In researching Roebling, fascination warred with frustration. Some sources were not available due to bureaucratic vicissitudes -- though the 1910 census manuscripts were officially released this year, they have yet to arrive at the National Archives so that they may be studied -- others were inexplicably missing from the Sterling stacks. Usually, however, I was amazed to find how often Sterling had a book so obscure I never dreamed they would. But in the end, the biggest challenge to an essay on Roebling was not the lack of primary sources, but secondary ones. As far as I could discover, no historical analysis has been published on the town of Roebling.

It thus became necessary simply to interpret the facts I could find with the help of comparable studies. Three books provided very useful background on steelworkers, immigrants and paternalism. David Brody's Steelworkers in America discusses the change in steel making from a craft to an industry. Stanley Buder's analysis of Pullman was very helpful for comparative purposes, as well as showing me which aspects of my own town to investigate more thoroughly. These areas of interest were expanded radically by John Bodnar's Immigration and Industrialization, a fascinating study of ethnicity, job mobility, social life, and everything else, in a steel town. His book gave me a painfully clear sense of what research remains to be done in Roebling.

Yet there was a lot to look at. The research I was able to do depended largely upon contemporary accounts of the town. The articles in Iron Age were invaluable: not only did they present facts and their own analysis, but they begged for analysis themselves. Further, the magazine's status as the mouthpiece of management in the steel industry helped to gauge the general sentiment of the times. Schuyler's biography of the Roebling family, while "authorized" and therefore highly uncritical, quoted the Roeblings at length; Mumford's history of the wire age was unequaled for fatuous prose and obscure racist joke, but gave a good sense of the popular view of the town. The value of both cooks, again, was primarily as documents in themselves rather than factual sources. The long article in the New York Herald also included the Roeblings speaking in their own words -fortunately for this essay at least one of the three Roeblings said something about nearly everything.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics report -- a real find -- had the numbers for everything, and it provided a statistical basis for comparison of Roebling and other company towns. The Roebling Collection of papers at Rutgers had a long history of the company written by Washington A. Roebling in memory of his brother, and also scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, that not only revealed the local reaction to the town but documented the events that didn't make it into Iron Age -- like the 1915 strike.

The residents of Roebling also had things to tell me, however. Louis Borbi's research, which he shared with me, contained a hundred small facts of everyday life, all of which added to my understanding of the town. And after I had collected all the data I could, Paul Englund and John Sabo, one executive, one worker, told me about Roebling the way they had experienced it, and filled in the blanks on my notecards with their lives.