 The
Devil in the White City:
Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
By Erik Larson
Reviewed by Rosellen Brown
This review is published with the permission of The Chicago Tribune,
where it first appeared on February 9, 2003.
Rosellen Brown is novelist, and a member of the Hyde Park Historical
Society. Among her novels, the most recent is Half a Heart;
others include the New York Times bestseller Before and
After. One of her short stories was chosen by John Updike
for his collection The Best American Short Stories of the
Century. Ms. Brown lives in Hyde Park and is currently
developing a work of historical fiction centering on the Columbian
Exposition of 1893. |
 |
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 citytnot 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 knowtsome vaguely,
but many by way of family memories and hoards of silver spoons,
guidebooks, colorful ticketstthe 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 Pennsylvaniathunted down
by a zealous detective not for the police but for a suspicious
insurance companytHolmes 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 spaceta separate Women s Building
or full integration with the other exhibits?tand 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...
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