High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline Page 19

  The McNamara trial nearly ruined Clarence Darrow. Conservatives despised him for representing the McNamaras, while liberals questioned his decision to let the brothers plead guilty. In January of 1912, Los Angeles prosecutors indicted Darrow for attempting to bribe one of the McNamara jurors. Only his famous eloquence saved him from jail. “Will it be the gray dim walls of San Quentin?” he woefully addressed the jury. “Oh, you wild insane members of the steel trust…. Oh, you bloodhounds of detectives who do your masters’ evil bidding. Oh, you district attorneys. You know not what you do!” The jury acquitted him after 11 minutes, but it took him years to regain his reputation.

  The ironworkers union still had an ordeal to face, too. Fifty-four high-ranking union members were indicted for their participation in the so-called “Dynamite Conspiracy” of the previous six years. Thirty-eight of these men were eventually found guilty, largely, again, due to testimony from Ortie McManigal. Herbert Hockin was given a six-year sentence. The union’s president, Frank Ryan, got seven years.

  The public, meanwhile, was left to wonder what exactly possessed the ironworkers. What had driven them to commit such wanton destruction? It’s a question that would puzzle labor historians for years to come. For Louis Adamic, who wrote about the ironworkers in his 1934 study of industrial violence, Dynamite, the ironworkers’ propensity to violence was best explained by their peculiar personalities. “Only men of great physical strength and courage became skyscraper men,” wrote Adamic. “Putting their lives in daily danger as they did, they developed a psychology of recklessness and violence that people in less hazardous occupations may find difficulty in understanding.” Ironworkers were naturally half-cocked, in other words. Compounding this tendency was their belief that they were in a fight for their union’s survival. They were cornered rats—to mix Ortie McManigal’s metaphors—with the instincts of a tiger.

  Some members of the press, including the celebrated muckraker Lincoln Steffens, excused the ironworkers on the grounds that they were incited to dynamiting by the intractable steel erectors. This view was echoed in Luke Grant’s 1915 study for the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations: “They found themselves overmatched and, believing the existence of their organization was at stake, they hit below the belt in trying to turn the tide in their favor. If the union resorted to unfair and unlawful methods…the erectors were in a degree responsible.” This is no doubt true. But whatever drove the ironworkers to use lethal force, absolution was, and remains, a tough sell. After all, the ends-justifies-the-means logic that made sense to the dynamiters of 1910 is the same logic that led terrorists to blow up the World Trade Center in 2001.

  The McNamara case produced neither heroes nor martyrs, but it did mint a few winners. General Otis, of course, came off looking more like a sage than a crank. William Burns, the detective, was elevated to national fame. He wrote many articles about the case, published a book, saw himself portrayed in a Broadway play, and was later appointed by President Harding to run the country’s Bureau of Investigation, precursor to the FBI. (As his assistant director, he named an ambitious 26-year-old agent named J. Edgar Hoover.) Ortie McManigal, the Great Confessor, didn’t fare too badly, either. He’d been granted immunity for his testimony and was given a large sum of money by the NEA for his help in convicting the ironworkers. Afterward, he became a watchman in Los Angeles. He spent the last years of his life guarding the Los Angeles Bureau of Records, a building he’d once tried, and failed, to blow up.

  INTO THE ETHER

  Oh, a pioneer

  Is the riveteer

  Till his pinnacle scrapes the dome.

  He swings away where the planets play.

  The ether is his home.

  —THE BRIDGEMEN’S MAGAZINE, September 1909

  At the end of September of 1911, as the McNamaras were preparing to go on trial, an ironworker named Morgan Richards, of 101 West 130th Street, entered the East 22nd Street station house in New York. He was a large man, over six feet tall with a husky build. He approached the desk and asked the policeman there to call his wife for him. “What fer?” the cop asked. “Telephone to her yourself.”

  “No, you do it for me,” pleaded Richards. “It’ll be easier all around.” He’d been mugged by a gang of seven men, he explained, and they’d stolen his week’s wages. “It ain’t the money, honest. What’s worrying me is how the Missus will take it. Now, be a good fellow and call her up.”

  “GIANT FEARS HIS WIFE” read the headline in the next day’s paper. The short article that followed was hardly newsworthy, but what editor could pass up such a delicious man-bites-dog twist? An ironworker—a man who presumably feared nothing—terrified of his wife!

  By the end of the first decade, the Ironworker had become a type. He was fearless, careless, defiant. He was the “Industrial Daredevil,” as Scientific American tagged him in 1912, “a peculiar type of human being.” He was “daring to a degree which is almost criminal,” according to the Literary Digest. He was an outlaw, a wander-luster, a renegade from a class of men “as reckless with their money as they are with their lives.” He was also, of course, a fighter. He was, for example, Arthur McGlade of East 178th Street, who appeared true to type in the Times in January of 1912. Like the hapless Richards before him, McGlade had run into a gang of thieves. They picked his pocket then attacked him on the platform of the Third Avenue El, unleashing the righteous fury of The Ironworker.

  “Take my $28, will you?” exclaimed the ironworker, as he dealt blows right and left.

  Other men passengers watched and women scurried from the platform to avoid the fight, but McGlade kept right on. With five blows he knocked down the five men, and as the first one rose to his feet the ironworker was ready for him again. Each time his huge fist whistled through the air there was a thud as it struck one of the five, and a second thud as the young man who was struck hit the platform flooring. Presently two of the men lay on the platform where McGlade had knocked them, afraid to get up.

  One of the others rose and tried to run away. McGlade caught him and threw him down the stairs after the first man. He seemed to like this idea, for before they could move he caught two of the others and tossed them down also. The two remaining jumped to their feet and took the steps at a couple bounds to escape the enraged ironworker.

  McGlade stormed, shouting, about the platform, looking for more foes.

  Now that was an ironworker. So was Joseph Eick, a foreman accidentally buried under 4,000 pounds of steel beams in 1915. As men scrambled to remove the beams from their presumably dead boss’s body, they heard his voice calling from beneath the steel. “Easy, there! Easy, there. Now—one two three!” Eick directed the rest of the rescue operation from beneath the steel, and when the last beam was off, he stood up and brushed himself off. “I’m all right,” he coolly announced. “It takes more than that to hurt an ironworker.”

  Between the tragedy of the Quebec Bridge and the infamy of the dynamiting campaign, ironworkers had been in the news a good deal lately. The great majority of the men, though, carried on in peaceful anonymity, building bridges and skyscrapers in ever tinier silhouette against the sky. Strikes continued in New York, but employers and ironworkers found ways around them. The big jobs were officially open shop, but union men worked alongside non-union men. They needed the job, and the erectors were happy to have them as long as they didn’t make an issue of their affiliation. Many charges could be leveled against union ironworkers, but no one, with the exception of a few folks in the NEA, ever claimed they weren’t capable and hard workers. The wage in 1911, about $4.80 an day, wasn’t much better than the union men had been making 10 years earlier, but it was still high by the standards of other blue-collar workers, most of whom still earned less than two dollars a day.

  The ironworker was compensated, in part, for the risks he took, still considerable at the start of the century’s second decade. In the fiscal year 1911–12, the international union paid out 124 death claims for a membership of about 11,00
0—over one percent of the members. Between 1910 and 1914, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, structural ironworkers suffered 12 deaths and 353.2 accidents per thousand workers—well over a third of the workforce killed or injured within four years. “The erection of structural steel,” concluded the study’s authors, “must be recognized as one of the most, if not the most, hazardous industrial operations” in the country.

  The passage of New York State’s workers’ compensation law in 1914 was the single most important event in the work lives of ironworkers before the Second World War. Workers’ compensation laws required employers to contribute to an insurance policy that would pay out automatically to an injured worker. The new law not only provided a financial cushion for injured ironworkers and their families, it also gave an incentive to employers to find ways to prevent accidents and keep insurance premiums low.

  Meanwhile, the frenzy of steel construction in New York that had begun at the end of the previous century occasionally paused for economic readjustments like the Panic of 1907, but otherwise continued unabated. By 1910, four of the longest bridges in the world reached across the East River into Brooklyn and Queens. The tallest building in the world, the 47-story Singer Tower, was completed in New York in 1908—a huge leap skyward. Even for ironworkers acclimated to height, the “Singerhorn,” as the building was popularly known, offered a new thrill, and at every chance they shinnied up the steel flagpole atop the tower. The foreman would return, wrote journalist Earnest Poole, to find “some delighted man-monkey high up on the big brass ball, taking a look out to sea.”

  The Singer Tower held the title as World’s Tallest for less than a year. The Metropolitan Life Tower vaulted over it in 1909, rising to 50 stories, or 700 feet. Earnest Poole went up to visit the man-monkeys atop this building, too. Although these skyscrapers were built by huge corporations, the view that Poole described from above was graphically democratic:

  [L]ooking straight down through the brisk little puffs of smoke and steam, the whole mighty tangle of Manhattan Island drew close in one vivid picture: Fifth Avenue crowded with carriages, motors, and cabs, was apparently only a few yards away from tenement roofs, which were dotted with clothes out to dry. Police courts, churches, schools, sober old convents hedged close round with strips of green, the Tenderloin district, the Wall Street region, the Ghetto, the teeming Italian hive, lay all in a merry squeeze below: a flat bewildering mass, streets blackened with human ants, elevated trains rushing through with a muffled roar.

  In the interest of mollifying a public still timid about skyscrapers, the new tall buildings were extremely well built, even overbuilt. Theodore Cooper had pushed the edge of the envelope with his Quebec Bridge, then fallen off it; the engineers of these buildings would take no such chances. They solidified the superstructures with ample diagonal bracing, making them very much like the triangulated trusses of a bridge. Any doubts about the strength of either the Singer or the Metropolitan towers were dispelled by a freak storm in 1912 that produced exactly the kind of winds that give engineers night sweats, with speeds sustaining 96 miles per hour. Both buildings survived perfectly intact.

  Every bit as remarkable as the new heights were the newly achieved speeds of construction. The steel frames of tall buildings like the Singer and Metropolitan Life were erected in a matter of months. This was the era of “Taylorism,” so called after Frederick Taylor, the same efficiency expert who’d prescribed ox-like laborers for steel companies twenty years earlier. Taylor had recently published his best-selling book, The Principles of Scientific Management, and his ideas were very much in vogue. To do a thing efficiently, to not waste a step or a moment—this was the new American ideal in steel plants, in factories, in offices, even in homes, where housewives strove to Taylorize their domestic chores. “In the past the man was first,” Taylor had written; “in the future the system must be first.”

  Taylor’s vision of progress was blatantly dehumanizing, but to a writer from Harper’s Weekly who visited a job site in 1910, the ironworkers did not seem to resent the push toward speed; rather, they seemed exhilarated by it. They took a “savage joy” in it, as gangs tried to outdo each other with feats of prowess. “They wait for nothing and obey no precedents in the building of the express skyscraper,” wrote the man from Harper’s. “The skyscraper is altogether an American institution. Its express speed of construction is also exclusively American, an expression of American enterprise, American inventiveness, American impatience and daredeviltry, American workmen.”

  One ironworker did complain mildly: “This going up at a story a day interferes with me social life. On that Thirteenth Street building there was a hotel within arm’s-reach, and one day I got to talking with a pretty maid—through a window. Next day I had to talk down to her, and the next day I had to yell to her, and in two days more I had to say good-by. ‘Good-by,’ says she, ‘Sorry to see you go; but I’ll introduce you to my friend Katie who works on the tenth floor.’”

  The future of the skyscraper, Harper’s concluded in 1910, was not greater height, but greater speed: “The limit of height has been reached.” But this was not quite so. Three years later, the Woolworth Building topped out at 792 feet, almost 100 feet higher than the Metropolitan Life Tower.

  For Frank Woolworth, founder of the chain of five-and-ten-cent stores that bore his name, it wasn’t enough for his building to be tall. It had to be the tallest; the most extraordinary building ever constructed. To design it, Woolworth chose Cass Gilbert, one of the country’s leading architects. Gilbert clad the towering steel frame in terra cotta and decorated it like a cathedral, complete with gargoyles and a Gothic portal. His building was to be the “Cathedral of Commerce,” as the Reverend S. Parkes Cadman christened it in his fore-word to a 1913 publicity brochure. “Just as religion monopolized art and architecture during the medieval epoch,” wrote Cadman, “so commerce has engrossed the United States since 1865.” This new building—or “Building,” as publicity writers usually wrote it, with divine uppercase B—would be “the chosen habitation of that spirit in man which, through means of change and barter, binds alien people into unity and peace….”

  At the top of the Woolworth Building, 1912.

  (Brown Brothers)

  Fifteen years earlier, the sheer height of the Woolworth Building would have terrified most New Yorkers, but they were accustomed to skyscrapers now. They were assured, furthermore, that the Woolworth Building was the safest building ever made. It was fireproof, its elevators were accident proof. Its steel was stronger, too, for Bethlehem Steel had recently developed a technique of rolling wide-flanged shapes that could handle more stress than earlier shapes. As the brochure informed its readers, “it may be safely stated that a hurricane, blowing at 200 miles per hour, would not damage the framework of this Building in any way. Winds of such velocity are, of course, unknown.”

  Not even God Himself, in other words, could blow this thing down.

  THE GOLDEN AGE

  Near the end of 1923, a Philadelphia trade magazine, The Building Age, sent a questionnaire to several hundred American men between the ages of 20 and 26. The goal of the survey was to gauge the young men’s enthusiasm for the building trades. Its results distressed the editors. Only a third of respondents professed any interest in entering the trades, despite the fact that construction paid relatively well. Of the 70 or so who thought they might be willing to give construction a chance, 25 percent preferred bricklaying and 20 percent preferred carpentry. How many wanted to be ironworkers? Exactly 3 percent.

  The real wonder, after 20 years of bad press, wasn’t why so few young men wanted to be ironworkers, but rather: who were those 3 percent? What sort of man wanted to risk his life in a job infamous for killing and maiming its practitioners or to join a union infamous for thuggery?

  As it turned out, those who took their chances were in for a wonderful ride.

  There had been economic booms before, but never one quite like the one that took hold of America
in 1923 and lasted seven strange and fabulous years. In the 1920s, America would produce roughly 45 percent of the manufactured goods in the world, the economy would grow an average of 6 percent a year, average incomes would rise over 40 percent, the number of automobiles in the country would approximately quadruple, and the stock market would grow by leaps and bounds.

  To those who were living through it, nothing symbolized the economic exuberance of the age more perfectly than the buildings that began to rise from all the loose money and speculative real estate. Skyscrapers climbed up from the ground almost as fast as Model T’s rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly lines. And what Detroit was to the automobile, New York was to the skyscraper. By the end of the decade, half of the country’s 377 skyscrapers—defined as buildings 20 stories or taller—would be in New York City, and nearly half the structural steel in the country would be shipping to New York.

  To live in New York in the 1920s was to inhabit a world under feverish overhaul. A constant caravan of trucks carried steel from river barges to construction sites. Plumes of dust released by round-the-clock foundation digging wafted down the avenues, accompanied by the rat-a-tat-a-tat of pneumatic rivet guns, “commonly complained of more than any other source of noise,” according to the Times in 1928. A promising solution, already in the works, was the “noiseless construction” of electric arc welding pioneered by Westinghouse. For the moment, though, the din of riveting was inescapable.

  Equally inescapable was the fact that the Woolworth Building’s reign as the world’s tallest would not survive the boom. The only questions were when it would be surpassed and how high its successors would rise.