The Great Bridge (34 page)

At the end of November Kingsley returned to the Bridge Company the fifty thousand dollars he had been overpaid, according to this new rule—returned it
voluntarily,
as his admirers would later stress, since there was nothing in the rule saying he had to do so. Again the record contains no explanation. The “construction” account is simply credited with fifty thousand dollars from Mr. Kingsley.

Presently, sometime in early December 1871, somebody went to the record book containing the old July 5 resolution and made an erasure, changing the “fifteen per centum” Kingsley was to get to read “five per centum.” No mention was made of this in the records. Nothing was said to explain why it was done or by whom.

Kingsley’s compensation as General Superintendent was to be the central issue to come out of the investigation, but serious questions would also arise concerning the company’s methods for purchasing materials. Who exactly decided what was to be bought from whom? Kingsley’s recommendations, so it appeared, always received the unqualified approval of the Executive Committee. Why were no bids advertised for? And more specifically, why had the Bridge Company in the past two years purchased more than $140,000 worth of lumber from the New York & Brooklyn Saw Mill & Lumber Company, or from that firm’s treasurer, a Mr. Ammerman, when, as was no secret, the General Superintendent was part owner of the firm? With how many other firms doing business with the bridge did Mr. Kingsley have “connections”? The impression was that the General Superintendent was deciding what to buy to build this bridge he had so eagerly wanted the two cities to pay for and that he was deciding to buy quite a lot from himself.

The Rink Committee would not be ready to report its conclusions until early spring the following year, 1872. By then Tweed had fallen on terrible times.

The elections had been over only a few days when Peter “Brains” Sweeny resigned his office as President of the Park Board and departed as swiftly as possible for France. Hugh Smith also fled the country, while Connolly by now was doing all he could to ingratiate himself with the New York Committee of Seventy. Only Tweed remained and his arrest seemed a matter of days.

Then it happened. On December 15 Tweed had been indicted by a Grand Jury on 120 counts. The following evening he was arrested by an old confederate, Sheriff Matthew T. Brennan, who came personally to Tweed’s office to conduct the historic ceremony. Touching Tweed lightly on the shoulder, Brennan said, giggling, “You’re the man I’m after, I guess.”

To nobody’s surprise Tweed got out on bail almost immediately. His first night as a “prisoner” he spent in the Metropolitan Hotel, which he owned. But he was forced to resign from the Public Works Department and on December 29 at Tammany Hall he was voted out of power as Grand Sachem.

Because the courts seemed unable to decide whether the county or the state had the right to bring Tweed to justice, it would be another year before he would go on trial. But his world was crumbling all around. On January 6 Jim Fisk was shot down in the Grand Central Hotel by Edward Stokes. Fisk had once swindled the wealthy Stokes out of the ownership of a Brooklyn oil refinery and Stokes for his part had been pursuing Fisk’s mistress, Josie Mansfield, with considerable success.

Tweed was among those at Fisk’s bedside as he lay dying. When Fisk expired at last, Tweed was beside himself. Of all the innumerable characters he had been in league with over the years, Fisk had been the most fun. The papers made much of the broken Tweed and his grief. Ten thousand people turned out to view the last remains of Fisk, lying in state, as it were, in his Erie Railroad office, but none would be so overcome as the former strong man of Tammany. The
Eagle
described the scene:

For a very large part of the public, Fisk’s murder seemed the just vengeance of the Almighty. From Plymouth Church came the voice of Beecher describing Fisk as “that supreme mountebank of fortune,” “absolutely without moral sense,” “absolutely devoid of shame,” “abominable in his lusts” and proclaiming that “by the hand of a fellow culprit, God’s providence struck him to the ground.”

Tweed’s arrest, the Fisk murder, Stokes on trial, smallpox in Brooklyn, the annual Assembly Ball at the Music Academy (“In the United States there is no pleasanter place than is our city socially…” said the
Union);
Talmage preaching out against Fielding and Dumas as obscene literature, Bill Cody playing in Brooklyn, the new Metropolitan Museum of Art opening in New York; talk of the upcoming Presidential elections, two thousand skaters on the lake in Prospect Park, and the East River spanned by gigantic cakes of ice—there was ever so much to read and talk about through that winter of 1871-72. But only rarely would there be anything in the papers about the actual building of the bridge. There was plenty of talk certainly about what the Rink Committee might turn up. But when Roebling announced in mid-December that the New York caisson was ready to begin its descent, only a line or two appeared in the papers. Not until later would it be considered a matter of the greatest interest, or would some observers find a certain irony in the idea that the New York foundation for the bridge was being sunk in a sewer.

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.