The Great Bridge (32 page)

July 12 was the day for the annual Orangemen’s Parade, in honor of the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. The event had caused a serious riot the year before, in Elm Park. Some two thousand Protestant Irish Orangemen gathered for a picnic had been set upon by about three times as many Irish Catholics armed with clubs and pistols. The police had arrived eventually, but not before several people had been killed on both sides and scores severely wounded. This year, fearing the same would happen again, Mayor Hall had forbidden the Orangemen to hold their parade. (Though himself a Protestant and of English ancestry, the Elegant Oakey was accustomed to reviewing St. Patrick’s Day parades dressed in a green cassimere suit with shamrock buttons, a bright-green cravat, and green kid gloves.) Hall’s decision provoked a storm of protest. The Ring was pandering to the Catholic rabble it was said. New York had come to a terrible pass if decent people were no longer able to parade peaceably without fear of mob violence.

As a result Governor Hoffman, probably acting with Tweed’s consent, if not at his direction, came rushing down from Albany to issue a proclamation saying that anyone who wished to “assemble and march in peaceable procession” was at liberty to do so and would get full protection from the police and the military. It was an immensely popular move. Some 160 Orangemen decided to go ahead with their parade. Four regiments of National Guard were ordered to stand by, including the Ninth, in which Tweed’s bosom friend Fisk was a colonel. Catholic priests called for peace and understanding, while it was rumored that in Brooklyn trained gangs of Irish thugs were getting ready for action.

The line of march was from the Gideon Lodge of Orangemen in Lamartine’s Hall, at Eighth Avenue and 29th Street, downtown to Cooper Union, at Eighth Street and the Bowery. Nothing much happened until the Orangemen reached 26th Street, where the police, marching on either side, had to force a path through a crowd blocking the way. At 25th Street the police were ordered to charge. By then stones and bricks were coming down from housetops. Near the corner of 24th Street a shot was fired. The police said later it came from an upstairs window, but others claimed a rifle went off accidentally among the Ninth Regiment, which had been drawn up at 25th Street, with the comic-looking Fisk prancing about on horseback.

Whichever the case, the bullet took off part of the head of a private in Company K, of the Ninth. Instantly, without orders, the soldiers opened fire into the crowds. The fusillade was very brief. When it was over, two soldiers, one policeman, and a total of forty-six bystanders, including a number of women and children, were dead.

(Fisk had dismounted in the midst of all this and disappeared into a saloon, where, it was later learned, he escaped out a back door, scaled several fences, got rid of his uniform in a house on 23rd Street, then fled as swiftly as possible to Long Branch, New Jersey, the fashionable seashore resort.)

Everyone was furious at the Ring, including most of the Irish Catholics who had long been the very lifeblood of Tammany. Among the Protestants there was angry talk of Irish despotism. “Write on the tombstone of Wednesday’s victims: ‘Murdered by the criminal management of Mayor A. Oakey Hall’” one man commented. Others felt the riot was symptomatic of a larger tragedy. “Behind the folly and wickedness of the Irish,” said
The Nation,
“there lie American shortcoming, corruption, and indifference.”

The problem was, however, that most of the people who could have organized any sort of movement against Tweed were out of town for the summer. The
Times
continued its assault day after day, but nothing happened. When Tweed was pressed to comment on what the
Times
was printing about him, he exclaimed defiantly, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

As it was, nothing would be done about it until the end of the summer, when a mass meeting was called at Cooper Union on the night of Monday, September 4. Former Mayor William Havemeyer presided, thousands attended. In no time the rather refined and reserved-looking crowd was in a fine frenzy. “There is no power like the power of the people armed, aroused, and kindled with the enthusiasm of a righteous wrath!” said Judge James Emott from the speaker’s platform. No more could there be any denying the frauds of the Ring, he said, and in obvious answer to Tweed’s now famous retort, he asked, “Now, what are you going to do about these men?” “Hang them!” shouted voices from the audience.

A so-called Committee of Seventy was organized that night, and included among its membership some of the most distinguished names in New York—Judge Emott, Robert Roosevelt, Andrew Green, who had been a pallbearer at John A. Roebling’s funeral, and Abram Hewitt. Also among them was Samuel J. Tilden, a wealthy friend and New York neighbor of Hewitt’s. Tilden was a rather cold, calculating corporation lawyer and a Tammany Democrat of great ambition, who had had little derogatory to say about Tweed prior to this, but who now took charge of the committee and shortly became known as the leader of the entire reform movement.

The campaign to destroy the Ring was on in earnest. On September 12 someone broke into Comptroller Connolly’s offices and stole all the vouchers for the year 1870. The theft was a great mystery according to city officials. But in
Harper’s Weekly
Nast pictured Connolly, Sweeny, Tweed, and Hall looking highly ridiculous as they proclaimed their innocence and a few weeks later Nast had the same group cowering in the shadow of a gallows.

Secretly, Tweed began transferring all his real estate holdings to his son. Hall tried to get Connolly to resign, while Connolly, terrified the others were about to throw him to the lions, consulted with Tilden, who told him to take a leave of absence and appoint the upright Andrew Green as Acting Comptroller. This was done. Armed guards were stationed in the Comptroller’s office to watch over what remained of the records. The reformers had achieved a beachhead.

Tweed, however, was anything but placid through all this. He had power aplenty still and he had no intention of giving up without a fight. The real test, he knew, the only one that mattered, would be in November, at the polls. His own term as State Senator would expire on December 31.

First he had himself unanimously re-elected chairman of the General Committee of Tammany Hall. Then he went off to the Democratic state convention at Rochester, taking along a gang of New York thugs to remind any wavering delegates where their sympathies lay. Bribes were handed out liberally. Tilden and some other reform delegates put up a fight of sorts, but Tweed was in control the whole time and everyone knew it. He got the nominations he wanted, including his own.

Back on the Lower East Side of New York the day after the convention ended, Tweed stood before some twenty thousand cheering followers, in Tweed Plaza, doffed a little Scotch cap, bowed low, and said the following:

For most Americans the evils of the Tweed Ring were the natural outgrowth of the essential evil of big cities. New York being the biggest of big cities, it would quite naturally produce a Tweed. New York simply got what New York deserved was the feeling. The city was mostly foreign-born after all, better than half Roman Catholic. The golden age of representative government had lasted less than a hundred years learned men were saying gloomily. Jefferson had been right about what cities would do to American life. The future now belonged to the alien rabble and the likes of Tweed. “Perhaps the title ‘Boss of New York’ will grow into permanence and figure in history like that of the doge of Venice,” wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary. Even Walt Whitman of Brooklyn, who celebrated the “power, fullness, and motion” of New York in his
Democratic Vistas
published that year, wrote savagely of the “deep disease” of America, which he diagnosed as “hollowness at heart.

But if in New York—even in New York—men of principle, men of integrity, education, and property, could rise up and triumph over a Tweed, then perhaps there was hope for the Republic. The idea was a tonic. Numerous other cities had their “mute, inglorious Tweeds,” as E. L. Godkin wrote in
The Nation,
and other cities would have their own spirited crusades for the restoration of political virtue. Reform groups became the fashion. Committees were formed. Silent indifference to political immorality was no longer acceptable in polite society and Brooklyn was no exception.

As might be expected the impact of things happening so close by in New York was especially pronounced in Brooklyn. The talk that October was nearly all politics. The editors of the
Union,
in their offices directly below the Bridge Company, wrote that Brooklyn could well use the services of New York’s Committee of Seventy and that there had been “fear and trembling” among certain Brooklyn officials ever since the assault on Tweed began.

That election frauds had made the Honorable Martin Kalbfleisch mayor of Brooklyn two years before was common knowledge. That there would be more of the same this time seemed inevitable. But even Kalbfleisch appeared to be caught up with reform spirit. He had denounced the Democrats and was running for re-election as an independent. So it was a three-way race. The Republicans had a candidate and Boss McLaughlin had put up a former mayor named Powell, a decent enough man, as were most McLaughlin mayors, with the notable exception of Kalbfleisch.

The Democrats appeared to be in trouble for the first time in years. The opposition was calling for the downfall of the Brooklyn Ring along with the Tweed Ring. Kalbfleisch would assuredly take away more Democratic votes than Republican. For McLaughlin, for Murphy, Kingsley, and Thomas Kinsella, these were exceedingly busy times, with much at stake, not the least of which was the total say on how the Bridge Company ought to be run. Nobody who understood the realities of Brooklyn politics seriously thought the Democrats might lose, but at the same time the Democrats were taking no chances.

Then on the 23rd of October there was a horrible accident at the bridge. Two men had been killed, both married men with families. A third was so dreadfully mangled that little hope was held out for him, and five others were badly injured. Until now the bridge had had a perfect safety record. In the two years since construction began there had not been a single serious accident, no injuries to speak of, no loss of life. This was extraordinary, in view of the known hazards, and it was generally taken as a sign of conscientious management.

The Brooklyn tower by then had reached a height of about seventy feet. The day of the accident an eight-ton block of granite was being hauled to the top of the tower by one of the three huge boom derricks mounted there, which were all held in position by wire rigging, like the masts of a ship. Suddenly a socket in one of the guy wires broke and two derricks fell from the tower.

One man, a rigger on the derricks, was struck by a great wooden boom that sheared off half his skull. He was thrown down on the top of the tower, stone dead. “If he had stood still he would not have been injured,” C. C. Martin said later; “but when he heard everything crackling and crashing, he lost his presence of mind and ran out where the derrick was coming down just in time to be struck.”

Another man had been standing on an elevated railroad track that ran along the side of the tower facing the river, about fifty feet above the dock where the stone scows tied up. His job was to shove a little flatcar under the stones as they were hoisted by an engine on the dock, then move them into position to be picked up by one of the derricks on the tower. When the derricks fell, the stone suspended from one of them crashed through the track about twenty feet from the spot where he was standing. It would have missed him, in other words. But seeing it coming, he had fled to the end of the track and leaped off. The fall broke both of his legs and no one knew how much else internally. He died later.

The other man killed instantly was also on top of the tower. He too saw the derricks falling and tried to get out of the way by jumping over a granite block sitting on the masonry. Just as he jumped, the mast of one derrick fell on him, crushing him, face downward, into a crevice in the masonry no more than eight inches deep.

Roebling, Paine, and Collingwood were over on the New York side at the time, but C. C. Martin, who was in his office in the yard below, heard the crash and rushed up the narrow flight of stairs built at one corner of the tower. Martin found several men trying frantically and futilely to move the fallen derrick. The man caught beneath was unconscious but still alive. Martin sent for jacks and levers and in another fifteen minutes had the derrick up and off. The man was pulled out from under; he breathed a few times, as though his awful agony had been eased, then died.