsible for the decision preferred to remain anonymous, and so the one person left to account for the change was Roebling.
Had it not been so near the end of the work, had there been less talk in the papers about the ever-mounting cost of the bridge, the change would probably not have mattered a great deal. But in October of 1881 when Roebling submitted his request for an additional one thousand tons of steel to put into the trusses to make the floor rigid enough to carry heavy locomotives and cars, several individuals saw it as the moment they had been waiting for.
Why the sudden concern about the strength of the bridge, they wanted to know. Who decided on railroad trains? How was such an immensely important decision arrived at and why was there no explanation of this in the record? And always, between the lines, was the larger question: Did the Chief Engineer know what he was doing?
The trouble was, mainly, that everyone was getting extremely anxious to see the work completed, and to know exactly, once and for all, just how much the whole thing was going to cost.
As of the start of the new year, 1882, total expenditures on the bridge would come to $13,377,055.67. But as several editorial writers noted habitually, the original estimate had been for about half that, and although Henry Murphy said he thought another $600,000 should be enough to finish with, even he was unwilling to be held to that figure. The old memory of Tweed’s courthouse was returning to haunt honest men on the board, the cost of the bridge now being up to what had been spent on the courthouse.
In addition, only a small minority of the trustees understood very much about the engineering of the bridge, or its history, and fewer still had ever had any personal dealings with the Chief Engineer. In fact, more than half the men now charged with managing the great enterprise had never even seen Washington Roebling. And there was no way to communicate with him except in writing, which few wanted to do, which was a nuisance for those who did, and which occasionally led to misunderstandings.
Robert Roosevelt, the most outspoken of them, asserted foolishly at the trustees’ meeting of October 13 that the added weight of the extra steel would weaken the bridge. Exactly how much more weight could the cables carry, he demanded to know. He wanted Roebling to present a complete report promptly. His motion had carried and Roebling had done as directed, explaining in a letter dated January 9, 1882, why the added weight meant added stiffness in the deck and so even greater strength, not less. Roebling did not say who had directed him to revise his plans, he said only that it had become “incumbent” upon him to do so. He had been against the idea of conventional trains on the bridge, as they knew, but he had gone along with it. “When I consented to make this change,” he said, “it was not so much owing to personal solicitation as to the reflection ‘of what benefit had it been to erect this bridge at a vast expense unless we use it for every possible purpose to which the structure will lend itself.’” They were now to have a bridge so rigid that ordinary traffic would have no visible effect on it. And to settle the nerves of anyone concerned about the cables, he concluded by stating rather dramatically that the cables were strong enough to uproot the anchorages.
The original plan for a cable-drawn bridge train had not been abandoned. It was just that the bridge would now have enough added strength to accommodate the future, which, it was quite naturally presumed, would involve some sort of railroad. The presumption was mistaken; but for different reasons nobody could have guessed at then—the advent of the internal combustion engine and the automobile, mainly—the decision would turn out to be the right one. As a result, the bridge would remain in service for another fifty years before any major alterations in the superstructure became necessary.
It was an extremely important and fortunate decision, in other words, and from some things said later Stranahan appears to be the one who made it, with Kingsley, Murphy, and, ultimately, Roebling backing him up. Perhaps Stranahan had reached an “understanding” with old Commodore Vanderbilt, who was dead by this time, and the New York Central was still serious about the idea. Perhaps Stranahan and the others simply figured the decision was in the best long-range interest of Brooklyn, that a bridge could not be too strong after all, and rather than risk a noisy fight over the thing—a fight they might very well lose—they just went ahead and did it.
The decision was made in Brooklyn, that much is certain, and whatever the explanation, they were pressing their luck. Delivery of steel already on order was way behind schedule; any additional steel would mean further delays, as well as greater cost. So the immediate result of the announced change in plans was a clamor to find out who was mismanaging things in this the final stage of the work.
Ironically, the bridge was all but built. Certainly the difficult and demanding work was done with. It was largely a matter of finishing things up now—the final masonry on the approaches, the last of the trusswork, the plank flooring for the roadways and promenade, and a lot of painting. Already the men had begun taking down the footbridge.
For the first time since his father’s death in the summer of 1869, Roebling could relax a little. For the first time in thirteen years his services were no longer vital. For the first time he was not really needed any longer.
Like Roebling, those trustees who had been in on the work since the beginning were all thirteen years older. A few, like Henry Murphy, were showing their age. But now, with the completion of the work at last almost within reach, it was the newcomers on the board who were the most impatient and the most frustrated by delays. As before, Robert Roosevelt made the greatest noise, claiming with some justification that nobody ever gave him a straight answer to his questions. But he also had an important new ally, the very young new Republican mayor of Brooklyn, Seth Low.
Seth Low said hardly anything at the first trustees’ meeting he attended in January 1882. He simply sat and listened, an alert, serious expression on his boyish face. Only toward the end did he inquire of Henry Murphy when the bridge would be finished.
Murphy answered the question as directly as it had been asked. The bridge would be finished in the fall, he said, providing there were no further complications about money.
At age thirty-two, Seth Low was young enough to be Henry Murphy’s grandson, but still not quite so young as Murphy had been when he was elected mayor of Brooklyn. Low was the son of A. A. Low, the wealthy silk merchant, whose clipper ships had once lined the Brooklyn wharves, and he had grown up with “all the advantages,” in the Low mansion down the street from the Roebling house on Columbia Heights. Perhaps Henry Murphy saw something of himself in the young man. Without question he understood the background Low came from.
Like Murphy, Low had done extremely well at Columbia College. President Barnard had called him “the first scholar in college and the most manly young fellow we have had here in many a year.” Since then he had taken his place in the silk business, married the daughter of a United States Supreme Court Justice, and organized a Young Republican Club in Brooklyn to help elect Garfield and Arthur. As political clubs went, it was quite a departure, there being no smoking or billiard rooms, no bar, no social occasions, nothing but hard work.
When Seth Low ran for mayor it was as “the people’s candidate” and the overriding issue had been home rule for Brooklyn. His well-scrubbed, well-brushed good looks and “tender” age had been in his favor. Politicians did not much care for him, but the people responded in no uncertain terms. He roundly trounced Boss McLaughlin’s candidate, winning with a majority of four thousand votes, and without using his own money. Out-of-state papers were already calling him a figure of national importance and there was talk he would be governor before long.
But by spring the completion of the bridge looked no nearer, Murphy’s assurances were no longer good enough, and Low had joined forces with A. C. Barnes and the New York contingent—Mayor Grace, Roosevelt, and the Comptroller of New York, a man named Campbell—“to clean the stables,” as the papers put it. The young men were all in a very great hurry now and the papers and the public seemed very pleased with that.
Low made his first move on June 12. He asked that the Chief Engineer be required to submit a regular monthly report on the work accomplished and that he include an opinion on when the bridge would be completed. Then a motion was made that the Chief Engineer be requested to appear in person before the trustees at a special meeting two weeks hence, “to consult on matters appertaining to the bridge.”
But later that very day Robert Roosevelt had thrown up his hands and in a great pique announced his resignation. If his purpose, in part, was to draw attention to the mounting animosity within the board, he succeeded. The problem with the bridge was lack of leadership, Roosevelt declared in a long open letter to William Grace. A conscientious trustee could never get straight answers on anything. The management of the bridge, he said, was in the grip of a solid phalanx that “even death itself could not break in upon.” The delays in steel delivery were scandalous and left little doubt that things never would have come to such a pass had there been a full-time Chief Engineer on duty, not just to supervise the work but to meet with the trustees whenever they needed explicit information.
The papers made much of what Roosevelt had to say. Henry Murphy immediately called in the reporters to present the other side of the story. If Roosevelt felt in the dark on bridge matters, the elderly lawyer said, it might be because he had attended less than half the meetings there had been in the time since he became a trustee. Nor had he ever once taken his technical questions to the assistant engineers, who were always available for just that purpose. As for Roebling, his place could not be filled by any twenty engineers.
Another trustee who was with Murphy at the time, John T. Agnew, interrupted to make the point that Roebling’s mind was as clear as ever. From his window Roebling could see everything going on at the bridge, Agnew said. Why, with a glass he was even able to distinguish the faces of the different men at work. “His plans and diagrams are all about him, and nothing is done in the work until it has first been submitted to him. He cannot walk about the streets as you and I can, but he moves about his room, and on some days can go out. He has promised to be present at a future meeting of the Board.”
Roebling had made no such promise. It was true he had improved somewhat. His eyesight, in particular, was much improved. He could write again, in a dreadful, childish scrawl that was just barely legible, but he could do it. And by this time he had gone out of doors once or twice. But irrespective of its accuracy, Agnew’s statement put a very different light on things.
Seth Low had also by this time accepted the chairmanship of a committee to investigate the failure of the Edge Moor Iron Company to deliver according to contract. When the head of the company appeared before Low’s committee to explain himself, he said the fault lay not with his firm but with the Cambria Iron Company at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, suppliers of the steel blooms Edge Moor rolled into eyebars and other pieces for the bridge. To the delight of the newspaper editors the man’s name was Sellers, the same as the central character in Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age, which had become a hit play in New York. The editors had a fine time with this right away, sarcastically emphasizing that the Sellers in question was a Pennsylvania gentleman and not, of course, Twain’s archetype Southern promoter whose stock expression was “there’s millions in it.”
Sellers’ contract was the issue to be taken up in the presence of the Chief Engineer at the special meeting scheduled for June 26. But when the appointed hour arrived and everyone was gathered, the Chief Engineer did not appear. Not only that, as the reporters and most of the trustees suddenly learned for the first time, to their extreme surprise, the Chief Engineer was not even in Brooklyn any longer. He was in Newport, Rhode Island.
“Cannot meet the trustees today” was all Roebling said in the telegram that arrived that morning, which Henry Murphy read as soon as everyone was seated.
The meeting continued as planned, but not before a good deal had been said about Roebling’s lack of manners. Slocum remarked acidly that Roebling was an employee of the board, that he should therefore appear before it when so directed, and that he could have at least sent a letter of explanation. Mayor Low commented ominously how much better it would have been had Roebling simply attended.
More than a few people were exceedingly upset now.
“The curt indifference displayed in sending such a message is not excusable by reason of any illness,…” wrote the New York Sun. “It is natural to sympathize with a distinguished engineer who has sustained severe physical injuries while engaged upon a great public work; but he should not rely upon this kindly sentiment to excuse conduct on his part that is unbecoming and hardly civil.” The civic-minded Seth Low, too, was leaving no doubts as to his feelings on the subject. He criticized Roebling whenever he got the chance and called the bridge nothing more than the “unsubstantial fabric of a dream.”
All kinds of intriguing stories were going about. It was said Roebling had been shipped off to Newport against his will, that he himself had nothing to hide but that Stranahan, Murphy, and Kingsley dared not let him be questioned by the others. Roebling knew too much about the original contracts, it was said. He was the one man who could tell the story from beginning to end.
There was another rumor that he had become hopelessly paralyzed by this time and that the trustees certainly did not want this known. It was said that he lost all control over his mind, that he was raving mad, that he was “really as one dead,” that his wife, without anybody knowing it, had been deciding everything, directing the entire work for months. Soon most of the papers were saying as much.
Roebling was again requested to appear before the board. But again when the day came around, he failed to appear. However, this time he did send a letter of explanation. He was too ill to come he said. He could only talk for a few minutes at most and could not listen to conversation if it continued very long. He had gone to Newport on the advice of his doctors, who hoped, he said, that being out of doors some and away from the noise of the city might lessen “the irritation of the nerves of my face and head.” He was now able to be out of his room occasionally.
He had not explained his absence from the previous meeting because he had assumed everyone knew he was sick and he figured the trustees must be getting as tired as he was of seeing his health discussed in the papers.
Not a day went by that he did not do some work on the bridge. His assistants could refer to him for advice at any time. The work to be done that summer was “very plain routine.” If the contractor, Sellers, would supply the steel as fast as it was needed, the work would proceed with no delays whatever.
But then he wrote to Henry Murphy to say he was powerless to speed Sellers up. Making the various shapes required was a difficult job, Roebling stressed, but even more to the point, since Sellers was making no profit out of the contract, he was in no particular rush about it. If all the steel needed were at hand, the superstructure could go up in three months. As it was, there was no chance of the bridge being finished that year, as Murphy had been saying it would. A more realistic date would be late in 1883. For Murphy and those others on the board still loyal to the Chief Engineer, this was extremely discouraging news.
“Newport has never looked more attractive than it does at present,” reported the Brooklyn Eagle in early July. “A large number of summer residents have already arrived. The business people seem to be satisfied with the outlook, and the hotel proprietors anticipate a bigger season than they have had for years.” The National Lawn Tennis Association was to hold its tournament there by invitation of the governors of the Cassino, and the meets of the Queens County Hunt, yachting, shooting and horse races were also to be included in the program of outdoor sports.
Newport had its reputation, of course, and when it was reported that Colonel Washington A. Roebling had taken “the Meyer Cottage” for the summer, people quite naturally had a definite picture in mind of the life he was leading.
The picture was decidedly mistaken, however. The house Emily had rented was not the sort of “cottage” Newport was famous for. It was large and comfortable, but located in what was known as “the other Newport,” the older, less fashionable section of the old sea-port, out near the end of Washington Street, which runs parallel with the shore of the bay and which was described in the Newport Guide of the time as “shady, quiet, and a favorite resort of persons of literary character.” The house suited their needs perfectly. The air came right off the bay, there was little noise or distraction and a good deal of privacy. The broad front porch and the front bedrooms upstairs offered a spacious view of the water and the Newport Harbor Light. Most important, the house was an easy, level, ten-minute ride from the New York steamboat landing, so bringing him up from the boat had been about as uncomplicated and painless as possible.
The yachting, tennis-playing, lawn-party side of Newport was not only out of sight several miles away, but was an entirely different and separate world from the one they experienced that summer, quite as distant in spirit as it had been when they were still in Brooklyn.
They had picked Newport because G. K. Warren was now stationed there. He had been put in charge of all Corps of Engineers activities in New England, the principal work at the moment being the construction of the breakwater at Block Island. Whether Emily was aware of how much her brother’s health had failed by this time is not clear, but more than likely that too was on her mind when she arranged for the house.
It was the first time she and her husband had been away from Brooklyn in five years. And it might have been a first real vacation since the trip to Europe in ‘67 had it not been for the clamor for him to return to face the trustees. As he saw it, there was little cause to have remained in Brooklyn. His instructions had all been prepared long since, the work was quite routine, as he said; there was really nothing more to be decided of any major consequence. Indeed it must have begun as about the most hopeful summer they had seen in a very long time. By now it was clear to both of them that he was going to pull through. The bridge was all but built, and except for an unfortunate falling out between Martin and Farrington, the work was going perfectly smoothly. (What the fight was about is not known. But Farrington was so angry he quit, much to Roebling’s regret, and there is no record of what became of him afterward.)
A sudden return to Brooklyn would have been a tremendous strain for Roebling, physically and emotionally, but he would have done so immediately, without reservation, had anything serious gone wrong at the bridge. But at this late date he did not propose “to dance attendance on the Trustees,” as he said in the private notes he dictated to his wife. “I never did it when I was well and I can only do my work by maintaining my independence.” If the trustees were angry and irritated with him, the feeling was mutual. He saw their request for him to appear before them as no more than a political ploy at his expense. Important elections were coming up in the fall and there were ambitious men of both parties on the board. The bridge might well decide who would be the next governor. How seriously Seth Low was taking the talk about his becoming governor was anyone’s guess. But there was no doubt at all about Slocum. He was a prime contender for the Democratic nomination. It was a long-awaited opportunity for Slocum, and for William Kingsley, his great benefactor, the time was ripe to become something more than the man to see in Kings County.
Roebling refused to be “dragged into the board and put on exhibition,” as he said, simply to serve the purposes of political ambition. He had had his fill of politicians. “I am not a politician and I have never tried to conceal the contempt I have always felt for men who devoted their lives to politics,” he wrote privately. At another point he said there was not a self-respecting engineer in the country who would have put up with what he had over the years. He was seething with indignation, and when the Sun editorial appeared, charging him with irresponsibility, his patience ran out. He drafted a long letter in response, a letter he never sent. The one copy is in pencil, in Emily Roebling’s handwriting, in one of her letter books, and it is the single piece of evidence that perhaps there was, after all, a grain of truth to the whispered story that he was staying away because he knew too much.
Roebling said in the letter that over the years he had had to deal with “no less than one hundred and twenty politicians” on the board. But now he found it particularly infuriating that the “virtuous Slocum” had been among those demanding that he appear in person before the board and that the “virtuous Slocum” had been seconded by “the still more virtuous Kingsley.”
“This is the same General Slocum,” he wrote, “who joined with the request that I absent myself from any meeting of the board because my presence may embarrass Mr. Kingsley’s proposed operations of putting a couple of millions in his pocket, millions which have not yet reached their destination.” His “patience at an end,” Roebling said flatly that General Superintendent William Kingsley had been paid $175,000 for work he had never done—for work that he, Roebling, had in fact done—and that it had been Henry Slocum who stood up in the conference room years back and exclaimed that no man could name a sum that would compensate so eminent a man as Mr. Kingsley for the services he had rendered.
In another note he commented that Kingsley had also been in line to get a granite contract, but the fall of the Tweed Ring had put an end to that. Which of the granite quarries Kingsley had an interest in, the note does not say.
So the Chief Engineer had been aware of what had been going on. Had he not been there, he seems to say in his notes for another letter, this one to Comptroller Campbell, things might have been worse. (“I have always had bitter enemies in the Board for no reason except that I was in the way of any schemes for robbery.”) But so far Roebling had held his tongue.
Farther along in his notes for the Campbell letter, Roebling wrote, “I have over and over again been interviewed by trustees who when they found themselves face to face with me and found me a live man and not the driveling idiot they had expected, had very few questions to ask and scarcely anything to say about the bridge in any way.”
Toward the end of July, Seth Low decided that if Roebling would not come to Brooklyn, then he, the mayor of Brooklyn, would go to Newport and see for himself. Low was one of those trustees who had never laid eyes on the fabled Chief Engineer.
It is only from comments Low and Roebling made later that anything can be deduced about Low’s flying visit and the confrontation. The papers said merely that the mayor of Brooklyn would be out of town briefly.
Low arrived by boat, took a carriage down Washington Street, and apparently was ushered directly into Roebling’s room. Few words were wasted. Low told Roebling that it was time for him to step aside, which would be a perfectly honorable move for him to make. History would still remember him as the builder of the bridge, Low said. He could remain on as a consulting engineer and his salary would stay the same. C. C. Martin would be made Chief Engineer.
Roebling flatly refused to do any such thing. If Low and the others wanted him out, he said, they would have to fire him out right. He would not step aside of his own accord and his decision on that was final. Low answered that if Roebling insisted on being stubborn then fire him they would. Why, Roebling wanted to know. Low tried to explain, but according to Roebling’s notes on the interview, the young mayor’s reasons “were so weak and childish he finally abandoned all attempt at argument and said, ‘Mr. Roebling, I am going to remove you because it pleases me.’” Whereupon Low walked out of the house and was back in Brooklyn in less than twenty-four hours.
A few days later Emily and Washington Roebling were struck still another crushing blow. On August 8, after a sudden, severe illness, G. K. Warren died at his Newport home at the age of fifty-two. The military court appointed to examine his ignominious relief at Five Forks had by this time reached its decision, not only exonerating Warren fully and applauding him, but casting serious doubts as to the manner in which he had been treated. But tragically, for him and his family, the findings of the court would not be published for another three months. He had not lived to see his name cleared.
On the afternoon of August 17 Mayor Low sent each of the Brooklyn trustees a note saying there would be a meeting of the board on Tuesday the 22nd. “Please make it convenient to be present, as business of importance is to be considered,” the mayor wrote. Right away reporters at the Brooklyn City Hall wanted to know what this meant, but Low replied that there was nothing more to be said in advance. In another couple of days, however, before the meeting, it was reported on good authority that Low planned to move for the dismissal of the Chief Engineer.
The trustees met as planned promptly at three in the afternoon. It was noted by one reporter that Henry Murphy “did not look nearly so eager to proceed as did the youthful, bright-faced Mayor Low of Brooklyn…Nor did the venerable member of the Board, Mr. James S. T. Stranahan…appear as thirsty for information as did the affable business-intending Mayor Grace of New York.”
Low made a little speech. “I am convinced,” he said, “that at every possible point there is a weakness in the management of the Brooklyn Bridge. The engineering part of the structure—the most important—is in the hands of a sick man.” He went on to say what a serious handicap this was and told how he had gone to Newport to reason with Roebling but had failed. He had made an eminently fair proposition to Roebling “in order to facilitate the completion of the work,” but the man “would not accede.” Therefore action had to be taken. So Low said he had held a private conference on the issue with two other ex officio members of the board (the mayor and comptroller of New York) and they were “of the opinion that the change ought to be made, notwithstanding Mr. Roebling’s unwillingness.” He had, therefore, Low said, prepared certain resolutions, which he immediately presented:
WHEREAS, The Chief Engineer of this Bridge, Mr. W. A. Roebling, has been for many years, and still is, an invalid; and,
WHEREAS, In the judgment of this Board the absence of the Chief Engineer from the post of active supervision is necessarily, in many ways, a source of delay; therefore,
Resolved, That this Board does hereby appoint Mr. Roebling Consulting Engineer, and Mr. C. C. Martin, the present First Assistant Engineer, to be the Chief Engineer of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge; and,
Resolved, That in doing so, this Board desires to bear most cordial testimony to the services hitherto rendered by Mr. Roebling, and to express its regret at the necessity of making such a change at this time.
Mayor William Grace rose to his feet and said he “heartily seconded” the resolutions of Mayor Low. “It is our duty to set aside all other considerations in seeing that nothing shall interfere with the progress of this work.” The elected heads of the two cities building the bridge and paying for it had decided the time had come to dispense with Washington Roebling.
But at that point the Comptroller of Brooklyn, Ludwig Semler, a new man on the board, asked for the floor. “I also think the work should be pushed,” he said, “but I do not think it would be using Mr. Roebling justly to oust him from his position now that he is about to reap the full benefit of his labors. If he had been in any way guilty of delaying the bridge, I should be in favor of retiring him, but there is not a shadow of a charge upon which to base such action. In fact, Mr. Roebling has done much toward pushing the bridge along. Let us not act summarily toward him after his thirteen years of service. If someone will tell me how an engineer is going to build a bridge without material I shall be pleased. Mr. Roebling did not have the material and so he is made a scapegoat for others’ sins.”
Semler, who had had almost nothing to say at the few previous meetings he attended, spoke with great feeling and was strongly commended for it by Stranahan, who had gotten up from his customary seat on a sofa that stood against the wall and began addressing the group, as one man said later, “with the manner and voice of a speaker at a funeral.”
“I cannot but remember at such time as this,” Stranahan said, “the eminent abilities of the elder and younger Roebling. When I think that that ability has given us the finest bridge in the world I cannot help but feel that there is something yet due to the Chief Engineer. True, his health is not as sound as we could wish, but it is as good as it has been for many years past—years wherein we could not dispense with his services because of the accurate knowledge of the enterprise which he alone possessed. The older trustees will comprehend the truth of what I say. If this matter is to be referred to another meeting I should be much obliged, so far as I am personally concerned, to have it come up at the next regular meeting. I have traveled one hundred and eighty miles to attend this one, and I must travel one hundred and eighty miles tomorrow to join my family.”
Stranahan, who had returned to Brooklyn from Saratoga, where he customarily spent part of the summer, was, in his usual fashion, stalling for time, banking on a “maturing of judgment” among those trustees who had not as yet made up their minds about what to do.
It was then moved that the subject be “laid over” until September 11 and the motion carried.
All Brooklyn was talking about it by the time the sun went down and in the next several days virtually every newspaper on both sides of the river began taking sides. The New York Tribune said the bridge had been “tainted at the start” and linked Roebling with Murphy, Kingsley, and Stranahan as the proper parties to blame. Things would have been far better, the paper said, had they all been pensioned off years before. “This is the day for sharp decision and vigorous action.”
The Star said it was obviously time to get a new Chief Engineer. “Had Mr. Roebling done his duty instead of becoming the cat’s-paw of the Bridge Ring, he might have saved millions of dollars to the two cities, and his zeal would not have gone unrewarded.”
The New York Evening Post said Mayor Low’s resolutions had been made not a moment too soon. The Daily Graphic reasoned that since Roebling’s special knowledge of suspension bridge construction was no longer essential to the work, and the bridge was too far along for anyone to mistakenly alter the plan, there was no real reason to keep him on. “That a man has been supervising a structure like this from its beginning gives him no right to delay the completion, as Mr. Roebling is now delaying this bridge,” concluded the editorial writer of the Daily Graphic.
The Iron Age said the only thing wrong with Low’s action was the idea of replacing Roebling with C. C. Martin. “If new life is to be infused in that comatose engineers corps, it must come from the outside—for inside it there is no leaven of redemption left. No wonderful or even exceptional engineering talent is required to bring the work to completion; but what is required is some man with good executive ability, of great force of character, and complete independence of all possible future political preferment.”
Even the Newport Daily News felt obliged to report on the situation. “Mayors Grace, of New York, and Low, of Brooklyn, are getting tired of waiting for the completion of the celebrated East River Bridge,” the little paper announced the morning of August 24. “The monster connecting link between the two cities has already cost them too much and it is about time that something was done to prevent anymore such delays as have hindered its completion.”
Only the Trenton Daily State Gazette and the Brooklyn Eagle rose immediately and angrily to Roebling’s defense. “His spotless integrity and high sense of honor are unquestionable,” wrote the Daily State Gazette, “his great skill as an engineer is established, and his devotion to this work has been attended by the sacrifice of his health.”
The Eagle, not surprisingly, had more to say. How, asked Thomas Kinsella in a two-column editorial, could Low present a proposal to appoint Roebling the consulting engineer, when Roebling, as Low himself reported to the trustees, had said explicitly he would not accept the job? And what earthly good would such a change accomplish? “Is it possible that the existence of Mr. Martin himself is now in the nature of a discovery, while the fact is that he has had practical executive control of the work for many years past? If he is not a ‘natural channel’ of information, who is?”
As for Roebling’s competence, that was not even an issue, Kinsella asserted. His past contributions to the work were enormous. There had not been a single failure on any part of the work that could be chargeable to the engineers. Furthermore it would be a rotten thing to degrade the man and deny him his rightful honors on the very eve of his triumph.
And that pretty much summed up the case for Roebling as it was being presented in Brooklyn—except for the strongly and privately expressed opinion of several on the board who claimed to know Roebling personally that he had been kept alive all these years only by his intense interest in the work and the desire to see it finished properly. The implication was that a vote to discharge him would be as good as a death sentence.
A very important question, of course, was whether the voice of Kinsella was the voice of William Kingsley. A few years before, the immediate assumption would have been that it was, but not so now, for the influential editor had grown increasingly independent. Not long before, when he felt there was too much interference in editorial matters on the part of the owners, Kinsella had threatened to resign and start a rival paper and ever since he had been left to decide things pretty much on his own.
The one other argument in Roebling’s behalf was, of course, the actual progress still being made on the bridge itself, progress that Henry Murphy kept presenting in formal reports to the two mayors. A hundred and fourteen intermediate chords had been put up in a week, 72 diagonal stays, 60 posts, 21 intermediate floor beams, 21 bridging trusses, 16 intermediate promenade floor beams, 12 lower chord sections, 2 upper floor stay bars. At the end of the Brooklyn approach, work had begun on the foundations for the iron viaduct and terminal station building.
But the question of Roebling’s mental and physical health had not been put to rest. If anything, rumors and innuendo on the subject were more plentiful than ever before. The three most prominent trustees of long standing—Murphy, Stranahan, and Kingsley—said they could vouch for Roebling’s state of mind, but their word was not only not enough any longer, it was outright suspect among the younger trustees. The only one of the younger men who had seen Roebling and talked to him in person was Seth Low and he would make no comment on Roebling’s condition one way or the other.
Toward the end of the month of August Comptroller Ludwig Semler received the following letter from Newport, from Mrs. Washington Roebling:
I take the liberty of writing to express to you my heartfelt gratitude for your generous defense of Mr. Roebling at the last meeting of the Board of Trustees. Your words were a most agreeable surprise to us as we had understood you were working in full sympathy with the Mayors of the two cities and the Comptroller of New York. Mr. Roebling is very anxious for me to go to Brooklyn to convey to you…a few messages from him. Can you see me at your office some morning…? I will go to Brooklyn any day you can give me a little of your time and see you at your own house or your office just as you may prefer….
As you are a stranger to Mr. Roebling all that you said was doubly appreciated. There are some few old friends in the Board of Trustees who know him well and who have always stood by him in the many attacks that have been made on him in the past ten years, but we never expect such consideration and kindness from those who have never seen him.
On Tuesday, September 5, a week before the trustees were to meet to vote, Comptroller Semler suddenly announced he was leaving for Newport that evening to see Roebling and judge for himself.
“Nobody should be convicted before he is tried,” Semler said. “As I have undertaken to defend Mr. Roebling to a certain extent against the attempt to remove him, I want to make his personal acquaintance and see what impression he makes on me. It seems from certain statements made in connection with this matter that an impression has gone abroad that he was not only suffering physically but that his mental faculties were also impaired. Of course, if this were so, his plans should not be relied upon, and the work should be suspended until an investigation could be had; but physicians tell me his intellect is all right. I am today more convinced than ever of the great injustice of displacing a man of his merit and standing without giving him an opportunity to defend himself. The idea that he could not do his duty without being at the bridge office is preposterous.”
De Lesseps had been in Paris while the Suez Canal was being built, Semler said, and so why was it so unreasonable for Roebling to remain in a house a few blocks from the bridge. “There is nothing sentimental in my feelings in this matter. The question is simply one of justice.” Semler told reporters he would be back in his office Thursday morning.
All at once Semler had become a most important figure. And a great deal seemed to hang on what kind of report he would come home with. As things looked now, Roebling had at least four sure votes against him and four for him. Low, Grace, Campbell (the New York Comptroller), and A. C. Barnes were clearly committed to ousting him, while Murphy, Stranahan, Marshall, and John T. Agnew could be counted on to vote the other way. But the rest were undecided, or appeared to be, and Semler’s evaluation might therefore be the deciding factor, at least among the younger men.
But there was also by now very particular interest in which way William Kingsley and General Slocum might go, for there was no longer any doubt that Slocum was the front-running contender for the Democratic nomination for governor and the convention was only two weeks off. On the surface it would appear both men would naturally go along with Murphy—to stand solidly behind the Chief Engineer. But Slocum had attacked Roebling on too many occasions and with no little public fanfare about it and to side with the old regime and vote against such known champions of reform as Low and Grace, to vote for what might appear to be further delays on the bridge and greater expense (greater graft and corruption was the implied idea), could be extremely foolish politics for a serious candidate at this particular moment and very hard to explain to the electorate later on. Still Slocum was Kingsley’s man, it was pretty generally believed. Kingsley had the power, Kingsley would be the one to decide. Kingsley was the man to watch.
In a note to Paine written about this time, Roebling remarked that if his position as Chief Engineer depended on Kingsley’s vote, then he would just as soon “be out of the bridge.”
On Thursday morning, as good as his word, Ludwig Semler was back at his desk in City Hall, just a few doors down from Mayor Low. The reporters were called in and the interview commenced.
Semler said he had been very kindly received by Roebling, whose acquaintance he had not made previously, and that a full, frank talk had ensued between them. He said he found the engineer suffering from a severe nervous affection, but his intellect was perfectly clear and strong. “If his intellect has been impaired,” he said, “I should consider myself a happy man if I had what he lost. He spoke to me with clearness, and exhibited a memory which was something astonishing.”
Semler was asked what Roebling had said about the proposition to supersede him.
“He said that under no circumstances should he take any other position than Chief Engineer,” Semler replied, and quoted Roebling as saying, “‘If they want to remove me, let them do it absolutely. They know I will not take any other position. Why don’t they say they do not want me anymore. That would be the straightforward way to do.’”
“Did you ask him his opinion as to the motives which prompted the opposition?”
“I asked him if he had any cause to believe that there was unfriendly feeling toward him. He said he did not like to say anything upon that point.”
“Now, to do away with the driver who has brought us very nearly to shore, I think would be shameful,” Semler continued. “Suppose that the resolution offered by Mayor Low should be adopted and Mr. Martin should not accept the position of Chief Engineer?” (It was commonly being said by this time that none of Roebling’s staff would assume his title, if offered, but this was the first time anybody in a position of authority had said so publicly.) “Suppose it should be offered to Mr. Paine? He will not take it. We should then have to have another man. That will cause further delays in the work…. He might commence to meddle with the work and defer the completion of the bridge ten years.”
A reporter for the Eagle then asked whether Mr. Roebling had said anything about what passed between him and Mayor Low during Low’s flying visit to Newport? Semler answered that Roebling had indeed quoted from his conversation with Low, but Semler said he did not think he ought to repeat Roebling’s remarks for publication.
As it was, very little more would be said for publication by anyone until the trustees gathered to cast their votes the following Monday, September 11.
But between Semler’s return and the crucial meeting of the board, Roebling had still one more visitor at Newport—a reporter for the New York World who somehow talked his way into the house and managed to get an interview with Roebling, something no other newspaperman had been able to do in ten years. The agreement was that no direct quotes would be used. Roebling apparently trusted the man and in the course of the conversation made some bitter remarks about the Board of Trustees being full of candidates for governor. On his way out the front door the reporter had again promised Emily Roebling that he would not print a line of what had been said. But the man had not kept his word and when the article appeared it did little to further Roebling’s cause in Brooklyn. His loyal backers on the board felt he had dealt himself the worst blow possible.
Emily was shattered by what had happened, felt she was to blame, and wrote a long letter of apology to William Marshall, the one man who had voted against the J. Lloyd Haigh contract and one of those few long-time trustees who was not a politician. Now she too was full of despair. There was no doubt, she said, of her husband’s “perfect sanity and ability as an engineer, but he certainly is unfit to be on the work where so many political interests are involved.” He had, she said, no capacity for doing anything for the sake of politics. “I thank you very much for all your efforts and do not think I shall be greatly disappointed when the bridge controversies are ended, even against us. It has been a long hard fight since Mr. Roebling first took sick and if this chance reporter’s visit changes everything I shall see in it the hand of God, that all my care could not direct or change.”
Seventeen were present, the entire board but three—John G. Davis, Henry Clausen, and H. K. Thurber—all of whom were in Europe. Henry Murphy sat in the president’s chair, as usual, and ranged in a semicircle before him were Mayors Grace and Low, Comptrollers Campbell and Semler, General Slocum, A. C. Barnes, Kingsley, Stranahan, Agnew, J. Adriance Bush, Thomas C. Clarke, Jr., William Marshall, Charles McDonald, Jenkins Van Schaick, Alden S. Swan, and Otto Witte, the secretary. A half-dozen representatives of the press had also been admitted.
The first ten minutes were spent on routine matters. Minutes from the preceding meeting were read, C. C. Martin made some comments on the delays on the two terminal stations being built at either end of the bridge, and it was announced that several hundred tons of steel still remained to be delivered by the Edge Moor Iron Company. Mayor Low requested that the president inform the company that the trustees were “in a hurry,” to which there was great laughter.
Then C. C. Martin left the room, the doors were closed, and Seth Low, having risen from his chair, began speaking in a very deliberate manner.
“If there is no other business before the meeting I will call up the resolution which I presented last month, and in doing so there is very little which I wish to add to what I said then. As I said at that time the resolutions bring the Board of Trustees face to face with the question as to whether the existing engineering arrangements of the bridge are the best that are within reach for the work that lies before us. If the majority of the board will take the responsibility of saying they are I shall feel that I have done my duty in bringing the matter to this issue, and no one will be more glad than myself—if the majority does decide that way—to find the facts justifying the judgment.
“On the other hand I have presented the resolutions which suggest making Colonel Roebling consulting engineer because I believe sincerely that that would be the best pledge we can give the public that nothing whatever shall be allowed to interfere with the speedy completion of this work. I think the effect would be instantaneous not only upon the employees of the trustees, but upon all the people with whom they are dealing. It would convince them that from this time, whatever may have been the case in the past, these trustees must be dealt with upon the theory that they mean business. I do not mean by my wording to reflect upon the trustees in their intentions in the past…. For myself, I repudiate entirely the idea that there is anything in this proposition that reflects upon Mr. Roebling either directly or indirectly. I—”
Henry Murphy interrupted. “Will you allow me to say that I have here a communication from Colonel Roebling, which perhaps ought to be read before you proceed with your remarks. In all events, it is on this question and—”
“I think it would be better if I finished now,” Low snapped back, “if you will allow me.
“I wish to say,” he went on, “that I repudiate the idea that there is anything in the proposition that reflects on the engineer, either directly or indirectly. I offered it believing that it was a proposition which he could honorably accept. I think it is one which he ought to accept. More than that I think it is one which, in its essence, is kind, because in my judgment it would take him out of a false position and place him in a true one with reference to this work, and by so doing we will relieve him of the criticism to which he has been subject.
“One other thing I will say is that I offered the resolutions which I presented last week without consulting Mr. Martin. I felt that if that question could not be settled by me without consulting a subordinate I had better not offer the resolutions. He was entirely unaware, so far as I know, of any such resolution being thought of, and in all of his utterances he has acted the part of the loyal friend of the Chief Engineer.
“But the real question is not that which concerns the engineer as much as it does the trustees and the people. By our action today we say: ‘We have nine months before us. We have charge of the expenditure of a million and a quarter of dollars and an interest and expense account of about three thousand dollars a day. The question is, shall we have a sick man or a live man—a man who is responsible and with whom we can come into contact day after day?’ I say this without any reference to what has been done in the past—which has no further claim to my attention than that of historical interest.”
Here, according to one of the reporters present, Mayor Grace broke into a broad grin, as if Low had just said something extremely funny.
“I have only to say,” Low continued, “that if the majority will take the responsibility of leaving things as they are it will give me the greatest pleasure to work with them in justifying their judgment and in bringing about the result we all want—the finishing of the bridge.”
With that Seth Low sat down and Henry Murphy handed Roebling’s letter to the secretary, Otto Witte, who read it aloud.
The letter was brief and said pretty much what was already known—that he would not accept a position as consulting engineer, that his absence from active supervision had in no way hindered progress on the bridge, and that it was his personal wish that the vote be taken simply as to whether or not he was to remain in command.
Mayor Grace was immediately on his feet. “At the last meeting I seconded the resolution offered by Mayor Low, and I have since found no reason to change my mind and I again second it now.”
Then William Marshall spoke. He had never had a great deal to say at board meetings before, the way most of the others had, and he was not known as a speaker. So it is doubtful anyone in the room was quite prepared for the speech he gave.
“Mr. President,” he began, “I am sorry this resolution has been introduced here. I see no reason why Mr. Roebling should be removed. I know that this bridge has been kept back time and time again by many, but I never knew that Mr. Roebling had kept it back one day or one hour. The very gentleman that you propose to put in his place is honorable and honest enough to say he doesn’t believe the bridge has been kept back by the engineer who is his chief. Furthermore, he says that to his knowledge the engineer and his assistants have not made a mistake upon the bridge.”
Then turning to Seth Low, he said, “You want to remove him; to drive him out. For what? Why? As a bridgebuilder he has not had his equal on the face of the earth. I defy contradiction!
“There are two bridges across Niagara. He built the largest of them and it stands there today—a perfect success. When I say ‘he’ I mean his father and himself—the father who sacrificed on this bridge. There are two bridges across the Ohio, one built by Mr. Roebling and one by a man who is ashamed of his name. The one at Wheeling fell into the river; the other, at Cincinnati, is an honor to the man who built it. I never heard he made a mistake and kept the bridge back, and he must be sacrificed. For one I would take the arm off my shoulder before I would permit myself to vote against a man standing here without a blemish upon his character or ability. If you search back to the time of the sinking of the caisson to the present moment you will find that he has not kept the bridge back a moment.”
Again he turned to the Mayor of Brooklyn and this time angrily. “But our friend Mr. Low goes down to Newport and demands his resignation! By what authority?” There was absolute silence in the room. “Have you any law for it? If you have I should like to see it. I should like to know by what parliamentary usages three or four trustees, meeting in the Comptroller’s office in New York, claim to represent the wishes of this board?” The two mayors and Comptroller Campbell kept looking right at Marshall, smiling all the while.
“I consider you are bringing an innocent man and holding him responsible for the delay and losses we have gone through here. I know this board, I know there is too much honor on this floor to enable you to remove the Chief Engineer. If there is any fault to be found we should begin where the fault belongs. If there has been any fault in the board for the last ten years, for one I am willing to assume the responsibility for it, but I don’t want to sneak out and place it on the shoulders of the Chief Engineer. It would be mean and contemptible for me to do that, and I don’t propose to do it.”
There was a long silence when he sat down again. Then Secretary Witte read a short prepared statement supporting the Chief Engineer and J. Adriance Bush said he also would vote to keep Roebling. Martin was not the only member of the engineering staff to speak up in Roebling’s defense, Bush said, they all had. The core of the issue was the change in the plans and that had not been Roebling’s doing and they all knew it. “I think,” he said, “the question is one that we ought to approach…with just the same solemnity as we would approach the trial of a man accused of high crimes and misdemeanors. We ought to look at it in the same light that you and I would regard the impeachment of a judge or anyone in authority. We ought to look at it free from public clamor on the one hand and free from any personal feeling on the other.”
A. C. Barnes said he had a very sincere admiration for Colonel Roebling, but that he did not think Roebling ought to feel wounded if he were to be retired with every honor and his present pay. “Why, sir, if Mr. Roebling were a regular Army officer he would have been retired long ago, with half pay and nothing to do, and nothing would be thought of it.” Barnes said he was simply unable to understand why Roebling did not accept Mayor Low’s resolutions “in the same kindly and considerate spirit which I am sure animates every one of us who would vote for it.”
Ludwig Semler, who apparently had decided that the meeting was running against Roebling, moved the vote be postponed and the whole issue referred to special committee. But William Kingsley, who like Murphy, Stranahan, and Slocum had said nothing thus far, had done some figuring it seems and decided that this was exactly the time to vote.
“I feel the same way,” Mayor Low said instantly.
A few others asked to be heard and were, briefly, including Stranahan, who said simply and rather weakly that Roebling was needed still. Then a voice vote was taken on the Low resolutions, with the following result:
Yeas—Mayors Grace and Low, Comptroller Campbell, and Messrs. Van Schaick, Clarke, McDonald, and Barnes.
Nays—Comptroller Semler and Messrs. Murphy, Bush, Witte, Marshall, Stranahan, Agnew, Swan, Kingsley, and Slocum.
The count was 10 to 7. The resolutions had lost; Roebling had won by a majority of three, including William Kingsley and Henry Slocum. But had the two of them, or any other two, voted differently, Roebling would have been out.
“ENGINEER ROEBLING RETAINED,” “A MAJORITY FOR ROEBLING,” “ROEBLING NOT TO RETIRE,” were some of the headlines the following day.
Mayor Low told reporters that he was quite content with the decision of the board and he told several others on the board who had backed Roebling that he had secretly been hoping Roebling would win all along. He would rather see the bridge finished under Roebling, Seth Low told Ludwig Semler, than any other engineer. Semler repeated this in an interview, thinking apparently that it would put the mayor in a more flattering light, and he offered his own personal diagnosis of Roebling’s mysterious malady, something he had not done before the voting began. “I actually believe that all that ails him is a nervous affection which prevents him from mingling with numbers of people.”