Building the Golden Gate Bridge: A Workers' Oral History by Harvey Schwartz (review)

Evan "Slim" Lambert worked on a fishing boat in Alaska and as a cowboy in Arizona in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but nothing could have prepared him for working on the Golden Gate Bridge. Slim started as a laborer and worked his way up to foreman. Then, the unthinkable happened. On a blustery February day in 1937, Slim watched with horror as the staging on which he and his men were working tore away from the unfinished bridge and plummeted toward the San Francisco Bay. "I knew that to have a prayer to survive," Slim later recalled, "I had to hit the water feet first" (110). Luckily, he did. Unluckily, he landed in a fallen safety net, which began dragging him down toward the bottom of the bay. He was so deep when he wriggled free that his nose and ears were bleeding by the time he made it back to the surface. Slim grabbed a coworker who was in even worse shape, and they floated on planks until a boat captain spotted them. "His eyes hit me, and what a relief. I figured, my gosh, we're going to make it." But Slim was only half right: his coworker died on the boat (111). Slim survived and returned to work, helping to finish construction of the iconic bridge.

Slim Lambert is one of a dozen interviewees featured in Harvey Schwartz's Building the Golden Gate Bridge: A Workers' Oral History. As the curator of the Oral History Collection of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in San Francisco, Schwartz has strong oral history interview experience and a wealth of knowledge of Bay Area labor history. He conducted most of the interviews for Building the Golden Gate Bridge in the run-up to the bridge's fiftieth anniversary in 1987. Arguing that workers' stories are often untold in favor of the "big shots" that designed, engineered, and funded the bridge construction, Schwartz chronicles the life histories of eight men and one woman who built or maintained the bridge, two nurses who cared for injured workers, and the wife of a bridge builder. These interviews are presented in edited, first-person narratives with questions redacted.

Each chapter in Building the Golden Gate Bridge follows a similar narrative arc, but they touch on an impressive range of significant historical themes and topics. They begin with childhood and education, continuing through the varied job histories typical of young, working-class westerners in the early part of the twentieth century. After discussing the bridge construction, the interviewees place this job experience in the context of their long careers. (Many of the men spent subsequent decades as ironworkers, with the bridge project as their introduction to the trade.) Finally, the interviewees reflect on the bridge's iconic status, although some offer refreshingly iconoclastic opinions about the landmark that they helped to build. Along the way, interviewees shed light on immigration, the travails of the Great Depression, New Deal politics, World War II's impact on California, the postwar building boom, the role of labor unions in construction work, and the evolution of race relations on the job.

In addition to the range of historical topics the interviewees covered, the other great strength of this book is Schwartz's deft editing, which lets the personalities of these workers shine through every page. "With them old-time iron-workers like Dago Frank, Steve Carter, Hooknose Smitty, and Tobacco George," one bridge worker colorfully recalled, "if you could work into their gang, God darn, boy, you was all right" (49). Students born in postindustrial America will get a crash course in industrial-era labor culture. Some of the interviewees get very technical about the work involved in constructing the bridge, from spinning suspension cables to riveting the bridge's famous towers. Footnotes explain some of the more technical aspects of the work; readers who do not consult these notes will find themselves lost in...