Also by David McCullough JOHN ADAMS BRAVE COMPANIONS TRUMAN MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS THE GREAT BRIDGE THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD SIMON & SCHUSTER Rockefeller Center 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10020 Copyright © 1972 by David McCullough All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form The quotation from My Life and Loves, by Frank Harris, is reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc.; copyright 1925 by Frank Harris, © 1953 by Nellie Harris, © 1963 by Arthur Leonard Ross as executor of the Frank Harris Estate SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: McCullough, David G The great bridge New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972 Bibliography: p Includes index Brooklyn Bridge (New York, N.Y.) I Title TG25.N53M32 624.5’5’097471 72-081823 ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1831-3 ISBN-10: 0-7432-1831-0 Visit us on the World Wide Web: http://www.SimonSays.com For my mother and father Contents AUTHOR'S NOTE PART ONE The Plan Man of Iron The Genuine Language of America Father and Son Brooklyn The Proper Person to See The Chief Engineer PART TWO All According to Plan Down in the Caisson 10 Fire 11 The Past Catches Up 12 How Natural, Right, and Proper 13 The Mysterious Disorder 14 The Heroic Mode PART THREE 15 At the Halfway Mark 16 Spirits of ’76 17 A Perfect Pandemonium 18 Number 8, Birmingham Gauge 19 The Gigantic Spinning Machine 20 Wire Fraud 21 Emily 22 The Man in the Window 23 And Yet the Bridge Is Beautiful 24 The People’s Day EPILOGUE APPENDIX NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX AUTHOR’S NOTE WHEN I began this book I was setting out to do something that had not been done before I wanted to tell the story of the most famous bridge in the world and in the context of the age from which it sprang The Brooklyn Bridge has been photographed, painted, engraved, embroidered, analyzed as a work of art and as a cultural symbol; it has been the subject of a dozen or more magazine articles and one famous epic poem; it has been talked about and praised more it would seem than anything ever built by Americans But a book telling the full story of how it came to be, the engineering involved, the politics, the difficulties encountered, the heroism of its builders, the impact it had on the lives and imaginations of ordinary people, a book that would treat this important historical event as a rare human achievement, had not been written and such was my goal I was also greatly interested in the Roeblings, about whom quite a little had been written, but not for some time or from the kind of research I had in mind Moreover, a good deal of legend about the Roeblings—father, son, and daughterin-law—still persisted, along with considerable confusion It seemed to me that the story of these remarkable people deserved serious study It is an extraordinary story, to say the least, not only in human terms, but in what it reveals about America in the late nineteenth century, a time that has not been altogether appreciated for what it was And beyond that I had a particular interest in the city of Brooklyn itself, having spent part of my life there, when my wife and I were first married, in a house just down the street from where Washington and Emily Roebling once lived But early in my research another objective emerged It became clear that this, to a large degree, was to be Washington Roebling’s book There was, for example, that day in the library at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute when I unlocked a large storage closet to see for the first time shelf after shelf of his notebooks, scrapbooks, photographs, letters, blueprints, old newspapers he had saved, even the front-door knocker to his house in Brooklyn No one knew then what all was in the collection There were boxes of his papers that had not been opened in years, bundles of letters that so far as I could tell had been examined by nobody The excitement of the moment can be imagined The contents of the collection, plus those in another large collection at Rutgers University, both of which are described in the Bibliography, were such that they often left me with the odd feeling of actually having known the Chief Engineer of the bridge He was not only the book’s principal character, he was the author’s main personal contact with that distant day and age So it has also been my aim to convey, with all the historical accuracy possible, just what manner of man this was who built the Brooklyn Bridge, who achieved so much against such staggering odds, and who asked so little I am not an engineer and the technical side of the research has often been slow going for me But though I have written the book for the general reader, I have not bypassed the technical side If I could make it clear enough that I could understand it, if it was interesting to me, then my hope was that it would be both clear and interesting to the reader During my years of research and writing I have been extremely fortunate in the assistance I have received from many people and I should like to express to them my abiding gratitude For their kindnesses and help I wish to thank the librarians at both Rutgers and Rensselaer and in particular Miss Irene K Lionikis of the Rutgers Library and Mrs Orlyn LaBrake and Mrs Adrienne Grenfell of the library at Rensselaer Herbert R Hands of the American Society of Civil Engineers, David Plowden, Dr Milton Mazer, Dr Roy Korson, Professor of Pathology at the University of Vermont, W H Pearson, Sidney W Davidson, J Robert Maguire, Charlotte La Rue of the Museum of the City of New York, Regina M Kellerman, William S Goodwin, Allan R Talbot, John Talbot, and Jack Schiff, the engineer in charge of New York’s East River bridges, each contributed to the research And Dr Paul Gugliotta of New York, architect and engineer, said some things over lunch one day years ago that started me thinking about doing such a book and later very kindly walked the bridge with me and answered many questions I am especially indebted to Robert M Vogel, Curator, Division of Mechanical and Civil Engineering at the Smithsonian Institution, to John A Kouwenhoven, authority on New York City history and on James B Eads, to Nomer Gray, bridge engineer, who has made his own extensive technical studies of the bridge, and to Charlton Ogburn, author and friend Each of them read the manuscript and offered numerous critical suggestions, but any errors in fact or judgment that may appear in the book are entirely my own I would like to acknowledge, too, the contribution of three members of the Roebling family: Mr Joseph M Roebling of Trenton and Mr F W Roebling, also of Trenton, who gave of their time to talk with me about their forebears, and Mrs James L Elston of Fayetteville, Arkansas, who let me borrow an old family scrapbook I am grateful for the research facilities and assistance offered by the staffs of the following: the Trenton Free Public Library; the Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh; the Brooklyn Public Library; the Long Island Historical Society, Brooklyn, and particularly to Mr John H Lindenbusch, its executive director; the Newport Historical Society, Newport, Rhode Island; the Library of Congress; the New York Historical Society; the New York Public Library; the Engineering Societies Library, New York; the Middlebury College Library, Middlebury, Vermont; the Baker Library, Dartmouth College; the Putnam County Historical Society and the Julia Butterfield Memorial Library at Cold Spring, New York; and the Butler County Library, Butler, Pennsylvania I wish also to acknowledge my indebtedness to two valued friends who are no longer living—to Conrad Richter, for his encouragement and example, and to Clarence A Barnes, my father-in-law, who was born on Willow Street on Brooklyn Heights, when the bridge was still unfinished, and who could talk better than anyone I knew about times gone by Lastly I would like to express my thanks to Paul R Reynolds, who provides steady encouragement and sound advice; to Peter Schwed, Publisher of Simon and Schuster, who had faith in the idea from the start; to Jo Anne Lessard, who typed the manuscript; to my children, for their confidence and optimism; and to my wife, Rosalee, who helped more than anyone —D M C AVID C ULLOUGH * There was so much talk about her, in fact, that at the next alumni gathering, a year later, a Brooklyn engineer named Rossiter W Raymond, who was not an RPI graduate, but was widely known as an afterdinner speaker, was asked to come and give a special toast (Raymond had such a grandiloquent platform manner that he would one day be invited to succeed Beecher at Plymouth Church, an invitation he declined.) “Gentlemen, I know that the name of a woman should not be lightly spoken in a public place,” he said to his hushed audience, “…but I believe you will acquit me any lack of delicacy or of reverence when I utter what lies at this moment half articulate upon all your lips, the name of Mrs Washington Roebling.” * The East River bridge was to be larger in every way The river span of the Cincinnati Bridge was 1,057 feet, or 543 feet less than what Roebling had projected for the East River The over-all length of the Cincinnati Bridge, 2,252 feet, was less than half the length, and its width, 36 feet, was also less than half that of the new bridge Roebling had planned * There is no official figure for the number of men killed building the bridge The Bridge Company compiled no list, kept no precise records on the subject, which is characteristic of the age In a booklet made up from his Cooper Union talks and published after the bridge was built, Farrington says between thirty and forty men died in the work, which is especially interesting if it is remembered that Emily Roebling may have done Farrington’s writing for him The Chief Engineer and William Kingsley, however, both said twenty had died and from the deaths reported in the papers and mentioned here and there in the minutes of Bridge Company meetings that seems to be a realistic figure * Apart from any interest he had in the lighting contract, Thomas Edison was enormously fascinated by the bridge and spent hours watching its progress He also took some extraordinary movies, among the earliest he made, of the final weeks of construction * Joseph Pennell, Joseph Stella, John Marin, Childe Hassam, Georgia O’Keeffe, O Louis Guglielmi, Raoul Dufy, Ludwig Bemelmans, Lyonel Feininger, Albert Gleizes, and Max Weber are some of the artists who have taken the bridge as their subject Several, such as Marin and Stella, have gone back to it many times Stella’s powerful abstraction The Bridge (1918) is probably the best known of all the paintings * The first subway, between Bowling Green, in Manhattan, and Joralemon Street, was completed in 1908; and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, opened in 1950, is one of the longest underwater tunnels in the world * With careful editing and numerous annotations she managed to turn a rather dry, colorless diary kept by a Putnam County preacher into an engaging chronicle She also included an additional chapter on the Warren family Titled The Journal of the Reverend Silas Constant, it was published in 1903 * All figures are based on the bridge as it was when completed in 1883 * The most famous latter-day example of this same phenomenon was the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, over Puget Sound, in the state of Washington On November 7, 1940, in a high wind, “Galloping Gertie,” as the bridge became known, began heaving up and down so violently that it soon shook itself to pieces The bridge lacked “aerodynamic stability” the experts concluded, for the simple reason that the necessary stiffness preached by Roebling had been overlooked by the designer Eyewitness accounts of the disaster are strikingly reminiscent of the one from the Wheeling Intelligencer, written nearly ninety years before * The full title of the translated work, published in 1867, was as follows: A Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour in Several of the American Colonies, in 1679—80 By Jasper Dankers and Peter Sluyter, of Wiewerd, in Friesland Murphy’s other translations include: The Representation of New Netherland (1849), from the Dutch of Adriaen van der Donck, and Voyages from Holland to America (1853), from the Dutch of D P deVries He also wrote Henry Hudson in Holland (1859) and Voyage of Verrazzano (1875), in which he took the mistaken view that Verrazzano’s claims of discovery were unfounded * In his Autobiography, Carnegie would tell the story of a personable mechanic named Piper who was sent by the Keystone company to help on the St Louis bridge “At first he was so delighted with having received the largest contract that had yet been let, that he was all graciousness to Captain Eads It was not even ‘Captain’ at first, but ‘Colonel Eads, how do you do? Delighted to see you.’” But presently feelings between them became a little complicated “We noticed the greeting became less cordial.” Colonel Eads became Captain Eads, then Mr Eads “Before the troubles were over, the ‘Colonel’ had fallen to ‘Jim Eads’ and to tell the truth, long before the work was out of the shops, ‘Jim’ was now and then preceded with a big ‘D’.” * It was about this same time, during construction of the Big Bend Tunnel, in West Virginia, that a Negro railroad worker named John Henry drove just such steel drills faster, it was said, than any man, for which he would be immortalized in what has been called America’s greatest ballad Henry supposedly met his death competing with a steam drill about 1870 No such steam drills were used in the bridge caissons * Copeland, unlike O’Rourke, had not been acting alone, but was a spy for Sheriff Jimmy O’Brien, a political enemy of Tweed’s, who got Copeland a job in Connolly’s office and intended to use the material to blackmail Tweed Tweed offered O’Brien $20,000 to keep him quiet and promised more O’Brien, who wanted $350,000, took the money, then took Copeland’s “research” to the Times * Claflin was Tennessee Claflin—sometimes spelled Tennie C.—Mrs Woodhull’s younger sister and the consort to old Commodore Vanderbilt * Harris thought the caisson was made of iron He describes the work chambers as small, when in fact they were quite large, and his figures for the wages paid, the hours kept, the time spent in the lock, etc., do not jibe with the records ... largest sailing ships afloat would have to trim their topmasts to pass beneath the bridge But because of the great elevation of the river span and the relatively lowlying shores, the rest of the bridge, sloping down to ground level, would have... Along the entire side of the ship the foam has turned into fiery streaks The spots of foam in the ocean, distant from the ship, which arise from the dashing together of the waves, appear in the dark night to the astonished eye as just so many fiery masses... various points along the bridge floor, both in the direction of the land and toward the center of the river span The wire rope for the suspenders and stays was to be of the kind manufactured by Roebling at his Trenton works