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  • Building the Golden Gate Bridge by Harvey Schwartz
  • Lauren Coodley
Harvey Schwartz, Building the Golden Gate Bridge (Seattle: University of Washington Press 2015)

As we sail over the Golden Gate Bridge between San Francisco and Marin County, too many of us never wonder who built that famous structure.

“See, all the big shots were the ones that were doing all the hand-shaking. In fact, they should of come out and handshaked us. We were the ones doing the work.” (3) That is veteran ironworker and Golden Gate Bridge builder Al Zampa’s comment when he was interviewed in 1986. How rarely we hear from those doing the labour! It is only in the last few years that the plain fact that slaves built the White House – as well as the plantations where the first presidents lived – has become widely known. The iconic Golden Gate Bridge has a song about it – yet until now no one has published full life oral history interviews with the men who actually built it in the middle of the Great Depression.

We are fortunate that Lynn Bonfield, who founded the Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University, hired Harvey Schwartz to interview some of these workers when the bridge celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1987. Schwartz, one of the premier practitioners of oral history in Northern California, learned from Sherna Gluck’s pioneering work Rosie the Riveter: Women, The War, and Social Change, (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), based on interviews with World War II workers. Gluck cautioned that each individual’s speaking style and syntax should be preserved. Schwartz has taken her instructions to heart here with admirable success.

The Golden Gate Bridge workers were the first to wear hard hats at all times. Only one man died building the bridge between the start of construction in 1933 and early 1937. Yet ten workers died on 17 February 1937, when a scaffold broke their safety net, which at the time was another safety innovation. Twelve men plunged 200 feet from the bridge’s partly completed roadway into the sea that day, just three months before the bridge was finished. A gripping interview with one of the two survivors is included in this book. By way of contrast, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, built at the same time without a safety net, cost the lives of twenty-four men.

Along the way, Schwartz provides an instructive history of the bridge itself and its origins in the early 20th century. For 27 years, it was the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world. Although military leaders wanted the bridge painted with stripes for visibility (the Navy wanted black and yellow while the Army [End Page 308] Air Corps wanted orange and white), the color settled on, international orange, helped make the bridge an artistic world heritage marvel.

The workers Schwartz interviewed included a paint scraper, an elevator builder, several iron workers, an electrician, and a truck driver. Schwartz adds profoundly to their narratives by including interviews with two of the nurses who cared for injured workers, one ironworker’s wife, and an African American woman ironworker who worked on the bridge twenty years ago. From the nurses, we get a fascinating glimpse of the men: “They looked so manly and yet were just like little kids. They loved to have attention. I think that poor men didn’t get much attention, you see. But I found them to be just softies” (131) said Sister Mary Zita Feliciano, who added “In the 1930’s you never thought of your nursing duties as something that would be written up in history. … In those days the sisters weren’t permitted to go out like we do now, so I didn’t see the bridge for a while.” (133) Patricia Deweese recalled that “Their families would bring along bread, a long thing of salami, and a bottle of red wine. … And they never stopped bringing food to us. That was the highlight in our life.” (135) She also described the bridge opening day: “My roommate and I went out in our white shoes. … We walked right down the bridge before the cars...

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