The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair
That Changed America
By Erik Larson
Crown, 447 pages, $25.95
A few years ago, new to Chicago, I found myself strolling behind the Museum of Science and Industry, enchanted by the grandeur of the building and the loveliness of its lagoon. Soon enough I discovered that this magnificent contrast of stone and water is all that remains, along with a few bridges and the faint echo of a Japanese garden, of a vanished city–not a drowned Midwestern Atlantis but hundreds of acres of certifiably genuine buildings that cast monumental shadows beside the lake a century ago. To anyone who has seen photographs of what thrived on this spot, its erasure is all too metaphoric for what will eventually be our own. It is unbearably haunting.
Buildings come and go, of course; they fall to changes in style and commercial usefulness, to fire (as Chicago knows so well), to the redesign of neighborhoods. Rarely are they built to be ephemeral. But, as every Chicagoan also seems to know–some vaguely, but many by way of family memories and hoards of silver spoons, guidebooks, colorful tickets–the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was a dream city, built to dazzle and inspire, to educate and, not least, to bring glory to a city much of which had been incinerated little more than 20 years earlier and whose cultural pretensions, in any event, were commonly derided. Unlike the city being reborn around it, the fair was created to evaporate in a mere six months, a bubble in time. Only the Palace of Fine Arts was made permanent, and though the scale of its reincarnation as a museum may exhaust visitors and their curious children, it was hardly the grandest of the temples in its brief day.
Now Erik Larson, whose previous best-seller, “Isaac’s Storm,” took on nature’s wonders as opposed to man’s, has written “The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America,” a hugely engrossing chronicle of events public and private. (The nickname “the White City” came about because those pillared, domed and lavishly ornamented colossi, celebrations of new technology, of art, of regional cultures, were actually simple sheds elaborately overlaid with a hardy but impermanent material that glowed white in the sun.)
Larson paints persuasive portraits of the ambitious and talented men–they were, of course, nearly all men–who fought for the commission to build the fair (for which New York, Washington and St. Louis had lustily competed), oversaw its difficult and incredibly speedy construction and worried over its problematic existence in grim economic times: Daniel Burnham; his partner, versatile and all-too-short-lived John Root; perfectionist Frederick Law Olmsted, who transformed a desolate swamp into a site of lushly landscaped splendor. Larson adds an opinionated chorus of out-of-town architects and miscellaneous accomplices, such as Sol Bloom, who at 21 created the unruly spectacle of the Midway and its exotic international attractions. (Where would the world be without the invention of wonders from the Ferris wheel to Cracker Jacks to Aunt Jemima pancakes?)
Then again, even the presumably sober side of the exposition displayed everything from Columbus’ journal and the world’s largest dynamo to a 22,000-pound Canadian cheese and a map of the U.S. made entirely of pickles. All in all, the fair seemed to have been designed by P.T. Barnum in consultation with the most serene Greco-Roman city builder, crossed yet again with a representative of an indigenous, democratic American vernacular. Considering the sordid poverty and corruption of so much of Chicago in those years, “With its gorgeous classical buildings packed with art, its clean water and electric lights, and its over-staffed police department, the exposition was Chicago’s conscience, the city it wanted to become.” That the closing ceremony was pre-empted by the funeral of Mayor Carter Harrison, murdered by a madman with his own balked ambitions, adds an almost implausible irony.
All this would have made a sufficiently lively book. But Larson has intercut another story so dark and horrifying that, taken together, the two seem to represent the best and the worst of human potential. “[T]his book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow,” Larson promises in his prologue. He is not exaggerating. Each story is finally deepened by reflection on the other, even if their simultaneity sometimes seems more coincidental than he contends.
Seven years before the exposition, a handsome and, as it turned out, diabolically devious young man arrived in Chicago fresh from medical school at the University of Michigan. Probably Herman Mudgett could have pursued his nefarious plans anywhere because they were fueled by urban anonymity, but the thriving village of Englewood seemed a particularly promising site for the pharmacy he intended to run. He secured a store at 63rd and Wallace and began a career as a psychopath with far more lurid, elaborate and methodical plans than Jack the Ripper, who merely slit the throats of unfortunate prostitutes who crossed his path.
A few years later, thousands of young people were streaming into Chicago, some to see the fair, most to find love and work amidst the thrills of the newly industrialized city. This flux, Larson contends, created the conditions in which a serial lady-killer like Mudgett could thrive.
He fitted out the upper floors of the building he called the Castle, named it The World’s Fair Hotel and began taking in guests. Invoking a deadly charm and a boundless capacity for lying, the young doctor (who called himself, among other names, H.H. Holmes, perhaps after Sherlock) inveigled one young woman after another into loving, trusting, and even becoming engaged to or marrying him. Most appeared to present opportunities for robbery by way of inheritance, or as subjects of insurance policies of which he made himself the beneficiary. The ingenious ways he secured their fortunes always appeared legal. All he did, when they became inconvenient, was murder them.
And worse: As though the boldness of the moment inspired such daring, in his Castle above the store he constructed a crematorium: a room sealed by a safelike, soundproof door, fitted with a pipe into which he could feed gas; a chute leading to a basement boneyard, double-lined like a kiln with firebrick and a burner that could provide 3,000-degree heat.
Given the difficulties of tracing newly arrived fairgoers whose itineraries were unknown to their families, it is impossible to say how many victims Holmes might have dispatched. Some estimates guessed at 200; the police reported 50 missing persons last traced to the Castle. Larson suggests fewer, whose disappearances can be documented: sweethearts, fiances and luckless employees. No one will ever know, but the record is atrocious enough.
When he was finally brought to ground in Pennsylvania–hunted down by a zealous detective not for the police but for a suspicious insurance company–Holmes was on the run with a trunk containing the gassed remains of two little girls, daughters of a murdered employee. Holmes claimed to be proud of his derangement. ” ‘My head and face are gradually assuming an elongated shape. . . . I am growing to resemble the devil.’ ” The Chicago Times-Herald called him, with fine literary discretion, ” ‘a human demon . . . that no novelist would dare to invent.’ ” He was hanged in 1896, the source of and motivation for his pathology only to be guessed at.
Larson is a fine and sometimes eloquent storyteller with a good ear for piquant conversation, and he moves us through this chiaroscuro of light and dark with vigor. Though his footnoting scheme, meant not to distract his readers, is peculiarly confusing, he has unearthed telling quotations from sources I’ve seen nowhere in the many books and the thousands of Web sites devoted to the exposition, nor in a previous book about Holmes by Harold Schechter subtly titled “Depraved.”
That said, there are a few dramas he does not engage at all. One, barely mentioned, is the battle royal waged between the men in power and a contingent of women under the directorship of Bertha Palmer, called the Board of Lady Managers, who wrangled about the deployment of exhibition space–a separate Women’s Building or full integration with the other exhibits?–and the symbolism of each.
More surprising is the absence of any note of the anger of black Chicagoans that led to a threat to boycott the fair for having been denied any voice in its planning. The irony of the “white city’s” obliviousness to the blacks in its presence is a painful moment in the city’s racial history, well-documented by Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, among others, in the pamphlet (still in print) “The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition.”
Occasionally Larson’s writing is overwrought (“Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.”). And there are a few too many moments when his generally responsible storytelling descends into gratuitous assertions of who was thinking what, though he is at pains to insist, with italics, “This is not a work of fiction.” The most ludicrous of these presumes to tell us what one hapless victim of Holmes’ was thinking as she discovered herself trapped in his death-safe. It does not take a literalist to suggest that suppositions, however sympathetic, ought to be so labeled.
But this is a cavil. “The Devil in the White City” is generally exceedingly well-documented, exhaustive without being excessive and utterly fascinating in its re-creation of a complex history of diverse passions. Chicago readers will be mesmerized by it. But its joined tales of an urban utopia with a sensational understory of the torture of innocents–the “juxtaposition of pride and unfathomed evil” –deserves to be hugely popular everywhere..
