High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (17 page)

After the collapse.
(Courtesy of National Archives of Canada, C-009766)

The gravest error concerned the weight of the bridge. While the bridge was still in its design stage, Szlapka, with Cooper’s blessing, had estimated a total weight for the bridge of 31,400 tons. Later, when it became clear that the weight of the bridge would be significantly higher, more like 38,000 tons, Cooper did nothing to change the specifications of the steel. He decided the new loadings fell within the margins of error figured into the bridge’s design and pronounced them safe. By doing this, he was allowing a
unit stress
on the steel—that is, the pounds per square inch the steel would be expected to bear—that was 20 percent higher than the standard practice of his day. Cutting so close to the bone might have been warranted in a smaller, more typical bridge, but in a bridge of this magnitude, where there was little precedent to rely on, it was foolhardy and arrogant. Cooper trusted the steel too well. And others trusted him too well.

In Cooper’s defense, he was underpaid and overworked. Lack of money tied his hands. He could not conduct tests that might have proved informative; he could hardly afford a secretary to help him with paperwork. The report took these facts into consideration and spread blame around. But most of the blame it placed squarely on the shoulders of Cooper and Peter Szlapka, the Phoenix Bridge engineer who drew the design. The language in the report by the Royal Commission was plain but devastating: “The failure cannot be attributed directly to any cause other than errors in judgement on the part of these two engineers…. The ability of the two engineers was tried in one of the most difficult professional problems of the day and proved to be insufficient to the task.”

The words were a wakeup call to engineers around the world, who checked and rechecked their calculations. To Cooper, they were as good as an epitaph. Though he would not in fact die for another 12 years, his career as an engineer was over, his reputation destroyed. For all his accomplishments, only one fact really mattered about Theodore Cooper now: he was the man who built the Quebec Bridge.

Beyond its significance as a monumental engineering debacle, the fall of the Quebec Bridge was, of course, a human tragedy. The tragedy was especially staggering at Kahnawake. Of the 75 men who died, 33 were Mohawks. Many families on the small rustic reservation of 2,000 people had lost a relative. In the days after the collapse, the bereaved clustered in front of the post office, an old stone structure that possessed the single phone in the village. They waited for news and tallied the loss. Twenty-four women were widowed. Fifty-six children were fatherless. One family, the D’Aillebouts, lost four brothers, as well as an uncle and a cousin. Joseph D’Aillebout left 11 children behind.

A delegation from the reservation traveled downriver to gather the dead, but there were few bodies to bring home. Most were pinned underwater by the failed steel, where they remain today. A funeral for the eight men whose bodies were recovered took place the Monday after the collapse. The village was almost entirely Catholic in those days, and the ceremony was held in the St. Francis-Xavier Mission, a stone church near the river. Eight simple coffins lay on a platform in front of the altar. A local choir sang liturgical chants in Mohawk. The Archbishop of Montreal said mass to the overflowing church. “I am here to pray and share your grief,” the Archbishop told the mourners, as a priest translated his sermon into Mohawk. “A father is above all in sympathy with his children in trial. Yours is a severe one. The remains of eight victims now lie before us; but how many more have found a watery grave, perhaps never to be recovered? Like Rachel’s, your sorrow is one that will not be allayed.”

BOOMING OUT

The sorrow had a peculiar effect on the Mohawks. Rather than end or diminish their enthusiasm for high steel work, it seems to have
done precisely the opposite. In 1915, just 8 years after the disaster, an investigator for the American Board of Indian Commissioners visited Kahnawake and reported that 587 out of 651 adult males belonged to the structural steel union, up from less than 100 in 1907. Even if this figure is inflated—it’s difficult to believe it’s not—there does seem to have been a real surge in interest. Apparently, the danger of the work only added to its appeal. “It made high steel much more interesting to them,” a retired Mohawk riveter told Joseph Mitchell in 1949. “It made them take pride in themselves that they could do such dangerous work.”

According to reservation lore, the women of Kahnawake imposed a condition on the men: they would no longer travel to jobs in large groups. Rather, they would spread out in smaller groups, minimizing the chances for wholesale slaughter of the sort that had occurred on the Quebec Bridge. It was thus, according to the lore, that men began “booming-out,” traveling in smaller groups to faraway places like Buffalo and Detroit and New York City.

Mohawk ironworkers had been working as far south as New York well before the Quebec Bridge disaster—as early as 1901, in fact—but over the decade that followed they came in greater numbers. By the early 1920s, Mohawks were regularly crossing the border to work on bridges and buildings up and down the Eastern Seaboard, traveling together in tight four-man gangs, communicating on the steel in Mohawk, boarding together wherever they could find inexpensive housing. The practice was nearly halted in 1925 when an ironworker named Paul Diabo (a common surname at Kahnawake) was arrested for illegal immigration while working on the Delaware River Bridge at Philadelphia. Diabo’s case resulted in a landmark decision by a federal court in 1927. Citing the 150-year-old Jay Treaty, the judge ruled that Mohawks, whose land had once overlapped parts of both countries, were entitled to pass freely over the border from Canada into the United States.

The ruling removed legal hurdles for the Mohawk itinerants but
it didn’t make the commute any shorter. The drive between Kahnawake and New York still took nearly 12 hours, making frequent visits home impractical. In lieu of returning home to their families, many of the men moved their families down from the reservation to live with them near the job site. Communities of Mohawk ironworkers quickly grew up in sections of Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, and, most significantly, in Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn families lived close to each other in the neighborhood of North Gowanus (now Boerum Hill), around the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Atlantic Avenue. Over the next several decades, the Mohawks’ presence there grew into a full-fledged ethnic enclave. By 1950, at least 400 Mohawks lived in Brooklyn; as many as 800 were there by the end of the decade. Apartment buildings filled up with Mohawk families. Bernie’s Grocery on Atlantic Avenue sold a special cornmeal called “o-nen-sto” that the Indian housewives needed to make their boiled cornbread. The tiny Nevins Bar and Grill became known as “the Wigwam,” the center of the community where men could meet, learn of jobs, and keep in touch with home. Drawings of Iroquois warriors and photos of the Native American athlete Jim Thorpe decorated the walls, and the hard hats of Indian ironworkers who had died on the job were displayed as memorials. “The Greatest Iron Workers in the World Pass Thru These Doors,” read a sign posted at the entrance.

The children attended the local public school or one of several parochial schools in the neighborhood. Most Mohawks still practiced Catholicism, but there were enough Protestant converts among them to inspire the local Presbyterian minister, Reverend David Cory, to learn Mohawk and offer a service every week to the Indians in their language. Cory’s church, the Cuyler Presbyterian on Pacific Street, became a gathering place for Presbyterians and Catholics alike.

Ironically, even as Reverend Cory was learning Mohawk, the Indians were forgetting it. Their children were growing up on English—
Brooklyn
English, no less—and American television. Many of the young ironworkers married non-natives, Italian and Jewish and Puerto Rican women who lived in the neighborhood. Some even moved from Brooklyn to the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey. They were partaking of that all-American rite of passage: assimilation.

The Mohawks lived quietly in Brooklyn for a decade or two without much remark from others. They simply formed one of the many ethnic enclaves in the demographic stew that was New York. But in the middle of the century, white people—white journalists, more precisely—began to take notice. The city-dwelling “redmen” who performed death-defying stunts on steel proved irresistibly exotic.

Joseph Mitchell deserves much of the credit, and blame, for sparking interest in the subject. His 1949 article for the
The New Yorker
, “Mohawks in High Steel,” described the settlement in Brooklyn and included a history of the itinerant Mohawks from Kahnawake, “the most footloose Indians in North America,” as Mitchell referred to them. While Mitchell’s article was clear-eyed and well grounded, it contained the seeds of a misconception that many white people, and some Indians, have held about Mohawk ironworkers ever since: that in addition to being footloose, they are preternaturally sure-footed; that they are innately endowed for life in high places and immune to fear of falling. It was Mitchell who first quoted a Dominion Bridge official’s opinion that the Indians were “agile as goats” and gladly would “walk a narrow beam high in the air with nothing below them but the river…and it wouldn’t mean any more to them than walking on the ground.”

Several years after Mitchell’s article,
National Geographic
ran a profile of the Brooklyn Mohawks that gave this notion greater credence and wider circulation. “Why did the Caughnawaga Mohawks take so eagerly to this spine-chilling high-iron work?” the magazine wondered rhetorically. “The answer seems to lie in a puzzling characteristic found in many North American Indian tribes, and out
standingly in the Iroquois: they are almost completely lacking in fear of heights.” The magazine quoted an early eighteenth-century English surveyor named John Lawson, who wrote of the Tuscaroras, another Iroquois nation: “They will walk over deep Brooks and Creeks, on the smallest Poles, and that without any Fear or Concern. Nay, an Indian will walk on the Ridge of a Barn or House and look down the Gable-end and spit upon the Ground, as unconcerned as if he was walking on Terra firma.” Scientists, according to
National Geographic
, could not explain this peculiar behavior.

In his
Apologies to the Iroquois
, published in 1959 (in a volume that included Mitchell’s article), the writer Edmund Wilson suggested that the Mohawks’ fearlessness derived from their earlier life in the forest, from scaling mountain peaks and canoeing in rapids. He also noted their habit of walking by “putting one foot in front of the other, instead of straddling as, when they see our tracks, we seem to them to do.” Presumably, this peculiar stride (which sounds more like that of a fashion model on a catwalk than an ironworker on steel) equipped them for traversing narrow surfaces.

The claim for Mohawk fearlessness and sure-footedness has been repeated, with greater or lesser degrees of credulity, in countless newspaper and magazine articles. Alongside it has grown another popular idea: that
only
Indians have the capacity to walk high steel. “Virtually all of New York City’s skyline has been built by American Indians; Mohawk Indians,” began a brief article in
Parade
in 1982. The first misconception—that Mohawks are genetically equipped for life in high places—naturally gives rise to the second.

In fact, Mohawks have never made up more than 15 percent of the ironworking force of the city. As for fear and agility, they exhibit no more or less of these than any of the other 85 percent of the men who walk steel for a living. Nor do they get injured or die less frequently than their Caucasian counterparts.

Around the same time that journalists were discovering Mohawk ironworkers, a young Columbia University–trained anthropologist named Morris Frielich undertook a more scholarly study of the subject. He began hanging out as unobtrusively as possible at the Wigwam (he feared getting beaten up, he admitted), observing the behavior of the Mohawks. He published his findings in 1958.

The Mohawks’ affinity for ironwork, both for its itinerancy and its danger, was best explained not by genetics, thought Frielich, but by cultural atavism. For hundreds of years, the role of the male in Iroquois society had been to leave his family for long periods of time to hunt and wage war. Working on high steel, a Mohawk man reprised his warrior role, traveling to perform acts of daring and either getting killed or returning home with booty (U.S. dollars, in this case). “Here in the world of men, one could fight, boast, talk men’s talk and be a warrior,” wrote Frielich. “Colloquially speaking the warrior returned to the tune of ‘Home the Conquering Hero Comes,’ and to hear it again and again, he necessarily had to keep leaving for war.” In short, “that the formula
‘to be a man = to be a warrior’
changed in a relatively short time period to
‘to be a man = to be a steel worker’
was due to similarities in the essence of the two ways of life.”

Frielich’s cultural explanation, while intriguing, is in some ways as problematic as the genetic explanation. The very existence of the place where he did much of his research—the Mohawk community in Brooklyn—seems to contradict his premise that Mohawk ironworkers were intent on getting
away
from their wives and families. Wouldn’t their role as warriors have played more convincingly if they’d kept the wife and kids up on the reservation while they whooped and plundered afar? Apparently, they felt the tug of other roles Frielich doesn’t consider: father and husband.