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The Devil
in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed
America by Erik Larson Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Monumental Erik Larson takes readers to the end of
the 19th century and makes that time come alive in his book. The
Devil in the White City. The White City is the World’s Columbian
Exposition in Chicago from 1893-4. Part of this book tells the story of the
architects and visionaries who created a wonderland for fairgoers. Daniel
Burnham comes alive, and the dreams of Frederick Law Olmstead become vivid
through Larson’s writing skills. The Devil is the murderer, Henry Holmes, who
preyed on women drawn to Chicago for the fair. For that part of the story,
Larson presents a mystery tale, and leads readers through the murders, the
investigation, and the capture of Holmes. Here’s an excerpt from early in the
book (pp. 13-21), from the chapter titled, “The Trouble is Just Begun”: On
the afternoon of Monday, February 24, 1890, two thousand people gathered on
the sidewalk and street outside the offices of the Chicago Tribune, as
similar crowds collected at each of the city's twenty-eight other daily
newspapers, and in hotel lobbies, in bars, and at the offices of Western
Union and the Postal Telegraph Company. The gathering outside the Tribune
included businessmen, clerks, traveling salesmen, stenographers, police officers,
and at least one barber. Messenger boys stood ready to bolt as soon as there
was news worth reporting. The air was cold. Smoke filled the caverns between
buildings and reduced lateral visibility to a few blocks. Now and then police
officers cleared a path for one of the city's bright yellow streetcars,
called grip-cars for the way their operators attached them to an ever-running
cable under the street. Drays full of wholesale goods rumbled over the
pavers, led by immense horses gusting steam into the murk above. The wait was electric, for Chicago was a prideful
place. In every corner of the city people looked into the faces of
shopkeepers, cab drivers, waiters and bellboys to see whether the news
already had come and whether it was good or bad. So far the year had been a
fine one. Chicago's population had topped one million for the first time,
making the city the second most populous in the nation after New York,
although disgruntled residents of Philadelphia, previously in second place,
were quick to point out that Chicago had cheated by annexing large expanses
of land just in time for the 1890 decadal census. Chicago shrugged the
sniping off. Big was big. Success today would dispel at last the eastern
perception that Chicago was nothing more than a greedy, hog-slaughtering
backwater; failure would bring humiliation from which the city would not soon
recover, given how heartily its leading men had boasted that Chicago would
prevail. It was this big talk, not the persistent southwesterly breeze that
had prompted New York editor Charles Anderson Dana to nickname Chicago
"the Windy City." In their offices in the top floor of the Rookery,
Daniel Burnham, forty-three, and his partner, John Root, newly forty, felt
the electricity more keenly than most. They had participated in secret
conversations, received certain assurances, and gone so far as to make
reconnaissance forays to outlying parts of the city. They were Chicago's
leading architects: They had pioneered the erection of tall structures and
designed the first building in the country ever to be called a skyscraper;
every year, it seemed, some new building of theirs became the tallest in the
world. When they moved into the Rookery at La Salle and Adams, a gorgeous
light-filled structure of Root's design, they saw views of the lake and city
that no one but construction workers had seen before. They knew, however,
that today's event had the potential to make their success so far seem
meager. The news would come by telegraph from Washington.
The Tribune would get it from one of its own reporters. Its editors,
rewrite men, and typesetters would compose "extra" editions as
firemen shoveled coal into the boilers of the paper's steam-driven presses. A
clerk would paste each incoming bulletin to a window, face out, for
pedestrians to read. Shortly after four o'clock, Chicago standard
railroad time, the Tribune received its first cable. Even
Burnham could not say for sure who had been first to propose the idea. It had
seemed to rise in many minds at once, the initial intent simply to celebrate
the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World by
hosting a world's fair. At first the idea gained little momentum. Consumed by
the great drive toward wealth and power that had begun after the end of the
Civil War, America seemed to have scant interest in celebrating its distant
past. In 1889, however, the French did something that startled everyone. In Paris on the Champ 'de Mars, France opened the
Exposition Universelle, a world's fair so big and glamorous and so exotic
that visitors came away believing no exposition could surpass it. At the
heart of the exposition stood a tower of iron that rose one thousand feet
into the sky, higher by far than any man-made structure on earth. The tower
not only assured the eternal fame of its designer, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel,
but also offered graphic proof that France had edged out the United States
for dominance in the realm of iron and steel, despite the Brooklyn Bridge,
the Horseshoe Curve, and other undeniable accomplishments of American
engineers. The United States had only itself to blame for this
perception. In Paris America had made a half-hearted effort to show off its
artistic, industrial, and scientific talent. "We shall be ranked among
those nations who have shown themselves careless of appearances," wrote
the Chicago Tribune's Paris correspondent on May 13, 1889.
Other nations, he wrote, had mounted exhibits of dignity and style, while
American exhibitors erected a melange of pavilions and kiosks with no
artistic guidance and no uniform plan. "The result is a sad jumble of
shops, booths, and bazaars often unpleasing in themselves and incongruous
when taken together." In contrast, France had done everything it could
to ensure that its glory overwhelmed everyone. "Other nations are not
rivals," the correspondent wrote, "they are foils to France, and
the poverty of their displays sets off, as it was meant to do, the fullness
of France, its richness and its splendor." Even Eiffel's tower, forecast by wishful Americans
to be a monstrosity that would disfigure forever the comely landscape of
Paris, turned out to possess unexpected elan, with a sweeping base and
tapered shaft that evoked the trail of a skyrocket. This humiliation could
not be allowed to stand. America's pride in its growing power and
international stature had fanned patriotism to a new intensity. The nation
needed an opportunity to top the French, in particular to "out-Eiffel
Eiffel." Suddenly the idea of hosting a great exposition to commemorate
Columbus's discovery of the New World became irresistible. At first, most Americans believed that if an
exposition honoring the deepest roots of the nation were to be held anywhere,
the site should be Washington- the capital. Initially even Chicago's editors
agreed. As the notion of an exposition gained shape, however, other cities
began to see it as a prize to be coveted, mainly for the stature it would
confer, stature being a powerful lure in this age when pride of place ranked
second only to pride of blood. Suddenly New York and St. Louis wanted the
fair. Washington laid claim to the honor on grounds it was the center of
government, New York because it was the center of everything. No one cared
what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck. Nowhere was civic pride a more powerful force than
in Chicago, where men spoke of the "Chicago spirit" as if it were a
tangible force and prided themselves on the speed with which they had rebuilt
the city after the Great Fire of 1871. They had not merely restored it; they
had turned it into the nation's leader in commerce, manufacturing, and
architecture. All the city's wealth, however, had failed to shake the
widespread perception that Chicago was a secondary city that preferred
butchered hogs to Beethoven. New York was the nation's capital of cultural
and social refinement, and its leading citizens and newspapers never let
Chicago forget it. The exposition, if built right—if it topped Paris—might
dispel that sentiment once and for all. The editors of Chicago's daily
newspapers, upon seeing New York enter the contest, began to ask, why not
Chicago? The Tribune warned that "the hawks, buzzards, vultures,
and other unclean beasts, creeping, crawling, and flying, of New York are
reaching out to get control of the fair." On June 29, 1889, Chicago's mayor, DeWitt C.
Cregier, announced the appointment of a citizens committee consisting of 250
of the city's most prominent men. The committee met and passed a resolution
whose closing passage read: "The men who have helped build Chicago want
the fair, and, having a just and well-sustained claim, they intend to have
it." Congress had the final say, however, and now the
time for the big vote had come. A
Tribune clerk stepped to the window and pasted the first bulletin. The
initial ballot put Chicago ahead by a big margin, with 115 votes to New
York's 72. St. Louis came next, followed by Washington. One congressman
opposed having a fair at all and out of sheer cussedness voted for Cumberland
Gap. When the crowd outside the Tribune saw that Chicago led New York
by 43 votes, it exploded with cheers, whistles, and applause. Everyone knew,
however, that Chicago was still 38 votes shy of the simple majority needed to
win the fair. Other ballots followed. Daylight faded to thin
broth. The sidewalks filled with men and women leaving work. Typewriters—the
women who operated the latest business machines—streamed from the Rookery,
the Montauk, and other skyscrapers wearing under their coats the customary
white blouse and long black skirt that so evoked the keys of their
Remingtons. Cab drivers cursed and gentled their horses. A lamplighter
scuttled along the edges of the crowd igniting the gas )ets atop cast-iron
poles. Abruptly there was color everywhere: the yellow streetcars and the
sudden blues of telegraph boys jolting past with satchels full of joy and
gloom; cab drivers lighting the red night-lamps at the backs of their
hansoms; a large gilded lion crouching before the hat store across the
street. In the high buildings above, gas and electric lights bloomed in the
dusk like moonflowers. The Tribune clerk again appeared in the
newspaper's window, this time with the results of the fifth ballot. "The
gloom that fell upon the crowd was heavy and chill," a reporter
observed. New York had gained fifteen votes, Chicago only six. The gap
between them had narrowed. The barber in the crowd pointed out to everyone in
his vicinity that New York's additional votes must have come from Congressmen
who previously had favored St. Louis. This revelation caused an army
lieutenant, Alexander Ross, to proclaim, "Gentlemen. I am prepared to
state that any person from St. Louis would rob a church." Another man
shouted, "Or poison his wife's dog." This last drew wide agreement. In Washington the New York contingent, including
Chauncey Depew, president of the New York Central and one of the most
celebrated orators of the day, sensed a tide change and asked for a recess
until the next day. On learning of this request the crowd outside the Tribune
booed and hissed, correctly interpreting the move as an attempt to gain time
to lobby for more votes. The
motion was overruled, but the House voted for a brief adjournment. The crowd
remained in place. After the seventh ballot Chicago was only one vote
short of a majority. New York had actually lost ground. A stillness settled
on the street. Cabs halted. Police ignored the ever-longer chains of
grip-cars that stretched left and right in a great cadmium gash. Passengers
disembarked and watched the Tribune window, waiting for the next
announcement. The cables thrumming beneath the pavement struck a minor chord
of suspense, and held it. Soon a different man appeared in the Tribune
window. He was tall, thin, and young and wore a black beard. He looked at the
crowd without expression. In one hand he held a paste pot, in the other a
brush and a bulletin sheet. He took his time. He set the bulletin on a table,
out of sight, but everyone in the crowd could tell what he was doing by the
motion of his shoulders. He took his time unscrewing the paste pot. There was
something somber in his face, as if he were looking down upon a casket.
Methodically he painted paste onto the bulletin. It took him a good long
while to raise it to the window. His expression did not change. He fastened the
bulletin to the glass. Burnham
waited. His office faced south, as did Root's, to satisfy their craving for
natural light, a universal hunger throughout Chicago, where gas jets, still
the primary source of artificial illumination, did little to pierce the
city's perpetual coal-smoke dusk. Electric bulbs, often in fixtures that
combined gas and electricity, were just beginning to light the newest
buildings, but these in a sense added to the problem, for they required
basement dynamos driven by coal-fired boilers. As the light faded, gaslights
on the streets and in the buildings below caused the smoke to glow a dull
yellow. Burnham heard only the hiss of gas from the lamps in his office. That he should be there now, a man of such exalted
professional stature in an office so high above the city, would have come as
a great and satisfying surprise to his late father. Daniel
Hudson Burnham was born in Henderson, New York, on September 4, 1846, into a
family devoted to Swedenborgian principles of obedience, self-subordination,
and public service. In 1855, when he was nine, the family moved to Chicago,
where his father established a successful wholesale drug business. Burnham
was a lackluster student: "the records of the Old Central show his
average scholarship to be frequently as low as 55 percent," a reporter
discovered, "and 81 percent seems the highest he ever reached." He
excelled, however, at drawing and sketched constantly. He was eighteen when
his father sent him east to study with private tutors to prepare him for the
entrance exams for Harvard and Yale. The boy proved to have a severe case of
test anxiety. "I went to Harvard for examination with two men not as
well prepared as I," he said. "Both passed easily, and I flunked,
having sat through two or three examinations without being able to write a
word." The same happened at Yale. Both schools turned him down. He never
forgot it. In the fall of 1867, at twenty-one, Burnham
returned to Chicago. He sought work in a field where he might be successful
and took a job as a draftsman with the architectural firm of Loring &
Jenney. He had found his calling, he wrote in 1868, and told his parents he
wanted to become the "greatest architect in the city or country."
The next year, however, he bolted for Nevada with friends to try his hand at
mining gold. He failed. He ran for the Nevada legislature and failed again.
He returned to Chicago broke, in a cattle car, and joined the firm of an
architect named L. G. Laurean. Then came October 1871: a cow, a lantern, confusion,
and wind. The Great Chicago Fire took nearly eighteen thousand buildings and
left more than a hundred thousand people homeless. The destruction promised
endless work for the city's architects. But Burnham quit. He sold plate
glass, failed. He became a druggist, quit. "There is," he wrote,
"a family tendency to get tired of doing the same thing very long." Exasperated and worried, Burnham's father in 1872
introduced his son to an architect named Peter Wight, who admired the young
man's skill at drawing and hired him as a draftsman. Burnham was twenty-five.
He liked Wight and liked the work; he liked especially one of Wight's other
draftsmen, a southerner named John Wellborn Root, who was four years younger.
Born in Lumpkin, Georgia, on January 10, 1850, Root was a musical prodigy who
could sing before he could talk. During the Civil War, as Atlanta smoldered.
Root's father had smuggled him to Liverpool, England, aboard a Confederate
blockade-runner. Root won acceptance into Oxford, but before he could matriculate,
the war ended and his father summoned him back to America, to his new home in
New York City, where Root studied civil engineering at New York University
and became a draftsman for the architect who later designed St. Patrick's Cathedral. Burnham took to Root immediately. He admired Root's
white skin and muscular arms, his stance at the drafting table. They became
friends, then partners. They recorded their first income three months before
the Panic of 1873 snuffed the nation's economy. But this time Burnham stuck
with it. Something about the partnership with Root bolstered him. It filled
an absence and played to both men's strengths. They struggled for their own
commissions and in the meantime hired themselves out to other more
established firms. One day in 1874 a man walked into their office and
in a single galvanic moment changed their lives. He wore black and looked
ordinary, but in his past there was blood, death, and profit in staggering
quantity. He came looking for Root, but Root was out of town. He introduced
himself instead to Burnham and gave his name as John B. Sherman. There was no need to amplify the introduction. As
superintendent of the Union Stock Yards, Sherman ruled an empire of blood
that employed 25,000 men, women, and children and each year slaughtered
fourteen million animals. Directly and indirectly nearly one-fifth of
Chicago's population depended on the yards for its economic survival. Sherman liked Burnham. He liked his strength, his
steady blue gaze, and the confidence with which he conducted the
conversation. Sherman commissioned the firm to build him a mansion on Prairie
Avenue at Twenty-first Street among homes owned by other Chicago barons and
where now and then Marshall Field, George Pullman, and Philip Armour could be
seen walking to work together, a titanic threesome in black. Root drew a
house of three stories with gables and a peaked roof, in red brick, buff
sandstone, blue granite, and black slate; Burnham refined the drawings and
guided construction. Burnham happened to be standing in the entrance to the
house, considering the work, when a young man with a mildly haughty air and
an odd strut—not ego, here, but a congenital fault—walked up to him and
introduced himself as Louis Sullivan. The name meant nothing to Burnham. Not
yet. Sullivan and Burnham talked. Sullivan was eighteen, Burnham
twenty-eight. He told Sullivan, in confidence, that he did not expect to
remain satisfied doing just houses. "My idea," he said, "is to
work up a big business, to handle big things, deal with big business men, and
to build up a big organization, for you can't handle big things unless you
have an organization." John Sherman's daughter, Margaret, also visited the
construction site. She was young, pretty, and blond and visited often, using
as her excuse the fact that her friend Delia Otis lived across the street.
Margaret did think the house very fine, but what she admired most was the
architect who seemed so at ease among the cairns of sandstone and timber. It
took a while, but Burnham got the point. He asked her to marry hitti. She
said yes; the courtship went smoothly. Then scandal broke. Burnham's older
brother had forged checks and wounded their father's wholesale drug business.
Burnham immediately went to Margaret's father to break the engagement, on
grounds the courtship could not continue in the shadow of scandal. Sherman
told him he respected Burnham's sense of honor but rejected his withdrawal.
He said quietly, "There is a black sheep in every family." Later Sherman, a married man, would run off to
Europe with the daughter of a friend. Burnham and Margaret married on January 20, 1876.
Sherman bought them a house at Forty-third Street and Michigan Avenue, near
the lake but more importantly near the stockyards. He wanted proximity. He
liked Burnham and approved of the marriage, but he did not entirely trust the
young architect. He thought Burnham drank too much. The Devil
in the White City will appeal to readers who enjoy engaging presentations
of history, have an interest in architecture, or who are captivated by criminal
behavior. The murder bits can be grizzly at times, so enter with warning. Architecture
buffs will enjoy the personalities and challenges faced by the architects, as
well as their snobbery and infighting. The story of the Ferris wheel adds
extra fun, as does the description of the Midway. The Exposition was a
monumental event, and The Devil
in the White City shares many of the fair’s stories with readers who may
have paid no attention to this watershed enterprise. Steve Hopkins, November 24, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the December 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Devil in the White City.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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