The Great Bridge (35 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The two investigators said they did not know “how far in reality Mr. Kingsley was interested in any stock besides that which appears in his name,” but their impression was pretty far. This, they agreed, was not as it should be and they said that “a mere partnership between the public and private individuals who have the expenditure of the money is not sufficient to protect the public interests.” So they concluded with two specific proposals.

First, that Alexander McCue, as counsel for the Bridge Company, draw up for approval by the Board of Directors an amendment to the original charter authorizing the cities of Brooklyn and New York a vote on their stock. The cities would also decide on the choice of directors, “taking care, so far as may be practicable, that the private stockholders are represented in the Board in proportion to the stock held by them.” In short, the two cities would henceforth control the bridge and the power enjoyed by the private stockholders—as granted by Murphy’s charter—would no longer be absolute.

The second proposal was to continue to employ a General Superintendent (no name specified), but at an annual salary not to exceed that paid the Chief Engineer, which by this time had been raised from eight to ten thousand dollars.

Demas Barnes, however, insisted on submitting his views separately. The criticism in the majority report he found too mild and generalized; the recommendations made fell far short of the mark, he said. So as a minority of one Chairman Barnes presented his own report, which was twice the length of the other one and infuriated nearly everybody who had had anything to do with the business management of the bridge. It was a remarkable document.

Barnes’s basic contention was that since the bridge was being built with public money, its managers ought to be accountable to the public, which they were not. He said that the original charter provided the people of Brooklyn and New York with no adequate protection against fraud; that the business side of the bridge had been carried on in much too much secrecy; and that certain members of the company were benefiting personally more than was proper. He reported that the Finance Committee kept no records, that there was no record of a minority motion ever voiced at a meeting of the Executive Committee, or of any substantive debate on any question. He noted that Kingsley, the largest stockholder, was not a director or on any of the committees, so he could not be held responsible for anything decided on by the board or by the committees. And yet: “While no restriction appears limiting his discretion, there is no act or recommendation of his which has not the unqualified approval of the Committee.” No part of the material purchased thus far had been advertised for. There was no indication of who opened bids, if indeed any of them had ever been submitted sealed.

Kingsley’s arrangement for a percentage of expenditures Barnes found to be the most reprehensible irregularity and he was puzzled why the various alterations in the agreement made the previous November had been done without any explanation. And it was Barnes who totaled up all the money paid out to Kingsley’s Saw Mill & Lumber Company or to its treasurer, A. Ammerman.

Barnes also reported that checks seemed to be handled in a rather peculiar fashion. When most organizations deposited checks in the bank, he said, it was customary to record the name of the drawer on the check in the margin of the checkbook. But, he went on, “The following credits are given for money received April 12th, 1870: Five parties, $23,000. The amount did not reach the bank until June 3rd, and only one check was deposited instead of five. The name of the drawer of the check deposited has been erased and the word ‘check’ inserted. The same circumstances (erasures, etc.) occur several times.” The procedure struck Barnes as most mysterious.

But this and one or two other things in his report struck some of the other directors as nit-picking, and for all the rather fishy-looking inconsistencies in the record books, Barnes had in fact found precious little proof of foul play except, again, for Kingsley’s $125,000.