Summary
Part II: An Awful Fight
Convocation
On February 24, 1891, the architects gather in the Rookery to present their designs for their buildings. The mood is hushed as they look at each other’s work, each building more lovely and glorious than the last. Hunt reveals his design for the Administration Building, the place where most visitors will enter. Post’s is the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, potentially the largest building ever constructed and to be lit by electric lamps and featuring twelve electric elevators. Sullivan and Adler have the Transportation Building, which will eventually have a great entrance (which Burnham suggests and Sullivan takes credit for).
All the architects, even the ornery Sullivan, seem enraptured. Augustus St. Gaudens, the famous sculptor who has joined them, says this must be the greatest gathering of artists since the 15th century.
Olmsted feels these same sentiments but wonders if the fair is getting too grand; after all, he thinks, it ought to be fun as well. He wants his lagoons to have flowers and waterfowl and boats constantly in motion. He is also a bit nervous now that the architects have revealed their plans, for he will have to work around them and achieve the greatness of Central Park in only 26 months. He writes a ten-page memorandum on his strategy for the transformation of Jackson Park, articulating all of his beliefs about landscape architecture within it. He wants a lagoon with a Wooded Island on it as the fair’s landscape centerpiece. He desires a poetic effect, dreaminess and imagination, nothing garish or gaudy. It should be theatrical, but elegant. All of this is brilliant, but Olmsted is 70 years old and in ill health.
As work begins, troubles pop up. Union members drive off Italian immigrants employed to dig a ditch. Committees squabble. Yet progress is made; Burnham hires Sophia Hayden, a young female architect, to design the Women’s Building. He finds a replacement for John Root, Charles B. Atwood, an opium addict but a genius. A young army officer, Lieutenant Mason A. Schufeldt, travels to Zanzibar to procure pygmies for the fair.
Outside the fair, the nation’s trouble increases. Financial conditions worsen and labor unions threaten to oppose the fair. Skyscrapers stand vacant, city officials try to prepare for the crime the fair is sure to bring.
Cuckoldry
Gertrude Connor comes to Ned in tears and says she must leave, though she will not say why. Ned assumes it is something to do with Holmes. Gertrude leaves, but dies soon after of an “accident of nature” (123).
Ned and Julia’s marriage seems to be crumbling, and Ned hopes that taking Holmes up on his offer to sell Ned the whole pharmacy will improve things. Besides, this assures him that nothing indiscreet could be going on with Holmes and his wife. This belief does not last long, though, and their marriage continues to worsen. Holmes is sympathetic and assures Ned things will improve. He brings in an insurance man, C.W. Arnold, to propose Ned insure his family. Ned refuses, somewhat confused why Holmes and Arnold are so persistent.
Ned also becomes wary of the creditors showing up at the pharmacy asking for repayment of mortgages. They are legitimate, signed by the previous owner Holmes, and Ned sees that he has to pay them. Holmes reminds him that all businesses have debts. This frustrates Ned, who also begins to revive his suspicions about Holmes and his wife. One day he quits and moves out, taking another job. Pearl remains with Julia, and though Ned gets a divorce, he does not win custody. Now that Ned is gone, Julia seems less appealing to Holmes and Pearl annoys him with her sullenness.
Vexed
Burnham rarely sees his family anymore now that he has to live full-time in the shanty at Jackson Park. Each morning he inspects the grounds, aware that the vast size makes it seem like little progress is being made. The work is slow partly due to the disputes between the National Commission and the Exposition Company, the architects’ inability to get their drawings in on time, and the difficult soil. Ironically, the soil is the worst where Post’s building—the largest one—is supposed to go.
Carter Henry Harrison loses his reelection bid narrowly, but plans to run again in a few years. Prendergast grieves and decides to redouble his efforts to campaign for Harrison.
Burnham has to deal with time-squandering visits, but some are significant, such as accepting Westinghouse’s alternating current plan for the fair. He is frank with the architects that they need to move faster, and also worries that there is as of yet no viable response to the Eiffel Tower. There are ludicrous ideas coming in, and at one point engineers from across the nation become enraged because they think it is a certainty that Eiffel himself will be designing a tower for them.
Sol Bloom, a young San Francisco entrepreneur, decides he wants to bring an Algerian Village to Chicago like there was at the Paris Exposition. He secures the rights to display the village and its inhabitants but the Exposition rebuffs hm. He then approaches Mike De Young, the publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle and one of the Exposition’s commissioners. De Young says he actually needs something else from Bloom—to select the concessions for the Midway Plaisance and guide their construction and promotion. Bloom is not interested but De Young says to name his price. Bloom thinks he will name something high as a gracious way to get out of it, but De Young smoothly agrees that his price is fine.
Burnham tries to anticipate every problem the fair might have. He creates a large police force called the Columbian Guard, has a water sterilization plant built on the fairgrounds, and tries desperately to prevent a fire from breaking out through prohibiting smoking, forming a fire department for the Exposition, commissioning a fire boat, and more. He also has to deal with his chief structural engineer, Adolph Gottlieb, who fails to calculate the wind loads for the fair’s main buildings and resigns.
Bloom arrives in Chicago and meets with Burnham, who gives the young man his full confidence.
The Women’s Building is moving the fastest, but Hayden is coming across multiple problems with the head of the fair’s Board of Lady Managers, Bertha Honore Palmer. Palmer is the wife of Potter Palmer, one of Chicago’s wealthiest residents. Without Hayden’s knowledge she seeks out donations of architectural ornaments and receives hundreds. Hayden is horrified with the “architectural hodgepodge” (142) and declines still-arriving donations. Palmer freezes her out and hires another designer. Hayden suffers a breakdown and lapses into “melancholia” in a sanitarium.
Olmsted is a thorn in Burnham’s side because of his obsession with the boats for the lagoon. Olmsted is furious that tugboats are planned because they would ruin his aesthetic.
The fair does continue to rise, however, though the first workers die (of fractured skulls). Other, lesser accidents also occur and the fair remains behind schedule. Chicagoans know the weather is crucial and has to cooperate, but there is no way to secure that. Also, the nation is still steadily experiencing signs of an economic decline.
Remains of the Day
Julia informs Holmes she is pregnant and he needs to marry her, to which he responds with kindness and agreement. He does tell her, though, that he needs to perform an abortion (something he says he has done many times since he is a physician) because his current hotel operation would make raising a child at this time difficult. She agrees, which is unsurprising given Holmes’s power over her.
Julia informs her friend and neighbor Mrs. Crowe that she and Pearl will be heading to Davenport soon for a sister’s wedding to a railroad man. Mrs. Crowe thinks nothing of this.
Holmes gets Julia ready for the operation and reassures her that she will be fine. He readies the chloroform on the cloth and places it over her mouth. He presses harder and when she begins to resist, he is delighted and aroused and simply pushes harder. After he is done, he goes to Pearl’s room to similarly suffocate the child.
Christmas arrives, and the Crowes expect Julia and Pearl to come before they depart on their trip. They never do, and Holmes informs them the two went to Davenport earlier than expected. The neighbors never hear anything more from Julia, and find this all very odd.
After Christmas Holmes asks Chappell to come to him. He had learned that Chappell was an “articulator,” meaning he could take the flesh from human bodies and reassemble the bones for skeletons for display in doctors’ offices or laboratories. Holmes knows how important cadavers are; doctors frowned on murder as a means of harvest, of course, but rarely looked into the provenance of bodies they received. There are often stories in Chicago of graveyards being raided.
Chappell finds nothing unusual when Holmes presents him with the body of a woman. Holmes says that he had done some dissection already, which is why her identity is not apparent; again, Chappell knows Holmes is a physician so he is not disturbed. Holmes pays him to articulate the skeleton, which he sells to Hahneman Medical College.
A new family, the Doyles, move in to Julia’s old quarters. It is strange that all the former inhabitant’s things are there, but he tells them sadly and soberly that the former inhabitant had to quickly leave to visit her sister. Later, Holmes would maintain that they were never physically active, he knew nothing of an abortion, and Julia did leave to escape her husband taking control of Pearl.
Analysis
Much of Devil’s drama comes from the dreaming, planning, and squabbling of the architects and builders of the fair. There are numerous difficulties Burnham faces, not the least of which is a worsening economic situation; he also has to consider water and sewage, potential crime, and preventing a fire. Time and money, the former especially, haunt him at every step. Yet, as Larsen writes, things are moving along, and the reader has no trouble admiring the tenacity of the fair’s designers. If there is anything that slightly irks or wearies, it would be, as a critic for McGill University’s book blog writes, that “the picture that emerges . . . is one of great men in smoke-filled rooms driving humanity forward. This is not to diminish that achievements of Burnham and his associates, only to say that the larger story of life in Chicago in the Gilded Age . . . is insufficiently explored” (we will return to that assertion in later analyses).
The other part of the narrative—Holmes—parallels Burnham’s story because here is yet another man using all of his ingenuity to carry out his own plans, though his are much more sanguinary. In this section Holmes seduces Julia Connor and then kills both her and her daughter. These are more or less facts, but the story of Julia’s death as told by Larsen bears some critical attention. One of the most salient critiques of The Devil in the White City is that Larsen is writing history but is often taking speculations and exhibiting them as fact. Larsen has 857 footnotes and used material from 139 different articles/books/archives and hundreds of newspaper articles, and told Patrick Reardon, whose analysis of the book we will delve into, that “[Devil] is, figuratively speaking, an open book, its logic and sourcing transparent to all.”
Reardon understands that Larsen’s sources are manifold and legitimate, but he has issues with Larsen’s re-creation of scenes from only the barest of materials. Larsen often writes authoritatively of how people think and feel with no proof of this. Julia’s murder is an apposite example, for Larsen writes that Holmes found Julia’s struggling “arousing,” that “his own excitement rose,” that “he did not think her so clever as to feign coma” and “the chloroform and his own intense arousal made him feel light-headed” (148). No one was with Holmes when he killed anyone, and he did not really provide any details as to his state of mind. Reardon comments, “Larsen writes the account of the murder with the same omniscient narrative voice and perspective that he uses throughout the book to describe well-established facts, such as the size of the grounds of the World’s Fair . . . the [murder] scenes, as they’re written, don’t give a hint of how speculative they are.” Reardon also takes umbrage with the account of Minnie and Anna and Holmes’s visit to the fair, because there is no actual proof of their movements there at all—something only mentioned in the endnotes, not the text itself. The account of their movements, then, “was not based on fact abut on the route they might have used.”
All of this is quite troubling, as Devil in the White City doesn’t present itself as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood did—definitively creative nonfiction. The McGill reviewer agrees, writing, “Larson’s account thus appears as little more than conjecture in many places, a sin that would be more forgivable if Larsen had stressed his artistic intentions from the outset . . . There is something slightly dishonest . . . seeing as Larsen’s novelistic passages alternate with more conventional narration, as well as lengthy quotations from letters and diaries, creating a uniform impression of veracity where there ought not to be.”
This does not mean the work is not skillfully rendered, compelling, or useful as a window onto the World’s Fair and its historical milieu, but it is a reminder that the reader should have a keen eye when it comes to author’s claims to know the thoughts and feelings of historical personages.
